In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, David Brooks offers a characteristic dismissal of socialist politics entitled “I Was Once a Socialist. Then I Saw How It Worked.”

As its title suggests, the piece (an adapted version of remarks Brooks gave at the Munk Debates in Toronto last week) is framed as a story of grown-up hardheadedness prevailing over the naive idealism of youth. Channeling the famous, unbearably smug quote erroneously attributed to Winston Churchill, Brooks presents his own political evolution as the triumph of head over heart; a slow coming to terms with the world as it really is rather than how we think it ought to be.

This biographical garnish mostly matters because the assumed binary between socialist naivete and capitalist realism heavily informs the more substantial parts of Brooks’s argument (more on those in a moment). But it’s also relevant because the definition of socialism Brooks gives himself as an intellectual sparring partner is so unforgivably thin: “The best version of socialism,” he writes, “is defined by Michael Walzer’s phrase ‘what touches all should be decided by all.’”