Paradise glossed: the problem with David Brooks.

• Author: Confessore, Nicholas
• Position: Journalist

A few weeks ago, as news of the torture at Abu Ghraib made its way out to the wider world, David Brooks published a column that many of his readers had probably been waiting months to see. Brooks, who joined The New York Times op-ed stable in 2003, had long been among the more cogent defenders of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But as the prison scandal reached its apogee, Brooks seemed to have had enough. "This has been a crushingly depressing period, especially for people who support the war in Iraq," he wrote. "The predictions people on my side made about the postwar world have not yet come true. The warnings others made about the fractious state of post-Saddam society have." Though he was not ready to give up on Iraq, Brooks continued:

It's not too early to begin thinking about what was clearly an intellectual failure. There was, above all, a failure to understand the consequences of our power. There was a failure to anticipate the response our power would have on the people we sought to liberate. They resent us for our power and at the same time expect us to be capable of everything. There was a failure to understand the effect our power would have on other people around the world. We were so sure that we were using our might for noble purposes, we assumed that sooner or later, everybody else would see that as well. Not only was Brooks perhaps the first among that group of conservative thinkers who had advocated war against Iraq for nearly a decade to concede that his side had gotten things dreadfully wrong. He had also put his finger on the central failing of the war hawks--their purblind arrogance and self-delusion--with a degree of precision all the more powerful for having come from a supporter of the war.

It's instructive, though, to go back and read what Brooks had written about Iraq one month earlier, when the Shiite uprising began to build steam. "Come on people, let's get a grip," Brooks lectured:

This week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam. Pundits and sages were spinning a whole series of mutually exclusive disaster scenarios: Civil war! A nationwide rebellion! Maybe we should calm down a bit. I've spent the last few days talking with people who've spent much of their careers studying and working in this region. We're at a perilous moment in Iraqi history; but the situation is not collapsing. Oh, good--he talked to some people. (The only Near East experts on the planet who didn't think the situation was collapsing, apparently.) Having begun his column like an overzealous junior press secretary ham-handedly spinning bad news, Brooks ended it like a second-rate talk-radio host playing tough guy. "Sadr is an enemy of civilization," he intoned. "The terrorists are enemies of civilization. They must be defeated." Well, sure.

I suspect I'm not the only one who has noticed that the quality, of Brooks's Times column varies wildly from week to week. One day, he's funny, unpredictable, insightful; you read along, glad that the Times has given this man a permanent place in its pages. Three days later, he's bloviating like Michael Savage, and Maureen Dowd doesn't seem so silly anymore. But if you peruse Brooks's considerable pre-Timesian oeuvre, you'll find that the same inconsistency is evident throughout his work. There is Brooks the Journalist. And there is Brooks the Hack.

Brooks the Journalist got his start working the police beat in Chicago; today, nearly alone among those conservative pundits who habitually bash the press for its laziness and myopia, Brooks still actually ventures out into the real world to do his own reporting on what it holds. Brooks the Journalist is erudite enough to pen essays for The Public Interest but accessible enough to write columns for Newsweek. Often when reading his best work, you feel that he's perfectly explained or captured something you knew to be true but couldn't find precisely the right words for. He is a keen observer, adept at distilling his reporting into generalizations that illuminate American life. The most famous of these is, of course, the bohemian bourgeoisie, or Bobos, the upscale, older liberals who "combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos," as Brooks put it in his bestselling book, Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Bobos was a bestseller not only because it captured the mores of middle-aged, blue-state Boomers--people who wear expedition-quality anoraks to shovel snow and spend thousands of dollars on brand-new dinner tables designed to look worn and authentic--but also because he was sympathetic to his subjects. (A wise move, as they were also his audience.) "I'm a member of this class," Brooks assured readers. "We're not so bad."

Indeed, such people enjoy reading Brooks the Journalist precisely because he is one of the few right-leaning pundits who doesn't seem to believe that liberals are evil. Though conservative, Brooks the Journalist is reflective rather than bombastic; his zingers barely singe, let alone burn. Instead of dispensing wrath on "Hannity & Colmes," Brooks offers witty apercus on "The News-Hour with Jim Lehrer." Even the political philosophy to which Brooks has attached his name, "national-greatness conservatism"--it has something to do with building nicer libraries and resuscitating the space program--seems rather unthreatening. To put things in Brooksian terms, he's a conservative, but the kind you'd bring home to discuss politics over $17-a-pound artisanal goat cheese and organic chardonnay bottled by third-generation French peasants. It's no wonder the Times felt comfortable putting him on the op-ed page.

But there is also Brooks the Hack...