Yglesias on Brooks
I sense that the campaign season has been driving a wedge between Matt Yglesias and yours truly, despite our shared pro-five boroughs agenda. That said, Matt’s great gift lies in calling spades spades, and he’s written a smart quasi-defense of David Brooks that strikes me as on point. I’m obviously incapable of being objective on the subject, but Matt has some critical distance.
I’m not sure I’ve ever really understood the progressive blogosphere convention that everything David Brooks writes must be read in the most ungenerous way possible. Certainly, though, if you apply that method to Brooks’ column from yesterday the widespread derision with which it was greeted on liberal blogs is warranted. But I thought it was a pretty good column. Recall that Brooks has historically been a big McCain fan. Back during the 2000 campaign, he was one of the relatively small number of decidedly conservative journalists to fall for McMania. And while lots of writers have gushed with praise for McCain over the years, Brooks was something more like an important ideologist of McCainism, someone who both praised McCain and also helped shape the higher rationale for his political ambitions. McCain, Brooks thought, was an ideal political vessel for ideas that Brooks thought were important. Brooks thought, in other words, that McCain was substantially different from and better than your average politician.
Brooks’ column from yesterday, meanwhile, is about how Brooks no longer thinks that’s true. It argues that McCain, like everyone else, turns out to be happy to put his personal ambition ahead of his ideals and principles. And it argues that McCain doesn’t have any special qualities whereby his ambition is best served through honorable methods. He’s a typical pol pulling the typical stuff.
Matt goes on to explain that “if you’re a conservative, as Brooks is, you’re still going to look at the situation and decide that in a Presidential election you should vote for the conservative candidate,” but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a deep cut. Matt’s commenters go on to make ludicrous claims about David Brooks supposedly deceitful nature, e.g., when Brooks referred to an Applebee’s salad bar, he was “lying” rather than making an honest mistake.
Boy, wonders will never cease. I’ve pronounced my name “Rye-han” my whole life. In the Arab world — it’s an Arabic name — it is, I late learned, generally pronounced “Ray-han.” I didn’t know this because my parents call me “Pritu” or “Preethu,” so I came up with “Rye-han” on my own. It occurs to me that this might be the ur-lie that has made me a deceitful mustachioed hatemonger in a howler hat, which, by the way, is what I am.
Huh, I thought it was ray-HAN and squelched some annoyance when Douthat called you RYE-han in a video. My bad. Odd that they use a Sanskrit-derived call-name, though, with an Arabic formal name. Is that normal?
— Sanjay · Aug 20, 04:50 PM · #
“It occurs to me that this might be the ur-lie that has made me a deceitful mustachioed hatemonger in a howler hat, which, by the way, is what I am.”
classic Salam tagline…but you must have meant a bowler hat (with a b)?
— donald · Aug 20, 05:18 PM · #
It baffles me as well that progressive bloggy-types don’t like this column; if you’re an Obama supporter and you have a reasonable understanding of Brooks and his political inclinations, this is exactly the kind of piece on McCain you’d want him to write. It’s not an anti-McCain diatribe, true, but then David Brooks is a conservative and he largely supports John McCain. That he can still write a column disagreeing with one of the principal narratives of the campaign is all for the good. I think the problem is that many liberal bloggers think that “a conservative a liberal can love” should just mean “a liberal”.
— Freddie · Aug 20, 06:34 PM · #
Following the rules of english it would be pronounced ree-han with an a like in hand. That’s just something I knew. Ithought I’d share it with you.
ps. I hate this whole preview/submit regime. Plus no HTML. Are you running this on freeware?
— cw · Aug 21, 12:06 AM · #
cw-
Yes, in fact, the site is running entirely on free and open software! Presumably you’ve missed the past fifteen years of the internet, but to make a long story short, tools you don’t have to pay for make most everything run these days.
As for the specific complaints, the preview/post routine is the reason you’ve never seen any comment spam on this site, and the textile-only constraint means there’s no susceptibility to cross-site scripting. Well worth it, in both cases.
— Matt Frost · Aug 21, 12:38 AM · #
I’ve lost more than one brilliant comment—well, actually the world lost more than one brilliant comment— because I hit preview, and then hit preview again (meaning to hit submit) and then went to the home page to see my brilliant comment live, and it’s not there. And then I go back to the form and my comment is gone and I’m too exhausted to recreate it. It took me a while to figure out what I was doing. For awhile I thought someone there at TAS was deliting my post because they were TOO brilliant.
I don’t see other sites with comment spam or cross-site scripting problems, whatever they are. You are the only ones with this system. But, then again, you didn’t sound too responsive to my complaint. I should probably just ask for my money back.
— cw · Aug 21, 03:27 AM · #
I’ve found the best way to mitigate spam is to not have an audience.
— Freddie · Aug 21, 03:52 AM · #
cw, I visit many sites that require previews before submitting, so I don’t think we’re unique. Also, try the Textile link to see how easy it is to generate HTML without using (or even knowing) the usual tags. If you try it and don’t like it, then we’ll reconsider your refund request. But no promises, okay?
— Alan Jacobs · Aug 21, 04:38 AM · #
CW, is that what happened to my post on this thread? I had assumed that Reihan was threatened by my brilliance and deleted it, but your hypothesis is also plausible.
— J Mann · Aug 21, 01:02 PM · #
If I ever delete a comment, I’ll note it in the thread.
— Matt Frost · Aug 21, 02:12 PM · #