Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) June 12, 2025: David Brooks (born in Toronto on August 11, 1961), the prolific author of best-selling books such as The Road to Character (Random House, 2015), is also the self-styled conservative columnist, in the tradition of Edmund Burke, at The New York Times since 2003. In the present essay, I want to discuss David Brooks' NYT column titled "I'm Normally a Mild Guy. Here's What's Pushed Me Over the Edge" (dated May 29, 2025).
For further information about David Brooks, see the Wikipedia entry titled "David Brooks (commentator)":
Now, in his new NYT column, David Brooks begins with a discussion of certain statements made by the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen and JD Vance before he became Vice President. David Brooks quotes Vance as having said, "'People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.'"
David Brooks characterize this as "Elite snobbery [that] has a tendency to set me off, and here are two guys with advanced degrees telling us that regular soldiers never fight partly out of some sense of moral purpose, some commitment to a larger cause."
However, David Brooks quickly pivots to criticizing "the moral rot at the core of Trumpism." David Brooks says, "Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies." So, the target of David Brooks' criticism is Trumpism - "including Trump, Vance, [Stephen] Miller, and the O.M.B. director, Russell Vought" - and, of course, also Patrick Deneen, described by David Brooks as "the Lawrence Welk of post-liberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing that the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy."
Poor Lawrence Welk!
Wikipedia does have an entry on "Patrick Deneen":
However, I would make two observations about it: (1) the entry on Patrick Deneen includes a somewhat lengthy quotation about him from David Brooks, but the quotation is from 2012 - years before Trump's political rise; (2) the Wikipedia entry about Patrick Deneen ends with the year 2020 - and this contains nothing about Deneen's more recent popularity that David Brooks highlights in his recent NYT column dated May 29, 2025.
Now, on May 21, 2025, the philosophy professor Alasdair MacIntyre of Notre Dame died at the age of 96. He is most widely known for his advocacy of virtue ethics.
Alex Traub wrote the obituary in The New York Times (dated June 2, 205):
In it, Traub mentions that "more recently, one constituency claimed Mr. MacIntyre's work most completely and prominently: the Trump-supporting, religious, anti-consumerist and illiberal right. Two leading commentators of this world, Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher, have written books that pay tribute to Mr. MacIntyre." Subsequently, Traub points out that "Mr MacItyre deplored becoming part of an ideological battle of his own time. "'The moment you think of yourself as a liberal or a conservative,' he said, 'you're done for.'"
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