Todd Culbertson was a longtime editorialist for The Richmond Times-Dispatch. This letter was inspired by his misreading of Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal, in my view 2016’s most on-point and useful polemic. Mr. Culbertson posited an equivalence in how each political party has careered from its philosophical and policy roots. No such equivalence exists. Despite its manifold defects, the Democratic Party retains a utilitarian ethos. It is perhaps unsurprising that Mr. Culbertson could not bring himself to acknowledge the intellectual bankruptcy of movement conservatism. My response is harsh but neither unfair nor inaccurate. As with David Brooks, I invite a comparison of our respective assessments of the two major parties and a judgment regarding which proved closer to the mark.
I was correspondent du jour again. Cool, I guess.
Todd Culbertson, “Frank Talk Declares Class Warfare,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 23 March 2017, A9 (https://richmond.com/opinion/editorial/todd-culbertson-column-thomas-frank-talk-declares-class-warfare/article_f321824f-210f-57da-bb8f-fd301ad8e9d5.html).
“On Dialogue and Empty Vessels,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 3 April 2017, A8 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/cod-april-3-2017-on-dialogue-and-empty-vessels/article_c7a878f2-f54c-5568-9719-54e262af5aef.html).
The third installment of the David Brooks trilogy contains a truly epic distancing of movement conservatism from the world as it exists. In his editorial, Mr. Brooks offers a nearly perfect, indeed textbook, description of the corrosive impact of the neoliberal consensus on the country’s economic and social fabric. Somehow the cause of this socioeconomic carnage evaded his notice. He did not even, as a rhetorical ploy, mention neoliberalism or supply-side economics as a potential explanation so that he could dismiss it. He in fact offers no explanation aside, perhaps, from a vague, indefinable, hard-to-put-one’s-arms-around degradation of the spirit. Puh-leeze.
David Brooks, “This Century is Broken,” The New York Times, 21 February 2017, A23 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/opinion/this-century-is-broken.html).
David Brooks identifies the “bubble” imprisoning American elites and finds the wellspring of popular outrage in a cruelly unfair economy; however, he ultimately engages in victim-blaming. Thomas Piketty, Lewis Lapham, Robert Reich, et al., have better accounted for the country’s troubling socioeconomic plight and corrosive politics.
Longue durée analysis reveals that grave maldistribution of income historically undercuts social mobility because of the proclivity for a fortune to “age well,” for a wealthy family to maintain its position generationally not necessarily from superior business acumen but by dint of affluent birth.
Furthermore, a shifting conception of ideal entrepreneurial behavior has exacerbated America’s bend toward plutocracy. Once expected to balance the interests of shareholder, employee, and community, the businessman now favors the shareholder über alles, a formula for short-term thinking and callous expedience. The sad result is an economy generating stupendous wealth without prosperity while consigning the many to insecurity.
Rather than languid resignation to a Hobbesian future, Mr. Brooks might consider whether reshaping of socioeconomic regulation offers hope for a fairer, more inclusive economy despite the election of Mr. Trump, the self-aggrandizing plutocrat’s avatar, Lewis Lapham’s “prosperous fool and braggart moth.”
This is part two of the David Brooks trilogy. A phrase cribbed from the Ramones says it best: “Second verse, same as the first.” There’s no subtlety in Mr. Brooks’ effort to paint President Id Incarnate as the right-wing Other, an aberration that could not possibly be Republican. Is it possible that Mr. Brooks, as a conservative thought leader, breathes such rarified air in his high sinecure that he has sniffed not a single whiff of what’s been wafting from the dank right-wing dungeon for decades? Is he inobservant or disingenuous or both? Whatever the case, he called for all good Republicans to stiffen their spines and limit The Chiseler In Chief’s depredations. Mr. Brooks would have been well advised not to hold his breath on this one, as he should now know.
David Brooks, “The Republican Fausts,” The New York Times, 31 January 2017, A29 (www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/opinion/the-republican-fausts.html).
David Brooks correctly characterizes the GOP’s “Faustian” bargain with Mr. Trump and commendably urges Republican legislators to oppose the Trump administration’s manifest incompetence and overreach. However, confidence in Mr. Brooks’ prescriptions is difficult to find. His recently expressed hope – that the new cabinet and the executive branch’s professional staff would blunt Mr. Trump’s worst impulses (“The Internal Invasion,” January 20, 2017) – was proven illusory by the rollout of the executive order on immigration. Does Mr. Brooks believe that the GOP, beholden to its base and more fearful of primary challengers than Democratic opponents, will effectively resist a president ticking off the base’s entire wish list? The low impulses he ascribes to Mr. Trump gestated in the conservative movement’s fever swamps and have long been cynically manipulated by the GOP for electoral gain. Mr. Brooks should ask himself whether Mr. Trump would have risen to the presidency had he run as a Democrat. A cure requires clearheaded diagnosis of the illness’s genesis.
And then the Grey Lady struck out the side. Perhaps the next three entries should be called the “the David Brooks trilogy.” Over a few weeks in early 2017, three letters were sent to The New York Times in response to opinions by Mr. Brooks. Each was consigned to the epistolary boneyard.
David Brooks has long been a sad character. He’s what passes for an intellectual in conservative circles and this has left him the unenviable task of defending a political theology – it requires too much willing suspension of disbelief and magical thinking to be a philosophy – that is well beyond its expiry date. If Mr. Brooks has an admirable quality, it’s his devotion to this Sisyphean endeavor. His seemingly irresistible and inexhaustible impulse to hold movement conservatism blameless for the Trump phenomenon serves him well. The intellectual contortions this job demands are a sight to behold.
There’s a fair question to pose: If these three essays by Mr. Brooks and my three responses are placed cheek by jowl, whose views have been vindicated by the four years of the Trumpian rule?
In the first essay, David Brooks posits that a kumbaya moment will materialize in which The Orange Waddler’s cabinet appointees and GOP legislators will summon the integrity and forthrightness to enforce political and constitutional norms and place The Boy King on a leash. Right.
David Brooks, “The Internal Invasion,” The New York Times, 20 January 2017, A29 (www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/opinion/the-internal-invasion.html).
When David Brooks identifies gemeinschaft and gesellschaft as the wellspring of our political dysfunction, he offers a tattered fig leaf to the GOP to obscure its willful dumbing down of its electorate and Mr. Trump’s Svengali-like manipulation of these voters’ basest instincts. Is Mr. Brooks so naïve that the kabuki theater of the confirmation hearings portends for him an effective curtailing of Mr. Trump’s narcissistic, authoritarian impulses, when his cabinet selections mostly share his proclivities? Does Mr. Brooks believe that the GOP – long a power-obsessed, non-legislating party – will magically succumb to a quasi-Hegelian melding with a vanquished opposition to thwart Mr. Trump’s nascent corporate statism? Does Mr. Brooks foster confidence in his opinion when his crystal ball is a light British comedy of the early 1980s with dubious relevance to our troubling circumstance? Mr. Brooks should suppress his pseudo-intellectual maundering and offer a sober analysis of how best to navigate the Trump era.
Cue the clichés: Third time is the charm. There was no third whiff. Pay dirt was hit.
The context for this letter to the editor was the aftermath of my father-in-law’s passing. After an extended stay in California, I returned to Richmond before New Year’s 2017. I covered The Beloved’s courses for a couple of weeks so that she could spend more time with her mother out west and I reverted to my slovenly bachelor ways. The Better Half discovered that she didn’t have enough of a refrigerated prescription medication, so I jerry-rigged a cold pack for quasi-illegal overnight shipment. I arrived at the Carytown UPS Store too early. Can Can, the nearby French bistro, beckoned. A self-indulgent, decadent breakfast with the newspapers followed.
An unsigned editorial in The Richmond Times-Dispatch disturbed my meal. It contended that President Obama had been successful in elevating nominees to the federal counts despite the Republicans’ glacially slow confirmation of them. It read like an apologia for GOP obstructionism, an aggravating stance against the backdrop of the Merrick Garland kerfuffle. It also seemed off factually. My inner dialogue whispered, “This can’t be accurate.” Its thrust was seemingly to normalize the GOP’s politically larcenous program of fulfilling Lewis Powell’s 1971 clarion call to movement conservatives. The avenue to power according to Mr. Powell lay in wresting control of media, state legislatures, and especially the courts from Democrats. The editorial was displeasing. I did some research, gathered the facts, and concluded that it was misleading. A response was written and submitted.
This was a watershed in learning the letter-to-the-editor ropes and honing a process for putting the bits together. The Richmond Times-Dispatch is due some credit. It’s frequently not to my taste editorially but it is good that it exists and retains a presence in print when so many papers have folded. Its policy on letters is sensible. A liberal maximum length allows for a coherent rebuttal to an editorial. My drafts invariably fracture the limit and are then carved down to the canonical wordcount. The Richmond Times-Dispatch places a sixty-day moratorium on further submissions once a letter reaches print. That too is sensible. Otherwise, I would fire an epistle at the paper weekly because of the silliness of many syndicated columnists.
The letter’s final draft was passed by The Mistress of the House, who offered encouraging words: “They’re never going to print this.” She likely thought it was too polemical and combative. The only reason I’m mentioning this, darlin’, is you’ve been the one banging the drum for me to archive this stuff.
The letter appeared in the paper’s Sunday edition without warning. This was pleasing, because Sunday circulation was then around two-hundred thousand rather than the weekday eighty thousand. The idea was to have the greatest possible opportunity to give a person or two pause to think. I discovered that I was also the correspondent du jour. The paper highlights a single letter each day, which is likely to ensure that more people read it. I learned that comments by readers were permitted online and there was feedback. It was mostly polite and positive, some of it even useful. Negative comments were by and large precious and self-indicting.
The bit, sadly, holds up pretty well, especially in light of subsequent events – Mitch McConnell’s assembly-line filling of judicial vacancies, his encouraging of senior conservative judges to retire and be replaced by barely post-adolescent ideologues, and President Best People’s filling of three Supreme Court vacancies, two more than he should have had. The courts in effect were stacked during the Trump ascendancy.
“The Party of Yes,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 4 January 2017, A8 (https://richmond.com/opinion/editorial/editorial—on-the-judiciary-the-gop-played-ball/article_126ee798-fc23-5e5e-a821-b6604d8db307.html).
“GOP Obstruction is Hurting the Courts,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 15 January 2017, E2 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/cod-jan-15-2017-gop-obstruction-is-hurting-courts/article_cebf7255-2df4-5606-9a56-3bcf0d3f521f.html).