Political Realist lances the pustule.

Mr. Brooks seems to think/believe that his readership is gullible and or clueless?

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In a magnificent 1949 essay on Churchill, Isaiah Berlin noticed that Churchill idealized his fellow Brits with such intensity that he lifted “a large number of inhabitants of the British Isles out of their normal selves and, by dramatizing their lives and making them seem to themselves and to each other clad in the fabulous garments appropriate to a great historic moment, transformed cowards into brave men, and so fulfilled the purpose of shining armor.”

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Mr. Brooks ‘forgets’ that Berlin defamed Isaac Deutscher, and cost Deutscher an academic position.

The Hedgehog and the Hedgehog: Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Deutscher

By David Mikics August 10, 2013

Here is a descriptive paragraph of Caute’s argument about the Berlin, Deutscher controversy, that was once a secret of Academic Mendacity: as a way of viewing Berlin as ‘as elitist snob’ and seeing Deutscher as victim of Berlin’s abuse of the power of position, in Academic Life.

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Caute paints Berlin as something of an elitist snob, in his words a “coddled bourgeois.” Surely Berlin reveled in the good life, but to imagine with Caute that this fact invalidates his arguments is rather silly. And on Berlin’s aesthetic preferences Caute falls down completely. Caute faults Berlin for spending too much time in his most famous work, The Hedgehog and the Fox, discussing Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, with their upper-class milieux, rather than (this is Caute’s suggestion) Walter Greenwood’s “memorable Love on the Dole (1933),” which Berlin’s Soviet hosts were shocked he had not read when they asked him about it on a 1945 visit. Caute laments the fact that Berlin never referred to Gorky and sees class prejudice in this omission. But Berlin would surely argue that his favorites Tolstoy and Turgenev tell us far more about the reality of human life than Gorky or the justly forgotten Greenwood. Caute seems to yearn for the good old days of socialist realism, when the worth of a piece of fiction could easily be deduced from whether it sympathetically portrayed working-class life and showed the wealthy to be corrupt fiends. These are the standards of propaganda, not art, and they had a devastating effect on writers in the Soviet bloc. Berlin, whose 1945 meeting in Leningrad with Anna Akhmatova was, according to his biographer Michael Ignatieff, the most important event of his life, cared deeply about the writers persecuted by Stalin. Deutscher, by contrast, seemed indifferent to the fate of art under Communism.

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On the question of Michael Ignatieff , his fawning interview with Berlin is hard to understand, or even follow. Yet Ignatieff’s fawning ‘interview’ with The Great Man, evokes embarrassment in the befuddled viewer.

Mr. Brooks is a New York Times Public Intellectual, is sum he and his employers intellectual, political standards are elastic!

Political Realist