David Brooks faces the truth of US history -- and runs away

David Brooks faces the truth of US history — and runs away
NY Times' pet conservative offers a lengthy apologia for America — and gets pretty much everything wrong

By Mike Lofgren
Contributing Writer
Published July 26, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) America’s so-called sane conservatives have had a lot of explaining to do since 2016, and even more since January of this year. How do they dissociate themselves from Donald Trump and still justify their own continuing belief in a conservative ideological project that is supposed to be good for America, but in practice has brought chaos, misery and poisonous social strife?

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This form of rationalization and denial is embarrassingly evident in a recent apologia by David Brooks, the New York Times’ notion of an ideal conservative. Writing in The Atlantic, Brooks says that the conservatism he enthusiastically discovered in the early 1980s was a movement bursting with ideas. There was a minority within the movement, he admits, who were not real conservatives, but reactionaries. At the beginning, they were barely worthy of notice.

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Brooks’ labored apologia is a history — his history — of recent American conservatism, a Manichaean fable of civilized, conscientious conservatives full of marvelous ideas and déclassé, knuckle-dragging right-wingers. But beyond its heroes-and-villains simplicity, the piece reminds us of a characteristic habit of conservatives.

Brooks distorts not only his own past, and that of the conservative movement, but the American past as well, since much of his piece is a Parson Weems-style potted history of our country, apparently written to vindicate his optimism that everything will come out right in the end. I have already written about right-wingers’ longstanding taste for distorting the record of the past to conform to their ideology. That kind of historical mythology is now the law in many Republican states. .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/07/26/david-brooks-faces-the-truth-of-us-history-and-runs-away/