David Brooks (journalist)

David Brooks
Born	(1961-08-11) August 11, 1961 Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Residence	Washington, D.C., United States
Nationality	American
Ethnicity	Jewish
Alma mater	University of Chicago (A.B. 1983)
Occupation	Columnist, pundit
Spouse(s)	Sarah (née Jane Hughes) (1986-2014; divorced); 3 children

David Brooks (born August 11, 1961) is a Canadian-born Jewish-American progressive, soft left-wing, or false conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times. He has worked as an editorial writer and film reviewer for the Washington Times; a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal; a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception; a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly; and as a commentator on National Public Radio. He is currently a columnist for The New York Times and commentator on the PBS NewsHour. An opponent of the nuclear family and of pro-white political activism, Brooks has written sympathetically about black gang members committing anti-white violence, using standard progressive concepts and terminology. He has described the attackers as victims themselves.

Background

Brooks was born in Toronto, Ontario—his father was an American citizen living in Canada at the time—and spent his early years in the middle-income Stuyvesant Town housing development in downtown New York City. His father taught English literature at New York University, while his mother studied nineteenth-century British history at Columbia. Although his family was Jewish, Brooks himself is not especially observant. As a young child, Brooks attended the Grace Church School, an independent Episcopal primary school in Greenwich Village. When he was 12, his family moved to the Philadelphia Main Line, the affluent suburbs of Philadelphia. He graduated from Radnor High School in 1979. In 1983, Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in history. His senior thesis was on popular science writer Robert Ardrey. Ardrey (also known as the playwright of Thunder Rock and the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of Khartoum) became famous as a science writer for his best-selling Nature of Man Series. This series, which includes African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, examined the role of inherited evolutionary traits (including aggression) on human development.

As an undergraduate, Brooks frequently contributed reviews and satirical pieces to campus publications. In his senior year, he wrote a spoof of the life-style of wealthy commentator and cultural influencer William F. Buckley Jr., who was scheduled to speak at the university: "In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping." To his piece, Brooks appended the note: “Some would say I’m envious of Mr. Buckley. But if truth be known, I just want a job and have a peculiar way of asking. So how about it, Billy? Can you spare a dime?” When Buckley arrived to give his talk, he asked whether Brooks was in the lecture audience and offered to give him a job.

Upon graduation, Brooks became a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago, a wire service owned jointly by the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times. He says that his experience on Chicago's crime beat had what he described as a conservatizing influence on him In 1984, mindful of the offer he had previously received from William F. Buckley, Brooks applied and was accepted as an intern on Buckley's National Review. According to Christopher Beam, the internship included an all-access pass to the affluent life style that Brooks had previously mocked, including yachting expeditions; Bach concerts; dinners at Buckley’s Park Avenue apartment and villa in Stamford, Connecticut; and a constant stream of writers, politicians, and celebrities.

Brooks was an outsider in more ways than his relative inexperience. National Review was a Catholic magazine, and Brooks is not Catholic. Sam Tanenhaus later reported in The New Republic that Buckley might have eventually named Brooks his successor if it hadn’t been for his being Jewish. “If true, it would be upsetting,” Brooks says.

After his internship with Buckley ended, Brooks spent some time at the nominally conservative Hoover Institute at Stanford University and then got a job writing movie reviews for the Washington Times. In 1986, Brooks was hired by the Wall Street Journal, where he worked first as an editor of the book review section, enlisting William Kristol to review Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which catapulted that book to national prominence. He also filled in for five months as a movie critic. From 1990–94, The Wall Street Journal posted Brooks as an op-ed columnist to Brussels, from whence he covered Russia (making numerous trips to Moscow); the Middle East; South Africa; and European affairs. On his return, Brooks joined the neo-conservative Weekly Standard when it was launched in 1994–95. In 1996, he edited an anthology, Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing.

In 2000, Brooks published a book of cultural commentary entitled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There to considerable acclaim. The book, a paean to consumerism, argued that the new managerial or "new upper class" represents a marriage between the liberal idealism of the 1960s and the self-interest of the 1980s.

According to a 2010 article in New York Magazine written by Christopher Beam, New York Times editorial-page editor Gail Collins called Brooks in 2003 and invited him to lunch.

Collins was looking for a suitable writer to replace outgoing columnist William Safire, who wasn't explicitly left-wing, but who understood how liberals thought. “I was looking for the kind of conservative writer that wouldn’t make our readers shriek and throw the paper out the window,” says Collins. “He was perfect.” Brooks started writing in September 2003. “The first six months were miserable,” Brooks says. “I’d never been hated on a mass scale before.”

In 2004, Brooks' book On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense was published as a sequel to his 2000 best seller, Bobos in Paradise, but it was not as well received as its predecessor. Brooks is also the volume editor of The Best American Essays (publication date Oct. 2, 2012), and he authored The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement. The book was excerpted in The New Yorker magazine in January 2011 and received mixed reviews upon its full publication, by Random House, in March of that year. The book has been a commercial success, reaching the #3 spot on the Publishers Weekly best-sellers list for non-fiction in April 2011.

Brooks was a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, and taught an undergraduate seminar there in the fall of 2006. In 2013, he taught a course at Yale University on philosophical humility.

Personal life

Brooks met his ex-wife, the former Jane Hughes, while both were students at the University of Chicago. She converted to Judaism and changed her given name to Sarah. In 2012, Brooks and his wife moved from their home in Bethesda, Maryland, to the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Northwest Washington, D.C., where they purchased a home. Brooks said during a February 2015 interview with Brian Lamb that he and his wife are divorced. This happened in November 2013. In 2017, Brooks married his former research assistant, writer Anne Snyder, who is 23 years his junior.

According to The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, in a September 2014 interview with the Hebrew-language newspaper Haaretz, Brooks revealed that his oldest son serves in the Israel Defense Forces.

Political views

Brooks and PBS staff at rehearsal for PBS Newshour in 2012.

Ottawa Citizen commentator David Warren, who is further to the political right than Brooks, has identified Brooks as a "sophisticated pundit" one of "those Republicans who want to 'engage with' the liberal agenda." When asked what he thinks of charges that he's "not a real conservative" or "squishy," Brooks has said that, "if you define conservative by support for the Republican candidate or the belief that tax cuts are the correct answer to all problems, I guess I don’t fit that agenda. But I do think that I’m part of a longstanding conservative tradition that has to do with Edmund Burke ... and Alexander Hamilton." In the same interview with Howard Kurtz in September, 2012, Brooks talked about being criticized by conservatives, saying, "If it’s from a loon, I don’t mind it. I get a kick out of it. If it’s Michelle Malkin attacking, I don’t mind it." With respect to whether he was "the liberals' favorite conservative" Brooks joked that he "didn't care," stating that "I don’t mind liberals praising me, but when it’s the really partisan liberals, you get an avalanche of love, it’s like uhhh, I gotta rethink this."

Brooks describes himself as having originally been a liberal before, as he put it, "coming to my senses." He recounts that a turning point in his thinking came while he was still an undergraduate, during a televised debate with free-market economist Milton Friedman. As Brooks describes it, "[It] was essentially me making a point, and he making a two-sentence rebuttal which totally devastated my point. That didn’t immediately turn me into a conservative, but ....”

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Brooks argued forcefully for American military intervention, echoing the belief of commentators and political figures that American and British forces would be welcomed as liberators. In the spring of 2004, some of his opinion pieces suggested that he had tempered his earlier optimism about the war.

His dismissal of the conviction of Scooter Libby as being "a farce" and having "no significance" was derided by political blogger Andrew Sullivan.

On August 10, 2006, Brooks wrote a column for The New York Times entitled "Party No. 3". The column proposed the idea of the McCain-Lieberman Party, or the fictional representation of the fictional moderate majority in America.

Brooks has long been a supporter of John McCain; however, he disliked McCain's 2008 running mate, Sarah Palin, calling her a "cancer" on the Republican Party. He has referred to her as a "joke," unlikely ever to win the Republican nomination. But he later admitted during a C-SPAN interview that he had gone too far in his previous "cancer" comments about Palin, which he regretted, and simply stated he was not a fan of her values.

In a March, 2007, article published in The New York Times titled "No U-Turns", Brooks explained that the Republican Party must reverse the minimal-government conservative principles that had arisen during the Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan eras, and adopt more socialist policies. He implied that these core concepts had served their purposes and they should no longer be embraced by Republicans in order to win elections, which he considers the most important purpose of a political party designed to serve the political class. Alex Pareene commented that Brooks "has been trying for so long to imagine a sensible Republican Party into existence that he can’t still think it’s going to happen soon."

Brooks has frequently expressed admiration for President Barack Obama. In an August, 2009, profile of Brooks, The New Republic describes his first encounter with Obama, in the spring of 2005: "Usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me. [...] I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” Two days after Obama’s second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, hit bookstores, Brooks published a column in The New York Times, titled "Run, Barack, Run", urging the Chicago politician to run for president. However, in December, 2011, during a CSPAN interview, Brooks' expressed a more tempered opinion of Obama's presidency, giving Obama only a "B-" rating, and saying that Obama's chances of re-election would be less than 50-50 if elections were held at that time.

In writing for The New York Times in January, 2010, Brooks described Israel as "an astonishing success story". He wrote that "Jews are a famously accomplished group," who, because they were "forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages... have been living off their wits ever since". In Brooks' view, "Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world."

Social views

Brooks opposes what he sees as self-destructive behavior, such as the prevalence of teenage sex and divorce. His view is that "sex is more explicit everywhere barring real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious" by "waiting longer to have sex...[and] having fewer partners." He sees the culture war as nearly over, because "today's young people...seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right." As a result, he is optimistic about the United States' social stability, which he considers to be "in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair."

As early as 2003, Brooks wrote favorably of same-sex marriage, stating that proper analysis would reveal homosexual unions to actually embody traditional conservative values. Rather than opposing it, he wrote: "We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.... It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage."

Brooks also takes a moderate position on abortion, which he thinks should be legal, but with parental consent for minors, during the first four or five months, and illegal afterward, except in extremely rare circumstances. (New York Times, April 22, 2002)

On the legalization of drugs, he has expressed opposition to the liberalization of marijuana, advocating that it encourages morally reprovable behaviour. Brooks stated he smoked it in his youth, but quit after feeling highly embarrassed during a class presentation under the influence.

Criticism

Brooks has been strongly criticized by right-wing commentators, who describe him as a cuckservative or a progressive centrist as best. Their opposition varies depending on the subject matter, but may escalate to describing Brooks in traitorous terms not even used for far-left political activists.

From other progressives

Brooks' writing on sociology has also been criticized by those further to the political left. They condemn him for including very small amounts of politically unacceptable science, meaning that his work should be rejected in general. In 2004, Sasha Issenberg, writing for Philadelphia magazine, politically analyzed Bobos in Paradise, concluding that many of its comments about middle America were misleading or the exact reverse of the truth. He reported Brooks as insisting that the book was not intended to be factual but to report his impressions of what he believed an area to be like: "He laughed...'[The book was] partially tongue-in-cheek'...I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being 'too pedantic,' of “taking all of this too literally,' of 'taking a joke and distorting it.' 'That's totally unethical', he said." Brooks later said the article made him feel that "I suck...I can’t remember what I said but my mother told me I was extremely stupid.” In 2015, Salon found that Brooks had got 'nearly every detail' wrong about a poll of high-school students.

Michael Kinsley also criticized Brooks for being insufficiently progressive. He claimed that Brooks was guilty of "fearless generalizing... Brooks does not let the sociology get in the way of the shtick, and he wields a mean shoehorn when he needs the theory to fit the joke." Writing for Gawker, which has consistently criticised Brooks' work, opinion writer Tom Scocca interpreted Brooks' career since 2004 to have been marked by political stands based on moral judgements, while disdaining the latest progressive evidence or politically acceptable statistical research. Scocca claimed that "possibly that is because he perceives facts and statistics as an opportunity...to work mischief."

In 2016, James Taranto criticized Brooks' analysis of a U.S. Supreme Court case, writing that "Brooks’s treatment of this case is either deliberately deceptive or recklessly ignorant." Law professor Ann Althouse concurred that Brooks "distorts rather grotesquely" the case in question. Brooks has previously been criticized for having "scrambled the actual significance of what the Supreme Court has done", as Lyle Denniston put it.

Sidney Awards

This article is about the Sidney Awards given each December by David Brooks. For the award presented by the Hillman Foundation, see The Sidney Award.

In 2004 Brooks created an award to honor the best political and cultural journalism of the year. Named for philosopher Sidney Hook and originally called "The Hookies," the honor was renamed "The Sidney Awards" in 2005. The awards are presented each December.

Partial bibliography

• Editor, Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing (Vintage, 1996) 0-6797-6654-5
• Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000) ISBN 0-684-85377-9
• On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004) ISBN 0-7432-2738-7
• The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011) ISBN 978-1-4000-6760-2
• The Road to Character (Random House, 2015) ISBN 978-0-8129-9325-7
• The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (Random House, 2019) ISBN 978-0-8-1299-3264

See also

• Co-commentator on NPR: E. J. Dionne.
• Co-commentator on the PBS Newshour: Mark Shields

External links

• David Brooks at TED
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Brooks on Bobos, July 30, 2000.
  • In Depth interview with Brooks, December 4, 2011
• The transformation of David Brooks, Columbia Journalism Review, 27 October 2015, long-form bio article on Brooks.
• David Brooks at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about David Brooks in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• "Meet David Brooks" and Column archive at The New York Times
• Discussion with Andrew Rosenthal, Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, The New York Times video, July 17, 2006
• Column archive at The Atlantic
• Column archive at The Weekly Standard
• David Brooks on The Emily Rooney Show on WGBH Radio
• Video: David Brooks discusses The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement on March 17, 2011, on Forum Network.
• Ubben Lecture at DePauw University; October 4, 2014
  • Dead link; here's a new source for this talk.
• I Am Not Charlie Hebdo // The New York Times, The Opinion Pages, Op-Ed Columnist, Jan 8, 2015