Bobo Brooks

The right having entered one of its periodic spasms of anti-intellectualism, I suppose that it's only fitting that The New York Times' David Brooks should be the most prominent conservative intellectual scribbler.  Brooks is a thinker with an even-handed disdain for facts and logic, which I suppose is handy when your job is making a case for the policies advocated by somebody like Paul Ryan.

Brad DeLong disinters an epic takedown by Sasha Issenberg:

Boo-Boos in Paradise: Brooks is operating in a long tradition of public intellectualism.... Whyte, who was an editor for Fortune in the 1950s, observed how people lived, inferred trends, considered what they meant, and then came up with grand conclusions about the direction of the country. When, in 1954, he wanted to find out which consumers were trend-setters, he went into Overbrook Park and surveyed 4,948 homes.... Brooks, by way of contrast, draws caricatures. Whether out of sloppiness or laziness, the examples he conjures to illustrate well-founded premises are often unfounded, undermining the very points he's trying to make...
Follow the links to the details.

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