As a preface to my comment about Mr. Brooks latest essay: the misfeasance of American Public Intellectuals to fully address the failure of Reconstruction, and the attendant racism that pervaded that effort: the integration of freed black slaves into American society as autonomous citizens was a failure. Jim Crow and other forms of institutional and societal racism and indentured servitude and slavery by another name continued, legal and illegal. We could look to three historical occurrences that are precipitating factors contributing to the decay of the inner cities: the mass exodus of the middle class whites to the suburbs, in order to live a post-war dream, the exodus of poor black southerners to the North looking for a better life and the post-war discontent of black soldiers that fought the Nazis and came home to Jim Crow north and south. Just to name but three of many reasons. That is the legacy we live with daily. Mr. Brooks takes as his subject the thought of James Q. Wilson as exemplary of the necessity of American Public Intellectuals to assume the role of Public Moralist, surely a backhanded defense of his intellectual position. Mr. Brooks titles his essay,The Rediscovery of Character, after an essay by Mr. Wilson and you can read it here. (One might, in the spirit of polemic, title this essay of Mr. Wilson as An American Mandarin Intellectual views the great unwashed.) Read the enlightening opening paragraph:

“The most important change in how one defines the public interest that I have witnessed—and experienced over the last twenty years has been a deepening concern for the development of character in the citizenry. An obvious indication of this shift has been the rise of such social issues as abortion and school prayer. A less obvious but I think more important change has been the growing awareness that a variety of public problems can only be understood–and perhaps addressed–if they are seen as arising out of a defect in character formation.”

The reason that you must read this essay by Mr. Wilson is that it sounds all the notes of the endlessly repeated policy imperatives, as morally necessary, to post-Reagan conservatism. It is laid before you in fourteen short pages. And the argument is breathtakingly redundant and reductive, in the areas of school,welfare, the economy and crime: proper moral behavior is the sine qua non in the Conservative world view to optimal functioning in these human endeavors. The definitional frame of ‘moral behavior’ is quite restrictive: no out of wedlock births etc. in the lower orders. All this is argued in a cartoonish version of cost benefit analysis bordering on the bizarre.

On the title, The Rediscovery of Character, Mr. Brooks has a penchant for this kind of high flown moralizing chatter, in fact bloated Platonisms are his intellectual bread and butter. Mr. Wilson’s essay was published in the journal Public Interest in 1985. If the curious reader finds it of concern, that the publication of this essay was in that journal, then it might be of equal interest that Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol were it’s founders, in 1965, and a list of it’s contributors is instructive: Charles Murray, Samuel P. Huntington, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks and James Q. Wilson among others. Mr. Moynihan is a public thinker and politician who made famous such plangent metaphors as ‘benign neglect’ and this telling observation: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” Should even the incurious reader find a demonstrable ideological bias here? The dithering of white conservative public intellectuals on the moral condition of the urban poor, i.e. black folk, might be worthy of concern except for their dismal record when it come to policies that could have had any ameliorative effect. Except, of course, the tired bromides of the ‘Free Market’ that are endlessly conjectured about as ‘serious’. Those policy prescriptions have the effect of showing moral/political concern that fits neatly into the notion that Conservatism is engaged with the welfare of all Americans. On the level of enacted, effective policy it is nonexistent. But on the level of propaganda, Mr. Brooks meditation on the moralizing political thought of Mr. Wilson could not be more timely or propitious as the 2012 Presidential race moves to the foreground, while the narrative of inequality of the 1% and the 99%, of Occupy Wall Street, has taken hold of voters disillusioned with both Conservatism and the New Democrats. Since 1980 the urban poor, black folks, have been the subject of the manufactured contempt,hostility and fear of both Conservatives and their New Democratic sub rosa allies. But with nearly 147 million Americans at or uncomfortably near the poverty line in 2012, Mr. Brooks’ tribute to Mr. Wilson’s politically inflected scholarship and posited moral leadership might prove as futile as his advocacy of the latest book by Mr. Charles Murray.

Political Observer