An old grad-school friend of mine wrote me this past Saturday to say that he'd heard David Brooks plug me and my Substack on a podcast. That was very nice to hear. Brooks and I have a number of things in common, among them a history of growing up for part of our childhoods in Stuyvesant Town on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. (Brooks is eight years older than I am, and we have no memory of running into each other on the many playgrounds scattered across that postwar development.) In the early phases of our respective careers, Brooks and I were both neoconservatives of a kind, followed by a shift to the liberal center'mine prompted by the Bush 43 administration, Brooks' by John McCain's choice of the unfit proto-Trump Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008. One final thing that Brooks and I share is a blend of aversion and attraction to right-wing critiques of liberal modernity. At some level, we both 'get it''we feel in our bones the dissatisfactions and discontents that haunt...
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