David Brooks Begs Democrats to Just Let Democracy Die

Leave it to David Brooks, a man whose entire career has been a masterclass in providing high-minded justifications for imperialism and oligarchy, to surface from the wreckage of his own failed century just long enough to lecture the victims on the virtues of a quiet death.

Writing from behind his paywall in The Atlantic, Brooks has delivered a manifesto of pure class panic titled “Democrats Became Great By Fighting the Left.”  In it, he looks out at an empire hollowed out by thirty years of neoliberal economics, sees a desperate and furious working-class base finally demanding an alternative—and diagnoses this raw political vitality as a terminal disease.

The very first paragraph of the piece is an explicit, unintended confession: it admits that the recent surge of leftism is a nationwide movement led by Democratic primary voters who are actively demanding new leadership. Yet Brooks’ entire thesis is a plea for the current management to ignore those calls—to sleepwalk off a cliff that is in full, agonizing view of the entire public. He demands that the establishment treat the fascist threat in the White House and the Democratic Socialists of America as precisely identical, malignant cancers. All to comfort the same roster of corporate donors that the Democratic base has correctly identified as the explicit enemies of popular government.

This essay arrives as the flagship anthem for a broader, frantic institutional panic. It is the polite, print version of James Carville screaming for a literal "schism" because he cannot stomach the democratic results of his own party's primaries. It is the drunken, late-night tweets of Neera Tanden dressed up in intellectual pretensions. It is the underlying ideology of Democrat-loyalist podcasts, hosted by an insular network of highly influential all-time professional losers who would rather oversee a controlled electoral collapse than cede a single inch of territory to an ascendant left.

Brooks pretends that he speaks out of a sober, dignified concern for the maintenance of democratic government and the electability of the party, so as to ensure the Democratic Party may win, so that they may govern. But the very issues he lists as liabilities—demands to challenge the dictates of capital, to end American imperial hubris, and to dismantle the exceptional brutality of a militarized prison-industrial complex—are overwhelmingly the urgent demands of the progressive masses who actually constitute the lifeblood of the Democratic Party.

The historical ascendancy and political dominance of the Democratic Party never came from cautious technocracy, nor did it win the beloved loyalty and authority of its voters through centrist moderation. It achieved greatness by being bold, openly progressive, and ruptural. The greatest moments in American history were moments where our political leadership led or were pushed into leading the most historic changes of our time.

When liberals sit in the dark nights of their souls, wondering what happened to the party of absolute political authority, they are clinging to a dream that never dies: but that memory is of a brave, populist rupture led by an ascendant and powerful left. They remember, even if they don’t know it, the socialist movement of the 1910s that forced the hand of the Wilsonian progressives. They remember, even if they don't know it, the communist movement of the 1930s that built the popular front and supplied the raw, organized muscle for the New Deal. They remember, and claim as their own, the liberation movements of the 1960s that earned a measure of freedom, dignity, and voting power for Black Americans despite furious and stiff-necked opposition from those who identified their enemy as being on the left—people like David Brooks.

The moments that defined the party's historic strength were never the product of Clintonian triangulation; they were the product of Rooseveltian co-option. The party succeeded only when it absorbed the radical energy of the left to use the state to smash the fat cat oligarchs and narrow-minded nationalists who have run the Republican Party since they sold out Reconstruction in 1876.

The Democrats have not existed despite the left. Its victories are because of its reliance on its marginalized base and left flank. 

Just look at when Democrats ceased to be in power.

The first Red Scare marked the end of Wilsonian progressivism. The GOP of the 1920s and the resurgence of the Second Klan took its place. The second Red Scare marked the end of New Deal popular frontism, splitting the world into two opposing camps and carving out a path for Eisenhower and Nixon. It is true that Cold War liberalism managed a final, historic gasp of legislative triumph in the 1960s with the Great Society, Medicare, and the Civil Rights Act—but only because they were dragged kicking and screaming by the sheer, undeniable force of a radical, grassroots Civil Rights movement.

Once the establishment broke the back of the liberationist, anti-war, and economic left in 1968, however, they lost their engine. Left without its radical base, liberalism did not triumph—it decayed. It deflated into a defensive, hollowed-out managerial project that paved the way for Republican electoral supermajorities under Reagan. Today, the party establishment views its job as merely retaining the remnants of what greater, bolder Democrats were forced to build decades ago.

Indeed, party “leaders” view their highest calling as retaining Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—if that, perhaps expanding it slightly at the margins, but never again daring to chase a dream of transformational change comparable to what the formation of programs like Social Security meant in their time.

Instead, the liberal establishment fights exclusively on questions of managerial competence and technical ‘insight.’ Their entire ideological posture exists in the most literal sense of reaction: What is the left demanding? How is the right responding? The modern Democratic establishment positions itself somewhere in the empty air between those two points.

This is a politics of negotiated surrender. It is a politics barely capable of articulating a bare plurality. It stands for nothing, offers nothing, and inspires no one who isn't already desperately clinging to what little they have left. It is a tacit admission that the dream is dead.

Yet Brooks and his cohort tediously complain that “sauvignon-blanc liberals in the affluent coastal suburbs hardly seem capable of pushing back effectively”—invoking a reverse class war, calling on the rich to begin their crusade against the rest of us and essentially begging the establishment to go to war with its own base. These pundits are angry because the voters aren't doing what they think is right. So the pundits are using what little influence they possess to bully nebbish, weak-willed Democratic politicians into adopting a hardline anti-left liberal stance, rather than a popular frontist pro-left liberal stance. They want to ensure they remain captains of a sinking ship—so long as they are captains.

There is something profoundly contemptible in the way Brooks bemoans the "weakness" of the liberal heart when confronted with what he terms the "righteous ruthlessness" of the left. He gaslights the reader into believing the center hasn't already deployed every dirty institutional trick in the book to lock democratic socialists out of power. But more importantly, what does Brooks think of the catastrophic weakness of the liberal heart when faced with a literal, existential fascist threat? Those are the weaknesses that actually doomed us all.

Joe Biden was carried into office off the back of the largest wave of popular, anti-racist unrest in recent American history, directly overcoming Donald Trump’s overt attempts to overturn a democratic election. Every single Republican who voted against certification was actively inciting a mob to steal democracy from the people on January 6th. They all should have been arrested, prosecuted, with the keys to their cells thrown away. The same is true of Trump and his entire circle of executive cronies. But the mere mention of such necessary, righteous ruthlessness would make a terminal institutionalist like Brooks balk in horror.

Instead, he retreats into his comfortable, heavily air-conditioned history museum. He brings up Hubert Humphrey as his model of the "tough" Democrat who broke the left to save the party's soul. He conveniently forgets to ask the most obvious question: How did Humphrey's 1968 presidential run go? We do not know a President Humphrey. The “tough” Democrat hard on the left led the party into an unmitigated electoral slaughter that birthed the modern right-wing counter-revolution.

This is the true legacy of the centrist playbook: an ironclad blueprint for historic defeat. Humphrey showed plenty of centrist grit in his campaign, utilizing the same anti-left purge tactics he had honed in the late 1940s when he systematically expelled progressives and socialists to seize control of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

In 1968, Humphrey deployed this exact insider strategy to secure control of the presidential nomination. It is a matter of historical record that he did not enter a single public primary. Instead, while anti-war candidates like Eugene McCarthy and the late Robert F. Kennedy overwhelmingly won the actual votes of the Democratic base, Humphrey stayed up late making phone calls to party bosses, labor leaders, and state chairmen to quietly lock up the delegates behind closed doors.

His accomplishment was shattering the party's illusion of internal democracy by entirely locking out the anti-Vietnam War left. This tension exploded that August at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. When thousands of students, anti-war activists, and civil rights workers gathered outside the convention hall to protest the party establishment's refusal to recognize the will of the voters, the party did not listen. They did not care that the country had reached a boiling point in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. They did not care that the people cried out for change, as they were all over the world. 

Instead, they sicced the state on them. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley deployed over 12,000 police officers and thousands of National Guardsmen. Humphrey looked the other way as Daley’s forces initiated what an official federal commission later classified as a "police riot"—beating unarmed demonstrators, delegates, and journalists bloody with nightsticks and firing clouds of tear gas into the crowds on national television.

Humphrey won the nomination, but his accomplishment was splitting the party cleanly into thirds. He successfully broke the left to save the party's soul, and all for absolutely nothing. Nixon swept the entire country.

Brooks’s historical delusion completely ignores the reality of the ballot box: every single time the establishment runs a campaign based on bloodless managerial competence, they lose miserably. When Democrats run purely as the responsible stewards of the status quo—as they did in 2000, in 2004, in 2016—they fail. The strategy crashed into the dirt yet again in 2024. The only Democrats who win the presidency are the ones who can successfully channel, embody, or at least mimic, the furious populist energy of the base. 

Centrist apologists will, of course, object. They will point to Clinton, Obama, and Biden.

They will hold up the 1990s as their supreme vindication, arguing that slick Willy rescued the party from the wilderness by staging a clean, necessary break from the left-wing excesses of George McGovern. But this cozy myth fundamentally misreads the terrain of that time. The early iterations of what would become Clintonism—the “New Politics” reformers, the Watergate Babies, the Atari Democrats—did not begin as a boardroom plot. They emerged directly from the ash heap of the McGovern campaign as a deeply anti-establishment force. They were a generational insurgency smashing against a sclerotic, culturally conservative New Deal and labor establishment that had locked up the party bosses' backrooms. These early New Democrats were not socialists, but they were, in their own way, revolutionaries against the status quo. They weaponized the fury of a younger generation against the ossified machines and entrenched bureaucracies that had dragged the party into stagnation. They did not lack a populist engine; they simply decoupled that anti-establishment energy from the working class and sold its steering wheel to capital. 

Bill Clinton only captured the White House in 1992 because he slid into office in the midst of absolute electoral chaos. The country was in the grips of a roaring insurgency that the gatekeepers of official opinion completely failed to read. Ross Perot didn't just split the vote; he briefly led the national polls that summer in a campaign driven by a protectionist, populist fury that ultimately captured nearly nineteen percent of the electorate—a third-party explosion the country hadn't witnessed since Theodore Roosevelt marched his Bull Moose party into the field almost a century prior. David Brooks was right there in the thick of it, of course, comfortably nested at The Wall Street Journal, undoubtedly penning the exact same style of high-minded, narrow columns he writes today—utterly blind to the structural rot beneath his feet and unable to apply the vaunted seriousness to the actual results of his own politics. 

Clinton simply did not survive that anti-elite firestorm in 1992 by offering hopeless austerity; he triumphed by embracing his own particular brand of radicalism. It is true he ran on cutting welfare and ballooning police budgets. He did indeed leap to defend the honor of White America against criticism from Sister Souljah. But that right-wing populism was not the full extent of his campaign. His "Putting People First" platform was an explicit assault on "twelve years of trickle-down economics," promising to guarantee healthcare and invest directly in the working class, all supposedly available on the Presidential Democratic ballot line. 

But again, beyond this economistic rhetoric, Clinton meant something politically populist. He was an outsider from Hope, Arkansas. He brought with him a slew of young reformers to shake up the lazy and corrupt party establishment. His words dripped with ideological zeal, naive optimism, and youthful vigor. He excelled on the campaign trail, thriving on interactions with the people.  

Barack Obama broke records in 2008 for the exact same reason. He won because the electorate projected their desperate desire for radical change onto his individual person, and so his campaign became a mass movement. The voters perceived him as a radical outsider who would end the Iraq War, punish the Wall Street banks, and turn the page on the Clintonian establishment. 

By 2012, that transformative energy had been thoroughly drained by his administration’s pivot to corporate bailouts, drone strikes, and a refusal to prosecute a single banker or nationalize a single bank. But Obama survived because the GOP nominated Mitt Romney—a walking vulture capitalist caught on tape writing off forty-seven percent of the country as lazy dependents. Our first Black president did not win as a sensible business-minded moderate or squeaky technocrat—he won as a radical activist whose slogan summed up the vibe behind his movement and the explanation for why so many felt betrayed by his administration: “Hope and Change.”

Even Joe Biden, the ultimate institutional chameleon, recognized this reality in 2020. He didn't defeat Donald Trump by executing an anti-left purge. Instead, he leaned directly into a popular-front strategy, forming joint policy task forces with Bernie Sanders and campaigning on "Build Back Better"—a state-led investment program explicitly pitched as a modern New Deal. He knew he could not win without the energy of the progressive base. For Brooks to hold this systemic record of necessary populist posturing up as a model of centrist success proves the ultimate charge: the establishment knows damn well that populism is the only engine that wins, yet they would genuinely rather watch the far-right capture the empire than cede a single inch of territory to our movement and the millions it represents.

Brooks gleefully produces his 2007 interview with Barack Obama, gushing over Obama's undying faith in Clinton-style managerialism despite his obvious charisma and sense for populist sentiment. But in the interview, Obama praises philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr. Brooks quotes the former President saying he took the following from Niebuhr: 

“I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain... we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things.”  

Who on the left is denying the existence of serious evil, hardship, and pain? Certainly not the communists. Our entire program is built explicitly on punishing the wicked, relieving the burdened, and comforting the pained. The "moral realism" of the modern anti-left liberal platform is nothing more than an intellectual alibi for weakness in opposition to fascism, inaction in the face of climate catastrophe, and hippy-bashing in the midst of the destruction of Brown and Black lives and livelihoods—all so David Brooks doesn't have to feel uncomfortable voting for what he calls "old fashioned ideas."

There is a sick, maddening cowardice at work here. Brooks is weaponizing the concept of "humility" to tell suffering people that they must simply accept their misery because human nature is inherently flawed. Yet, the subjects he pleads his case for never have to practice this modesty: the corporate boards, the health insurance giants, or the politicians staffing empire and genocide. Their power is treated as permanent and unquestioned. Brooks demands restraint only from the working class, transforming a gutless submission to capital into a profound spiritual virtue. It is a magnificent scam—using the language of moral realism to disguise a politics of keeping oligarchs safe and Palestinians dying. 

Pundits like Brooks have shrieked and pecked at every left-populist or DSA candidate, making little distinction between the two, probing for the slightest weakness and gloating with open contempt whenever one is found. There is little more disgusting than the example in Maine. Just look at how quickly the political centrists jumped to wave around the horrific and credible accusations of rape against war criminal Graham Platner—not out of concern for the victims, but as a weapon to discredit the left-populist insurgency and insist that this means we must vote for the center! 

I might remind the reader that these same figures fastidiously supported establishment icons in their habitual sexual predation for decades, from Bill Clinton to Andrew Cuomo. The moment the people had their say, the pious calls of “Vote Blue No Matter Who” quickly gave way to a vicious independent campaign to stop Zohran Mamdani at all costs. Even now, they scheme like rats to seize control of the Maine Senate seat in the aftermath of Platner’s compounding disgrace, desperate to force through an establishment centrist against the democratic will of the Maine electorate—seeing the outrage at this crime as an excuse to take over a seat. 

They are engaged in a death struggle, and they want the Democratic electeds to join them at Thermopylae to hold the line against the vast armies of progressive Democratic base voters. They are entirely willing to lose to the right. To them, losing to us is just as bad as losing to the fascists—probably worse, because, if the right wins, they get to keep being in charge of a loyal and controlled opposition, protecting their ‘elite’ jobs and bloated contracts. 

Let’s remember the fundamental reason the center and the corporate elite wants to punch left: if we win, the grift ends.

The more the center picks fights with the left on issues like socialism, Israel, prosecuting Trump, or abolishing ICE, the more the Democratic voters see them as enemies, and the more polarized they become in favor of the only side in American politics willing to stand up for the people: the left. 

As a perfect example, take Mallory McMorrow. When the now-former Senate candidate for Michigan began to punch left as a part of her strategy of positioning herself between the two “extremes” of social democrat Dr. Abdul El Sayed on one hand and corporate zombie Haley Stevens on the other, she precipitously plummeted in the polls before washing out of the race entirely. 

She made clear by her collapse that there are really only two camps that matter within the Democratic Party: the insurgent, Populist Left, and the sclerotic, Establishment Center. Having demonstrated this,  the Democratic base made their way into their respective camps. It remains to be seen which camp is larger in a swing state like Michigan, but it has already been revealed elsewhere in house districts from Philadelphia to Denver, from the Mayor of New York City, to statewide in Maine.

Finally, let us speak plainly about David Brooks in particular.

When he invokes Arthur Schlesinger to preach about the “corruptions of power” and the need for a “healthy appreciation for human sinfulness,” he is projecting. He writes with practiced solemnity that official liberalism was once identification with a picture of man as "endowed with sufficient wisdom and selflessness to endure power and to use it infallibly for the general good"—but no longer, not since the crimes of the 20th century revealed the horrific marrow of humanity to the brain trust of 20th and 21st century liberalism. 

He writes these words as if he were an innocent bystander checking the minutes of history, and not an active architect of ruin. It was Brooks, and men exactly like him, who destroyed entire countries for the sake of neoconservative imperial hubris. His personal history is one of authoring apologetics for clumsy, bloody imperialism, cheering on war crimes from the safety of an op-ed column. 

Brooks concludes his piece by shadowboxing with the specter of the French Revolution, expressing his terror at the fearsome Jacobin magazine and their preferred candidates who want to dismantle hallowed institutions like TSA PreCheck. He puts himself so far back in the past because he knows, somewhere deep in his shriveled heart, that the future is moving on without him, and that he has no idea how to approach the problems of the present. He cannot even properly identify them. 

So he'd rather fancy himself back in 1793, sitting across a desk from Edmund Burke, agreeing on the madness across the Channel and yearning for the forced reinstatement of the Bourbon dynasty. Brooks knows his politics are moribund, universally despised, and recognized as an absolute failure by every single faction uncorrupted by corporate PAC money. So now he hues and cries when democratic voters look to insurgent leaders to solve the very crises the establishment manufactured.

Our movement will leave them behind, as it did with the Bourbons and the Romanovs, and all their little sycophants in the press. They are all forgotten now, or should be, as Brooks hopefully soon will be. That blessed day cannot arrive quickly enough.