After laying out his simplistic center-right philosophy, David Brooks diagnoses why his form of moderation didn’t prevail in Washington:
…I confess that about 16 months ago I had some hope of a revival. The culture war, which had bitterly divided the country for decades, was winding down. The war war — the fight over Iraq and national security — was also waning.
The country had just elected a man who vowed to move past the old polarities, who valued discussion and who clearly had some sympathy with both the Burkean and Hamiltonian impulses. He staffed his administration with brilliant pragmatists whose views overlapped with mine, who differed only in that they have more faith in technocratic planning.
Yet things have not worked out for those of us in the broad middle. Politics is more polarized than ever. The two parties have drifted further to the extremes. The center is drained and depressed.
What happened?
History happened. The administration came into power at a time of economic crisis. This led it, in the first bloom of self-confidence, to attempt many big projects all at once. Each of these projects may have been defensible in isolation, but in combination they created the impression of a federal onslaught.
Notice the copout: “History happened.” How’s that for personal responsibility? No mention of the Republicans and their media hacks driving the narrative of a ‘federal onslaught.’
On one level I agree with Brooks.
During periods when the [size of] government war is at full swing, the libertarian/Goldwater-esque tendency in the Republican Party becomes dominant and all other tendencies become dormant. That has happened now.
I usually phrase this differently. I say that the Republicans are against all government spending that they don’t control (and from 1933-1995 they rarely had any control of federal spending), but they conveniently forget their small-government principles as soon as they gain control of the pursestrings. That, combined with their tax-cuts, led them to destroy the country’s finances under both Reagan and Bush the Younger. They’ll do it again if given the chance. In fact, there is zero chance that they won’t.
What Brooks fails to do is to assign any responsibility to the Republicans for the fundamentally dishonest nature of their political ideology. They aren’t really for small government. They’re for control. Their governing style is indistinguishable from plunder. And, if the country feels like there is some socialist onslaught at play currently, the responsibility for that lies at least as much with the whackjobs and cynical hacks that are spewing that nonsense all over the radio and teevee waves in this country as it does with anything the president and the Democrats are doing.
And in the areas where there really has been some massive increase in federal action (banking, finance, the auto industry), it was only to clean up after the latest predictable Republican-created disaster.
History happened = the right wing pretty much broke the world.
he really is such an asshole. I also enjoyed the way he drew an equivalency between the “hard left” (to the extent that any exists)of the Democratic Party to the hard right of the GOP, which is like comparing apples to elephant turds. I mean, SERIOUSLY Bobo?
that’s just insane. and a total lie: the democrats in general have drifted right (embracing indefinite detention, escalating in afghanistan, offshore oil drilling, expanding abortion restrictions, retroactively legalizing warrantless wiretapping, and a whole host of other issues), while the GOP has simply gone batshit insane with the lying about death panels, the Hitler analogies, the socialism bullshit, and the rest..
what a fucking tool brooks is
wow, I finally agree with you about something! Well said.
The thing I hate most about Brooks is that, like most others of his despicable ilk, he is so. fucking. SMUG.
It’s not even about assigning blame. Brooks follows the classic ruling class static model of politics where there is a left, a right and a centre half way in between. Reality is a bit more dynamic and complex. For instance, the Health Care Bill treated as such a triumph by the Left now originated in right wing think tanks. It’s not just the Overton window that has moved, but the whole body politic and what is centrist now may well be seen as weirdly wacko conservative in a couple of years time.
History doesn’t just happen, and the neo-cons have been expert at creating facts on the ground – e.g. a generalised civilian terror – which moves everything to the right. Obama is above all a pragmatist, and seeks to resolve problems (often created by his predecessor) in the most effective way possible often using analytical and policy tools not much different from those of his predecessors. E.g. the neo-classical model of market capitalism is still largely in place and driving policy choices.
What Brooks can’t see – because his concepts and horizons and interests don’t allow him to see – is that there is a paradigmatic shift going on generated by financial capitalism’s own contradictions, by peak oil and by climate change. Neo-classical economics and Libertarian politics assume an ever expanding world with infinite resources awaiting exploitation and have no model of resource depletion or the external costs of their actions on others.
Brook’s world is imploding and he cannot even see that happening. All he can see is a swing left within his blinkered spectrum when in reality that swing is a belated and totally insufficient response to very changed realities.
“The war war — the fight over Iraq and national security — was also waning.”
Yeah, David “War cheerleader” Brooks, let’s ignore the elephant in the bathroom. Ignore the vampire that is sucking the money out of the tax payer and into off shore banks.
What’s stunning about Brooks (in a “can’t-turn-away-from-the-car-crash-that’s-about-to-happen” way) is that he’s clearly intelligent and self-aware enough to recognize that our new president won office and has governed as an exemplar of conservative progressivism.
On a policy level, Brooks-Obama is not a debate that takes place between the 40 yard lines of the metaphorical political football field. It’s a debate that takes place between the 48 yard lines—and on some level Brooks realizes that.
Then Brooks’ psychological defense mechanisms kick in. (Psychoanalysts, psychiatric social workers, psychologists, et al, feel free to weigh in.)
From a distance, it seems like it would be far less stressful for Brooks to celebrate Obama’s:
(I could go on.)
But then Brooks would have to confront the fact of how far right the Republican party has moved in the past 15 years. He then might have to take a stand like William F. Buckley’s fight to expel the John Birch Society from the conservative movement.
To do so would require far more political courage of Brooks than it did of Buckley, because the modern equivalents of the Birchers are not at the fringe of the conservative movement, but at the heart of it.
At some point (maybe if Obama wins reelection with 60% of the vote and expanded majorities in both houses of Congress), progressive conservatives like Brooks will have to confront the extremists in the conservative movement and find a way to marginalize them again.
Clearly that time has not arrived.
For all his “moderate” veneer, Brooks is just a GOP mouthpiece when it comes to basic attitudes. So why would he be expected to point out Republican responsibility for our problems?
Dems steer clear of anything “ideological” like cows from fire, so there’s no real voice for questioning the governing cliches on which this country is run. Even those who call themselves leftists on bloglandt rarely rise to more than partisan nattering over the details of stunningly unimaginative and intellect-devoid legislation. There’s no pressure even on Dems, much less the likes of Brooks, to take a hard look at the institutions and ideas that are running the country into the ground. In retrospect, I more and more see the Clinton administration as the turning point for the end of thought as a component of political process. That’s what happens when “pragmatism” routs ideology.
Chuck Schumer finally admitted that the Democrats have been allowing the Republican leadership to state outright lies about the Democrats in public without challenge. Chuck admitted this during a news conference the other day. He also said that the Democrats will be more aggressive in refuting these lies immediately and “on the spot”. However, the Democrats are still letting the Republicans blur the line between the people who were running the regulatory agencies during the eight Bush years of Republican control of the government. The American people voted out the Republicans because the screwed up the administration of government business during this eight year period, and ever since they have been out of power the Republicans have blamed BIG GOVERNMENT for the problems that they created while in power. Further they have been successful in HANGING this BIG GOVERNMENT label around the necks of the Democrats current in control. The Republicans have been successful in scapegoating the governmental problems that they created onto the Democrats simply because the Democrats refused to fight back against these lies.
Since I had an opportunity to observe the concept of Republican style deregulation in action under SEC chairs Harvey Pitt and William Donaldson, in my opinion the seeds of the economic crash caused by Wall Street was the direct result of the SEC being placed in a non-regulatory status in adherence to the Republican ideology on the subject of too much government regulation. Traders in Goldman were able to dream up these commoditized CDO’s made up of known “non-performing” mortgage loans and sell them as they knew damn well that there would be no interference from the SEC. Likewise, the CDS insurance fiasco was made possible because the Wall Street houses knew that the SEC was too busy watching porn to care about what was going on the Street. More of Republican style deregulation in action. All of this while the Republicans controlled the government, the stage was being set for trillions of dollars in financial ruin for millions of Americans across the country. This graphic real life example of deregulation decimated the major pension funds around the nation. Even a shaken remorseful Greenspan testified before Congress that he never thought something like this could occur in the “FREE MARKET SYSTEM”! What no one is yet to call the synthetic CDO’s and their associated contrived Credit Default Swaps (CDS) what they were in actuality, nothing more than a grand CON game!
So now we have Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and his cohorts rising up to loudly condemn the SEC over the discovery that executives at the agency were spending all of their time downloading porn using government computers. This is another instance of the Republicans trying to push their dirt over onto the Democrats. The study that revealed the porn viewing at the SEC went back 5 years. That puts it between 2005 thru 2010 (or maybe 2004 thru 2009). I am certain that these SEC executives were Republican appointees, who were told just “punch in” and “do nothing” all day. After all what’s one to do at a regulatory agency when the official government policy is NO REGULATION? Viewing porn is just as good for some people as playing computer games or scrabble to while away the time is for other people.
The Democrats need to publicly establish the time line for this SEC porn viewing, along with which POLITICAL PARTY was running the government and lastly WHO THESE SEC EXECUTIVES ARE, Democrat or Republican appointees? If the Democrats don’t get out in front on this, the Republicans will push ownership of this hot button scandal onto them in NOVEMBER! Democrats need to smarten up and NOW!