David Brooks Dances With Himself

In the New York Times today, David Brooks finally suggests that he's got an answer for Iraq: they need Moses. I guess that what passes for good cheer among the GOP smart-set today is the hope that Iraq may eventually turn out OK after we spend forty years wandering in the desert. Three down and only thirty-seven to go. Hooray!

The column is interesting less as an explication of Iraq's realities than as a deconstruction of Brooks's troubled psyche. I've always liked Brooks, despite the fact that I commonly disagree with his glib cultural analysis. In general, he's a thoughtful and moderate sort, capable of making fine distinctions and offering insightful readings of people like Walt Whitman and Reinhold Niebuhr as they apply to modern politics. But too often he seems to be on a fishing expedition--he uses his chosen thinkers less to instruct his judgments than to prop them up, and sometimes those judgments go horribly wrong. Today's column is a case in point. Brooks stages a debate between the two warring sides of his own mind: the realist who reads Elie Kedourie's classic critique of British imperial goofs in Iraq, and the optimist who has "adopted the Exodus mentality." The realist knows history and recognizes that Iraq's bloody and fractious past cannot be simply willed away; the optimist believes that while all change is painful, great transformations are possible as "generational journeys." How Haight-Ashbury! Brooks dubs his yin and yang "Mr. Past" and "Mr. Future"--thus giving the game away--although they're clearly his empiricist brain fighting against his Bush-lovin' heart. You can guess who wins.

So a war that began as an effort to unify the country behind the GOP, as bearers of an unadorned heartland authenticity (to cop a Brooks trope), has unravelled as a schizoid identity crisis for the intellectuals of the Right. It's Fight Club without the happy ending. As Project Mayhem explodes, we're comforted only by the prospect that flowers may grow in the dung heap. In thirty seven years.