I Am Not Charlie Hebdo
By David Brooks
January 8, 2015 | New York Times
URL: http://mobile.nytimes.com/
Showing posts with label David Brooks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Brooks. Show all posts
Monday, January 12, 2015
David Brooks: I'm not Charlie Hebdo
OMG, I agree with David Brooks.
I Am Not Charlie Hebdo
By David Brooks
January 8, 2015 | New York Times
URL: http://mobile.nytimes.com/
I Am Not Charlie Hebdo
By David Brooks
January 8, 2015 | New York Times
URL: http://mobile.nytimes.com/
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Yale prof.: How privileged kids can 'avoid becoming out-of-touch, entitled little shits'
You might have seen that movie Admission with Tina Fey. I watched it on a plane, quaffing a lot of red wine with my tiny meal, so parts of it really got to me.... Anyhow, if the admissions process at Ivy schools is anything like in that movie... it's no wonder today's well-groomed leaders are out-of-touch, elitist, uncreative, self-absorbed a-holes.
Here's how Deresiewicz sums it up:
Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.
Sedulous readers might recall how back in 2007 I re-posted an Atlantic article by conservative pundit David Brooks with similar sentiments, "The Organization Kid." Unlike Deresiewicz, Brooks also worried that kids today are too coddled (safe) and pleasantly addled with mollifying prescription pharmaceuticals:
All your life you have been pleasing your elders, performing and enjoying the hundreds of enrichment tasks that dominated your early years. You are a mentor magnet. You spent your formative years excelling in school, sports, and extracurricular activities. And you have been rewarded with a place at a wonderful university filled with smart, successful, and cheerful people like yourself. [...] The world they live in seems fundamentally just. If you work hard, behave pleasantly, explore your interests, volunteer your time, obey the codes of political correctness, and take the right pills to balance your brain chemistry, you will be rewarded with a wonderful ascent in the social hierarchy.
Of course, Brooks said the problem is that we've taken the moral backbone out of elite education, that "when it comes to character and virtue, the most mysterious area of all, suddenly the laissez-faire ethic rules: You're on your own, Jack and Jill; go figure out what is true and just for yourselves." In other words, elite education is OK, as long as it inculcates a touch of roughhousing rebel sensibility and dash of Christian noblesse oblige in future leaders.
Brooks and Deresiewicz agree that these coddled kids are less likely to be brave and original than their parents or grandparents, because, as Deresiewicz describes it:
Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error.
Personally, I find Deresiewicz's thesis, minus Brooks' moral backbone stuff, more convincing. Smart kids from privileged families learn a lot, they're polite, kind and well-intentioned, but they're so busy with studying, extracurriculars and having "essay-ready summers" that they don't experience real life the way most other kids do. For example, if they work it's because they WANT to, because it looks good on a college application, not because the HAVE to.
I'm not saying all high schoolers should work. No, at least not during the school year. Studying is their job, forget sports and extracurriculars. At the same time, public university should be free for those with good grades, like it is in Europe. That should be the new social contract: study hard, free college. It's also the smartest investment we could make in our workforce. (And those who aren't cut out for college should be tracked into quality trade and technical schools.)
The way things are now, we have kids who work to help pay the family's bills and save up for college, then work during college, and then probably never finish college. (The NY Times recently showed just how dependent U.S. college graduation rates are on their parents' income.) Privileged children will never understand that world; they're carried up and away from it blithely and forever on their parents' shoulders.
That's a failed system of education for top and bottom. For those who never make it to college or don't finish, the failure is obvious. For those who "succeed" their failure is less obvious, since they will have mastered at an Ivy "climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy [they] decide to attach [themselves] to;" however, leadership for them has no higher meaning, or any meaning at all, it just means being on top: the One Percent.
Or as Deresiewicz writes: "This system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead."
UPDATE (08.17.2014): Here's a pretty critical review by Carlos Lozada of Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep in the Washington Post: "A mind is a terrible thing to waste at Yale." I think most of Lozada's criticisms miss the mark and are full of snark.
By William Deresiewicz
July 21, 2014 | New Republic
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Frum: Mitt played up to the rich's class terror but got burned
Conservative pundit David Frum makes it clear what the 47 percent is meant to mean to Republicans, the facts be damned:
Start with this data point: When you ask white Americans to estimate the black population of the United States, the answer averages out at nearly 30%. Ask them to estimate the Hispanic population, and the answer averages out at 22%.So when a politician or a broadcaster talks about 47% in "dependency," the image that swims into many white voters' minds is not their mother in Florida, her Social Security untaxed, receiving Medicare benefits vastly greater than her lifetime tax contributions; it is not their uncle, laid off after 30 years and now too old to start over. No, the image that comes into mind is minorities on welfare.
It's also a lot of silly and, frankly, disproven fear about Obama's diabolical designs on the wealthy (his first term is almost over and America still exists, pretty much as it was under Dubya):
The background to so much of the politics of the past four years is the mood of apocalyptic terror that has gripped so much of the American upper class.Hucksters of all kinds have battened on this terror. They tell them that free enterprise is under attack; that Obama is a socialist, a Marxist, a fascist, an anti-colonialist. Only by donating to my think tank, buying my book, watching my network, going to my movie, can you - can we - stop him before he seizes everything to give to his base of "bums," as Charles Murray memorably called them.And what makes it all both so heart-rending and so outrageous is that all this is occurring at a time when economically disadvantaged Americans have never been so demoralized and passive, never exerted less political clout. [...]Yet even so, the rich and the old are scared witless! Watch the trailer of Dinesh D'Souza's new movie to glimpse into their mental universe: chanting swarthy mobs, churches and banks under attack, angry black people grabbing at other people's houses.It's all a scam, but it's a spectacularly effective scam. Mitt Romney tried to make use of the scam, and now instead has fallen victim to it himself.
By David Frum
September 18, 2012 | Daily Beast
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Brooks: GOP has no soul, nothing to offer the poor
By David Brooks
August 30, 2012 | New York Times
America was built by materialistic and sometimes superficial strivers. It was built by pioneers who voluntarily subjected themselves to stone-age conditions on the frontier fired by dreams of riches. It was built by immigrants who crammed themselves into hellish tenements because they thought it would lead, for their children, to big houses, big cars and big lives.
America has always been defined by this ferocious commercial energy, this zealotry for self-transformation, which leads its citizens to vacation less, work longer, consume more and invent more.
Many Americans, and many foreign observers, are ambivalent about or offended by this driving material ambition. Read "The Great Gatsby." Read D.H. Lawrence on Benjamin Franklin.
But today's Republican Party unabashedly celebrates this ambition and definition of success. Speaker after speaker at the convention in Tampa, Fla., celebrated the striver, who started small, struggled hard, looked within and became wealthy. Speaker after speaker argued that this ideal of success is under assault by Democrats who look down on strivers, who undermine self-reliance with government dependency, who smother ambition under regulations.
Republicans promised to get government out of the way. Reduce the burden of debt. Offer Americans an open field and a fair chance to let their ambition run.
If you believe, as I do, that American institutions are hitting a creaky middle age, then you have a lot of time for this argument. If you believe that there has been a hardening of the national arteries caused by a labyrinthine tax code, an unsustainable Medicare program and a suicidal addiction to deficits, then you appreciate this streamlining agenda, even if you don't buy into the whole Ayn Rand-influenced gospel of wealth.
On the one hand, you see the Republicans taking the initiative, offering rejuvenating reform. On the other hand, you see an exhausted Democratic Party, which says: We don't have an agenda, but we really don't like theirs. Given these options, the choice is pretty clear.
But there is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions.
Today's Republicans strongly believe that individuals determine their own fates. In a Pew Research Center poll, for example, 57 percent of Republicans believe people are poor because they don't work hard. Only 28 percent believe people are poor because of circumstances beyond their control. These Republicans believe that if only government gets out of the way, then people's innate qualities will enable them to flourish.
But there's a problem. I see what the G.O.P. is offering the engineering major from Purdue or the business major from Arizona State. The party is offering skilled people the freedom to run their race. I don't see what the party is offering the waitress with two kids, or the warehouse worker whose wages have stagnated for a decade, or the factory worker whose skills are now obsolete.
The fact is our destinies are shaped by social forces much more than the current G.O.P. is willing to admit. The skills that enable people to flourish are not innate but constructed by circumstances.
Government does not always undermine initiative. Some government programs, like the G.I. Bill, inflame ambition. Others depress it. What matters is not whether a program is public or private but its effect on character. Today's Republicans, who see every government program as a step on the road to serfdom, are often blind to that. They celebrate the race to success but don't know how to give everyone access to that race.
The wisest speech departed from the prevailing story line. It was delivered by Condoleezza Rice. It echoed an older, less libertarian conservatism, which harkens back to Washington, Tocqueville and Lincoln. The powerful words in her speech were not "I" and "me" — the heroic individual. They were "we" and "us" — citizens who emerge out of and exist as participants in a great national project.
Rice celebrated material striving but also larger national goals — the long national struggle to extend benefits and mobilize all human potential. She subtly emphasized how our individual destinies are dependent upon the social fabric and upon public institutions like schools, just laws and our mission in the world. She put less emphasis on commerce and more on citizenship.
Today's Republican Party may be able to perform useful tasks with its current hyperindividualistic mentality. But its commercial soul is too narrow. It won't be a worthy governing party until it treads the course Lincoln trod: starting with individual ambition but ascending to a larger vision and creating a national environment that arouses ambition and nurtures success.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
David Brooks: Why aren't there more liberals?
Of course Brooks's op-ed is mostly wrong, but it's wrong in a thoughtful way, not a "liberals-hate-America-and-are-trying-to-destroy-it" way, so Brooks deserves a thoughtful response.
To start, we must concede that "liberal" is a dirty word in the U.S. nowadays, unfair and silly as that may be. We liberals have failed to own it and say it proudly. (Except for me). The Right has done a pretty good job of destroying it, by linking "liberal" to anything that goes wrong with government. As Brooks correctly points out, Republicans are in the ridiculous but advantageous position of being able to criticize any lapse of government, including lapses of their own creation, on "liberal" government, or Big Government. When they screw up it's just an abstract "See, I told you so," moment. When they don't screw up, they've defied the odds and "proven" that Republicans govern better. Win-win for them. Give them a pat on the back for excellent spin control.
But as Michael Moore and others have aptly noted, when you go policy by policy, Americans who won't dare call themselves liberals say they hold liberal policy views -- equal pay for equal work; higher taxes on the rich; right to abortion and gay marriage; environmental regulation, etc.
Liberals and liberalism, I believe, are partly a victim of their own successes. I don't distinguish "progressives" from liberals in any significant way, except self-identified progressives seem more interested in reform. Anyway, my point is that the Progressive Era, one of the only hopeful and shining eras of U.S. politics, is now under attack, as is the word "progressive" *. I've written about this before. The achievements of the Progressive Era, presided over by reformist Republicans Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft, are numerous, profound, and enduring. To name just a few: ban on child labor; the 8-hour workday; regulating sweatshops; direct election of U.S. senators; breaking up monopolies and trusts; regulating interstate commerce; food and meat inspection; establishing national wilderness parks (a uniquely American invention); and on and on. None of us wants these reforms repealed. We take them so much for granted, or are simply ignorant about how hard-fought they were, that today's liberal-progressives don't even think to brag about their track record of successful reform within the framework of free market capitalism.
* Evil psych patient Glen Beck's recent "lectures" about the "horrors" of the Progressive Era and Teddy Roosevelt are his attempt at Swiftboating U.S. history; because Republican sharks like him understand they must attack their opponent's greatest strengths, not their weaknesses.
If you want to go back to the post-WWII and Great Society, again, I believe liberals are victims of their own success. After winning two world wars and ending the Great Depression, Democrats passed two programs, Social Security and Medicare, which have helped to keep generations of U.S. seniors out of squalor, suffering and indignity in old age. Compare poverty stats of seniors before and after Social Security: 50 percent in poverty before; 12 percent in poverty today (during a recession, mind you). No comparison. The G.I. Bill and cheap G.I. housing loans put the Greatest Generation through college with a roof over their heads. The War on Poverty did work. It's just that Democrats (and liberal-progressives) don't take credit for it, because, well, maybe we look at those today as American achievements. But strictly speaking, they weren't. They were liberal-progressive achievements. We liberals are always stuck, as David Brooks remarks, defending Big Government's administrative weaknesses, and not celebrating its dramatic successes -- as Republicans would do... if they had any successes to celebrate. (Seriously, think hard and name one in the last 30 years that is all theirs. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. .... OK, I'll name one for you: they ended unfunded federal mandates on the states. Bet you weren't going to say that, though.)
Brooks is right about "rent-seeking" behavior, although let's face it, he's really just talking about the need for congressional campaign finance reform of our pay-to-play system. We don't have bureaucrats regularly soliciting bribes in America, or political patronage on a 19th century scale anymore. What we have are the rich paying for more legislated tax breaks and privileges all the time, to the detriment of the middle-class majority.
Americans may not have a lot of trust in government, but compared to what? The military? Oops, that sort of is government. The priesthood? Big oops. Corporations? Do they trust BP more than the EPA? I doubt it. But again, it's the fault of us liberal-progressives for not constantly pointing out the obvious, which is just how seamlessly our federal bureaucracy works most of the time. We suck at self-promotion. Instead we let conservatives jump on every badly designed program, or dishonest citizen who games the system, and blame it all on hapless liberals, as if the exceptions prove the rule.
For better or worse, America is a country where the loudest voice seems the most convincing, where you spike the ball in the endzone to brag about every achievement, and where you kick your opponent when he's down and call him a loser. But that's just not the way most liberals are. And it costs us. We look terribly weak and ineffective when in fact we are strong and make America stronger. That is our problem, Mr. Brooks.
By David Brooks
January 9, 2012 | New York Times
Why aren't there more liberals in America?
It's not because liberalism lacks cultural power. Many polls suggest that a majority of college professors and national journalists vote Democratic. The movie, TV, music and publishing industries are dominated by liberals.
It's not because recent events have disproved the liberal worldview. On the contrary, we're still recovering from a financial crisis caused, in large measure, by Wall Street excess. Corporate profits are zooming while worker salaries are flat.
It's not because liberalism's opponents are going from strength to strength. The Republican Party is unpopular and sometimes embarrassing.
Given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism. Yet the percentage of Americans who call themselves liberals is either flat or in decline. There are now two conservatives in this country for every liberal. Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been astonishingly incapable at expanding its market share.
The most important explanation is what you might call the Instrument Problem. Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don't trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don't trust the federal government.
A few decades ago they did, but now they don't. Roughly 10 percent of Americans trust government to do the right thing most of the time, according to an October New York Times, CBS News poll.
Why don't Americans trust their government? It's not because they dislike individual programs like Medicare. It's more likely because they think the whole system is rigged. Or to put it in the economists' language, they believe the government has been captured by rent-seekers.
This is the disease that corrodes government at all times and in all places. As George F. Will wrote in a column in Sunday's Washington Post, as government grows, interest groups accumulate, seeking to capture its power and money.
Some of these rent-seeking groups are corporate types. Will notes that the federal government delivers sugar subsidies that benefit a few rich providers while imposing costs on millions of consumers.
Other rent-seeking groups are dispersed across the political spectrum. The tax code has been tweaked 4,428 times in the past 10 years, to the benefit of interests of left, right and center.
Others exercise their power transparently and democratically. As Will notes, in 2009, the net worth of households headed by senior citizens was 47 times the net worth of households led by people under 35. Yet seniors use their voting power to protect programs that redistribute even more money from the young to the old and affluent.
You would think that liberals would have a special incentive to root out rent-seeking. Yet this has not been a major priority. There is no Steve Jobs figure in American liberalism insisting that the designers keep government simple, elegant and user-friendly. Sailors scrub their ships. Farmers clear weeds. Democrats have not spent a lot of time scraping barnacles off the state.
Worse, in an attempt to match Republican rhetoric, Democratic politicians are perpetually soiling the name of government for the sake of short-term gain. How many times have you heard Democrats from Carter to Obama running against Washington, accusing it of being insular, shortsighted, corrupt and petty? If the surgeon himself thinks his tools are rancid, why shouldn't you?
In the past few weeks, the Obama administration has begun his presidential campaign by picking a series of small fights with the Republican-led House over things like recess appointments. These vicious squabbles may help Obama in the short term by making him look better than Republicans in Congress. But they will only further discredit Washington over the long run.
Life is unfair. Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good.
Liberalism has not expanded because it has not had a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years.
If you'll forgive some outside advice, President Obama might consider running for re-election as Luther. It's not enough to pick a series of small squabbles and then win as the least ugly man in the room. He might run as someone who believes in government but sees how much it needs to be cleansed and purified.
Make the tax code simple. Make job training simple. Make Medicare simple. Every week choose a rent-seeker to hold up for ridicule and renunciation. Change the Congressional rules. Simplify the legal thickets that undermine responsibility.
If Democrats can't restore Americans' trust in government, it really doesn't matter what problems they identify and what plans they propose. No one will believe in the instrument they rely on for solutions.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Brooks: Today's GOP won't accept 99% success
It sounds like Obama may be wising up to the zero-sum extremists he's up against, but don't hold your breath. He thinks he's transformational, while they say he's a socialist, "and never the twain shall meet," goes the Barack-room balad.
The GOP is going to eat Obama's lunch if he doesn't immediately grow a spine.
David Brooks Slams GOP Obstructionism: 'If You Offered Them 99-1, They'd Say No'
By Alex Seitz-Wald
December 2, 2010 Think Progress
Yesterday, the entire Senate Republican caucus signed a letter vowing to block every piece of legislation unless the body holds a vote on the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. This came after two years of a concerted GOP effort to "obstruct, delay, obstruct, delay," as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said yesterday. This morning, at a debate with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) at the American Enterprise Institute, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks slammed the GOP's reflexive obstructionism and demand for ideological purity, saying their "rigidity" harms "governance" and is based on a false world view that progressives are a "bunch of socialists":
BROOKS: And my problem with the Republican Party right now, including Paul, is that if you offered them 80-20, they say no. If you offered them 90-10, they'd say no. If you offered them 99-1 they'd say no. And that's because we've substituted governance for brokerism, for rigidity that Ronald Regan didn't have.
And to me, this rigidity comes from this polarizing world view that they're a bunch of socialists over there. You know, again, I've spent a lot of time with the president. I've spent a lot of time with the people around him. They're liberals! … But they're not idiots. And they're not Europeans, and they don't want to be a European welfare state. … It's American liberalism, and it's not inflexible.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Brooks: God & capitalism prevent natural disasters
It's weird how some figures on the right -- Limbaugh, Robertson, Brooks -- have seemed eager to turn this act of God against Haiti into some kind of "See, I told you so"/teachable moment.
It's shades of post-Katrina: instead of, "You only drowned if you deserved it," it's "That building only fell on your head because you didn't fully embrace capitalism."
My prediction is that we'll continue to hear such sanctimonious sermons from The Rich to The Poor whenever a natural disaster strikes a country that is not sufficiently Christian and/or doing its sweaty best to live out the received wisdom of neo-liberal globalist agenda.
URL: http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/01/18/translating-david-brooks-haiti/
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Brooks: Rise of talk radio corresponds to fall of GOP
I'm interested how many of my esteemed Republican friends will respond to this op-ed, written by conservative pundit David Brooks, with a "Well, duh," and how many of them will leap to defend Rush, Hannity, and Beck's importance?
I can't wait to find out!
The Wizard of Beck
I can't wait to find out!
The Wizard of Beck
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Brooks: Conservative Class Warfare
By David Brooks
October 10, 2008 | New York Times
Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, "Ideas Have Consequences." Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn't believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.
Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.
Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.
In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota.
But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.
George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party — the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism — but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, "Rebel-in-Chief," Bush "reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don't live along the East or West Coast. He's not a sophisticate and doesn't spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn't come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven't."
The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it's 2-to-1. With tech executives, it's 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it's 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.
This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking "eastern elites." (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.
Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the "normal Joe Sixpack American" and the coastal elite.
She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.
And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
David Brooks on Obama: 'OCS' vs. 'MBS'
David Brooks' latest op-ed on Barack Obama is a disgusting example of how the mainstream media covers the campaigns, which has been described in loathsome detail by journalist Matt Taibbi. First the media build up Obama to god-like proportions, and then they reserve the right to knock him down again.Brooks consistent use of the general "they" to refer to Obama's alleged legions of over-frenzied, hope-addicted supporters is a journalistic cover for: "I did no research, I talked to nobody, and got no quotes for my story." By coining the name of a phenomenon ("Obama Comedown Syndrome") without offering any evidence to support it, he is substituting bald assertion for facts. What Brooks may in fact be describing is the media's ennui: I wouldn't be surprised if they really were tired of talking about Obama as if he were JFK, Jesus Christ, and Muhammed Ali all wrapped up in one. God knows I am. But I don't blame Obama for it.
To be fair, Obama never claimed to be a miracle-worker; nor did he ask to be made into some super-human answer to everybody's political prayers. The mainstream media made him into that. And perhaps they'll decide to yank that distinction away from him in a matter of weeks or months. Who knows? That's their right as America's cynical king-makers.
In any case, it's a superficial distinction, and it's unfair to Obama himself and to the other candidates. Every candidate should be judged by the same standard. Building up Obama only to knock him down again is a cynical ploy by the media to drum up public interest & TV ratings, and to demonstrate their power over our elections.
So, in reply to Brooks and his pals, allow me coin a term: MBS ("Media Bullshit Syndrome"). I'm seeing it all over the country.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
David Brooks: It takes a village, people
David Brooks is about as conservative as they come. Yet one may be forgiven for paraphrasing the moral of his op-ed piece thusly: "It Takes a Village" to raise children properly!
This op-ed also jibes with my own statements that, "we believe what we believe and find the 'intellectual' reasons to justify those beliefs ex post facto;" and "liberal and conservative 'thinkers' read selectively to reinforce beliefs they already hold for reasons that they themselves can't fully explain."
Politics, like morality, is mostly a matter of taste, which is in turn a matter of the subconscious. And the subconscious mind is formed largely in childhood by our family, our community, and our material surroundings -- alas, without our consent.
A little while ago, a national study authorized by Congress found that abstinence education programs don't work. That gave liberals a chance to feel superior because it turns out that preaching traditional morality to students doesn't change behavior.
But in this realm, nobody has the right to feel smug. American schools are awash in moral instruction — on sex, multiculturalism, environmental awareness and so on — and basically none of it works. Sex ed doesn't change behavior. Birth control education doesn't produce measurable results. The fact is, schools are ineffectual when it comes to values education. You can put an adult in front of a classroom or an assembly, and that adult can emit words, but don't expect much impact.
That's because all this is based on a false model of human nature. It's based on the idea that human beings are primarily deciders. If you pour them full of moral maxims, they will be more likely to decide properly when temptation arises. If you pour them full of information about the consequences of risky behavior, they will decide to exercise prudence and forswear unwise decisions.
That's the way we'd like to think we are, but that's not the way we really are, and it's certainly not the way teenagers are. There is no central executive zone in the brain where all information is gathered and decisions are made. There is no little homunculus up there watching reality on a screen and then deciding how to proceed. In fact, the mind is a series of parallel processes and loops, bidding for urgency.
We're not primarily deciders. We're primarily perceivers. The body receives huge amounts of information from the world, and what we primarily do is turn that data into a series of generalizations, stereotypes and theories that we can use to navigate our way through life. Once we've perceived a situation and construed it so that it fits one of the patterns we carry in our memory, we've pretty much rigged how we're going to react, even though we haven't consciously sat down to make a decision.
Construing is deciding.
A boy who grew up in a home where he was emotionally rejected is going to perceive his girlfriend differently than one who grew up in a happier home, even though he might not be able to tell you why or how. Women who grow up in fatherless homes menstruate at an earlier age than those who don't, and surely perceive their love affairs differently as well.
Women who live in neighborhoods with a shortage of men wear more revealing clothing and are in general more promiscuous than women in other neighborhoods. They probably are not conscious of how their behavior has changed, but they've accurately construed their situation (tougher competition for mates) and altered their behavior accordingly.
When a teenage couple is in the backseat of a car about to have sex or not, or unprotected sex or not, they are not autonomous creatures making decisions based on classroom maxims or health risk reports. Their behavior is shaped by the subconscious landscapes of reality that have been implanted since birth.
Did they grow up in homes where they felt emotionally secure? Do they often feel socially excluded? Did they grow up in a neighborhood where promiscuity is considered repulsive? Did they grow up in a sex-drenched environment or an environment in which children are buffered from it? (According to a New Zealand study, firstborns are twice as likely to be virgins at 21 than later-born children.)
In other words, the teenagers in that car won't really be alone. They'll be in there with a whole web of attitudes from friends, family and the world at large. Some teenagers will derive from those shared patterns a sense of subconscious no-go zones. They'll regard activities in that no-go zone the way vegetarians regard meat — as a taboo, beyond immediate possibility.
Deciding is conscious and individual, but perceiving is subconscious and communal. The teen sex programs that actually work don't focus on the sex. They focus on the environment teens live in. They work on the substratum of perceptions students use to orient themselves in the world. They don't try to lay down universal rules, but apply the particular codes that have power in distinct communities. They understand that changing behavior changes attitudes, not the other way around.
They understand that whether it's in middle school or the Middle East, getting human nature right is really important. We're perceivers first, not deciders.
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