Give me that old-time conservatism, it's good enough for me

Typical symposium, from the Diver's Tomb at Paestum, Campania, ca. 475 B.C.E., or about 60 years before the poet Agathon threw the unforgettable party, after his victory in the playwrights' competition in the Dionysia of 416, that Plato (who wasn't there) dramatized in his great Symposium three or so decades afterwards. Via Wikipedia. You guys on the right get a room, for Apollo's sake!

Shorter David Brooks, "The Age of Reaction", September 27 2016:

The real problem is the crappy conservatives we have nowadays. Conservatives in my time used to be people you could look up to, with positive ideas, moderate but optimistic religiosity like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a humanistic appreciation for progress, and now they're all nothing but a bunch of reactionaries. These kids make me sick.

So he's a kind of meta-reactionary himself, yearning to go back to when the conservatives were the right, clubbable sort. That's after castigating Hillary Clinton on Friday for being mired in the tired ideas of the 20th century.

Obviously I'm psyched about the debate, but everybody's writing great stuff about it, and I was really busy all day, and here's Brooks, and this strange doom of mine to deal with him week after week. There's a couple of laughs coming, in any event.

It's book report day at Brooks's shop. He must have had to file early yesterday afternoon so he could get over to the PBS studio for the Great Debate, where he was needed to deliver such deathless insights as

The spiritual boom-and-bust cycle

After the War a Medal and Maybe a Job, antiwar cartoon by John French Sloan, 1914. Digitally restored. Via Wikipedia.

David Brooks seems to have decided that he's married to us now, and of course it's a bad marriage, that is he's really upset about something but he won't tell us what it is, like, "If you really cared about me you'd know." It seems to have something to do with our never helping out with the democracy spreading:

When the U.S. became a superpower, Americans felt responsible for creating a global order that would nurture the spread of democracy. But now the nation is tired, distrustful, divided and withdrawing.

Henry, did you take delivery on that load of democracy we were supposed to bring down to the lower forty?

Or maybe his feelings were hurt by Mark Lilla in the New Republic, who is a little bit patronizing over the recent democracy-spreading project Brooks was involved in: