Do David Brooks and the New Right Share Common Threads?

“The general public—and not the elite—is, in fact, the primary obstacle to the New Right’s political project.”

There are few right-of-center writers in the United States who attract as much ire in the internecine conservative movement as The New York Times’ David Brooks. Hired by the newspaper in September of 2003, the moderate conservative has been called a “useful idiot” for “progressivism’s thoroughgoing dominance of our culture,” a “scorned lover” in an “isolated, imperious, and condescending leadership class,” and, most memorably, sympathetic to an elite group who “advocated and profited from incessantly trying to destroy everything we cherish, including our communities, as they outsourced jobs while demanding ever more of our tax dollars for the privilege of having them screw us.”

The above examples, all in the past two years, capture the tempestuous relationship Brooks has had with his conservative peers. Although he has had a reputation for being a bit of an iconoclast his entire career, it was the 2015 ascension of then-candidate Donald Trump that was the catalyst for Brooks’ spats with many other contemporary conservatives. The columnist now gravely warns of the Trumpist right’s threat to democracy, the United States, and conservatism itself.

To understand fully the ideological battles between newer conservatives (or the “dissident right,” as some like to be called) and the self-anointed defender of Burkeanism, however, requires more than just following the debates of the Trump era. To comprehend the battleground, one must return to the late 1990s, an era in which a discombobulated conservative intelligentsia tried to navigate the Clinton years. Two young commentators wrote this in The Wall Street Journal:

“But, unpleasant though it is to admit, a barrier to the success of today’s conservatism is…today’s conservatism. Something is missing at conservatism’s core. And the main tendencies that now compete to guide today’s conservative movement can’t fill this void.