Nick Licata Book Review of

David Brooks “The Second Mountain”: The Quest for a Moral Life

A nationally prominent conservative forsakes individualism in the search for a moral compass. His solution is to embrace passion and obsession as a path toward a life of meaning and joy. However, he does not explore the unintended consequences of such a pursuit.

David Brooks is a thoughtful conservative commentator, a best-selling author, TV commentator, and New York Times syndicated columnist. He worked for conservative William Buckley’s National Review and was at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution. Still, he praised President Barack Obama at times and was so outraged by candidate Donald Trump’s version of conservatism that he supported Hillary Clinton and even wrote a “No, Not Trump, Not Ever” op-ed. In sum, he is not a dogmatist.

His newest book “The Second Mountain — The quest for a Moral Life”, rejects the dogma of individualism and replaces it with communalism. A rather ironic turn in his life, given that his first best seller, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, praised consumerism. He also admits that his most recent book, The Road to Character, was written while “I was still enclosed in the prison of individualism.” His beliefs have changed, no longer believing that, “character building is…