I understand why he would have taken such questions to be comical from a place of skepticism about the self-understanding of someone like him, but isn’t he supposed to be a UChicago lover of disputation? It was the heyday of the Tea Party, Glenn Beck and Michele Bachman after all.

I always think of him as one of the laziest minds of his generation.

He strikes me as a Thought Leader, someone who holds forth a great deal but doesn't supply the feedback loop enough to keep his ideas grounded.

I had to stop reading that Brooks piece half way through. I live in the world he describes and it bears almost no resemblance to reality. He’s mostly inventing a progressive guy to get mad at. And it’s the same straw man guy that Bill Buckley was mad at in 1951 when he wrote God and Man at Yale.

David Brooks is the David French of David Dukes.

In my experience, the UChicago alleged lovers of disputation also fall back on their own authority and reputations for being “smart” any time they’re seriously challenged (see, e.g., the Epstein-Chotiner interview).