Shift Change at the Wheel Reinvention Factory

David Brooks is a writer who purports to explain America even though he spends one hundred percent of his time shuttling between the New York Times building and the Aspen Ideas Festival. You can see how this might leave a gap in his knowledge. He fills this gap with endless amounts of pop psychology, always ready to latch onto a new sociological theory to explain why poor people don’t understand fancy sandwiches. Brooks is the most prominent example of the “guy you made an excuse to walk away from at the party because every time you said something he replied, ‘you know, I read an interesting theory about that.’” Had he not landed at the Times, he could have had a more appropriate career as a bad personal therapist. There, he could have only misled one person at a time, whereas journalism gives him the opportunity to mislead millions.

Though Brooks’ original position was as the Times’ in-house conservative, you need only spend one second gazing at him giving a TED Talk in a quarter-zip fleece to know that the Republicans left him behind long ago. This leaves him in the odd position of being a man who gives advice for a living while having no idea what just happened to his own party. Needless to say, this has not stopped him from writing things. He engages in self-reflection the same way that a newscaster on live TV picks his nose: quickly, leaving no evidence that it ever happened.

Now, Brooks is alarmed for our country. He is able to see that Trumpism is destroying our country, but his own intellectual toolbox, stuffed with Steven Pinker books and course catalogs from Yale, is comically unsuited to deal this this moment in history. His response is to write a long article in The Atlantic titled “America Needs a Mass Movement—Now.”

If you’re thinking to yourself, “David Brooks calling for a mass movement in the pages of The Atlantic is like me calling for a parade of supermodels to come date me as I sit in my cousin Roy’s garage surrounded by half-eaten chicken wings,” well—yes. Yes, this is accurate. It is a measure of the depth of our national crisis that I am going to try to offer a good faith critique of Brooks’ arguments here, rather than just trying to point