On David Brooks' "I should have seen this coming"

Already a chill should spider down your spine at the idea of anyone having to read David Brooks, but of the dreary pieces in the latest issue of The Atlantic (which included a suspiciously timed profile of Ringo Starr (this and the announced casting for the Beatles biopics within the same month?), Brooks was the least bad.

In "I should have seen this coming," Brooks digs deep to finally acknowledge that modern "conservatism," especially as expressed in the current Administration, is a smokescreen for reactionary politics. There is no strategy, there are no good faith debates about policy implementation, there is no one in any room reading "Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke," as Brooks waxes through nostalgia. There is, instead, a policy of power, and a rising chorus of backstabbing sycophants who will kill themselves (but many, many others before turning knives inward) to grab that power.

I appreciate any pundit's public accounting of mistakes. We deserve transparent, moral reckonings, and it's become too rare for anyone to own up to Being Embarrassingly Wrong, but I have personally reached my limit on this kind of thing.

Years ago, I attended a panel discussion of New York Times writers on "Why you should care about privacy" (I'm on camera briefly here!). Having worked against the expansion of the NSA's surveillance authorities at the time, I wanted to know how reporters and columnists at the Paper of Record thought through similar issues, and, for at least two of the speakers that night, I can say they didn't really think through issues all that much ("I just fell in love with Alexa," one said 🙄).

I don't blame the writers themselves, but the papers that hire them. For more years than I've been alive, "objectivity" in journalism has been used as a veneer to cover up a bland stew of centrism, consumerism, and dispassion (did you know that some newspapers' Code of Ethics state that journalists cannot vote?). It's easy to understand why. Particularly within the political divide in America, the absolute Non-Thought of "Both Sides are Bad, Actually" can masquerade itself as insight. But it isn't. It's a refusal to engage with the information at hand, which brings me back to why I'm just so tired about all these delayed discoveries.

Being paid to pay attention to the world and its noise is not terribly harrowing work. It's a little maddening, it's frustrating, and the readers are often racist, but the job is to read, listen, ask questions, and match patterns between all the data. It's just disappointing that so, so many people who have that responsibility (and privilege) find themselves incapable of fulfilling it.