StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/feb/23/can-we-have-democratic-e…

I take the title of my essay from Harold Bloom’s book title which neatly captures all of that is amiss with this essay by Mr. Brooks. I’ll take some key sentences and paragraphs and subject them to some examination and analysis.

(“The Simpson-Bowles report wasn’t just a policy document. For a few months, it expanded the national debate. Everybody seemed to realize that the country was beset by large challenges that could no longer be neglected: soaring debt, lagging growth, wage stagnation, family breakdown, political dysfunction.”)

Here is Mr. Brooks celebrating Simpson-Bowles, a report that advocated deep cuts to social programs, austerity, but no taxes on the financial industry. Mr. Bowles was a director for Morgan Stanley. Mr. Brooks thinks his readers are uninformed and unable to do some independent research. By the way, I don’t think that ‘family breakdown’ was part of the Simpson-Bowls mandate, but David can’t resist the felt ideological imperative: Mr. B. loves to ride his favorite hobbyhorses.

(“Suddenly, there was a sense of urgency. There were grand plans coming from all directions.”)

The political hot air produced by the debate on Simpson-Bowles as somehow the strong medicine needed to redeem our economic condition was enhanced by Mr. Brooks propagandizing.

(“It’s sad to compare that era of bigness to the medium-sized policy morsels that President Obama put in his State of the Union address. He had some big themes in the speech, but the policies were mere appetizers. The Republicans absurdly call Obama a European socialist on the stump, but the Obama we saw Tuesday night was a liberal incrementalist.”)

To call Barack Obama a ‘liberal incremetalist’ is so wide of the mark as to be quite laughable, hence the map of misreadings title. President Obama is a New Democrat.

(“In normal times, that sober, incremental approach would be admirable. In normal times, the best sort of change is gradual, flexible and constant. But these are not normal times. This is not Clinton’s second term, or Eisenhower’s. The fiscal train wreck is coming. The current U.S. growth model is insufficient. The American family and the American political system are cracking up.”)

We are in a crisis,these are not normal times, incrementalism won’t work, it is time for radical economic austerity and sweeping moral reform. There is no time to ponder, to hand wring over the blight that Free Market Economics brought, we must act to save ourselves from the ravages of ‘Liberalism’!

(“Legislatively, the president has to build a center-left governing majority that can overwhelm those Republicans who will never support him. That can be done only with ground-shifting policies. Politically, the president has to resonate with voters who feel the country is on the wrong track. Prudentially, the president has to prepare for the likelihood that the economy is going to hit another rough patch this year — if Greece leaves the euro or if the French banks implode or if the Iranian crisis comes to a head. If any of that happens, the desire for profound change would be overwhelming and the candidate with a few carefully targeted tax credits would get blown away.”)

There is no ‘Left’ or the possibility of a ‘center-left’ coalition, only cowardly New Democrats and nihilistic destructive Republicans. That is the sum of our politics, and Mr. B’s imitation of superior knowledge of those politics is pathetic and unconvincing.

(“This election is about averting national decline. The president is making a mistake in ceding the size advantage to the Republicans. The Republicans at least speak with epic alarm about the nation’s problems. They are unified behind big tax and welfare state reforms that would purge Washington and shake things up.”)

Here again Mr. Brooks voices one of his master ideas, national decline, a favorite of Conservatives, that ever approaching ‘decadence’ that haunts our national life, at least as imagined by our essayist. Is it real, is it a potential reality? His argument is that if austerity defined as the dismantling of what is left of the New Deal and higher taxes on middle income and poor people, and a continuing tax policy favoring the rich is not followed, to enhance our economic success in the 21^st Century, we are doomed to failure.

(“The president is making a mistake in running a Sunset Boulevard campaign: I am big; it’s my presidency that got small.”)

And you thought Mr. Brooks didn’t have a sense of humor or lacked a quick and native wit!

American Litterateur

http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item6562285/The%20Freud%20Files/?s…

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http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300169362

David Brooks cares about the ‘little people’ like Maddie Parlier getting by, but aspiring to better herself. But Mr. Brooks likes his corporate allies and friends just a bit more than he cares for the welfare and aspirations of Ms. Parlier, even though he devotes a great many words to establish in the mind of his readers, that he too can express concern for his fellow citizen: David Brooks expresses his concern as a convoluted rhetorical cousin of noblesse oblige. His maxim is: higher taxes on the 1% (the rich) will not improve the lot of Maddie Parlier, not, of course, based on any empirical evidence, but his simple assertion of its validity. The key to better the chances of Ms. Parlier is to combine Free Market Capitalism with the Moral Regeneration of America. This Regeneration will take its master ideas, its formulas for success from the naturally superior and ascendent Patriarchy. This is Mr. Brooks’ favorite intellectual hobbyhorse, it never fails to illumine his opinionating, yet the hortatory tone does wear thin after so many iterations. Mr. Brooks gets into trouble when he stops ‘reporting’ and begins ‘opinionating’: he does however have a talent for the acid,the illuminating one liner, one might even compliment his talent by calling some of his sentences and paragraphs epigrammatic:

(“Davidson’s article is important because it shows the interplay between economic forces (globalization and technology) and social forces (single parenthood and the breakdown of community support). Globalization and technological change increase the demands on workers; social decay makes it harder for them to meet those demands.”)

The hobbling of Capital with too much government regulation, the phenomenon of globalization: the rise of rapacious Global Capital, are linked to American Decadence, expressed as moral and community fissure and decay.

(“Tens of millions of children have poor life chances because they grow up in disorganized environments that make it hard to acquire the social, organizational and educational skills they will need to become productive workers.”)

(“Tens of millions of men have marred life chances because schools are bad at educating boys, because they are not enmeshed in the long-term relationships that instill good habits and because insecure men do stupid and self-destructive things.”)

These two sentences might suggest that Mr. Brooks strikes a rhetorical pose utterly Spenglerian in it moral/political gloom, a tempting conclusion, but we must look elsewhere, to the comforting intellectual bromides of modern day American Conservatism for the root of his pessimism.

(“Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their emphasis from lifting up the poor to pounding down the rich. Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.”)

Here Mr. Brooks takes his revenge on errant Democrats, New Democrats i.e. ‘Liberals’ and the great unwashed Occupy Wall Street movement, that he characterized as ‘milquetoast radicals’. He very handily uses a paraphrase of Raymond Aron’s very famous book title to pillory his opponents.

American Litterateur

Is this essay Sol Stern seeks the root of the current revival of ‘antisemitism’ to it’s origin: the great Jewish thinker and Heidegger apologist Hannah Arendt. Here we have the latest installment of the current war on the policies and practices of the Zionist state’s critics, in the guise of an intellectual history of a prominent ‘self-hating Jew’ (a term that has lost it appeal because it no longer retains its ability to shock and confound) published by The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Here is an informative paragraph that appears early in the essay,I quote it in full:

“Since the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, serious scholars have debunked the most inflammatory of Arendt’s charges. Nevertheless, for today’s defamers of Israel, Arendt is a patron saint, a courageous Jewish intellectual who saw Israel’s moral catastrophe coming. These leftist intellectuals don’t merely believe, as Arendt did, that she was the victim of “excommunication” for the sin of criticizing Israel. Their homage to Arendt runs deeper. In fact, their campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel and exile it from the family of nations—another kind of excommunication, if you will—derives several of its themes from Arendt’s writings on Zionism and the Holocaust. Those writings, though deeply marred by political naivety and personal rancor, have now metastasized into a destructive legacy that undermines Israel’s ability to survive as a lonely democracy, surrounded by hostile Islamic societies.”

Mr. Stern has mapped the territory of his polemic, so the rest is simply elaboration on his chosen theme. What we do know from Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt is that she had an agreement with her professors, that she would leave her classes if the antisemitic remarks by her fellow students became too much. So her consciousness of her Jewishness was a phenomenon that probably came earlier that Mr. Stern indicates in his essay. Although that piece of key evidence might just subvert the political intention of his piece, even if it’s impact be minimal to his argument. That Arendt and many young intellectuals including, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcus were spellbound by the lectures of Heidegger, he taught a generation of German students. Consult :The Young Heidegger,Rumor of the Hidden King by John van Buren and Heidegger’s Children by Richard Wolin.

In this long essay Mr. Stern merely sketches the political missteps, bad faith and political naivete of Arendt on the Zionist question that serves his narrative thrust, that she was an apostate to the followers of the evolving party line of mainstream Zionism: she was radically independent, she went her own way, a dissenter. That is the problem with Arendt, she thought independently and expressed herself forcefully;her intellectual heirs share her problem. The party line is not served by dissenters, by apostates. (Let me conjecture here that Arendt was in all likelihood one of the few women involved in any capacity with the formation of the state of Israel, at least in its intellectual dimension: she was a lone female voice in a field dominated by men habituated to their patriarchal privilege.) That is the central argument is this piece of backhanded propaganda, masquerading as intellectual history,updated to serve the needs of present day apologists for the self-destructive nihilism of Israeli politics.

But let me quote the prescient Arendt on the future of Israel, that seems to elude Mr. Stern’s intellectual and argumentative grasp.

“degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta. Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large numbers of Jews lived. Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland.”

This could be a description of the fortress state of contemporary Israel, although Mr. Stern misses it’s currency. Another quote from near the end of this seemingly interminable indictment:

“Making the charges all the more outrageous is that we now know that she herself, at the time of the trial, was voluntarily engaged in a collaboration of sorts with Heidegger, who never repented for his Nazi allegiance. According to the historian Richard Wolin, Arendt served “as Heidegger’s de facto American literary agent, diligently overseeing contracts and translations of his books.”

Arendt always spoke to the fact that her work owed its genesis to the philosophical project of Heidegger, and that she maintained a deep intellectual connection and affection for him. Was he worth her loyalty and affection? Perhaps we should ask the same question of Marcuse, Jaspers, Gadamer, Löwith, and a host of his other students. I have chosen to comment on certain sections of Mr. Stern’s long polemic against Arendt, as apostate, but let me quote from the end of most telling paragraph:

“Those writings, though deeply marred by political naivety and personal rancor, have now metastasized into a destructive legacy that undermines Israel’s ability to survive as a lonely democracy, surrounded by hostile Islamic societies.”

Israel has the best equipped and trained military out side of the USA, that is America’s 147 billion dollars military investment, our unmanageable protectorate. It has between 100 and 400 atomic weapons and the capability and the means to deliver them. Israel is neither beleaguered nor threatened, except in the collective mind of certain political factions, whose reason to be is to stir up war fever against Iran: the only ‘Middle East Democracy’ flourishes on an unending flow of American dollars.

Political Cynic

“The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once observed that it takes several generations to make a career. Interests, habits and lore accrue in families and shape those born into them.”

This defense of the British hereditary aristocracy by Michael Oakshott is not the least bit out of place in Mr. Brooks latest essay, that has all the marks of a political press release, although a bit more tarted up . Or should we just call it what it really is, just the usual David Brooks sycophancy aimed at a rich and powerful male,whose ruthless swaggering practice of Capitalism and an addiction to the vocabulary of Patriarchal power as always unquestionably right, as in always justified, makes Mr. Romney an unsurprising choice for our scribe. Add to this the possibility that Mr. Romney might just have a very good chance of winning, given the shoddy and shopworn character of his opponents. Romney looks like the perfect stand-in for Ronald Reagan, updated of course, but without having mastered the amiable bonhomie that Reagan practiced to great effect. But perhaps Mr. Romney’s, wooden yet sincere, personality might play well to the Independents and dissatisfied Democrats, not speak of disillusioned Republicans, that gave a victory to President Obama. Of course, if the Bain Capital and the Caymans matters can be effectively neutralized. Perhaps that is the point of Mr. Brooks’ haigiography, neatly disguised as an American Family Melodrama (with the Great Man as its’ final issue) to begin the long process of naturalizing the candidate, in the philosophical/religious/political sense, thereby rendering him not just as a reasonable alternative to the failed New Democrat Obama, but as the only alternative. David Brooks has lent his column space and his unquestioned preeminence in the production of Conservative propaganda,rhetorically framed as the harbinger of a great American Renewal,to that very end.

Political Cynic

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/opinion/south-carolina-diarist.html?partner…

“The other pleasure of covering campaigns is getting to play American Idol judge, evaluating the political performances.

Mitt Romney is never going to be confused for Pericles on the stump. Every sigh and utterance is prescripted, so watching his rallies is like watching the 19,000th performance of the road show of “Cats.” And he has terrible reaction responses. When somebody else is talking and he means to show agreement, he mugs like someone from a bad silent movie. His wife, Ann, is much warmer and more natural on stage.”

(Here Mr. Brooks comments using metaphors drawn from popular culture to garnish his opinions. In sum Mitt Romney is wooden yet well coached, rehearsed, and above all sincere.)

“But Romney’s awkwardness seems to endear him to audiences, because he’s trying so hard. He spends an enormous amount of time after the speeches shaking hands, taking pictures and holding babies. Beads of sweat form on his forehead as he throws himself graciously into the crowds. He also has a nice startle response. When something unexpected happens, his face lights up and you get a burst of happy humanity out of him.”

(Mitt is an awkward but loveable white boy who appeals to Republicans who feel their world under attack from the other: socialists,blacks,gays, jihadists etc.)

“Newt Gingrich’s presentations are forceful. He has a genius for pithy formulations and a consistent theme: The solutions to everything are obvious if only the idiots would get out of my way.”

(Mr. Gingrich makes his own rules and is unapologetically, insufferably arrogant.)

“Ron Paul’s supporters are so grateful. The world was once confusing, but then they read “End the Fed” and the scales fell from their eyes. Paul himself is fascinating because as some smart person observed (I’ve forgotten who), he thinks serially, not causally. The income tax happened and the Patriot Act happened and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, bailed out the banks and job growth stinks. Paul doesn’t bother with logical links. He just strings events together and assumes causation.”

(Respectable Republicans believe Ron Paul is a crackpot!)

“I brought my 12-year-old son on this latest trip. My rule is that if a candidate can’t relate well to a 12-year-old, they’ll never win a general election. He approached all the candidates, and they were all wonderful except Gingrich. But that wasn’t Gingrich’s fault. My son, whose heroes include John Boehner and Tupac Shakur, picked an argument about gay marriage. Gingrich engaged, but after 10 seconds signaled security to brush my kid away.”

( Gingrich is demonstrably unfit for the presidency because he gave the bums rush to my kid.)

“Rick Perry ran a poor campaign but seems like the guy you’d most want to have a beer with. He took the time to tell my son how important it is to study hard and prepare for whatever you do.

Dad really appreciated that one.”

(Mr. Brooks likes a fellow dad who takes the time to reinforce respect for the protestant ethic.)

American Litterateur

Before I comment on David Brooks’ latest essay in the New York Times, let me just volunteer this thought on newspapers: there is nothing like holding a newspaper and thumbing through it’s pages, it is tactile, it is visceral, it is intellectual, or some or all three of these pleasures, at that same moment. No piece of electronic equipment can duplicate its particular pleasures, yet I know that it is an anachronism, in every way. Still I desire its , even as I read newspapers on the internet.

Another comment on the New York Times specifically, it’s newsstand price is now $2.50 which seems excessive except, I guess, in light of the revolutionary $4.00 cup of coffee. I do subscribe on line at a modest $15.00 per month, but one still longs for those Sundays and the hours spent exploring the fullness of the pleasure of that weekly event. I’m showing my age, and the imperatives that were inculcated into me at school, when it was a sign of being educated to read and discuss ‘current events’, with some notion of being informed, that regular reading of a newspaper granted to the good citizen. It was a way of exercising part of one’s civic responsibility, a notion that has seen it’s day.

On to Mr Brooks and his adventures on the campaign trail, his dispatch is marked Sumter, S.C. ,and titled People Needing People, in the print edition. Cliché and it exercise is the piece de resistance at Chez Brooks as he does not think and write so much as string together his thoughts and binds them at the seams using the catch phrases from popular music to voguish Conservative Pop Intellectualism, a genre that Mr. Brooks almost single-handed brought to vivid life, with the aide of his mentor Wm. F Buckley Jr.

But on to the text:

“When I started covering presidential primaries, the best part was getting to know the candidates. We journalists would ride around in vans and buses with them and get an intimate look at what it’s like to endure this soul-destroying process. But the ubiquity of Web cams and tweets has ended that off-the-record culture. As the technology gets more open, the lines of political communications become more closed.”

(Mr. Brooks is a hands on kind of guy, loves to press the flesh of his fellow campaigners, and get to know them at close range, cheek by jowl a la L.B.J., as it were; I could be wrong! Perhaps, Mr. Brooks is old school, but not too old school? Or just enough to make good copy.)

“Now the best part is meeting the people who come to the rallies. It’s best to get to the events an hour early and treat the waiting crowd like a cocktail party. First, you ask people about the local economy. Then you ask them about their lives (about which they are always interesting). Then you ask them about what they think of the issues and candidates (they generally repeat the banalities they have heard one of us pundits utter on TV the day before).

This past weekend in South Carolina I met, among many others, a soldier leaving for Afghanistan who quoted the Book of Revelation from his iPhone, a Vietnam veteran who movingly described the death of his first wife, a textile factory middle manager whose job got sent to El Salvador and a pawnshop manager who supports Ron Paul and said he has clients who buy a new gun every time the government does something they don’t like.”

(In the first part of this he sounds just like one of those ‘coastal elites’ talking about rallies as if they were ‘cocktail parties’ and then promptly shifting into a kind of unseemly adoration of the Republican Proletariat he meets along the way, in his latest campaign adventure: what I find telling is that he listens but doesn’t quite learn much. Mr. Brooks seems to adopt an awe shucks, Will Rogers faux-naïf stance, at the appearance of his fellow citizens, who possess no title or have no readily apparent power or connection to same.)

“I came here wondering how voters would react to the charge that Mitt Romney was a corporate vulture when he ran the private equity firm Bain Capital. I asked dozens of people. They were all familiar with the attacks, thanks to the TV ads. Almost everybody thought the charges were ridiculous, even supporters of Newt Gingrich.

A realtor looked at me dismissively: Sometimes deals work, he said, sometimes they don’t. You have to be efficient to survive. That’s the way capitalism works. Romney’s opponents probably would have been smarter to hit him for being a flip-flopper, not a businessman.”

(The next topic of discussion is Bain Capital with Mitt Romney as its head, and the unquestionable inherent virtues of Capitalism, that locates its primary functional imperative as profit at any cost, and the consequences to civic life be dammed, as an expression of the exalted dog eat dog ethic of the Republican Party, post Reagan: a perfect complement to the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon.)

“I was also struck, as in New Hampshire and Iowa, by the mood of this year’s rallies. Republican audiences this year want a restoration. America once had strong values, they believe, but we have gone astray. We’ve got to go back and rediscover what we had. Heads nod enthusiastically every time a candidate touches this theme.

I agree with the sentiment, but it makes for an incredibly backward-looking campaign. I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return.”

(Here is where Mr. Brooks strikes a familiar note to all of his regular readers, of the notion of ‘restoration’. It is a capacious concept and full of promise,undelivered at present,to the Republican political/moral imagination. The last sentence is a complete revelation of the political nostalgia that is the sine qua non of modern Republican Party. ‘ I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return.’ )

American Litterateur

In his latest essay, Leslie Gelb, through rhetorical sleight of hand, makes an attempt to appear as the voice of reason in the ‘debate’ before an actual attack on Iran, that has taken up so much political space and time, as a preoccupation of policy makers, and a committed position of psychotic Neo-Conservative policy intellectuals. Mr. Gelb is an establishment policy maker and thinker fully aligned with the Clintons, nothing surprising here. How seriously should we take Mr. Gelb’s plea for an informed debate about an attack on Iran? This debate and the manufactured hysteria that will accompany it is also nothing surprising, in the long tradition that is an exploitable constant in American politics. Mr. Romney, in his campaign rhetoric, will be banking on his ability to manipulate the fear of the Iranian Satan, in the minds of ‘low information voters’ and even serious well informed Republican, Independent and some Democratic voters. Perhaps, the question of an attack on Iran could be the great defining issue of the Presidential campaign of 2012, making the nagging questions of the American Economy and the questions raised by the Occupy Wall Street movement appear trivial to a great crusade against our mortal enemy, that would very probably lead to a world wide conflict.

The question of Mr. Gelb’s position on an attack on Iran remains an unknown since his own thought remains in abeyance, in this provocative position paper, aimed at the serious reader of The Daily Beast. Mr. Gelb is no public moralist, but simply put, is a reliable source of something resembling serious policy debate, pitched at the level of a Tina Brown edited publication.

Political Cynic