http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=1&hp

The comic potential of Mr. David Brooks is here manifest in his self-description as ‘Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective’ in his latest essay in The New York Times titled Pundit Under Protest. An observer might comment on the Olympian proportion of his self-conception and its rhetorical expression, which allows him to heap scorn on the bankrupt two party system and its lack of ability to fully engage with the vital project of an American Renaissance, with the proviso that The Free Market take the lead. One might try two other names for Mr. Brooks: Wall Street Valet or Capitalism’s Intellectual Poodle, it is a choice fraught with the recognition of power of metaphor to shape intellectual/political debate. A quote from this essay is demonstrative of his singular idea:

‘This election is about how to avert national decline. All other issues flow from this anxiety.’

 Mr. Brooks as thinker is obsessed with the singular idea, the sometimes tellingly simplistic notion is his intellectual bread and butter, the play of the many forces in the political/ethical life of Zoon Politikon is utterly foreign, even subversive of his limited imagination. He is, in fact, a political conformist masquerading as thinker and which leads him to garnish his limited, stunted commentaries with pertinent factual data, while never engaging in a germane commentary or critique of his closely held notion of the supremacy of ‘The Market’, which failed utterly to demonstrate its’ efficacy or viability in any way but as a simulacrum for theft. We are in our present condition of decline because of that failure, that Mr. Brooks is incapable of discussing honestly, while he condemns the Republicans for Rigid Political Orthodoxy and the Democrats for engaging in New Deal Nostalgia. The brief political description of each is a wonder of his clueless reductionism, making caricature into political reality. But The Answer is in the Hamiltonian Party a product of his political speculation, or more accurately of an ersatz ‘political idealism’. In this part of the essay he attempts to reframe the idea and practice of Conservatism as somehow dynamic, innovative and forward looking.  Conservatism in its’ American iteration is about two nostalgias: Constitutional Originalism and Free Market Romanticism, both inherently static and backward looking, solely, resolutely  about the past, not the potential dynamism of an active present or future, in the life of the Republic. While others may play Fantasy Baseball or Football this thinker conjures a Fantasy Political Party i.e. the game of the restive Opinionator. One feels his deep discontent with the Party machinery and its addiction to ‘Old Thinking’ as opposed to ‘New Thinking’, or even that old American standby ‘Thinking outside the Box’. He wishes to emancipate American Politics from an addiction to the outworn ideas of Right and Left, of The Oligarchs versus The Progressives.  Mr. Brooks is just a run of the mill rationalizer for a Conservatism whose singular economic idea, an abiding faith in the Free Market, went utterly, criminally wrong. He possesses a great deal of intellectual pretension and a delusion that he has a mind of his own, that manifests itself in these small fits of rebellion against his masters. 

Political Observer