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I note and quote NYT opinion columnist David Brooks here fairly regularly, because though he’s nominally conservative, he isn’t MAGA or populist and he often makes points about, oh, how to live a meaningful life, that are worth thinking about. Though I have noted that, for my tastes, he’s a little too concerned with how other people live what is a meaningful life according to *him*. As conservatives are wont to do; they don’t quite trust other people to make their own decisions about life, especially if those decisions are different than what conservatives think are good and proper.
Today Salon posts a take-down.
Salon, Mike Lofgren, 26 Jul 2025: David Brooks faces the truth of US history — and runs away, subtitled “NY Times’ pet conservative offers a lengthy apologia for America — and gets pretty much everything wrong”
This responds to a piece by Brooks in The Atlantic back on April 7, which I noted that day, without having read it closely all the way through.
Lofgren begins like this:
America’s so-called sane conservatives have had a lot of explaining to do since 2016, and even more since January of this year. How do they dissociate themselves from Donald Trump and still justify their own continuing belief in a conservative ideological project that is supposed to be good for America, but in practice has brought chaos, misery and poisonous social strife?
It would be more straightforward and honest of these anti-Trump conservatives to admit that postwar conservatism in America was all a lie, that they were dupes and that they finally saw the light. Or they could claim they were seduced by its darker, authoritarian strains, its temptation to worship power, and now they have finally saved their souls by renouncing this ideological devil. That is the well-worn path of sinners come to confession, or, in secular terms, Whittaker Chambers renouncing his allegiance to Stalin.
Instead, they typically reposition themselves as the immovable axis of correct values, and denounce their former ideological fellow travelers as heretics who profaned true conservatism. As they so often claim, I didn’t leave the party, the party left me.
And,
This form of rationalization and denial is embarrassingly evident in a recent apologia by David Brooks, the New York Times’ notion of an ideal conservative. Writing in The Atlantic, Brooks says that the conservatism he enthusiastically discovered in the early 1980s was a movement bursting with ideas. There was a minority within the movement, he admits, who were not real conservatives, but reactionaries. At the beginning, they were barely worthy of notice.
I won’t bore the reader by recapitulating the process of his shocked realization, 40 years too late, that the reactionary “fringe,” as Brooks calls it, was the true core of the party, the seed of a poisonous fruit that required decades to reach its putrid bloom.
Lofgren’s thesis is that Brooks, and the so-called intellectual conservatives, are white-washing the past, not just the recent past, but most of American history, to claim that the sins of America (those the Trump administration are trying to remove from the National Parks and the history books) were not perpetuated by conservatives — whether at the time they were called Republicans or Democrats.
Of course, maintaining one’s innocence requires rearranging history. It was mainstream conservatives, not some fringe, who perpetrated the Iran-Contra affair, invaded Iraq under false pretenses, enthusiastically tortured prisoners in the quixotic war on terrorism, and recklessly cut taxes and deregulated markets to pave the way for the biggest global financial crash since the Great Depression. It was mainstream conservatives who voted unanimously against Barack Obama’s rather tepid Affordable Care Act, itself a rehash of a Heritage Foundation proposal from the 1990s.
And,
But beyond its heroes-and-villains simplicity, the piece reminds us of a characteristic habit of conservatives.
Brooks distorts not only his own past, and that of the conservative movement, but the American past as well, since much of his piece is a Parson Weems-style potted history of our country, apparently written to vindicate his optimism that everything will come out right in the end. I have already written about right-wingers’ longstanding taste for distorting the record of the past to conform to their ideology. That kind of historical mythology is now the law in many Republican states.
Lofgren compares Brooks’ essay with “a real work of history, “What Hath God Wrought,” by the former Oxford and UCLA historian Daniel Walker Howe.”
Lofgren goes on, challenging the conventional conservative takes on American exceptionalism, slavery (“Eventually, white elites in the South began to defend slavery as a beneficial and even benevolent institution, enlisting the Bible as scriptural support.”), how the Republican/Democrat “labels were the reverse of what we perceive as customary today.” There’s a litany of awful presidents, and a history of the Whigs.
Long piece.
Conservatives like Brooks will always seek refuge in a sanitized past in order to avoid honest confrontation with present conditions. If slavery wasn’t that bad, and was in any case abolished, why bother engaging with painful examinations of present inequality?
Finally, there’s a dig at the popular quote from MLK about the “arc of the moral universe” bends toward justice. This can’t be literally true, of course; that would be teleology. There is no fore-ordained future. Yet the quote is an observation that is still more-or-less true, despite current reversals. Lofgren concludes:
As a glance at the world today will tell us, from the battlefields in Ukraine and the abattoir of Gaza to the ICE detention centers here at home, the arc of history bends in no certain direction. The view that history is teleological, that it is goal-directed, is a fallacy believed in by Christians, conservatives, liberals and Marxists alike. But it is not only wrong; it is harmful.
The arc of history is a narcotic that robs us of human responsibility, in allowing us to believe in some mysterious mechanism that will make things come out right by a sort of magic. Much elite political commentary of the last decade, with its talk of institutions and guardrails, is a species of whistling past the graveyard. In truth, an era — our era — is only as good or bad as the citizens who live in it; there is no historical process to bail us out.
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Related. Another item on the totalitarian regime checklist: control information; suppress the past.
Washington Post, 25 Jul 2025: Park gift shops could remove books on slavery and the Civil War, subtitled “Among the books flagged for possible removal were ‘The 1619 Project’ and a book about former Interior secretary Deb Haaland.” (via)
National parks employees have raised the idea of removing books on slavery, Native Americans and George Washington from their gift shops as part of Trump officials’ efforts to scrub these popular sites of “corrosive ideology” that disparages Americans, according to internal records reviewed by The Washington Post.
Agency employees were required to report items for review by last week. The inventory of books possibly running afoul of the administration’s directive includes “The 1619 Project” on the history of slavery in America and a picture book about former Interior secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary. Those works are sold at the Fort Sumter, Fort Moultrie and Liberty Square park stores in Charleston, South Carolina, along with three other books on slavery and the Civil War that were flagged.
Arguably, this kind of totalitarian behavior is beneficial for the survival of the tribe, if that’s your only concern. If you believe you’re on the side of good and of God, you’ll be more optimistic about the future, have more children, and so on. And win out against pessimistic tribes. But that’s tribalistic thinking, as if humanity has learned nothing about anything over the past millennia, about the cosmos, or about itself.
The problem is when this kind of ideology encounters reality. As I’ve said many times.
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It’s a matter of scale, yet again. Humanity evolved living in small groups, and now we’re a global civilization on what most of us recognize as one planet among billions in an enormous cosmos.
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It’s so much easier for modern people to retreat to the simplistic religious myths they were taught as children.
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 24 Jul 2025: Shane Vaughn Ties Obama And Russia To Noah’s Flood And ‘The Watchers’
For the last week, journalists, commentators, andeditorialshaverepeatedlyandsystematicallydebunkedthe Trump’s administration’s claims that high-level Obama administration officials engaged in a “treasonous conspiracy” to manufacture intelligence about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election to harm President Donald Trump.
Of course, that has not stopped Trump supportersfrom goingcompletely off the deep endby insistingthat Obamaand others in his administration are responsible for “the single greatest political scandal in all of American history, maybe even world history.”
Never one to be outdone, MAGA pastorand unabashed Trump cultist Shane Vaughn seized upon the Trump administration’s conspiracy theory during a recent episodeof his podcast to uncork his own wildly supernatural theory that Obama’s presidency itself was a plot by “fallen angels” known as “The Watchers” to destroy humanity.
“The fallen angels, they were known in days of old as ‘The Watchers,'” Vaughn said. “And the Bible tells us that when Yahweh flooded the Earth, he arrested those angels in the year of Noah’s flood. And why did he do that? Because those angels had so fundamentally transformed society that the Bible says that the thoughts of men became so wicked continually because of these Watchers, because of their offspring, and so God took them in Genesis Chapter 6 and literally arrested them and stopped them from corrupting mankind.”
Bible Bible Trump Bible Obama bible fallen angels Bible Bible bible.
People like this are just sad.
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Ending with a substantial item.
Despite the fear-mongering by conservative/populist politicians, America is *not* suffering a crime wave by illegal immigrants, or anyone else. In fact, crime is falling. And MAGA seems to be completely unaware of this.
Vox, Miles Bryan, 25 Jul 2025: Why America is murdering less, subtitled “How Baltimore explains America’s miraculous murder decline.”
Over the last two years, a quiet miracle has been playing out across the United States: People are killing each other far less often.
Murder and other types of violent crime spiked across the country in 2020, when the pandemic closed down schools and recreation centers and the police murder of George Floyd fueled a collapse in community trust in policing. Violent crime stayed high for the next two years.
But murders fell by about 12 percent in 2023 — the largest drop ever recorded in federal crime statistics — and may have declined even further in 2024. Federal data for the year has yet to be released, but murders likely fell around 14 percent in 2024, according to data compiled by the Real Time Crime Index. This year, they’re down roughly 20 percent. Jeff Asher, a crime analyst who helps run the index, said 2025 is on track to have the lowest murder rate since 1960, when the FBI began keeping reliable records.
How do people know, or think they know, how bad crime is? By watching Fox News? Likely. Far less likely that they have any personal experience with being the victim of a crime.
The article goes on with the example of Baltimore.
One of the most remarkable examples of this trend is Baltimore, which in the first six months of this year has had its fewest homicides in five decades.
Baltimore, like many other cities in the US, received a massive influx of federal funding in 2021 from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). In the last few years, the funding paid for things like new recreation centers and street lights in high-crime areas. At the same time, the Biden administration distributed billions in grants to nonprofit violence reduction groups.
That funding, Asher told Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, may be part of the answer. He described an “everything but the kitchen sink” theory of gun violence reduction, with a tide of federal money addressing multiple potential factors, directly and indirectly.
So the answer is: it’s not just any one thing. As everything else in life, social trends like this are a product of many factors. And may well reverse. Despite any particular policies by any particular political party. Conservatives always think it is just one thing or another.
