StephenKMackSD's Blog

David Brooks is a pundit that can’t keep from putting his foot in his mouth:
“The progressive budget in the House seems to have been written by people hermetically sealed in the house of government. They work in government. They represent public-sector workers. They seem to have had little contact with private-sector job creators and no idea about what factors might play in their thinking. It’s a reminder that while Republicans may embarrass on a daily basis, many progressives have lost touch with what actually produces growth and prosperity.”
The ‘Free Market’ was a destructive failure, followed by the equally failed ‘Austerity’:one economic theology followed by another. One might ask the most pertinent question: who are the ‘private-sector job creators’? Another question: where are the ‘jobs’? Obscene profits on Wall Street, and a totally sluggish job market, Mr. Brooks seems to be suffering from his own bought with hermeticism.

Old New Dealer

In another time in America, when there was an actual ‘Left’, that ‘Left’ would have called David Brooks a Capitalist Stooge! But even the staunchest New Dealer would wince at this maladroit attempt to rewrite history:
“Today, liberalism seems to have changed. Today, many progressives seem to believe that government is the horse, the source of growth, job creation and prosperity. Capitalism is just a feeding trough that government can use to fuel its expansion.”
As if the New Deal was not about the power of government to help save Capitalism from it’s own self-destructive greed, and utter lack of civic responsibility. But unfortunately the New Democrats have discarded that old New Deal Liberalism for the the trappings of the winners, Neo-Liberalism. Just call this breathtaking re-write, by Mr. Brooks, what it is, Austerity propaganda! The current societal laboratory for the failure of that Austerity is Great Britain.
Almost Marx          

The rallying cry of Conservatism whether it be in turn of the century Vienna or America 2013, is the pernicious threat of Decadence. And Moral Decline is it’s most pernicious expression: the decline of ‘hetero marriage’ and the advent of ‘gay marriage’ is the point of no return, in Mr. Douthat’s world.

In a time when many eyes are on the arguments before The Supreme Court, Mr. Douthat is stoking the fires of Hetro paranoia, with his observations on the sorry state of marriage, now mind you, we’re speaking of that old standby Man, woman, child. Human institutions are eternal and unchanging,(like the Church?) at least in the world view of Conservatives like Mr. Douthat, but the rest of the country and world are redefining themselves and their principals. While raising children without the putative stability of marriage. Whether the results be good, bad or indifferent. Not to mention that Conservatives are the staunch defenders of prenatal life and the primary impediment to enlightened social policy, that could enrich and encourage that life after birth.

Mr. Douthat is an experienced , indeed, perennial propagandist but like King John who bid the tides to stop, his propaganda is for naught. Except as a fascinating ethical/political relic.

Political Cynic

I think an observer of the opinionating of Mr. David Brooks just might readily look at his essay How Movements Recover, in which he reaches back to the Donatist movement (Heresy) in early Christianity, he references Peter Brown’s biography of Augustine, as a movement of reaction and defense compared to the embrace of the spiritual creativity and openness of Augustine. The interpolation of Brown through Brooks might meet with some deserved skepticism!

I’m reading James J. O’ Donnell’s Augustine: A New Biography and quite frankly, the portrait that Mr. O’Donnell creates of Augustine is one of a failed public career, reinvigorated by a crass self-promoter and opportunist, in the world of the church, who battled the heresy’s of Arianism and Donatism. He even managed to anger that other old Christian fraud Jerome. In fact Jerome’s letter, pages 93-96 of Mr. O’Donnell book,is withering in it’s unalloyed contempt for the theological/political machinations of Augustine.

But never mind, this is just a tedious, convoluted and intellectually pretentious introduction to Mr. Brooks genuflection in the direction of the latest occupant of the papal throne, Francis I. Mr. Brooks’ view is, as usual, myopic and avoids any mention of the pope’s involvement with the Argentinian Junta and the torture of two priests, that will haunt Jorge Mario Bergoglio, even as he pays homage to the saint of renunciation and service to the poor. Mr. Brooks’ worship of male power is perennial.

Queer Atheist

You must grant Ross Douthat credit for being a dependable Republican myth-maker, there are other words for his particular endeavors, but let this mildest descriptor stand as adequate. You could call this essay by another title, ‘The Iraq War: A gift to the Democrats’ if you allowed yourself to engage in an extreme political cynicism. Mr. Douthat demonstrates no such scruple. Continue reading →

Ross Douthat’s essay of March 16, 2013 titled What the Church Needs Now is, of course, rhetorically framed as a defense of Catholic authoritarianism. The primacy of justified male authority is the central concept of the precipitously declining patriarchy, here synonymous with Catholicism, unable to confront it’s own complicity, in the world wide child sexual abuse crisis, and the cover up by the actors and institutions of the Catholic church.

Mr. Douthat recently stated on Left, Right and Center that there was no ascertainable link between priestly celibacy and epidemic sexual molestation by priests. The moral dislocation, indeed the schizophrenia, of this Catholic/Conservative intellectual on the subject of justified male authority has produced this defense of the Church: submission to authority as key to salvation, ‘renunciation’, ‘chastity’,’solidarity’ as primary to religion and foundation to social stability. The key to which is the Family, exclusively represented by a man and a women and the centrality of procreation. I have chosen this particular paragraph of his essay because it so clearly states his Conservative Catholic defense of religion, his religion. Note too, his concern with the declining birth rate. Decadence, the subversive menace of the Hegemon.

“Religion without renunciation has obvious appeal. But its cultural consequences are not all self-evidently positive. Absent ideals of chastity, people are less likely to form families. Absent ideals of solidarity, more people live and age and die alone. The social landscape that we take for granted is one that many earlier generations would have regarded as dystopian: sex and reproduction have both been ruthlessly commodified, adult freedoms are enjoyed at the expense of children’s interests, fewer children grow up with both a mother and a father, and fewer and fewer children are even born at all.”

Political Observer

Imagine Professor Muller as the central character in Granville’s Juggler of Universes, but instead of planets he juggles the leaden cliches of Neo-Liberalism, reinforced by the Social Darwinism of the Present, known as Sociology. Now the Sociology of the Present reifies pre-given assumptions of the Politics of Now, while celebrating the values of an ‘objectivity’ in thrall to ideological fixity.

One might compare this exercise in Platonic Ideas to the high flown chatter that David Brooks produces twice a week at the New York Times. Yet Professor Muller outdistances the Conservative Sage of The Good Grey Times with a more inflated intellectual pretension and even less enlightenment.

Capitalism and Inequality, no! But Glory to our Capitalism, yes! As title for this little travelogue laced with quotes from Marx, Engels, and the redoubtable Political Romantic masquerading as Economist Friedrich Hayek. He ends his essay with a literary nod to Chernyshevsky and a long quote from ‘ the greatest American student and practitioner of political economy, Alexander Hamilton’.

The temptation to quote the ideas of Professor Muller has to be resisted,in sum his position could be described as being: I am the middle term between the waring left and right. But if the left and right are simply the factions of Neo-Liberalism, the contested political territory is utterly narrow. Again, Professor Muller offers the well worn cliches of a failed and failing Neo-Liberalism.

Political Observer