Washingtonian Asks What's Next For David Brooks, Whether You Want To Know Or Not
He's going to help restore a 'shared moral order' after his wife finishes high school.
We’ll give some credit to this Washingtonian magazine profile of David Brooks and his plans for life after ending his New York Times column back in January. Author Drew Lindsay acknowledges at the outset that many, many readers just plain find Brooks exasperating, irritating, and “ideologically squishy.” It’s one thing to say that the person you’re writing about is controversial or even widely disliked. But it’s even rarer to concede that the subject of your profile is widely considered an insufferable weenie.
In fact, we were actually a little surprised to see the Bluesky post promoting the profile, because we hadn’t even noticed when Brooks stopped writing his columns and got hired on by the Atlantic. That, or we did hear it, but it was of such little consequence that we’d forgotten. If David Brooks stops telling the world to reorganize itself to suit David Brooks, would it make a sound?
Best take on this post so far comes from Wonkette founder Ana Marie Cox, who quote-posted it with the comment, “The only thing David Brooks has ever grinded on is his intern.”
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The profile certainly acknowledges that many people find Brooks almost endlessly annoying — with choice quotes from critics, too. Chicago Times book reviewer John Warner observed, shortly after Brooks’s final column, “I am in my 22nd year of publicly pronouncing that David Brooks sucks.” That’s from a fun piece in which Warner shared a couple of his own favorite headlines from stories mocking Brooks, like “Trying to Figure Out David Brooks’ Deal” (2023) and “David Brooks Also Eats Cereal.”
Warner also added a key point that helped me understand my own reactions to David Brooks sucking, which is qualitatively different from how I feel about the suckiness of, say, George Will or Bari Weiss: “I do not think I hate author and New York Times columnist David Brooks, and yet, there is no writer or public figure towards whom I have been so critical for so long.”
Yeah, it’s not hate; it’s just deep, abiding irritation.
In any case, Brooks is moving on from his twice-weekly columns to writing bothsides crap for the Atlantic, for which he’ll also be doing a weekly video podcast co-produced by Yale, where Brooks also landed a five-year fellowship. He will use his new sinecures to yell at educated cultural elites for dividing America, which will be very different from his political columnist days in that he won’t necessarily be tying those mushy jeremiads to the news of the day.
His new mission, Brooks says, is to move beyond politics and to work on bigger-picture stuff: “What the novelist deals with, what a historian deals with, what a moral philosopher deals with—that just strikes me as more important.”
As Lindsay describes it, Brooks hopes to move America to rebuild a “shared moral order” that he thinks we once had, by restoring “kindness, humility, and generosity, virtues he believes lie buried under 60 years of moral relativism.”
“What the hell happened to us?” he asked on a recent Times podcast. “Why did 77 million people last election take a look at Donald Trump and didn’t see anything morally disqualifying? I do not think that would’ve happened in America 50 years ago. I think there was a moral ruination, a loss of moral knowledge that preceded Donald Trump’s arrival on the scene.”
It’s always the moral relativism with this guy, the endless struggle to recapture the common decency Americans used to have in some imagined past. Was it back when we still had lynchings, perhaps? Or merely redlining, proxy wars, and Watergates?
David Brooks calling for a return from moral collapse feels like another invitation to remember how in 2013 he left his wife Sarah after 27 years because he fell in love with his much-younger research assistant, Anne Snyder. That was while she helped him with his 2015 book The Road to Character. Really.
But please, Lindsay notes, Brooks says his relationship with Snyder
remained purely professional during the period when he was still married. When he later made his feelings clear, Snyder rebuffed him, left DC, and cut off communication.
Still, Brooks pursued her, planting messages for her in his Times columns. Eventually, his efforts paid off. They married in 2017.
How romantic! He embedded little coded love notes in his columns, which he wrote with his penis! And now he’s still so much in love! Hosting a recent dinner party, Brooks asked everyone in the room to “Describe 30 seconds of your life when you were deliriously happy,” which is a darn good conversation starter, like something from my favorite NPR podcast, Wild Card. He initially joked that for him, it was the Mets winning the World Series in 1986, but then he recounted how he fell in love with Snyder. Awww. Ewww.
Lindsay notes, a bit squeamishly, that the “unconventional details of Brooks’s personal life have served as fodder for his critics anytime he has addressed questions of morality.” After offering a few examples of such criticism from folks who find Brooks especially smarmy and hypocritical for some reason, Lindsay concedes again that “Brooks has always inspired such animus. The man can get under the skin.”
But I think he overstates things a bit in saying that critics don’t merely disagree with Brooks, but instead are “outraged.” As I said above, my own reaction isn’t hate, outrage, or even disgust. It’s related, but more a kind of aggravated exasperation, a sense that David Brooks will always be so invariably clueless that if he were your passenger on a road trip, you might need to hit the brakes really hard just to make him shut the hell up.
We’ll close with one more smile and nod to Lindsay for describing Brooks as “cartoonishly out to lunch” after mentioning the notoriously goofy 2017 column in which Brooks suggested that cultural elitism was to blame for excessively complex Italian sandwich meats that alienate the working class and polarize the nation. Nice touch, although we could also mention Brooks’s more recent sputtering over the insanely high price of a meal at Newark Airport — but neglecting to mention that a good chunk of the cost came from his bar tab.
It really does little good to be annoyed at David Brooks, though. He seems incapable of understanding why people find him so grating. Besides, I got one good thing out of this profile. I think I might try that “30 seconds of delirious happiness” conversation starter with the woman I just started seeing! Hi, M!
[Washingtonian / The Biblioracle Recommends]
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Good. Do Ross Douthat next. He also writes in the “oh shit, undergrad seminar essay due tomorrow morning” format.
Honestly I despise David Brooks BUT...I REALLY despise George Will and will never forgive that sleazy rat bastard for getting a copy of Jimmy Carter's debate prep book and handing it over to Pruneface Reagan's debate prep team.
Will should have been FIRED and blacklisted for that. Instead that sleazy prick got away with it.