David Brooks: The New York Times' Favorite Conservative Con Man

By Nick Bromell, AlterNet. Posted February 1, 2008.

At some point in our lives, we all dream of playing in the big leagues. But what if our fantasies came true? What if we were suddenly plucked from our crabgrass and dead clover and dropped magically onto the emerald outfield of Yankee Stadium? What would we feel -- ecstasy or terror?

I suspect that something like this happened to David Brooks when he was summoned from the obscure nook of the Weekly Standard and asked to write a regular op-ed column for the New York Times. Here was someone who had edited a cranky right-wing journal and written a clever book poking fun at baby-boomer bohemians suddenly being required to render informed opinion on everything from global warming to stem cell research. Is it any wonder that for the past three years we have watched a drowning man flounder in a froth of chatty drivel?

Fortunately, his legions of exasperated readers don't have to wonder whether he'll ever get his just reward. The truth is that Brooks is already being punished. Deep beneath his protective sheath of psychic blubber, he knows what the Wizard of Oz knew -- that he's a fake and a failure.

To stand in Brooks's wingtips as I have and to feel the self-doubts that consume him, all you have to do is look back over the columns he has written. What you'll see is precisely what Brooks himself sees -- an astounding inconsistency. I'm not suggesting that in print he often changes his mind. In fact, this is exactly what he does not do. He doesn't say, "I thought it was going to be sunny, but it looks like rain." He says: "It's going to be sunny." And then three days later: "It's going to rain."

Mercifully, most of his readers hardly notice how often and how rapidly he jerks from one position to another. Because an op-ed column is by nature (or genre) a series of flashes surrounded by stretches of darkness, they don't remember what Brooks wrote last week, much less last month or last year. His many self-contradictions become clear only when his pieces are placed back-to-back and read quickly, one after the other, as if flipping through matchstick drawings to create a little movie. Like this:

July 3, 2004: "Iraq now has a popular government with a tough, capable minister. Democratic institutions are emerging, including a culture of compromise. ... Thanks in part to Bremer's decisiveness, the political transition is going well. This administration can adapt, and stick to a winning strategy once it finds it. ... the Iraqis really do have a galvanizing hunger for democracy ... that makes the long-term prospects for success brighter than they appeared a few months ago."

Sept. 24, 2006: "Iraq is the most xenophobic, sexist and reactionary society on the earth. The larger lesson, as we think about future efforts to reform the Middle East and combat extremism, is that the Chinese model probably works best. That is, it's best to champion economic reform before political reform."

July 24, 2004: "Only 10 percent of our efforts from now on will be military. The rest will be ideological ... We've got a long struggle ahead, but at least we're beginning to understand it."

Oct. 5, 2004: "The pace of events seems to be quickening in Iraq; ... an Iraqi-U.S. military offensive took back Samarra, and Rumsfeld said yesterday that Samarra is a model for what is about to happen in other towns in Iraq."

Jan. 28, 2007: "Ethnic cleansing is dividing Baghdad, millions are moving, thousands are dying and the future looks horrific. The best answer, then, is soft partitition; separate the sectarian groups as much as possible. In practice that means, first, modifying the Iraqi Constitution."

October 2007: "Most American experts and policy makers wasted the past few years assuming that change in Iraq could come from the center and move outward ... Now at last the smartest analysts and policy makers are starting to think like sociologists. They are finally acknowledging that the key Iraqi figures are not in the center but in the provinces and the tribes."

One day Brooks is praising the Iraqis' hunger for democracy and their political transition toward democracy. Two years later, without a backward glance at his earlier column, he's saying the Iraqis are much too reactionary to become democratic and that economic reform has to pave the way for political transition. One day Brooks reports that the top strategists who confide in him are redefining the war as ideological, not military, and he opines that this signals our improved understanding of the struggle. Then, two months later, he reports that the top planners are renewing their commitment to a primarily military strategy. One piece suggests that U.S. policy should focus on revising the Constitution, loosening the federal structure of Iraq, and shepherding Shias, Sunnis and Kurds into separated and distinct regions. A subsequent piece recommends a quite different policy: Ignore the endless constitutional debate, stop seeing everything in terms of metacategories like Sunni, Shia and Kurd, and focus instead on "the agglomeration of order, tribe by tribe and street by street."

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