New Republic defends David Brooks

[Cocoa]

I can see how Stephen Glass was able to get away with his shit at this elitist rag. How can the New Republic justify going out of its way to defend this fraud?

Why is it necessary to psychoanalyze the people who don't like being lied to by frauds like David Brooks? To me, it seems a natural reaction.


http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=scheiber033104

David Brooks probably doesn't need me defending him. And, as I occasionally find his pieces sloppy and his analysis a little seat-of-the-pants, there are probably less conflicted defenders than me. But, having said that, I can't say I find him to be a journalistic villain worthy of a 3,000-word takedown <http://www.phillymag.com/ArticleDisplay.php?id=350>--and much journalistic schadenfreude, to boot. (As an employee of The New Republic, I feel like I know a villain worthy of a 3,000-word takedown when I see one.)

For those who haven't read it, the article, by Sasha Issenberg in Philadelphia magazine, spends most of its word-count assessing the literal truth of various Brooksian claims, most of them from a piece he did about the divide between Red and Blue America in 2001. Brooks merits this detailed fact-check, Issenberg says, because "he postures as a public intellectual--and has been received as one."


<snip>

In my mind, the real question here is why this otherwise thin anti-Brooks piece is resonating so much, particularly with liberals and other journalists. I think it has something to do with a sense of ideological betrayal on the one hand, and jealousy on the other. As my colleague Frank Foer suggested yesterday around the water cooler (and--note to Issenberg--I mean that figuratively, not literally), liberals still can't seem to get over the fact that the warm, fuzzy David Brooks they got to know on PBS has turned out to be such a fire-breathing conservative on the Times op-ed page. Meanwhile, I get the impression that journalists like me are perpetually annoyed that Brooks has, in a sense, been a highly successful journalistic entrepreneur: That is, he managed to invent (or, as it happens, revive) a genre of writing that's proved both incredibly popular and engaging while at the same time requiring much less effort than would be involved in literally chronicling various events, institutions, and trends--which is the standard journalist way of doing things. It's not surprising that this makes the rest of us resent him--if only a little bit. That doesn't mean we should feel free to pummel him.

[LiviaOlivia]

1. TNR-My final word on Brooks--I promise!

http://www.tnr.com/etc.mhtml
Noam Scheiber
TNR

MY FINAL WORD ON BROOKS--I PROMISE!: Nick Confessore and Matt Yglesias over at Tapped were apparently not so satisfied with my defense of David Brooks. As someone who is admittedly ambivalent about Brooks himself, I find a lot to concede in their posts--some of it I think I actually did concede in my piece. But I have a few thoughts in response nonetheless.

First, Nick argues that, even if you concede that Brooks is right at the broadest level--i.e., that there are some stark cultural differences between the kinds of people you find a lot of in Blue states (or regions or counties) and the kinds of people you find a lot of in Red states--this observation is "so true as to be useless." (Nick also accuses me of being "too fair to Brooks." But as I'm not quite sure what that means, I think I'll take a pass on it.) I agree that Brooks's is not an especially novel thought. But, given that fact, it's amazing how often the point--or at least its implications--is overlooked. For example, many people believed that Howard Dean might be able to overcome Southerners' predispositions against a culturally liberal northerner by simply appealing to them on the level of economics. People in the South need health care and good schools and jobs just as much as the rest of us, Dean would say, and it sounded reasonable enough at the time. What this analysis obviously missed is that cultural predispositions run pretty deep--some times so deep that they swamp otherwise impeccable political logic. And what a good Brooks piece does, I think, is demonstrate--pretty vividly, but, yes, occasionally pretty sloppily--why these cultural forces aren't nearly as surmountable as they sometimes appear.

Matt, for his part, says Brooks papers over the fact that affluent, culturally liberal, suburbanites are only one part of the Democrats' coalition; African Americans and the working poor also tend to vote heavily Democratic, and many of these people have more important things to worry about than where their next latte is coming from. I couldn't agree more (on both points). But, by the same token, fire-breathing evangelicals are also part of the Republican coalition, and Brooks doesn't spend a whole lot of time talking about them either (though he clearly does talk about religion). If I had to guess why, I'd say it's because these neglected groups are the safest part of each party's coalition--that is, the base. Conversely, the reason I imagine Brooks devotes most of his attention to the vast middle--affluent suburbanites versus slightly less affluent exurbanites, for example--is that this is where he sees the real action, politically. And there's some truth to that claim. While African Americans and the working poor are voting basically the same way today as they voted in 1980 or 1988, affluent suburbanites once voted Republican but are increasingly voting Democratic.

In any case, these are all worthy topics for discussion. And a good piece about Brooks would have gotten into them. My biggest problem with the Issenberg piece wasn't that it took a critical view of Brooks, but that it was pretty superficial, consisting by and large of the kinds of cheap shots you could take at anyone, whether or not they were any good at what they did.(A final point: Nick in his post refers to me as "his friend," which is often times just a polite way of saying "this idiot who I'm about to skewer." But in this case Nick and Matt and I do all happen to like and respect one another, at least as far as I know, so please understand that there's no bad blood here.)

posted 2:58 p.m.

[formactv]

2. I watched Brooks defend Bush administration on PBS

regarding the nonfinding of WMD- and my surprise was matched by the jaw dropping of Mark Shields and the moderator, that Brooks could be such an obvious shill for the administration. He stated that he never considered WMD the main reason; it was the evildoing of Saddam that was really the justification. He was lying outright, and I will never forget the reaction of the other two men. They were aghast at his falseness. Brooks was as obviously lying as Condolexxa Rice attacking Clarke.

[The Zanti Regent]

3. The New Republican is just another key in the Press Whoregan

Once upon a time, there was a person named Henry Wallace who ran the New Republic and stood up to liars like Joe Mc Carthy.

Now you have whores such as Sullivan, Glass and thier ilk who just want to be überwhores.