Horizon

I'd pay to read the year or so worth of correspondence surrounding David Brooks' transition to NYT opinion columnist.

What makes a successful writer and editor jettison successful instutitions and broadly-lauded writing, choosing instead to churn out cringeworthy dreck? Is it overreach? Is it inept editing? Has the platform turned him into a partisan hack? If so, is his recurring incoherence the result of battles between his inner writer and the party line?

I suspect that email would be the best place to figure that out

I haven't followed Brooks closely enough to know if there's a difference -- but is he the fellow who peddles the "bobo" claim that young urban liberals are indifferent to poverty? Which battles you see going on in him? And which "party line"? Really I don't know much about the man directly, but the criticisms make it sound as though he's a right-winger passing himself off as a liberal in order to be able to claim he's criticizing liberals more in sorrow than in anger. Not true?

So far as I'm aware, Brooks has never tried to pass himself off as a liberal. In fact, he's filling the token conservative spot at the NYT opinion page right now.

His best work has been as a popular anthropologist in columns in The Atlantic, The Weekly Standard, and his books Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive. For a sample I suspect you might enjoy -- in which he writes perceptively about suburbian without sneering -- see his WS article "Patio Man and the Sprawl People" one and two.

The "bobos" he describes are hardly young, urban, or (necessarily) liberal. They're more stereotypically college-town residents of places like Austin or Ann Arbor. I'm unaware of any statements he's made about their opinions on poverty.

The only political claim I remember him making in his demographic writings is that being surrounded by things you cannot afford affects your economic self-image and tends to correlate with Democratic voting, while people in rural/exurban areas are more likely to view themselves as well-off and vote Republican.

Regarding Brooks' battles, all I can say is a few years ago he was producing well-written and insightful portraits of the worldview of some important parts of American society while editing a center-Right magazine that -- while saddled with a few idiots like Fred Barnes -- was perfectly willing to lambast Republicans. Now he's writing columns for the Times that deal with politics that are out of his league and his demographic observations have been dumbed down into twee anecdotes that neither support his political points nor edify. The Weekly Standard has gone from 20% pro-Administration dreck to 80%, so is rarely worth reading anymore.

So the net from my perspective is that a favorite author has effectively disappeared, an enjoyable read has gone down the tubes, and anybody I talk about Brooks' old work about thinks of the cornball folksy dittohead who's writing in the Times. I'd like to know why.