David Brooks

American journalist, cultural commentator, and author. Long-standing op-ed columnist for the New York Times and former writer for the Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard. Known for bringing moral and social philosophy into mainstream political commentary.

His two most influential books — The Road to Character (2015) and The Second Mountain (2019) — argue that a good life is built on commitment rather than self-expression, and that the Western turn toward individual autonomy since the 1960s has left people lonelier, less purposeful, and less capable of the deep relationships on which happiness actually depends. He teaches at Yale and describes his politics as Whig: in the tradition of Hamilton and Henry Clay, sceptical of both libertarian minimalism and progressive statism, in favour of energetic but limited government aimed at social mobility.

Core positions

Brooks is a cultural determinist who traces the loneliness epidemic, rising mental-health problems, and the purposelessness of young adulthood to a single cause: the individualism that succeeded the conformist culture of the 1950s. He holds that autonomy, taken to its extreme, leaves people reverting to tribalism as a substitute for the genuine community they cannot form. The remedy is not nostalgia but recommitment — to spouse, vocation, community, and faith or philosophy — building structures of behaviour that sustain love through the moments when feeling falters.

On religion he is ‘bisexual’ — shaped equally by Judaism and Christianity — and defends non-extremist faith grounded in occasional transcendence, radical self-doubt, and pluralism. He holds that the concept of the soul is not mere theology but an empirical tool: without it, he says, he cannot report on human beings or explain why atrocity is wrong. His two-mountain model of adult life — a first mountain of career and identity, a valley of suffering or disillusionment, and a second mountain of communal service — he treats as a near-universal pattern among people who describe themselves as fulfilled.

In the wiki

• David Brooks on Youth, Morality, and Loneliness — Conversations with Tyler, Ep. 42: loneliness, the telos crisis in young adulthood, suffering as depth-revelation, and the two-mountain life
• David Brooks on Audacity, AI, and the American Psyche — Conversations with Tyler, Ep. 252 (live at 92NY): the ‘most rejected generation’, smartphones and AI as ‘semi-kryptonite’, the lost audacity of the humanities, Buckley and Friedman as mentors, moral order, and national ‘rupture and repair’