Our Awesome Meritocracy

If there’s one heretical view I’ll stand on, it’s that cold, heartless, relentlessly prompt shattered AI should be the only things allowed to do these fluffer interviews.
“Turns out the horror from beyond the stars likes his eggs over easy, too!”

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— Dan Sylveste (@constantinejn.bsky.social) August 18, 2025 at 9:29 PM

National treasure Dave Roth, at Defector, concerning blog favorite chew toy BoBo Brooks:

… Brooks made his name as an amateur cultural taxonomist, driving (or not!) around this great country, looking at whatever people were buying or wearing or doing or eating and then writing, Rich people like to have summer homes in Nantucket, but poor people like to drink energy drinks. He has done this for many years, producing work of no real import on a regular schedule, much of it faintly trailing the stink of The Deadline Sweats. This, maybe, is another reason why I’ve always been so dismissive of his work: He is more or less doing a lower-effort version of what I do, except my parents actually know where to find his work, and read it. They don’t like it, but Brooks has been in the Times long enough and lazily enough that he is just part of the landscape at this point. Provided you don’t actually read anything that he writes, there is almost something comforting about knowing that, even as the nation gnaws and hacks itself to bits in a state of blind tantrum, David Brooks is still off in a corner somewhere, maundering about charter schools…

The cabin from within which Brooks writes these things is pressurized, and any breach—the question of why all these mediocre people have wound up owning and controlling so much, or what social and political forces are at work making sure that they stay just where they are—would send all those white papers and tasteful finishes rocketing out through that aperture and into a very cold expanse. It is easier and safer, and also something like a precondition of the whole enterprise, for Brooks to look out through that bulletproof glass and describe whatever he sees going on out there, but that doesn’t mean that he is always going to like what he sees. “America’s democracy is under threat,” Brooks wrote in his most recent Times column. “President Trump smashes alliances, upends norms and tramples the Constitution. So it’s normal to ask: What can one citizen do to help put America on a healthier course?”…

So it’s a bad column, and not news as such. But what is poignant about it is that Brooks, unlike the less enlightened types busying themselves writing That’s Actually Still Not A Genocide or Thank You For Helping Us WIN, Sir, really is aware that something is going wrong. It is just that his deep incuriosity and prissy dismissal of material politics—that is, his whole shtick and whole being, to the extent either exists independent of the other—prevent him from proposing or even imagining any kind of solution to it beyond everyone and everything just settling down somewhat, and trying to send their children to highly selective universities. Also in this one Brooks mentions that there needs to be more room for Trump supporters in “media, nonprofits, the academy, the arts world.” Great shit, obviously, but the reason this blog exists is because of the solution that Brooks hits upon in his final paragraph:

Mostly it will require ground-up social reform. The rest of us can do something pretty simple: join more cross-class organizations and engage in more cross-class pastimes. Even something small makes a difference. This summer I’ve been wearing a New York Mets hat. As is their wont, the Mets have been trampling all over my heart for the past few months. But over that time, in places all around America, I’ve had scores of people from all walks of life come up to me to talk about the Mets, which often leads to conversations about other things. My Mets hat has reminded me of a nice reality: We still could be one nation, despite all the ways we’ve segregated it up.

It is probably true that a nation with as many problems as this one does not necessarily need the sort of commentary that David Brooks provides. That sort of thing is a luxury good, a trifle for your less-discerning elites to nibble on between meals, and this broader moment is starving and wild-eyed and desperate, and it is always and everywhere absolutely devouring itself. But, again, Brooks somehow backs into something profound, here. He can more or less see things as they are: everyone everyday further apart and more at risk and everything always being shoved further under the idiot bootheels of some of the worst people this country has ever produced, and even he can feel how helpless and awful that is, how fucking pathetic it is that things have fallen so far simply because the people in power—his beloved meritocratic elite, with all their values and traditions and institutions—don’t actually know or value or believe in anything but their own status and comfort. He knows it is bad.

But because he cannot admit or acknowledge why any of that is, and because his understanding of the world and the people in it is entirely a matter of affect and aesthetics, Brooks is pretty well stymied. Almost, that is, but not entirely. There is still that Mets hat, and all the people—some of them clearly from other “walks of life”—who approach him to ask him what’s wrong with the damn bullpen. This is where it begins: with Americans of every station, the important ones and also the less important ones, coming together to ask each other what is wrong with Mark Vientos, and then go to their respective homes to watch him pop out—one nation of people complaining, soulfully, about things they cannot change, together. Does this moment call for anything less?

Snarky Respite Read: <em>David Brooks: Wearing A Mets Hat Might Just Save Our Democracy</em>Post + Comments (68)