Oh dear, it's David Brooks again

David Brooks. I'm not sure that there is any other opinion writer in the main stream media who seems to have the talent of writing views with which I feel I can I can say "Yes...Yes...Yes;" only to then read a paragraph that leads to anti-climatic "Nooooo."

Take, for example, his second most recent column in which, actually, the "Nooooo" came first.  He opens with criticism of the Democrats for shutting down the government because it wants to preserve lower health insurance costs;  only later does he get stuck into Trump and the modern Republicans for trashing all previous "democratic norms".   

But the most recent column (Hey Lefties! Trump has stolen your game!) the "yes's" came first - he makes the point I'm sure I've said before here: that the MAGA movement has co-opted what the Republicans used to criticise in Leftist intellectual circles - such as postmodernism-ly believing that Truth doesn't matter and isn't a real thing, and everything is but putty in the hands of power.    I think it's a really good list of the way the American Right has intellectually debased itself.   But then, at the end, he blows it:

But the left doesn’t get off the hook. Since 1848, leftist intellectuals have been working on a core body of thought, composed, in part, from the ideas listed above. Back in 2020, woke Democrats embraced these ideas with gusto — until Donald Trump utterly co-opted and discredited them. One of the reasons the Democratic Party is struggling so much is that the radical left ideologies that undergirded its cultural stances are kaput, and it hasn’t yet built a more moderate intellectual tradition to fall back on. 

Much wild exaggeration there, me thinks.  He just can't resist turning things around to find a way to blame Democrats, after all.