The great piano virtuoso Arturo Benedette Michhelangelli is said to have arrived at concert appearances just as the curtain rose, and to play the entirety of his concert in his overcoat. Here is David Brooks in his latest essay at The New York Times titled The Wonky Liberal of December 6,2011, imitating Mr. Michhelangelli: in the sense that here is our pundit dressed to go out for an evening, with his overcoat on, tapping away at his old, refurbished IBM Selectric I, you know he is a Conservative, but he really can’t resist the feel of this miracle of last centuries technology, and he learned to type on one just like it .He found a man in town that actually sells refurbished typewriters of all kinds.

The center of this particular essay is based on statistics provided by The Center of Progressive Reform, or more directly, on how that information should be interpreted. And it’s unsurprising data that President Obama and the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, headed by Cass Sunstein, have been very friendly to ‘reform’ of business regulation, tilted in the direction of relaxed rather than restrictive government interventions. And on cue, enter the ‘Left’ to provide the necessary antagonists to this, the enlightened reform, although Mr. Brooks doesn’t spare the critics on the ‘Right’ ,either, for their charges of ‘Socialism’. It is a celebration of the moderation of President Obama’s position on regulatory issues, and a proclamation of Mr. Brooks’ assent to that moderating practice. Although one could identify that Moderation as defined by parameters introduced by Reaganism and adapted by the New Democrats , who thirsted after power, so much so, that they willfully forgot the imperatives that fueled the Party for nearly fifty years: rationalized as modernization or as staying competitive with the winners. The Market being the ultimate test of economics, as well as the practices of governance.

Mr. Brooks acts as if his readers are incapable of interpreting this, or any political document, without his interpolation being determinative. He re-enacts the Conservative worldview that renders null the seminal ideas of Emmanuel Kant, of the self-emancipation from tutelage and the self-responsibility that inheres in freedom. Conservatism is about authority wielded in the name of superior knowledge: making questions to that constituted authority verboten. Mr. Brooks makes just that argument, in a rhetoric softened by it’s tone of the mean between the two extremes, and it’s asserted self-evident rightness.

Political Observer