Well, somebody had to do it. And they did it. Sasha Issenberg has a story in Philadelphia Magazine about David Brooks' proclivity for sweeping cultural generalizations that aren't supported by facts. For example, in his influential Atlantic Monthly magazine article about Red and Blue America, where Brooks visited Franklin County, Pennsylvania, a presumed exemplar of Red America, he claimed:

On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu --steak au jus, "slippery beef pot pie", or whatever -- I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee's. I'd scan the menu and realize that I'd been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and "seafood delight" trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it.

Turns out it's pretty easy to spend $20 on dinner in Franklin County, including at the Red Lobster.

In the same article, Brooks remarks that:

In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing.

Turns out that QVC's audience, according to their vice president of merchandising, skews Blue, not Red.

In another influential article, this one in The Weekly Standard, on "Patio Man" who lives in fast-growing "Sprinkler Cities" mostly in the South and West, Brooks said that the women of Sprinkler Cities were "trim Jennifer Aniston women [who] wear capris and sleeveless tops and look great owing to their many hours of sweat and exercise at Spa Lady".

Turns out that Spa Lady's franchises are all in New Jersey.

There are many other examples in the article that show Brooks frequently overstates how well the real world fits his cultural models. This is important because Brooks' status as a sociological and political analyst is heavily based on his presumed ability to capture the real America through his acute cultural observations. If those observations are merely charming anecdotes that are bit fanciful to begin with and cannot be generalized into larger socio-political categories, his analysis loses a great deal of its power. And that, in turn, undermines what Issenberg terms "the Brooks Consumer Taste Fallacy, which suggests that people are best understood by where they shop and what they buy". Take that away--people are not best understood by where they shop and what they buy--and Brooks would have to make his political case the old-fashioned way: with reference to hard facts, documented trends, survey data and all the rest of the boring stuff other analysts (like myself) have to rely on.

And, as I've suggested in other writings, when Brooks does have to makes his case in these more straightforwardly political ways, his analysis frequently has serious problems. See, for example, this post on his analysis of "Bush Democrats" or this article, where I discuss his analysis of exurban political trends.

In other words, if you take away his cultural generalizations, his political analysis has to stand on its own merits and can be distinctly underwhelming.

Of course, Brooks' defense of his approach--which we get in the Issenberg article--is that he really doesn't mean his cultural-political assertions as factual assertions. They are not meant to be taken literally and are more in the nature of jokes or satire.

That's fine, but then he needs to ease up on the sweeping cultural-political generalizations he tends to make and the very high explanatory power he tends to assign them in explaining contemporary politics. Or else he shouldn't be suprised when people take what appear to be claims about the real world and put them to the test.

You live by the sword, you die by the sword.