I got a good many responses to my earlier post on the widespread social-media agita about David Brooks, and almost all of them said something like this: “It’s because he’s wrong about X in Z way.” I have two comments about these responses.

1. A zillion other people are wrong about just those things in just those ways. So why single Brooks out? And the obvious answer — obvious to me, anyway — is that those other people  aren’t wrong in the New York Times. But if that’s the case, then shouldn’t the anger be directed less towards Broooks and more towards the people who hired him to write for what Alasdair MacIntyre once called “the parish magazine of self-congratulatory liberal Enlightenment”?

2. It’s perhaps a sign of out key cultural attitudes and priorities that all these people were taking it for granted that intense anger is a completely appropriate response to someone else’s being wrong about something.
   from Brooks redux