I recently wrote about conservative darling Ben Sasse, now become a conservative power as McKinsey reformer at the University of Florida. He was once a figure of popularity, winning statewide elections; he’s now a figure of influence, winning positions rather more important than a measly Senatorial seat. Let me add a few more such portraits of prominent conservatives, that we may reflect on the elite attempt to discover new figures who can marry popularity & influence, winning over the many on behalf of the few. This should shed light on the conservatism of the 2010s, the post-Bush attempt to restore coherence & popularity to a catastrophic intellectual & political project. Partly, this was about replacing Baby Boomers (or even older people) with Gen X-ers: Sasse was born in 1972 & was elected to the Senate at 42. Partly, it was about a deeper continuity, as the Sasse-McKinsey partnership suggests, a 1990s idea in 2023. See the post below:
But today, let’s turn from Sasse, a man who is all about virtue, to a man who is all about happiness, an even higher & more desirable thing: Arthur Brooks. His success makes Sasse’s success seem so small as to be parochial—conservative, in a word. They have certain things in common: Harvard, the highest star in the firmament of American ambition. But Brooks is not a Nebraska guy like Sasse, with all that implies. He’s cosmopolitan (traveled the world, lived & married in Barcelona back when it was cool); eccentric; artistic (professional musician, French horn); open to the world & inexplicably eager to solve the world’s problems. He’s the ideal sensitive male, because he’s an intelligent family man rather than handsome. Brooks is accordingly also the ideal TED talker for the post-sexual world, almost the embodiment of the elites of his era, a speaker who puts all his cleverness in the service of turning morality into pleasure—our favorite bit of alchemy, if we’re being honest. Who else will persuade you, with cutting edge scientific research, that your “you can have it all” spirituality, now rebranded as fulfillment, is really the truth of the human experience? Or who else will save you from the growing worry that the entire ‘90s elite arrangement is crumbling?
Even more than Sasse, like most people who can afford to, the young Mr. Brooks had many years of finding himself in a way compatible with building a CV, with various successes along the way in his ‘20s. Brooks was born in 1964, at the end of the Baby Boom. By the late ‘90s, he was on his way, working for the RAND Corporation & becoming a professor. In the 2000s, he defended the Bush-era “compassionate conservatism,” charity, the free market, social entrepreneurship. These are all great delusions, but they were the favored delusions of elites who did not wish to see they were rapidly being replaced by liberal elites who are much more competent at running foundations to take control of society & are much better funded.
What came of those years was an insistence on happiness, which we may call doing well by doing good—you likely have no idea how profitable philanthropy really can be!1 In the 2010s, this made Brooks a first-tier conservative. Since Brooks is not associated with any faction of conservatism, his success is perhaps due to the fact that everybody important was discredited, ignored, or forgotten. But the result is that Brooks ran AEI, then the top conservative think tank, 2009-2019. Obviously, AEI has been replaced by Heritage in importance & in the affections of conservatives, including the young, but I don’t think anyone blames Brooks for this loss of prestige—who would care or expect anything different? After this further success, in 2019, Brooks moved on to Harvard to teach people about happiness, where he is apparently even more successful than he has ever been before.
Thus we come to the full embrace of elite liberal media popularity, self-help with Oprah, the last paragon of culture in liberal America. This is a remarkable success & it finally dispenses with conservatism. Oprah helped with publicity for Brooks’s previous self-help book, From Strength To Strength: Finding Happiness, Success, & Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. The Dalai Lama gave it his seal of approval as well. What’s more Clinton-era liberal than that? A #1 NYT Bestseller. Now they’re working together, indeed have written Build the Life You Want: The Art & Science of Getting Happier. This is indeed social entrepreneurship of a rare kind, charity of a rare kind, compassion, philanthropy, & everything self-sacrificing, so of course it’s worth many millions of dollars! Enjoy:
Read this report at American Affairs from 2018 to guess how many millions of dollars one could make in the city of non-profit, D.C.
Lots of people need to read their Pascal, with the Storeys at their side. https://pomocon.substack.com/p/the-storeys-on-pascal?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Meantime, I am getting a great deal of comedic Pleasure--which maybe is not Enjoyment, as Brooks schools us--from certain of Titus's on-target digs in this. There are several, but try this one:
"Obviously, AEI has been replaced by Heritage in importance & in the affections of conservatives, including the young, but I don’t think anyone blames Brooks for this loss of prestige—who would care or expect anything different?"
I wrote this earlier, but perhaps forgot to push "Post": delightfully devastating take-down, alternating between sardonic and sarcastic.