David Brooks is a great pop sociologist, but he’s not much of an empiricist. Jon Chait administers the necessary beatdown:

David Brooks’s column in yesterday’s New York Times tries to wedge TNR into a larger theory of the change in American liberalism. He has some kind words for us, and his theory is at least somewhat correct, albeit shallowly rendered, but the evidence he musters actually subverts his own point.

The really weird part of the column is the first paragraph. He begins by citing a 1981 Michael Kinsley article called “The Shame of the Democrats.” This article, he writes, “began the era of neoliberalism,” which is now dead, because it is the sort of article TNR has stopped publishing.

I know the article very well, having read it several times. Its point was to attack the Democratic Party for surrendering to Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut, and for failing to use its leverage in Congress to fight for traditional liberal goals of preserving the progressivity of the tax code and maintaining social benefits for the very poor. “The Democrats have done practically nothing to mitigate the general unfairness of Reagan’s scheme,” Kinsley wrote, “Instead, they have concentrated on saving or inventing various special goodies.”

In other words, Kinsley was attacking the Democrats from the left. If this is Brooks’s definition of neoliberalism, then he need not fear: Neoliberalism is alive and well at Daily Kos.

In any case, in recent years TNR has run countless stories along precisely those same lines–attacking Democrats for capitulating to regressive tax cuts…

So the opening of Brooks’s column, which is the frame upon which he hangs his entire thesis, is wrong to the point of absurdity. It would be as if I were trying to identify a change in Brooks’s style by citing some old column he wrote about Hipster Yuppies or Patriotic College Students or Firefighters Who Shop at the Gap and wondered why he doesn’t write that sort of piece anymore.

Brooks also criticizes TNR for failing to offer detail about its policy recommendations. Chait defends the magazine before zinging Brooks:

Like I said, I could see the case for even more detail. But what an odd complaint coming from David Brooks! This is the creator of National Greatness Conservatism, a governing ideology whose one specific programmatic detail was a call for more national monuments.