David Brooks is insufferable. He continues to moan about the inadequacies of the ‘center’ in this country. He so desperately wants to support someone or something, but there is no representation for his fantasyland ideology.
…these days, the political center is a feckless shell. It has no governing philosophy. Its paragons seem from the outside opportunistic, like Arlen Specter, or caught in some wishy-washy middle, like Blanche Lincoln. The right and left have organized, but the center hasn’t bothered to. The right and left have media outlets and think tanks, but the centrists are content to complain about polarization and go home. By their genteel passivity, moderates have ceded power to the extremes.
Can we be honest for just half a second? Take a look at the Democratic Party and show me, identify for me, who the extremists are. Once you’ve identified them for me, please explain how much power they have and how effective they are at wielding that power. How did their views get incorporated into the economic recovery bill, the health care bill, or the Wall Street Reform bill?
Compare the present Democratic Party to the party of the 1990’s, 1980’s, 1970’s, and 1960’s. Where, on an ideological scale, does the present party reside? My answer? To the left of the 1990’s party and to the right of the 1960-1980’s party. This holds true for everything except race, where the party has never been more enlightened. Now, make the same comparison for the GOP. Where does the present GOP reside on the ideological scale? My answer? They are farther to the right than they have ever been. They are miles to the right of the party that pursued and impeached Bill Clinton over a blow job. They are to the right of the party that gave carte blanche to George W. Bush to fuck up everything in sight. They are the definition of extreme. It’s now mainstream in the Republican Party to doubt the theories of evolution and plate tectonics and to dispute that climate change is occurring. Show me anything comparable in the worldview of mainstream Democrats. You won’t find it.
The center hasn’t ceded power to the extremes. You have one party that is trying to govern in a recognizably American way, and another party that is debating whether it was a mistake to desegregate lunch counters. Given that choice, what does it even mean to be in the center? If you can’t make a choice with these options, maybe the center is the place for imbeciles.
The Center is the place for the DC media wankers and no one but the DC media wankers. For decades, the “center” was represented by the bland voices appearing on your TV every night. These bland voices are the ones that lulled us into unjust wars and economic decline, and they no longer have the same soothing power they once did.
Between the internet and the partisan viciousness and insanity of Fox News, Brooks’ beloved center doesn’t stand a chance. Bobo will need to find another wall to hide behind; the one he’s hiding behind now has big holes in it.
The center is where the pendulum currently is in its swing. It is the one-sigma deviation from the average.
Centrism? What’s that? What kind of ideology is that, a Chinese menu? Who is the philosopher of “centrism”?
More and more I think it is correct to call Obama centrist because his political position is exactly where the one-sigma deviation from average opinions in the public is. And remember that the one-sigma deviation includes 62% of the statistical population.
Bobo was, is, and I guess always will be a Republican apologist. Sad that’s it’s getting much harder for him on that score. “Public intellectual” that he’s considered to be in some quarters.
well, haven’t we learned that the only legislation that can pass is what a few conservative Democratic senators and one Republican are willing to vote for? How else could Obama govern but in that one sigma range? All that’s really debatable is the degree to which he could be more convincing to that small group of senators and any given issue.
should be “on any given issue.”
If Obama needs 60% of the Senate that means he’s governing from a slightly right of centre position. (A Republican president needing 60% would have to govern from a slightly left of centre position if dem centrists weren’t so cravenly establishmentarian).
But what is happening is that the centre is moving steadily leftward (just as it has moved right from Reagan to Bush). That leaves a lot of marooned and stranded centrists who used to be playmakers and who are no longer at the centre of things – and a lot of teabaggers who are in the process of falling off a cliff on the right – with only the most tenuous links to political or scientific reality.
The problem is that reality has a “liberal” bias. The movement of history leaves a lot of casualties in its wake – and Brooks is but one of the losers.
Two things. “Bobo” Brooks doesn’t like Ben Nelson? He’s Brooks perfect kind of guy. And I’ll repeat Jim Hightower’s great line. “The only thing you’ll fund in the middle of the road is yellow lines and dead armadillos.” That might not be exactly it, but it is close.
well said.
but you left out the part about those on the right who cloak themselves in “family values” while living secret lives of gay prostitution, diaper prostitution, corporate prostitution, etc.
It’s not like centrism isn’t it’s own ideology with it’s own biases and flaws. People need to be at least aware that centrism is not perfect and doesn’t take the best of both sides.
They are to the right of Joseph McCarthy and 1946 Richard Nixon.
Do you think so? Not so sure about the McCarthyists. It’s hard to compare because the “anti-communism” of the time was so triumphant that it excused everything, from gross violations of human rights to total control by the military-industrial complex. The sad truth is that the Reps of the time were not all that different from the Dems. Maybe it’s more that the Reps stayed pretty much where they were then while the Dems, for all their faults, changed big time.
First of all, most of his beloved moderates are not really moderates, they are conservatives. Threatening to filibuster a neoliberal approach to health care reform that preserves private industry profits puts Ben Nelson, Liberman, Lincoln, etc on the center-right of the political spectrum. If you can’t understand that you’re either an idiot or a hack and Brooks isn’t an idiot.
Its stuff like that that makes me tune out the rest of what Brooks says because he doesn’t have any credibility- his agenda and his audience I find fascinating though. Just drawing on my own personal experience, for a lot of people in my social circle who hated Bush, are disgusted by the hypocrisy of the religious right, and generally believe in science, evolution, climate change, etc, Brooks is a beacon in the storm that allows them to still dislike the dems and Obama, claim they are conservatives, and while publicly disavow them, still vote for the GOP and get a good nights sleep at night. Oh and did I mention most of these dudes are well-off financially? Brooks I think knows this game very well and nobody plays it better than him.
They love him, because they like to feel enlightened and open minded, and he is an articulate, well spoken conservative.
But if you admitted that the Democratic Party IS the center and has been for decades, then you couldn’t practice on-the-other-hand lazy ass journalism. You would have to be an advocate, and that is inherently not objective.
It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just Brooks, Broder and the gang. The myth of the Center is fundamental ideology for virtually all of the Big News establishment. That’s what’s insufferable for me. The bland and mindless notion that good journalism means uncritical airing of whatever idiotic claim has some buzz today, and then blaming all our troubles on “partisanship” and the takeover by “extremists on both sides”. The country is run by journalists, pundits, and pols whose intellectual and emotional development stopped when they were six and mommy and daddy were having a fight and all they wanted was for them to stop it — or at least that’s the audience they cater to.
There’s no such thing as a “center” in this country because rightwing ideology is about slogans, not policy. Contrary to GOP spew, there is no great divide between “small government” and “big government” factions, for example. There is no consistent party difference on individual liberties and states’ rights. All that is just a cover for pretending that catering to the bizarre coalition of nativist/racist anger and neo-fascist royalism is based on some kind of idealistic principles that connect somehow to the country’s founding ideals.
The soft idiots have managed to convince most of us that a willingness to find compromise = “moving to the center”. It does not. It isn’t even in the same universe. You compromise by finding ways to accommodate conflicting concerns about an issue or a policy. That can’t be done when the “concerns” of one side are nothing but deceptive excuses for backing insupportable claims. “Moving to the center” is the opposite of compromise and negotiation because it does not engage the players in seeking common ground. It merely gets mommy and daddy to shut up by pretending everything’s fixed now because meaningless and comforting cliches have been babbled. Thereby assuring that the battle will go on forever.
One big problem is the belief that there is a linear continuity from one “extreme” to the other that can somehow be bisected to get to the middle. In many cases what can be represented as metaphorically continuous is only so as a metaphor. If on one had you have flat earthers and on the other people who believe the world more or less looks like a basket ball, the compromise of having a upside down bowl shape for the world actually resolves no issues.
Brooks’ writing style is a major problem for me. In the column linked to, we are “treated” to the political viewpoints of a hypothetical person: Ben.
In this case, I can’t argue directly against Brooks because to do that I’d have to argue against Ben, but Brooks has ownership of this character. E.g. “Ben looked around for leaders who might understand his outrage, he only found them among the ideological hard-liners”
If I wish to challenge that and assert that sensible non-crazypeople can address outrage – and following Brooks style – I have to create another person, call her Barbara, but then Brooks and I would be talking past each other.
That’s why I don’t read his NYTimes column.