David Brooks in his latest essay titled The Spirit of Enterprise inhabits the spirit of a besotted lover, but the love object is Capitalism and the villains are the lowly, lazy Southern European countries of Spain, Italy and Greece. It reads like the many and varied complaints of Anglo-Saxons about their good-for-nothing relatives, from those dissolute southern climes. Mr. Brooks can with difficulty contain his indignation, even contempt, for those lazy,shiftless southerners. Who do not share the Teutonic gene of self-sacrifice and iron discipline of their northern neighbors. The central concepts of both Capitalism and Protestant Christianity is the idea of sacrifice and self-blame, in pursuit of a hoped for salvation and Capital accumulation plays the part of the earthly salvation, a precursor to the salvation of the spirit that awaits the soul. Mr. Brooks has turned to the Christian Theology of Calvin and Luther for political inspiration and sustenance in this time of the continuing failure of Capitalism. This polemic rehearses the themes of the No-Nothings of America’s nineteenth Century,during the mass immigration of southern Europeans:but argued in the rhetorical register of economic profligacy. It reeks of the aroma of a selective xenophobia wedded to a protestant ethical mainstay, of self-loathing directed at another: here Mr. Brooks acts the part of the amiable ventriloquist.

Almost Marx