Promoted by Steven D. I think Booman would agree with you about our dear Uncle Bobo.
Shorter David Brooks, “Snap Out of It“, New York Times, September 23, 2014:
I don’t know why everybody’s so upset. There’s nothing wrong with our government that couldn’t easily be solved by eliminating partisanship and getting legislators to dock their own pay if they don’t get their work done. Meanwhile it’s autumn in New York! And the city’s the most walkable it’s been in years, in the parts I go to!
I love walking in New York too, I’m not going to lie. Still, it’s a little bit fatuous to be so pleased to be a wealthy person (just sold the Cleveland Park place for about $4.5 million, we hear) in the most unequal city in the United States.
Driftglass keeps calling Brooks a Whig, but he’s always been a Tory, longing for an imaginary time when America was governed by the well-reared, well-behaved younger sons of a squirearchy:
America was governed best when it was governed by a porous, self-conscious and responsible elite — during the American revolution, for example, or during and after World War II. Karl Marx and Ted Cruz may believe that power can be wielded directly by the masses, but this has almost never happened historically.
Porous? I guess there’s tiny holes in the barriers between the upper and lower orders through which the occasional Horatio Alger hero might manage to sqeeze.
The Cruz reference must be to the senator’s anti-Obamacare campaign last year when he was demanding that government respond to the people’s desires, as Ezra Klein reported when he was blogging the famous non-filibuster just a year ago:
Cruz isn’t so much making an argument against Obamacare as an argument for direct democracy, or at least a high level of responsiveness to public opinion. “Americans feel like they don’t have a voice,” Cruz said. “I hope to play a small part in providing that voice for them.”
The comical thing was, as Ezra noted at the time, that he didn’t seem to know what public opinion was, which was opposed to defunding the ACA and to cutting spending on Medicare and Social Security, and in favor of progressive taxation on the wealthy and gun control.
Also Cruz is one of the especially retroactionary anti-democracy crusaders who thinks we should go back to having our state legislatures name Senators instead of electing them directly:
Prior to the 17th Amendment, the state legislatures’ ability and authority to select senators was a powerful check on the federal government coming and intruding on the prerogatives of the state,” Cruz said on Thursday. “Because if you have the ability to hire and fire me, I’m a lot less likely to break into your house and steal your television.”
Lol, steal your television. Because direct elections allow all kinds of riffraff into the world’s greatest deliberative body.
Cruz doesn’t give any fucks about the Will of the People; he cares about the state governments, elected in turnouts so low it could be 1820s England, making it all the easier for corporations to buy them. He was just demogoguing the refs, who obediently rolled over and called him a populist, but really it’s too silly to tolerate.
The other comical thing, of course, is how in order to build his both-sides-do-it paragraph structure, Brooks has to get his left opposite number to Cruz in the form of somebody who died in 1883 and wasn’t even an American, though he was an enthusiastic supporter of big-government leftist president Abraham Lincoln. At least Marx did believe in direct democracy, it seems, though he didn’t have all that much to say about it.
Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.
I like this. Saving it for use later.
Docking congressional pay – wow, I never thought of that. Cutting ten or twenty grand off the salary of an independently wealthy millionaire would work so much better than anything I have ever thought of! Genius!
It’s been a while since the the last flogging of the insufferable Brooksie at BT, so thanks for this.
What I want to know is who actually reads his shit for “content”? Really, other than other Beltwayers? Self congratulating CEOs and Wall Street Boyz? Surely not anyone calling themselves either a Dem or a Repub, a progressive or a conservative, cuz Brooksie has nothing to say to them. How this self regarding, puffed up fool became a journamalist multi-millionaire (of which I doubt there are many) is awe inspiring.
Can it be from sales of his goddam books? Wasn’t his only hit that “Bohemian Bourgeoisie” claptrap of twenty years ago where he basically sent up for mockery his own family’s high end existence of heirloom tomato salad crafting and Andean potato souffle makin’? Must be money in the family.
Yes, indeed a “social commentator” who apparently still imagines that the “border” between the elites and commoners (genteel and vulgar?) in America is “porous” and that social mobility is the order of the day—in contrast to all recent findings about America’s actual social IMmobility. Can’t let facts get in the way! And if the border of elites is so “porous” how in fuck do we STILL see gold medal failures like Newt Turdrich and Warmonger Kristol and Loser McRube on the teevee every goddam day?!
And why exactly did that noble class of non-partisan meritocratic leadership seem to fall to shit after WWII, David B? Might a little thing like the Age of Nixon and the advent of the (still ongoing) “Conservative Era” have anything to do with it? Oh Good Gosh, NO! It’s radical feminism and no-fault divorce and failed baby daddies and working class moral decay! Ongoing social degeneracy, especially in the (jobless) lower classes! Yes, that’s indisputably it! Also, too, “partisanship”, gee where did toxic partisanship come from?
But Snap Out of It America, things are especially great for wealthy NYers who cash in on massive real estate bonanzas! The Bistros are booming! The pumpkin butternut squash ravioli simply fabulous!The stock market roaring, global instability just ain’t what it used to be to plutocrats and world class investors, I guess.
The reality of our gub’mint failure and “conservative” dominance, Brooksie? Yes, nice fall walks on the upper west side, but also, crappy dead end jobs, a workforce waiting to be outsourced, the reserve army of the unemployed as massive as ever (catch the Marx, David?), rising energy costs, monolithic fossil fuel companies rolling over any and all, irrefutable global warming and weather instability, obviously collapsing infra-structure from big to small, daily news of environmental collapse (should one chose to be informed and care, unlike Brooks), shuttered up, goin’ nowhere cities and small towns of once prosperous Middle America, unwinnable, fool’s-errand wars without end or coherent goal, intentionally corrupted gub’mint(s) from sea to shining sea polluted by “campaign contributions”, a nation awash in an ocean of automatic firearms and ammo rounds (fuck your definitions, gun nuts), with brigades of mentally unbalanced male imbeciles carrying them around every Walmart and Taco Bell (the very existence and ugliness of Walmarts and Taco Bells and the whole sorry lot of logo-ed franchised shitola vending from diapers to burgers), the cabal of rightwing activists masquerading as “justices”, militarized authoritarian domestic soldiery (er, police forces) abusing power coast to coast, a useless corporate media blatting its retardation 24/7, the Repub war on women (undeclared as far as Brooksie knows).
And one could go on on and on for line after line, but Snap Out of It America!—things are really great, especially through the patented Rose colored glasses of the fatuous David Brooks,who interviews the latest American Fascist wannabe Ted Cruz, and still cannot see just what the problem might be. But enjoy the autumnal equinox at the Bistro, David! Tip well!
You just wrote a front page diary is you;d posted this sooner.