http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/opinion/26brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Here is David Brooks and his latest political column ‘The Big Disconnect’: the pleasures of the great overarching metaphor. Some have dubbed him Cockeyed Platonist for his love of forms and ideas rather than commenting on the world as it is. But in this particular essay he makes the argument that American politics are both stagnant and fragile and that both political parties represent products made in Soviet Production Facilities A and B: one can only laugh at this utterly weak argument as representative of stale Cold War thinking, reeking of easily manufactured fear of The Great Satan, The Soviet Union. Mr. Brooks is subject to these spells of self-styled political prescience, which pass, but not as quickly as his readers might hope for. Here is a long quote presenting his rotting beams and pillars, structural problems argument:

‘This cracking and rotting is originally caused by a series of structural problems that transcend any economic cycle: There are structural problems in the economy as growth slows and middle-class incomes stagnate. There are structural problems in the welfare state as baby boomers spend lavishly on themselves and impose horrendous costs on future generations. There are structural problems in energy markets as the rise of China and chronic instability in the Middle East leads to volatile gas prices. There are structural problems with immigration policy and tax policy and on and on.

As these problems have gone unaddressed, Americans have lost faith in the credibility of their political system, which is the one resource the entire regime is predicated upon. This loss of faith has contributed to a complex but dark national mood. The country is anxious, pessimistic, ashamed, helpless and defensive.’

Loss of faith, complex but dark national mood, the country is anxious, pessimistic, ashamed, helpless and defensive: this is rot of an intellectual kind, a phenomenon fully known by the regular readers of Mr. Brooks’ political chatter, which regularly dons some of the garments of serious thought. Mr. Brooks and his Free Market Fellow Travelers have never publicly admitted that their faith in their manufactured Economic Theology failed in 2008, with disastrous worldwide consequences. And even after the bailout of Capital by the government and the obscene profit margins of 2010, Capital has not created the necessary jobs that might bring prosperity back, or even something resembling that elusive economic good. Might that be a more rational explanation for the ills Mr. Brooks enumerates with such assiduity? At least following the Law of Parsimony! The structural problems argument is a replacement for a necessary mea culpa, a mea maxima culpa, even sackcloth and ashes, that might be expected from an honest, candid, thinker and writer.  Instead, Mr. Brooks has positioned himself, in terms of a propaganda offensive for 2012, and the victory of the next Sclerotic Old White Guy, whoever that might be. Leaving no doubt that this highly garnished essay, abundant in jargon, and statistical quotations, is just a part of that campaign.

Almost Marx