A piece which fact-checks David Brooks, author of Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive, about his assertions about "divided America," is I think a bit unfair in its harshness (the author's puncturing of Brooks' generalizations were not statistically robust enough for me to justify the sneering), but overall he makes the point that confirming stereotypes with research and analysis that is validated by their fit to those stereotypes seems a bit circular. I don't read many of Brooks' columns (this is the one element of mainstream media that I think blogs have superseded), but I have read his longer pieces and Bobos, and it seems to me that his "optimistic conservatism" founders on the reality that in many ways conservatives are losing the culture wars. Like Dinesh D'Souza in What's So Great About America, it seems to me that a certain brand of Right-leaning intellectual wants to conflate the victory of capitalism with the victory of conservatism (analogous to those on the Left who view the tendency toward social tolerance that seems dominant among the youth as a sign that the next generation would lean toward government mandated redistributative justice).