Newspaper Reader: Evan Goldstein pays homage to David Brooks in a mere 3913 words!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Feb 22, 2026

Editor: ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’was the turning point of Mr. Brooks political career! He became a New York Times opinion writer. Evan Goldstein’s fawining ‘interview’ is a monument to political confromity and obsequiousness!

For more than two decades, David Brooks has been a fixture of The New York Times opinion page — “the kind of conservative writer that wouldn’t make our readers shriek and throw the paper out the window,” as one Times editor put it when Brooks was hired. A temperamental moderate with a knack for affectionately mocking the elite, Brooks trafficked in wry bemusement rather than moral prescription. In a classic 2001 article in The Atlantic, he trained his eye on “organization kids” — the apolitical, hyperstriving careerists of the Ivy League, whom Brooks regarded as both inordinately obsessive about grabbing the next brass ring and oddly incurious about life’s deeper questions. These students prioritized the cultivation of what Brooks calls résumé virtues at the expense of eulogy virtues, the qualities you hope to be remembered for at your funeral. While he plainly felt something had gone awry, he struck a pose of cocked-eyebrow observer rather than finger-wagging scold.

In the years since, his critique of elite higher education has taken on a sharper tone. In his 2024 Atlantic cover story, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” his target isn’t the psychological malformation of elites, but the entire system that’s anointed their rise. Our method of sorting and sifting via college admissions is bad for higher education and bad for the country, Brooks argues. The architects of the American meritocracy dreamed of a world of “class-mixing and relative social comity; we ended up with a world of rigid caste lines and pervasive cultural and political war. … We ended up with President Trump.”

Now Brooks is moving to the belly of the beast. He recently announced that he would be leaving the Times to take up a new position at Yale University, where he has taught on and off for years. He was recruited to New Haven directly by Yale’s president, Maurie D. McInnis. In his new role, he will lecture, convene discussions on campus, and — what else? — start a podcast in a partnership between Yale and The Atlantic.

I called him on his last day as an employee of The New York Times. We spoke about what Trump gets right, why this is a time for reform in higher ed, and the false consciousness of progressive professors. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Editor: Marcus Stanley in 2021 takes on the question of David Brooks!

What does David Brooks see when he looks in the mirror?

The War on Terror-era neocon is at it again, scolding America for withdrawing from Afghanistan and advocating we stay in the game.

If you were politically aware during the buildup to the 2003 Iraq War, David Brooks’s recent column calling for America to stay in Afghanistan and take a more aggressive role overseas might feel uncomfortably familiar.

Once again, as he did when promoting the Iraq invasion, he calls for America to be the “indispensable nation” and “democracy’s champion.” Once again, there is the obliviousness to the human costs of a supposedly humanitarian U.S. intervention. That was already strange in 2003, but it’s now grotesque after the death of more than 1.3 million human beings in just the first ten years of the War on Terror that Brooks had championed.

The studied turning away from the costs of our wars to those who live in the places where they are fought turns almost surreal in the part of his column devoted to Afghanistan. Brooks cheerfully informs us that “in 1999, no Afghan girls attended secondary school…and as of 2017 the figure had climbed to nearly 40 percent,” all at the cost of “relatively few” American casualties. The cost of a quarter of a million Afghan dead, over 70,000 of them civilians, in a country with a smaller population than California gets zero mention in his column. Neither does the widespread human rights violations associated with the foreign military presence, ranging from torture and detentions to ignoring the return of institutionalized child rape by U.S.-aligned Afghan security forces, something that even the Taliban never tolerated.

After Iraq and Afghanistan, Brooks observes, America “lost faith in itself and its global role, like a pitcher who has been shelled and lost confidence in his own stuff.” Apparently the U.S. is losing its mojo in the democracy-championing business. With the upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11 the champions of the War on Terror seem to think we are reaching some kind of statute of limitations for the relevance of our past actions. One might have more confidence in this assertion if there had been real accountability and reckoning in Washington for the individuals and ideology that drove the catastrophic decisions made after 9/11.

But this article underscores that there has been no such reckoning. What it instead illustrates is the through-line that links the ideology of global dominance that drove our decisions then, and the way we still look at the world today. The invasion of Iraq was justified by commentators like Bill Kristol using a Manichean distinction between “a world order conducive to our liberal democratic principles and our safety, or… one where brutal, well-armed tyrants are allowed to hold democracy and international security hostage.” Twenty years later, Brooks, a champion of that invasion, still depicts the world as “enmeshed in a vast contest between democracy and different forms of autocracy…a struggle between the forces of progressive modernity and reaction.” And it’s true, as Brooks claims, that this view is close to that espoused by some in the Biden administration.

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The more subtle difference, acknowledged by Brooks in a brief statement that “we’re never going back to the Bush doctrine,” is a belief we can avoid the overreach of boots-on-the-ground invasions of foreign countries while still pursuing claims to unilateral U.S. global leadership. This recasts the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as driven not by ideological overreach but by a short-sighted failure to anticipate the practical difficulties of invasion and occupation. Calls for new hot wars are out; a sweeping, ill-defined global cold war with the forces of reaction domestically and abroad is in. But cold wars carry their own dangers — including igniting a hot war in any of the numerous simmering low-level conflicts with our ideological enemies around the world, from Ukraine to the Persian Gulf to the Taiwan Strait.

Brooks closes by saying that without aggressively fighting this new global conflict between authoritarianism and progressive values we won’t be able to “look at ourselves in the mirror without a twinge of shame.” It’s an odd moral calculus that tries to ignore shameful acts facilitated by the United States itself and instead calls on us to be ashamed of the actions of foreign governments based on the vague hypothetical claim that U.S. intervention could prevent them. But it’s at the heart of the humanitarian interventionism Brooks sold 20 years ago and is still selling today. We should hope that this time there won’t be buyers in Washington.

Editor: Andrew Bacevich in 2013 on Brooks:

David Brooks is constantly wrong

Takes a lot to be the voice on the New York Times op-ed page most consistently wrong about war in the Middle East!

September 15, 2013

The final paragraphs of Bacevich’s revelatory essay on Brooks:

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Sprinkling his columns with references to “irony” as he channeled the spirit of Reinhold Niebuhr, Brooks might have chosen to reflect deeply on all that had gone wrong in Iraq and in his own calculations. Was the main problem simply incompetence on the part of George W. Bush, his advisers, and his generals—a splendid initiative squandered through faulty implementation? Or did failure derive from deeper causes, perhaps a fundamental misunderstanding of war or history or human nature itself? Or could the problem lie, at least in part, with a perversely undemocratic military system that condemned soldiers to waging something like perpetual war at the behest of a small coterie of Washington insiders, while citizens passively observed from a safe distance?

Sharing the inclination of his countrymen, Brooks chose not to engage in any searching inquiry at all. Rather than reflecting on Iraq, he looked for new fields in which to test his theory of using military power to spread American ideals while redeeming American culture at home. Afghanistan—a war already under way for more than a decade—presented just the second chance he was looking for. Based on a quick visit, Brooks concluded that Afghanistan was nothing like Iraq. U.S. military efforts there promised to yield a different and far more favorable outcome. “In the first place,” he wrote during his government-arranged reporting trip in early 2009, “the Afghan people want what we want . . . That makes relations between Afghans and foreigners relatively straightforward. Most [U.S.] military leaders here prefer working with the Afghans to the Iraqis. The Afghans are warm and welcoming.” Even better, they actually “root for American success.”

That wasn’t all. In contrast to its fumbling performance in Iraq, the U.S. military had now fully mastered the business of winning hearts and minds. Know-how had displaced ineptitude, with the union of John Wayne and Jane Addams now fully consummated. Further, with the distraction of Iraq now out of the way, the troops in Afghanistan possessed the wherewithal needed for “reforming the police, improving the courts, training local civil servants and building prisons.” As Brooks put it, “we’ve got our priorities right.” Furthermore, “the Afghans have embraced the democratic process with enthusiasm.” Unlike the recalcitrant and ungrateful Iraqis, they were teachable and amenable. Brooks commended President Obama for “doubling down on the very principles that some dismiss as neocon fantasy: the idea that this nation has the capacity to use military and civilian power to promote democracy, nurture civil society and rebuild failed states.” Granted, the trial run in Iraq had gone badly, but why cry over spilled milk? Besides, Iraq had served as an education of sorts. Brooks felt certain that trying again in Afghanistan would yield a better outcome. In short, that war was “winnable.”

Yet Afghanistan proved no more winnable than Iraq had been, at least not within the limits of what the United States could afford and the American public was willing to pay. The U.S. troops who burned Korans, defiled Taliban corpses, and gunned down innocent civilians in shooting sprees made it difficult for Afghans to appreciate the Jane Addams side of the American soldier. As for John Wayne, Hollywood had thought better than to film him urinating on dead enemy fighters. By 2012, an epidemic of “green-on-blue” incidents—Afghan security forces murdering their U.S. counterparts—revealed the absurdity of Brooks’s blithe assertion that Afghans “want what we want” and “root for American success.” What most Americans wanted was to be done with Afghanistan. In hopes of arranging a graceful withdrawal, they might allow Washington to prolong the war a bit longer, but with the usual terms fixed firmly in place: only so long as someone else’s kid does the fighting and future generations get stuck with the bill.

Newspaper Reader.