Tag Archives: David Brooks

Our Mr. Brooks….

In the early days of television, Eve Arden played “Our Miss Brooks”– a sardonic, wise-cracking and self-aware observer of life around her.

David Brooks, our present-day “Mr. Brooks,” is a columnist for the New York Times who often produces perceptive analyses of governance and American society–and sometimes follows them with truly bizarre “meditations.”  The link is to one of the latter.

He opens the column with a broadside:

The campaign of 2016 was an education in the deep problems facing the country. Angry voters made a few things abundantly clear: that modern democratic capitalism is not working for them; that basic institutions like the family and communities are falling apart; that we have a college educated elite that has found ingenious ways to make everybody else feel invisible, that has managed to transfer wealth upward to itself, that crashes the hammer of political correctness down on anybody who does not have faculty lounge views.

As Robert W. Merry put it recently in The American Conservative, “When a man as uncouth and reckless as Trump becomes president by running against the nation’s elites, it’s a strong signal that the elites are the problem.”

It has become fashionable among highly-educated and self-important writers commenting on current American schisms to sneer at “elites,” a category they themselves rather clearly inhabit. (We live in an irony-free age.)

I don’t know what “faculty lounges” Brooks has visited, but conversations among my colleagues in the halls of academia (we’re a state school–we don’t have lounges) are rarely characterized by “political correctness”–unless that category includes bitching about grading papers and the inability of students to write a grammatical sentence.

Most of Brooks’ column was devoted to the subject of alienation, which he has apparently decided is the explanation for many if not most of the ills of American society.

Alienation breeds a hysterical public conversation. Its public intellectuals are addicted to overstatement, sloppiness, pessimism, and despair. They are self-indulgent and self-lionizing prophets of doom who use formulations like “the Flight 93 election” — who speak of every problem as if it were the apocalypse.

Alienation also breeds a zero-sum mind-set — it’s us or them — and with it a tribal clannishness and desire for exclusion. As Levin notes, on the right alienation can foster a desire for purity — to exclude the foreign — and on the left it can foster a desire for conformity — to squelch differing speakers and faiths.

Here, Brooks paints with a very broad brush. Are there people who exhibit these behaviors–who are “self-indulgent and self-lionizing”? Certainly. Are there partisans who divide all of humanity into “them” and “us.” Indubitably. Do these descriptions fit all, or even most, of those on either side of the political divide? I don’t think so–and I don’t think such facile characterizations of entire groups of people advances either  public understanding or civility.

The truth is, I know some privileged people who are wonderful human beings, and I know some who are assholes. Some disadvantaged people are saintly, and some are real jerks. Humans are complicated that way.

Brooks makes several points with which it is hard to disagree: America does need a political establishment– people who have been educated to actually know something about public policy problems, people with government experience and a commitment to ethical public service.

But then he gives us this:

Over the longer term, it will be necessary to fight alienation with participation, to reform and devolve the welfare state so that recipients are not treated like passive wards of the state, but take an active role in their own self-government.

As someone who has spent the past 40 years trying–largely in vain– to encourage greater civic participation, first in City government and later in a number of voluntary organizations and  in the classroom, this paragraph made me want to strangle its author. Bromides like these join other endless Sunday sermons and pious political exhortations: We should all welcome the stranger, fight injustice, get out the vote, encourage poor people to eat better….the list of what we should do is endless; the all-important “how” is hotly contested when it isn’t totally ignored.

What Brooks is yearning for requires broad culture change, and cultures don’t change quickly or easily. They certainly aren’t changed by “devolving” social welfare programs–i.e., turning the money and rule-making authority over to the states. We’ve done that in the past, and the consequences weren’t pretty.

The great irony of Trump’s improbable election is that it has done more to prompt civic engagement (albeit not always as courteous an engagement as Brooks might like) than people like me–and Brooks– have done in half a century. We can only hope that the very real concerns that are sending people into the streets will ultimately move the civic culture toward more participation and inclusion–not to mention more self-aware punditry.

A bit more “Our Miss Brooks” and a bit less smugness.

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How Gerrymandering Gave us Donald Trump (And Bernie, too)

Last night was another Republican debate, this time minus “The Donald.” It’s difficult to believe that this assortment of wannabes is the best a once-serious political party can muster.

How have we come to this?

David Brooks, the conservative columnist for the New York Times, is a thoughtful observer of the American scene, and while (in my opinion) he often misses with his analysis, he also often contributes to our understanding of the America we inhabit.

In a recent column, Brooks honed in on the public’s pervasive feelings of powerlessness:

The Republican establishment thinks the grass roots have the power but the grass roots think the reverse. The unions think the corporations have the power but the corporations think the start-ups do. Regulators think Wall Street has the power but Wall Street thinks the regulators do. The Pew Research Center asked Americans, “Would you say your side has been winning or losing more?” Sixty-four percent of Americans, with majorities of both parties, believe their side has been losing more.

These days people seem to underestimate their own power or suffer from what Giridharadas calls the “anxiety of impotence.”…

There are, as Brooks points out, many reasons for these perceptions of powerlessness, and certainly not all of them are political. That said, however, a case can be made that one of the great frustrations fueling the palpable anger in today’s electorate is the realization by so many citizens that their votes don’t count.

The American message has always been that we have political choice. If we don’t approve of the behavior of our political representatives, we can vote them out. Increasingly, that’s not true; gerrymandering has produced Congressional districts that would re-elect dead people if they ran with the correct political label.

At the federal level, the House of Representatives is unrepresentative of the American public, and likely to remain that way. In the last Congressional cycle, Democrats garnered a million more votes than the Republicans who nevertheless remain firmly in control—and, thanks to checks and balances—able to obstruct and defeat policies favored by a popularly-elected President.

I’ve written previously about the lack of competitiveness that gerrymandering produces, and about other deleterious consequences of the practice. Brooks points to one I omitted: the frustration experienced by citizens who feel—with considerable justification—that they have no voice.

Plagued by the anxiety of impotence many voters are drawn to leaders who pretend that our problems could be solved by defeating some villain. Donald Trump says stupid elites are the problem. Ted Cruz says it’s the Washington cartel. Bernie Sanders says it’s Wall Street.

When voters feel powerless, they are vulnerable to simple messages, identifiable villains, and candidates who channel their anger.

If history is any guide, that has never turned out well.

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Adverse Childhood Experiences

David Brooks’ New York Times column this morning was depressing.

Brooks was discussing academic research that traced a variety of adult anti-social behaviors and failures to cope back to certain “adverse” childhood experiences, including abuse, incarceration of a parent and similar destabilizing experiences.

The link between childhood trauma and adult outcomes was striking. People with an ACE score of 4 were seven times more likely to be alcoholics as adults than people with an ACE score of 0. They were six times more likely to have had sex before age 15, twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer, four times as likely to suffer emphysema. People with an ACE score above 6 were 30 times more likely to have attempted suicide.

Later research suggested that only 3 percent of students with an ACE score of 0 had learning or behavioral problems in school. Among students with an ACE score of 4 or higher, 51 percent had those problems.

There’s more–all linking troubled childhoods to adult dysfunctions, both behavioral and medical.

This is depressing because our ability to intervene productively in an individual’s psyche–the ability of professionals or parents to “kiss it and make it well” is still in its infancy. If the conclusions being drawn from this research are accurate–if the problems reported by the adults are actually caused by the identified childhood traumas, and not just correlated with them–social service agencies and psychologists have a very limited ability to help.

It’s also depressing because–despite all the pious political concern expressed about “families” and the sanctity of each life–our public policies are anything but family-friendly. Forcing women to bear unwanted children raises the odds of unhappy childhoods. (Not to mention the studies–admittedly contested–that have tied easing of the access to abortion to lower crime rates twenty years later.) Punitive welfare policies all but ensure familial stress. Our insane approach to drug prohibition deprives thousands of children of their fathers without any corresponding benefit to society. Demonizing homosexuality torments the childhood of GLBT youngsters, disproportionate numbers of whom commit suicide.

As someone recently said, too many people who claim the label “pro life” are really only “pro birth.” Once the child has emerged from the womb, they lose both  interest and compassion.

We may not be able to cure the effects of “adverse childhood experiences,” but rational public policies could help ameliorate those effects. If we really cared about children and families, a lot of our priorities would change.

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Framing the Wrong Argument

I like David Brooks. I even agree with a significant part of what he writes. But his column in yesterday’s New York Times not only missed the boat, it swam in the wrong ocean.

Brooks characterized the Obama ads attacking Romney’s performance at Bain as an attack on capitalism, and essentially framed the current Presidential race as a contest between “big government” and “capitalism.” This is wrong on so many counts, it’s hard to know where to begin.

I am an ardent believer in capitalism and free markets.  In my opinion, Mitt Romney is the poster boy for a destructive and distorted vision of market economics that is giving capitalism its current bad name.

The sort of capitalism that works, the capitalism that originally made this country the most productive in the world, is characterized by transparency and a level playing field. Transparency means marketplaces with willing buyers and willing sellers who both possess the information relevant to their transaction. There are obviously areas–like healthcare–where that sort of information symmetry is impossible; in such areas, markets cannot work. Markets work extremely well, however, when buyers and sellers both have access to sufficient information on which to base their economic behavior.

The metaphor of a level playing field goes well beyond parity of information, however. A level playing field requires rules against cheating–and authorities willing and able to enforce those rules. Crony capitalism is the antithesis of a level playing field. Gaming the system by sending your lobbyists to Washington to buy influence, obtain favorable tax treatment, gut regulations and subsidize your endeavors are hallmarks of oligarchy. Such behaviors bear no relationship to a true market economy.

The notion that Mitt Romney represents true capitalism is delusional. So, for that matter, is the charge that Obama represents “big government.” As even the Wall Street Journal has conceded, growth in government spending under the Obama administration has been the lowest since the Eisenhower administration. The charge of “big government” rests on two aspects of Obama’s presidency: the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) and his continuation of George W. Bush’s policies on surveillance and national security.

I agree with critics of Obama’s national security policies. Those policies infringed civil liberties when Bush inaugurated them, and they are no less ill-conceived and dangerous simply because the President pursuing them can pronounce “nuclear.” But the widespread belief that the ACA is anti-capitalist and pro “big government” rests on the same fundamental misapprehension as Brooks’ column: that anything done by the private sector is by definition “capitalism.”

The basic question to be answered when constructing a government is: what is its role? What tasks must we do collectively,through this governing mechanism we have created, and what tasks should be left to individuals, businesses and/or nonprofit organizations?

In areas where markets work, we should let them. But there are areas where markets don’t work, or work only with substantial assistance. Think public safety, national defense, infrastructure provision. Healthcare is an area where markets demonstrably do not work and have not worked. Every other western industrialized nation has come to that conclusion. The cost of ignoring that reality is draining our treasury and increasing the inequities that are splintering our polity.

Recognition of reality is sanity, not preference for “big government.”

If we really need to frame the electoral choice we face, I’d suggest “a contest between ‘I’ve got mine’ and the common good.”

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Essential Reading

This morning’s column by David Brooks is a dead-on accurate description of what has happened to the GOP.

I was going to excerpt a paragraph, but I couldn’t decide which one, because Brooks goes from pointed observation to perfect analogy and back. (He notes that the primaries haven’t been about policy differences; rather, they’ve been a “series of heresy trials.”)

David Brooks is exactly the sort of thoughtful conservative who used to exemplify the Republican Party, back when I was an active member of the GOP. Now–next to the raging troglodytes and the culture warriors and the know-nothings who want to keep kids out of college and repeal the Enlightenment–he is an anachronism.

He has a lot of company.

Read the column. And weep.

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