History is Not a Surprise Party
The Delusions of David Brooks: Why We Must Demand Better
David Brooks is once again caught in the act of arriving late to a conclusion most Americans—especially the ones he so routinely ignores—arrived at decades ago. His April 2025 piece in The Atlantic, titled "I Should Have Seen This Coming," is a performance of elite self-reckoning so deeply embedded in the genre of privileged astonishment that it becomes, somewhat ironically, one more piece of evidence against the continued elevation of voices like Brooks' in the national conversation.
Let us be clear: the rise of Trumpism did not spring from nowhere. It is not an aberration, nor is it a break from American conservatism. It is the full-throated, naked embodiment of the politics David Brooks helped normalize and whitewash for nearly half a century. The authoritarian rot Brooks laments is not a betrayal of his beloved conservatism—it is its telos, its logical destination, the fruit of seeds sown by Reaganism, neoliberalism, the Powell Memorandum, and the steady march of corporate-fueled, anti-democratic policy dressed up as intellectual discourse.
In this latest piece, Brooks seeks to differentiate between the "conservatives" of his youth—those who purportedly cared about ideas—and the "reactionaries" who just wanted to shock. But this division is both arbitrary and self-serving. The problem was never just the sledgehammer-wielding frat-boy edge of the right; the problem was, and remains, the deep commitment to an economic ideology that prioritized deregulation, privatization, and the hollowing out of the public sphere in favor of unfettered corporate power. Brooks' lamentations are a sleight of hand, a desperate attempt to distance himself from the inevitable consequences of an ideology he helped midwife.
The Powell Memorandum and the Corporate Counterrevolution
One of the great omissions in Brooks’ piece—and indeed in nearly all of his writing—is the role of the corporate counterrevolution in shaping modern American conservatism. The 1971 Powell Memorandum, written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, was a calculated response to the growing civic power wielded by consumer advocates like Ralph Nader, whose work with Public Citizen and other watchdog groups helped expose corporate malfeasance and protect the public from exploitation. Powell warned that American business was losing the battle for public opinion and urged a systemic, coordinated, and well-funded campaign to retake control of schools, media, and the political narrative.
Powell, in the elevation of Trump and Trumpism, won. For now, fascism that disappears the brown and black vulnerable, fiat and fickleness as policy and purpose, and “cruelty is the point” civic discourse rule America.
And it is my view that Brooks facilitated that elevation at each step along with way.
The Powell memo was the intellectual origin of institutions Brooks would later sanctify as bastions of conservative intellectualism—the think tanks like Heritage Foundation, the media echo chambers like the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, and the university donor pipelines that reoriented higher education toward serving capital. It was not about ideas—it was about influence. It was about capturing the machinery of democracy to insulate capital from the consequences of civic activism and egalitarian reforms.
By ignoring the Powell Memorandum, Brooks obscures the coordinated effort that made Trumpism not just possible, but inevitable. He speaks of Trumpian nihilism as a hostile takeover, rather than the ripened fruit of five decades of corporate strategy.
Reaganism: Measurable Harm, Incalculable Loss
Brooks’ beatification of Reagan-era conservatism must be dismantled with facts. Reagan didn’t just change the political tone—he instituted policies that devastated the working class, dismantled the welfare state, accelerated inequality, and ballooned incarceration rates.
As Vanity Fair reported in its 2015 piece on Reagan’s policy legacy, the Reagan administration presided over a devastating recession in the early 1980s that disproportionately impacted working-class Americans while offering tax cuts to the wealthiest. He slashed mental health funding, contributing directly to the explosion of homelessness in American cities. His tax reforms facilitated the transfer of wealth from labor to capital, while his administration waged a covert and overt war on unions, culminating in the infamous firing of the PATCO air traffic controllers.
What most also miss from this period is how Reagan and members of his administration fully institutionalized lying to the American people
Over 130 Reagan administration officials were either formally investigated, indicted, or convicted on charges ranging from perjury and obstruction of justice to fraud and conspiracy. The most well-known of these was the Iran-Contra affair - where Reagan looked the American people down the barrell of the television camera lens and lied to their faces - but there were several other scandals involving fraud, corruption, and abuse of power. Brooks may choose to forget the names, but we do not: Anne Gorsuch Burford, James Watt, Michael Deaver, Lyn Nofziger, Ed Meese, John Poindexter (convicted, later reversed on appeal), Oliver North. These and many others are the names we would have up on the wall of National Memorial of Fraud, Corruption, and Abuse of Power if we built one for the national mall.
Instead, we relied on Brooks and others for that institutional memory, activated; that American recollection, for purpose. And it appears that Brooks struggles to recall the truth of Reaganism in its raw form then, and its legacy impacts now.
From 1980 to the early 2000s, average American wages stagnated while CEO pay multiplied by over 900%. Reagan’s "trickle-down" economics didn’t lift all boats—it anchored most to the bottom while inflating yachts. Under the guise of small government, Reagan expanded the carceral state, disproportionately targeting Black and Brown communities through the "war on drugs" while gutting social services. He normalized cruelty in the name of "responsibility."
The loves lost during this period—the generations of families torn apart by poverty and incarceration, the dreams deferred due to disinvestment in public education, the cities decimated by outsourcing and deindustrialization—these were not policy side effects. They were the plan. And they are the plan, again, now.
And Brooks, for decades, wrote as if these were unfortunate misfires in an otherwise noble effort.
Endless Wars, Endless Costs: The Neocon Era’s Legacy
Brooks was no passive observer during the neoconservative ascendance; he was a flag-waver. He championed the Bush doctrine, supported the Iraq invasion, and argued for American exceptionalism as a rationale for military adventurism.
The economic toll of these wars is staggering: estimates put the cost of U.S. wars post-9/11—including Iraq and Afghanistan—at over $8 trillion. That’s trillions not spent on healthcare, education, climate change, or infrastructure. The opportunity cost includes the housing crisis, the underfunding of VA services, and the explosion in private military contracting that turned war into a profit machine.
But the human cost is more devastating: over a million people killed, entire regions destabilized, and generations of veterans suffering from PTSD, brain injuries, and suicide. And as these wars rolled on through the Obama years and into Trump’s tenure, Brooks remained largely unwilling to admit that the moral high ground he believed America occupied had been cratered by its own bombs.
The Hypocrisy of Brooks, Phase by Phase
At every stage of America's descent into plutocracy and authoritarian flirtation, Brooks has played the part of the intellectual gatekeeper. In the 1990s, he papered over the corporatization of government. In the 2000s, he supported disastrous wars. In the 2010s, he lectured about civility - the way some people chose to talk about being destroyed - while ignoring systemic racism, economic devastation, and climate collapse (destruction itself). Now, in the 2020s, he claims to be shocked that the children of Reaganism have grown fangs.
Brooks decries the moral collapse of the American right while never naming his own complicity. He seeks to distinguish himself from the MAGA movement as if he did not help set the table for its banquet of grievances. His aversion to self-awareness is matched only by his continued access to platforms that should know better.
The Voices We Need, Not the Ones We Have
It is long past time to stop centering voices like David Brooks in our national storytelling. We do not need more elite mea culpas. We need clarity. We need vision. We need lived experience.
We need the people who saw Trumpism coming—not because of prophetic brilliance, but because they lived the consequences of Reaganomics, neoliberalism, and the wars that Brooks defended. We need economists like Darrick Hamilton and Stephanie Kelton. We need community organizers like Alicia Garza. We need chroniclers of structural violence like Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Anand Giridharadas, and Naomi Klein. We need prophets home from war like Chris Hedges and Amy Goodman. We need farmers, teachers, union stewards, and single mothers who have been carrying this nation on their backs while the Brookses of the world opined from comfort.
[Brooks] seeks to distinguish himself from the MAGA movement as if he did not help set the table for its banquet of grievances.
Let The Atlantic and The New York Times shift their focus—or risk their own irrelevance.
History Is Not a Surprise Party
The most dangerous myth Brooks peddles is the idea that no one could have seen this coming. But we arrive where we walk. Trumpism did not emerge from a void—it was built brick by brick with policies, ideas, media ecosystems, and economic betrayals.
Reaganism emerged as a reactionary revolution, following Nixon's faltering authoritarianism and setting the stage for Bush's neocon excesses. The executive bloat, deregulation, executive orders, and disdain for the vulnerable were passed like a baton. Trumpism is not a break—it is a crescendo.
Brooks does not get to rewrite this arc as tragedy. He played a role. And if he could not see this coming, then he cannot see where we’re going. The future will not be won by passive reflection. It will be built by those with the will to make something better—and that will requires truth-telling, not brand rehabilitation.
The Last Word
Brooks writes as if Trumpism will collapse under its own weight. But fascism doesn’t end because of bad math. It ends because people make it end. People organize. People fight. People refuse to let it be the air we breathe.
If we fail to heed the voices of those who saw this coming, who have suffered through each policy shift, each moral compromise, each intellectual evasion, then we deserve the spiral we’re in. Brooks’ gender, race, and class will insulate him from its fallout until the end. But for the rest of us, the clock is ticking.
We cannot afford more columnists waking up in slow motion. The time for awakened elites is over. The time for visionary builders is now.
Let us leave behind those who could not see, and follow those who always could—and did.
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Brooks says Trumpism will eventually collapse. But what if it doesn’t—unless we make it?
What voices do you think should replace the elevated class of corporate courtiers?
Hit reply. Leave a comment. Let’s talk about who we should be listening to—and who needs to step aside.
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