Дэвид Брукс: Американдық журналист және саяси комментатор

American journalist, commentator, editor
an American cultural commentator

David Brooks (born August 11, 1961) is a Canadian born American conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times. He has worked as a film critic for The Washington Times, a reporter and later op ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly, in addition to working as a commentator on NPR and the PBS NewsHour. As a young child, Brooks attended the Grace Church School, an independent Episcopal primary school in the East Village. When he was 12, his family moved to the Philadelphia Main Line, the affluent suburbs of Philadelphia. He graduated from Radnor High School in 1979. In 1983, Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in history. To his piece, Brooks appended the note: "Some would say I'm envious of Mr. Buckley. But if truth be known, I just want a job and have a peculiar way of asking. So how about it, Billy? Can you spare a dime?" When Buckley arrived to give his talk, he asked whether Brooks was in the lecture audience and offered him a job.

Upon graduation, Brooks became a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago, a wire service owned jointly by the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times. was derided by political blogger Andrew Sullivan. In 2004, Brooks' book On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense was published as a sequel to his 2000 best seller, Bobos in Paradise, but it was not as well received as its predecessor. Brooks is also the volume editor of The Best American Essays (publication date October 2, 2012), and authored The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement. The book was excerpted in The New Yorker in January 2011 and received mixed reviews upon its full publication in March of that year. It sold well and reached #3 on the Publishers Weekly best sellers list for non fiction in April 2011. Brooks was a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, and taught an undergraduate seminar there in the fall of 2006. In 2013, he taught a course at Yale University on philosophical humility. In 2012, Brooks was elected to the University of Chicago Board of Trustees. He also serves on the board of advisors for the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. In 2019, Brooks gave a TED talk in Vancouver entitled 'The Lies Our Culture Tells Us About What Matters – And a Better Way to Live'. TED curator Chris Anderson selected it as one of his favourite talks of 2019.

Ideologically, Brooks has been described as a moderate, a centrist, a conservative, and a moderate conservative. Brooks has described himself as a "moderate", and said in a 2017 interview that "[one] of [his] callings is to represent a certain moderate Republican Whig political philosophy." In December 2021, he wrote that he placed himself "on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party." Ottawa Citizen conservative commentator David Warren has identified Brooks as a "sophisticated pundit"; one of "those Republicans who want to 'engage with' the liberal agenda". When asked what he thinks of charges that he's "not a real conservative" or "squishy", Brooks has said that "if you define conservative by support for the Republican candidate or the belief that tax cuts are the correct answer to all problems, I guess I don't fit that agenda. But I do think that I'm part of a long standing conservative tradition that has to do with Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton." In fact, Brooks read Burke's work while he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and "completely despised it", but "gradually over the next five to seven years came to agree with him". Brooks claims that "my visceral hatred was because he touched something I didn't like or know about myself." In September 2012, Brooks talked about being criticized from the conservative side, saying, "If it's from a loon, I don't mind it. I get a kick out of it. If it's Michelle Malkin attacking, I don't mind it." With respect to whether he was "the liberals' favorite conservative" Brooks said he "didn't care", stating: "I don't mind liberals praising me, but when it's the really partisan liberals, you get an avalanche of love, it's like uhhh, I gotta rethink this." On August 10, 2006, Brooks wrote a column for The New York Times titled "Party No. 3". The column imagined a moderate McCain Lieberman Party in opposition to both major parties, which he perceived as both polarized and beholden to special interests. In a March 2007 article published in The New York Times titled "No U Turns", Brooks explained that the Republican Party must distance itself from the minimal government conservative principles that had arisen during the Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan eras. He claims that these core concepts had served their purposes and should no longer be embraced by Republicans in order to win elections. Alex Pareene commented that Brooks "has been trying for so long to imagine a sensible Republican Party into existence that he can't still think it's going to happen soon."

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Brooks argued for American military intervention, echoing the belief of commentators and political figures that American and British forces would be welcomed as liberators. In 2005, Brooks wrote what columnist Jonathan Chait described as "a witheringly condescending" column portraying Senator Harry Reid as an "unhinged conspiracy theorist because he accused the [George W. Bush] administration of falsifying its Iraq intelligence." By 2008, five years into the war, Brooks maintained that the decision to go to war was correct, but that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had botched U. S. war efforts. In 2015, Brooks wrote that "[f]rom the current vantage point, the decision to go to war was a clear misjudgment" made in 2003 by President George W. Bush and the majority of Americans who supported the war, including Brooks himself. Brooks wrote "many of us thought that, by taking down Saddam Hussein, we could end another evil empire, and gradually open up human development in Iraq and the Arab world. Has that happened? In 2004, I would have said yes. In 2006, I would have said no. In 2015, I say yes and no, but mostly no." He has referred to Palin as a "joke", unlikely ever to win the Republican nomination. But he later admitted during a C SPAN interview that he had gone too far in his previous "cancer" comments about Palin, which he regretted, and simply stated he was not a fan of her values. Brooks has frequently expressed admiration for President Barack Obama. In an August 2009, profile of Brooks, The New Republic describes his first encounter with Obama, in the spring of 2005: "Usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don't know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me. I remember distinctly an image of – we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I'm thinking, (a) he's going to be president and (b) he'll be a very good president." Brooks appreciates that Obama thinks "like a writer", explaining, "He's a very writerly personality, a little aloof, exasperated. He's calm. He's not addicted to people." However, in December 2011, during a C SPAN interview, Brooks expressed a more tempered opinion of Obama's presidency, giving Obama only a "B−", and saying that Obama's chances of re election would be less than 50–50 if elections were held at that time. He stated, "I don't think he's integrated himself with people in Washington as much as he should have." In regard to the 2016 election, Brooks spoke in support of Hillary Clinton, applauding her ability to be "competent" and "normal" in comparison to her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump. In addition, Brooks noted that he believed Clinton would eventually be victorious in the election, as he foresaw that the general American public would become "sick of" Trump. On the August 9, 2019 episode of the PBS NewsHour, Brooks suggested Trump may be a sociopath.

Brooks has expressed admiration for Israel and has visited almost every year since 1991. He supported Israel during the 2014 Gaza War. In writing for The New York Times in January 2010, Brooks described Israel as "an astonishing success story". He wrote that "Jews are a famously accomplished group," who, because they were "forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages have been living off their wits ever since".

Brooks opposes what he sees as self destructive behavior, such as the prevalence of teenage sex and divorce. His view is that "sex is more explicit everywhere barring real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious" by "waiting longer to have sex [and] having fewer partners". In 2007, Brooks stated that he sees the culture war as nearly over, because "today's young people seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right." As a result, he was optimistic about the United States' social stability, which he considered to be "in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair". As early as 2003, Brooks wrote favorably of same sex marriage, pointing out that marriage is a traditional conservative value. Rather than opposing it, he wrote: "We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage." In 2015, Brooks issued his commentary on poverty reform in the United States. His op ed in The New York Times titled "The Nature of Poverty" specifically followed the social uproar caused by the death of Freddie Gray, and concluded that federal spending is not the issue impeding the progress of poverty reforms, but rather that the impediments to upward mobility are "matters of social psychology". When discussing Gray in particular, Brooks claimed that Gray as a young man was "not on the path to upward mobility". Brooks had already started in 2017 a project called "Weave", in order, as he described it,

Brooks also takes a moderate position on abortion, which he thinks should be legal, but with parental consent for minors, during the first four or five months, and illegal afterward, except in extremely rare circumstances. He has expressed opposition to the legalization of marijuana, stating that use of the drug causes immoral behavior. Brooks relates that he smoked it in his youth but quit after a humiliating incident: Brooks smoked marijuana during lunch hour at school and felt embarrassed during a class presentation that afternoon in which he says he was incapable of intelligible speech.

Critics have claimed that Brooks' writings on sociology promote stereotypes and present false claims as factual. In 2004, Sasha Issenberg, writing for Philadelphia magazine, fact checked Bobos in Paradise, arguing that many of its comments about middle America were misleading or the exact reverse of the truth. He reported Brooks as insisting that the book was not intended to be factual but to report his impressions of what he believed an area to be like: "He laughed '[The book was] partially tongue in cheek' I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being 'too pedantic,' of 'taking all of this too literally,' of 'taking a joke and distorting it.' 'That's totally unethical', he said." Brooks later said the article made him feel that "I suck I can't remember what I said but my mother told me I was extremely stupid." Michael Kinsley argued that Brooks was guilty of "fearless generalizing Brooks does not let the sociology get in the way of the shtick, and he wields a mean shoehorn when he needs the theory to fit the joke". Writing for Gawker, which consistently criticized Brooks' work, opinion writer Tom Scocca argued that Brooks does not use facts and statistics to support his policy positions, noting "possibly that is because he perceives facts and statistics as an opportunity for dishonest people to work mischief". Furthermore, Annie Lowrey, in writing for the New York magazine, criticized Brooks' statistical methods when arguing his stance on political reform, claiming he used "some very tricksy, misleading math". Additionally, Sean Illing of Slate criticized the same article from Brooks, claiming he argued his point by framing his sources' arguments out of context and routinely making bold "half right" assumptions regarding the controversial issue of poverty reform. In 2016, James Taranto criticized Brooks' analysis of the U. S. Supreme Court case Dretke v. Haley, arguing that "Brooks's treatment of this case is either deliberately deceptive or recklessly ignorant". Brooks was previously criticized by Lyle Denniston with regard to another case, arguing that he "scrambled the actual significance of what the Supreme Court has done". In 2018, Brooks wrote an article in The New York Times about the generation gap between older and younger Democrats, in which he attributed young Democrats' radicalism to "the cultural Marxism that is now the lingua franca in the elite academy." Brooks was criticized by journalist Ari Paul, writing for progressive media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), who claimed that Brooks "rebrands cultural Marxism as mere political correctness, giving the Nazi inspired phrase legitimacy for the American right. It is dropped in or quoted in other stories—some of them lighthearted, like the fashion cues of the alt right—without describing how fringe this notion is. It's akin to letting conspiracy theories about chem trails or vaccines get unearned space in mainstream press." Ari Paul and Spencer Sunshine, an associate fellow at the Political Research Associates, argued that failure to highlight the nature of the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory "has bitter consequences. 'It is legitimizing the use of that framework, and therefore it's coded antisemitism."

Brooks met Jane Hughes, his first wife, while both attended the University of Chicago. She converted to Judaism and changed her given name to Sarah; they divorced in November 2013. Their eldest son served in the Israel Defense Forces, as Brooks shared in a September 2014 interview for Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Brooks converted to Christianity over a period between 2013 and 2014. Brooks married Anne Snyder in 2017; they met while he wrote The Road to Character and she was his research assistant.