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.
"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"
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