The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for “The Atlantic”
This looks less like justice and more like strategy.
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/ January 30, 2026
The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for The Atlantic
The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of lazy cultural stereotyping.
The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for “The Atlantic”
The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of lazy cultural stereotyping.
Chris Lehmann
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David Brooks
(Nathan Congleton / NBC via Getty Images)
Through an unlikely set of circumstances, in the early aughts, I was at the media party where longtime New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd approached David Brooks about coming on board. I’ve long thought in retrospect that I should have put my body on the line to prevent the ensuing intellectual catastrophe from happening.
Brooks, who has occupied the prestigious (if mythical) “reasonable conservative” perch at the opinion section of the Paper of Record for nearly a quarter century, is now decamping for The Atlantic, another inert organ of elite consensus politics, to serve as a staff writer and host of a video podcast. For Brooks to be forsaking his role as the nation’s Times-branded civic scold while US democracy swoons further into the abyss amid Donald Trump’s second authoritarian term drives home how ineffectual-to-untenable he has been as a trollish Never Trumper. Still, his failure bears a closer look, if only to size up the vacuity of a particular strain of culture-calibrating punditry from the US right that has bent over backward to avoid acknowledging a clear and present mobilization of blood-and-soil reaction.
For in the moral universe that David Brooks presides over, there is never a sustained ideological threat to democracy and civic culture from an insurgent right; instead, the great hazard before us is the failure of liberal and left elites to strike just the right Goldilocks posture of sympathy with the conservative grievance-industrial complex. Across successive revanchist right takeovers of the GOP, Brooks’s columnizing output hewed to this message with the unshakable conviction of a Soviet apparatchik, and he also reliably plied it from his role as a reasonable right solon on the PBS News Hour—which, alas, shares the same editorial instincts as Maureen Dowd.
During a post-2016 election colloquy of pundits debating the laughably irrelevant proposition, “Do liberals hold the moral high ground?,” Brooks, who was of course arguing the negative claim, disclosed the formula behind all his sober diagnoses of what ails our body politic. “A lot of people voted for Donald Trump because they thought a lot of tenured radicals along the coasts thought they …
This looks less like justice and more like strategy.
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The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for “The Atlantic”
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Current Issue
Society
/ January 30, 2026
The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for The Atlantic
The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of lazy cultural stereotyping.
The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for “The Atlantic”
The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of lazy cultural stereotyping.
Chris Lehmann
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Ad Policy
David Brooks
(Nathan Congleton / NBC via Getty Images)
Through an unlikely set of circumstances, in the early aughts, I was at the media party where longtime New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd approached David Brooks about coming on board. I’ve long thought in retrospect that I should have put my body on the line to prevent the ensuing intellectual catastrophe from happening.
Brooks, who has occupied the prestigious (if mythical) “reasonable conservative” perch at the opinion section of the Paper of Record for nearly a quarter century, is now decamping for The Atlantic, another inert organ of elite consensus politics, to serve as a staff writer and host of a video podcast. For Brooks to be forsaking his role as the nation’s Times-branded civic scold while US democracy swoons further into the abyss amid Donald Trump’s second authoritarian term drives home how ineffectual-to-untenable he has been as a trollish Never Trumper. Still, his failure bears a closer look, if only to size up the vacuity of a particular strain of culture-calibrating punditry from the US right that has bent over backward to avoid acknowledging a clear and present mobilization of blood-and-soil reaction.
For in the moral universe that David Brooks presides over, there is never a sustained ideological threat to democracy and civic culture from an insurgent right; instead, the great hazard before us is the failure of liberal and left elites to strike just the right Goldilocks posture of sympathy with the conservative grievance-industrial complex. Across successive revanchist right takeovers of the GOP, Brooks’s columnizing output hewed to this message with the unshakable conviction of a Soviet apparatchik, and he also reliably plied it from his role as a reasonable right solon on the PBS News Hour—which, alas, shares the same editorial instincts as Maureen Dowd.
During a post-2016 election colloquy of pundits debating the laughably irrelevant proposition, “Do liberals hold the moral high ground?,” Brooks, who was of course arguing the negative claim, disclosed the formula behind all his sober diagnoses of what ails our body politic. “A lot of people voted for Donald Trump because they thought a lot of tenured radicals along the coasts thought they …
The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for “The Atlantic”
This looks less like justice and more like strategy.
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The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for “The Atlantic”
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Current Issue
Society
/ January 30, 2026
The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for The Atlantic
The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of lazy cultural stereotyping.
The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for “The Atlantic”
The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of lazy cultural stereotyping.
Chris Lehmann
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
David Brooks
(Nathan Congleton / NBC via Getty Images)
Through an unlikely set of circumstances, in the early aughts, I was at the media party where longtime New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd approached David Brooks about coming on board. I’ve long thought in retrospect that I should have put my body on the line to prevent the ensuing intellectual catastrophe from happening.
Brooks, who has occupied the prestigious (if mythical) “reasonable conservative” perch at the opinion section of the Paper of Record for nearly a quarter century, is now decamping for The Atlantic, another inert organ of elite consensus politics, to serve as a staff writer and host of a video podcast. For Brooks to be forsaking his role as the nation’s Times-branded civic scold while US democracy swoons further into the abyss amid Donald Trump’s second authoritarian term drives home how ineffectual-to-untenable he has been as a trollish Never Trumper. Still, his failure bears a closer look, if only to size up the vacuity of a particular strain of culture-calibrating punditry from the US right that has bent over backward to avoid acknowledging a clear and present mobilization of blood-and-soil reaction.
For in the moral universe that David Brooks presides over, there is never a sustained ideological threat to democracy and civic culture from an insurgent right; instead, the great hazard before us is the failure of liberal and left elites to strike just the right Goldilocks posture of sympathy with the conservative grievance-industrial complex. Across successive revanchist right takeovers of the GOP, Brooks’s columnizing output hewed to this message with the unshakable conviction of a Soviet apparatchik, and he also reliably plied it from his role as a reasonable right solon on the PBS News Hour—which, alas, shares the same editorial instincts as Maureen Dowd.
During a post-2016 election colloquy of pundits debating the laughably irrelevant proposition, “Do liberals hold the moral high ground?,” Brooks, who was of course arguing the negative claim, disclosed the formula behind all his sober diagnoses of what ails our body politic. “A lot of people voted for Donald Trump because they thought a lot of tenured radicals along the coasts thought they …
