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.”