Leadership Quote by David Brooks

A neat little indictment hides inside Brooks's plain-language shrug: the problem isn't that people reject reality, it's that they shop for a version that flatters them. "Reality" here is doing double duty. It's not the world as it is; it's the curated feed, the partisan storyline, the friend-group consensus that feels like the world. By framing it as a want, Brooks shifts the moral weight from ignorance to appetite. This isn't a failure of information. It's a demand for emotional insurance.

The line works because it captures a modern psychological bargain: certainty in exchange for curiosity. "How right they are all the time" isn't just about being correct on policy. It's about maintaining identity without friction. If your politics, values, and tribe are welded together, being wrong doesn't merely sting; it threatens belonging. So reality gets remodeled into something confirmatory, a mirror with better lighting.

Brooks (more accurately a prominent political commentator than a politician) has built a career warning about civic fragmentation and moral complacency in American life, and this fits that project. In an era of algorithmic personalization and grievance-driven media, "reality" becomes a consumer product: tailored, soothing, and always available. The subtext is bleak but practical: if democracy requires tolerating discomfort, then our current marketplace of righteousness is a direct attack on democratic competence.