The one they love: or do they? The liberals' David Brooks problem.

DAVID BROOKS is every liberal's favorite conservative--or so every liberal says. He is the New York Times's "loveable house conservative," according to Slate; "the in-house conservative pundit of Liberal America," says Philadelphia magazine; the "right's ambassador to the liberal establishment," writes Timothy Noah in the Washington Post; and the Left's "tame conservative, the right-winger without flecks of foam on the sides of his mouth," according to The Nation. CNN's Aaron Brown and Michael Kinsley (writing in the New York Times Book Review) have proffered similar phrases of fond condescension. But Nick Confessore recently topped them all, writing in The Washington Monthly that "to put things in Brooksian terms, he's a conservative, but the kind you'd bring home to discuss politics over $17-a-pound artisanal goat cheese and organic chardonnay bottled by third-generation French peasants."

Yet Brooks is also, according to his cluster of supposed admirers, "a snarky punchline artist ... who translates echt nerd appearance (glasses, toothy grin, blue blazer) and intellectual bearing into journalistic credibility" (Philadelphia)--despite lacking "consistency and intellectual chops" (Salon). At his best, he's "overextended and underinspired" (Noah). At his worst, he's guilty of "embarrassing displays of intellectual obedience," behaving like an "overzealous junior press secretary ham-handedly spinning bad news," or "a second-rate talk-radio host playing tough guy" (Confessore). Oh, and he's a cheat and coward, because he "helped set the table for the wars on terror and Iraq but ducks from their consequences ..." (Slate).

The official justification for this raft of attacks is the publication of On Paradise Drive, Brooks's latest foray into his favored terrain of gentle social satire. On Paradise Drive follows on the very successful heels of Bobos in Paradise, his 2000 dissection of upper-middle-class mores, and some of the recent anti-Brooksian fervor is readily explained by second-book backlash, the mix of envy and unreasonable expectations that drives critics to overpan sophomore efforts.

But only some of it. A few of Brooks's critics--namely Kinsley and Noah--have confined themselves to taking stilettos to On Paradise Drive itself (which is, admittedly, a deeply uneven effort). But the rest have used the book as a prop in a larger assault on Brooks--on his ideas, his skill as a columnist, even his journalistic integrity. For these critics, Brooks isn't just guilty of producing a work that falls short of his previous standards. He's guilty of being a hack.

He's a hack because he can't cope intellectually with the Iraq war, claims Slate's David Plotz, who argues that Brooks has blood on his hands and can't admit it, can't even muster the guts to travel to Iraq to see what his neocon follies "look like on the ground."

He's a hack because he lies and exaggerates, according to Sasha Issenberg of Philadelphia, who humorlessly fact-checks the breezy generalizations in Brooks's 2001 Atlantic Monthly cover story on Red and Blue America and concludes with absurd pomposity that Brooks "satisfies the features desk's appetite for scholarly authority in much the same way that Jayson Blair fed the newsroom's compulsion for scoops."

But it's Nick Confessore's Washington Monthly cover story that best captures the emerging liberal narrative about Brooks, which is that he's second-rate, yes, but only some of the time. "There is Brooks the Journalist," Confessore explains, "and there is Brooks the Hack." The former is the author of Bobos in Paradise, the "keen observer" liberals love to say they love. The latter can barely keep his inner troglodyte in check: He's a graduate of the "Wall Street Journal's famously kooky and fact-challenged editorial page" who is "willing to carry water for his political allies" and "indulges in predictable--and frequently dishonest--caricatures of Democrats."

The absurdity of this line of argument should be self-evident. Brooks may have his hackish moments, but compared with much of his competition in the Times's op-ed stable--not to mention the editorial page's shrill Upper West Side echo chamber--Brooks is the soul of decency, fairness, and journalistic excellence.

But to complain of unfairness in these critiques is to miss what's really going on here, namely, the appalled discovery by a host of liberal commentators that the conservative they adored when he was archly limning meritocratic manners is, well, a conservative.

This wasn't supposed to be such a shock. Brooks's appointment to the Times op-ed page was the latest (and longest-overdue) step in the conservative movement's march toward intellectual respectability, toward a recognition that right-wing thought can be more than a series of "irritable mental gestures," in Lionel Trilling's famous phrase.

But it turns out that such recognition, while real, only extends so far--to the idea of conservative ideas, you might say, and not to the ideas themselves. Oddly enough, it's Brooks-basher Laura Miller (reviewing On Paradise Drive in Salon) who nails what's happening here. "Although they won't admit it," she writes, "most liberals secretly believe that no one sensible and decent could ever seriously entertain conservative ideas, and therefore no one could ever fulfill the platonic role of Acceptable Conservative." So when a conservative as manifestly sensible and decent as Brooks comes along, his liberal fans are forced to take the Confessore approach, insisting that they love only his better half--the Jekyll and not the right-wing Hyde, the Journalist and not the Hack.

Sure, Confessore generously allows that Brooks's conservatism "leads him to smart ideas that a more liberal columnist probably wouldn't conceive." But neither he nor any of Brooks's other liberal critics can actually name one of those "smart ideas"--save for the largely apolitical insights of his comic anthropology. In their eyes, Brooks is a hack when he praises President Bush, a journalist when he talks about Iranian McMansions and Korean megachurches. He's a hack when he lauds a relatively conservative Democrat like Joe Lieberman, a journalist when he discusses Ubermoms and Cigar Aficionado. He's a hack when he's feeling optimistic about progress in Iraq, a journalist when he succumbs to the lure of despair.

But this madonna-whore split can't be sustained forever, and the liberal responses to On Paradise Drive suggest that their disappointment with the right-leaning Times columns of Brooks the Hack is spilling over to embrace the social criticism of Brooks the Journalist. The upper-middle-class typologies that so charmed liberal readers of Bobos in Paradise are suddenly being parsed for reactionary messages ("Why not just call her a screechy dyke and be done with it?" snaps Confessore about one of On Paradise Drive's gentle caricatures), while the genial optimism about American life that has made Brooks a fixture on the NPR/PBS circuit is now thought to be aimed at glossing over the sufferings of the working class ("The people of the United States may need a decent system of public education or adequate healthcare, but one thing they do not need is another TV or radio program, another article or book telling them how terrific and contented they are," Nicholas von Hoffman snipes in The Nation).

Of all conservatives, Brooks should be immune to this kind of treatment--Brooks, who is pro-choice and pro-gay marriage, who is never wild-eyed and rarely dogmatic. The fact that he isn't immune suggests that conservatives of any stripe are still regarded by the journalistic elite as party-crashers at best--their wit and writing style perhaps appreciated, their political opinions not merely disagreed with but disdained.

This air of disrepute creates a dangerous temptation for a writer who, like Brooks, finds himself cast as the liberals' favorite. If you've become accustomed to praise from left-wing friends, it's easy to find yourself tailoring your ideas to fit their idealized image of what a smart conservative should be. The next thing you know, you find yourself "growing in office," as the press used to say approvingly of Republican lawmakers who eased their way leftward. (This is a fate, one hopes, Brooks is intellectually secure enough to resist.)

Yet the unending unrespectability of conservative ideas can also be a blessing in disguise. Just as the media's reflexive liberalism often cocoons Democratic politicians while they speed toward electoral ruin, so too does it swaddle liberal intellectuals with delusions of grandeur, until every Moore fancies himself an Eisenstein, every Dowd a Lippmann. Whereas the slings and arrows hurled at David Brooks suggest that conservatives need never fear the dangers of self-puffery--because no matter how high you rise or how brilliantly you write, there will always be a liberal pundit whispering in your ear, calling you a hack.

Mr. Douthat is an Atlantic editorial researcher and the author of the forthcoming Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion).