RIP David Brooks

the fact that he is just a bad prose stylist, just straight-up shitty at writing, and that he continually, year after year, relies on this anecdotal "red states think like this, blue state think like this" bullshit is just galling in the extreme to me. douthat gang for life

when i see what an unserious void he is and how much money he's made, it makes me believe that i can accomplish anything

no it totally is rigged, but it could be rigged _in my favor_

* head explodes *

It’s hard to run for national office from California or New York. The urban parts of those states are so unrepresentative you don’t understand what you’re about to face. https://t.co/S7AsKZ5Ly1

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) November 29, 2019

Let me, David Brooks, tell you about Chicopee Massachusetts

the flyover whisperer

huh how did Reagan and Trump do it?

his optimistic "look back" at the 2020s includes President Biden of course

then he ends it with the Mets winning every World Series, which is a big fantasy clue-in

Nurse, he's up.

Over the past few years wages for workers toward the bottom of the income stream have been rising faster than wages for those toward the top. If the bosses have the workers by the throat, how can this be happening? https://t.co/kKVbXVcSDH

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) January 17, 2020

Bournemouth doomed this year unless this guy can return from the dead soon

David Brooks reassures us: billionaires aren't hoarding an ever-greater share of the world's resources. Rather, if you're on the wrong side of the inequality paradigm, you simply need to increase your productivity. https://t.co/3uuzlIPr6C

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 17, 2020

I think David Brooks' comment kind of makes sense, and am not sure how Taibbi extrapolates to get to his point

well I can't deal w/ the first half of that sentence, Dan

People whose values are "guns, patriotism, abortion, masculinity" are not swing voters.

now now, you cant have political legitimacy as a politician or political party unless u get clearance from the demographic most associated with domestic terrorism.

you guys are right

Can’t share details, but one time David Brooks wrote a column that was so bad—so wildly off-base, wrong about basic political history and tax policy—that I and others had to pull an all-nighter working on a line-by-line rebuttal. We had a 3am conference call, about its wrongness. https://t.co/xTSVn92GUk

— Brian Highsmith (@bd_highsmith) February 5, 2020

no he's right i wonder how that would have played out

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/

right in the fuckin pocket, this one, a true master at work

for the first time in my life, i'm sorry i'm not an Atlantic subscriber. just so i could cancel for publishing this boob.

fucked if i’m gonna read the whole thing but the opening section has huge divorced-guy energy and thus is classic brooks territory

I’m not going to click on that, is it some warmed over eugenics, bc that’d be pretty on brand for the Atlantic no?

idk, it's really long, i'm just gonna assume he thinks we should live in longhouses, raise each other's babies

a lissome and willing young research assistant for everyone who wants one

oh boy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcBXfod8U7c

tasteful

This article is one extended fart noise but right before I could take it no more:

it’s not just the institution of marriage they’re eschewing: In 2004, 33 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 were living without a romantic partner, according to the General Social Survey; by 2018, that number was up to 51 percent.

Oh my god the video

It’s a parody video THAT ISN’T

This morning I'm spending time being mad that any woman with David Brooks' teeth would never had made it to television, even PBS.

aww, david looks so happy to be giving his daughter away at her wedding!

*thirty seconds pass*

oh god david what are you doing? david, noooooo!

i hate you so muchg right now

he's a dumbass throughout, and it does seem to almost veer into "i'm going to ask my millennial wife to open up our marriage", but.............................. this isn't the worst column

he's just, as always, unimaginative and far too nostalgic when he tries to think of alternatives (charity and apps!)

For instance, might I recommend leaving your wife for your young research assistant https://t.co/LA29D50kSU

— andi zeisler (@andizeisler) February 11, 2020

Read about "the Bernie lens" in today's column

I actually was going to post that column this morning. I'd even typed out a whole rant about it, then I decided to delete it and get on with my day.

Anyway, I agree with the first two-thirds of the column -- Bernie will likely win the nomination because he has a clear message! -- but then he totally undercuts his point in the last third with bad-faith reasoning and centrist pablum.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/bernie-sanders.html

lol the most coveted endorsement

the end of liberalism u say? sounds fuckin’ great

sorry to expose y'all to David Brooks, but this foolishness is such fucking catnip to me

dude absolutely *loves* to pretend communist revolutionaries usurped beneficent liberal democracies pic.twitter.com/tGwF59SXx1

— Alex P 👹 (@SaddestRobots) February 28, 2020

Eventually Brooks will see that the waters around him have grown and that sooner or later, he’ll be drenched the bone. His old world is rapidly fading.

Seriously if american upper classes weren’t so fucking greedy they wouldn’t have had this problem. But the myth of equitable growth is only tenable when people can afford to live.

Susan Sontag, 1978: "Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one."

David Brooks, 2020: pic.twitter.com/9uOHJyYgtc

— inverted vibe curve (@PatBlanchfield) March 27, 2020

Is she leaving him? https://t.co/FF9fUFGZLn

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) March 29, 2020

The intellectual decline of the GOP is astonishing, especially when your remember how different it was just 15 or 20 years ago. https://t.co/HeNz6rjhKy

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) April 2, 2020

i saw a tweet with that beside another brooks column from 2004 saying pretty much exactly the same thing

those neocon intellectuals and their sterling record

can’t fault their consistency

Friedmanesque conservatism all sounded so brilliant to Brooks during those dorm room bull sessions at U. of Chicago, and Wm. F. Buckley's eyes seemed to twinkle so charmingly on PBS.

how you like them freedom fries