Although I disagree with some of his views, I highly respect him some of the core values I share with him like Morality, Humility etc. Great piece on The Transformation of David Brooks by Danny Funt:
In general, Brooks contends, journalists balk at sharing moral viewpoints, and readers bristle upon receiving them. His critics find him an insufferable scold, a pompous sermonizer. “I think there is some allergy our culture has toward moral judgment of any kind,” he reflects. “There is a big relativistic strain through our society that if it feels good for you, then who am I to judge? I think that is fundamentally wrong, and I’d rather take the hits for being a moralizer than to have a public square where there’s no moral thought going on.” There is at least marginal evidence that this is changing. His book, published in April, spent 22 weeks on the Times best-seller list.
Writing in 2001 for The Atlantic Monthly, where he regularly contributed, his first sense of a decline in moral dialogue came from a visit to Princeton and led to “The Organization Kid.” The students he encountered lacked “a vocabulary of virtue and vice.” After talking to them about character, Brooks noticed, “they’re a little nervous about the subject. … When I asked about moral questions, they would often flee such talk.”
“Even back then, you find David beginning to develop this central interest of his own life’s work,” says George, who was heavily quoted in that article, and whom the Times later called “this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker.”
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Whatever forces led to his transformation, it seems at least partly propelled by his disillusion with politics. Brooks was once infatuated with Capitol Hill. An unexpected bond formed between Brooks and the president, and he estimates that he visited the White House on 40 occasions during Obama’s tenure. But over time, Brooks came to find traditional political analysis to be trivial. “Who the hell cares about what Trump said to Ted Cruz?” he says.
A career immersed in those issues, even at the highest levels of journalism, was not as fulfilling as planned. One close friend is Yuval Levin, whom the New Republic calls “the right’s new favorite intellectual” and who Brooks calls a mentor. Levin says Brooks has come to believe “ultimately, it isn’t really politics that shapes an advance toward justice. It’s moral improvement.”
In general, Brooks contends, journalists balk at sharing moral viewpoints, and readers bristle upon receiving them. His critics find him an insufferable scold, a pompous sermonizer. “I think there is some allergy our culture has toward moral judgment of any kind,” he reflects. “There is a big relativistic strain through our society that if it feels good for you, then who am I to judge? I think that is fundamentally wrong, and I’d rather take the hits for being a moralizer than to have a public square where there’s no moral thought going on.” There is at least marginal evidence that this is changing. His book, published in April, spent 22 weeks on the Times best-seller list.
Writing in 2001 for The Atlantic Monthly, where he regularly contributed, his first sense of a decline in moral dialogue came from a visit to Princeton and led to “The Organization Kid.” The students he encountered lacked “a vocabulary of virtue and vice.” After talking to them about character, Brooks noticed, “they’re a little nervous about the subject. … When I asked about moral questions, they would often flee such talk.”
“Even back then, you find David beginning to develop this central interest of his own life’s work,” says George, who was heavily quoted in that article, and whom the Times later called “this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker.”
[---]
Whatever forces led to his transformation, it seems at least partly propelled by his disillusion with politics. Brooks was once infatuated with Capitol Hill. An unexpected bond formed between Brooks and the president, and he estimates that he visited the White House on 40 occasions during Obama’s tenure. But over time, Brooks came to find traditional political analysis to be trivial. “Who the hell cares about what Trump said to Ted Cruz?” he says.
A career immersed in those issues, even at the highest levels of journalism, was not as fulfilling as planned. One close friend is Yuval Levin, whom the New Republic calls “the right’s new favorite intellectual” and who Brooks calls a mentor. Levin says Brooks has come to believe “ultimately, it isn’t really politics that shapes an advance toward justice. It’s moral improvement.”
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