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I read and thought about Mr. Brooks essay of October 25th 2012, What Moderation Means while I was reading, and wanting to concentrate on Jurgen Habermas' The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. But I found that this essay contains some of the central intellectual conceits, that govern the political opinionating of Mr. Brooks. It is long but I hope it offers some insights.   

In the past month, Mitt Romney has aggressively appealed to moderate voters. President Obama, for some reason, hasn’t. But, in what he thought was an off-the-record interview with The Des Moines Register, Obama laid out a pretty moderate agenda for his second term.”

Let us consign this opening bit of campaign detritus to it’s rightful place. But consider the arguments about ‘moderation’ as a description of Mr. Brooks’ political faith, his belief in his concept of ‘moderation’.

“It occurred to me that this might be a good time to describe what being a moderate means. First, let me describe what moderation is not. It is not just finding the midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting yourself there. Only people who know nothing about moderation think it means that.”

Mr. Brooks is unashamed of his ignorance of the evolution of the idea of moderation, but he also a political propagandist with no compunction in attacking the Golden Mean of Aristotle: symmetry, proportion and harmony. Buddha, who taught the middle way,  or Confucius who taught that excess is similar to deficiency. “St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Philosopher, in his Summa Theologica, Question 64 of the Prima Secundæ Partis, argues that Christian morality is consistent with the mean. He observes: "evil consists in discordance from their rule or measure. Now this may happen either by their exceeding the measure or by their falling short of it;…Therefore it is evident that moral virtue observes." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_%28philosophy%29 )         Mr. Brooks self-servingly re-describes moderation as a political notion of his own making, producing an easily manipulated political shadow.   

“Moderates start with a political vision, but they get it from history books, not philosophy books. That is, a moderate isn’t ultimately committed to an abstract idea. Instead, she has a deep reverence for the way people live in her country and the animating principle behind that way of life. In America, moderates revere the fact that we are a nation of immigrants dedicated to the American dream — committed to the idea that each person should be able to work hard and rise.”

The notion of ‘moderation’ is historical/philosophical/political, not to speak of abstract and concrete; theory and practice. Reverence is not a part of the theory and practice of ‘moderation’ but a betrayal of Mr. Brooks’ theo-political bias. Live and let live is an old America credo, reverence is the province of the theologian. The attachment to the idea of social mobility as a product of hard work, of the cultivation of the virtue of sacrifice for future goods is pillar of the American idea, a political embodiment of the protestant ethic, but not an idea that fuels modern American Conservatism, except as amenable cliché.

“This animating principle doesn’t mean that all Americans think alike. It means that we have a tradition of conflict. Over the centuries, we have engaged in a series of long arguments around how to promote the American dream — arguments that pit equality against achievement, centralization against decentralization, order and community against liberty and individualism.”

Conflict/violence is the lynchpin of the Schmitt/Strauss political philosophy, based upon violence or the threat of violence as the root of the political. Here Mr. Brooks carefully grooms this construct as an in-order-to of his domestication of that unpalatable, yet utterly necessary argument of Modern American Conservatism. Aristotle’s idea of the concomitant birth of ethics/politics is another discard of Mr. Brooks’ historical/political re-write, complete with a dialectical garnish. Conformity to the prevailing political wisdom is the bane of American existence.    

“The moderate doesn’t try to solve those arguments. There are no ultimate solutions. The moderate tries to preserve the tradition of conflict, keeping the opposing sides balanced. She understands that most public issues involve trade-offs. In most great arguments, there are two partially true points of view, which sit in tension. The moderate tries to maintain a rough proportion between them, to keep her country along its historic trajectory.”

The political moderate seeks consensus not to preserve ‘conflict’ but reach the middle way of political consensus, that is the practice of moderation as the ‘art of the possible’.

“Americans have prospered over the centuries because we’ve kept a rough balance between things like individual opportunity and social cohesion, local rights and federal power. At any moment, new historical circumstances, like industrialization or globalization, might upset the balance. But the political system gradually finds a new equilibrium.”

The most elementary ‘political science’ or should we call it un-enlightening cliché, used here as intellectual filler. Balance/equilibrium is the agenda of the Republican Party of 2012?  

“The moderate creates her policy agenda by looking to her specific circumstances and seeing which things are being driven out of proportion at the current moment. This idea — that you base your agenda on your specific situation — may seem obvious, but immoderate people often know what their solutions are before they define the problems.”

Political pragmatism is a part of the Republican Party platform and standard bearers of 2012? One need only cite Mr. Romney’s thundering 47% as proof of what?

“For a certain sort of conservative, tax cuts and smaller government are always the answer, no matter what the situation. For a certain sort of liberal, tax increases for the rich and more government programs are always the answer.”

Mr. Brooks and the ‘moderates’ are the middle way, the mean between the extremes: the Paul Ryan budget, or the failed practice of ‘austerity’ that we view as collaborators, spectators of the European and domestic successor to the ‘Free Market’.   

The moderate does not believe that there are policies that are permanently right. Situations matter most. Tax cuts might be right one decade but wrong the next. Tighter regulations might be right one decade, but if sclerosis sets in then deregulation might be in order.

The Republican as nimble political pragmatist?, like the Eisenhower Republican, non-existent.

“Today, we face our own set of imbalances. Inequality is clearly out of whack. The information age, family breakdown and globalization have widened income gaps. Government spending and government debt are also out of whack. The aging population and runaway health care costs have pushed budgets to the breaking point. There’s also been a hardening of the economic arteries, slowing growth.”

Imbalances: Income inequality, family breakdown, globalization, government spending and debt, aging population, runaway healthcare costs, slow growth. A collection of Mr. Brooks favorite topics on which to found his moralizing chatter, in service to a ‘political renewal’ based on market principles, not on republican values and practice. Mr. Brooks fails to mention the obscene profits of American Capital in this period of recovery, and the scarcity of decent well paying jobs, that any worker could buy a home and start a family.

“The moderate sees three big needs that are in tension with one another: inequality, debt and low growth. She’s probably going to have a pretty eclectic mix of policies: some policies from the Democratic column to reduce inequality, some policies from the Republican column to reduce debt.”

Do Boehner/McConnell embody the political pragmatism Mr. Brooks advocates?

“Just as the founding fathers tried a mixed form of government, moderates like pluralistic agendas, mixing and matching from columns A, B and C. They try to create harmonious blends of policies that don’t, at first glance, go together.”

Mr. Brooks replaces thinking with more high-flown, clichéd political chatter.

“Being moderate does not mean being tepid. It will likely take some pretty energetic policies to reduce inequality or control debt. The best moderates can smash partisan categories and be hard-charging in two directions simultaneously.”

The Radical Center of American political lore: fostered by opinionators, who somehow must add some vulgar window dressing to their shopworn goods.  

“Moderation is also a distinct ethical disposition. Just as the moderate suspects imbalance in the country, so she suspects it in herself. She distrusts passionate intensity and bold simplicity and admires self-restraint, intellectual openness and equipoise.”

The moderate is nothing if not self-congratulatory in the search of the two roads taken simultaneously. With Mr. Brooks anything is possible.

“There are many moderates in this country, but they have done a terrible job of organizing themselves, building institutions or even organizing around common causes. There are some good history books that describe political moderation, like “A Virtue for Courageous Minds” by Aurelian Craiutu, a political scientist at Indiana University. But there are few good manifestoes”

The reader doesn’t discover that   Mr. Brooks builds upon a book titled “A Virtue for Courageous Minds” by Aurelian Craiutu. The complete title is A Virtue of Courageous Minds: French Political Thought, 1748-1830. The French context is simply left out, and the context in which Mss.  Craiutu makes his argument for ‘moderation’ is within the intellectual and political thought of pre and post-revolutionary France; political radicalism, political extremity and moderation take on a very different hue given this historical context. But  careful editing make for a shift that might appear to be just a bit disingenuous, although politically useful, as rhetorical frame for his argument for an heroic political moderation. Mr. Brooks styles himself as an enlightened moderate, in the heroic mould. One might even say that his extensive use of third person feminine pronouns in his argument tends to distance that emotion, and is a kind of rhetorical pandering , masquerading as political correctness. It also acts as a mask for Mr. Brooks’ palpable defensive anger.     

“Therefore, there’s a lot of ignorance about what it means to be moderate. If politicians are going to try to pander to the moderate mind-set, they should do it right. I hope this column has helped.”

Mr. Brooks both banishes ignorance and answers non-existent questions.

Political Observer

 

 

 

 

 

 

The full cast of characters of the potent mythology of the current Republican Party are front and center for Mr Douthat's essay titled 'A Time for Choosing', posted November 3,2012. A profligate Federal Government that spends more than it takes in, the retirement of the baby boomers, the attempted, but not fully realized, austerity, government spending at 25 percent of GDP, in 2009. This as introduction to the Republican's ever ready 'painful policy decisions'. These 'painful policy decisions' do not apply to a Wall Street glutted on obscene profits. All this is completely predictable, including this attack on Scandinavian Social Democracy, that needs full quotation:
"The European model of social democracy has its virtues, but it has always depended on the wealth created by American laissez-faire. As a recent economic paper entitled “Can’t We All Be More Like Scandinavians?” points out, it’s easier for smaller countries to afford a more “cuddly” form of capitalism if big countries like the United States are driving global economic growth. And the price of a permanently larger government — in growth lost, private-sector jobs left uncreated, breakthroughs forgone — is much higher for a country of our size and influence than it is for a Sweden or a France."
Mr. Douthat will never cease his war on the menace of socialism, but that 'American laissez-faire' that Mr. D. mentions was the Marshall Plan wedded to the Roosevelt New Deal, the actualized 'Third Way' of the, now, forgotten debate of some years past, at least in the New Democratic camp. And by all means don't forget the burden of all those old folks deftly renamed as 'protected clients'. This opposed to the young 'productive entrepreneurs'. When has the Republican Party done anything for the young?
Mr. Douthat confines his argument for Romney/Ryan to the economic sphere, which renders this re-write of our contemporary economic history, through the Douthat lens as predictably myopic and completely one dimensional.
Political Cynic
             

The full cast of characters of the potent mythology of the current Republican Party are front and center for Mr Douthat's essay titled 'A Time for Choosing', posted November 3,2012. A profligate Federal Government that spends more than it takes in, the retirement of the baby boomers, the attempted, but not fully realized, austerity, government spending at 25 percent of GDP, in 2009. This as introduction to the Republican's ever ready 'painful policy decisions'. These 'painful policy decisions' do not apply to a Wall Street glutted on obscene profits. All this is completely predictable, including this attack on Scandinavian Social Democracy, that needs full quotation:
"The European model of social democracy has its virtues, but it has always depended on the wealth created by American laissez-faire. As a recent economic paper entitled “Can’t We All Be More Like Scandinavians?” points out, it’s easier for smaller countries to afford a more “cuddly” form of capitalism if big countries like the United States are driving global economic growth. And the price of a permanently larger government — in growth lost, private-sector jobs left uncreated, breakthroughs forgone — is much higher for a country of our size and influence than it is for a Sweden or a France."
Mr. Douthat will never cease his war on the menace of socialism, but that 'American laissez-faire' that Mr. D. mentions was the Marshall Plan wedded to the Roosevelt New Deal, the actualized 'Third Way' of the, now, forgotten debate of some years past, at least in the New Democratic camp. And by all means don't forget the burden of all those old folks deftly renamed as 'protected clients'. This opposed to the young 'productive entrepreneurs'. When has the Republican Party done anything for the young?
Mr. Douthat confines his argument for Romney/Ryan to the economic sphere, which renders this re-write of our contemporary economic history, through the Douthat lens as predictably myopic and completely one dimensional.
Political Cynic
             

Decided voters/undecided voters
Political insiders/political outsiders
High information voter/low information voter
Political skeptic/political believer
Wise Athenian/Colosseum mob (a historical miss)

Along with these binary opposites, the very stuff of the Structuralist intellectual endeavor, comes a certain convenient myth: The bipartisan back and forth of political negotiation: not any kind of reality, in the Republican mindset and the very real political obstructionism since the defeat of 2008. Although Mr. Douthat's argument falls to ruin, without this comforting bit of rhetorical legerdemain. We might just call it what it is, a rather scandalous but necessary untruth! Here is a salient, indeed instructive, example of Republican concern over the vote, in one state.
"The Secretary of State of Ohio, Jon Husted, has apologized to the U.S. District Court Judge who ruled against him last week. The Judge, Peter Economus, ordered Husted to reinstate the three-day “early voting” days and hours, which Husted had eliminated as a supposed confusion-eliminating measure. Husted, however, brazenly defied the judge’s order, telling all Ohio county voting officials to ignore the ruling until the order was heard by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals – a Republican-leaning court."

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/12939816-federal-judge-orders-ohio-sec-of-state-to-personally-explain-defiance-of-orders-to-stop-voter-suppression

Mr. Douthat's essay reaffirms his status as apologist for a Party, not just deeply committed to a self-serving political nihilism, but to active subversion of republican principles and practices, not to speak of defiance of the law.

Political Observer

   

This essay by Ross Douthat titled Washington Versus America is a history of a selected income and social strata of Washington, D.C.: this might even be considered , in a moment of literary charity, a 21st Century revision of Henry Adams’ Democracy: An American Novel, in miniature. A defuse and self-serving history of the lawyers,politicians, hucksters, pundits and other political riff-raff, that have arrived since Mr. Douthat, himself, arrived in Washington D.C., ten years ago. These are the central actors in the historical melodrama that Mr. Douthat constructs, although it is really a travelogue with some vague geographical references, a record of an intimate, yet distant acquaintanceship. Somehow, Mr. Douthat accomplishes this impossibility.
“When I moved to Washington, D.C., in 2002, you could sense that the nation’s capital had turned a corner after decades of decline.”
This is based on what empirical evidence? Ten years of living in the city, rather than an intuition upon arrival, a simplistic question and observation, at best.

“No doubt there were boomtowns in the 19th-century Wild West that changed faster than D.C. did over the ensuing decade.”
Another sweeping bit of historically inflected melodrama, coming from the prolific Douthat imagination.
It might even be a ‘Free Market’ success story!You might just simply title this the rise of the governmental technocrats.
But then Mr. Douthat switches tracks and draws his descriptive metaphors from the movie The Hunger Games, it provides a bit of rhetorical lift and ballast, not to speak of bloat, to his thought. After this long meandering introduction Mr. D. comes to the point:
“For Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, what’s happened in Washington these last 10 years should be a natural part of the case against Obamanomics. Our gilded District is a case study in how federal spending often finds its way to the well connected rather than the people it’s supposed to help, how every new program spawns an array of influence peddlers, and how easily corporations and government become corrupt allies rather than opponents.”
Should it surprise that six of the first of the ten years of Mr. Douthat’s residing in D.C. was under the Bush Restoration. A bit of partisan shading absent from Mr. Douthat’s cautionary tale of the inherent evil of Government and by association his antagonist/protagonist President Obama.
“The state of life inside the Beltway also points to the broader story of our spending problem, which has less to do with how much we spend on the poor than how much we lavish on subsidies for highly inefficient economic sectors, from health care to higher education, and on entitlements for people who aren’t supposed to need a safety net — affluent retirees, well-heeled homeowners, agribusiness owners, and so on.”

‘Inside the Beltway’ and the ‘poor’ are here featured as objects of contempt transformed into objects of concern in the Market oriented thought of this Conservative’s self-serving rhetoric. The ‘poor’ are the absent witnesses of the rise of the revitalized technocratically controlled city.
“There’s a case that this president’s policies have made these problems worse, sluicing more borrowed dollars into programs that need structural reform, and privileging favored industries and constituencies over the common good.”
Sluicing,borrowed dollars,structural reform,privileging favored industries,favored constituencies: Mr. Douthat is never far from the Free Market economic cliches of the Republican Party of 2012, and it’s master strategist that great ‘legislative entrepreneur’ Rep. Paul Ryan. The mention of the ‘common good’ is a bit of political nostalgia, adding not content, but a necessary nod in the direction of an obliterated, not to say abandoned precept of a compromised Republic.
At this point, Mr. Douthat can’t resist the temptation of gently chiding candidate Mitt Romney:
“But this story is one that Romney and his party seem incapable of telling. Instead, many conservatives prefer to refight the welfare battles of the 1990s, and insist that our spending problem is all about an excess of “dependency” among the non-income-tax-paying 47 percent.”
That Mr. Romney is perhaps the most clueless, maladroit candidate to be nominated by the Republicans in living memory: that thought,conveniently does not occur to Mr. Douthat, or at the least, he is guarding his conservative credentials, with a self-serving political tact. With the preliminaries out of the way, Mr. Douthat issues his final two enlightening paragraphs:
“ In reality, our government isn’t running trillion-dollar deficits because we’re letting the working class get away with not paying its fair share. We’re running those deficits because too many powerful interest groups have a stake in making sure the party doesn’t stop.
When you look around the richest precincts of today’s Washington, you don’t see a city running on paternalism or dependency. You see a city running on exploitation.”
The paternalism that seems absent to Mr. Douthat is being exercised by himself, in apology for the mentioned exploitation.

Political Observer

 

David Brooks little missive to candidate Romney is a mild scolding,
for being so stupid as to so forthrightly argue, in front of a
private dinner of supporters his flagrant class and political
prejudices, about a large number of Americans. But no regular reader
of Mr. Brook’s essays can miss, unless through willful ignorance or
bad faith, that the first three paragraphs of his column are a defense
of that very position: which places Mr. Brooks squarely in the Romney
political corner. And merely confirms my conviction that Mr. Brooks is
a two bit moralist who can’t pass up an opportunity to lecture both
the candidate and his readers. No journalistic opportunity should be
wasted. And the title of the essay ‘Thurston Howell Romney’ is pure
pop culture reference that sets off this propaganda:
“In 1980, about 30 percent of Americans received some form of
government benefits. Today, as Nicholas Eberstadt of the American
Enterprise Institute has pointed out, about 49 percent do.
In 1960, government transfers to individuals totaled $24 billion. By
2010, that total was 100 times as large. Even after adjusting for
inflation, entitlement transfers to individuals have grown by more
than 700 percent over the last 50 years. This spending surge,
Eberstadt notes, has increased faster under Republican administrations
than Democratic ones.
There are sensible conclusions to be drawn from these facts. You could
say that the entitlement state is growing at an unsustainable rate and
will bankrupt the country. You could also say that America is spending
way too much on health care for the elderly and way too little on
young families and investments in the future.”
“Entitlement” is the code word for dismantling both Social Security
and Medicare and the notorious voucher system that will be the Free
Market successor to these two very successful programs. It is a
reiteration of the Mr. Brooks program of ‘entitlement reform’: it is
his tiresome ideological obsession.
What Mr. Romney and other Republicans believe is that the American
nation is divided into ‘producers’ and ‘drones’ a Randian principle
last articulated in a national context by the Political No-Nothing
Alan Simpson, co-chair of the Simpson-Bowles Commission, on Social
Security:
“We’ve reached a point now where it’s like a milk cow with 310 million tits!”

But here in the last of the quoted paragraphs is the ‘sensible
conclusions to be drawn from these facts.’ Ah, the indispensability of
the Brooks moralizing political rhetoric: we are headed for disaster,
repent or ye shall know the wraith of my poorly argued economic
determinism. It’s almost theological in it’s reach! But the real
loathsome political hypocrisy awaits: ‘ You could also say that
America is spending way too much on health care for the elderly and
way too little on young families and investments in the future.’ Mr.
Brooks is not concerned with the ‘elderly’ or with ‘young families’ or
‘investments in the future’, it’s still about a contemporary and
retrospective defense of the failed and failing ‘Free Market
Mythology’, the only real idea of American Conservatism, in it’s
various iterations. If you are like me, after so much
self-congratulatory and self-affirming chatter, it begins to annoy and
irritate, until we reach the final paragraph:
“Personally, I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things
because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of
cartoonish government-hater. But it scarcely matters. He’s running a
depressingly inept presidential campaign. Mr. Romney, your entitlement
reform ideas are essential, but when will the incompetence stop?”
‘Mr. Romney, your entitlement reform ideas are essential,but when will
the incompetence stop?’ Here is the essential ‘truth’ of Mr. Brooks’
essay and mild scolding of candidate Romney.
Political Cynic

“Why did God put Barack Obama on this earth?”

A question filled with promise in a branch of Christian theology called eschatology, but certainly not in a political essay by Mr. David Brooks, the doubtful might ask, if they weren't regular readers of his commentary. You, as reader of my thoughts, might say eschatology concerns the four questions: death, judgment,heaven and hell: my assertion leaves the question of God's purpose as blank as Mr. Brooks' sentence. How can anyone speculate on God's purpose with any degree of believability? Except perhaps theologians, but can you name a contemporary theologian? Or are these questions left to television preachers who fill the air waves with ponderous, self-aggrandizing chatter, heavenly garnished with admonishing scriptural references. Not to be out done by theological pretenders, Mr. Brooks opens his latest essay with a question of political theology that is unanswerable. The whole point of this opening sentence is to establish in the readers mind his moral seriousness, and to legitimize his standing as a pundit worthy of public attention. This in quest of shaping public debate about political issues.

Mr. Brooks moves from his momentous question of God's purpose for Mr. Obama to a self-serving yet totally preposterous reductive historical/political retelling of the Republican obstructionism since 2008.This selective retelling, a specific form of pragmatic Conservative amnesia, is the central leitmotif of the Brooks political narrative and it's clumsy revisionism. Mr. Brooks presents President Obama as a singular political actor, as if he was alone without political antagonists. This reflects the demands of rhetorical purpose rather than political reality. But the real motive of Mr. Brooks essay is to offer unsolicited political advice to President Obama. Three choices are offered by Mr. Brooks (he only sees three viable options for the President) for the next big crusade: global warming, reforming broken Capitalism, and Simpson-Bowles. The part on broken Capitalism is the most surprising, while still appearing within the bland mainstream vocabulary of 'reform':

“Second, broken capitalism. Obama could go before the convention and say that there has been a giant failure at the heart of modern capitalism. Even in good times, the wealth that modern capitalism generates is not being shared equitably. Workers are not seeing the benefits of their own productivity gains.

Obama could offer policies broad enough to address this monumental problem. He could vow to strengthen unions. He could promise to use federal funds to pay for 500,000 more teachers and two million more infrastructure jobs. He could cap the mortgage interest deduction, cap social security benefits, raise taxes on the rich, raise taxes on capital gains and embrace other measures to redistribute money from those who are prospering to those who are not. He could crack down on outsourcing and regulate trade. He could throw himself behind a new industrial policy to create manufacturing jobs.

This agenda wouldn’t appeal to moderates, or people like me, but it’s huge, it’s serious and it would highlight a real problem.”

I agree with everything but the Social Security cap, this almost qualifies as good advice!

On Simpson-Bowles: repair broken Capital and reinstate a vigorous Glass-Steagall designed for the 21^st Century, while the country has a real debate about the deficit, not the carefully managed politics of the Neo-Liberal consensus of Simpson-Bowles.

Political Observer

Here is a more reality based description of Mr. Ross Douthat's notion of 'policy entrepreneurship', of some weeks ago in his NYT column, and it's relevance to Paul Ryan as Republican Budget Guru:
"Mr Ryan is often called author of the Republican budget. Actually, he is author of the Republican budget resolution. The definition matters. First, budget resolutions aren’t legislation. They set broad spending and revenue totals to which the appropriations and oversight committees are supposed to conform. Since resolutions by their nature skimp on detail, Mr Ryan could set out sweeping changes to taxes and spending without the scut work of having to explain where they come from. Apart from his Medicare voucher programme, Mr Ryan’s resolutions contain little practical information that can actually be turned into law. His tax reform plan can be reduced to a tweet: "reduce 6 marginal rates to 10% and 25%, close loopholes. Total revenue = 18-19% of GDP."
Second, budget resolutions are nowadays largely irrelevant. A budget resolution takes effect when the Senate and House pass the same version. They haven’t done so in years. Mr Ryan blames that on the failure of Senate Democrats to cooperate, an argument that is only partially right. I  addressed it here. Suffice to say, budget legislation these days does not come from budget resolutions but from omnibus appropriations bills, continuing resolutions, and cliff hanger deals such as that hammered out between the administration during last summer’s debt ceiling impasse. The budget committee chairmen have been bystanders."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/08/paul-ryan-vice-presidency?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/americasnextprimeminister
Although G.I.'s blog at the Economist is full of the markers of mainstream journalism, political cliches and platitudes, it still manages to be very informative and enlightening.
Political Observer
  

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

You have to credit Mr. Ross Douthat for the ability to produce an almost 750 word essay on the natural superiority of the Romneys, both Ann and Mitt. It looks like a long and ardent genuflection in homage to the royal couple. Mr. Douthat posits that Mormons as the new WASP elite – don't mention that the last prominent members, in American government, of that elite were the notorious Bundy brothers,although that might just put a damper on his musings.( How to locate the intellectual terrain of this essay is one of it's challenges? You might just call it by it's real name, public relations.) It could be argued that the Bundy brothers were Endicott  Peabody's greatest failure, that might be a bit controversial, there could be many more, but these brothers seem exemplary of the WASP culture that Mr. D. is in the mood celebrate. It strikes this reader as revelatory of certain usable political nostalgia for the good old days, of the invincible white male, in the age of Obama. But, no matter, Mr. Douthat does give a walk on to one of Mr. Peabody's greatest successes, the novelist and essayist Louis Auchincloss. This essay has the tone and cadence of self-aggrandizing dinner party chatter, recalled in the haze of too much wine, and in the haste of leave taking.
American Litterateur