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david brooks
Progressives Don’t Want David Brooks in Our Movement Anyway
The toxic attitudes of Brooks and others toward poor people are the problem. Direct cash works because it fundamentally trusts people to meet their own needs.
Oct 15, 2025
David Brooks’ recent column in the New York Times, “Why I Am Not A Liberal,” claims that giving people money has failed as an anti-poverty solution because poor people lack the right culture and character.
Here we go again. Brooks' characterization of poverty isn’t new—it’s an American tradition. It’s the same tired tropes I’ve been hearing since I was a kid and my family relied on CalFresh and MediCal to get by. We relied on government aid not because my parents were lazy, or that they didn’t want to work, but because they were working and it still wasn’t enough.
Let’s be clear: Poverty is a lack of cash, not character. It persists because policy solutions are piecemeal and exploitation is ongoing. Brooks claims that “we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor,” and then cites the increased government spending on welfare programs as proof that they haven’t worked. But according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, for every dollar budgeted for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 2020, poor families directly received an average of just 22 cents. As Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, By America, explains, “The American welfare state is a leaky bucket.”
The goal should be simple: Get more of the money we spend on fighting poverty into the hands of people who actually need it. Guaranteed income does precisely that, providing direct cash to people with minimal administrative overhead. And it works. Research from more than 20 academic studies has found that guaranteed income increases financial resilience, improves food and housing stability, and gives families more time together. Not a single pilot has shown decreased employment among recipients of guaranteed income, and the vast majority of pilots have shown increased rates of full-time employment.
If we are serious about weaving America back together, then we need policies that provide stability and dignity, not arguments that fray the fabric further.
This game of blaming poor people for their outcomes has always been rooted in racism. By Brooks’ logic, white families must have the purest culture, since they have amassed the most wealth. That claim is not just wrong—it’s absurd. He even pines for the left to embrace old neocons like Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan—the same person who released the 1965 “Moynihan Report,” under President Lyndon B. Johnson, which blamed the problems facing Black Americans as more deeply rooted in “ghetto culture” than in discrimination, exclusion, and lack of opportunity.
David Brooks calls himself a cultural determinist, suggesting that poverty persists because people lack the “traditional values” that enable success. But this view misunderstands how poverty actually works in America. For most families, poverty is not a lifelong condition—it is a temporary spell, a risk that far too many Americans face after a layoff, a medical bill, or a family crisis. To reduce this reality to some imagined permanent underclass devoid of the right culture is both inaccurate and unfair.
What’s more, it runs counter to Brooks’ own work. In 2018, he founded Weave: The Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute to rebuild trust and strengthen communities through belonging and human connection. Yet when he turns to poverty, he abandons that spirit of unity—portraying families who are struggling not as neighbors working to get back on their feet, but as deficient in values. If we are serious about weaving America back together, then we need policies that provide stability and dignity, not arguments that fray the fabric further.
The toxic attitudes of Brooks and others toward poor people are the problem. Direct cash works because it fundamentally trusts people to solve their own problems. Guaranteed income expands liberty. It is the infrastructure of freedom—a floor sturdy enough to make every other solution possible.
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Why Are Conservatives So Destructive? It’s Everyone Else’s Fault
Why are the rest of us supposed to respectfully indulge people who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old? Fascists are victims only of their own delusional understanding of the world, not the alleged problems a so-called "woke" culture imposes on them.
Aug 26, 2025
David Brooks, the New York Times’ philosopher in residence, has stumbled onto the astonishing fact that present-day conservatives don’t actually want to conserve anything; rather, they are nihilists who just want to destroy. He is hardly the first person to think this: I saw it coming many years ago, as have a host of others.
But it wouldn’t be a Brooks piece without a thumping non sequitur as its thesis: conservatives became nihilists, he says, because liberals drove them to it. Liberal culture and its sanctimonious hectoring literally “smother” American society, triggering a result as inevitable as combining two reactive chemicals.
He bases this conclusion on a survey of university students in two universities. If most of us think back on our college years, wasn’t it almost expected that we should be disaffected with any authority whatever, something we grow out of once the necessity of making a living stares us in the face?
On this slender evidentiary basis, Brooks concludes that conservatives are victims who can’t get a word in edgewise in woke America. This ignores the ubiquity of Fox News (a correspondent once wrote to me about being subjected to Fox News playing in a doctor’s office, as if the patients weren’t sick enough already). If you still own a device called a radio, you will notice that every commercial news-talk station is conservative.
Beyond that, have you ever been to a gun show (even in ostensibly liberal Northern Virginia where I live, there is a huge one at Chantilly)? Did you ever attend a NASCAR race, a country music concert or a megachurch, visit Branson, Missouri, or, if you’re really in the mood for amusement, tour the creation museum in Petersburg, Kentucky? None of these are exactly bastions of wokism, and somehow thrive despite the repressive atmosphere that Brooks conjures.
His victim narrative also puts conservatives in a strange ideological position that is contrary to their alleged principles. In the 1960s, as crime rates rose and inner cities smoldered with discontent, some liberals hypothesized that bad social conditions led to crime: crudely put, the slum made the criminal. Conservatives, led by William F. Buckley, Jr., their patron saint, responded vehemently: “society” bore no responsibility, it was a matter of innate character. The criminal made the slum.
Brooks has inverted this formula. As a spokesman for the erstwhile Party of Personal Responsibility, he now asserts that conservatives are persecuted victims of society. Their nihilistic rampages can be excused as acting out against cultural repression, as if they were the protagonist in Richard Wright’s Native Son, whereby the black youth commits a murder that is preordained by his upbringing in a violently segregationist society.
This is a slightly more sophisticated variant of the old chestnut that whites, particularly white males, are the most discriminated against people on earth, a trope that has been relentlessly worked over since Archie Bunker satirized it 50 years ago.
Embedded in Brooks’s complaint that the supposedly dominant liberal culture won’t listen to conservative ideas is the fallacy that all ideas, opinions, and traditions deserve equal consideration. One hopes that the vast majority of people would instantly reject the notion that slavery, ritual human sacrifice, or cannibalism are an acceptable basis for social organization. They once were, but enlightened opinion banished them.
All the supposedly vibrant ideas of present-day conservatism always reduce to a handful of notions that the Republican Party has been pushing for decades. The vision that the state can make life better for its citizens, meaning healthier, more economically secure, better educated, and with better infrastructure, is something conservatives have fought tooth and nail against since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
What they want is a weakened state that will do nothing for the citizen; instead, they want a strong state only when it comes to punishment—hence the money they throw at militarizing law enforcement and constructing a society of incarceration. Take a good look at Washington, DC—it’s coming to a city near you.
Conservatives believe in human inequality, whether in the economic, social, or racial spheres. Depending on the circumstances, they go to some lengths to conceal this belief, but the major voices of post-World War II conservatism were quite open about it. Buckley said “Unless you have the freedom to be unequal, there is no such thing as freedom.” Except that when conservatives are in power, inequality will indeed increase, but there is no corresponding increase in freedom, as anyone paying attention during the last seven months will have noticed.
Why are the rest of us supposed to respectfully indulge people who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old? Should we invite young earth creationists to rewrite geology textbooks to demonstrate how tolerant we are of their opinions? Is there really a legitimate difference of opinion on whether anthropogenic climate change exists, suggesting that scientists all over the world got it wrong and right-wing ideologues got it right? Should we thoughtfully examine the evidence that Jewish space lasers caused wildfires in California or that the Covid-19 vaccine is actually an injectable microchip just to show what good sports we are?
Beyond that, Brooks’s contention that nihilism is somehow the antithesis of conservatism is shaky. Joseph de Maistre, identified by the great historian of philosophy, Sir Isaiah Berlin, as one of the founders of Western conservatism, practically wallowed in nihilism: “The whole earth,” he wrote, “continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.”
Western religion itself, which Brooks thinks we must return to for life to have meaning, has its nihilistic element. Apparently, almost four in ten American adults believe we live in “end times,” and the behavior of much of the religious right during the Covid pandemic was that of a death cult. R.R. Reno, the editor of the religious-right publication First Things, actually wrote a paean to accepting death from Covid rather than taking precautions against it.
David Brooks spent his entire adult life pretending that modern American conservatism was about Edmund Burke and James Madison rather than an embryonic extremist movement that only needed the right leader to become a full-blown fascist party. Having finally lurched onto the unavoidable truth, he now assumes a pained expression and searches for a scapegoat.
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When David Brooks Goes 'Bernie Bro' (Sort of)
The longtime conservative NYT columnist is certainly not a member of the political left. But his recent admission still has something to offer us.
Nov 14, 2024
Has Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 turned the New York Times’ most prominent and popular conservative columnist David Brooks into a “Bernie bro?” To read his “morning-after” piece—“Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?”—might well make you think so.
Responding to the polls showing that more working-class voters in all their diversity had voted for the Trump/Vance ticket than for that of Harris/Walz, Brooks proffered nothing less than an historical class-analysis of what had led them to turn from the “Party of the People” to the party of a billionaire real-estate mogul and his Make America Great Again politics. In fact, even before Sanders himself issued a post-election attack on the Democratic Establishment stating that “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Brooks charged the Democrats with having failed to fulfill their primary political responsibility.
“The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality," wrote Brooks. "Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it.” And he then went on to declare: “I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption—something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.”
So, has Brooks joined the Left—and if so, why should we care?
I have always taken Brooks seriously, going all the way back to his years writing for The Weekly Standard, the neo-conservative magazine published by Rupert Murdoch and edited by Bill Kristol. Brooks originally caught my attention because he was posing questions about the “purpose and promise of America” that I sincerely believed needed addressing, but which my left comrades— in contrast to past progressives and radicals from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King Jr.—were failing to ask, if not outright scorning them.
For all of his talk about class inequality, and as much as he has come to see the light on what the Democrats should have been doing and, presumably, should be doing if they/we ever get it together and win back the White House and Congress, he still doesn’t really get what led us here...
At the same time, I never failed to recognize that as much as Brooks was asking the right questions—most notably in “A Return to National Greatness” (1997); “What is America For?” (2014) and “What are We Supposed to Do (about the growing class divide and the impending nomination of Trump)? (2016)—he was consistently offering the wrong answers. As I wrote in response to the second of those pieces: “(How could the conservative Brooks effectively answer that question?) How could he possibly appreciate and write informatively of America’s purpose and promise—the promise inscribed in our historical memory and imagination by Paine’s Common Sense, Jefferson’s Declaration, the Founders’ Preamble to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, FDR’s Four Freedoms, and King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech? How could he appreciate the promise that inspired not just a revolutionary war, but also generations of Americans to struggle to expand both the “We” in “We the People” and the democratic process through which “the people” can genuinely govern themselves?”
Brooks, unlike his own comrades on the right, had never been completely oblivious to questions of class. But he never wrote the kind of piece that he did on November 6 of this year—a populist class analysis and narrative that clearly holds the nation’s elites accountable for Trump’s victories in both 2016 and 2020. The very title of the column signals Brooks new sympathies. While he definitely has no affection or admiration for Trump and the MAGA crowd, he takes seriously the working-class voters who lined up with them on Election Day. Notably, he does not dismiss them as simply “deplorables,” as so many liberals have done ever since 2016. “There will be some on the left,” he writes, “who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again…. The rest of us need to look at this result with humility. American voters are not always wise, but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us.”
As Brooks tells it, the past 40 years of American history, which he dubs the “information age,” saw the emergence of a post-industrial class structure, a society divided into two classes, that is, a governing class of highly educated university graduates and a lower class of the less educated, in essence, the working class. In this order, “those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the post-industrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies [trade policy, immigration policy, education policy, environmental policy, and technology policy] to meet our needs.” And while “we” benefited, the less educated definitely did not. They have endured, he points out, not only lower incomes, less financial security, and fewer social and cultural opportunities, but also less healthy and shorter lives. Making this social order all the more oppressive, he says, the educated class has looked down upon and lorded it over those beneath them: “That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect.”
Inevitably, the “chasms” created “led to a loss of faith, a loss of trust, a sense of betrayal” on the part of the working class.
He acknowledges that the Democratic Party was not insensible to inequality. But it “focused on racial inequality, gender inequality, and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality,” not class inequality. And he states, as “the left veered toward identitarian performance art,” Donald Trump “jumped into the class war with both feet...” and put together what the “Democratic Party once tried to build – a multiracial working-class majority.”
Of course, Brooks notes that “the Biden administration tried to woo the working class with subsidies and stimulus.” But he observes: “there is no economic solution to what is primarily a crisis of respect.”
With those words Brooks himself answers the question posed at the outset: Has Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 turned the New York Times most prominent and popular conservative columnist David Brooks into a “Bernie bro?” For all of his expressed populist sympathies and sensibilities, Brooks is not one of us. Sure, respect matters—it matters deeply. But it wasn’t the lack of respect that brought about the class divide and the injustices endured by working people.
For all of his talk about class inequality, and as much as he has come to see the light on what the Democrats should have been doing and, presumably, should be doing if they/we ever get it together and win back the White House and Congress, he still doesn’t really get what led us here and what we need to do not only to begin to find our way out of the political abyss into which we have fallen, but also go on to lead Americans to truly transcend the ever intensifying crisis of democracy that we will surely continue to confront.
So, Brooks is not one of us. But neither is he the conservative he long had been...
In short, Brooks’ narrative ignores the real class war from above waged these past 50 years by corporate bosses, Republican conservatives, and yes, Democratic neoliberals—a class war against the democratic rights secured and the progressive achievements accomplished during what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called the “Long Age of Roosevelt” from the 1930s to the early 1970s. That “great sucking sound” to which Brooks refers was not simply sucking up and redistributing respect upwards to an educated class. Even more so, it was sucking up the wealth that working people were producing and redistributing it up to multimillionaires and billionaires.
Brooks says, “The Democrats obviously have to do some major rethinking.” That’s putting it mildly. To save the Democratic Party and redeem the nation from the grip of billionaires and reactionaries, and the serious threat of outright Fascism, the Democrats are going to have to not only join with the Labor Movement in favor of articulating a progressive and social-democratic vision and agenda that polls repeatedly show the great majority of Americans truly want. They will also have to stop promising to fight for the people and, by their own actions, start encouraging the fight in the people.
Okay. So, Brooks is not one of us. But neither is he the conservative he long had been (fascists can do that to you). Thus, he can be an important ally in the struggle to defend and enhance democracy. From his perch at the Times, he speaks to not only conservatives, but also to moderate Democrats, without whom we cannot transform the Democratic Party and start taking back America.
So, David, welcome to the left, sort of.
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