Brooks is the paradigmatic New York Times Public Intellectual, who couches this essay of moral/political chatter, with this attempt at confronting ‘the decline of the American psyche’, via Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe. The pseudo-profound, sometimes attached to Public Moralizing is now ‘the why’ that defines the Brook’s métier. I’ll leave it to The Reader to evaluate my commentary! The inclusion of Tom Wolfe is the singular comic note here.
Here are the first two paragraphs of Mr. Brooks essay in the The Atlantic of August 14, 2023
Headline: How America Got Mean
Sub-headline: In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world
Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.
My second, related question is: Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.
In the first paragraph Brooks presents empirical evidence, and in the second paragraph an admixture of the anecdotal and the empirical. But The Reader detects in these paragraphs Brooks’ adherence to bourgeoise political respectability, as his measure of what is ‘normal’. As I child I recall all those Saturday Evening Post covers illustrated by Norman Rockwell, on reflection to be the epitome of ‘niceness’ … that is before Rockwell discovered the Civil Rights Movement.
Given that I will not spend eighty dollars, on a marginal publication, that is the headquarters of Neo-Conservatives, in search of cultivating political respectability. So as my critical strategy, I will search the New York Times database and other sources for Mr. Brook’s political moralizing, in its more more diminutive expressions.
On Meanness, let me begin with this Brooks’ essay of July 15, 2021:
The American Identity Crisis
Here is an excerpt of Brooks’ political moralizing:
…
I guess what befuddles me most is the behavior of the American left. I get why Donald Trump and other American authoritarians would be ambivalent about America’s role in the world. They were always suspicious of the progressive package that America has helped to promote.
But every day I see progressives defending women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial justice at home and yet championing a foreign policy that cedes power to the Taliban, Hamas and other reactionary forces abroad.
If we’re going to fight Trumpian authoritarianism at home, we have to fight the more venomous brands of authoritarianism that thrive around the world. That means staying on the field.
Not to forget this War Mongering essay: ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ofApril 28, 2003. I’ll just post the link to the ‘essay’, it is a moral/political obscenity. A man who had never served in a war, writes dull witted war propaganda! In ‘The American Identity Crisis’ he carefully air-brushed it as the abandonment of American Values.
Headline: ‘The Power of American Capitalism’of April 20, 2023
…
My point is not that American capitalism is perfect. My point is that there is a tension between economic dynamism and economic security. For reasons deeply rooted in our culture, the American brand of capitalism has always been tilted toward dynamism, with freer markets and smaller welfare states.
…
In 2013, Thomas Piketty published a much discussed book called “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” arguing that widening inequality is an inherent feature of modern capitalism. The problem is that right around the publication of his book, inequality stopped widening, the economist Noah Smith notes, and it now appears to be slightly decreasing.
The American model of capitalism is under assault from the left, which rails against the supposed horrors of neoliberalism and globalization, and from Tucker Carlson-style populists, who often treat American capitalism as a great betrayal. But it has proved superior to all real world alternatives.
In fact, I’m kind of amazed. We’ve lived through a wretched political era. The social fabric is fraying in a thousand ways. But American capitalism rolls on
On the vexing question of Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital’, Brooks missed R.A’.s ten part review of ‘Capital’ in The Economist. I relied on this exercise of political honesty, as the antidote to this dismissive, in deed reductive Economist essay.
Brooks is a propagandist, though not a particularly adept practitioner, of the art of mendacity. Though he is still be employed by The New York Times, as that toxic American Political Type: The New York Times Public Intellectual.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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