David Brooks (journalist) - Political Views

Political Views

Ottawa Citizen commentator David Warren has identified Brooks as the sort of conservative pundit that liberals like, someone who is "sophisticated" and "engages with" the liberal agenda, in contrast to a "real conservative" like Charles Krauthammer. When asked what he thinks of charges that he's "not a real conservative" or "squishy," Brooks has said that "if you define conservative by support for the Republican candidate or the belief that tax cuts are the correct answer to all problems, I guess I don’t fit that agenda. But I do think that I’m part of a longstanding conservative tradition that has to do with Edmund Burke, which is be cautious, don't think you can do all things by government planning, and Alexander Hamilton, who wanted to use government to help people compete in the capitalist economy." In the same interview with Howard Kurtz in September 2012 Brooks talked about being criticized from the conservative side, saying "if it’s from a loon, I don’t mind it. I get a kick out of it. If it’s Michelle Malkin attacking, I don’t mind it." With respect to whether he was "the liberals' favorite conservative" Brooks said he "didn't care," stating that "I don’t mind liberals praising me, but when it’s the really partisan liberals, you get an avalanche of love, it’s like uhhh, I gotta rethink this."

Brooks describes himself as being originally a liberal before "coming to my senses." In 1983, he wrote a parody of conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr., which said "In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping."

Buckley admired the parody and offered Brooks a job with National Review. A turning point in Brooks's thinking came later that year in a televised debate with Milton Friedman, which, as Brooks describes it, "was essentially me making a point, and he making a two-sentence rebuttal which totally devastated my point."

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Brooks argued forcefully for American military intervention, echoing the belief of commentators and political figures that American and British forces would be welcomed as liberators. In the spring of 2004, some of his opinion pieces suggested that he had tempered his earlier optimism about the war.

Brooks' public writing about the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is similar to those by neoconservatives, according to a Salon article by Glenn Greenwald, that labels Brooks as a neoconservative. His angry dismissal of the conviction of Scooter Libby as being "a farce" and having "no significance" was derided by political blogger Andrew Sullivan.

On August 10, 2006, Brooks wrote a column for The New York Times titled "Party No. 3". The column proposed the idea of the McCain-Lieberman Party, or the fictional representation of the fictional moderate majority in America.

Brooks has long been a supporter of John McCain; however, he did not show a liking for McCain's 2008 running mate, Sarah Palin, calling her a "cancer" on the Republican Party. He has referred to her as a "joke," unlikely to ever win the Republican nomination. But he later admitted during a CSPAN interview that he had gone too far in his previous "cancer" comments about Palin, which he regretted, and simply stated he was not a fan of her values.

In a March 2007 article published in The New York Times titled "No U-Turns", Brooks explained that the Republican Party must distance itself from the minimal-government conservative principles that had arisen during the Abraham Lincoln, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Calvin Coolidge eras. He claims that these core concepts had served their purposes and should no longer be embraced by Republicans in order to win elections, which he considers the most important purpose of a political party designed to serve the political class.

Brooks has been a frequent admirer of President Barack Obama. In an August 2009 profile of Brooks, The New Republic describes his first encounter with Obama, in the spring of 2005: "Usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me. I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” Two days after Obama’s second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, hit bookstores, Brooks published a column in The New York Times, titled "Run, Barack, Run", urging the Chicago politician to run for president. However as of December 2011 in a CSPAN interview, Brook's opinion of Obama's presidency was more tempered, giving Obama only a "B-" rating, and said that Obama's chances of reelection would be less than 50-50 if elections were held at that time.

In writing for The New York Times in January 2010, Brooks described Israel as "an astonishing success story". He wrote that "Jews are a famously accomplished group," who, because they were "forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages... have been living off their wits ever since". In Brooks' view, "Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world."