Just when I was beginning to develop warmer feelings toward him, New York Times columnist David Brooks, the erstwhile Republican turned Democrat, has gone off the rails again. In a post-election piece entitled “The Fever is Breaking” (11/11/22), the newly minted Democratic partisan provided an object lesson in why sudden party switches have to be taken with a grain of salt.
First, a bit of background: Brooks, until recently a Reagan Republican, reached a moral and intellectual crisis with the coming of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. As related in a soul-searching essay for The Atlantic (January-February 2022), this caused him to abandon a 40-year identification with the GOP as the home of responsible, pragmatic conservatism and move to the Democratic Party — but not just any branch of it. Brooks wants to pursue his brand of conservatism within “the promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party.”
A similar Brooksian journey has been undertaken lately by numerous onetime activist Republicans. Tune in any evening to the house organ of the Democratic establishment, the MSNBC network, and you’ll find prominent refugees from the Republican Party of yore serving as program hosts or regular commentators. All evidence the Brooks affiliation; that is, they no longer feel comfortable in the Trumpified far-right GOP and have shifted their allegiance to the Democrats. These alienated Republicans include veterans of the Bush White House and the McCain or Romney presidential campaigns — the last-named considered by David Brooks the apogee of true American conservatism, which, he argues, both peaked and reached its endpoint in 2012.
Trump, for Brooks and many mainstream Republicans, was simply a bridge too far; his amoral, cultish authoritarianism, which is anything but conservative, offended their sensibilities and jangled their nerves. They despaired of ever regaining control of their radicalized party — the fate of Rep. Liz Cheney was the symbolic nail in that coffin — and starting a new center-right party on what Brooks calls Burkean (after Edward Burke) principles seemed impractical. So, having given up on reclaiming and reforming the wayward GOP, they’ve chosen to invest their energies in the malleable, big-tent Democratic Party.
The problem is that, while these Republican émigrés are decent, honorable people, they’re also conservatives, not liberals; that fact hasn’t changed. Their motivations for moving across the aisle is basically antipathy toward Trumpism and fears for democracy, not any fundamental change in philosophy or ideology. Like David Brooks, they want to take up residence “on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency.”
In other words, these former moderate Republicans want to identify as centrist or conservative Democrats and influence their adopted party in the direction of the pre-Trump GOP, diluting its leftist tendencies. Their input, should they remain, will inevitably be to nudge the Democratic Party to the right, undercutting its progressivism.
The times appear right for this kind of mini-realignment, what with a Democratic president in office who values bipartisanship above all else. It also fits the moment, encompassing the broad realization that only one party in our two-party system is presently capable of, or interested in, governing. For the time being, political ideology is taking a back seat to pragmatism. If there’s to be only one functioning party, the apparent thinking goes, it should be middle-of-the-road. The Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and the recent midterm election, in which MAGA barbarianism breached democracy’s outer walls (though not yet its citadel), have also played a role by placing American liberalism in a defensive crouch.
Finally, there’s the sad fact that the US has given up for now on trying to solve its most critical and intractable problems. We’ve decided as a country not to deal seriously with climate change, immigration, gun violence, economic inequality, and the dissolution of democracy; they’re simply too difficult and politically risky. This facilitates movement back and forth across party lines. Beyond the cultural-identity realm, there are no hard lines of demarcation in the traditional sense.
Which brings us roundabout fashion to David Brooks’ recent hosanna to centrist politics in The Times. Populism — he calls it “populist fury” — has supposedly run its course. This applies, Brooks says, to populism of the left (the democratic brand championed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), as well as populism of the right (the fascistic MAGA variety brought forth by Donald Trump and emulated by Ron DeSantis, among others). They’re mirror opposites; one is as bad as the other, insists the new moderate Democrat, tarring the progressive version with the same extremist brush as reactionary Trumpism.
Brooks reserves special contempt for such laudatory progressive-populist concepts as the Green New Deal, labelling it a mere exercise in “performance politics,” thereby missing the substance behind the slogan. He also draws no distinction between the first iteration of modern left populism, the initial Sanders campaign of 2016, and later iterations that emerged during the Trump years. The former was essentially genuine economic populism, a derivative of historical populism, the latter a form of social-cultural identity politics that does superficially resemble the MAGA movement in a stylistic sense.
The Brooksian answer lies with the “establishment moderate” Joe Biden and his supposed healthy elimination of the destructive populist impulses within the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future. Biden and company, he insists, saved the Democrats by beating back the populist excesses of their party, something Republicans failed to emulate in their own. Well, let’s see where that’s left us.
The Biden program, which eschews big initiatives in favor of incrementalism, has resulted in the following: climate legislation carrying the label historic only because virtually nothing preceded it; a corporate tax law taxing few corporations and very little at that; firearms legislation that largely leaves weapons of war on the streets; reduced costs for insulin users, but only if they’re on Medicare; mandatory Medicare prescription-drug negotiations covering precious few drugs for years to come; an infrastructure law enacted only at the cost of not passing social-policy legislation.
This record of moderate (and modest) Democratic accomplishment led, David Brooks, implies, to saving the Republic last November. Actually, the “victory,” if a 50-50 split and razor-tight margins can be called a victory, was attributable to incredibly bad opposition candidates and hubristic MAGA overreach. Anti-populist centrist posturing? Not so much.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2023
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