Furthermore, why is David Brooks a thing? I’ve been wondering that every time I’m reminded of him for twenty or thirty or a hundred years now. The latest reminder was accidentally seeing a few seconds of some pompous PBS chat show last night with him pompously saying words on it. Why? Who cares what he thinks? Why do the Approved Media keep asking for his input?

The Nation wondered the same thing last August.

Take heed, American reprobates! Your self-appointed spiritual doctor, David Brooks, is diagnosing your faults, sins, and self-serving moral evasions, and his findings are grim. In successive turns at the bully pulpits of The New York Times and The Atlantic, Brooks has detected a collective failure to grow up and lay aside the childish things that haunt our epoch: self-absorption, incivility, tribalism, and other just plain rude repudiations of character and virtue.

This line of argument has been a recurring theme in Brooks’s never-ending tenure as a commentator of mysteriously high profile.

Emphasis added. That. Why?? Why does he have such a high profile, and why has he had it for so long? He’s not another Christopher Hitchens now is he, so why?

Speaking of Christophers…

Brooks’s recent New York Times outburst—titled, of course, “Grow Up, America”—repeatedly cites [Christopher] Lasch’s best known work, the 1979 jeremiad The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch, as it happens, was my adviser in graduate school, and it’s been a grim intellectual crucible for me to see his work cited admiringly—and in predictably bowdlerized, stunted, and distorted fashion—on the American right. In his invocations of The Culture of Narcissism, Brooks carries on this appalling annexation project—and does so by once again excising all of the book’s many discussions of the central role that the capitalist political economy plays in the rise of a collective American narcissistic personality. Brooks approvingly quotes Lasch’s diagnosis of a debilitating brand of narcissism that leaves its sufferer doomed to seek “neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it,” while of course neglecting entirely to note Lasch’s own characterization of those conditions.

Brooks is a boring mediocre hack yet he’s a darling of public broadcasting and The New Atlantic York Times. It’s interesting that the same Major Media are all-in on trans ideology.