From the online edition of The Atlantic, May, 2025:
I SHOULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING
When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideas, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won.
By David Brooks
Everybody you’ve been sneering at for the last 40 years saw this coming. Everybody who could tell the difference between Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr. saw this coming. I gotta say, you’re as stupid and full of yourself now as you were 40 years ago. You’ve always been a joke as a bully, you’re even more of a joke now as a victim.
Oh. Good. Grief.
Truly, who does he think he’s kidding? The nanosecond his beloved conservative movement makes the very slightest gesture (faux, or not) toward sanity he’ll climb right back “up that rope” to install himself on the upper decks of the ship…. and, crow he’d seen it coming and the equilibrium our vaunted political system had been restored. Break out the champagne; he’ll even pop the cork! JFC. I am so very tired and feeling so very old.
You and me both. In my case, I actually am old. Given I’ve got grandchildren, though, it’s not as much comfort as it should be that I’ll soon be out of this shitshow for good.
Meanwhile, Brooks continues to be as reliable as ever for provoking a gale or two of sardonic laughter along the way to our common destiny.
I suspect I might be a good deal closer to your age than Pedinska’s, fwiw.
Age may be only a number, but my sense of that number creeps ever closer to the reality of the calendar.
Amen, sister!
Don’t know it it counts but I started being “mature for my age” at around 5yo when I figured out my grandparents were raging racists. I didn’t have the words yet, but I got the gist.
How many years does precocity bestow?
David Brooks should have been fired decades ago. He’s nothing but moldy lint the navel of what’s left of media’s rotting corpse.
I see my fyslexic dingers are displaying to best effect today. [rolling eye emoji]
How many years?—a good question, that one. Here’s one weird answer: My father didn’t believe in TV, so we didn’t have one in the house until I was 13 (1956). In 1957, he did, however, pay more than the price of a cheap, “table model” TV for the entire “Great Books of the Western World,” the 54-volume set published by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and edited by Robert Hutchins, then the President of the University of Chicago. As you might imagine, had you known my old man, he started at one end with Plato’s Republic, and I started at the other with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. After that, the twain never met again.
Side note: Robert Hutchins later founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. When, fresh from a year as an “outside agitator,” I enrolled as a student at UC Santa Barbara, the Center was already the tastiest place outside of Ann Arbor to argue with well-fed liberals. Glory Days!