http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/opinion/12brooks.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Mr. David Brooks in his latest essay, an installment in his signature series of Platonic Melodramas purporting to be about Politics, the title of which is ‘The Magic Lever: sounds almost like the title of a fairy tale, rather than a serious meditation on serious matters of import. Considering that Mr. Brooks is specialist in a particular kind of self-serving intellectual reductionism, political actors acting in historical time are neatly and very handily taken out of that dimension, and in their places are the ‘ideas’ that he congers, in service to his propagandistic meditations.

 ‘The world economy is a complex, unknowable organism.’ This capacious cliché is the opening gambit of this essay. Followed by this choice historical description, sans the actual actors, and it neatly frames his opinionating: “ But a few years ago a group of bankers thought they had the magic tool to help them master financial trends and predict the future. Sophisticated risks assessment models would enable them to rewrite the rules and make more money.’ That The Financial Reform of 1999 was signed into law by Bill Clinton and a bipartisan coterie, that included among its prominent supporters David Brooks, enabled the bankers mentioned  to , now, ignore the important even singular lesson of The Great Depression and the economic /political necessity of Glass-Stiegel and it’s annulment  should be noted as the antecedent cause of the Economic Collapse of 2008. But Mr. Brooks as a  poor, but experienced, propagandist needs to point the accusing finger at The Democrats and their modified Keynesianism, as a central concern of the Free Marketers, who have shifted political focus from the notion of economic rescue of malfeasant American Capitalism,  to the dire necessity of Austerity, as the key to future prosperity.  But Mr. Brooks must maintain his bourgeois respectability for the readers of The Good Gray Times, by taking to task The Republicans who are convinced that the key to prosperity is a tax policy that favors the ruling plutocrats. As a dramaturge, he now has identified the three protagonists: Bankers, Democratic Keynesians and Republican Tax Cutters; each group believes that they have found ‘the Magic Lever’; was this intellectual terminus unexpected? But here is the stirring summation: Mr. Brooks and his compatriots are the Rational Conservative Centrists who possess greater knowledge and can critique secure in the notion of that superior knowledge. Mr. Brooks is nothing, if not utterly dependable, in his intellectual self-congratulation.

Political Observer