I don’t know who David Brooks is trying to convince with his article on immigration reform, but telling conservatives that our immigration policies should be based on Canada’s is probably about as compelling to them as an argument for basing our health care system on Sweden’s system. That doesn’t mean that he is wrong, though.
His conclusion, however, compels us to ask a question.
The second big conclusion is that if we can’t pass a [immigration] law this year, given the overwhelming strength of the evidence, then we really are a pathetic basket case of a nation.
The question is, if we cannot pass an immigration law this year despite the overwhelming strength of the argument in favor of reform, who will be responsible for that failure? Who is turning this nation into “a pathetic basket case”? And why does David Brooks insist on continuing to associate himself with the culprits? At what point does he look himself in the eye (presumably, using a mirror to do this) and say that he agrees with Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee and Colin Powell and Lawrence Wilkerson and Chuck Hagel?
I know that David Brooks gets paid handsomely to be Charles Krauthammer’s favorite liberal columnist, but it’s a cartoonish existence lacking in any semblance of dignity. Last week, Brooks called for the creation of a second Republican Party for people who don’t live in Jesusland, which caused me to say that he is as stupid as a boiled ham. If he wants a reasonable party that represents the broad center of political opinion in this country…a party that wants to do sensible immigration reform, he should join the Democratic Party. The only reason he doesn’t is because his career would crumble into irrelevance four seconds after he made the jump.
Amazingly fiscal conservatives keep pointing to the mathematical impossibilities of our entitlement programs, and they have a point — the babies weren’t born over the last several decades –but the right is also opposed to immigration reform which is the single thing we can do to get more/enough people paying into the system to keep it anything like the system we promised younger generations.
Same with liberals, actually, who keep insisting on raising the cap. Anyway, yep, that’s the easiest fix.
Immigration reform is sufficient without raising the cap? I’d still prefer both in that opening up immigration is needed for many reasons and raising the cap makes the FICA less regressive, but show me.
It’s his vanity more than anything. He doesn’t think of himself as a Republican but as a philosopher, the Walter Lippmann of the right. I ‘m pretty sure it’s his “liberal” audience he cares about, since they have better taste than the conservatives (they don’t know whether Appleby’s has a salad bar or follow Nascar, so to speak)–he’s not trying to persuade anyone of anything other than that he’s smart, and clubbable (he secretly thinks he’s “too Jewish” and Mr. Buckley didn’t really like him).
Immigration, though, is a point where the two sides of the right–country club and country-western–are bound to conflict. Your old-money conservatives love immigrants, as employees who put up with low wages and no rights; illegals are best, because they can be virtually enslaved, but legal ones are OK too. White-trash conservatives are nativists, afraid of immigrants because they’re foreign, brown, and after our women. And they are running the party at the moment, but Brooks is free to ignore them. He’s not being a liberal here.
Booman–I think you’re developing a fixation on Brooks that will lead you to reflexively ridiculing anything he writes. Keep up the good work.
One aspect of Brooks’ work that can be maddening is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Once or twice a year Brooks will write a coherent, well-argued column that stands for pragmatic conservatism and against the radical right that has taken over the Republican Party. Then he’ll go back to his usual style of writing.
Jeff Jacoby fills the conservative chair in the Boston Globe’s band of op-ed columnists and does so with far more coherence and insight than Brooks can usually muster—thus proving it can be done well.
Brooks is unwilling to maintain intellectual and political honesty. All his pundit sins flow from that.
The good ship Irrelevant sailed long ago, Democrat or not.
Crumble into tremendous financial loss, then?
Someone earlier in this thread suggested that Brooks writes in response to his desire to be respected by liberals. I’ve heard of this status he supposedly has as a conservative columnist who is respected by many liberals. I haven’t become acquainted with a liberal who respects Bobo, and if they confessed that sin, I’d rake that misguided soul over the coals with dispatch.
I think that was me, but I put “liberals” in quotes. People whose political awareness doesn’t go much beyond abortion and single-sex marriage, physicians and accountants who remember smoking dope in college, people who must skip the third act of the opera because they have to get back to Jersey. Check out the comment threads from his columns for the mash notes about how they appreciate his civility.
They’re nice people too, don’t get me wrong, good-natured and reasonably generous. That’s partly why they’re bamboozled into taking him seriously.
Oh, I’ve heard this often enough to know that Brooks-loving liberals exist in unfortunate plentitude. I’m a bit disappointed that I haven’t had a chance to talk with one about the subject. But a boy can dream…