It has sometimes seemed over his career that David Brooks was the only opinion journalist still operating, or still operating like the real "pundits" of 1975 operated. Those boys were everywhere all the time, on television and radio and in your newspaper, conceiving their job of creating and nurturing a public and helping it figure out what to think.
It’d be difficult to conceive a more "mainstream" or "establishment" figure than Brooks in his era, and he had the gigs to match. An American who's a bit of an intellectual—a professor, for example, living in Indiana or Tennessee—might’ve read Brooks in the morning in the Times, and in the evening in the Atlantic, and heard him weekly on NPR's All Things Considered and PBS’s News Hour, and then read one of his books. Our professor might’ve done that for a quarter century whether he wanted to or not, really, just in virtue of being in a certain media environment.
No one else's opinions had that penetration in that era, but the reason he’s been everywhere all the time is the same reason that everything he says disappears without a trace: he’s the opposite of a provocateur; he's a real mainstreamer. Like the rest of the mainstream, he loves Springsteen, know what I mean? But he's milder-mannered than the Boss.
He habitually seeks the reasonable center of every controversy. He's a conservative in a classical-liberal sort of way. He venerates both cultural traditions and social science expertise and if he's ever peddling absurdities, which isn’t impossible, they come from such sources. (He's more likely to be vague than absurd, however.) These are sources, but also excuses: no one can reasonably blame you for holding to positions that are traditional within your demographic; it's just what your parents or priests taught you. And no one can blame you for believing the science or taking the views of the faculty seriously: those are our experts, after all.
Admittedly, the tensions between these two things might make for difficulties. But they provide resources for addressing those tensions: the faculty might not only squawk with you at Trump, but also give you big concepts to sweep up everything into, including your venerable traditions. "Narrative," for example: your culture should provide you with one, to give you hope and meaning. That's something that positive psychologists, English professors, and Barack Obama's media team agree about. And they also agree about what a good narrative can deliver, especially if accompanied by meditation and SSRI's: hope. Or even Hope.
As Brooks withdraws, he's had one last chat with The New York Times, a sort of death-bed confession. You’ll not be surprised to hear that it's not surprising, which is just what the editors have paid him for all these years. It would’ve been difficult for anybody hearing his basic responses not to have heard them before.
In the exit interview, he takes selected questions from readers. He shares his notably unprovocative love for Springsteen and Edmund Burke yet again. And he brings again (and again) the reasons to hope. Well, not the reasons, exactly, or exactly not the reasons. Rather, he brings strategies for cultivating hope as a psychological condition, ways of manipulating oneself to keep yourself hopeful: psychological and spiritual and above all readerish tactics to make yourself feel hopeful for a couple of hours this afternoon. He gives you books to read, affirmations to intone, self-care activities that will help you feel better, no matter what’s really going on.
And he has reasons to proceed this way: readers want Brooks to give them hope, to change the way they feel about America. The task is conceived to be therapeutic, with the opinion columnist as national counselor administering to the brain chemistry of each of us.
For example, Times reader Thuc Nguyen, a California teacher, says that a majority of his students are "disadvantaged," and asks "what would you say to them to give them hope of a better future?" Brooks' answer is appropriately vague: study history. I'm not sure whether that will really help. But the point is that people are still looking to David Brooks for words that will give them hope. I have the feeling that this is the reason people read The New York Times or listened to NPR over the last 10 years.
But I just don't think that's a task for journalists. What I want from journalism in general and opinion journalism in particular, is not to be spiritually or psychologically transformed. I'm reading the paper or watching the news, rather, to find and to achieve some sort of accurate representation of reality.
Asked what book every high school student should read (this is just the sort of question everyone seems to address to Brooks), he responds with Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Frankl "teaches that the animating human drive is not the desire for money, fame or popularity," Brooks remarks. "It is the desire to feel that your life has purpose." We will, Brooks teaches, fix the world by each fixing ourselves psychologically, and that will involve having some narrative, purpose, or hope. I guess I'd be more interested in a discussion of the practical effects of some policy on people's incomes, for example.
The last question Brooks selects runs along these lines: "How have you managed to keep the faith and hope in our country when so many have given up and are screaming into the abyss?" Or in other words: "please fix us psychologically so we can fix ourselves politically." But the pundits of 1975 knew better than to try to fix us psychologically. And they also knew that this notion that hope produces good results, so the way to get good results is to hope harder and harder all the time, is a weirdly reversed style of magical thinking.
Good conditions produce hope, not the other way around. Hope might help get you through; it might just collapse you into despair. In itself, it has no value. Hopes can be false or flimsy or unsustainable; faiths can be misplaced or destructive. Realizing your sense of purpose could be great or disastrous. More to the point, I'm not reading your news source to have certain feelings; I'm reading it to figure out what’s happening. Let's take the absence of Brooks to be a hopeful moment for the future of journalism.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell