"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"
"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"
The narrator recounts witnessing Maureen Dowd recruit David Brooks to the New York Times and regrets not preventing his tenure. Brooks held a "reasonable conservative" role at the Times for nearly twenty-five years and is departing to join The Atlantic as a staff writer and video-podcast host. His move amid rising threats to US democracy underscores a long pattern of ineffectual Never Trump posturing. Brooks consistently reframed political danger as a problem of liberal and left elites failing to adopt the correct sympathetic stance toward conservative grievances, minimizing the mobilization of a reactionary right.
Read at The Nation
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