The Grey Lady failed to smile again, this time by proxy. June of 2019 found me in the Golden West and The (San Jose) Mercury News had picked up a David Brooks column. It’s difficult not to wonder whether Mr. Brooks assumes that no reader recalls who William F. Buckley Jr. was. Mr. Man-and-God-at-Yale was many things; a paragon of tolerance wasn’t one of them.
David Brooks, “The Generation Gap and the Imminent GOP Apocalypse,” The (San Jose) Mercury News, 5 June 2019, A7 (www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/opinion/republicans-generation-gap.html). If The Mercury News posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The link above is to the version in The New York Times.
David Brooks correctly diagnoses the demographic and electoral buzzsaw into which the GOP is pushing itself through its stance on “immigration, diversity, (and) pluralism,” but he misses the mark on two points. Progressive multiculturalism is in no wise pessimistic. It merely recognizes that the sine qua non for redemption, whether for individual or society, is acknowledgment of and contrition for past misdeeds, something Mr. Brooks, with his boundless capacity for moralizing, surely understands.
Mr. Brooks, moreover, does not acknowledge how a calculated brand of intolerance has been inextricably woven into the Republican Party’s DNA since the adoption of the “Southern strategy.” The GOP has no credibility to assert an “optimistic multiculturalism.” It is rich that Mr. Brooks mentions in this context his “mentor” William F. Buckley Jr., a man whose homophobia is enshrined on videotape (see Gore Vidal) and whose racial attitudes cannot withstand cursory scrutiny.
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.