Supported by
Sampling the outpouring of responses to a column by David Brooks about the shortcomings of the liberal approach to the nation’s ills.
To the Editor:
I read “Despite Everything, I’m Still Not a Liberal,” by David Brooks (column, Sept. 5), with interest. As a piece of rhetoric, it is fine, but as an account of American political history, it is risible.
Between 1933 and 2024, Democratic politicians, many of them liberal, created the greatest engine for economic mobility that has ever existed. They funded schools and universities; ensured that people had decent housing by making mortgages available to average Americans; cleaned up a century of industrial waste through environmental legislation; enfranchised millions of Black voters through civil rights legislation; made sure that older people and veterans had decent health care (an initiative that was only recently extended to all Americans through the Affordable Care Act); and advanced the state of scientific and medical knowledge through the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I could go on.
