David Brooks never tires of telling his readers that he takes the mean, the rational political/moral position, in regards to the antagonists that he creates in all his essays. In addition, today, he admonishes the hyper-individualist Republican Party, while reminding the reader, by means of a short list of the failures of the Democrats, that he is that rational center, or at the least it's arbiter. His re-description of the root of American virtue being greed is part of the self-serving myth of the Free Marketeers. You know the usual cast of characters, Friedman,Hayek,Mises, and the high priestess of the cult of greed Ayn Rand. The opening paragraphs are Brooks as moral/political revisionist:

“America was built by materialistic and sometimes superficial strivers. It was built by pioneers who voluntarily subjected themselves to stone-age conditions on the frontier fired by dreams of riches. It was built by immigrants who crammed themselves into hellish tenements because they thought it would lead, for their children, to big houses, big cars and big lives.

America has always been defined by this ferocious commercial energy, this zealotry for self-transformation, which leads its citizens to vacation less, work longer, consume more and invent more.

Many Americans, and many foreign observers, are ambivalent about or offended by this driving material ambition. Read “The Great Gatsby.” Read D.H. Lawrence on Benjamin Franklin.”

Call this what it is, a breathtakingly cartoonish re-write of the American ethos. But perfectly engineered to appeal to the ever shifting American Zeitgeist. One could simply wonder at the utter shallowness of these paragraphs, except that print propaganda functions not as history, but as an attempt to shape public debate by rhetoric alone, having no allegiance to that trivial practice of history.

“If you believe, as I do, that American institutions are hitting a creaky middle age, then you have a lot of time for this argument. If you believe that there has been a hardening of the national arteries caused by a labyrinthine tax code, an unsustainable Medicare program and a suicidal addiction to deficits, then you appreciate this streamlining agenda, even if you don’t buy into the whole Ayn Rand-influenced gospel of wealth.”

After the failure of the Free Market to deliver the goods, as advertised over nearly a generation, the new intellectual hobby horse of the Conservatives and Neo-Liberals has been the deficit. Not jobs or debt relief for home owners, or even another much need economic stimulus to prod that economy back into life, nor any other pressing economic issue. Because the Republicans have blocked any attempt to improve the economy hoping that their political nihilism will doom President Obama in the coming election. Ms. Rand's gospel is not a gospel of wealth but a gospel of unalloyed, unapologetic greed, just to set the record straight. The paragon of Brooksian virtue at the Republican Convention was Condoleezza Rice. Here Mr. Brooks celebrates the virtues of a wider more inclusive civic patriotism:

“The wisest speech departed from the prevailing story line. It was delivered by Condoleezza Rice. It echoed an older, less libertarian conservatism, which harkens back to Washington, Tocqueville and Lincoln. The powerful words in her speech were not “I” and “me” — the heroic individual. They were “we” and “us” — citizens who emerge out of and exist as participants in a great national project.

Rice celebrated material striving but also larger national goals — the long national struggle to extend benefits and mobilize all human potential. She subtly emphasized how our individual destinies are dependent upon the social fabric and upon public institutions like schools, just laws and our mission in the world. She put less emphasis on commerce and more on citizenship.”

Let me state my prejudice forthrightly: Ms. Rice spent her moral/political capital long ago. Who can take her seriously but the Republicans of this inauspicious political moment?

“Today’s Republican Party may be able to perform useful tasks with its current hyperindividualistic mentality. But its commercial soul is too narrow. It won’t be a worthy governing party until it treads the course Lincoln trod: starting with individual ambition but ascending to a larger vision and creating a national environment that arouses ambition and nurtures success.”

The problem with the Republican Party is not it's hyper-individualism but it's obsession with political purity, destructive political nihilism, it's allegiance to a theology of male power and and an unbridled and unapologetic capitalism: The Tea party, Grover Norquist, Christian Fundamentalism, Bain Capital and Paul Ryan.

Political Observer