Get Brooks!

Brooks Steals from Woody Allen and Still Falls Flat

2008-09-01T15:21:00.000-07:00

In reference to the awful, childish Brooks piece supposedly satirizing Obama's acceptance speech. I noticed in the comments that someone caught him lifting material from a Woody Allen essay:

I'm not sure what the point of the column is but that second paragraph is a close rip off of Woody Allen's "Speech to College Graduates" in Side Effects, 1980:

Allen:
"More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

Brooks:
"One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely."

The hackiest hack of them all. . .

David Brooks makes excuses for McCain

2008-08-19T13:19:00.001-07:00

David Brooks makes excuses for McCain
Posted August 19th, 2008 at 3:50 pm

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Two weeks ago, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and the Politico’s Roger Simon agreed that John McCain may be running an ugly, low-road campaign, but it’s his staff’s fault. “McCain really doesn’t like attacking…which is why I think he’s often uncomfortable with his own campaign,” Simon insisted.

Last week, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman argued that McCain doesn’t really approve of his own campaign’s message attacking Barack Obama’s patriotism.

And today, the NYT’s David Brooks insists that McCain, deep down, isn’t a party hack, but “The System” is forcing him to become one.

McCain started out with the same sort of kibitzing campaign style that he used to woo the press back in 2000. It didn’t work. This time there were too many cameras around and too many 25-year-old reporters and producers seizing on every odd comment to set off little blog scandals.

McCain started out with the same sort of improvised campaign events he’d used his entire career, in which he’d begin by riffing off of whatever stories were in the paper that day. It didn’t work. The campaign lacked focus. No message was consistent enough to penetrate through the national clutter.

McCain started his general-election campaign in poverty-stricken areas of the South and Midwest. He went through towns where most Republicans fear to tread and said things most wouldn’t say. It didn’t work. The poverty tour got very little coverage on the network news. McCain and his advisers realized the only way they could get TV attention was by talking about the subject that interested reporters most: Barack Obama.

I suppose, for Brooks, this constitutes criticism of McCain. The underlying message of the column is that McCain has become something of a phony.

That said, Brooks’ excuse-making is utter nonsense.

Kevin explained:

Bloggers are somehow responsible for McCain running juvenile ads comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? A bored press is responsible for McCain claiming that Obama puts personal interest ahead of country? The conservative establishment prevented McCain from calling out Jerome Corsi’s book for the vile trash that it is? The system forced McCain to hire one of Karl Rove’s disciples as his campaign manager?

Enough. Just enough. There are plenty of ways of getting attention, and McCain made his own choices. No one forced them on him, not the system, not bloggers, not the press. If McCain is running a campaign based on personal destruction, he’s doing it because that’s the choice he made.

Hilzoy, meanwhile, is cleverly willing to consider Brooks’ argument at face value.

[L]et’s pretend, just for the sake of argument, that they are right to say that the only way to win, this year, is by taking the low road. Would that mean that they have to take it? Of course not. That means you have a choice between honor and ambition; between running a decent campaign and a sordid one; between being a candidate the country can be proud of and being a candidate who contributes to the degradation and trivialization of political discourse.

You would have no choice only if you assumed that your own ambitions were more important than your honor.

And finally, Steve M. connects the dots, to explain why Brooks gets the big bucks.

[A]nyone can argue that John McCain is so pure and virtuous that he had to be forced into running a campaign consisting almost exclusively of vicious negative attacks …

… and anyone can argue that longtime media darling McCain is actually the victim of liberal media bias …

… but it takes a special talent — a David Brooks — to argue that pure, virtuous McCain was forced to run a negative campaign because of liberal media bias. That’s just brilliant. That’s advancing two memes at once!

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/16611.html

NYT - David Brooks Lies

2008-08-12T13:04:00.000-07:00

From Daily Kos:

NYT: David Brooks Lies!
by ezdidit
Tue Aug 12, 2008 at 01:32:00 PM CDT

Brooks applauds the economic rise of China. But that nation has constructed a capitalist initiative through enslavement of its poor and its working class through utter repression, censorship and massive manipulation. From reading Brooks, one would think China is now a free society when the facts reveal a total opposition to his notions.

The rise of China isn’t only an economic event. It’s a cultural one. The ideal of a harmonious collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American Dream.

Problem is that there is no "harmonious collective" in China whatsoever. There is merely repression, surveillance and more repression. So that's just a plain old LIE from Brooksie, but what else did you expect?

Why would he be shilling for China? And what is it about China that is so applicable to plans for governance in the U.S.?

The nasty truth below....from his biography:

Mr. Brooks joined The Weekly Standard at its inception in September 1995, ...
Mr. Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983....

Please stop reading right there. Please pay no attention to this miscreant of Chicago school Straussian elitism. Brooks is a prop! What the hell the Times was thinking when they hired this transparent verbalist is beyond my grasp.

China's recent economic "rise" is an artificial construct borne of one of the most horribly repressive and bloodthirsty social experiments on earth. It bears no relation to comparisons with America - none whatsoever, except as a stark contrast and a flashing red warning light. It is a totally reprehensible government system and it stands up as flimsily as a cardboard diorama unfolded from a children's book!

Brooks speaks breathtaking volumes to students, elites and elitist futurists in our own nation. And that's pretty frightening.

Here's some truth from Naomi Klein who presents the loathsome reality of China's experiment in capitalism-by-fiat in all its horror:

Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn't exist....Today, Shenzhen is a city of 12.4 million people, and there is a good chance that at least half of everything you own was made here: iPods, laptops, sneakers, flatscreen TVs, cellphones, jeans, maybe your desk chair, possibly your car and almost certainly your printer.
[snip]
China today, epitomized by Shenzhen's transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society. Sometimes called "market Stalinism," it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.
[snip]
Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen....
Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric.

[my emphasis]

That is the survival mode militancy that we are confronting from corporations and from our Congressional capitulators. We make a grave mistake by failing to recognize Pelosi and Reid in their true colors. Fomenting massive repression within the United States is their plan for governance in the 21st Century. It is the only way that egregious capitalist greed can survive, and they know it.

It is mega-evil on steroids, and the thinking is as harsh and dogmatic as the lack of moral principles of blood-thirsty authoritarians down through the ages. These are really, really bad people, and this is a personal matter for me. It reeks of death, and the defeat of these traitors must come swiftly and surely. They must be defeated at the polls by every means available. There is yet a Democracy in our country, but its days are numbered. Obama cannot come soon enough, and there's way too much of the patrician and the oligarch in him already.

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. [University of Chicago Law School] He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996.

He ugh....there's too much of Chicago school in him already.

My greatest fear is that Obama will accede to the forces of authority. My hope is that he will restore our electoral institutions (as in Clean Money Clean Elections) and reform our government leading us out of this despicable future envisioned by tyrants like Cheney.

So, please pay no attention to the lying traditional transitional corporate media. They suck in ways that are disgusting and reprehensible. These are really bad people who want nothing at all to do with you and me or pluralistic, populist democracy. They have no use for elections or accountability whatsoever.

And, for David Brooks and his lies about China? What's a rag like the New York Times worth? Pay attention while there's yet time.

How big of a douchebag is David Brooks?

2008-06-04T10:17:00.000-07:00

From Dailykos:

How big of a douchebag is David Brooks?
by Kagro X
Wed Jun 04, 2008 at 11:40:48 AM CDT

How big of a douchebag is David Brooks?

He's such a big douchebag that he tries to criticize Barack Obama as not being an oh-so-regular guy (just like the tortoise shell spectacled and pink necktied drip Brooks is, of course) by saying:

[H]e doesn‘t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee‘s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there.

Only problem? David Brooks has apparently never stepped out of the limo and actually gone into an Applebees. Because they don't have salad bars.

Dumbass.

Excuse me, you're out of Low Fat Ranch. Oh, I'm sorry,
I thought you worked here, Mr. Regular Fellow!

Oh, that Barack Obama! Why, he probably doesn't even know proper etiquette between chukkers at one of those "NASCAR" motoring exhibitions! (That's what the little people like these days, isn't it, Lovie?)

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/4/8239/45507/729/529138

David Brooks - Dick

2008-04-30T12:36:00.000-07:00

David Brooks
From Dickipedia - A Wiki of Dicks

David Brooks (b. August 11, 1961) is a columnist for The New York Times, a commentator on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and a dick.

He has written two pseudo-intellectual books of junk social science, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. Though he is a conservative, the primary reason for his success is not his popularity among conservatives, but, rather, among liberals. He is, in fact, known as the liberals’ “favorite conservative.” This is because he speaks softly, is effeminate, and gently gratifies their self-loathing, masochistic wish to be insulted.

Success in professional life

Brooks is very interested in anthropology, psychology and sociology, and likes to apply the language and tools of these fields to his analysis of politics and pop culture. He wishes to be taken very seriously by scholars in these fields, and would be, if only he hadn’t been born extremely lazy.

Because of this condition, Brooks is unable to do any of the actual analysis and research that would ordinarily give a person credibility in these fields. Many have criticized the insular nature of academia. They claim that those who, like Brooks, were born lazy, or, to use the more politically correct term, “differently incentivized,” are discriminated against.

Brooks has been able to surmount these obstacles with surprising success. At an early age, he resolved that he would overcome his disability through a combination of dishonesty and smiling. This potent combination worked to a stunning degree, and Brooks has become one of the leaders in public influence, as well as serving as a role model to those all over the world who happened to have been born lazy and dishonest and have nice smiles.

The Brooks method

The Brooks method is to take a banal, long-existing or only partially true observation, give it a cute name and take credit for it. In other words, he’s a perfect op-ed columnist.

His obsessions include the differences between “red states” and “blue states,” America as a consumerist society, regional and intergenerational differences in America, and how an analysis, or, in Brooks’ case, an “analysis,” of these always ultimately proves the essential truth of Republicanism as Brooks chooses to define it that week.

The Brooks philosophy

Brooks’ favorite point to make is that what he calls “red staters” are somehow more authentic, honest, virtuous and American than so-called “blue staters.” His “shtick,” as Michael Kinsley once called it, is to go from his home in “blue state” Maryland deep into “red state” America, much like the Victorian explorers to Africa who would venture into Africa and report back to the Royal Geographic Society with their tales of the frightening, but noble savages.

Many have noted the seeming illogic in Brooks’ success among liberals, when the conclusions he comes back with after his forays into the heart of redness are actually insulting to his liberal fan base. But this is, in fact, not illogical. Early on, Brooks identified and has subsequently exploited an essential attribute of eastern liberalism: self-hatred. Like Brooks, much of his liberal fan base is effete, highly educated, sexually insecure, and slightly afraid of “red state” America. They are thus perversely gratified by his conclusions.

Brooks on the war

In 1997, Brooks wrote an influential article called “A Return to National Greatness,” for The Weekly Standard, the in-house newsletter for neo-con dicks. “National Greatness” is what results when unacknowledged feelings of sexual inadequacy manifest themselves as a theory of foreign policy. The ostensible theory is that the United States, at the time, no longer had the sense of large, unifying national purpose that it had during the days of the western expansion, the Cold War, and the space program. The remedy was for the government to create “a spirit of confidence and vigor that can then spill across the life of the nation."

Those behind this movement, including Weekly Standard editor and founder William Kristol, himself a second-generation dick, were the primary intellectual force behind the Iraq War, which has proven the theory to be a smashing success.

Brooks as Republican hack

It is very important to Brooks that he be seen as different from those widely seen to be Republican party hacks who support the Bush administration in almost anything they do, like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

And it is true that he is, in fact, very different than Limbaugh. He is, for example, not as fat, smiles more, talks in a soothing voice, and isn’t known to be addicted to Oxycontin. And his hackery is better written. For instance:

“There's something about our venture into Iraq that is inspiringly, painfully, embarrassingly and quintessentially American.

No other nation would have been hopeful enough to try to evangelize for democracy across the Middle East. No other nation would have been naive enough to do it this badly. No other nation would be adaptable enough to recover from its own innocence and muddle its way to success, as I suspect we are about to do.”

This was written in May of 2004.

In 2007, he became engaged in a feud with fellow New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. In his book The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman recounts the story of how Ronald Reagan gave a 1980 campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in the 1960’s. In his speech, Reagan mentioned his support of states’ rights, which was a clear signal of his solidarity with white southern racists.

On November 9 2007, Brooks responded with a column defending Reagan against this “slur,” writing:

“You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase ‘states’ rights’ in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.”

This is an example of powerful Brooksonian dick logic: if only Reagan had said something not racist, instead of racist, he would not be thought of as racist. Likewise, if only Paris Hilton would wear underwear, people would stop the “slur” that Paris Hilton doesn’t wear underwear.

http://www.dickipedia.org/dick.php?title=David_Brooks

James Wolcott - David Brooks Makes an Asperger's of Himself

2008-04-15T07:16:00.000-07:00

David Brooks Makes an Asperger's of Himself

An incalculable public service was rendered a few years ago by Sasha Issenberg in Philadelphia magazine when she subjected David Brooks to cruel and inhumane fact-checking and ascertained that his pop sociology was mostly a figment of his Clark Kent imagination. Confronted with the evidence of his cock-eyed assertions, Brooks was reduced to sputtering and accusing his critics of not getting the joke--his brand of satire was lost on literal-minded nitpickers such as Issenberg. ("I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being 'too pedantic,' of 'taking all of this too literally,' of 'taking a joke and distorting it.'") But what explains Brooks' popularity in the upper echelons of journalism, given the cartoon distortions of his work?

In recent years, American journalism has reacted to the excesses of New Journalism -- narcissism, impressionism, preening subjectivity -- by adopting the trappings of scholarship. Trend pieces, once a bastion of three-examples-and-out superficiality, now strive for the authority of dissertations. Former Times editor Howell Raines famously defended page-one placement for a piece examining Britney Spears's flailing career by describing it as a "sophisticated exegesis of sociological phenomenon." The headline writer's favorite word is "deconstructing." (Last year, the Toronto Star deconstructed a sausage.) Richard Florida, a Carnegie Mellon demographer whose 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class earned Bobos-like mainstream cachet, nostalgizes an era when readers looked to academia for such insights:

"You had Holly Whyte, who got Jane Jacobs started, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, Galbraith. This is what we're missing; this is a gap," Florida says. "Now you have David Brooks as your sociologist, and Al Franken and Michael Moore as your political scientists. Where is the serious public intellectualism of a previous era? It's the failure of social science to be relevant enough to do it."

This culture shift has rewarded Brooks, who translates echt nerd appearance (glasses, toothy grin, blue blazer) and intellectual bearing into journalistic credibility, which allows him to take amusing dinner-party chatter -- Was that map an electoral-college breakdown or a marketing plan for Mighty Aphrodite? -- and sell it to editors as well-argued wisdom on American society. Brooks satisfies the features desk's appetite for scholarly authority in much the same way that Jayson Blair fed the newsroom's compulsion for scoops.

Mentioning Jayson Blair, why that's just plain mean.

Anchored by his op-ed column at the Times, Brooks spends less time these days doing Call Me Bwana field research in outer exurbia and more time taking his pulse and contemplating the middle-aged spread between his ears. He's traded in pop sociology for pop neurology and, guess what, he doesn't know what he's talking about there either. Mistakes keep sticking like peanut butter to the roof of his brain, as Nell Scovell discovers and documents at VF Daily:

Brooks's most recent column, "The Great Forgetting," ruminates on how our aging society is divided into "memory haves and have-nots." He writes: "This divide produces moments of social combat. Some vaguely familiar person will come up to you in the supermarket. 'Stan, it’s so nice to see you!' The smug memory dropper can smell your nominal aphasia and is going to keep first-naming you until you are crushed into submission."

Brooks clearly thinks "aphasia" is a colorful word for "forgetful," but anyone who has dealt with aphasia—or read Oliver Sacks's wonderful book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat--knows that aphasia is a language-and-expression disorder, not a memory disorder, and occurs from damage to portions of the brain, usually after a head injury or stroke.

[snip]

The second mistake popped up in Brooks's March 14 column, "The Rank Link Imbalance." That piece, written just after Eliot Spitzer quit his day job, dissected the psyches of powerful men who achieve greatness but lack grace. Brooks writes, "They develop the specific social skills that are useful on the climb up the greasy pole: the capacity to imply false intimacy; the ability to remember first names." (Clearly, remembering first names is a big deal for Brooks.)

Brooks goes on to blast Spitzer and his slick ilk for acting "like complete idiots." He continues, "These Type A men are just not equipped to have normal relationships. All their lives they've been a walking Asperger's Convention, the kings of the emotionally avoidant."

The National Institutes of Health describes Asperger's syndrome as a developmental disorder on the autism spectrum with "a distinct group of neurological conditions characterized by a greater or lesser degree of impairment in language and communication skills, as well as repetitive or restrictive patterns of thought and behavior." People with Asperger's do not exult in being "emotionally avoidant," as the word "kings" implies. They struggle to understand social cues that any successful politician would take for granted.

I showed the Brooks article to autism expert Dr. Lynn Koegel (who wrote a book called Overcoming Autism with my sister, Claire LaZebnik) and she emailed me back: "Spitzer’s behaviors are not consistent with a diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome. In fact, individuals with Asperger's Syndrome tend to be exceedingly honest, truthful, and forthright." It appears Brooks was dead-on—in an exact-opposite sort of way.

"Dead-on in an exact-opposite sort of way" might someday be Brooks' journalistic epitaph, one that he could conceivably share with his ideological bunkmate on the op-ed page, Bill Kristol, whose crocodile grin is beginning to leave the rest of his face behind.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2008/04/an-incalculable.html

Nell Scovell: A Second Opinion of David Brooks

2008-03-15T07:28:00.000-07:00

April 14, 2008

Nell Scovell: A Second Opinion of David Brooks

Nell ScovellNew York Times columnist David Brooks needs to see a neurologist stat. Twice in the past month, Brooks’s op-eds have included references to neurological disorders—aphasia and Asperger’s—and both times he missed the diagnosis. I’m not a doctor—although I’ve written for them on TV—but this is a clear case of Brooks flaunting his intelligence and revealing his ignorance. I’m sure the Germans have a word for this.

Brooks’s most recent column, “The Great Forgetting,” ruminates on how our aging society is divided into “memory haves and have-nots.” He writes: “This divide produces moments of social combat. Some vaguely familiar person will come up to you in the supermarket. ‘Stan, it’s so nice to see you!’ The smug memory dropper can smell your nominal aphasia and is going to keep first-naming you until you are crushed into submission.”

Brooks clearly thinks “aphasia” is a colorful word for “forgetful,” but anyone who has dealt with aphasia—or read Oliver Sacks’s wonderful book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat—knows that aphasia is a language-and-expression disorder, not a memory disorder, and occurs from damage to portions of the brain, usually after a head injury or stroke.

Brooks might defend this as a playful exaggeration. It’s certainly easy to come up with equally witty comparisons, like saying someone who’s nervous before going onstage has “performance Parkinson’s.” Or someone splashing in the pool has “aquatic epilepsy.” Or a columnist who misuses medical terms suffers from “journalistic dementia.”

The second mistake popped up in Brooks’s March 14 column, “The Rank Link Imbalance.” That piece, written just after Eliot Spitzer quit his day job, dissected the psyches of powerful men who achieve greatness but lack grace. Brooks writes, “They develop the specific social skills that are useful on the climb up the greasy pole: the capacity to imply false intimacy; the ability to remember first names.” (Clearly, remembering first names is a big deal for Brooks.)

Brooks goes on to blast Spitzer and his slick ilk for acting “like complete idiots.” He continues, “These Type A men are just not equipped to have normal relationships. All their lives they’ve been a walking Asperger’s Convention, the kings of the emotionally avoidant.”

The National Institutes of Health describes Asperger’s syndrome as a developmental disorder on the autism spectrum with “a distinct group of neurological conditions characterized by a greater or lesser degree of impairment in language and communication skills, as well as repetitive or restrictive patterns of thought and behavior. ” People with Asperger’s do not exult in being “emotionally avoidant,” as the word “kings” implies. They struggle to understand social cues that any successful politician would take for granted.

I showed the Brooks article to autism expert Dr. Lynn Koegel (who wrote a book called Overcoming Autism with my sister, Claire LaZebnik) and she emailed me back: “Spitzer’s behaviors are not consistent with a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome. In fact, individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome tend to be exceedingly honest, truthful, and forthright.” It appears Brooks was dead-on—in an exact-opposite sort of way.

The King of the Bobos probably doesn’t care that he insulted people with his sloppy neurological metaphors. I can imagine him smirking and saying to himself, “What are they gonna do about it? The aphasics won’t remember and those Asperger types have no feelings to hurt.”

And I know Brooks has bigger things to apologize for, but maybe he could start by saying he’s sorry for these small things and work up to the big ones. I’m sure the Germans have a word for that, too.

http://www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/blogs/daily/2008/04/nell-scovell-a.html#more

Boo-Boos in Paradise

2008-02-15T07:18:00.000-08:00

Boo-Boos in Paradise
Wayne-bred David Brooks is the public intellectual of the moment. But our writer found out he doesn't check his facts

By Sasha Issenberg

A few years ago, journalist david brooks wrote a celebrated article for the Atlantic Monthly, "One Nation, Slightly Divisible," in which he examined the country's cultural split in the aftermath of the 2000 election, contrasting the red states that went for Bush and the blue ones for Gore. To see the vast nation whose condition he diagnosed, Brooks compared two counties: Maryland's Montgomery (Blue), where he himself lives, and Pennsylvania's Franklin (a Red county in a Blue state). "I went to Franklin County because I wanted to get a sense of how deep the divide really is," Brooks wrote of his leisurely northward drive to see the other America across "the Meatloaf Line; from here on there will be a lot fewer sun-dried-tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters." Franklin County was a place where "no blue New York Times delivery bags dot driveways on Sunday mornings ... [where] people don't complain that Woody Allen isn't as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny," he wrote. "In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing."

Brooks, an agile and engaging writer, was doing what he does best, bringing sweeping social movements to life by zeroing in on what Tom Wolfe called "status detail," those telling symbols -- the Weber Grill, the open-toed sandals with advanced polymer soles -- that immediately fix a person in place, time and class. Through his articles, a best-selling book, and now a twice-a-week column in what is arguably journalism's most prized locale, the New York Times op-ed page, Brooks has become a must-read, charming us into seeing events in the news through his worldview.

There's just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false. According to Amazon.com sales data, one of Goodwin's strongest markets has been deep-Red McAllen, Texas. That's probably not, however, QVC country. "I would guess our audience would skew toward Blue areas of the country," says Doug Rose, the network's vice president of merchandising and brand development. "Generally our audience is female suburban baby boomers, and our business skews towards affluent areas." Rose's standard PowerPoint presentation of the QVC brand includes a map of one zip code -- Beverly Hills, 90210 -- covered in little red dots that each represent one QVC customer address, to debunk "the myth that they're all little old ladies in trailer parks eating bonbons all day."

"Everything that people in my neighborhood do without motors, the people in Red America do with motors," Brooks wrote. "When it comes to yard work, they have rider mowers; we have illegal aliens." Actually, six of the top 10 states in terms of illegal-alien population are Red.

"We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books," Brooks asserted. A 2003 University of Wisconsin-Whitewater study of America's most literate cities doesn't necessarily agree. Among the study's criteria was the presence of bookstores and libraries; 20 of the 30 most literate cities were in Red states.

"Very few of us," Brooks wrote of his fellow Blue Americans, "could name even five NASCAR drivers, although stock-car races are the best-attended sporting events in the country." He might want to take his name-recognition test to the streets of the 2002 NASCAR Winston Cup Series's highest-rated television markets -- three of the top five were in Blue states. (Philadelphia was fifth nationally.)

Brooks could be dismissed as little more than a snarky punch-line artist, except that he postures as a public intellectual -- and has been received as one.

It's hard, in fact, to think of many American thinkers more influential at this moment than Brooks. His 2000 book Bobos in Paradise heralded the rise of a new upper class that mixed '60s-style liberalism with '80s-style conspicuous consumption; celebrated by reviewers, it quickly became a best-seller. Brooks wrote that his hometown, Wayne, was emblematic of the "Upscale Suburban Hippiedom" that was the natural habitat of these "bourgeois bohemians." Like "yuppie" and "metrosexual," Brooks's "bobo" entered the language as a successful coinage of pop sociology. It shows up in magazine articles and casual conversations, and the book itself is footnoted in dozens of books on American society and consumer culture, and cited in a college history textbook.

On the publication of Bobos, New York Times critic Walter Goodman lumped Brooks with William H. Whyte Jr., author of The Organization Man, and David Riesman, who wrote The Lonely Crowd, as a practitioner of "sociological journalism." (In the introduction to Bobos, Brooks invoked Whyte -- plus Jane Jacobs and John Kenneth Galbraith -- as predecessors.) In 2001, the New School for Social Research, in Manhattan, held a panel discussion in which real-life scholars pondered the bobo. When, in 2001, Richard Posner ranked the 100 highest-profile public intellectuals, Brooks came in 85th, just behind Marshall McLuhan at 82nd, and ahead of Garry Wills, Isaiah Berlin and Margaret Mead.

Following the success of Bobos, Brooks -- who was then writing for the Atlantic Monthly and Newsweek and appearing on pbs and NPR -- was offered the Times column, formalizing his position as the in-house conservative pundit of liberal America. In his column, Brooks writes mostly about affairs of state, but with the same approach -- a cultural analysis grounded in social observation -- that made Bobos such a success. This summer, Bobos will get a sibling when Brooks publishes On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.

Brooks is operating in a long tradition of public intellectualism. Like William Whyte, another child of Philadelphia's western suburbs fascinated with the interplay of money and manners among his contemporaries, Brooks is a journalist who works on sociological turf. But Whyte, who was an editor for Fortune in the 1950s, observed how people lived, inferred trends, considered what they meant, and then came up with grand conclusions about the direction of the country. When, in 1954, he wanted to find out which consumers were trend-setters, he went into Overbrook Park and surveyed 4,948 homes -- all inhabited by real people. Brooks, by way of contrast, draws caricatures. Whether out of sloppiness or laziness, the examples he conjures to illustrate well-founded premises are often unfounded, undermining the very points he's trying to make.

In January, I made my own trip to Franklin County, 175 miles southwest of Philadelphia, with a simple goal: I wanted to see where David Brooks comes up with this stuff. One of the first places I passed was Greencastle Coffee Roasters, which has more than 200 kinds of coffee, and a well-stocked South Asian grocery in the back with a product range hard to find in some large coastal cities: 20-pound bags of jasmine rice, cans of Thai fermented mustard greens, a freezer with lemongrass stalks and kaffir-lime leaves. The owner, Charles Rake, told me that there was, until a few years back, a Thai restaurant in Chambersburg, run by a woman who now does catering. "She's the best Thai cook I know on Planet Earth," Rake said. "And I've been to Thailand."

I stopped at Blockbuster, where the dvd of Annie Hall was checked out. I went to the counter to see how Scott, the clerk, thought it compared to Allen's other work. "It's funny," said Scott. "What's the funny one? Yeah, Annie Hall, that's the one where he dates everyone -- it's funny."

"In Montgomery County we have Saks Fifth Avenue, Cartier, Anthropologie, Brooks Brothers. In Franklin County they have Dollar General and Value City, along with a plethora of secondhand stores," Brooks wrote. In fact, while Franklin has 14 stores with the word "dollar" in their name -- plus one Value City -- Montgomery County, Maryland, has 34, including one that's within walking distance of an Anthropologie in Rockville.

As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home. "On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu -- steak au jus, 'slippery beef pot pie,' or whatever -- I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most-expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee's," he wrote. "I'd scan the menu and realize that I'd been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and 'seafood delight' trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it."

Taking Brooks's cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The "Steak and Lobster" combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. "Most of our checks are over $20," said Becka, my waitress. "There are a lot of ways to spend over $20."

The easiest way to spend over $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts "turn-of-the-century elegance." I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn's proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks's article. They laughed. After it was published in the Atlantic, the nearby Mercersburg Academy boarding school invited Brooks as part of its speaker series. He spent the night at the inn. "For breakfast I made a goat-cheese-and-sun-dried-tomato tart," Sandy said. "He said he just wanted scrambled eggs."

I looked at another of Brooks's more celebrated articles, an August 2002 piece in the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard in which he discerned a new American archetype he dubbed "Patio Man." Patio Man, in Brooks's description, "walks into a Home Depot or Lowe's or one of the other mega hardware complexes and his eyes are glistening with a faraway missionary zeal, like one of those old prophets gazing into the promised land. His lips are parted and twitching slightly." Patio Man, Brooks wrote, lives in one of the new Sprinkler Cities, "the fast-growing suburbs mostly in the South and West that are the homes of the new-style American dream."

Brooks illuminated Patio Man's world with vivid portraiture, telling details, and clever observations about American culture. ("All major choices of consumer durables these days ultimately come down to which model has the most impressive cup holders.") Brooks's suggestion that Patio Man's brethren would become the basis of a coming Republican majority found many friends. Slate identified him as a "new sociological icon." The New York Times Magazine 2002 "Year in Ideas" issue cited Patio Man in its encapsulation of "Post-Soccer-Mom Nomenclature."

Unfortunately, as with the Red/Blue article, many of the knowing references Brooks deftly invoked to bring Patio Man to life were entirely manufactured. He describes the ladies of Sprinkler City as "trim Jennifer Aniston women [who] wear capris and sleeveless tops and look great owing to their many hours of sweat and exercise at Spa Lady." That chain of women's gyms has three locations -- all in New Jersey, far from any Sprinkler City. "The roads," Brooks writes, "have been given names like Innovation Boulevard and Entrepreneur Avenue." There are no Entrepreneur Avenues anywhere in the country, according to the business-directory database Referenceusa, and only two Innovation Boulevards -- in non-Sprinkler cities Fort Wayne, Indiana, and State College, Pennsylvania. There is also an Innovation Boulevard in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

The basic premises of Brooks's articles aren't necessarily wrong. His Red/Blue article was anchored in the research of political analyst Michael Barone, who in a June 2001 article in National Journal delineated a country split evenly in two: "One is observant, tradition-minded, moralistic. The other is unobservant, liberation-minded, relativistic." Brooks's Patio Man article was a pop translation of a February 2002 paper by University of Michigan demographer William H. Frey, who wrote that 2000 Census figures showed growth of "the New Sunbelt."

Brooks, however, does more than popularize inaccessible academic work; he distorts it. Barone relies on election returns and public-opinion data as the basis for his research; Frey looks to the census. But Brooks takes their findings and, regardless of origin, applies to them what one might call the Brooks Consumer Taste Fallacy, which suggests that people are best understood by where they shop and what they buy. So Brooks takes Barone's vote-counting in a two-sided election and says the country is split between Anthropologie and Dollar General. Then he takes Frey's demographic studies and says Sprinkler Cities are marked by their Home Depots. At this point, Frey was already working on a paper called "Three Americas" which argued for a tripartite model for understanding the nation: the Melting Pot (populous, immigrant-heavy states like New Jersey, Texas, Illinois); the Heartland (rural, without much population growth); and the New Sunbelt. If one really believes that the New Sunbelt and its Sprinkler Cities mark a culturally distinct region (as Brooks does), Frey suggests, one can't also believe that the country is rather evenly split into two culturally distinct factions (as Brooks does).

There are salient cultural divides in the United States -- and, in fact, different values and practices among residents of Montgomery and Franklin counties -- but consumer life is the place where they are most rapidly converging. In this regard, Brooks would have been better off relying on the newest generation of elitist truism -- tongue-in-cheek laments about the proliferation of ubiquitous chain espresso bars and bookstores. Last fall, Pottery Barn opened stores in Huntsville, Alabama, and Franklin, Tennessee, and the New York Times has introduced home delivery in Colorado Springs. It likely won't be long before Franklin County gets both; yoga classes have already arrived.

Most of Brooks's own ideas are clichés borrowed from popular culture. His Franklin County dispatch included a riff on the differences between "indoor guys" and "outdoor guys," a divide handled with more nuance by the characters on Home Improvement. Outdoor guys have "wraparound NASCAR sunglasses, maybe a napa auto parts cap, and a haircut in a short wedge up front but flowing down over their shoulders in the back -- a cut that is known as the mullet," Brooks writes, before getting to their "thing against sleeves," their well-ventilated armpit hair, and the way ripped sleeves hang over bad to the bone tattoos. This is a clever homage to the fieldwork of comic/sociologist Jeff Foxworthy, whose 1989 study You Might Be a Redneck If ... included: "You own more than three shirts with the sleeves cut off."

I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. "I didn't see it when I was there, but it's true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn," he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. "That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end ... " he replied, his voice trailing away. "That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20."

I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being "too pedantic," of "taking all of this too literally," of "taking a joke and distorting it." "That's totally unethical," he said.

Satire has its purpose, but assuming it's on the mark, Brooks should be able to adduce real-world examples that are true. I asked him how I was supposed to tell what was comedy and what was sociology. "Generally, I rely on intelligent readers to know -- and I think that at the Atlantic Monthly, every intelligent reader can tell what the difference is," he replied. "I tried to describe the mainstream of Montgomery County and the mainstream of Franklin County. They're both diverse places, and any generalization is going to have exceptions. But I was trying to capture the difference between the two places," he said. "You've obviously come at this from a perspective. I don't think if you went to the two places you wouldn't detect a cultural difference."

I asked him about Blue America as a bastion of illegal immigrants. "This is dishonest research. You're not approaching the piece in the spirit of an honest reporter," he said. "Is this how you're going to start your career? I mean, really, doing this sort of piece? I used to do 'em, I know 'em, how one starts, but it's just something you'll mature beyond."

I shared with him some more of my research, and asked how he made his observations. On NASCAR name recognition: "My experience going around to people that I know in urban metro areas is a lot of them can't name five NASCAR ... but that's a joke." On Spa Lady locations: "I think that's the type of place where people would get the joke and get the reference." On whether Blue Americans read more books: "That would be interesting, but one goes by one's life experiences."

"What I try to do is describe the character of places, and hopefully things will ring true to people," Brooks explained. "In most cases, I think the way I describe it does ring true, and in some places it doesn't ring true. If you were describing a person, you would try to grasp the essential character and in some way capture them in a few words. And if you do it as a joke, there's a pang of recognition."

By holding himself to a rings-true standard, Brooks acknowledges that all he does is present his readers with the familiar and ask them to recognize it. Why, then, has his particular brand of stereotype-peddling met with such success? In recent years, American journalism has reacted to the excesses of New Journalism -- narcissism, impressionism, preening subjectivity -- by adopting the trappings of scholarship. Trend pieces, once a bastion of three-examples-and-out superficiality, now strive for the authority of dissertations. Former Times editor Howell Raines famously defended page-one placement for a piece examining Britney Spears's flailing career by describing it as a "sophisticated exegesis of sociological phenomenon." The headline writer's favorite word is "deconstructing." (Last year, the Toronto Star deconstructed a sausage.) Richard Florida, a Carnegie Mellon demographer whose 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class earned Bobos-like mainstream cachet, nostalgizes an era when readers looked to academia for such insights:

"You had Holly Whyte, who got Jane Jacobs started, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, Galbraith. This is what we're missing; this is a gap," Florida says. "Now you have David Brooks as your sociologist, and Al Franken and Michael Moore as your political scientists. Where is the serious public intellectualism of a previous era? It's the failure of social science to be relevant enough to do it."

This culture shift has rewarded Brooks, who translates echt nerd appearance (glasses, toothy grin, blue blazer) and intellectual bearing into journalistic credibility, which allows him to take amusing dinner-party chatter -- Was that map an electoral-college breakdown or a marketing plan for Mighty Aphrodite? -- and sell it to editors as well-argued wisdom on American society. Brooks satisfies the features desk's appetite for scholarly authority in much the same way that Jayson Blair fed the newsroom's compulsion for scoops.

There's even a Brooksian explanation for why he has become so popular with the East Coast media elite. Blue Americans have heard so much about Red America, and they've always wanted to see it. But Blue Americans don't take vacations to places like Galveston and Dubuque. They like to watch TV shows like The Simpsons and Roseanne, where Red America is mocked by either cartoon characters or Red Americans themselves, so Blue Americans don't need to feel guilty of condescension. Blue Americans are above redneck jokes, but they will listen if a sociologist attests to the high density of lawnbound-appliances-per-capita in flyover country. They need someone to show them how the other half lives, because there is nothing like sympathy for backwardness to feed elitism. A wrong turn in Red America can be dangerous: They might accidentally find Jesus or be hit by an 18-wheeler. It seems reasonable to seek out a smart-looking fellow who seems to know the way and has a witty line at every point. Blue Americans always travel with a guide. b

E-mail: sissenberg@phillymag.com

Originally published in Philadelphia magazine, April 2004

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/booboos_in_paradise/

David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist

2007-12-21T17:44:00.000-08:00

David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist

by Mark Liberman

Having digested Leonard Sax on "the emerging science of sex differences", David Brooks has been continuing his education in neuroscience by reading Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain ("Is Chemistry Destiny?" 9/17/2006):

These sorts of stark sex differences were once highly controversial, and not fit for polite conversation. And some feminists still argue that talking about biological differences between the sexes is akin to talking about biological differences between the races. But Brizendine’s feminist bona fides are unquestionable. And in my mostly liberal urban circle — and among this book’s reviewers — almost everybody takes big biological differences as a matter of course.

Without too much debate or even awareness, there has been a gigantic shift in how people think human behavior is formed.
... In the 1950’s, the common view was that humans begin as nearly blank slates and that behavior is learned through stimulus and response. ...

But now the prevailing view is that brain patterns were established during the millenniums when humans were hunters and gatherers, and we live with the consequences.

This is all true, as a picture of social trends in scientific (and popular) attitudes. But maintaining the 1950s "blank slate" orthodoxy required true believers to ignore mountains of contrary evidence, and the emerging "hard-wired" creed has exactly the same problem.

In my opinion, the most important insight in this area right now is Deena Skolnick's demonstration of the power of neuroscience to cloud people's minds. She took explanations of psychological phenomena that had been crafted to be "awful", and which (in their plain form) were recognized as bad both by novices and by experts, and added some (totally irrelevant) sentences about brain anatomy and physiology. With the added neuroscientific distraction, the bad explanations were perceived as satisfactory ones. [Update 6/6/2007: the paper has now been published, and is discussed here. ]

Brooks' conclusion:

Consciousness has come to be seen as this relatively weak driver, riding atop an organ, the brain, it scarcely understands. ...

Once radicals dreamed of new ways of living, but now happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago.

Again, this is true as a description of an intellectual trend. But let's be careful to keep the political agendas and the scientific evidence from getting tangled. The science in this area is complex and equivocal (or more exactly, it offers unequivocal evidence for a complex interaction of genetic and environmental effects), and there's a long tradition of overinterpretation and misrepresentation on all sides of the issue, which recent works have maintained to a high degree. In addition, the connections between what is "natural" and what is "moral" -- between what comes easy to our species and how we decide we should live -- are not simple ones for any of us, and especially not for cultural conservatives like David Brooks and me. (Well, at least I'm a member of one of the most conservative cultures in the history of the planet, contemporary American academics.)

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003586.html

Decline of Classic Rock = Rise of Tom Tancredo

2007-11-21T09:53:00.001-08:00

From the Paladin of the Palisades:

Brooksie's "The Segmented Society" column in Nov 20 times is choice. A
new hi-lo in classic Brooks column blueprint #1: Armchair sociology.

Hi-Lolites

1. DB's signature anecdotal fieldwork featuring celebrity tiresome half
hippie windbag guitarist Little Steven Van Zandt.

2. Column pivot point: "He describes a musical culture that has lost
touch with its common roots. And as he speaks, I hear the echoes of
thousands of other interviews concerning dozens of other spheres."

"It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about
fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind
the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization
and behind the entire Obama candidacy."

3. Conclusion drawn - Death of classic rock = Tom Tancredo

4. Favorite quote as he weaves this magical thought crapestry: "
Computers allow musicians to produce a broader range of sounds."

Perhaps Davy can use computers to produce a written version of the
broader range of sounds - the printed equivalent of the dog whistle.

Glenn Greenwald - David Brooks and the deceitful tactics of the Beltway pundit

2007-09-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

David Brooks and the deceitful tactics of the Beltway pundit
Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com
(updated below)

As I've noted many times before, virtually every column David Brooks writes is grounded in one of two highly misleading tactics and, on special occasions, like today, are grounded in both. That's all there is to him. He just re-cycles these same two themes over and over in different forms.

The first tactic is merely the most commonplace conceit of the standard Beltway pundit: Brooks takes whatever opinions he happens to hold on a topic, and then -- without citing a single piece of evidence -- repeatedly asserts that "most Americans" hold this view, and then bases his entire "argument" on this premise. Thus, the only way for Democrats to have any hope of winning elections is to repudiate their radical, rabid Leftist base and instead follow Brooks' beliefs, because that is "centrism." This is actually a defining belief of the Beltway pundit, and it is as intellectually corrupt as an argument gets.

There is now this new invention called "polling data" which reveal what "most Americans" actually think about virtually any topic. Yet when Beltway pundits claim that "most Americans" think X (and, invariably, X = "the opinion of the Beltway pundit" which = "conventional Beltway wisdom"), they rarely cite polls because those polls virtually always contradict what they are claiming about what "most Americans" think.

Instead, Beltway pundits believe that they are representative of, anointed spokespeople for, the Average Real American, and thus, whatever the pundit's belief is about an issue is -- in their insular, self-loving minds -- a far more reliable indicator of what "Americans believe" than something as tawdry as polling data. Nobody uses this manipulative tactic more than David Brooks.

The other Brooks tactic is also a defining feature among pundits and a central prong in the Washington Establishment's orthodoxies. No matter what polls or elections show, Brooks' overriding goal is to "prove" that "most Americans" favor a "hawkish" foreign policy whereby America will rule the world by military force, most importantly in the Middle East. As he put it earlier this year, citing absolutely nothing (as always):

Americans are having a debate bout how to proceed in Iraq, but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American power and influence . . . .

What's happening today is just another chapter in that long expansionist story. . . . . they don't question the need for America to play a leading role. They take it for granted that the U.S. is going to be in the Middle East for a long time to come. . . .

The hegemon will change. The hegemon will do more negotiating. But the hegemon will live.

In the Beltway pundit world, there is never any Republican/Democratic or liberal/conservative split allowed on this issue. According to Brooks' most common claim, that the U.S. will continue to rule the world by military force is an unchallengeable belief spanning both parties, one that is so widely accepted that it is even beyond the reach of what can be debated.

Hence, the warmongering principles of Brooks and his former employer, The Weekly Standard, not only endure regardless of changes in party control, but they can never even be subject to examination in the mainstream. And that is the standard Beltway belief -- to be Serious, one must affirm America's right to rule the world by force. The only ones who reject that view are the Unserious -- the radical Leftist bloggers and, increasingly, the "isolationist" weirdos on the Right.

The reality is that Brooks' claims in this regard are completely, demonstrably false: huge (and increasing) numbers of Americans believe we are far too militaristic and involved in trying to rule the world. But Brooks, like most Beltway pundits, cares only about enforcing Beltway orthodoxies, no matter how unpopular, not about the facts.

Brooks' column today -- praising Democrats for ignoring radical anti-war bloggers and instead embracing "Centrism" -- is a perfect showcase for both of these dishonest tactics. His column is devoted to the argument that the Democratic Party hates its blogger and anti-war activist base, is committed to hawkish military policies, and that it is doing the Right Thing in this regard because Most Americans want a hawkish military policy. That is "centrism."

Thus, ignoring bloggers' demands for greater confrontation with Bush and remaining in the "center" (i.e., adhering to Brooks' political beliefs) is the only way Democrats can win elections (Brooks, of course, cares deeply about the health of the Democratic Party and wants only what is best for it). This is his argument:

In the beginning of August, liberal bloggers met at the YearlyKos convention while centrist Democrats met at the Democratic Leadership Council's National Conversation. Almost every Democratic presidential candidate attended YearlyKos, and none visited the D.L.C.

At the time, that seemed a sign that the left was gaining the upper hand in its perpetual struggle with the center over the soul of the Democratic Party. But now it's clear that was only cosmetic.

Now it's evident that if you want to understand the future of the Democratic Party you can learn almost nothing from the bloggers, billionaires and activists on the left who make up the "netroots." You can learn most of what you need to know by paying attention to two different groups -- high school educated women in the Midwest, and the old Clinton establishment in Washington.

So the real Heart and Soul of the Democratic Party is not bloggers, but those "high school educated women in the Midwest" whom Brooks condescendingly idealizes. And there is, of course, no overlap between those two groups. Bloggers are rabid elitists freaks from the coasts, while "high school educated women in the Midwest" are the saintly salt of the American earth who don't know what blogs are.

And how do we learn what the true political beliefs are of the all-important "high school educated women in the Midwest"? Do we consult polls or the outcome of elections? No, there is no need for any of that. We can just ask David Brooks, because he profoundly understands them, and they always think as he does. Like David Broder and the rest of the Beltway class, David Brooks speaks for Them. Thus, Democrats can only win elections if they adopt the views of David Brooks, because those are the views which are adored in the Heartland.

To "prove" this claim, Brooks all but declares Hillary Clinton the nominee of the Democratic Party, and then points to her winning foreign policy views which, he claims, repudiate the anti-war radicalism of the Leftist bloggers and instead embraces the ongoing Middle East hawkishness which "most Americans" want:

On "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," Clinton could have vowed to vacate Iraq. Instead, she delivered hawkish mini-speeches that few Republicans would object to. She listed a series of threats and interests in the region and made it clear that she'd be willing to keep U.S. troops there to handle them.

The fact is, many Democratic politicians privately detest the netroots' self-righteousness and bullying. They also know their party has a historic opportunity to pick up disaffected Republicans and moderates, so long as they don't blow it by drifting into cuckoo land. They also know that a Democratic president is going to face challenges from Iran and elsewhere that are going to require hard-line, hawkish responses.

Finally, these Democrats understand their victory formula is not brain surgery. You have to be moderate on social issues, activist but not statist on domestic issues and hawkish on foreign policy. This time they're not going to self-destructively deviate from that.

So what "most Americans" want is hawkishness on Iraq and Iran and the Middle East generally. In other words, they all embrace Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney's foreign policy views. What a coincidence! As always, what the "high school educated women in the Midwest" all believe happens to be exactly what David Brooks wants! By contrast, anyone who rejects those views resides in "cuckoo land."

Thus, Democrats can win elections only by repudiating those rabid anti-war bloggers who hold Fringe Views (such as favoring an end to the Iraq War and opposition to a war with Iran) and instead vow to remain in the Middle East more or less forever, ruling the region militarily. Because that's what "high school educated women in the Midwest" women want.

Of course, Brooks' entire column is factually false. That's why he does not cite any polling data, because it shows the exact opposite of everything he says. Most Americans want and have long wanted compelled withdrawal from Iraq. Overwhelming majorities oppose military action against Iran and favor negotiations. As indicated, large and increasing numbers believe that we are far too militarized and are excessively interfering around the world, including in the prized Middle East. And the defining views of the Radical Heartland-hating bloggers are, in virtually every case, shared by most Americans.

And while Brooks is certainly right that Democrats generally have been following his advice and that of David Broder and Fred Hiatt -- that, particularly with foreign policy, the smart thing for Democrats to do is to support, and certainly not disrupt or impede, the Cheney/Kristol foreign policy in the name of "centrism" -- it is somewhat hard to argue that this is smart politics in light of this:

A new Gallup Poll finds Congress' approval rating the lowest it has been since Gallup first tracked public opinion of Congress with this measure in 1974. Just 18% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing . . .

That 18% job approval rating matches the low recorded in March 1992, when a check-bouncing scandal was one of several scandals besetting Congress.

And how do Democrats view the behavior of their own party as they follow Brooks' "centrism" advice?

Frustration with Congress spans the political spectrum. There are only minor (but not statistically meaningful) differences in the approval ratings Democrats (21%), Republicans (18%), and independents (17%) give to Congress. Typically, partisans view Congress much more positively when their party is in control of the institution, so the fact that Democrats' ratings are not materially better than Republicans' is notable.

Only in the twisted, fact-free, self-loving world of the Beltway Pundit is a political approach which produces these disastrous results "smart" and "successful." But they are so convinced that what they believe is always what Real Americans in the Heartland believe -- they so endlessly equate their own views with "centrism" -- that they will never accept that their orthodoxies are unpopular, even when facts prove conclusively that they are. That is why the gap between the Beltway and America continues to grow rapidly.

What the Beltway Establishment believes more than it believes anything else is that the U.S. should continue to intervene in other countries, dominate the Middle East, and rule the world by superior military force. Thus, no matter how many Americans come to reject that mindset, affirming that mentality will remain a prerequisite for Seriousness and for being approved of by the Beltway class. Any politician, Democratic or Republican, who rejects these basic orthodoxies, no matter how unpopular the orthodoxies become, will be relegated to "cuckoo land."

The real goal of the Beltway class is to eliminate all real differences, all meaningful debate, on these central questions. The Beltway class demands bipartisan agreement on the most important issues. Along with the belief that crimes committed by the revered Beltway elite should never be investigated and especially not prosecuted, they venerate this harmony above all else.

And even when the American citizenry rebels against this bipartisan consensus -- as it plainly has done with regard to Iraq specifically and generally concerning our imperial behavior in the world -- the Beltway class, led by the likes of David Brooks, will simply take to lying, falsely claiming that "most Americans," the good pure Heartland, really do agree with them and that Democrats therefore must continue to embrace these shared Beltway pieties if they have any hope of winning. And because David Brooks and David Broder and the like rule the Beltway opinion-making world, Democrats listen and follow.

Thus, this is what we hear: The Democratic controlled Congress has reached new depths of unpopularity, but what they are doing is politically smart. Most Americans really want us to stay in Iraq. Bloggers are espousing views that most Americans hate. Views held by most Americans are the province of the "radical angry Left." Democrats can only win elections by supporting the popular President's policies, avoiding any real differences, and scorning their own base. The only hope Democrats have is to adhere to prevailing Beltway orthodoxy.

That is the only real point of what David Brooks and most of his pundit comrades say and do over and over and over. And as their assertions become more and more transparently false, they just increasingly invoke misleading and deceitful tactics in order to maintain them.

UPDATE: There really were too many factually dubious claims in Brooks' column to mention them all, but at Talk Left, BTD points out another one: Clinton's stated views on Iraq have changed dramatically in the direction of the "netroots" -- from a steadfast opponent of withdrawal to one of the most pro-withdrawal Senators in the country.

Earlier in the year, she was one of only 14 Senators to vote outright against funding the war -- supposedly the most "radical" and "leftist" anti-war position there is in Beltway World -- and, as Timelagged points out in Comments, Clinton had this exchange just this weekend with Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: As you well know, you voted to authorize the war, voted to fund the war at least 10 times. Are you now saying that you will not vote one more penny for the war in Iraq?

SEN. CLINTON: Tim, I am saying that. . . .

She was also, last week, one of only 25 Senators to vote against condemning MoveOn. Obviously, one can question the motives and sincerity of her doing all of this. But whatever else is true, as she runs for President, she has been moving steadily towards the "blogger/leftist" view on Iraq that Brooks dishonestly claims she is repudiating.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/25/brooks/index.html

David Brooks the Sophist

2007-08-30T11:30:00.000-07:00

David Brooks the Sophist

By Jim Sleeper
TCP Cafe

Gabbing about Democrats' pre-primary campaigning the other day on "All Things Considered," David Brooks tried to lighten the stress he's under while pretending to be fascinated by Iowa Dems' opinions. He'd interviewed some in Manley, Iowa, he chortled, "because I'm so manly" --a typical Brooksian aside.

Two days later, on PBS' News Hour, Brooks tried to yuk it up deflecting Harold Meyerson's observation that since markets overreact, they need to be regulated. He smirked that Congress doesn't understand markets well enough to regulate them. Two days after that, in a column disguised as a New York Times book review, he lampooned a liberal academic for arguing that since Republican candidates hawk irrational fears and resentments, Dems should, too. The next day, Brooks was back on the News Hour, trying to put at least some wan, ironic humor on Alberto Gonzales' demise.

We've been seeing, hearing and reading a lot of pseudo-funny churlishness from Brooks – a lot of Brooks, period. Maybe NPR, PBS, and Times audiences have been calling in, demanding, "More David Brooks!" More likely, editors and producers think him a conservative congenial to liberals like themselves. It doesn't hurt that many conservatives think him a traitor. But could a sophist be a conservative at all? Can't we have a conservative with integrity? The latest Brooksian overkill forces that question.

Sophistry is clever but misleading reasoning. The conservative historian Russell Kirk described the ancient Greek Sophists as I'll shortly portray Brooks: "'realistic,' sardonic," able to pass off trickery or intimidation as righteous persuasion. They were "impelled by their passions and low interests, their illusions, even at the moment they claimed to speak as practical logicians and champions of common sense…. Sophists taught the young men of Athens… the way to material success, especially through public speaking before the assembly or in cases at law." Too few students noticed (or regretted) that Sophists led them "not to truth but to worldly success."

The alternative to sophistry isn't really pure leftism or conservatism. Demanding either would let Brooks off the hook, for no American-republican thinker with integrity can be ideologically consistent. What we need is clarity about which principles you're advancing and about your difficulties in reconciling them. Sophistry puts great intelligence and rhetorical charm at the service not of reasonable truth-seeking but of perversity and power. People like Brooks are drawn to it not intellectually but characterologically.

But what about his editors, producers, and on-air interlocutors? The most memorable portrait of Brooks' sophistic evasions is by Nicholas Confessore in 2004 in the Washington Monthly. I've occasionally sketched his evasions myself. The old saw about New York editors is that they don't think; they "do lunch," and there they learn what to think. But it is unfair. They simply don't have time to read and think about pieces like the above.

Entertainment value matters a lot, too, and you had only to watch Brooks at work in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review to know why some editors find him beguiling. Pretending to review The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, by Emory psychologist Drew Westen, Brooks pirouetted back and forth between cutesy and nasty, making us laugh at liberal eggheads, a riff of his that plays terrifically well with wounded neo-cons who are themselves scurrying off toward academic nunneries after abusing power. (Brooks has designs on Yale.)

Westen's book shows that when malevolent leaders stir and stoke voters' primal emotions to bolux their more rational reckonings with higher interests, dark fears and resentments drive their choices. He notes that Republicans have done this more skillfully (and malevolently) than Democrats.

But then Westen makes a misstep: He urges Democrats to pay Republicans back in kind, fantasizing, a moment in 2000 campaign when Gore confronts Bush: "Why don't you tell us how many times you got behind the wheel of a car with a few drinks under your belt, endangering your neighbors' kids? Where I come from, we call that a drunk."

Westen's argument "raises some interesting questions," Brooks writes, licking his chops as he prepares to do precisely what Republicans always do when challenged this way: They turn the blame on their liberal opponents' frustrated rage and supposed viciousness and draw themselves up into a pseudo-liberal posture of arch disdain for the liberals' own supposed fear-mongering.

Voters aren't really as irrational as Westin claims, Brooks tells us; it's beastly, insulting, and pathetic of Westen to claim that (as Brooks summarizes him) "Republicans have brilliant political consultants like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, who frame issues so fiendishly, they can fool the American people into voting against their own best interests."

Brooks was on the debate team at the University of Chicago, and it shows in the "interesting questions" he claims Westen's book raises:

"First, why did someone with so little faith in rational inquiry go into academia, and what does he do to those who disagree with him at Emory faculty meetings, especially recovering alcoholics?"

First, you see, Brooks goes ad hominem. Then, he changes the subject or turns the charge against his opponent. In reality, there's no contradiction in a rational academic's studying irrationality. Brooks needs to read essays by the dread Herbert Marcuse written in Europe in the late 1930s and collected in a book called "Negations." He may be shocked to find himself staring into a mirror. As for Emory faculty meetings, wouldn't it be more credible to cite, say, participants on panels at the American Enterprise Institute or writers of columns like those by Brooks' old Weekly Standard colleague William Kristol?

But Brooks the sophist has changed the subject, and Gore's imaginary explosion has eclipsed the campaign Brooks served in 2000 and, more consequentially, in 2004, when it was "Swift-boating" John Kerry at the gutter level which Brooks excoriates Westen for commending to Democrats. On the News Hour when Swift-boating was at its peak, Brooks declined to condemn it, pleading that Kerry's Vietnam service "happened before I was born." In his new review, Swift-boating never appears. What appears is an imagined Gore explosion.

"is it possible that substance has something to do with the political fortunes of parties? Could it be that Democrats won in the middle part of the 20th Century because they were right about the big issues — the New Deal and the civil rights movement? Is it possible Republicans won in the latter part of the century because they were right about economic growth and the cold war? Is it possible Democrats are winning now because they were right about whether to go to war in Iraq?"

This is sophistry at its deftest. As LBJ anticipated, Democrats lost the South because of civil rights, and Republican "economic growth" means Wall Street-driven quarterly bottom lining through which markets rule the public airwaves, with disastrous consequences for republican deliberation. More important, when Al Gore made this argument in The Assault on Reason, Brooks denounced "the chilliness and sterility of his wordview" -- unlike that of Bush, who was down-to-earth and wise enough to give us the Iraq war, with the help of Brooks, who wrote column after column telling us how wrong Democrats were about whether to go to war in Iraq.

Let's be clear, shall we? David Brooks does not believe that American voters are rational, and he has never used his rhetorical and political skills to help them become more so. On the News Hour in 2004, he announced that John Kerry had flunked "the Joshua test" by meeting Brooks' young son Joshua and turning him off. "Anyone who can't relate to a 10-year-old boy can't relate to the American electorate," Brooks opined, but if he was right, why does he disparage Westen for saying pretty much the same, with regret, not a smirk?

The question Westen's book ought to prompt isn't really whether voters are rational or irrational. As Marcuse wrote in 1938, the broader rationalism of a democratic socialism or republicanism that overrides markets at times to achieve common goods after rational public deliberation "is well aware of the limits of human knowledge and of rational social action, but it avoids fixing these limits too hurriedly and, above all, making capital out of them for the purpose of uncritically sanctioning established hierarchies." The question Westen's book should prompt is whether real leaders and opinion makers are needed to lift, not lower, people's sights. "It is the business of our Chief Thinkers to tell us of our own deeper desires, not to keep shrilling our little desires in our ears," D. H. Lawrence insisted. Does Brooks agree?

After a decade shrilling our little desires in our ears, Brooks denies or ignores the extent to which anyone is doing it at all, except Westen. Brooks asks,

“Finally, if voter decisions are driven by the sort of crude emotional outbursts Westen recommends, and if, as he writes, ‘a substantial minority of Americans hold authoritarian, intolerant ideologies….’, then shouldn’t we abandon this whole democracy thing? Shouldn’t we have a coup, led perhaps by the Emory psychology department, which could prevent the brutish and hate-filled from ever gaining control?”

Our college debater concludes triumphally:

"It's rare that one comes across a book that raises so many questions. Of course it's rare that one comes across a book that so avidly flatters the prejudices of its partisan readers."

It's also rare to come across a book review that so avidly flatters the prejudices of editors at the Neoconservative Damage Control Gazette which they have made of New York Times Book Review a few times too often since 2002. The sophistry of Brook's supposedly rhetorical question – "Shouldn't we have a coup?" – evades the record of his own apologetics for something like a coup from November, 2000 through at least 2005, when the conservative shock troops, spin machine and Bush factota whom Brooks promoted and defended won elections with Swift Boat and GWOT fear-mongering and a creeping coup unwarranted surveillance, detention, and signing statements.

I'd love to think that if voters have turned against these measures and minions, it's because they've become more rational than they were when they accepted them. But I fear that the real reason is that while success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan – in Iraq, in New Orleans, in health insurance, in market regulation.

Perhaps editors and producers are more rational than their stressed audiences. I'd ask Jim Lehrer at PBS, Ellen Weiss at NPR, and Gail Collins, Sam Tanenhaus, and Barry Gewen at the New York Times to read the essays linked above and ask how it has happened that all of them have offered their large, liberal-leaning audiences a smart, charming sophist, not a thoughtful, honest conservative or two who can contend worthily with Mark Shields, Harold Meyerson, E.J. Dionne, Ruth Marcus, Paul Krugman, and others.

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/aug/29/david_brooks_the_sophist

Feemus - David Brooks Is a Moron

2006-11-26T18:50:00.000-08:00

David Brooks Is a Moron
by Feemus (dailykos)

Sun Nov 26, 2006 at 06:10:58 PM CST

Proving that he loves nothing more than the status quo and rich people, Brooks takes time out from loving conservatives with inherited wealth to loving liberals with inherited wealth. Way to weathervane, Dave!

Yesterday's column was on Bobby Kennedy and how brave and stoic and generally dreamy he was. How he was the original (tragic) Bobo. Whatever.

Now, I'm tempted to write about Brooks is so in love with power and wealth that he can't even remain consistent to his own ideology. But I won't. I am not even going to write about how transparently Brooks is sucking up to the new "in crowd."

No, what REALLY pisses me off is to hear Brooks acting as an apologist for the classics. I am all in favor of those in power reading classical literature. But Brooks does more harm than good with his advocacy. This is the second Brooks column in as many months in which he quotes and egregiously misinterprets an Aeschylus quote. The SAME Aeschylus quote (which makes me think that it is, perhaps, all of Aeschylus that Mr. Brooks has ever read).

He first used this quote in his excruciatingly pretentious column about being a Mets fan; in the course of talking about fandom, he manages to squeeze in every single quote he remembers from his University of Bartlett's education. Gack.

In yesterday's column, Brooks writes about how Bobby Kennedy found strength in reading Edith Hamilton's book about Greek culture, The Greek Way. Brooks writes: "Kennedy found in the Greeks a sensibility similar to his own — heroic and battle-scarred but also mystical."

Now this is, of course, nonsense upon stilts. Which Greeks? This monolithizing of the Greeks is just moronic--there is no Greek "sensibility" in any meaningful sense--the Greek culture of antiquity with which we are familar spans a millenium and two continents and any number of philosophical and religious traditions. But even when he's specific, Brooks gets it wrong. This is the quote in which RFK found solace for his brother's murder and for which Brooks finds solace for the Mets' performance (um, bathetic much?). Brooks offers up the quote and his own gloss on it:

“God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

Kennedy, recovering from his brother’s murder, found in the ancient Greeks a civilization that was eager to look death in the face, but which seemed to draw strength from what it found there. The Greeks seemed more convinced of the dignity and significance of life the more they brooded on the pain and precariousness of it.

In neither of Brooks' columns does he identify the source of this quote. I wonder if he knows. If he understood its context, he might not like it quite so much. The passage is from the Agamemnon, and the chorus is discussing the Justice of Zeus, which grinds slow but exceeding fine. The chorus is about vengeance/justice and about how it is often visited upon subsequent generations. The specific passage that Brooks quotes is mistranslated.

Brooks writes: "God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer." The "must" there is entirely interpolated, and "suffer" is not, perhaps, the best translation of Aeschylus's πάθει, which can mean anything from "suffering" to "experience." At any rate, Aeschylean values do not embrace suffering as ennobling, nor did they find dignity in suffering. This was still a culture that valued the thanatos kalos, the beautiful death that is praised by such poets as Mimnermus. Mr. Brooks is reinscribing his own culture's values onto these lines. Mr. Brooks clearly doesn't know his Aeschylus from his elbow.

In his great satire against intellectual pretensions, The Dunciad, Alexander Pope invokes the Goddess of Dullness, whose acolytes dominated the world of publishing in Pope's 18th century England (the more things change, eh?). One of the great boons to the Dunces who pretend to erudition are all the footnotes, prefaces, indexes, commentaries, etc, that allow one to have the appearence of learning without the substance (Pope would have fainted at Wikipedia). He writes that Dullness shows her worshippers how to read only the scholarly apparatuses and to dispense with the literature altogether. To them she shows:

How random Thoughts now meaning chance to find.
Now leave all memory of sense behind:
How Prologues into Prefaces decay,
And these to Notes are fritter'd quite away.
How index-learning turns no student pale,
Yet holds the Eel of science by the tale.

David Brooks has certainly not been turned pale by too much study. He is the pinnacle of Dullness, he has reached the height of index-learning and achieved the height of its folly. He even writes at the end of his column that we are lucky if we find the wisdom of the Greeks "by happenstance."

But the danger of finding learning by happenstance is that we take it out of context--rather than allowing education to reshape our understanding of the world, we take it as portable sound bites. This isn't education, this is cocktail party schtick.

To some degree, we always take things out of context. Or rather, we all have our own context which informs our reading—we read our own ideas and values into the text. This is why single text is never really singular—it has as many iterations as it does readers. But to perform this dislocation of values with such unexamined and ideologically motivated vigor is just annoying. It falsifies the past and it falsifies our relationship with it.

But what annoys me most is how it misrepresents the study of classical languages and literature. Classicists already have a lot of baggage—others in academia are, on the strength of the Nazis’ appropriation of Virgil and the philhellenism of much nationalist and proto-fascist thought, still suspicious of classicists. Classicists are still under the shadow of the racism and anti-Semitism of many who were drawn to the field for its ideological potential. The unthinking and nuance-free encomia of people like Brooks makes it all the harder to distance the discipline from the misuses to which it’s been put for the last hundred and fifty years.

It's also the reflex of a small mind that assumes that everything was better in the past, and doesn't bother to find out what that past really has to teach us. It has a lot to teach us, but we have to be willing to learn.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/11/26/19112/669

Matt Taibbi - THE LOW POST: The Mansion Family

2006-08-12T13:29:00.000-07:00

THE LOW POST: The Mansion Family

In the first installment of his weekly Web-only column, Matt Taibbi writes that yuppie paranoia (and David Brooks) guarantees the Democrats are still -- and forever -- doomed.

MATT TAIBBI

"The conservative mansion has many rooms. In one chamber there are the resurgent Burkeans . . . In another chamber are the staunch Churchillians . . . But I wonder if amid all the din there might be a room, even just a utility closet, for those of us in yet another rightward sect, the neocon incrementalists." -- David Brooks, "Onward Cautious Soldiers," The New York Times, July 23, 2006

So David Brooks wants to go into the closet with his fellow neocon incrementalists. And I thought The New York Times was a family newspaper!

There are many people out there who are baffled by the career of David Brooks, but I am not one of them. Any man willing to admit in print that he can get a boner surveying the "awesome resumes" of marrying Ivy Leaguers on the New York Times wedding page ("you can almost feel the force of mingling SAT scores," he coos in his book Bobos In Paradise) is always going to occupy an important spot in the American media landscape; the ruling class always needs its house bumlickers. And Brooks does the job well, although at times I think he's so craven that he does his masters a disservice. I mean, seriously -- a mansion of conservatism? Why not go all the way: The yacht of Republicanism has a great many berths . . .

Brooks is the perfect priest of American conservatism, and by conservatism I don't mean the bloodthirsty, gun-toting, go-back-to-Africa, welfare-bashing right-winger conservatism of the NRA and Sean Hannity and the Bible Belt. I mean the dickless, power-worshipping, good-consumer pragmatic conservatism of Times readers and those other Bobos in Paradise who have exquisitely developed taste in furniture, coffee and television programming but would rather leave the uglier questions of politics to more decisive people, so long as they aren't dangerous radicals like Michael Moore or Markos Zuniga.

That's why the marriage of David Brooks and the Democratic Leadership Council makes perfect sense. It's repugnant and the kind of thing one should shield young children from knowing about, but it makes perfect sense. Both prefer a policy of being "cautious soldiers," "incrementalists" who shun upheavals and vote the status quo, although they subscribe to this policy for different reasons. Brooks worships the status quo because he has no penis and wants to spend the rest of his life buying periwinkle bath towels without troubling interruptions of conscience. The DLC, a nonprofit created in the mid-1980s to help big business have a say in the Democratic Party platform, supports the status quo because they are paid agents of the commercial interests that define it.

Moreover, Brooks and the DLC have this in common: While they both frown on the open flag-waving and ostentatious religiosity of the talk-radio right-wing as being gauche and in bad form, they're only truly offended by people of their own background who happen to be idealistic.

Hence the recurring backlash by both against the various angry electoral challenges to the establishment of the Democratic Party -- including, most recently, the campaign of Ned Lamont, challenger to Joe Lieberman's Senate Seat in Connecticut.

Brooks's column of a few weeks ago on the subject of Lieberman/Lamont, titled "The Liberal Inquisition," was a masterpiece of yuppie paranoia. In an editorial line that would be repeated by other writers all across the country, Brooks blasted the "netroots" supporters of Lamont for being leftist extremists driven by "moral manias" and "mob psychology" to liquidate the "scarred old warhorse" Lieberman, whom he calls "transparently the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men." This is the archetypal suburban-conservative nightmare -- anonymous hordes of leftist boat-rockers viciously assaulting the champion of the decent people, who is just a really nice guy given to tending his lawn and minding his own business.

Being "nice" is a central part of the Brooks yuppie's guilt-proofing self-image rationale; so long as you're the kind of guy who lets people merge on highways, stands politely in line at Starbucks, doesn't put garish Christmas decorations on his lawn and pays his taxes, you're not really doing anything wrong. It gets a little tiring after a while, hearing people who vote for wars tell you how nice they are.

But the most objectionable thing about the Brooks column was its crude parroting of a suspiciously similar DLC editorial published about a month before (See Road Rage, from the August 10th, 2006, issue of Rolling Stone) entitled "The Return of Liberal Fundamentalism." Both columns described Lamont's Internet supporters as "fundamentalist" liberals bent on a "purge" of poor nice old Joe Lieberman, who represents heterodoxy, centrism and bipartisanship. Brooks used the word "purge" twice; the author of the DLC column, Ed Kilgore, used it eight times.

Let's be clear about what we're dealing with here. These people are professional communicators. They don't repeatedly use words like "purge" and "fundamentalist" -- terms obviously associated with communism and Islamic terrorism -- by accident. They know exactly what they're doing. It's an authoritarian tactic and it should piss you off. It pissed me off. When I called the DLC about the editorial, Kilgore was not available, but they put Will Marshall on the line.

Marshall is the president of the DLC's Progressive Policy Institute and owns the distinction of being the first public figure to use the term "body count" in a positive sense with regard to the Iraq war ("Coalition forces still face daily attacks but the body count tilts massively in their favor"). He wasted no time in giving me the party line: "What we're seeing is an ideological purge," he said cheerily. "It's national effort by the left to get rid of somebody they've decided to demonize . . . we have concerns about narrow dogmatism. . ."

We went back and forth for a while. I noted that his conception of "narrow dogmatists" included the readers of Daily Kos, a website with something like 440,000 visitors a day; I also noted that recent Gallup polls showed that fully 91 percent of Democrats supported a withdrawal of some kind from Iraq.

"So these hundreds of thousands of Democrats who are against the war are narrow dogmatists," I said, "and. . . how many people are there in your office? Ten? Twenty? Thirty?"

"Well, it'd probably be in the thirty zone," sighed Marshall.

I asked Marshall if there was a publicly available list of donors to the DLC.

"Uh, I don't know," he said. "I'd have to refer you to the press office for that. They can help you there . . ." (Note: a DLC spokeswoman would later tell me the DLC has a policy of "no public disclosure," although she did say the group is funded in half by corporate donations, in half by individuals).

"So let me get this straight," I said. "We have thirty corporate-funded spokesmen telling hundreds of thousands of actual voters that they're narrow dogmatists?"

He paused and sighed, clearly exasperated. "Look," he said. "Everybody in politics draws money from the same basic sources. It's the same pool of companies and wealthy individuals . . ."

"Okay," I said. "So basically in this dispute over Lieberman, we have people on one side, and companies on the other? Would it be correct to say that?" I asked.

"Well, I guess if you live in a cartoon world you could say that," he said.

The DLC are the lowest kind of scum; we're talking about people who are paid by the likes of Eli Lilly and Union Carbide to go on television and call suburban moms and college kids who happen to be against the war commies and jihadists. On the ignominious-sellout scale, that's lower than doing PR for a utility that turns your grandmother's heat off at Christmas. And that's pretty bad -- but with enough money and enough of the right kind of publicity their side still might win in the Lamont/Lieberman primary on August 8th.

Which tells you just about everything you need to know about the modern Democratic Party. Why is anyone surprised that the Republicans never lose?

Think the Democrats are doomed? Tell us why. Plus: Check out Taibbi's latest Road Rage column, "Lieberman: Bush's Favorite Democrat."

Posted Aug 02, 2006 8:22 AM

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11034127/the_low_post_why_the_democrats_are_still_doomed/print

The Daily Howler - When The Lofty Attack

2006-08-11T00:29:00.000-07:00

WHEN THE LOFTY ATTACK: Pity poor David Brooks! In this morning’s Times, he lets us know how deeply he longs for a civilized politics. There are really three parties today, he informs. And the third party—The McCain-Lieberman Party—knows what the voters really want:

BROOKS (8/10/06): The McCain-Lieberman Party counters with constant reminders that country comes before party, that in politics a little passion energizes but unmarshaled passion corrupts, and that more people want to vote for civility than for venom.

People want civility, not venom, Brooks says. But uh-oh! Even as he tells us this, he emits vast poison of his own, name-calling those with whom he disagrees in the most venomous manner.

Could you possibly write a less civil column? A column driven more by venom? In paragraph 2, Brooks establishes moral equivalence between “scandal-tainted Tom DeLay” and—you guessed it—Ned Lamont. No, Lamont isn’t tainted by any known scandal—but he had “the net roots exulting before him and Al Sharpton smiling just behind” when he won his race Tuesday night. As a result, Brooks name-calls Lamont and his supporters in the most egregious ways. What does he tell us about these people? Brooks sheds his deep desire for civility as he name-calls and slimes:

In paragraph 3, we learn that Lamont supporters engage in “the Sunni-Shiite style of politics.”

In paragraph 4, we learn that Lamont supporters are “flamers” who “tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too.” Indeed, “[t]hey rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country.”

In paragraph 5, we learn that Lamont supporters are “hyper-partisans;” they “may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist.”

And in paragraph 6, we learn, by inference, that Lamont people favor venom, not civility. Later, Brooks refers to them as a “hostile force” inside the Democratic Party.

Wow! For someone so deeply in love with civility, Brooks really lets himself go in this piece! He doesn’t name a single Democrat who has actually misbehaved; he doesn’t explain what any Dem has done wrong. But so what? In a sweeping, name-calling indictment, he seems to say that Lamont supporters are “vicious” “flamers” who have “shelved their integrity” so they can “engage in Sunni-Shiite politics.” They’re “extremists,” we are told. Their partisanship has “led them to malice.”

For ourselves, we’ll only say this about that: Thank God David Brooks is in love with civility! Just think how this morning’s piece might have read if he’d let his own venom break loose!

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh081006.shtml

The Pundits Begin To Rationalize

2006-08-10T11:48:00.000-07:00

The Pundits Begin To Rationalize

by DemFromCT

David Brooks is livid. Betrayed by his class (who voted for Lamont), most of what he wrote before the election was wrong (hell, most of what he writes is wrong) so it's time to rationalize and cherrypick to make things right (and never, ever left).

The McCain-Lieberman Party sees Democrats in the grip of teachers’ unions and Republicans who let corporations write environmental rules. It sees two parties that depend on the culture war for internal cohesion and that make abortion a litmus test.

It sees two traditions immobilized to trench warfare.

The McCain-Lieberman Party is emerging because the war with Islamic extremism, which opened new fissures and exacerbated old ones, will dominate the next five years as much as it has dominated the last five. It is emerging because of deep trends that are polarizing our politics. It is emerging because social conservatives continue to pull the GOP rightward (look at how Representative Joe Schwarz, a moderate Republican, was defeated by a conservative rival in Michigan). It is emerging because highly educated secular liberals are pulling the Democrats upscale and to the left. (Lamont’s voters are rich, and 65 percent call themselves liberals, compared with 30 percent of Democrats nationwide.)

Yeah, David. Lamont voters in Hartford and New Haven are rolling in dough, just like teachers everywhere. The poison in the pen that polarizes? This was from The Liberal Inquisition, written July 9.

What's happening to Lieberman can only be described as a liberal inquisition. Whether you agree with him or not, he is transparently the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men. But over the past few years he has been subjected to a vituperation campaign that only experts in moral manias and mob psychology are really fit to explain. I can't reproduce the typical assaults that have been directed at him over the Internet, because they are so laced with profanity and ugliness, but they are ginned up by ideological masseurs who salve their followers' psychic wounds by arousing their rage at objects of mutual hate...

The big story out of the campaign last week was the aggressiveness Lieberman has finally brought to his side of the fight. Over the past few years, polarizers have dominated Congress because people who actually represent most Americans have been too timid or intellectually vacuous to stand up. Even today many Democrats who privately despise the netroots lie low, hoping the anger won't be directed at them.

But Lieberman has had no choice but to fight, and he will probably prevail. If he doesn't, and if his opponents go from statewide victory in Connecticut to a national primary assault in 2008, then I hope the Republicans will be smart enough to scoop up what is sure to come -- yet another wave of disaffected Democrats looking for a political home.

If you disguise the loathing with sweet words and don't swear, then it's okay, if you're David Brooks. But CT voters rejected Joe for a variety of reasons, and he did not prevail. Nor is it clear that all those general election voters in CT are going to vote for the self-centrist (I love that term, stolen from the barbarians online) represented by Joe and David.

More importantly, Brooks paints Lamont as a tool of the radical wild-eyed netroots, as David's masters command him to:

W. House: Democrats' extreme left defeated Lieberman

..."I know a lot of people have tried to make this a referendum on the president. I would flip it. I think instead it's a defining moment for the Democratic Party whose national leaders now have made it clear that if you disagree with the extreme left in their party, they're going to come after you," he said.

Brooks isn't the only David to say so. Writing in the WaPo, Broder sees it the same way.

In the primary, Lamont found his most prominent support on the far-left flank of the Democratic Party. His organization was a hand-me-down from the Howard Dean presidential campaign, bolstered by a blizzard of Internet blogs from outside his home state. His roster of visiting campaigners was uniformly of the same political slant -- notably Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Rep. Maxine Waters of California.

Now, with former Lieberman supporters such as Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Rosa DeLauro closing ranks behind Lamont, the novice candidate will have an opportunity -- and an urgent need -- to moderate his stance and attempt to broaden his base.

The difference is that while both Davids get the Lamont voters wrong (if they're the left wing, the WaPo editorial board must be the center), Broder gets the big tent idea right. Lamont isn't a wild-eyed radical, so broadening the base will be easy - in CT where the guy is running (sorry to remind you). And yes, that will have to happen for Lamont to win. And yes, that's a good thing. After all, Lamont is a candidate of the irate middle, and David Brooks is wrong again.

http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2006/08/the_pundits_beg.html

David Brooks Pithed on Me (w/poll)

2006-08-10T07:22:00.000-07:00

David Brooks Pithed on Me
by wonkydonkey

David Brooks just pithed on me (and by extension, many Kossacks and other bloggers) and I'm not going to take it any more.

Many readers no doubt observed that if today's prostate-aged moochers wanted to loaf around all day reading books and tossing off their vacuous opinions into the ether, they should have had the foresight to become newspaper columnists.

Others will note sardonically that the only really vibrant counterculture in the United States today is laziness.

Follow me after the jump to find out why the ever-reactionary Brooks is just following a fine old aristocratic tradition of ignoring basic economics and social history to instead pass a condescending moral judgment on the lower classes.

Ha! Ha! The "vibrant counterculture" of blogs, podcasts, vlogs, zines, Move.on and Meetup is nothing more than the "laziness" of those who did not have the foresight to spend their entire lifetimes insinuating themselves into the journalistic establishment like those esteemed purveyors of Truth like Judith Miller, Bob Woodward, Jason Blair, Geraldo Rivera, and Brooks himself.

As the illustration above shows, the tradition of defending unjust upper class privilege by denigrating the alleged vices of the lower classes is an enduring intellectual pretense of those who need to maintain the status quo. This famous illustration named "Gin Lane" by William Hogarth (1751) shows the wicked social abuses the poor would perpetrate due to their indolence unless proper gentlemen made sure they were gainfully employed and kept away from strong spirits. Rather than discuss political and economic reform, or social progress like universal education, the noblesse oblige titter behind their tasteful fans and embroidered hankies at the sheer ridiculousness of moral failings of their inferiors, and cackle at the thought of what would happen should such depravity gain greater social traction.

Brooks seems amused that those without journalism degrees and New York Times paychecks actually care enough to think and write about their country and the evil corruption destroying it from within. He seems to not consider that many highly-skilled and educated people who would LOVE to be working full-time are driving cabs, making lattes or "going back to school." He sees these folks as a "Leisure Class," too good to work the menial jobs available to them because of lazy pretensions, instead of as victims of his beloved "free market" which ships whole industries overseas to add a few cents to the bottom line, while foisting all the associated social costs onto the rest of the nation to pay, as the top one percent lobby for more tax cuts. Billions for Halliburton and Exxon, not one cent for health care or education!

Wouldn't we all be working very hard, if like Mel Gibson, we could command a million dollars a day in our chosen profession? Is it just our own laziness and damn fault that we don't? The role of family, edcuation, health care, social connections never enters into Brooks meritocracy of the extremely, very overworked rich. But then how did George W. Bush get to where he is today? All that hard work of four hour workdays and ten weeks of vacation? Yes, there must have been some "screw-up in the moral superstructure."

As an alleged "prostate-aged moocher" myself thanks to the dot.com crash and government-supported outsourcing of tech jobs, and health conditions exacerbated by the lack of access to affordable healthcare in this country, Brooks is not the first person who would prefer to call me "lazy" than actually help make me a whole, fully-productive member of society again. Or to assert that my political opinions and blogging would disappear like a snowflake on a globally-warmed July sidewalk if only I had a "real job" to occupy my squandered "free time."

Make no mistake, Brooks and others of the same historical ilk have as firm a grasp on reality as did Marie Antoinette when she said of the starving French peasantry rioting for bread, "Let them eat cake." They are whistling pass the graveyard of their illusions that their privileged positions are somehow secure due to their "god-given moral superiority." As people like Brooks and Lieberman notice that something is stirring up the lower classes, like Gandhi famously said: "First they laugh at you..."

So while the laughing rich dump their pisspots out the window on the heads of the poor begging for survival in the streets below, they can't help but notice something seems different now. The allegedly lazy seem to be industriously building barricades and organizing themselves. Instead of obsequiously thanking m'lord and m'lady for the tuppence tossed into an outstretched hand, there's a sarcastic sneer and a glimmer of something angry about the eyes on the beggar's face. The streets don't feel as safe for them to parade around in their finery, and in hushed whispers in grand salons they ask each other if they have heard of the latest act of insolent disrespect. That groaning rumble in the distance couldn't be tumbrils heading for the palace, could it?

Keep laughing, David, at your Georgetown neocon cocktail parties, while DC declares a crime emergency. Keep laughing, George W, at the "bitch in the ditch" who now owns a piece of Crawford real estate just down the road apiece. Keep laughing, ex-Exxon CEO Lee "Fat Bastard" Raymond at $4/gallon a gasoline and your $400 million golden parachute. Keep laughing, KKKarl at getting away for now, with what will almost certainly be seen by history as a piece of treason that may well bring the world to its first nuclear "war of civilizations."

You keep laughing, and we poor, lazy schmucks will just keep "tossing our vacuous opinions into the ether." And that knock on your door that will come in the middle of the night in the none too distant future won't be the maid arriving early to tidy up. You keep "standing up for traditional morality" while the housing bubble pops, Americans file record numbers of bankruptcies, and another generation of fellow citizens despairs of ever having the semblance of middle class security their parents took for granted.

And remember, he who laughs last, laughs best.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/8/3/160

At Long Last Have You No Sense of Decency David Brooks?

2006-08-10T07:20:00.000-07:00

At Long Last Have You No Sense of Decency David Brooks?
by intrepidliberal

The diary below was originally posted earlier today on my blog the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

David Brooks is a lightweight whom I typically ignore. Other progressive bloggers critique his sophomoric punditry and infantile analysis with enthusiasm. Until Friday, I considered attacking Brooks akin to abusing the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Standing on an overcrowded A-Train with malfunctioning air conditioning, I read Brooks' column "Bye-Bye Bootstraps" while commuting to Manhattan from Brooklyn. Brooks had the temerity to suggest that a "Wal-Mart leisure class" was emerging in America. One wonders how my fellow passengers suffering from the heat as we commuted to our jobs would've responded to this soft minded propagandist of America's plutocracy.

The New York Times recently did a piece about how some people out of work were taking advantage of their free time. Brooks cleverly exploited quotes from these individuals to suggest that today's work ethic belongs to the hard working wealthy. Even worse, Brooks' perverts the word "dignity" to claim it as the property of elites:

"Once upon a time, middle-class men would have defined their dignity by their ability to work hard, provide for their family and live as self-reliant members of society. But these fellows, to judge by their quotations, define their dignity the same way the subjects of Thorstein Veblen's `The Theory of the Leisure Class' defined theirs.

They define their dignity by the loftiness of their thinking. They define their dignity not by their achievement, but by their personal enlightenment, their autonomy, by their distance from anything dishonorably menial or compulsory."

You see what he's doing? Brooks is hijacking the egalitarian concept of dignity. Dignity is a virtue that no single economic class, race, religion or nationality can lay claim to as his or her own. Dignity belongs to all of us. As Robert Fuller has written so persuasively, dignity is a universal right. Brooks has twisted dignity into a virtue belonging to the wealthy.

Obviously he hopes to justify the status of today's mega wealthy by implying elites possess superior dignity. The wealthy are hard working souls driven to achievement while those lazy people working at Wal-Mart just don't have the same dignity of ambition. This man is a jerk.

I immediately thought of my good friend known by some in the blogosphere as "Breaking Ranks." She is a driven person down on her luck professionally without steady work. I could think of no one more qualified to refute the garbage inside David Brooks' column.

She did not disappoint. My friend is a gentle soul but Brooks' column provoked her into posting a diary on Daily Kos entitled, "F*** YOU DAVID BROOKS AND NYT." Her title made me laugh. In nearly twenty years of friendship from our days as undergraduate classmates, I don't recall her ever dropping an F-bomb. For her to even have "F" followed by three asterisks was a big deal. Brooks may be a mediocre scribe but he managed to provoke the most gentle and civil of souls.

Her post was a tour de force and a must read. It should've made the recommended list at Daily Kos but didn't. A talented writer she got to the point quickly:

"I've been limping around in agony for three weeks. An ingrown toenail got seriously infected, and the only thing Neosporin seems to be doing is preventing it from getting worse. Why haven't I gone to a podiatrist? I don't have any health insurance. Thus this NYT article by David Brooks makes me want to scream with rage.

I haven't worked regularly since 2003. Nothing is going into Social Security for me, and it's likely that I will be a renter (or possibly a homeless person) until the day I die. I've never held a full-time job that made use of my education and talents, much less enabled me to pursue my dreams. I haven't been to the movies in over three years, and I don't conspicuously consume at Wal-Mart or anywhere else. I handwash all my clothes, and I'm down to one pair of pants.

Yep, I'm sooo sure this is what Veblen had in mind when he described the Leisure Class. My take on the dignity of my condition diverges considerably from Brooks' mean-spirited screed as well.

So forgive the INAPPROPRIATE CAPS - I'm officially PISSED THE HELL OFF!"

Alas, David Brooks enjoys a veneer of respectability. The New York Times is discredited from the Judith Miller fiasco and other transgressions. However, the gray lady remains a powerful forum and Brooks is a frequent commentator on the inside the beltway talking circuit. Consequently, he has the ability to shape the terms of debate and discussion that influences political discourse. Those who control the terms of debate rule the day in politics.

Since Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964, conservatives have managed to define the social safety net as evil and taxes on wealth as immoral. With ruthless skill conservatives have promoted an ethos in America that rewards wealth over work and hyper individualism over community values.

These people realize their reign of indecency may be coming to an end if the terms of debate are not altered before November. Enter David Brooks at stage right with his mean spirited diatribe sullying the dignity and virtues of hard working people. Our corporatist policies that reward wealth over work can be justified because in Brooks' view the wealthy are the only people who are truly working.

During his weekly appearance with Mark Shields on the PBS News Hour, Brooks even criticized the attempt to raise the minimum wage because it would only help "teenagers." Mark Shields promptly corrected him and noted that minimum wage earners are the primary earners in forty percent of households.

Sadly, abstract columns by David Brooks and others that justify class warfare from the top are not effectively refuted. Media Matters is terrific at exposing disinformation and falsehoods but this sort of diatribe often survives and eventually becomes an accepted part of the lexicon. It sounds absurd yet given Republican success at manipulating language it's not hard to imagine liberals soon having to defend that regular working people have dignity too.

My friend did a beautiful job in responding to Brooks. More is needed however. I urge anyone reading this posting to write to the New York Times and demand that Brooks recant and apologize to millions of working Americans. This should be done in a respectful tone without profanity. Blogosphere etiquette will be ineffective. Instead, please utilize civil assertiveness to persuade the New York Times editorial board that David Brooks has created a firestorm with his indecency.

One aspect of the New York Times I always appreciated is the diversity of their columnists. Columnists for the Wall Street Journal are nothing but a total echo chamber for corporate fascism. At least the New York Times tries to promote a diversity of views with their columnists. Nevertheless, David Brooks' column on Friday requires a heavy volume response from the working people of this country. I can think of no better place to start then the netroots.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/8/6/13591/18716

AlisaR - David Brooks attacks the Netroots (Again!)

2006-08-09T21:04:00.000-07:00

David Brooks attacks the Netroots (Again!)
by AlisaR (dailykos)

David Brooks again attacks the netroots, this time comparing us to the "Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself" that becomes a form of "tribalism" focusing on "aggression and stridency."

He equates the "scandal-tainted Tom DeLay" with "Ned Lamont ... Al Sharpton smiling just behind" and "the net-root DeLays." In Brooks' world, arguing a point of view in an on-line column and money-laundering are the same thing. As a result of our "aggression and stridency" we are reducing politics to a "continuing jihad." Brooks says: "a little passion energizes but unmarshaled passion corrupts." Therefore, the mere fact that we care means we MUST be corrupt!

His use of loaded language is insidious and intellectually dishonest, but also quite clever. He interweaves terms like "jihad," "tribalism" and "Sunni-Shiite" with "flamers" implying that the violence of what is happening in Iraq is on-par with an internet argument of words. I wish Iraq was fighting with Merriam-Webster's, rather than drilling holes into peoples' bodies while they are still alive, but I suppose that's a distinction only a flaming jihadist liberal would make...

The crux of Brooks' column is that a new party, a "McCain-Lieberman" party will emerge that will, conveniently, support everything that Brooks believes is perfect--i.e. more free trade, free market, but leave his bedroom alone. Oh, and unmentioned in the entire column is Bush, Cheney, the Christian Coalition, the Religious Right and any of the forces that have honestly contributed to the increasingly partisan tenor of the last 26 years!

Brooks seems to have missed the NY Times' excellent analysis yesterday "Revenge of the Irate Moderates" about how this is really about an

uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president's choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration's contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.

Brooks seems incapable of understanding that the country has moved so far to the right that a Goldwater conservative really would be a liberal today and is intent on tarring us all with a very heavy hand and an intellectually dishonest argument. I think letters to the NY Times Editor and the Public Editor are needed!

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/8/9/23369/44787

Greg Mitchell - Endorsing Death in Lebanon

2006-08-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

Endorsing More Death in Lebanon

As dozens more die in Lebanon, and much of that nation lies in ruins, David Brooks, The New York Times columnist, calls for more of the same, while admitting the policy probably won't work -- partly because of the war in Iraq, which he strongly supported.

By Greg Mitchell

(July 30, 2006) -- The juxtaposition could not have been more humiliating (assuming a capacity for some): A New York Times news story about an Israeli air strike killing dozens of civilians in Qana, Lebanon, most of them children, and a Sunday column by David Brooks coming out against a ceasefire in the conflict and praising the Bush administration's adroit handling of the situation.

This is Brooks' right, as a Republican apologist, of course, but what is truly bankrupt about his stance is his admission that the current U.S. policy has little chance for success -- beyond the certain slaughtering of hundreds if not thousands more -- but he endorses it anyway. And why can't it succeed? Because, he admits, America's standing and influence has been fatally crippled by its Iraq debacle -- which Brooks strongly backed and still supports.

Talk about loss of moral authority.

What Brooks doesn't mention, among other things, is that it is not just Iraq but the accurate perception by those in the Middle East, and around the globe, that the death Israel is raining down from the sky comes in the form of U.S.-made or donated missiles unleashed by U.S. jets or artillery (as I noted in my previous column).

Most editorial pages in U.S. newspapers have failed to condemn the level of Israeli air strikes on civilian areas, and the infrastructure, in Lebanon, and in fact, cheered it on until recently. Leading liberal bloggers have also failed to take a stand against it. Now what will they do?

Sadly, it is in many ways already too late, since the extent of Israel's bombing has already turned Lebanon against it, killed hundreds of innocents, and crippled that country for years to come. Israel has not been defeated -- but self-defeated. Oh, did we mention, that recent air strikes produced oil slicks causing what is now being termed the worst environmental disaster in the region's history?

But back to Brooks, who in a July 16 column mocked those who claimed that Israel might be "overreacting." Now he not only comes out against a ceasefire but he wants to make sure that Hezbollah does not emerge "from this moment still strong." Yet he does not clearly suggest how this can be accomplished. An all-out Israeli invasion? That failed 20 years ago -- and, in fact, created Hezbollah. Harsher air strikes guaranteed to kill thousands more? That will work wonders for Israel's, and America's, image and influence in the region, for sure, not to mention further destroying Lebanon and its centrist government.

In fact, it was an air strike against this same Qana that led to an international uproar forcing Israel to end its operations then.

No, Brooks says nothing about this, but instead rips those idealists who want to stop the suffering but who refuse to consider "long-term considerations." In fact, it is others -- not Brooks, the Bush crowd and Israel's leadership -- who accurately warned of the dire long-range implications of the massive air strikes, now becoming obvious to (nearly) everyone. Hezbollah, condemned by most Arabs two weeks ago, now enjoys surging popularity. Those few Americans who predicted this, trying to restrain the air war, were the true friends of Israel and its longterm prospects, not Brooks.

But all this appears lost on our Mr. Brooks, who babbles: "Lebanon is a chance to show that the death cult is not invincible. ... To its enormous credit, the Bush administration has kept its focus on that core reality, and it has developed a strategy to reverse the momentum."

Then, after all that, he admits: "Yet, having spent a week on the phone with experts and policy makers, I'd be lying if I said that I was optimistic the strategy will work. The renovation of Lebanon will require scaffolding, and the fact is the scaffolding of the West is corroding at every joint.

"The U.S. lacks authority because of Iraq. Over the past few days, Israel has grown wary of getting into Lebanon, because it might have no help getting out."

In other words, Brooks in the end admits that all of his fulminating about a solution to the conflict is crippled by a U.S. war in Iraq -- which he always thought, and still thinks, was a swell idea, launched and managed by an administration he still showers with "enormous credit." A former New York Times columnist, Russell Baker, used to write like this -- but his columns were meant to be funny.

Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002914839

Thomas Kalinwski - Why David Brooks is full of crap

2006-07-28T15:31:00.000-07:00

Why David Brooks is full of crap
by Thomas Kalinowski (dailykos)
Thu Jul 27, 2006 at 12:31:25 PM PDT

Yes, it was all good clean fun taking David Brooks' lame anti-liberal rant and doing a search-and-replace to turn it into an anti-conservative rant, but my point (and I did have one) was, I think, a good one. To show you all just how good, I'm going to come right out and make it in as sober and serious a way as I can manage.

Brooks insisted that Lamont's challenge to Lieberman was part of a larger trend within the Democratic Party whereby zealous extremists were determined to take out moderate incumbents. You'll notice, though, that he didn't cite any other examples to support his thesis. The reason for that is simple: there are no other examples.

Look at Nebraska, where Democrat Ben Nelson is running for re-election. If the liberal wing of the Democratic Party was aiming to launch an ideological purge, Nelson would be first up on the firing line, because he is actually the most conservative Democrat in the Senate. But, surprise, surprise, Nelson isn't facing a liberal primary challenger. Or how about Delaware, where another conservative Democrat, Tom Carper, is also running for re-election? No liberal primary challenger there, either.

In short, David Brooks is full of crap. There is no general trend within the Democratic Party to purge conservatives. The challenge to Lieberman is specific to Lieberman. He's being challenged because he, personally, is out of touch with the people of Connecticut, and the people of Connecticut are sick of it.

Mind you, if there were a general ideological purge going on within the Democratic Party, Brooks would be right, and it would indeed be a sign that the Democratic Party is in deep, deep trouble. If some liberal group was sponsoring a liberal primary challenger to Ben Nelson, regardless of the fact that a liberal candidate would face certain defeat in the general election, that would be evidence of a serious dysfunction among liberals. It would be a sign that they do indeed value ideological purity above winning.

Which brings us to Lincoln Chafee.

Just as Ben Nelson is the Senate's most conservative Democrat, so Chafee is its most liberal Republican (though, incidentally, Nelson is still more liberal than Chafee). Like Nelson, Chafee is running for re-election this year. Unlike Nelson, Chafee is being challenged by a more conservative candidate, Steve Laffey, who is being sponsored by a conservative group, the Club for Growth, regardless of the fact that a conservative like Laffey would face certain defeat in the general election. The Club for Growth, along with Laffey's many supporters in Rhode Island, have made it clear that they value ideological purity above winning, and this is indeed evidence of a serious dysfunction among conservatives.

If David Brooks had wanted to write honestly about a group of extremists endangering their party by carrying out an ideological jihad against moderate incumbents, he could have done no better than to write about the Club for Growth and its campaign against Lincoln Chafee. But he didn't. Instead, he chose to write about an imaginary jihad by liberals against moderate Democrats.

And that's why David Brooks is full of crap.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/7/27/153125/163

Paul Glastris - Brooksian Math

2006-07-27T17:20:00.000-07:00

BROOKSIAN MATH...
Paul Glastris (Washington Monthly)

In his column today (sub. req.), David Brooks argues that increases in federal college aid have had no effect on college graduation rates, and that therefore Hillary Clinton and the DLC are foolish for proposing a big new college aid program.

Over the past three decades there has been a gigantic effort to increase the share of Americans who graduate from college. The federal government has spent roughly $750 billion on financial aid. Yet the percentage of Americans who graduate has barely budged. The number of Americans who drop out of college leaps from year to year.

If, like me, you read that column and had that familiar, infuriating feeling that Brooks is playing fast and loose with the numbers, you're right. Kevin Carey over at The Quick and the Ed explains:

There are two basic challenges to increasing the percentage of people who earn college degrees: getting more students to go to college, and getting more students to graduate once they get there. Brooks mixes and muddles these issues throughout the column, but as it happens he's got his facts wrong no matter how you look at it.

According to the U.S. Department of Education and the Census Bureau, the percent of high school graduates who immediately enrolled in college the fall after graduation increased from 49% in 1972 to 67% in 2004.

The percent of 25- to 29-year olds who completed at least some college increased from 36% to 57%.

The percent of 25- to 29-year olds who earned a bachelor's degree increased from 19% to 29%.

All of those numbers can and should be better. But it's foolish to say that the federal student aid money spent during that time did no good.

Guess Brooks is wearing his hack hat today.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_07/009246.php

Thomas Kalinowski - The Conservative Inquisition

2006-07-27T15:34:00.000-07:00

The Conservative Inquisition
by Thomas Kalinowski (dailykos)

Sun Jul 16, 2006 at 12:12:53 AM PDT

Sometimes history comes with previews. In the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War served as a precursor to the global conflict that was World War II. And in a smaller fashion, the primary battle playing out on the smiling lawns of upscale Rhode Island serves as a preview for the national conflict that will dominate American politics for the next two years.

This isn't a fight between left and right. It's a fight about how politics should be conducted. On the one hand are the true believers: the fundamentalists of both parties who believe that politics should be about party discipline, passion, purity, orthodoxy and clear choices. On the other side are the quasi-independents: the heterodox politicians who distrust ideological purity, who rebel against movement groupthink, who believe in bipartisanship both as a matter of principle and as a practical necessity.

In 2008, heterodox politicians like Mark Warner, Hillary Clinton and even Rudy Giuliani are going to have to face zealous assaults from within their own parties. But for the moment that war has come to Lincoln Chafee.

What's happening to Chafee can only be described as a conservative inquisition. Whether you agree with him or not, he is transparently the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men. But over the past few years he has been subjected to a vituperation campaign that only experts in moral manias and mob psychology are really fit to explain. I can't reproduce the typical assaults that have been directed at him over the Internet, because they are so laced with profanity and ugliness, but they are ginned up by ideological masseurs who salve their followers' psychic wounds by arousing their rage at objects of mutual hate.

Next has come the effort to expel Chafee from modern conservatism. In a dark parody of the old struggle between Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, the highly educated, highly affluent, highly Caucasian wing of the Republican Party has turned conservatism from a philosophy into a secular religion, and then sought to purge a battle-scarred warhorse on the grounds of insufficient moral purity.

So these days, for example, one hears that Chafee is a crypto-liberal, a latte-sipping Volvo owner. In reality, of course, this is a man who has been endorsed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He has a National Network for Youth rating of 0.

But a lifetime's record is deemed not to matter any longer. For in the midst of the inquisition all of American conservatism has been reduced to one issue, the war. Just as some edges of the pro-choice movement reduce all of liberalism to abortion, the upscale revivalists on the right reduce everything to Iraq, and all who are deemed impure must be cleansed away.

Chafee's opponent, Steve Laffey, has neither expertise in foreign affairs nor any specific knowledge of Iraq, and he has struggled to come up with a plan for what we should now do there. But that is not the point, for the opposition to Chafee is not about future actions or even politics as it is normally understood. It is about impurity, the scarlet letter, and the need to expunge those who have transgressed.

Conservative interest groups that seek practical goals, like the Republican Main Street Partnership, back Chafee. But the netroots now seek to purge what's left of the William Weld Republicans, and to eliminate those who have had contact with the evildoers in the other party, because movements are deemed to prosper to the extent they achieve holiness unmarred.

Steve Laffey is a strange vessel for all this passion. Based on interviews, he seems a genial if under-prepared politician who would be an innocuous presence in the Senate if he were elected to it.

The big story out of the campaign last week was the aggressiveness Chafee has finally brought to his side of the fight. Over the past few years, polarizers have dominated Congress because people who actually represent most Americans have been too timid or intellectually vacuous to stand up. Even today many Republicans who privately despise the netroots lie low, hoping the anger won't be directed at them.

But Chafee has had no choice but to fight, and he will probably prevail. If he doesn't, and if his opponents go from statewide victory in Rhode Island to a national primary assault in 2008, then I hope the Democrats will be smart enough to scoop up what is sure to come: yet another wave of disaffected Republicans looking for a political home.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/7/16/31253/5491

Deconstructing Brooks - the Neo-Con smear of Harry Reid

2005-11-03T10:45:00.000-08:00

Deconstructing Brooks - the Neo-Con smear of Harry Reid
by ellinton (dailykos)
11/3/05

Today, David Brooks maligns Sen. Harry Reid by childishly painting him as a paranoid nutcase who doesn’t understand that which all true Republicans (and their courtesans in the punditocracy) now perceive as a received truth: If a Democrat ever claimed that Saddam Hussein had WMD’s, then the Bush administration couldn’t have fixed the intelligence in making their case for the Iraqi War.

How dare Reid demand that we investigate how the administration used – or misused – intelligence in the run up to the war! He must be crazy; for that matter, Pat Roberts must be as well! After all, Roberts promised his Intelligence Committee would look into this after the 2004 elections – doesn’t he understand that the point is moot because Bill Clinton once said Saddam had WMD?

Of course, it’s lost on Brooks that Clinton said this in 1998, in the run-up to a military action Brooks has apparently never heard of: Operation Desert Fox. An operation that actually succeeded in containing Saddam and didn’t cost one American life. But you wouldn’t know that from reading Brooks – nor would you know the context in which his cherry-picked statements from Democrats are presented. So let’s put David to the test:

Do the quotes from Democrats he cobbled together let Bush off the hook for going to war over WMD’s?

Let’s start with Clinton – Brooks quotes him as saying:

Reid now knows that as far back as 1998, Karl Rove was beaming microwaves into Bill Clinton's fillings to get him to exaggerate the intelligence on Iraq. In that year, Clinton argued, "Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions ... and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons."

Here’s the original quote, from February 17, 1998, in context:

It is obvious that there is an attempt here, based on the whole history of this operation since 1991, to protect whatever remains of his capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, the missiles to deliver them, and the feed stocks necessary to produce them.

The UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons.

Now, against that background, let us remember the past here. It is against that background that we have repeatedly and unambiguously made clear our preference for a diplomatic solution.

The inspection system works. The inspection system has worked in the face of lies, stonewalling, obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. The people who have done that work deserve the thanks of civilized people throughout the world.

It has worked. That is all we want. And if we can find a diplomatic way to do what has to be done, to do what he promised to do at the end of the Gulf War, to do what should have been done within 15 days within 15 days of the agreement at the end of the Gulf War, if we can find a diplomatic way to do that, that is by far our preference.

But to be a genuine solution, and not simply one that glosses over the remaining problem, a diplomatic solution must include or meet a clear, immutable, reasonable, simple standard.

Iraq must agree and soon, to free, full, unfettered access to these sites anywhere in the country. There can be no dilution or diminishment of the integrity of the inspection system that UNSCOM has put in place.

First, let’s again acknowledge that this quote is from 1998 – BEFORE Desert Fox crippled Saddam’s WMD capabilities. This makes this statement IRRELEVENT to the Bush case for war that started in 2002.

Further, Clinton specifically called for international inspections with “…free, full, and unfettered access…” Only in the mind of David Brooks can this quote be misconstrued as supporting the Bush case for war.

Unfortunately, three other quotes Brooks cites – those of Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, and Sandy Berger – are also presented in the same mendacious fashion. Brooks won’t come clean with his readers about the context of these statements: they were made before Desert Fox, they were made in support of a limited military action, and they had NOTHING to do with the case Bush made for the current war.

Not to fear, however: Brooks also quotes former Clinton officials who opined during the Bush administration. Here, for example, is Brooks’ remix of Richard Einhorn:

This is why in 2001, a Clinton assistant secretary of state, Robert Einhorn, said at a Congressional hearing, "Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors."

But here’s what Einhorn said about inspections in the SAME testimony:

There are steps we can take now to address the Iraqi WMD threat. We can put in place smarter sanctions that can help shore up international support for retaining restrictions on sensitive Iraqi imports. We can seek to minimize illicit Iraqi oil revenues, urge tighter monitoring of trade at Iraq’s borders, press supplier governments to adopt more rigorous scrutiny and control over exports to Iraq, and work with other governments to interdict sensitive cargoes headed to Iraq when we receive information about such shipments. And if Iraq agrees to admit U.N. inspectors on terms provided for in existing Security Council resolutions, we can give our full support to that resumed verification effort, while stressing to the other P-5 members the need to be resolute and unified in the face of any Iraqi failure to provide full cooperation.

Yes, Einhorn was for “regime change,” but he was also for inspections. And, to speak directly to Brooks’ argument, does Einhorn believe that there are grounds for the investigation of the failure/fixing of intelligence?

Einhorn believes that the most basic intelligence assumptions on Iraq were misguided. 'In retrospect it did not really make sense for Iraq to hold on to large stocks of WMD over a decade to obsolescing junk, when it could meet the letter of the law required by UN resolutions, have sanctions lifted, and covertly develop what you might call a just-in-time WMD capability.

'I am talking about missiles just below the nominal range permitted that could be upgraded quickly, and dual-use facilities that could quickly be turned into a capability for producing chemical and biological weapons.

'What is so remarkable is that it became very quickly apparent in the post-war interviews with scientists and other officials, that no one even admitted that even plans such as those existed.

'In our intelligence community there was simply not a lot of incentive to second-guess the casual assumptions of a decade about Iraq. No one was asked to offer alternative explanations for what they were seeing... to second-guess what had become conventional wisdom.'

Does this sound like a man who doesn’t think the second phase of the Intelligence Committee’s investigation is needed?

Brooks also quotes Kenneth Pollack, he of the now (in)famous The Gathering Storm, a tome that neo-cons used to make the case for war with Iraq:

This is why the Clinton National Security Council staffer Kenneth Pollack has written, "The U.S. Intelligence Community's belief toward the end of the Clinton administration [was] that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons.

Wow, sounds bad. Pollack couldn’t possibly think now that the Bush administration was fixing the intelligence – could he (January 8, 2004)?

And on the political side, there's no question that there were some Bush administration officials who played fast and loose with the intelligence of weapons of mass destruction, who took what, it turns out to have been, exaggerated estimates from the intelligence community and then further embellished on them when they were presenting the case in public.

Nice try, David – even Pollack demonstrates that there is a justification for Reid’s call to finish what the Intelligence Committee only started. Brooks’ smoking gun, however, must be this quote from the neo-con’s favorite whipping boy, Al Gore:

This is why in 2002 Al Gore declared that Saddam Hussein "has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."

Again, here’s the full quote, in context:

Moreover, if we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth rate military of Iraq and then quickly abandon that nation as President Bush has abandoned Afghanistan after quickly defeating a fifth rate military there, the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam. We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

We have no evidence, however, that he has shared any of those weapons with terrorist group(s). However, if Iraq came to resemble Afghanistan - with no central authority but instead local and regional warlords with porous borders and infiltrating members of Al Qaeda than these widely dispersed supplies of weapons of mass destruction might well come into the hands of terrorist groups.

If we end the war in Iraq, the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we could easily be worse off than we are today. When Secretary Rumsfield was asked recently about what our responsibility for restabilizing Iraq would be in an aftermath of an invasion, he said, "that's for the Iraqis to come together and decide.

Gore was DIRECTLY contracting the claim the administration was making at the time – that Saddam was sharing his WMD’s with terrorists. But somehow this quote proves Harry Reid is off his rocker.

Brooks’ article is just the latest iteration of a neo-con fiction that the right is desperately trying to sell the American public: “The Democrats supported the war, because they thought Saddam had WMD’s as well – and they had the same access to the same intelligence that the Bush Administration did.”

Let me use Brooks’ own technique against him – here’s Kenneth Pollack again:

The President is responsible for serving the entire nation… Only the Administration has access to all the information available to various agencies of the US government – and withholding or downplaying some of that information for its own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility.

David, Harry Reid does not “sit(s) alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m.”

Harry Reid stands and leads a party that will not put politics above national security.

Harry Reid will not accept the fictions perpetrated by the neo-cons regarding the run-up to this war – fictions sold primarily through the pages of YOUR OWN NEWSPAPER.

Harry Reid stands and demands that the loss of over 2000 American lives be explained.

Harry Reid stands with millions of us who want the truth.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/3/105653/307

David Brooks is like school on a Sunday

2005-10-25T12:48:00.000-07:00

David Brooks is like school on a Sunday: no class awareness
by jbeach (dailykos)
Tue Oct 25, 2005 at 12:22:03 PM PDT

I haven't read Brooks since the Times started charging. Why pay to feel pain? But I came across Media Matters taking his most recent article apart, and it was so concisely illuminating, I just had to share.

They quote Brooks:

"In part because of Bush's shift, the G.O.P. has become the party of the middle class. Bush beat Kerry among whites earning between $30,000 and $75,000 a year by 22 percentage points."

Can you notice the conflation there? It's pretty slick. Look at it for a sec, then read below the flip. I just want to see if you see it just the same way I do.

Here's the article:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200510250001

What Brooks does is, in this 2-sentence statement, is automatically equate the Middle Class with Middle Class WHITES.

And the way that step is made so slickly, in one sentence, is that element of Brooks writing, that makes me think that he's a bit more than merely an awful thinker.

It takes that step into slick propaganda. Have the reader in what he thinks is familiar, comforting territory, and slip in a change-up. A false conflation, a false comparison, that seems to follow emotionally while it does not at all follow logically.

I mean, we always see the middle-class in movies and TV as being white. So it's already well set up, to pull that sleight-of-hand.

I'm still not fully decided on whether Brooks conflates, muddles and distracts things like this fully consciously, or in Orwell-style 'doublethink'. In the latter, the only way that Brooks can support the pseudo-logic of the GOP/conservatives and make it sound lucid, is to himself think and write in a pseudo-logical fashion.

But when he does it, which is most of the time, it's done with such polish that I'm finding it increasingly likely that he's a fully aware propagandist.

This means that he's lying to himself in some other area; has some other conscience-distracting subterfuge whereby he's lying for a greater good. And anyway it's no big deal. And anyway, he's got to make a living. Etc. etc.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/25/15223/728

Stop The Presses: Brooks Lies Again

2005-05-08T09:15:00.000-07:00

Stop The Presses: Brooks Lies Again
by Armando (dailykos)
Sat May 7th, 2005 at 17:00:18 PDT

Boy oh boy, David Brooks really is incapable of telling the truth. Now he lies by the hundreds of billions. He makes the presposterous claim that the Bush Social Security plan is, in fact, a call to share the pain:

Over this time, Democrats have been hectoring President Bush in the manner of an overripe Fourth of July orator. The president should be summoning us to make shared sacrifices for the common good. The president should care for the poor, and stop favoring the rich. He should make the hard choices and impose a little fiscal discipline on government.

Sometimes you had to walk through Democratic precincts in a gas mask, the lofty rhetoric was so thick. But now we have definitive proof that they didn't mean it. It was all hokum.

Over the past few weeks, the president has called their bluff. By embracing the progressive indexing of Social Security benefits, the president has asked us to make a shared sacrifice for the common good. He's asking middle- and upper-class folks to accept benefit cuts so there will be money for the people who are really facing poverty.

He has asked us to redistribute money down the income scale. Why should programs for children and families be strangled so Donald Trump can get bigger benefit checks?

Shared sacrifice? What a liar. Let me remind you of that Brooks wants folks to forget, Bush's tax giveaways to the rich:

The Estate Tax:

The House voted 272 to 162 yesterday to permanently repeal the estate tax, throwing the issue to the Senate where negotiations have begun on a deep and permanent estate tax cut that can pass this year, even if it falls short of full repeal.

The House vote pitted repeal proponents, who held that a tax on inheritances is fundamentally unfair, against Democrats, who questioned how Congress could support a tax cut largely for the affluent that would cost $290 billion over 10 years, in the face of record budget deficits.

Income Tax Cuts:

The tax plan approved by Congress on May 26, 2001 preserves the high-income tax cuts proposed by George W. Bush, but adds enough new tax breaks to make the final bill 20 percent more costly that the original Bush plan.

A distributional analysis released by Citizens for Tax Justice shows that when the tax plan is fully phased in:

* The typical tax cut for the median income taxpayer will be $600 a year.

* For the 78 million taxpayers in the lowest 60 percent of the income scale, the tax cut will average $347 a year.

* In contrast, at the top of the income scale the average tax cut will be $53,000 annually--virtually identical to the $54,000 annual tax cut proposed by the President.

"Congress has given the President what he truly cared about--gigantic tax cuts for the rich," said Robert S. McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. "But Congress reneged on its promise to honor fiscal responsibility. Instead of a tax cut one-quarter less in size than the President's plan, Congress actually increased the fully-phased-in cost of the tax cuts by a fifth."

Brooks mentions Donald Trump's Social Security benefits. The thing is since Trump is in the top 1% of income earners, a group whose taxes Bush has cut by 24%, it is not clear what pain Brooks thinks Bush has imposed on Trump. Handing Trump and Paris Hilton millions of dollars is not exactly a normal person's idea of imposing pain.

But for a liar like Brooks, the truth no longer has a chance.

Update [2005-5-7 21:14:8 by Armando]: For those who want to debate the "merits" of Brooks' non-analysis of Bush's SS plan, DeLong references Krugman. I'll stick to Brooks' Big Lie of Bush as Robin Hood.

Comprehending the Lower Classes

2005-05-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

Comprehending the Lower Classes
by Hunter (dailykos)
Wed May 4th, 2005 at 16:55:44 PDT

Tom Tomorrow, speaking about John Tierney's latest column (you know, the one that patiently tries to explain to Democrats that they just don't understand red state, i.e. "Real" Americans, because red state Americans love a good joke about horse masturbation), gets it exactly right:

Of course, Tierney and Brooks aren't really writing about red states and blue states. They're writing about the assumptions about red states and blue states which seem prevalent at the cocktail parties they attend, the dinners they go to. This isn't about liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans--it's about the elites trying to comprehend the lower classes, spinning out competing fantasies at those cocktail parties and on the op-ed pages of major newspapers: you don't understand real Americans like I do! And in a way, it's true--you'll never understand someone else's fantasies as well as they do...

Absolutely, 100% right. Tom has pegged, here, exactly the reason these little Brooksian essays are so maddening to read, every single time. Brooks, Tierney, et al take a bizarre and unabashedly elitist view of America, in which they incessantly examine the normal, mainstream, middle-class that makes up most of the country as if it were a paleontological specimen before pronouncing, after ten or twenty minutes of deep thought, that their most recent primitive discovery indeed has opposable thumbs, listens to music, or prefers lemon scented dishwashing soap.

They write about mainstream America, and they write about mainstream America from the view of top-tier editorial newspaper columnists sitting in the very midst of the political powerbroker class, every one invited to the correct parties and appearing regularly on the same small set of television shows, and they tell us patiently that their view from this distant closed-circuit perch is much, much more illuminating than the view from our own cars and sidewalks and porches. Because we, living in that mainstream America, don't understand.

Of course, Tom's right about the second half of that, too. These incessant columns aren't directed at any of us, at all; they're directed at the other cocktail-party pundits opining on the exact same fuzzy images of what middle-class life must be like, an unending parlor game of theorizing and counter-theorizing about those odd little people that do not have columns in major newspapers or attend dinners with Colin Powell.

Ugh.

David Brooks Opposes Frist's Nuclear Option

2005-05-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

David Brooks Opposes Frist's Nuclear Option
by Armando (dailykos)
Thu May 5th, 2005 at 08:25:24 PDT

In a revolting display of ignorance, mendacity and distortion, David Brooks tops even himself, all while coming out, in a whisper, against Frist's nuclear option.

The title I chose here does to Brooks' column what Brooks has done to Lincoln's views on religion and government. From the column:

Abraham Lincoln gathered his cabinet to tell them he was going to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He said he had made a solemn vow to the Almighty that if God gave him victory at Antietam, Lincoln would issue the decree. Lincoln's colleagues were stunned. They were not used to his basing policy on promises made to the Lord. They asked him to repeat what he'd just said. Lincoln conceded that "this might seem strange," but "God had decided the question in favor of the slaves."

I like to think about this episode when I hear militant secularists argue that faith should be kept out of politics. Like Martin Luther King Jr. a century later, Lincoln seemed to understand that epochal decisions are rarely made in a secular frame of mind. When great leaders make daring leaps, they often feel themselves surrendering to Divine Providence, and their strength flows from their faith that they are acting in accordance with transcendent moral truth.

And I also think back on Lincoln at moments like these, when other boundaries between church and state are a matter of hot dispute. Lincoln is apt, because this emancipation moment was actually exceptional. Lincoln was neither a scoffer nor a guy who could talk directly to God. Instead, he wrestled with faith, longing to be more religious, but never getting there.

Today, a lot of us are stuck in Lincoln's land. We reject the bland relativism of the militant secularists. We reject the smug ignorance of, say, a Robert Kuttner, who recently argued that the culture war is a contest between enlightened reason and dogmatic absolutism. But neither can we share the conviction of the orthodox believers, like the new pope, who find maximum freedom in obedience to eternal truth. We're a little nervous about the perfectionism that often infects evangelical politics, the rush to crash through procedural checks and balances in order to reach the point of maximum moral correctness.

What drivel. Did Brooks ever ask himself why, in his word, the Cabinet was "stunned"? Perhaps it would have helped if Brooks had explained that:

Though Lincoln frequently attended New York Avenue Presbyterian Church while in the White House, and while he was respectful of the churches and shaped by the biblical message they transmitted, he kept some distance from their doings. He was the only president known never to have joined the church. Through much of his life, he therefore was haunted by charges of the pious...that the Illinoisan was really an infidel.

As for the Emancipation Proclamation, Brooks simply distorts beyond recognition. The time of the issuance of the proclamation was the only thing in doubt by July 1862:

Lincoln had already drafted what he termed his "Preliminary Proclamation." He read his initial draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to Secretaries William H. Seward and Gideon Welles on July 13, 1862. For a moment, both Secretaries were speechless. Quickly collecting his thoughts, Seward said something about anarchy in the South and possible foreign intervention, but with Welles apparently too confused to respond, Lincoln let the matter drop.

Nine days later, on July 22, Lincoln raised the issue in a regularly scheduled Cabinet meeting. The reaction was mixed. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, correctly interpreting the Proclamation as a military measure designed both to deprive the Confederacy of slave labor and bring additional men into the Union Army, advocated its immediate release. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase was equally supportive, but Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster General, foresaw defeat in the fall elections. Attorney General Edward Bates, a conservative, opposed civil and political equality for Blacks but gave his qualified support. Fortunately, President Lincoln only wanted the advice of his Cabinet on the style of the Proclamation, not its substance. The course was set.

And Brooks, as is his wont, slyly tries to juxtapose the abolitionist movement of the antebellum period with the antiabortion movement of today. More Dred Scott talk. Does he mention Dred Scott or Roe? Of course not, that would be too honest an approach for this dissembler. But his allusion is all too apparent.

The rankest lie Brooks perpetrates is his couching of the dispute over Frist's nuclear option as one pitting "militant secularists" against the devout. This is a foul lie. It is no such thing. While the question of religion in government is part of the dispute, it is the extreme Religious Right of Dobson and Robertson that declares this a war of faith.

The fact is few on the Left demand the expunging of religion from the public square. What MOST oppose is the imposition of religion on ALL in the public square. Not to mention the fact that it is the attempt to impose CERTAIN religions, while excluding most others, that is truly opposed. To invoke Lincoln for this type of foul lie would be hilarious were it not so insidious. Because Lincoln himself was the target of such attacks:

When, in the summer of 1846, Abraham Lincoln stood for election to the U.S. House of Representatives, running as a Whig in the Seventh Congressional District of Illinois, his opponent was the popular and formidable Methodist circuit rider, Peter Cartwright. During the final days of the campaign, Lincoln discovered that the Democrats were slyly circulating defamatory charges that he was "an open scoffer at Christianity." His private disclaimers failing to stop the smears, Lincoln arranged for the publication of a handbill setting out his religious position. "That I am not a member of any Christian Church is true," he wrote, "but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular." Following his comfortable victory on August 3, Lincoln asked the editor of the Illinois Gazette to publish the text of the handbill as a means of laying Cartwright's claims firmly and finally to rest.

For those seeking to piece into a coherent whole the elements of Lincoln's religious faith, this episode has obvious value. Though the handbill falls far short of a full credal statement, it does provide a unique public expression of the private religious views of a man who was otherwise unyielding in his conviction that they should remain private.

Oh, and on the nuclear option, Brooks write this in the last part of his piece:

Another is that while the evangelical tradition is deeply consistent with the American creed, sometimes evangelical causes can overflow the banks defined by our founding documents. I believe the social conservatives' attempt to end the judicial filibuster is one of these cases.

Oh my what a "reasonable" man Brooks is.

Brooks Lies Again and Again

2005-04-21T06:03:00.000-07:00

Daily Kos :: Brooks Lies Again and Again
"Brooks Lies Again and Again
by Armando (www.dailykos.com)

Wed Apr 20th, 2005 at 22:01:37 PDT

It is now pathological. The man is incapable of telling the truth. David Brooks lies in every column he writes. He brings to mind Mary McCarthy's famous remark concerning Lillian Hellman - "every word she writes is a lie - including 'and' and 'the.'"

Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit, but only a bit. Why? Because the central thesis of virtually every David Brooks column is a lie.

Tomorrow's lie is this:

Every few years another civilizing custom is breached. Over the past four years Democrats have resorted to the filibuster again and again to prevent votes on judicial nominees they oppose. Up until now, minorities have generally not used the filibuster to defeat nominees that have majority support. They have allowed nominees to have an up or down vote. But this tradition has been washed away.

This is a bald faced fucking lie. And Brooks knows it. A deliberate lie. One of many. The fact is that the Senate never required the actual invocation of the filibuster very often precisely because Senators could stop a nomination, either secretly in committee, or before the nomination was brought to a vote. Brooks knows this. Fucking liar.

Why does Brooks lie? Here's why:

Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.

He wants the right to choose stripped away from women. Read this bullshit:

When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.

Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.

Liar. Fucking liar. The Roe decision, while not well reasoned, is a natural and correct progression from the general acceptance of the right to privacy first proposed by the great Justice Louis Brandeis in dissent. Brandeis' views won the day over time. Griswold expanded privacy rights to the right to contraception. Roe was the proper and natural extension of this right, even though Blackmun wrote a pretty crappy opinion.

The right to choose of course extends to women's control of their bodies. There is a principled opposition to Roe - that a fetus has rights that outweigh the privacy rights of women. But the question remains a judicial and Constitutional one. This is not an example of judicial activism.

Why? Because a fetus is not, and never has been, under law, a person with cognizable rights. When people say "abortion is murder" they are expressing personal moral views. But the law has never said this. Even when abortions were illegal, it was not because abortions were deemed murder, rather that the Constitutional right to privacy, to choose, was not yet recognized by the Supreme Court.

The Roe Court did not reach out to decide this issue - a case was filed. Courts weighed the arguments. A decision was reached. The correct one in my opinion, both as policy AND as a question of Constitutional law.

Brooks proposes that the Court should have abdicated its duty. Understand what he is saying. The Supreme Court should NOT decide Constitutional questions properly presented before it. This idea is as dangerous, as illegitimate, as lawless, as the Schiavo travesty and all of Delay's shenanigans.

Brooks is an unscrupulous, lying, shameless shill. He disgusts me."
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/21/05646/6888

I'm Not Like Them. Really.

2005-04-07T16:49:00.000-07:00

From Digby http://digbysblog.blogspot.com

I'm Not Like Them. Really.

Perhaps I'm unduly cynical, but I simply cannot take this David Brooks column seriously. Brad Plumer and Mark Schmittt seem to think that he's really on to something, while Matt Yglesias takes issue with it. I think it's just the usual GOP projection bullshit combined with a little CYA sleight of hand.

I don't think it's wrong to say that Democrats should embrace the big ideas. I think we've all agreed that our approach has been a bit too long on programmatic details and a bit too short on the vision thing. But the mere idea that the Republicans derive their strength from diversity just cracks me up. Yeah. And FoxNews is fair and balanced. Tipsy disagreements at cocktail parties don't count as diversity.

Brooks says that Republicans are strong because they argue all the time amongst themselves in a congenial way and everybody is open minded and understanding that they can't have everything they want. It's one big philosphy seminar over there in GOPland. Liberals, on the other hand, are so obsessed with our ever expanding list of big complicated government programs that we haven't given a moment's thought to the kind of big thinking that evidently goes on among cosmopolitan Republican intellectuals who represent all those heartland values we are supposed to revere.

Why, he asked the unnamed head of a big liberal think tank who his favorite philospher was and he never called him back with the answer. Imagine that. (And here I thought we all knew that the only appropriate response to that question was "Christ --- he changed mah heart.")

Brooks says that we should emulate the right's unruly but friendly fractiousness and spend more time arguing philosophy. He says that's what they did when they were completely out of power and it's shown to be very healthy for their big happy tentful of civilized individualists. This entire discussion about media infrastructure and message discipline is wrong because that is not where the real strength of the right's political dominance lies.

The rule of thumb for all Republicans giving advice to Democrats on op-ed pages is to assume the opposite. This means that message discipline and the right's media infrastructure is exactly where the strength of the right's political dominance lies. And I would argue that regardless of the friendly philosophy seminars in the break room at NR or The Weakly Standard, their governing philosophy can quite easily be summed up as a strong belief in no taxes on wealth, laissez faire capitalism, coercive Christianity and a huge police/military infrastructure. There are only a couple of philosophers who lead you in that direction, and it's a place that I don't think America knows it's going.

He further says that we have a hard time understanding the big philosophical ideas because liberal theorists are so "influenced by post-modernism, multiculturalism, relativism, value pluralism and all the other influences that dissuade one from relying heavily on dead white guys."

This means that we are on the right track because understanding post-modernism, relativism and the rest is the single most important key to understanding how the right is operating right now. Any party that can win the presidency by saying that hand counting uncounted votes is inherently unreliable compared to the machines that failed to count the votes in the first place cannot be said to be a party that doesn't understand relativism. Michel Fouccault is a much better guide to modern politics in the radical Republican era than John Dewey could ever be. We should be dragging all those ivory tower Derrida-ites out of the classrooms and hiring them at think tanks to deconstruct Republican rhetoric. (In fact, the most valuable person in the Democratic party may be Michael Berube.)

It's funny, the last I heard liberals were elitists for being a bunch of pointy headed intellectuals who spent too much time watching PBS and not enough time burning rubber and eating at Red Lobster. There was no end to the lectures telling us that we libs were out of touch with everyday real Americans and we should take our heads out of our nancy-boy literchur and open up the Bible for some real inspiration. And now Brooks says we should be holding a non-stop series of undergrad rap sessions. Man, it's so hard to know what we should do to be more like Republicans. My head is spinning.

Brooks says that we should embrace disunity. Like the Republicans have. He must be talking about stuff like this:

Conservative leaders across the country are working now to make sure that any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay," he said."

I think that is what's at work here. Brooks has been recently embarrassed by his GOP cronies in a number of ways and now he is trying to excuse his affiliation with them by saying that the Republican party is one big bunch of iconclastic thinkers so don't even try to say that he's like them. But hey, you hang around with mangy dogs you get it too. He's one of them whether he likes it or not.

Update: Jonathan Chait says:

If you look at the major organs of conservative opinion, you'd start with the Standard and National Review, add in The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and probably include columnists like Brooks, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Robert Novak. You could toss in The Washington Times editorial page and, arguably, talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Depending on your definition, you could add or subtract from this group and have a good sense of all the opinion outlets that wield any significant influence over the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

So, what major issues do these conservative intellectuals disagree on? They all supported the Iraq war, with the exception of Novak, who has tellingly muted his criticism. They all supported every one of Bush's tax cuts and Social Security privatization. They all clucked their tongues at Bush's Medicare drug benefit but, like the White House, have refused to recognize any connection between the deficit and Bush's tax cuts. They all passionately supported Bush's judicial nominees. They all basically endorse Karl Rove's political strategy. They all see Bush as a towering Churchillian figure of compassion, wisdom, vision, homespun virtue, and basic decency.

Basically, these organs agree on everything--certainly every major political issue of the last five years. Even if you follow Brooks's bizarre definition and include Reason and The American Conservative, you'll get some dissent on judicial nominations and the war and a less worshipful view of Bush as a man. But you'll still have basic agreement on all the major domestic policy questions.

[...]

Brooks insists, "Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly." In fact, on every important debate of his presidency, Bush has enjoyed a solid phalanx of conservative pundits all repeating the same talking points on his behalf. It's a successful arrangement. It also worked for the Comintern, for a while. I'm sure the communist intellectuals who relentlessly backed Moscow's every move liked to flatter themselves by insisting they were a bunch of squabbling freethinkers, too.

And Ezra adds:

...where's the refusal to face up to big disagreements and ideas? For that matter, what serious factions are missing and therefore leaving converts no place to join up? Is there no DLC, no MoveOn, no place for liberals and greens and law-and-order types and moderates? Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't Marc Cooper and Al From pledge allegiance to the same ticket every four years, but spend the intervening periods screaming at each other?

[...]

In recent months, various folks -- notably Mike Tomasky -- have called for liberals to learn or relearn their history, to understand their evolution. They're right to do so. But they've been joined and, in some cases, mixed up with the David Brooks and Jonah Goldbergs of the world, conserva-scolds who wear their semi-functional knowledge of Hayek and Hobbes on their sleeves, all the better to allude to the moral and intellectual grounding they've got that progressives don't. It's ridiculous, and we shouldn't buy into it. Knowing our history is critical to understanding the genesis and thus root causes of contemporary problems, but that imperative shouldn't be expanded to transform politics into a game of trivial pursuit. If philosophers aid your understanding of your values, fine, great, I suggest you read them. But no Republican needs to know Burke's views on the French Revolution in order to comprehend his movement and no liberal needs to rattle off philosophers to conservative columnists in order to have her beliefs judged legitimate.

Read thewhole thing. It sizzles.

Mr. McBobo T-shirt, etc.

2005-03-17T10:45:00.000-08:00

You used to be able to order merchandise mocking "Mr. McBobo, The Intellectually Near-sighted Pundit" . Now that's gone, but you can see the graphic here:

Yep, that's our boy.

Timothy Noah - David Brooks, Huckster

2004-11-10T06:13:00.000-08:00

From Slate
chatterbox

David Brooks, Huckster
I got my royalties through the New York Times!

By Timothy Noah

Posted Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, at 8:01 PM PT

I'm usually not one to begrudge an author the opportunity to hawk his newest book, but David Brooks' shameless hucksterism in his New York Times column today on behalf of On Paradise Drive carries things too far. Brooks doesn't merely plug his book; he suggests that its weak sales help explain why the Democrats lost the presidential election. "I could never get my parts of blue America really curious about exurban culture," Brooks sighs, so is it any wonder that red-teamer Karl Rove walked off with the exurbs instead of blue-teamer John Kerry? The poor fool!

Brooks is attempting a relaunch. He describes On Paradise Drive as a book about the exurbs, which it isn't really. It's really a book about … well, to tell you the truth, many reviewers (including me) had difficulty figuring out what On Paradise Drive was about, which, I think, is the real reason it failed to make as big a splash as his earlier Bobos in Paradise. Mainly, I suspect, On Paradise Drive was about repackaging a few weakly connected magazine pieces (some of which were about exurbia). Now, I gather, On Paradise Drive is about cashing in on the 2004 election.

Brooks doesn't actually write, "If you read one book this year, read On Paradise Drive." Instead, he berates himself for failing to "adequately describe the oxymoronic attraction these places have for millions of people." On the one hand, they're conformist and orderly. On the other hand, they're the wild, wooly frontier. O speak, Muse!

But Brooks' modesty sounds false to me. He tips his hand when he complains that blue America just wasn't ready to part with a half-century of stereotyping. Movies from "The Graduate" to "American Beauty" have reinforced the idea that the suburbs are bland, materialistic, ticky-tacky boxes in a hillside where people are conformist on the outside and hollow within. The stereotype is absurd, but it closes off fresh thinking.

And whose fresh thinking might that be?

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

David Brooks - The Values-Vote Myth

2004-11-09T13:27:00.000-08:00

November 6, 2004

The Values-Vote Myth

By DAVID BROOKS

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top.
This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong.

Here are the facts. As Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center points out, there was no disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year.

Evangelicals made up the same share of the electorate this year as they did in 2000. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who are pro-life. Sixteen percent of voters said abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who say they pray daily.
It's true that Bush did get a few more evangelicals to vote Republican, but Kohut, whose final poll nailed the election result dead-on, reminds us that public opinion on gay issues over all has been moving leftward over the years. Majorities oppose gay marriage, but in the exit polls Tuesday, 25 percent of the voters supported gay marriage and 35 percent of voters supported civil unions. There is a big middle on gay rights issues, as there is on most social issues.
Much of the misinterpretation of this election derives from a poorly worded question in the exit polls. When asked about the issue that most influenced their vote, voters were given the option of saying "moral values." But that phrase can mean anything - or nothing. Who doesn't vote on moral values? If you ask an inept question, you get a misleading result.

The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president. Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's hardly the Bible Belt. Bush, on the other hand, did not gain significantly in the 11 states with gay marriage referendums.

He won because 53 percent of voters approved of his performance as president. Fifty-eight percent of them trust Bush to fight terrorism. They had roughly equal confidence in Bush and Kerry to handle the economy. Most approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq. Most see it as part of the war on terror.
The fact is that if you think we are safer now, you probably voted for Bush. If you think we are less safe, you probably voted for Kerry. That's policy, not fundamentalism. The upsurge in voters was an upsurge of people with conservative policy views, whether they are religious or not.

The red and blue maps that have been popping up in the papers again this week are certainly striking, but they conceal as much as they reveal. I've spent the past four years traveling to 36 states and writing millions of words trying to understand this values divide, and I can tell you there is no one explanation. It's ridiculous to say, as some liberals have this week, that we are perpetually refighting the Scopes trial, with the metro forces of enlightenment and reason arrayed against the retro forces of dogma and reaction.

In the first place, there is an immense diversity of opinion within regions, towns and families. Second, the values divide is a complex layering of conflicting views about faith, leadership, individualism, American exceptionalism, suburbia, Wal-Mart, decorum, economic opportunity, natural law, manliness, bourgeois virtues and a zillion other issues.

But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Bush. If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are?

What we are seeing is a diverse but stable Republican coalition gradually eclipsing a diverse and stable Democratic coalition. Social issues are important, but they don't come close to telling the whole story. Some of the liberal reaction reminds me of a phrase I came across recently: The rage of the drowning man.

David Brooks - Take a Ride to Exurbia

2004-11-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

November 9, 2004

Take a Ride to Exurbia

By DAVID BROOKS

Orlando, Fla.

About six months ago I came out with a book on the booming exurbs - places like the I-4 corridor in central Florida and Henderson, Nev. These are the places where George Bush racked up the amazing vote totals that allowed him to retain the presidency.

My book started with Witold Rybczynski's observation that America's population is decentralizing faster than any other society's in history. People in established suburbs are moving out to vast sprawling exurbs that have broken free of the gravitational pull of the cities and now exist in their own world far beyond.

Ninety percent of the office space built in America in the 1990's was built in suburbia, usually in low office parks along the interstates. Now you have a tribe of people who not only don't work in cities, they don't commute to cities or go to the movies in cities or have any contact with urban life. You have these huge, sprawling communities with no center. Mesa, Ariz., for example, has more people than St. Louis or Minneapolis.

In my book I tried to describe the culture in these places - the office parks, the big-box malls, the travel teams and the immigrant enclaves. But when it came to marketing the book, I failed in two important ways.

I couldn't figure out how to tell the people in exurbia that I had written a book about them. Here I was writing about places like Loudoun County, Va., and Polk County, Fla., but my book tour took me to places like downtown Philadelphia, downtown Seattle and the Upper West Side. The places I was writing about are so new, and civic life is as yet so spare, there are few lecture series or big libraries to host author talks. The normal publishing infrastructure is missing.

I was about to give a reading in Berkeley when I asked a few of the bookstore employees if they sold many copies of Rick Warren's book, "The Purpose-Driven Life." They weren't familiar with the book, even though it has sold millions and millions of copies. I realized there are two conversations in this country. I was in the establishment conversation, but somehow I needed to get into the Rick Warren conversation and I could never find a way.

That's why I'm so impressed by Karl Rove. As a group of Times reporters demonstrated in Sunday's paper, the Republicans achieved huge turnout gains in exurbs like the ones in central Florida. The Republicans permeated those communities, and spread their message.

My second failure is that I could never get my parts of blue America really curious about exurban culture. There were exceptions. For example, when Al From of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council learned what I was writing about, he was right on it, inviting me to speak to Democratic groups to describe the importance of the exurbs. He knew how vital they would be.

But I couldn't get most of the people I spoke to really fascinated, even in an anthropological sense, by these new places. That's in part because I was struggling against a half-century of stereotyping. Movies from "The Graduate" to "American Beauty" have reinforced the idea that the suburbs are bland, materialistic, ticky-tacky boxes in a hillside where people are conformist on the outside and hollow within. The stereotype is absurd, but it closes off fresh thinking.

The other problem I had is that I didn't adequately describe the oxymoronic attraction these places have for millions of people. On the one hand, people move to exurbs because they want some order in their lives. They leave places with arduous commutes, backbreaking mortgages, broken families and stressed social structures and they head for towns with ample living space, intact families, child-friendly public culture and intensely enforced social equality. That's bourgeois.

On the other hand, they are taking a daring leap into the unknown, moving to towns that have barely been built, working often in high-tech office parks doing pioneering work in biotech and nanotechnology. These exurbs are conservative but also utopian - Mayberrys with BlackBerrys.

The Republicans won in part because Bush and Rove understand this culture. Everybody is giving advice to Democrats these days, and mine is don't take any advice from anybody with access to the media - including me, just to be safe.
Get out into the sprawl, into that other conversation. Take your time. It's a new world out there.

Joshua Micah Marshall -- Brooks and the Anti-Semitism Card

2004-11-07T10:33:00.000-08:00

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/002372.php

(January 06, 2004 -- 01:46 AM EDT)

One of the greatest rhetorical and moral challenges of opinion writing is how to respond to or critique aggressively dishonest or tendentious arguments. One part of you wants to discuss the underlying issue with its complexities and ambiguities intact --- and every issue has complexities and ambiguities. But, in battles of ideas, decibels and clarity matter. And, to take up a different sort of metaphor, the niceties of conflict resolution are hardly appropriate or sensible if you’re trapped in a dark alley with a couple mafia goons.

A case in point is the increasingly brazen tendency for conservative columnists to label any critical discussion of neoconservatism as a form of anti-Semitic diatribe.

Let me point you toward one recent example from a December 31st column by Joel Mowbray. Here are the first three grafs:

"Discussing the Iraq war with the Washington Post last week, former General Anthony Zinni took the path chosen by so many anti-Semites: he blamed it on the Jews."

"Neither President Bush nor Vice-President Cheney—nor for that matter Zinni’s old friend, Secretary of State Colin Powell—was to blame. It was the Jews. They “captured” both Bush and Cheney, and Powell was merely being a “good soldier.”"

"Technically, the former head of the Central Command in the Middle East didn’t say “Jews.” He instead used a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites: “neoconservatives.” As the name implies, “neoconservative” was originally meant to denote someone who is a newcomer to the right. In the 90’s, many people self-identified themselves as “neocons,” but today that term has become synonymous with “Jews.”"

So Tony Zinni, retired four-star general, former head of Centcom, a tough critic of the Iraq war and its architects, is an anti-Semite. And the basis for this is his criticism of neoconservatives.
Here’s another example, from Tuesday’s column by David Brooks in the Times …

"In truth, the people labeled neocons (con is short for "conservative" and neo is short for "Jewish") travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another. The ones outside government have almost no contact with President Bush. There have been hundreds of references, for example, to Richard Perle's insidious power over
administration policy, but I've been told by senior administration officials that he has had no significant meetings with Bush or Cheney since they assumed office. If he's shaping their decisions, he must be microwaving his ideas into their fillings. "

"It's true that both Bush and the people labeled neocons agree that Saddam Hussein represented a unique threat to world peace. But correlation does not mean causation. All evidence suggests that Bush formed his conclusions independently. Besides, if he wanted to follow the neocon line, Bush wouldn't know where to turn because while the neocons agree on Saddam, they disagree vituperatively on just about everything else. (If you ever read a sentence that starts with "Neocons believe," there is a 99.44 percent chance everything else in that sentence will be untrue.)"

"Still, there are apparently millions of people who cling to the notion that the world is controlled by well-organized and malevolent forces. And for a subset of these people, Jews are a handy explanation for everything."

The Brooks’ example is a bit more gussied up. But the essential point is the same.
First, on the accusations --- subtle or crass --- of anti-Semitism.

We’ve now gone from arguments where anti-Semitism is perceived at the margins of critiques of neoconservative intellectuals to the current practice in which it is treated as a given that 'neoconservative' is simply a code word for Jew and criticisms of the same are one shade or another of anti-Semitism.

Let’s be clear on what’s going on here.

Pressure groups exist in politics. The loose association of people generally termed 'neoconservative' use the term to describe themselves. And while no group is monolithic in its thinking, they generally think of themselves as a group and act in that fashion. We can get into a discussion at some other point about the fine points of intellectual history and note that intellectual or ideological movements are as much social constructs tethered to specific institutions as they are coherent and consistent textbook philosophies which remain the same over time. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The point is that this is an ideological group in American politics. The people who are a part of it see it as such, as do its critics and opponents. And yet many now want to use blanket criticisms of anti-Semitism to stigmatize and ward off any and all criticism.

It’s almost like a thuggishly rhetorical assertion of intellectual property rights. Neoconservatives can use the term and talk about their movement as a movement. But it’s off-limits for opponents --- sort of like how trademark holder Nike can use the phrase “Just Do It” but if Reebok tried, Nike would sue.

Not only is this dishonest. It's a conscious cheapening of the charge of anti-Semitism that should be roundly and vociferously criticized.

Another point.

In Brooks’ column, aside from the anti-Semitism stuff I’ve noted, we can see another common ploy. In fact, it makes up almost the entirety of Brooks’ column.

The aim is to discredit any notion that neoconservatism plays any significant role in Bush administration foreign policy --- a demonstrably ridiculous point. Brooks does this by mixing in all sorts of code words about ‘conspiracies’, ‘jews’, radio communications through dental filings and the like to stigmatize as ridiculous what is actually a serious issue and ripe field for serious debate.

It’s almost the definition of anti-intellectualism.

Here’s a particular example from the second graf of Brooks’ column:

"Theories about the tightly knit neocon cabal came in waves. One day you read that neocons were pushing plans to finish off Iraq and move into Syria. Web sites appeared detailing neocon conspiracies; my favorite described a neocon outing organized by Dick Cheney to hunt for humans."

This is really classic. First, a demonstrably accurate point, neocons pushing for forcible regime change in Syria followed by some story about Dick Cheney’s hunting trip to hunt humans.
How do you respond to something like this?

Sort of like:
"So many crazy stories out there. One minute people are claiming that jumbo-jets are flying from New York to Paris. The next day we hear that flying saucers are beaming people up to space and spiriting them away to Mars …"

Finally, a small confession. Both of the writers I've discussed above are what I guess you'd call casual acquaintances -- at least people I've met on several occasions in the past and almost certainly will again. So there's a natural or I guess unavoidable tendency to resist calling their arguments dishonest or tendentious -- and referring to them by name. But what else is possible or appropriate when they're slandering and maligning whole categories of people?

What's being practiced here isn't argument. These are rhetorical brickbats meant to squelch argument. The whole thing is disinformation from start to finish.

-- Josh Marshall

Timothy Noah - Rhapsody in Red and Blue

2004-11-07T08:59:00.000-08:00

Rhapsody in Red and Blue
A journey along the highways and byways of American identity.

Reviewed by Timothy Noah

Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page BW05
ON PARADISE DRIVE: How We Live Now
(And Always Have) in the Future Tense
By David Brooks. Simon & Schuster. 304 pp. $25

Four years ago, David Brooks published Bobos in Paradise, a captivating book about the convergence of bohemian and bourgeois cultures. The trend had been noted before. Indeed, an entire magazine, the Baffler, had been founded largely to decry it. But where the leftist Baffler savaged the hypocrisy of Baby Boomer capitalists who styled themselves counterculture rebels, Brooks, a conservative, invented an affectionate nickname for these bourgeois bohemians ("bobos"); lampooned them wittily but gently; and pronounced them harmless and in some ways actually beneficial to the common weal. This upbeat diagnosis made bobos feel better about themselves, and Brooks quickly became the right's ambassador to the liberal establishment. This past September, the New York Times formalized that role by giving him an op-ed column.

Brooks's new book, On Paradise Drive, has a more ambitious scope than Bobos in Paradise. This time, Brooks is examining all of America -- all of its middle class, anyway -- and he's reaching for a larger theme that will explain how its various subcultures relate to one another.

Unfortunately, he never finds one.

That Brooks has not lost his penchant for bemused social taxonomy is amply demonstrated in the book's first chapter, which takes us on an imaginary drive that begins in a prototypical urban core. We travel from the downtown "urban hipster zone," characterized by "a stimulating mixture of low sexuality and high social concern," to the "crunchy" suburbs, where "all the sports teams are really bad, except those involving Frisbees." Then it's on to the pricier inner-ring suburbs, once inhabited by the Republican WASP elite but now taken over by the meritocratic elite, who babble at dinner parties about "the merits and demerits of Corian countertops." Farther on, we find the strip-mall-laden immigrant enclaves and, past these, the postwar suburbs that sometimes seem "shaped more by golf than by war or literature or philosophy." Finally, we reach our terminus at the "new exurbs" inhabited by Patio Man and Realtor Mom, who live in "a 3,200 square-foot middle-class home built to look like a 7,000 square-foot starter palace for the nouveaux riche." It's a beguiling trip, but where are we going?
In the next chapter, Brooks introduces the promising theme that class and cultural warfare never reach a boiling point because America's multiple tribes are only dimly aware of one another's existence. "There is no one single elite in America," Brooks explains. "Hence, there is no definable establishment to be oppressed by and rebel against. Everybody can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus." Whereas the Greeks advised, "Know thyself," the inhabitants of America's "self-reinforcing clique communities . . . live by the maxim 'Overrate thyself.' " This is an amusing and intellectually provocative point, and I briefly looked forward to Brooks taking the rest of the book to elaborate on it.

But he doesn't develop the theme, choosing instead to move on to the more banal point that Americans are full of restless energy and spiritual striving, sometimes expressed through the "mystical transubstantiation" of consumerism, which isn't so much about having what you can afford now as it is about getting rich by working hard so you can have something more luxurious in the future. "We are motivated by the Paradise Spell," Brooks concludes, "by the feeling that there is some glorious destiny just ahead." This sentiment could animate a perfectly acceptable high school class valedictorian speech or, with a few more laughs thrown in, a passable Lake Wobegon monologue by Garrison Keillor. But though he dresses it up with learned citations from many non-obvious sources -- the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann, the radical socialist Leon Samson, etc., etc. -- Brooks simply can't make Jay Gatsby's infatuation with the green light at the end of the pier feel like a fresh new expression of the American character.

Brooks's earlier book and the insightful social and political commentary in many of his magazine essays have led us to expect he would have something more original to say. (In the Times column he is still finding his voice, but it certainly isn't this bland.) I must also confess creeping impatience with his heavy reliance on satirical composites to make serious sociological points. Even Tom Wolfe, who is better at this than anyone else alive, leavens his hyperbolic generalizations with narratives about real people -- in his nonfiction, anyway. In the introduction, Brooks says it is necessary to "speak in parables, composites, and archetypes, for the personality of a people, as much as the personality of an individual, is a mysterious, changing thing." But a little of this goes a long way. When, halfway through the book, Brooks introduces a succession of composite-driven chapters with the aside "Sometimes a little satire is in order," it sounds like an apology.

And while we're on the subject of apologies, what's with Brooks's nervous little joke in the acknowledgments that his wife Jane's "design for our new house made this book necessary"? Is he saying that he's feeling a little overextended and underinspired these days? If so, give him points for honesty. In my characteristically American way, I see a worthwhile book coming out of David Brooks sometime in the future. But On Paradise Drive is a disappointment. •

Timothy Noah writes the "Chatterbox" column for Slate magazine.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
'

Nicholas Von Hoffman - Don't Worry, Be Happy

2004-11-07T08:55:00.000-08:00

From The Nation http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040621&s=vonhoffman

Don't Worry, Be Happy
by NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN
On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tenseby David Brooks
[from the June 21, 2004 issue]

David Brooks is a writer whose chief claim to fame is not what he says but where he says it. These days he says it twice a week in the New York Times and on PBS and NPR, where he functions as the tame conservative, the right-winger without flecks of foam on the sides of his mouth. A book written by a man thus placed will get talked about perforce, and given the marketing power his position accords him, he will attract attention. He is on the required review list. His books must be given a look-see, no matter how trivial and insipid they may be.
A look-see at Brooks's On Paradise Drive reveals old-fashioned, spread-eagle oratory groaning with passages such as:

whatever the nation's problems, America, and the idealism present in that word, are the solution. America is the solution to bourgeois flatness, to materialistic complacency, to mass-media shallowness, because America, with all its utopian possibilities, arouses the energies and the most strenuous efforts. America is the answer to insularity, to balkanization, to complacency, to timidity, because America is a set of compulsions pulling people out of their narrow and trivial concerns and lifting their sights to the distant hopes.

Brooks fails to mention that America is also good for teenage acne, children with reading disabilities and/or enuresis. For those of us in our sunset years, America has proven effective in lessening the debilitating effects of arthritis. America is good for you.

In On Paradise Drive, Brooks looks at how the great American middle stratum lives (top- and bottom-income people are left for another time). But this is no Travels With Charley, for it is written by a man who, though he seems to have bounced about here and there, has no eye for the telling detail and no ear for the colorful quote. Though Brooks humbly likens his writing to Twain's and Mencken's, the best you can say for him as a writer is that he's fought the English language to a draw. Whereas Twain on the warpath was a sharpshooting rifleman and Mencken laid about with the broadsword, Brooks's literary weapon is the tweezers. Follicle by follicle, he snaps the hairs out. Painful but not so entertaining.

His travels led him to the conclusion that the middle is not an undifferentiated mass but a garden of subgroups chiefly distinguishable by how they spend their money. In a characteristically revelatory passage, Brooks writes:

Hispanics spend a far greater percentage of their income on footwear and clothing for children under two, and a far lower percentage on stationery and tobacco products than the average American consumer. Whites spend much more on entertainment and much less on clothing for teenage boys. Blacks spend more on poultry and telephones and less on furniture and books.
Judging from descriptions like that, Brooks seems to have spent the better part of the past twenty years below the gradient in a think tank. He may be the last person on this continent to have discovered giant, stand-alone box stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot. But if On Paradise Drive yields little of moment about contemporary America, it offers us a map of the mind of a right-winger who has cleverly packaged himself and is marketed as a caveman with a throbbing heart and a kinder, gentler sensitivity. The Brooksian gestalt is glimpsed in the following:

There is no one single elite in America. Hence, there is no definable establishment to be oppressed by and to rebel against. Everybody can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus. You can be an X Games celebrity and appear on ESPN2, or an atonal jazz demigod and be celebrated in obscure music magazines. You can be a short-story master and travel the nation from writers' conference to writers' conference, celebrated for your creativity, haircut, and style.... Ours is not a social structure conducive to revolution, domestic warfare, and conflict. The United States is not on the verge of an incipient civil war or a social explosion. If you wanted to march against the ruling elite, where exactly would you do it?

More to the point, why exactly would you write these words? Civil war? Domestic warfare? Social explosion? What can the man be thinking? The only people in the United States tortured by such turbulent dreams are crackpots, those among the very rich who are pursued by the fear that some of their money will be taken from them and naughty conservative publicists seeking to impute treason to those on their left.

These passages are revealing. The first sentence, when translated out of the original opaque, means that wealth and power have successfully disguised themselves and are safe from scrutiny. Every American man and every American woman, according to Brooks, is a king and queen in his or her small, meaningless, slightly contemptible, slightly humorous, compartmentalized world. With people organizing themselves into nothing more dangerous than skateboard clubs and long-haired writers' conferences, the possessors of power and property have nothing to fear.

On Paradise Drive is devoted to the glorification of ordinariness, of blinkered plodding, of going along to get along, of mastering the practice of not standing out. For the mediocre, the rewards can be rich. "Millionaires," Brooks writes of his favorite kind of people, "are not exactly Einsteins. The average millionaire in the U.S. had a collegiate GPA of about 2.92, a B- average. The average SAT score for the millionaires is 1190, good but not nearly good enough to get you into an Ivy League college." It is beyond explaining how such strange statistics are gathered or, perhaps, invented, but the point of publishing them is to restate the ancient conservative suspicion of brilliance, of wit, of anything smacking of instability or unpredictability and therefore of danger to the treasure hoard.

The right-winger substitutes Sitzfleisch, unrelieved and unrelenting labor, for flashy outbreaks of genius. With pride of country, Brooks proclaims that his fellow citizens are "the hardest-working people on the face of the earth. We work the longest hours and take the shortest vacations of any affluent people." The nonaffluent, most of the population of the planet, apparently take shorter vacations, perhaps because so many live in tropical climes where life is so pleasant and the trade winds so refreshing they don't need vacations. "Polls indicate," Brooks explains, that the American reluctance to recreate "is not all forced; far more than people in other lands.... Americans take the initiative to check in with work while they're supposedly on vacation." In the real world of water coolers and cubicles people "check in" because they know that when you come back from vacation your desk and your chair may be gone. But the man can seriously write that "for most of human history, people at the bottom of the income ladder worked longer than people at the top. But that's no longer true." Doubtless he can produce yet another one of his polls to back this stuff up, but in a land of two-, three- and four-job households, it's nuts. You can't tell me that those people with the house in Telluride, the apartments in New York and London and the place on the Côte d'Azur work harder than the people who clean their bathrooms. What Brooks is describing is not what is, but what right-wingers tell themselves is.

It follows that the book includes de rigueur grousing about the French, French intellectuals and the intelligentsia in general. In place of thought Brooks offers the reader litanies of brand-name products bought and owned by various statistical categories of people. The work positively suppurates with the results of polls and surveys proving that satisfaction reigns and our investments are safe. In a passage worthy of Dr. Pangloss, he writes:

I would like to think that an idealist flame does burn in every American split level, that every day American life is shaped by grand metaphysical visions, a holy sense of mission.... I would like to believe that we are all driven by some spiritual impulsion of which we are perhaps not even aware.

You may be sure that somewhere in his papers Brooks has a survey showing that three out of four Americans are impulsed every 9.4 seconds by grand metaphysical visions and/or facial tics.
The people of the United States may need a decent system of public education or adequate healthcare, but one thing they do not need is another TV or radio program, another article or book telling them how terrific and contented they are. That is what David Brooks has given them, but isn't one of the traits of conservatism to give us more of what we already have too much of and to withhold what we have too little of and need?

Michael Kinsley - Suburban Thrall

2004-11-07T08:52:00.000-08:00

http://query.nytimes.com/search/article-printpage.html?oref=login&res=9C02EEDB1F3CF930A15756C0A9629C8B63

May 23, 2004
Suburban Thrall
By Michael Kinsley
ON PARADISE DRIVE How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense.
By David Brooks.
304 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $25.

For several years, in the world of political journalism, David Brooks has been every liberal's favorite conservative. This is not just because he throws us a bone of agreement every now and then. Even the most poisonous propagandist (i.e., Bill O'Reilly) knows that trick. Brooks goes farther. In his writing and on television, he actually seems reasonable. More than that, he seems cuddly. He gives the impression of being open to persuasion. Like the elderly Jewish lady who thinks someone must be Jewish because ''he's so nice,'' liberals suspect that a writer as amiable as Brooks must be a liberal at heart. Some conservatives think so too.

There is a prize for being the liberals' favorite conservative, and Brooks has claimed it: a column in The New York Times. With Brooks, The Times continues its probably unintentional experiment in reinventing the political column. First came Frank Rich, who added culture, high and low, to the traditional tired stew of Washington concerns. Maureen Dowd added psychiatry -- trying to understand politicians as real people, usually not to their advantage. Thomas Friedman added parables, circling the globe in search of small but sturdy anecdotes to support huge structures of metaphor.

Brooks adds social anthropology. His distinctive combination of wisdom and wisecracks, now available to readers of this newspaper, was perfected in his previous book, ''Bobos in Paradise,'' a funny examination of the 1960's generation as it negotiates the twin perils of aging and prosperity. His new book, ''On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense,'' applies the Brooks technique to the whole darn country. He starts by slicing and dicing the American population into categories and subcategories, each with its own values and habits and sartorial preferences. Then he turns around and puts us all back together again, reinterpreting his previous examples of our differences as evidence of our essential similarity. It's a bravura performance and always entertaining, if not always convincing.

The Brooks sociological method has four components: fearless generalizing, clever coinage, jokes and shopping lists. In the April issue of Philadelphia Magazine, the journalist Sasha Issenberg nailed Brooks, a local boy, pretty hard on some of his generalizations. Checking out the assertions in a couple of magazine articles that were partly incorporated into this book, Issenberg reported that, contrary to Brooks, people in blue states (those that went Democratic in 2000) don't read more books than people in red (Republican) states. Nor do reds buy more items on QVC. ''When it comes to yardwork,'' Brooks had written, ''they have rider mowers; we have illegal aliens.'' Part of Brooks's charm is that he often includes himself (disingenuously, but that makes the gesture even grander) in groups he is mocking. But Issenberg reports that red states tend to have more illegal aliens than blue ones.

Brooks defends his generalizations as poetic hyperbole and got disappointingly pompous with Issenberg, according to him, when confronted with their inaccuracy. But this won't do. When he says that a store in a suburban mall is ''barely visible because of the curvature of the earth,'' that is poetic hyperbole. When he claims that it is impossible to spend more than $20 for dinner in a Red Lobster, that is just wrong, and mystifyingly so. As Issenberg points out, these little factoids are credibility crutches. They are the difference between sociology and shtick. America's cities needn't actually be full of ''African bistros where El Salvadoran servers wearing Palestinian kaffiyehs serve Virginia Woolf wannabes Slovakian beer'' in order to justify this typical Brooks formulation. But there ought to be one Salvadoran server somewhere who routinely wears a kaffiyeh -- and I wonder if there is one.

At the very least, Brooks does not let the sociology get in the way of the shtick, and he wields a mean shoehorn when he needs the theory to fit the joke. Among some of the formerly young, ''the energy that once went into sex and raving now goes into salads.'' O.K., that's funny. So is essentially the same joke a few pages later, when Brooks writes that ''bathroom tile is their cocaine.'' Except that now he's referring to a different one of his demographic slices, which undermines the claim to sociology. And when another joke surfaces three times, it undermines the shtick as well. The ''16-foot refrigerators with the through-the-door goat cheese and guacamole delivery systems''? Ha ha. A large Home Depot salesman ''looking like an S.U.V. in human form''? Ha ha ha. S.U.V.'s ''so big they look like the Louisiana Superdome on wheels''? Enough already.

''In America, it is acceptable to cut off any driver in a vehicle that costs a third more than yours. That's called democracy.'' True? Funny? Wouldn't the joke work just as well the other way? ''. . . a third less than yours. That's called capitalism.'' And if it works both ways as a joke, it must not work at all as a sociological insight.

In his fondness for coining phrases and his show-off use of commercial brand names as shorthand for demographic nuances, Brooks clearly takes after the country's greatest living conservative social observer, Tom Wolfe. Like the factoid bubbles so skillfully burst in Philadelphia Magazine, the brand names are there as evidence that you're not talking through your hat. So the nuances had better be right. As far as I know, most of Brooks's are. As far as I know is not very far in some shopping areas. I must take his word about Corian countertops. But in the case of Trader Joe's, to which Brooks devotes a multipage riff, I feel more at home. And Brooks has failed to solve the mystery of this appealing but hard-to-define California-based food chain.

The term ''Bobos'' (short for ''bourgeois bohemians'') almost joined Tom Wolfe classics like ''the right stuff'' and ''radical chic'' in the Coinage Hall of Fame. The test of a successful coinage (I state with Brooksian bluff-authority) is whether many people use the term without knowing where it came from. If ''Bobos'' ultimately fell short, keep in mind that the challenge was daunting. It would have had to displace a beloved and long-established incumbent -- ''yuppies'' -- describing roughly the same phenomenon. The near miss must have hurt. In his new book, Brooks flings coinage after coinage up against the zeitgeist, hoping that one will stick. Among the more promising contenders are the ''crunchy zone'' (one of his suburban slices), the ''meatloaf line'' (between distant suburbs, where they allegedly don't eat meatloaf, and real rural America, where they do), ''Patio Man'' (from an already famous Brooksian epic about purchasing a barbecue at Home Depot) and ''conquest shopping'' (from the same saga).

When he turns from the task of subdividing Americans to the task of stitching us back together, Brooks becomes as incomprehensible as the subtitle of this book. (What does it mean to ''live in the future tense''?) Near as I can tell, Brooks's argument is a variation on the famous Turner thesis. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893, just as America's western expansion was more or less complete, that the empty West had served as the country's defining fact and safety valve. The ever-present possibility of picking up and moving west had made Americans free and equal, and had spared us the conflicts of class and nation that infected the Old World of Europe.

Brooks's thesis -- to give it more clarity than he does, at the risk of getting it wrong -- seems to be that the suburbs and exurbs play a similar role in 21st-century America. Although sometimes he seems to be saying that the ''move on'' energy of Americans comes from technology like the Internet, or is more spiritual than geographical or material anyway. In any event, our defining -- and uniting -- characteristics as Americans, according to Brooks, are that we'd rather leave than fight, and we're always thinking about the future instead of dwelling on the past. That means the enormous gulfs in values, aspirations, understanding of the world and food preferences he outlines so wittily in the first part of ''On Paradise Drive'' don't turn Americans against one another (as they would the folks of some clotted and backward Old World nation). We all prosper in our various cultural cul-de-sacs (or as Brooks puts it, much better: ''Everybody can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus''), and we don't trouble ourselves about what the folks in the next cul-de-sac might be up to. No skin off our backs.
The Brooks thesis, if I've got it right, is a lovely, sweet thesis, as genial as the author himself. But a better answer to the question of why, if Americans are so diverse, we get along so much better than those foreigners, might be, ''What in the world are you talking about?'' It certainly is not obvious that the spirit of live-and-let-live is stronger in America than elsewhere. The citizens of other countries at our economic level, like those in the old nations of Europe, seem generally better than we are, not worse, at not rubbing one another raw. Maybe that is because they know they will be rubbing up against one another in any case.

Brooks almost makes this point himself a while later: ''America is not only the nation where you can get a supersize tub of French fries to go with our 32-ounce double cheeseburger, it is also just about the only nation where people blow up abortion clinics.'' But this comes while he is riffing about Americans' inclination toward excess, rather than our mystical ability to get along. So that's different.

Brooks has a wise and funny few pages turning the familiar golf concept of ''par'' into a universal suburban state of grace:

''Your DVD collection is organized, and so is your walk-in closet. Your car is clean and vacuumed, your frequently dialed numbers are programmed into your cordless phone, your telephone plan is suited to your needs, and your various gizmos interact without conflict. Your spouse is athletic, your kids are bright, your job is rewarding, your promotions are inevitable, everywhere you need to be comes with its own accessible parking. You look great in casual slacks.''
Unfortunately, he couldn't resist doing practically the same clever thing with a remark from the autobiography of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's, about the importance of French fries. Brooks conjures up a mystical concept called ''Fry!,'' defined roughly as monomania about some business goal, preferably one that seems shallow or pointless in the larger scheme of things. This he also presents as a spiritual state of grace, and he credits the business executives who religiously ''Follow Your Fry!'' with America's economic success.

These riffs will not win prizes for internal consistency. In the Fry! discussion, there are detours into the culture of frequent flier points and the obsession with upgrades, among other topics. These are hilarious, but Brooks seems to forget his premise that Fry! is about monomania. That hardly matters if he's not trying to be serious. But he is trying to be serious, at least sometimes. He says he wants to rescue American civilization from the charge that it is shallow, and his main argument against that charge is that seemingly shallow behavior like shopping for the perfect barbecue or marketing the perfect French fry is actually a deeply spiritual quest, on a continuum with those of the Pilgrims arriving from the east and the pioneers heading west. We're certainly not going to buy that notion if the author himself can be distracted from it whenever the possibility of a good joke floats by.

''Is he serious?'' is an interesting question about David Brooks. But a more important question, for Brooks himself and for all of humanity (now that he is a Times columnist), is ''Is he conservative?'' Although Brooks's mockery is genial rather than sneery and distancing like Tom Wolfe's, there is no doubt that if a professed liberal New York Times columnist, say Paul Krugman, were to describe the products and culture of capitalism the way Brooks does, his lines would be cited and denounced on every right-wing radio talk show.

When he ridicules consumer appetites, Brooks is safely within the permissible, rueful conservative critique of capitalism's ''contradictions.'' When he writes of the ''tediousness of pod after pod of the highway-side office parks'' and the ''sheer existential nothingness of an office-park lobby,'' he sounds quaintly like the cultural critics of American capitalism in the 1950's and 60's. But when he declares that hard-working business executives are living their ''whole lives'' in a furrow -- ''in that furrow, your personality becomes a mere selling device. Friendships become contacts. The urge to improve deteriorates to mere acquisitiveness. Money becomes the measure of accomplishment'' -- well, frankly, that sounds more than a bit like Karl Marx, doesn't it?

And it gets even worse. In an uncharacteristically heavy-handed passage, Brooks imagines an effete French intellectual confronting a straightforward, honest, rough-hewn Nevada trucker. Boy, does that Frog learn a thing or two. Brooks's complaint is not that the French hate Americans, but that they love us for the wrong reasons:

''Our eager openness to everything, our capacity for mindless fun. . . . The convertible nation, ripping off our tube tops, yipping like banshees as we cruise down the freeway from cineplex to surf shop. How charming! How wild! How seductive the Americans are, with all their careless money and ingenuous vitality!''

Brooks calls this a ''pro-American insult,'' but it is alarmingly close to his own pro-American critique. And when he goes on to imagine his French intellectual ''posing like a great Gallic hunter'' next to a ''bon mot he has bagged on the American desert,'' the appalling truth becomes unavoidable.

David Brooks is not merely a liberal. He's French.
J'accuse.

Sasha Issenberg - Boo-Boos in Paradise

2004-11-07T08:48:00.000-08:00

from: http://www.phillymag.com/ArticleDisplay.php?id=350

Boo-Boos in Paradise
by Sasha Issenberg

From the April 2004 issue.

Wayne-bred David Brooks is the public intellectual of the moment. But our writer found out he doesn't check his facts.

A few years ago, journalist david brooks wrote a celebrated article for the Atlantic Monthly, "One Nation, Slightly Divisible," in which he examined the country's cultural split in the aftermath of the 2000 election, contrasting the red states that went for Bush and the blue ones for Gore. To see the vast nation whose condition he diagnosed, Brooks compared two counties: Maryland's Montgomery (Blue), where he himself lives, and Pennsylvania's Franklin (a Red county in a Blue state). "I went to Franklin County because I wanted to get a sense of how deep the divide really is," Brooks wrote of his leisurely northward drive to see the other America across "the Meatloaf Line; from here on there will be a lot fewer sun-dried-tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters." Franklin County was a place where "no blue New York Times delivery bags dot driveways on Sunday mornings ... [where] people don't complain that Woody Allen isn't as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny," he wrote. "In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing."

Brooks, an agile and engaging writer, was doing what he does best, bringing sweeping social movements to life by zeroing in on what Tom Wolfe called "status detail," those telling symbols -- the Weber Grill, the open-toed sandals with advanced polymer soles -- that immediately fix a person in place, time and class. Through his articles, a best-selling book, and now a twice-a-week column in what is arguably journalism's most prized locale, the New York Times op-ed page, Brooks has become a must-read, charming us into seeing events in the news through his worldview.

There's just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false. According to Amazon.com sales data, one of Goodwin's strongest markets has been deep-Red McAllen, Texas. That's probably not, however, QVC country. "I would guess our audience would skew toward Blue areas of the country," says Doug Rose, the network's vice president of merchandising and brand development. "Generally our audience is female suburban baby boomers, and our business skews towards affluent areas." Rose's standard PowerPoint presentation of the QVC brand includes a map of one zip code -- Beverly Hills, 90210 -- covered in little red dots that each represent one QVC customer address, to debunk "the myth that they're all little old ladies in trailer parks eating bonbons all day."

"Everything that people in my neighborhood do without motors, the people in Red America do with motors," Brooks wrote. "When it comes to yard work, they have rider mowers; we have illegal aliens." Actually, six of the top 10 states in terms of illegal-alien population are Red.
"We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books," Brooks asserted. A 2003 University of Wisconsin-Whitewater study of America's most literate cities doesn't necessarily agree. Among the study's criteria was the presence of bookstores and libraries; 20 of the 30 most literate cities were in Red states.

"Very few of us," Brooks wrote of his fellow Blue Americans, "could name even five NASCAR drivers, although stock-car races are the best-attended sporting events in the country." He might want to take his name-recognition test to the streets of the 2002 NASCAR Winston Cup Series's highest-rated television markets -- three of the top five were in Blue states. (Philadelphia was fifth nationally.)

Brooks could be dismissed as little more than a snarky punch-line artist, except that he postures as a public intellectual -- and has been received as one.

It's hard, in fact, to think of many American thinkers more influential at this moment than Brooks. His 2000 book Bobos in Paradise heralded the rise of a new upper class that mixed '60s-style liberalism with '80s-style conspicuous consumption; celebrated by reviewers, it quickly became a best-seller. Brooks wrote that his hometown, Wayne, was emblematic of the "Upscale Suburban Hippiedom" that was the natural habitat of these "bourgeois bohemians." Like "yuppie" and "metrosexual," Brooks's "bobo" entered the language as a successful coinage of pop sociology. It shows up in magazine articles and casual conversations, and the book itself is footnoted in dozens of books on American society and consumer culture, and cited in a college history textbook.

On the publication of Bobos, New York Times critic Walter Goodman lumped Brooks with William H. Whyte Jr., author of The Organization Man, and David Riesman, who wrote The Lonely Crowd, as a practitioner of "sociological journalism." (In the introduction to Bobos, Brooks invoked Whyte -- plus Jane Jacobs and John Kenneth Galbraith -- as predecessors.) In 2001, the New School for Social Research, in Manhattan, held a panel discussion in which real-life scholars pondered the bobo. When, in 2001, Richard Posner ranked the 100 highest-profile public intellectuals, Brooks came in 85th, just behind Marshall McLuhan at 82nd, and ahead of Garry Wills, Isaiah Berlin and Margaret Mead.

Following the success of Bobos, Brooks -- who was then writing for the Atlantic Monthly and Newsweek and appearing on pbs and NPR -- was offered the Times column, formalizing his position as the in-house conservative pundit of liberal America. In his column, Brooks writes mostly about affairs of state, but with the same approach -- a cultural analysis grounded in social observation -- that made Bobos such a success. This summer, Bobos will get a sibling when Brooks publishes On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.

Brooks is operating in a long tradition of public intellectualism. Like William Whyte, another child of Philadelphia's western suburbs fascinated with the interplay of money and manners among his contemporaries, Brooks is a journalist who works on sociological turf. But Whyte, who was an editor for Fortune in the 1950s, observed how people lived, inferred trends, considered what they meant, and then came up with grand conclusions about the direction of the country. When, in 1954, he wanted to find out which consumers were trend-setters, he went into Overbrook Park and surveyed 4,948 homes -- all inhabited by real people. Brooks, by way of contrast, draws caricatures. Whether out of sloppiness or laziness, the examples he conjures to illustrate well-founded premises are often unfounded, undermining the very points he's trying to make.

In January, I made my own trip to Franklin County, 175 miles southwest of Philadelphia, with a simple goal: I wanted to see where David Brooks comes up with this stuff. One of the first places I passed was Greencastle Coffee Roasters, which has more than 200 kinds of coffee, and a well-stocked South Asian grocery in the back with a product range hard to find in some large coastal cities: 20-pound bags of jasmine rice, cans of Thai fermented mustard greens, a freezer with lemongrass stalks and kaffir-lime leaves. The owner, Charles Rake, told me that there was, until a few years back, a Thai restaurant in Chambersburg, run by a woman who now does catering. "She's the best Thai cook I know on Planet Earth," Rake said. "And I've been to Thailand."
I stopped at Blockbuster, where the dvd of Annie Hall was checked out. I went to the counter to see how Scott, the clerk, thought it compared to Allen's other work. "It's funny," said Scott. "What's the funny one? Yeah, Annie Hall, that's the one where he dates everyone -- it's funny."
"In Montgomery County we have Saks Fifth Avenue, Cartier, Anthropologie, Brooks Brothers. In Franklin County they have Dollar General and Value City, along with a plethora of secondhand stores," Brooks wrote. In fact, while Franklin has 14 stores with the word "dollar" in their name -- plus one Value City -- Montgomery County, Maryland, has 34, including one that's within walking distance of an Anthropologie in Rockville.

As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home. "On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu -- steak au jus, 'slippery beef pot pie,' or whatever -- I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most-expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee's," he wrote. "I'd scan the menu and realize that I'd been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and 'seafood delight' trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it."

Taking Brooks's cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The "Steak and Lobster" combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. "Most of our checks are over $20," said Becka, my waitress. "There are a lot of ways to spend over $20."

The easiest way to spend over $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts "turn-of-the-century elegance." I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn's proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks's article. They laughed. After it was published in the Atlantic, the nearby Mercersburg Academy boarding school invited Brooks as part of its speaker series. He spent the night at the inn. "For breakfast I made a goat-cheese-and-sun-dried-tomato tart," Sandy said. "He said he just wanted scrambled eggs."

I looked at another of Brooks's more celebrated articles, an August 2002 piece in the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard in which he discerned a new American archetype he dubbed "Patio Man." Patio Man, in Brooks's description, "walks into a Home Depot or Lowe's or one of the other mega hardware complexes and his eyes are glistening with a faraway missionary zeal, like one of those old prophets gazing into the promised land. His lips are parted and twitching slightly." Patio Man, Brooks wrote, lives in one of the new Sprinkler Cities, "the fast-growing suburbs mostly in the South and West that are the homes of the new-style American dream."

Brooks illuminated Patio Man's world with vivid portraiture, telling details, and clever observations about American culture. ("All major choices of consumer durables these days ultimately come down to which model has the most impressive cup holders.") Brooks's suggestion that Patio Man's brethren would become the basis of a coming Republican majority found many friends. Slate identified him as a "new sociological icon." The New York Times Magazine 2002 "Year in Ideas" issue cited Patio Man in its encapsulation of "Post-Soccer-Mom Nomenclature."

Unfortunately, as with the Red/Blue article, many of the knowing references Brooks deftly invoked to bring Patio Man to life were entirely manufactured. He describes the ladies of Sprinkler City as "trim Jennifer Aniston women [who] wear capris and sleeveless tops and look great owing to their many hours of sweat and exercise at Spa Lady." That chain of women's gyms has three locations -- all in New Jersey, far from any Sprinkler City. "The roads," Brooks writes, "have been given names like Innovation Boulevard and Entrepreneur Avenue." There are no Entrepreneur Avenues anywhere in the country, according to the business-directory database Referenceusa, and only two Innovation Boulevards -- in non-Sprinkler cities Fort Wayne, Indiana, and State College, Pennsylvania. There is also an Innovation Boulevard in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

The basic premises of Brooks's articles aren't necessarily wrong. His Red/Blue article was anchored in the research of political analyst Michael Barone, who in a June 2001 article in National Journal delineated a country split evenly in two: "One is observant, tradition-minded, moralistic. The other is unobservant, liberation-minded, relativistic." Brooks's Patio Man article was a pop translation of a February 2002 paper by University of Michigan demographer William H. Frey, who wrote that 2000 Census figures showed growth of "the New Sunbelt."
Brooks, however, does more than popularize inaccessible academic work; he distorts it. Barone relies on election returns and public-opinion data as the basis for his research; Frey looks to the census. But Brooks takes their findings and, regardless of origin, applies to them what one might call the Brooks Consumer Taste Fallacy, which suggests that people are best understood by where they shop and what they buy. So Brooks takes Barone's vote-counting in a two-sided election and says the country is split between Anthropologie and Dollar General. Then he takes Frey's demographic studies and says Sprinkler Cities are marked by their Home Depots. At this point, Frey was already working on a paper called "Three Americas" which argued for a tripartite model for understanding the nation: the Melting Pot (populous, immigrant-heavy states like New Jersey, Texas, Illinois); the Heartland (rural, without much population growth); and the New Sunbelt. If one really believes that the New Sunbelt and its Sprinkler Cities mark a culturally distinct region (as Brooks does), Frey suggests, one can't also believe that the country is rather evenly split into two culturally distinct factions (as Brooks does).

There are salient cultural divides in the United States -- and, in fact, different values and practices among residents of Montgomery and Franklin counties -- but consumer life is the place where they are most rapidly converging. In this regard, Brooks would have been better off relying on the newest generation of elitist truism -- tongue-in-cheek laments about the proliferation of ubiquitous chain espresso bars and bookstores. Last fall, Pottery Barn opened stores in Huntsville, Alabama, and Franklin, Tennessee, and the New York Times has introduced home delivery in Colorado Springs. It likely won't be long before Franklin County gets both; yoga classes have already arrived.

Most of Brooks's own ideas are clichés borrowed from popular culture. His Franklin County dispatch included a riff on the differences between "indoor guys" and "outdoor guys," a divide handled with more nuance by the characters on Home Improvement. Outdoor guys have "wraparound NASCAR sunglasses, maybe a napa auto parts cap, and a haircut in a short wedge up front but flowing down over their shoulders in the back -- a cut that is known as the mullet," Brooks writes, before getting to their "thing against sleeves," their well-ventilated armpit hair, and the way ripped sleeves hang over bad to the bone tattoos. This is a clever homage to the fieldwork of comic/sociologist Jeff Foxworthy, whose 1989 study You Might Be a Redneck If ... included: "You own more than three shirts with the sleeves cut off."

I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. "I didn't see it when I was there, but it's true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn," he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. "That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end ... " he replied, his voice trailing away. "That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20."

I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being "too pedantic," of "taking all of this too literally," of "taking a joke and distorting it." "That's totally unethical," he said.

Satire has its purpose, but assuming it's on the mark, Brooks should be able to adduce real-world examples that are true. I asked him how I was supposed to tell what was comedy and what was sociology. "Generally, I rely on intelligent readers to know -- and I think that at the Atlantic Monthly, every intelligent reader can tell what the difference is," he replied. "I tried to describe the mainstream of Montgomery County and the mainstream of Franklin County. They're both diverse places, and any generalization is going to have exceptions. But I was trying to capture the difference between the two places," he said. "You've obviously come at this from a perspective. I don't think if you went to the two places you wouldn't detect a cultural difference."

I asked him about Blue America as a bastion of illegal immigrants. "This is dishonest research. You're not approaching the piece in the spirit of an honest reporter," he said. "Is this how you're going to start your career? I mean, really, doing this sort of piece? I used to do 'em, I know 'em, how one starts, but it's just something you'll mature beyond."

I shared with him some more of my research, and asked how he made his observations. On NASCAR name recognition: "My experience going around to people that I know in urban metro areas is a lot of them can't name five NASCAR ... but that's a joke." On Spa Lady locations: "I think that's the type of place where people would get the joke and get the reference." On whether Blue Americans read more books: "That would be interesting, but one goes by one's life experiences."

"What I try to do is describe the character of places, and hopefully things will ring true to people," Brooks explained. "In most cases, I think the way I describe it does ring true, and in some places it doesn't ring true. If you were describing a person, you would try to grasp the essential character and in some way capture them in a few words. And if you do it as a joke, there's a pang of recognition."

By holding himself to a rings-true standard, Brooks acknowledges that all he does is present his readers with the familiar and ask them to recognize it. Why, then, has his particular brand of stereotype-peddling met with such success? In recent years, American journalism has reacted to the excesses of New Journalism -- narcissism, impressionism, preening subjectivity -- by adopting the trappings of scholarship. Trend pieces, once a bastion of three-examples-and-out superficiality, now strive for the authority of dissertations. Former Times editor Howell Raines famously defended page-one placement for a piece examining Britney Spears's flailing career by describing it as a "sophisticated exegesis of sociological phenomenon." The headline writer's favorite word is "deconstructing." (Last year, the Toronto Star deconstructed a sausage.) Richard Florida, a Carnegie Mellon demographer whose 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class earned Bobos-like mainstream cachet, nostalgizes an era when readers looked to academia for such insights:

"You had Holly Whyte, who got Jane Jacobs started, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, Galbraith. This is what we're missing; this is a gap," Florida says. "Now you have David Brooks as your sociologist, and Al Franken and Michael Moore as your political scientists. Where is the serious public intellectualism of a previous era? It's the failure of social science to be relevant enough to do it."

This culture shift has rewarded Brooks, who translates echt nerd appearance (glasses, toothy grin, blue blazer) and intellectual bearing into journalistic credibility, which allows him to take amusing dinner-party chatter -- Was that map an electoral-college breakdown or a marketing plan for Mighty Aphrodite? -- and sell it to editors as well-argued wisdom on American society. Brooks satisfies the features desk's appetite for scholarly authority in much the same way that Jayson Blair fed the newsroom's compulsion for scoops.

There's even a Brooksian explanation for why he has become so popular with the East Coast media elite. Blue Americans have heard so much about Red America, and they've always wanted to see it. But Blue Americans don't take vacations to places like Galveston and Dubuque. They like to watch TV shows like The Simpsons and Roseanne, where Red America is mocked by either cartoon characters or Red Americans themselves, so Blue Americans don't need to feel guilty of condescension. Blue Americans are above redneck jokes, but they will listen if a sociologist attests to the high density of lawnbound-appliances-per-capita in flyover country. They need someone to show them how the other half lives, because there is nothing like sympathy for backwardness to feed elitism. A wrong turn in Red America can be dangerous: They might accidentally find Jesus or be hit by an 18-wheeler. It seems reasonable to seek out a smart-looking fellow who seems to know the way and has a witty line at every point. Blue Americans always travel with a guide.

E-mail: sissenberg@phillymag.com

David Plotz - Why liberals are turning on their favorite conservative

2004-11-07T08:45:00.000-08:00

from slate: http://slate.msn.com/id/2102382/
David Brooks
Why liberals are turning on their favorite conservative.
By David Plotz

Posted Monday, June 14, 2004, at 3:17 PM PT

If a liberal who's been mugged is a conservative, what's a conservative who's been mugged? Let's ask David Brooks!

For the past few months, the lovable house conservative of the New York Times and satirical sociologist has been taking a beating. In April, Philadelphia's Sasha Issenberg fact-checked Brooks' articles about divided America and discovered that Brooks exaggerated and distorted differences between Red and Blue states to make his pop sociology even fizzier.

And since Brooks' new book, On Paradise Drive, hit bookstores this month, Brooks' erstwhile liberal friends have been thumping it—and him. In the New York Times Book Review, Brooks' pal (and Slate founding editor) Michael Kinsley jabbed Brooks' supposed sociology as mere comic shtick. In Salon, Laura Miller wrote that Brooks has made a "brief, ignominious, muddy slide" from "amusing to annoying," and reviewers in the Nation and the Washington Post Book Review likewise swung baseball bats at his kneecaps. Some switch has flipped: Journalist pals who used to chuckle at "liberals' favorite conservative" now rage against him.

I haven't talked to Brooks—who is a friendly acquaintance—since the pummeling started. But I expect he's agonized and baffled by it. Why so much sneering? Why now?

Some of the reasons are obvious. As a conservative columnist at the Times—a job he has held since September 2003—Brooks is the steer at the steakhouse. Liberals who admired him when he was the jolly voice of reason at the Weekly Standard resent him now that he occupies the throne of American journalism.

And Brooks' Times column is a drag. Occasionally he reminds us of his talent (and his enormous decency)—as when he gently mocks college admissions or pleads for gay marriage. But after 10 months, it's become clear that he doesn't have enough ideas—or anger—to sustain a twice-a-week column. (To be fair, few columnists do.) Consider what he's done this month:

June 1: "Grading the President." Almost a parody of an op-ed column, it examined a National Journal survey rating the Bush administration's economic performance. Brooks eventually concured with National Journal's grades, then offered an exhortation so tired it was almost Pfaffian: "Let's address the long-term problems. Let's talk about the consequences of the aging baby boomers. Let's talk about reforming the tax code to encourage domestic savings."

June 5: "Circling the Wagons" inaugurated a series of columns he plans to write on political polarization. He concludes—with solemn regret—that people pick political sides for emotional reasons, not rational ones.

June 8: Brooks credited Ronald Reagan with "a bold and challenging optimism."

Week after week, Brooks has been dribbling out well-meaning and dreary sentiments: Let's hear it for the "sensible majority" and "bipartisanship." Let's, but somewhere else.

The Brooks bashing can also be attributed to the fact that On Paradise Drive isn't a particularly good book. A slapdash sequel to his bestselling Bobos in Paradise (what's with all the Paradise, David?), On Paradise Drive smooshes together bits of comic anthropology (lists of consumer products, essentially) and a few smug chapters about how we Americans are great despite our shallow materialism, because we share a sense of grand mission. As Kinsley points out, a close look at its MO makes it hard to take him seriously as a social scientist and harder to take him lightly as a satirist.

But there's another reason for the irritation with Brooks. The most interesting section of On Paradise Drive outlines Brooks' notion that America has become a "cellular" instead of hierarchical nation. No single elite remains, he says. We all live cheerfully in our own separate tents, no group subordinate to any other. Everyone, in fact, feels happily superior to everyone else.

Everyone can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus. You can be an X Games celebrity and appear on ESPN2, or an atonal jazz demigod and be celebrated in obscure music magazines. … Perhaps you are an NRA enthusiast, an ardent Zionist, a Rush Limbaugh dittohead, a surfer, a neo-Confederate, or an antiglobalization activist. Your clique will communicate its code of honor, its own set of jokes and privileges. It will offer you a field of accomplishments and a system of recognition. You can look down from the heights of your own achievement at all those poor saps who are less accomplished in the field of say, antique-car refurbishing, Civil War reenacting, or Islamic learning. And you can feel quietly satisfied about your own self-worth.

The implication of cellularity for Brooks is that Americans get along by not paying attention to each other. Because we all get to achieve in our own way, we don't need to lord it over others (or even notice them). There's a sharp insight here: Cultural fragmentation has diffused hierarchy. But because Brooks believes in the primacy of culture, he seems to think that all that excelling means that we don't clash. This is a delightful view to hold, and it certainly felt true in the late '90s, when Brooks was writing Bobos: The economy was booming, the world was at peace, and the big worries were stock options, lattes, and oral sex with interns.

But Brooks' cellularity wishes away conflict. He ignores that not every distinction is cultural and that much more is at stake than self-esteem. His "antiglobalization activist" isn't simply happy to wear his hemp shirt, as Brooks suggests; he also wants to shut down the polluting factory where the "Rush Limbaugh dittohead" works. And the "NRA enthusiast" actually believes the Islamic scholar is a probable terrorist who should be jailed or deported. Sometimes it's not enough to "feel quietly satisfied about [our] own self-worth." Sometimes we need to kick the other guy in the teeth. The stakes are real in America: We are constantly truncheoning each other for more money, more liberty, more power. By making Americans merely smug emperors of our own little consumer worlds, he ignores the bigger, brutal battles that we fight against each other.

And Brooks also ignores the even bigger, even more brutal battles that we are fighting in the world. Brooksianism helped set the table for the wars on terror and Iraq but ducks from their consequences. In 1997, Brooks wrote an influential manifesto for the Weekly Standard, "A Return to National Greatness." Brooks claimed the United States was losing the sense of grand national mission that built the Panama Canal, conquered the West, won the Cold War, built the interstates, and walked on the moon. America needed to reanimate itself with a cause, and the federal government needed to "convey a spirit of confidence and vigor that can then spill across the life of the nation." It didn't really matter what the cause was—maybe colonizing Mars—but it had to be something.

Brooks' "National Greatness" notion was again about American psychology and esteem. He overlooked actual events—that conquering the West meant killing Indians, that the Cold War meant Vietnam—because what mattered was the effect on the national psyche.

National Greatness became a powerful idea in the Republican Party's Teddy Roosevelt wing, and when Sept. 11 occurred, National Greatness found its cause: rooting out terror, bringing democracy to the Middle East. Brooks and his Weekly Standard colleagues called for war in Iraq, and Brooks preached about the noble benefits of democratizing the Arab world.

As the occupation has soured, Brooks has wilted. His columns have lost their swagger: "We're a shellshocked hegemon," he wrote last month. "This has been a crushingly depressing period." Optimistic and conflict-averse, Brooks didn't see how our good intentions could go wrong, because our superior ideas were bound to win the day. He has shied away from the bloody strife that is the requirement of his National Greatness ideas. At the pit of the prisoner-abuse scandal Brooks wrote:

There's something about our venture into Iraq that is inspiringly, painfully, embarrassingly and quintessentially American. No other nation would have been hopeful enough to try to evangelize for democracy across the Middle East. No other nation would have been naive enough to do it this badly. No other nation would be adaptable enough to recover from its own innocence and muddle its way to success, as I suspect we are about to do.

While other conservatives—Charles Krauthammer, his old boss William Kristol, President Bush—have the courage of their convictions and believe that Americans are killing and dying and torturing for a great cause, Brooks, squeamish, still sees it as a kind of academic dispute, where ideas can clash without bloodying noses. Tellingly, Brooks hasn't gone to Iraq, perhaps because he doesn't want to see what these ideas look like on the ground, even though he likes nothing so much as venturing into the hinterlands, then telling Washingtonians of the wonders beyond the Beltway. (This structure is the foundation of his two Paradise books).

In Brooks' ideal world, Americans should all reasonably discuss the war, reach a consensus that it's righteous, persuade Iraqis of same, and win. In real life, it is a much nastier business, and there is no consensus among Americans of either party about the morality of this war. In peace, Brooks' genial mockery and optimism are delightful. In wartime, they're a cheat. Other conservatives confront the ugliness and bloodshed of the occupation and redouble their commitment. Brooks, whose national-greatness ethos lent more energy to the war than anything his colleagues have written, will neither embrace the war, nor disown it, nor even look it square in the face. He hides.

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Among other things, Issenberg found that—contrary to Brooks' assertions—most of the top states for illegal aliens are Red states, the most literate cities are in Red states, and most of the top NASCAR markets are in Blue states.David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. You can e-mail him at plotz@slate.com.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2102382/
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A Response to the "Values-Vote Myth" Column

2004-11-07T08:43:00.000-08:00

By a poster named "phat-ass" on the wfum message board www.wfmu.org:

Brooks has some salient points concerning the insularity of the Democratic party. And living in Nebraska I've seen what that can do to people. Selling "Buck Fush," bumper stickers is not going to help the cause here in the heartland.

But I can't say the Democrats are the only ones with this problem. Running around calling people commie-pinko ain't going to help things much either. And that may be funny to some on the east coast who can say it with a bit of a wink. Out here it's no joke. We recently had a county commissioner call our very reasonable and not particularly radicalized planning commission "socialistic." He meant it. And people's heads could get cracked open around here over such labels.

The question about "moral values" is a poorly worded question until you realize that it is code. Think of it this way. George Bush claims to have a deep and abiding faith in his Lord Jesus Christ the Savior. His claim is backed up by his position on abortion, and gay rights and a slew of other things. Well, then, he must be a moral person. His economic decisions must be moral. His military decisions must be moral, etc. The Republican party has done a bang-up job in setting this up. With a set up like this a devout Catholic man who has spent his adult life in public service and farming can be painted with the "immoral" tag just because he happens to want to protect family farms and is a Democrat because he is convinced--and he has a good argument that it's true--that the Democratic party has a history of standing up for family farms. I'm talking about Matt Connealy, who ran for Congress in Nebraska and was beaten by a man who barely said anything aside from the words, "family values." Connealy's opponent will not be doing a whole hell of a lot for family farms. He'll talk the talk. But he'll walk right over to Con-agra's headquarters in downtown Omaha and promise them the world.

It's all well and good to call the Democrats effete, elitist, east-coast swine. But think about who's lives are being effected by the other elitist swine in this world. David Brooks can go on and on about how he has travelled this country all he wants. But I would love to see him spend an hour on a line at a meat-packing plant in a small town in Nebraska. A lot of people around here do not have the time or the ability to look at a candidate beyond just a few easily understood issues. We work long hours and get paid very little. Karl Rove sees that and is able to get people to vote for his man because of "moral values."

Economic booms don't happen in these parts of the country for various reasons. Nebraska has never experienced any time of great wealth and prosperity. We have grown accustomed to it. We take what we can get and it makes sense to not vote our pocketbook since our pocketbooks have never been overflowing. The Washington elites know this and take advantage of it. What's the morality in that?

Mickey Kaus - Brooks and the Anti-semitism Card

2004-11-07T08:37:00.000-08:00

Mickey Kaus January 8, 2004

From: http://slate.msn.com/id/2093493/

Now David Brooks is implying--mostly jokingly, I think, but I am not quite sure and don't think he is either--that the very term "neoconservative" is somehow anti-Semitic. (I'd thought the forbidden term was "Likudnik.") By the end of his column, Brooks merges this argument into the more sensible and obvious complaint that any "collective name" lets you rob your opponents of "their individual humanity" and makes it easier to demonize them--like, say, when you easily brand as "anti-Semitism" reasonable attempts to make generalizations about various schools of public policy.

(Brooks also played the "anti-Semitism" card back in February). ...
Would Brooks really deny there is a loose-knit group of writers and thinkers who see themseles as "neoconservative"? Tell it to Irving Kristol! And why isn't it legitimate to a) note that many neocons (e.g. Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith) occupy important positions in the Administration; b) note that for many of these people Judaism and/or support for the state of Israel has a lot to do with their self-image and world view--and c) argue that their support for the Iraq war was wrong and, consciously or subconsciously, influenced by factor (b)? I don't necessarily agree with this argument but I don't see how it amounts to anti-Semitism. It's a pretty standard, non-crazy form of criticism (e.g., "Kaus, you like the Republicans too much because you're fixated on welfare reform"). ...

As Brooks notes, there are significant differences within the neocon camp, even among the neocons inside the administration (i.e., Wolfowitz is reportedly much, much less supportive of the current Israeli government's pro-settlement policies). But Brooks also notes--generalizing wildly!--that neoconservatives generally agreed on the need to remove Saddam.
Besides, if he wanted to follow the neocon line, Bush wouldn't know where to turn because while the neocons agree on Saddam, they disagree vituperatively on just about everything else. [Emphasis added.]

How exactly does it refute allegations of the neocons' influence that Bush has done the one thing Brooks says they all agree on? ...

P.S.: See Joshua Micah Marshall's more extensive response.

P.P.S.: I don't think Brooks' column is a calculated--or, heaven forbid, coordinated!--attempt to squelch criticism of the neocons in the Bush administration. I think Brooks needed a quick column and this was a handy "evergreen" theme.

P.P.P.S.: The parallel between conservatives who cry "anti-Semitism" at legitimate criticism from the left (in part by lumping it together with real anti-Semitism) and liberals who cry "racism" at legitimate criticism from the right (in part by lumping it together with real racism) is itself almost too obvious to mention. But not quite! ... 10:58 P.M.

Joanne McNeil Review of "On Paradise Drive"

2004-11-07T08:29:00.000-08:00

http://www.townhall.com/bookclub/brooks.html

On Paradise Drive
How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense
By David Brooks
Review by Joanne McNeil

There is no better example of the upsurge of American middle class luxury than the recent trend of books reflecting on it. In recent months we've seen Trading Up: The New American Luxury, Living It Up: America's Love Affair With Luxury, and The Substance of Style, all prominently displayed at our neighborhood Barnes and Noble. It all started with 2001's Bobos in Paradise, and that book's author, David Brooks, is now back with another look at popular culture. This time, Brooks cruises past urban areas in a metaphoric "drive" from the cities into the heartland.

On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense categorizes our perpetually fragmenting culture as we strive to meet the ideals portrayed in magazines like Malt Advocate and Field and Stream. Still, Brooks believes Americans, no matter how stratified, have motivation rooted in the same values of achievement.

The New York Times columnist and Atlantic Monthly contributor is as funny as he is prolific. This book is laugh-out-loud comical, as he describes the "Ubermoms" that "weigh less than their children" and Price Club shoppers that all appear to be having the same conversation, "which is how much they are saving by buying in bulk."

Brooks is primarily concerned with the suburbs, but not the inner-ring suburbs like Bethesda, MD that are now populated with yoga studios and art-house restaurants. Suburbia has extended out to regions like Loudoun County, VA, with "no past, no precedent, [and] no social conventions."

He also defends our culture from the noxious gaze of French intellectuals. They are on a "safari for puerile paradoxes." They attack our Elvis impersonators without first reading our great literature or exploring our cities.

By doing so, Brooks separates Americans into two groups: the "cosmic blondes" and the "cosmic brunettes." This is not based on our hair color, or even intellect; it is a description of our disposition and outlook. The cosmic blondes are always sunny; the cosmic brunettes are more introspective, and are writers, readers, artists - and always critics.

Maybe this is the "cosmic brunette" in me, but Brooks seems to let those blondes off the hook - at least the "vapid" ones. After describing their "golden retriever"-like vapidity in full detail, it is awfully difficult for Brooks to give these people any credit, dreamers or not. Salivating over Ikea and J. Crew catalogues isn't just silly, but - the word the Brooks fails to use - shallow.

Brooks shows us characters that should be already familiar to us, so we can only combine his perceptions with our own. But for that reason it is often hard to accept his airbrushed vision of "buttery chunks" highlights and "play dates." Some of these suburbanites have dreams, some of them are motivated, and some of them are driven with the same spirit as the pioneers to inhabit new territory like the emerging "outer circle" suburbs. Then again, some of them are failures and slackers.

The moms in Brooks' world have perfectly sculpted thighs after hours at the gym each day. America is by most accounts, however, getting fatter every year. Surely there are other suburban mothers that eat high-carb foods, just as there are students that bypass the "achievatron" and flunk out of high school.

Brooks' gloss on university life is the most disappointing. He agrees it is a shame that college students are going through the "achievatron," jumping through hoops indiscriminately with "little discussion about intellectual matters outside of class." But isn't that a little "blonde" of them? After all, they are driven by a nebulous carrot, an incomplete dream that requires stepping out of the "achievatron" for a moment in order to form. Brooks is far more concerned with their sexual appetites. In the end he describes successful students as "bright, flexible, responsible, tolerant, broad-minded, nice, compassionate, considerate, and lively." As a recent college graduate, I'd argue college life is far more cutthroat than in this rosy picture.Brooks is an essayist and a satirist, not a political scientist, which is why his sweeping and unsubstantiated observations often fall short. He never explains how his observations apply to all suburbanites, just as he fails to explain why the traits of achievement and motivation are unique to Americans. His talents would be better applied to character-driven fiction writing.

Brooks would make an excellent novelist, on par with Thomas Wolfe, whom he cites approvingly. He is witty and visionary. Although his definition of the American spirit is uplifting, it's also unconvincing.

Joanne McNeil is a writer in Washington, D.C. Her website is joannemcneil.com.

David Brooks - "The Values-Vote Myth"

2004-11-07T08:27:00.000-08:00

November 6, 2004

The Values-Vote Myth

By DAVID BROOKS

very election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top.
This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong.

Here are the facts. As Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center points out, there was no disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year. Evangelicals made up the same share of the electorate this year as they did in 2000. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who are pro-life. Sixteen percent of voters said abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who say they pray daily.
It's true that Bush did get a few more evangelicals to vote Republican, but Kohut, whose final poll nailed the election result dead-on, reminds us that public opinion on gay issues over all has been moving leftward over the years. Majorities oppose gay marriage, but in the exit polls Tuesday, 25 percent of the voters supported gay marriage and 35 percent of voters supported civil unions. There is a big middle on gay rights issues, as there is on most social issues.
Much of the misinterpretation of this election derives from a poorly worded question in the exit polls. When asked about the issue that most influenced their vote, voters were given the option of saying "moral values." But that phrase can mean anything - or nothing. Who doesn't vote on moral values? If you ask an inept question, you get a misleading result.

The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president. Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's hardly the Bible Belt. Bush, on the other hand, did not gain significantly in the 11 states with gay marriage referendums.

He won because 53 percent of voters approved of his performance as president. Fifty-eight percent of them trust Bush to fight terrorism. They had roughly equal confidence in Bush and Kerry to handle the economy. Most approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq. Most see it as part of the war on terror.
The fact is that if you think we are safer now, you probably voted for Bush. If you think we are less safe, you probably voted for Kerry. That's policy, not fundamentalism. The upsurge in voters was an upsurge of people with conservative policy views, whether they are religious or not.

The red and blue maps that have been popping up in the papers again this week are certainly striking, but they conceal as much as they reveal. I've spent the past four years traveling to 36 states and writing millions of words trying to understand this values divide, and I can tell you there is no one explanation. It's ridiculous to say, as some liberals have this week, that we are perpetually refighting the Scopes trial, with the metro forces of enlightenment and reason arrayed against the retro forces of dogma and reaction.

In the first place, there is an immense diversity of opinion within regions, towns and families. Second, the values divide is a complex layering of conflicting views about faith, leadership, individualism, American exceptionalism, suburbia, Wal-Mart, decorum, economic opportunity, natural law, manliness, bourgeois virtues and a zillion other issues.

But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Bush. If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are?

What we are seeing is a diverse but stable Republican coalition gradually eclipsing a diverse and stable Democratic coalition. Social issues are important, but they don't come close to telling the whole story. Some of the liberal reaction reminds me of a phrase I came across recently: The rage of the drowning man.

David Brooks - A Mole Posing as a Blue-State Snitch

2004-11-07T08:18:00.000-08:00

I have a special kind of loathing for David Brooks. He's the Right's official emissary to liberal America. And he's perfect for the job, with his whole harmless, nebbishy Michael Kinsley-esque demeanor. By god, he's one of "us"!

But that's the con. His job is to pose as one of us and appear in our forums (NY Times editorial pages, PBS, etc.) and explain to us in terms we understand why we will be crushed by the "real America." He's a mole posing as a blue-state snitch who's job is to build up every stereotype of the effete liberal and to spread despair and self doubt amongst blue-staters.

He has two basic moves: everything is divided into two: two Americas, two cultures, two types of people, etc. (which is the basic Rove-ian strategy). Then he pretends to speak for the liberal side, in a mode of fake "confession" which lends creedence to every straw-man construction of liberal, blue-state America. He loves to say things like "we here on the coasts like to think of ourselves as morally superior and just plain smarter than the hard-working, church-going folks of the great red center." etc. etc. He tries to come off as so reasonable and regular, but in some ways he is more viscious and damaging than Limbaugh and the other outright haters.

And this last essay of his really takes the cake. He has made his entire career on this game of playing up the "divided America" theme. He's written two books which insist on it and underscore it with facile pseudo-journalism in the midst of an unprecedented Republican effort to divide the country----then he has the gall to declare the whole thing a "liberal myth" to "reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them." Is he kidding? Does he really think he can get away with that?

Nicholas Confessore - Paradise Glossed

2004-04-06T17:22:00.000-07:00

Paradise Glossed
The problem with David Brooks.

By Nicholas Confessore
Washington Monthly

A few weeks ago, as news of the torture at Abu Ghraib made its way out to the wider world, David Brooks published a column that many of his readers had probably been waiting months to see. Brooks, who joined The New York Times op-ed stable in 2003, had long been among the more cogent defenders of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But as the prison scandal reached its apogee, Brooks seemed to have had enough. "This has been a crushingly depressing period, especially for people who support the war in Iraq," he wrote. "The predictions people on my side made about the postwar world have not yet come true. The warnings others made about the fractious state of post-Saddam society have." Though he was not ready to give up on Iraq, Brooks continued:

It's not too early to begin thinking about what was clearly an intellectual failure. There was, above all, a failure to understand the consequences of our power. There was a failure to anticipate the response our power would have on the people we sought to liberate. They resent us for our power and at the same time expect us to be capable of everything. There was a failure to understand the effect our power would have on other people around the world. We were so sure that we were using our might for noble purposes, we assumed that sooner or later, everybody else would see that as well.

Not only was Brooks perhaps the first among that group of conservative thinkers who had advocated war against Iraq for nearly a decade to concede that his side had gotten things dreadfully wrong. He had also put his finger on the central failing of the war hawks--their purblind arrogance and self-delusion--with a degree of precision all the more powerful for having come from a supporter of the war.

It's instructive, though, to go back and read what Brooks had written about Iraq one month earlier, when the Shiite uprising began to build steam. "Come on people, let's get a grip," Brooks lectured:

This week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam. Pundits and sages were spinning a whole series of mutually exclusive disaster scenarios: Civil war! A nationwide rebellion! Maybe we should calm down a bit. I've spent the last few days talking with people who've spent much of their careers studying and working in this region. We're at a perilous moment in Iraqi history, but the situation is not collapsing.

Oh, good--he talked to some people. (The only Near East experts on the planet who didn't think the situation was collapsing, apparently.) Having begun his column like an overzealous junior press secretary ham-handedly spinning bad news, Brooks ended it like a second-rate talk-radio host playing tough guy. "Sadr is an enemy of civilization," he intoned. "The terrorists are enemies of civilization. They must be defeated." Well, sure.

I suspect I'm not the only one who has noticed that the quality of Brooks's Times column varies wildly from week to week. One day, he's funny, unpredictable, insightful; you read along, glad that the Times has given this man a permanent place in its pages. Three days later, he's bloviating like Michael Savage, and Maureen Dowd doesn't seem so silly anymore. But if you peruse Brooks's considerable pre-Timesian oeuvre, you'll find that the same inconsistency is evident throughout his work. There is Brooks the Journalist. And there is Brooks the Hack.

Brooks the Journalist got his start working the police beat in Chicago; today, nearly alone among those conservative pundits who habitually bash the press for its laziness and myopia, Brooks still actually ventures out into the real world to do his own reporting on what it holds. Brooks the Journalist is erudite enough to pen essays for The Public Interest but accessible enough to write columns for Newsweek. Often when reading his best work, you feel that he's perfectly explained or captured something you knew to be true but couldn't find precisely the right words for. He is a keen observer, adept at distilling his reporting into generalizations that illuminate American life. The most famous of these is, of course, the bohemian bourgeoisie, or Bobos, the upscale, older liberals who "combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos," as Brooks put it in his bestselling book, Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Bobos was a bestseller not only because it captured the mores of middle-aged, blue-state Boomers--people who wear expedition-quality anoraks to shovel snow and spend thousands of dollars on brand-new dinner tables designed to look worn and authentic--but also because he was sympathetic to his subjects. (A wise move, as they were also his audience.) "I'm a member of this class," Brooks assured readers. "We're not so bad."

Indeed, such people enjoy reading Brooks the Journalist precisely because he is one of the few right-leaning pundits who doesn't seem to believe that liberals are evil. Though conservative, Brooks the Journalist is reflective rather than bombastic; his zingers barely singe, let alone burn. Instead of dispensing wrath on "Hannity & Colmes," Brooks offers witty aperçus on "The News-Hour with Jim Lehrer." Even the political philosophy to which Brooks has attached his name, "national-greatness conservatism"--it has something to do with building nicer libraries and resuscitating the space program--seems rather unthreatening. To put things in Brooksian terms, he's a conservative, but the kind you'd bring home to discuss politics over $17-a-pound artisanal goat cheese and organic chardonnay bottled by third-generation French peasants. It's no wonder the Times felt comfortable putting him on the op-ed page.

But there is also Brooks the Hack. Brooks the Hack spent his formative years at The Wall Street Journal's famously kooky and fact-challenged editorial page, for which he wrote "editorial features," the Journal's term for axe-grinding reportage that sidesteps the paper's famously demanding news pages and, indeed, frequently contradicts what is published there. (Though Brooks's dispatches, to be sure, ground much less than those of his colleagues.) Later, he helped launch The Weekly Standard, which played house organ to the Gingrich revolution in the days before it played house organ to the Bush administration hawks. (In between these periods, the Standard was perhaps the most trenchant and interesting political magazine in the country.) While Brooks the Journalist is honest and self-critical, Brooks the Hack is willing to carry water for his political allies. He opines that the Bush administration is "drunk on truth serum" and "exceptionally forthright" about its policies. He unsheathes the marvelous sophistry that "our government couldn't even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq--thank goodness, too, because any 'plan' hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality." (Actually, technocrats at Departments of Defense and State did hatch a pretty good plan. Alas, Brooks's fellow-travelers among the Pentagon's civilian appointees ignored it.) He insists that pro-war neoconservatives "travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another," when in fact a game of "Two Degrees of Richard Perle" would get you just about every member of this alleged neocon diaspora.

Similarly, Brooks the Hack indulges in predictable--and frequently dishonest--caricatures of Democrats. He once wrote that "upscale areas everywhere" voted for Al Gore, even though a cursory check of census data reveals that seven of the 10 richest counties in America voted for George W. Bush in 2000. When it began to look like John Kerry would carry the Democratic banner in 2004, Brooks argued that the Democrats "won't nominate a guy unless his family had an upper-deck berth on the Mayflower"--this of a party whose last five nominees included a Georgia peanut farmer, a guy raised by a working-class single mom in Arkansas, and another born to Greek immigrants. Yet Brooks the Hack seems to revel in cheap shots, such as implying that the term "neocon" was anti-Semitic-- "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish'," he recently wrote in the Times.

More broadly, whereas Brooks the Journalist unfurls grand abstractions that illuminate essential truths about American life, Brooks the Hack peddles unreliable generalizations that describe the world as he and his friends wish it to be. Every pundit makes bad calls during election season, but only Brooks was of the opinion that "[t]he closest thing to a Dean resistance movement is emerging inside the Lieberman campaign," as he wrote in December 2003, when the steadfastly pro-war senator was parked in a race for fifth. When Brooks set out to describe the differences between red and blue America--by driving a whopping 65 miles from Bethesda, Md., to Franklin County, Pa.--he produced an article replete with seemingly knowing observations that turned out to be factually wrong. Brooks says few blue staters "could name even five NASCAR drivers"; but as reporter Sasha Issenberg noted in Philadelphia magazine, three of the five top markets for the Winston Cup are in blue states. Brooks says that Red America is home-shopping country, but it turns out that QVC's audiences skew towards affluent, suburban blue staters. Brooks says you can't spend more than $20 at a restaurant in Franklin County, when in fact it's possible to blow $50 on veal medallions and wild-rice pilaf at a bed-and-breakfast where Brooks himself had spent the night.

Split personality

Brooks the Journalist and Brooks the Hack are both on display in his new book, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. Like Bobos, it is a work of cultural reporting, with Brooks in the role of "comic sociologist." But whereas Bobos limned the mostly liberal, mostly blue state-dwelling upper middle-class, On Paradise Drive is concerned with a lower social register and a broader geographic swath--the "moderately affluent strivers" whose peregrinations have made suburbia the demographic center of American life. Today, more people live, work, and play in the 'burbs than in urban or rural locales. And as Brooks is not the first to note, the new suburbs are also very different from the old ones. Taken as a whole, for instance, they contain more single people than families with kids. They have replaced cities as the first destination of immigrants, most of whom now skip Chinatown and move directly to the outskirts of places like Charlotte, N.C., and Lincoln, Neb.

On Paradise Drive
by David Brooks
Simon & Schuster, $25.00

What's more, Brooks argues, these suburbs are not the boring and conformist cul-de-sacs of popular repute, but places where venerable and vibrant American traditions have taken root and flourished. "The human longing for transcendence, spiritual depth, and moral cohesion has not perished in the sprawls of suburbia," he writes, "it has just taken a different form, because so many Americans live so much of their lives in the imagined land of the future." It is in the new suburbs--with their limitless physical, social, and political space--that the American penchant for decentralization and segmentation has come to full flower. In suburbia, every subculture has its geographic enclave, every niche sport a championship broadcast on ESPN 2, every hobby its own clubs, conventions, and celebrities. Hence, the 'burbs are home to white people, but also to a pastiche of American cultural, religious, and lifestyle diversity: "lesbian dentists, Iranian McMansions, Korean megachurches, nuclear-free-zone subdevelopments, Orthodox shtetls with Hasidic families walking past strip malls on their way to Saturday-morning shul," as Brooks puts it. And thanks to the job mobility of the post-industrial economy, people who don't like where they live or who they live next to can simply move somewhere else, which Americans do more than any other people in the world.

This is good observational journalism, grounded in (other people's) social-science research. But then there are those abstractions. For a book about America, On Paradise Drive has very few Americans in it. For the most part, as Brooks explains early on, he prefers "to speak in parables, composites, and archetypes." And there are a lot of them, some of which will be familiar to readers of Brooks's magazine writing. There is the Ubermom, the high-achieving woman who, upon leaving the workforce for motherhood, channels her intelligence and drive into unleashing the potential for greatness possessed by each of her children. ("By the time her child is in the pre-preschool years, Ubermom is boosting her junior achiever's prephonics-acquisition skills.") There is the Organization Kid, the dutiful meritocrat who spends high school amassing "extracurriculars" and his college years trying to climb the system instead of bucking it. "One finds students applying time-quadrant techniques to maximize their mental efficiency. They read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens," he writes. "Opportunity lures them, the glorious future." Others of Brooks's composite characters lack cutesy names but are endowed with fully-realized inner lives. In an amusing section about niche magazines, Brooks describes "the perfect Cigar Aficionado reader" as someone who sips 400-year-old port, watches James Bond DVDs, and "contemplates whether it is really worth it to travel to Russia just so he can break the sound barrier in a rented MiG, or whether his time would be better spent at the Dean Martin fantasy camp for frustrated crooners."

It's easy to find yourself nodding along with On Paradise Drive, in part because Brooks is a very funny writer and in part because his composites are often wickedly acute. (I still remember playing tennis against other Organization Kids whose MBA-holding Ubermoms firmly believed they could turn little Billy into the next Andre Agassi.) I'm even willing to accept that sometimes, "One simply must tolerate imprecision of the poetic if one is to grasp the true or powerful essence of a place or people," as Brooks argues in his introduction. Ambitious journalism is perforce the work of translating on-the-ground facts into big ideas with universal import.

But it's hard work, and one is liable, if not relentlessly honest with oneself, to slight a nuanced truth in favor of a pet theory. Just ask any reporter who's ever been told to find subjects for a story on, say, what Soccer Moms are thinking these days. In practice, if you ask 10 different Soccer Moms what their opinion is of George W. Bush, you're likely to get 10 different answers. The temptation is to pick the Soccer Mom who's thinking what everyone in New York and Washington expects her to be thinking--or what the polls say she should be thinking. Or to ask a local advocacy group to provide you with just the right homeless guy you need to illustrate your story on cuts in social services budget. Or to use the same "man on the street" your buddy on the metro desk used last month, hoping readers won't notice that Fred O'Keefe of Flushing has remarkably quotable views on both the city's budget crisis and "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?"

Some reporters, of course, don't even bother. Fabulists such as Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, and Jack Kelley each ran aground on the rocks of reality, so desperate to find telling anecdotes or characters or details that they simply invented them.

Schtick figures

Brooks could never be called a fabulist, if for no other reason that he sidesteps the problem altogether by writing about archetypes instead of real people. But there's evidence in On Paradise Drive of tension between the abstractions Brooks the Hack wants to be true and the reality Brooks the Reporter should have gotten right.

Take, for example, the suburban typology that occupies the early part of the book. You don't have to read too closely to figure out that, in Brooks's estimation, some suburbs are better expressions of the new American dream than others. On the one hand, you have the exurbs, the land of office parks, megastores, and sprawling housing developments plopped into the middle of Southwestern deserts and Florida swampland. Brooks evidently likes the exurbs. They are, he writes, "built to embody a modern version of the suburban ideal." The exurbs are populated by "Patio Man" and "Realtor Mom," people who are "infused with a sense of what you might call conservative utopianism." They live in new urbanist planned communities with sculpted driveways and perfect landscaping. They are self-effacing and pleasant. They like paninis and chain stores and golf. They moved to the exurbs because they want bigger houses, nicer neighbors, and lower crime--and also because, Brooks tells us, they are uncomfortable in the increasingly cosmopolitan inner-ring suburbs, with their immigrant group-housing and foreign-film festivals. Patio Man and Realtor Mom vote overwhelmingly Republican. "They are," Brooks writes, "wonderful people."

Rather less wonderful--at least in Brooks's telling--are those who live on the other side of the Beltway. Though he likes to decry clichés about suburban life, here's how he describes a typical resident of the more liberal inner-ring communities:

The assistant anthropology professor can stride through life knowing she was unanimously elected chairwoman of her crunchy suburb's sustainable-growth seminar. She wears the locally approved status symbols: the Tibet-motif dangly earrings, the Andrea Dworkin-inspired hairstyle, the peasant blouse, and the public-broadcasting tote bag … No wonder she feels so righteous in her beliefs.

Why not just call her a screechy dyke and be done with it? But that's not all. These crunchy suburbanites, Brooks alleges, "subtly compete to prove they have the worst lawn in the neighborhood, just to show how fervently they reject soul-destroying standards of conventional success." They don't paint their houses enough because they regard "exterior housepaint in the same way they regard makeup, as something that was probably developed using animal testing." In these places, "the chief dilemma is whether to send the kids to Antioch or Hampshire College." And so forth. These are not wonderful people. These are character sketches for a Dartmouth Review cartoon.

Then we get to the professional zones, filled with "affluent sophisticated types who disapprove of the suburbs in principle but find themselves living in one in practice." Here, he insists, "it is apparently socially acceptable to buy a luxury car so long as it comes from a country that is hostile to U.S. foreign policy." This is funny at first, and then I wondered whether Brooks actually met a single person who bought their Audi because Germany declined to join the coalition of the willing. I doubt it. (What car does Brooks drive, anyway?) Of Trader Joe's, the chain of low-priced gourmet grocery stores beloved by liberal suburbanites, Brooks writes, "Everyone knows that snack food is morally suspect, since it contributes to the obesity of the American public, but the clientele still seems to want it. So the folks behind this enterprise have managed to come up with globally concerned stomach filler that tastes virtually like sawdust ground from unendangered wood." Give me a break. Even liberals don't usually buy food that they think tastes bad, and if you look closely at the allegedly goody-goody foods that Brooks cites, you'll find that Veggie Booty and wasabi peas are not very good for you. That is why they are called junk food.

But Brooks believes that even the eating habits of liberal suburbanites are shallow and hypocritical. "When you stumble across Teriyaki Fajita Salad du Jardin, you realize it is possible to cram so many authentic indigenous cultures together that they've created something totally bogus and artificial," he writes. Not only that, but the professionals and the crunchies are provincial and out-of-touch compared to other people. They "don't know what makes a Pentecostal a Pentecostal," "can't tell a military officer's rank by looking at the insignia," and "don't know what a soybean looks like growing in the field." Brooks is probably right on all counts. But then again, I would guess that nearly every American who is not a Pentecostal doesn't know what makes a Pentecostal a Pentecostal. (Quick, what distinguishes a Catholic from an Episcopalian?) And I would love to see polling data on how many Americans, in this age of industrialized agribusiness, know what a soybean looks like growing in the field.

The point is that too often, Brooks's "archetypes" are really just old-fashioned stereotypes. It should go without saying that most people are more complicated and contradictory than stereotypes allow for. I doubt Patio Men, if they exist, are all wonderful people, but I also don't think they would turn out to be any more or less wonderful than any other group of people in America. The inner-ring suburbs, too, are rather more varied than Brooks's caricature allows. Montgomery County, Md., where Brooks lives, does have its Takoma Park neighborhood, which I strongly suspect was the model for Brooks's archetypal "crunchy suburb." But it has lots of other parts, too: upper-crust Chevy Chase, young professionals living in Silver Spring because the apartments are cheaper there than in the District, the strip-mall row of Rockville Pike, and so forth. Takoma Park is not typical of Montgomery County, but the thing is, there really is no typical Montgomery County. Average things out that way, and you only blur the reality.

Maul of America

There's some indication that even Brooks himself doesn't think much of his suburban typology. Patio Man and Realtor Mom originally made their appearance in a Weekly Standard article published shortly before the 2002 elections. That time around, Brooks elevated them to the heart of a much broader thesis. They "represent the beau ideal of Republican selfhood," he wrote in the Standard, "and are becoming the new base--the brains, heart, guts and soul of the emerging Republican party." Driven out of the inner-ring suburbs by snooty latté-sipping cosmopolitans, they were moving to the new suburbs, places like Loudoun County, Va. and Douglas County, Colo. As Brooks elaborated later in an article for Blueprint, the house journal of the Democratic Leadership Council:

With the explosion of office park people and institutions, a new culture is emerging. And people who are part of that culture tend to adopt the values of George W. Bush, regardless of the values they had in their old towns. These include order and neatness over disorder and dysfunction; achievement, sports, and competition; and a sense of responsibility and success. It's a jock culture filled with talk of college football, NASCAR, and kids' sports teams that travel. It's a culture in which seeker-sensitive mega-churches are part of the atmosphere, even if you never set foot in one. It's a culture of big-box mega-malls with parking lots as big as nuclear test sites where sprawl people gather to brag about how much they're saving by buying in bulk.

The coming political era, Brooks posited, was one of suburb v. suburb, with the Sprawl People of exurbia duking it out for dominance with the crunchies, immigrants, and professionals of the Democratic-leaning inner-ring suburbs. Because the exurbs were growing faster than the latter, and because they were pretty good at incorporating new arrivals into their orderly center-right political culture, they would win.

But like some of Brooks's other abstractions, this one just didn't hold up under close inspection. The exurbs have certainly grown faster than the inner-ring suburbs. But as political demographer Ruy Teixeira has pointed out in this magazine ("Deciphering the Democrats' Debacle," May 2003) since the former were so small to begin with, the latter are still growing much faster in absolute terms. More tellingly, as the exurbs get bigger--as they become more prosperous, get integrated into the larger metropolitan areas Teixeira calls "ideopolises," and attract more immigration--they actually tend to get more cosmopolitan and Democratic. That's why, among counties with the largest total population growth, Al Gore won nearly 3 million more votes than George W. Bush. Loudoun County may have given Bush 56 percent of the vote in 2000, but the same county gave his dad 66 percent in 1988. (Reflecting the emergence of a Democratic ideopolis, Virginia's northern suburbs have gone from overwhelmingly Republican a few decades ago to evenly split now, helping put a Democrat back in the governor's mansion.) Other states with sprawl--among them Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado--are becoming more blue, not more red.

That may be why Brooks neglects to include his theory of future Republican dominance among the pages On Paradise Drive, which is, on the whole, not a very political book. Indeed, he pretty much drops his original typology after the first few chapters, implicitly acknowledging that it wasn't very useful in the first place, and the heart of his analysis--the chapters about how Ubermom and her Organization Kid shop and live and learn--doesn't rely much on the peculiarities of the crunchy suburbs or the glories of the exurbs. By the end of the book, Brooks is much more interested in what suburbanites have in common: the "Paradise Spell" that drives our tendency to "work so hard, to consume so feverishly, to move so much." Ultimately, it's the same longing, the same desire for opportunity, success, and fulfillment, that drive both the exurban Patio Man with his military-grade Weber grill and the suburban lawyer who rips apart his kitchen to make room for a Tuscan-style culinary operations center. This is what Brooks means by living "in the future tense." And here you sense that--once again--Brooks has put his finger on something. As a friend of mine once put it, there's no Canadian Dream. But there is an American Dream, and everyone in the world knows what it is. We are the eschatological nation.

Of course, this line of thinking is neither particularly new--see Frederick Jackson Turner's enormously influential thesis, articulated slightly more than a century ago, about the effect of a permanent frontier on American culture--nor particularly conservative. Not too long ago, in his speech accepting the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination, Bill Clinton reminisced about what he had learned at Georgetown from the historian Carroll Quigley: that "America was the greatest country in the history of the world because our people have always believed in two great ideas: first, that tomorrow can be better than today, and second that each of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so." It was a motif Clinton would come back to repeatedly during his two campaigns for the presidency--he won the suburban vote both times--and during his time in the White House. Brooks may believe that Clinton "debased the presidency and disillusioned a generation of young people," as he wrote a few years ago. But he shares with the former president a surprisingly similar sense of the essential fabric of American life.

Brooks the Journalist seems to, at any rate. But Brooks the Hack still desires to be part of a wider political movement, even one that commands embarrassing displays of intellectual obedience. And while most of On Paradise Drive is written by Brooks the Journalist, Brooks the Hack still lurks within, always threatening to overcome his better half, always clouding his vision and throwing off his aim. It's true that Brooks's conservatism leads him to smart ideas that a more liberal columnist probably wouldn't conceive. But it's also true that his hankering after movement cred accounts for most of what is dishonest and sloppy in his ideas. Eventually, Brooks will have to decide exactly who he wants to be.

Nicholas Confessore is an editor of The Washington Monthly.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0406.confessore.html