StephenKMackSD's Blog

If the reader of David Brooks latest essay at The New York Times is looking for intelligent,cogently argued rejoinders to his conservative opinionating, that reader need only look at the comments section posted below his column on the Times website. The comments are devastatingly direct, demonstrably critical of not just his arguments as presented in his opinion piece, but of the whole of the Conservative political/ethical project. Here are some of my thoughts:

Mr. Brooks takes as his subject of the evolution of modern Liberalism, in the sense of it’s failure to win adherents, post Reagan, to engage in argumentative foreshortening. But Mr. Brooks fails at the outset to even define what that ‘Liberalism’ might be descriptive of, except the growth of incompetent, mendacious government.( Let us, for the moment, table the issue of the concerted propaganda campaign waged by conservative think tanks and commentators, over the past forty years identifying ‘big government’ as inherently ‘evil’-the argument is always formulated in moralistic terms.) The ultimate conservative specter, a rhetorical fabric unfurled on which the reader can project her/his/their own definition, the definitional ambiguity adds a certain luster to his reputation as an intelligent political observer.

His long introduction, aided by using Mr. George Will’s borrowed argumentative frame, makes sense only in the political context of identifying President Obama as his ‘Liberal’ protagonist, this is, after all, a political opinion commentary. Obama is most assuredly a New Democrat not a Liberal. The New Democrats willfully rejected the New Deal legacy, perhaps the most potent expression of Liberalism, as excess political baggage, in a bid for power, in the wake of the political success of Reagan’s wedding of a capacious political nostalgia, Free Market romanticism and a more refined expression of the Southern Strategy. So, how to define Liberalism is a question totally absent from Mr. Brooks’ essay. The New Democrats made their peace with Capital in order to meet the demands of an electorate no longer responsive to the message of restraint of thievery masquerading as free markets, and the exorbitant monetary demands of political campaigns. These are some thoughts that may not constitute an argumentative whole, but their pertinence leads me to record them, none the less.

Here is a question that is pure speculation, but might be worth asking: If Obama loses the campaign of 2012, in tandem with a possible victory for Elizabeth Warren, will the Democratic Party reclaim the rejected legacy of the New Deal as their own? Or will they continue to be a branch of what Gore Vidal called The Property Party, and simply nominate another New Democrat in 2016? Although one might argue that Obama is two beings, one a rhetorical New Dealer, the other a political moderate conservative. All this in the watershed of the Market collapse of 2008, the Bank bailout, and the wholesale rejection of the rescue of homeowners makes the case against Obama quite strong. Except that the Republican candidates, to a man, appear dedicated to the failed Free Market Ideology or at least to some variant of that Economic Theology.

Political Observer

http://koikoikoi.com/2012/01/the-abandoned-house-series-made-of-lego/

A great American artist!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/opinion/brooks-a-new-social-agenda.html?par…

“Santorum believes Head Start should teach manners to children.”

(Santorum believes that poor children should be seen but not heard: that the poor need to remember their place.)

“Santorum’s policies on tax reform, entitlement reform and the other big issues are similar to Mitt Romney’s and most of the other Republican candidates. But he seems to understand that simply cutting is not enough to build a healthy society. To avert decline, America has to restore its values.”

(Santorum like his fellow Republicans believes the Party to be the instrument of the will of the plutocrats that finance it, so ‘tax reform’ and ‘entitlement reform’ mean lower taxes for the wealthy and slashing demonstrably successful social programs. To avert our precipitous moral decline we must in self-defense reassert Patriarchal authority, from the top down.)

“Santorum understands that we have to fuse economics talk and values talk.”

(The economic hegemony of the Market must be framed in the moralizing rhetoric of the Abrahamic Tradition.)

“But he hasn’t appreciated that the biggest challenge to stable families, healthy communities and the other seedbeds of virtue is not coastal elites. It’s technological change; it’s globalization; it’s personal mobility and expanded opportunity; it’s an information-age economy built on self-transformation and perpetual rebranding instead of fixed inner character. It is the very forces that give us the dynamism and opportunities in the first place.”

(Here is where Mr. Brooks become prescriptive rather than descriptive: ‘stable families’,’healthy communities’,’other seedbeds of virtue’ (what entity might this be?one can only wonder at this rhetorical creature) not ‘coastal elites’ meaning the decadent, the irreligious, the blasphemers, the degenerates who wish to seduce our virtuous children to a life of moral degradation, of sin. Then Mr. B. speaks glowingly of the Market and the wonders of its technological gifts and then quite mysteriously of an “economy built on self-transformation and perpetual rebranding instead of fixed inner character. It is the very forces that give us the dynamism and opportunities in the first place.” Is not the ‘self-transformation and perpetual rebranding of fixed inner character’ the absolute moral opposite of the entirety of his argumentative stance: is this encomium to the liberating character of the products of the Market just the opposite of the value of a conformity to Patriarchal values? Or does Mr. B. get lost is his poetic evocation of the wonders of the technology produced by Modern Capital?)

“Santorum doesn’t yet see that once you start thinking about how to foster an economic system that would nurture our virtues, you wind up with an agenda far more drastic and transformational.”

(Santorum must be led by intellectuals, platonic philosopher kings like Mr. B., toward the right path of the marriage of authority, capital and the cultivation of virtue.)

“If you believe in the dignity of labor, it makes sense to support an infrastructure program that allows more people to practice the habits of industry. If you believe in personal responsibility, you have to force Americans to receive only as much government as they are willing to pay for. If you believe in the centrality of family, you have to have a government that both encourages marriage and also supplies wage subsidies to men to make them marriageable.”

(Is the ‘dignity of labor’ to be defined as the production of things on an assembly line, or as the labor that a speculator in the market place uses to inflate the price of commodities he has invested in? As an advocate of the failed Free Market Ideology, Mr. B. is the least credible source to advocate ‘wage subsidies’ instead of a fair living wage for the 21^st Century. Or is that what he’s advocating,its hard to decipher his meaning.)

“If you believe social trust is the precondition for a healthy society, you have to have a simplified tax code that inspires trust instead of degrading it. If you believe that firm attachments and stable relationships build human capital, you had better offer early education for children in disorganized neighborhoods. If you want capitalists thinking for the long term and getting the most out of their workers, you have to encourage companies to be more deeply rooted in local communities rather than just free-floating instruments of capital markets.”

(If you believe that ‘social trust’ is measurable by the ‘fairness’ of the tax code, you are David Brooks but for the rest of us ‘social trust’ could be simply defined as the assumption of the good will of your fellow citizens and acting on that faith. Human capital could also be expressed as human potential and early childhood education makes all things possible. The awful problem with Capitalism that Mr. Brooks refuses to face is that the interests of Capital and the interests of Labor are very frequently antithetical.)

“I doubt Santorum is going to win the nomination. Main Street Republicans like Romney usually beat social conservatives like Santorum because there are just so many more of them in the Republican electorate. But social conservatives and libertarians often provide the ideas that Main Street leaders co-opt.”

(Santorum reminds me of the aggressive, grating and condescending moralizing of Newt Gingrich. He managed to make a lot of enemies, while in the Senate, using his hyperbolic style. Mitt Romney is less threatening to the American sensibility than Mr. Santorum, put succinctly. American political life is alive with a variety of ideas good and bad ,but usability and appropriation are it two constants.)

“America is creative because of its moral materialism — when social values and economic ambitions get down in the mosh pit and dance. Santorum is in the fray.”

( Mr. Brooks uses his talent for the telling contemporized aphorism to conclude his essay)

American Litterateur

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/opinion/brooks-a-new-social-agenda.html?par…

“ I’m to Rick Santorum’s left on most social issues, like same-sex marriage and abortion. I’m also put off by his Manichaean political rhetoric.”

( Mr. Brooks is a Conservative with a capital C so he just can’t bring myself to speak ill of another fellow Conservative Republican (are there any Moderate Republicans?) . You recall the 11^th Commandment of thirty some years ago? As for “Manichaean Rhetoric” that’s just Mr. Brooks’ intellectually inflated way of saying that Mr. Santorum likes to keep political comments within the bounds of the hyperbolic, the polemical.)

“He seems to imagine America’s problems can best be described as the result of a culture war between the God-fearing conservatives and the narcissistic liberals.”

( This is the closest Mr. Brooks get to employing actual political irony, since he really does believe that Liberals are Narcissistic and that, indeed, we are engaged in a Culture War: A War against The Godless,The Heretical.)

“One of Santorum’s strengths is that he understands that a nation isn’t just an agglomeration of individuals; it’s a fabric of social relationships. In his 2005 book, “It Takes a Family,” he had chapters on economic capital as well as social capital, moral capital, cultural capital and intellectual capital. He presents an extended argument against radical individualism. “Just as original sin is man’s inclination to try to walk alone without God, individualism is man’s inclination to try to walk alone among his fellows,” he writes.”

( In sum what Mr. Santorum is advocating is the Tribalism and Neo-tribalism of the Abrahamic Tradition. This set of beliefs must then become the guiding principles for our national life, and that ‘radical individualism’ must be understood as any form of nonconformity, political,intellectual, sexual that does not meet that standard. The vexed question of Constitutional governance then becomes moot: our conformity is our freedom.)

“Communities breed character. Santorum argues that government cannot be agnostic about the character of its citizens because the less disciplined the people are, the more government must step in to provide order.”

(The Community will enforce its version of ‘morality’ and ‘right conduct’ on the members of that Community, in the name of political manageability and the social tranquility: a highly socialized Panopticon.)

“His political philosophy is built around the Catholic concept of subsidiarity — that everything should be done at the lowest possible level. That produces a limited role for Washington, but still an important one.”

(His political philosophy is built upon the care and maintenance of male power otherwise known as Patriarchy. His political vision is theocratic rather than democratic, the state of Iran is an example.)

“Over the years, Santorum has sought to use the federal government to nurture healthy communities. Welfare reform, which he helped lead, was a paternalistic way to use state power to encourage hard work.”

( Are there no work houses, no poor houses that can provide subsistence for the less worthy among us? We must not be deterred from our destiny is to wage war on the Infidels.)

American Litterateur

David Brooks titles his latest essay with a riff on Marx and Engels, “Working men of all countries ,unite!” expressed as the cliche Workers of the World Unite. Mr. Brooks thinks himself very clever to wed this quotation to his argument that the Republican Party is the party of America’s white working class. This ‘white working class’ is framed by the issues:

“They sense that the nation has gone astray: marriage is in crisis; the work ethic is eroding; living standards are in danger; the elites have failed; the news media sends out messages that make it harder to raise decent kids. They face greater challenges, and they’re on their own.”

All the same issues Mr. Brooks endlessly recycles are woven together, although they appear to be just modulated enough to be demonstrative of difference, if only rhetorically recast: although the addition of the failure of the elites adds a populist piquancy to the argumentative line. It is not a real set of arguments but a collection of assertions floating free of an honest historical assessment of the Republican Party and it’s predominately white constituency, as argued by Mr. Brooks. A 2009 Gallup Poll shows that the Republican Party is made up of 63% Non-Hispanic white conservative and 26% non-Hispanic white Non-Conservatives. And Census data demonstartes that 63.7% of America’s population is white, so the fact that the Republican Party is white is hardly news, although Mr. Brooks presents this as if it were a revelatory insight and as such worthy of our attention as readers.

But any reader curious enough to use a search engine will find this provocative essay in The Weekly Standard of November 21, 2011 titled Losing The Working Class: As Ohio Goes…? by Henry Olson.

Here is the thought provoking first paragraph:

“Last week’s election indicates that the GOP marriage with the white working class is on the rocks. That’s bad news, since the epic Republican landslide in 2010 was fueled by record-high margins among these voters. It’s doubly bad for the GOP frontrunner, multimillionaire Mitt Romney, who is already struggling to connect with non-college grads in the primaries. If white working-class independents need to be wooed to win in 2012​—​and they do​—​Republicans need to ask themselves: Is Romney the right man to do the wooing?”

It seems that we might better direct our attention at defining the challenges that Mr. Brooks raises at the end of his second paragraph:

“They sense that the nation has gone astray:” Astray defined as off course, rudderless. The ‘they’ that Mr. Brooks is speaking of are Republican Evangelicals, Free Marketeers, Libertarians and intimidated Centrist Republicans who are in the process of plotting a new course for the country. He couches his critique in his usual moralizing tone. While we should as thinkers maintain a certain respect for Aristotle’s Politics and his argued symbiosis between politics and ethics, Mr. Brooks is a thinker who uses morality as a cudgel.

“marriage is in crisis” Does he mean that more than half of American marriages end in divorce? Or is his aim at the proponents of Gay Marriage as part of his obsession with American Decadence?

“the work ethic is eroding” How would one know that the work ethic is eroding in the the worst economy since the Great Depression, and the fact that corporations are cutting jobs in the name of the bottom line.

“living standards are in danger” See “The work ethic is eroding”

“the elites have failed” The President, The Senate, have proven to be pointedly hostile to the policy prescriptions advocated by Mr. Brooks.

“the news media sends out messages that make it harder to raise decent kids.” the news media is the great seducer of American Youth.

Political Observer

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/us/gordon-hirabayashi-wwii-internment-oppon…