http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/opinion/10brooks.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Mr. David Brooks in his latest opinion piece ‘Politicians Behaving Well’ has missed the social fact that new forms of communication have rendered the notions of public and private conduct into a kind of limbo, that needs to be vigorously debated, in the context of the cultivation  civic republican virtue. This debate will never happen. Yes, this is categorical. The Hetero Moralizers, like Mr. Brooks, are incapable of giving sexual conduct its due regard in human affairs, without the bankrupt frame of the Abrahamic Tradition’s tribalist morality filtered through the more gentile, civilizing, even, aristocratic English Literary Tradition. That might be a way to characterize Mr. Brooks’ entire career as Fake American Political Moralist. Mr. Brooks’ political philosophy is based in male authority, a romantic attachment to a past that has quickly been eclipsed in the Capitalist West. The subversive Idea of Human Freedom  is slowly but inexorably working its way through the rest of the world, opened by the internet and other forms of social media: male power is under attack regardless of whatever form it may take, religious, ideological/political or both.

Mr. Brooks is an adept at using dubious rhetorical antithesis in service to his modest political ends , a long quotation is illustrative of this strategy:

‘Trollope admired Prudent Insiders, not Innocent Outsiders. His most admirable characters have been educated by long experience. They have grown mature by exercising responsibility. They have been ennobled by custom and civilization. In his books, powerless outsiders often behave self-indulgently and irresponsibly. Those who are in government have to grapple with the world as it really is.’

So we are presented with his ideas of ‘Prudent Insiders’ and ‘Innocent Outsiders’ as moral/political antagonists/protagonist as a kind of metaphorical description of political life in the novels of Mr. Trollope. Conformity/Nonconformity might be another iteration of this duality. But one needs no real help in deciphering Mr. Brooks’ politically conformist arguments and his self conception as a ‘Prudent Insider’, as supreme in the pantheon, as conceived in this reductive, simplistic but politically useful argument. He, at least, in this political homily, does not beat us over the head ,but instead assumes an audience sophisticated enough to decipher his paean to ‘political wisdom’, as synonymous with a self-conscious pragmatic, even, opportunistic political conformity.