Posted on 10/08/2008 8:00:06 PM PDT by pissant
Does David Brooks even pretend to be a conservative anymore? Can we finally acknowledge that this man isn’t even remotely interested in what motivates outside the Beltway - or even inside the Beltway - conservatives? Here’s what Brooks had to say in a recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic:
[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn’t think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.
What evidence is there that Sarah Palin “rejects ideas?” This is unquestionably one of the most snobbish opinions I have ever heard expressed by Brooks, or really anyone for that matter. He displays an absolutely irrational scorn for Governor Palin based on little more than his disapproval of what she represents. I am sympathetic to Brooks’ disdain for populism, but it is Brooks himself who has been promoting what can properly be called political populism. After all, it is Brooks who has done nothing but kiss Douthat and Salam’s asses over their “Party of Sam’s Club” thesis. It is Brooks who has continually called for a watering down of conservative principles over the years to the point where the views he upholds are barely distinguishable from moderate liberalism. Palin, on the other hand, expresses traditional conservative values - the values of Reagan and Buckley - more than anyone else currently running for President or Vice President, and it isn’t even close. In fact, other than Fred Thompson and Duncan Hunter, she is arguably the most prominent traditional conservative to appear on the presidential scene in this cycle.
What’s even worse is that Brooks derides Palin’s lack of experience, and adds:
He explained, “The more I follow politicians, the more I think experience matters, the ability to have a template of things in your mind that you can refer to on the spot, because believe me, once in office there’s no time to think or make decisions.”
But yet he goes on to praise Barack Obama, who makes Sarah Palin look like Henry Clay in terms of experience. And why is Brooks so infatuated with Obama:
Obama has the great intellect. I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I’m getting nowhere with the interview, it’s late in the night, he’s on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he’s cranky. Out of the blue I say, ‘Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?’ And he says, ‘Yeah.’ So i say, ‘What did Niebuhr mean to you?’ For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.
Yeah, that’s right: Obama can regurgitate what an obscure political philosopher thought. Sure he also wants to provide federal funding for abortion, has no desire to protect children who survive abortion, promotes a socialist economic agenda, and formulated his political ideas at the knees of radicals and domestic terrorists, but hey - he reads Reinhold Niebuhr. What a guy.
Excuse me if I don’t find this all that persuasive. Then again, Brooks is also a guy who earlier in the interview said that John McCain and Barack Obama were “the two best candidates we’ve had in a long time.” Really? These guys are the best that we’ve had to offer in a “long time?” If your definition of a “long time” is four years, then yeah, maybe Brooks has a point. Otherwise, he just may be senile.
Conservatives have often fretted that other conservatives who go to work for institutions like the New York Times might “go native.” I don’t think we have to wonder anymore about David Brooks.
A pile among piles, as it were.
You don't think that "greedy", and corrupt, Wall Street has caused us a few problems lately?
If Brooks actually believes that a certain candidate should be elected president because he happens to able to quote the words of a not particularly well-known writer, he should be disqualified from ever writing about politics again. He should certainly never be taken seriously by any conservatives ever again.
“In the beginnings of his work as a vocal social justice proponent, he was a strong democratic socialist. Having once railed against Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal as being unattainable, after the war Niebuhr became more pragmatic and began to support the New Deal and the Vital Center of the Democratic Party. Niebuhr’s work was a great voice within the rising tide of welfare capitalism.”
Niebuhr seems to be loved by democrats and fake conservatives.
He seems like the sort of author read by people who think they are smart, rather than by people who actually DO something in their lives.
David Brooks hasn’t accomplished 1/10th of what Sarah Palin has, so he reads Niebuhr and discusses it with another person who has never actually DONE anything - Obama!
David Brooks got beat up too many times by girls, that should explain why he is intimidated by bright conservative women.
Note: this topic was posted 10/8/2008. Thanks pissant.
from 2012:
Thurston Howell Romney
By DAVID BROOKS
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/opinion/brooks-thurston-howell-romney.html?ref=davidbrooks
And there's nothing faux-conservatives and liberals fear more than being forced to see themselves for what they really are.
Agreed..
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