Posted by Matt Patterson Feb 11th 2010 at 7:01 am in Featured Story, Mainstream Media, New Media, New York Times.David Brooks is a thoughtful writer and, by all appearances, a nice fellow.
But on his February 9 appearance on Charlie Rose, Brooks painfully revealed the limits of his understanding and the poverty of his vision. These failings are not exclusive to Brooks — rather, they are typical of the class with which Brooks self-identifies, the hyper-educated coastal elite.
Of the Tea Party, for example, Brooks told Rose, “It’s not conservative, it’s not pro-Republican, it’s just a recoil from what’s happening [in Washington].” Has Brooks actually convinced himself of this tripe? The tea partiers recoil from Washington precisely because of their commitment to small-government conservatism; because Washington now represents the antithesis of their deeply held conservative principles. Brooks would know this if he actually talked to some Tea Party members instead of viewing them with horror and barely concealed disgust from his Beltway offices.
Brooks confesses plainly that he has found the Tea Party movement “scary” because he feels it represents prejudice against his class. It does not seem to have occurred to Brooks that his class, the bureaucrats, politicians, journalists, professors, and entertainers on the coasts, have 1) supported policies which have driven this great nation to the brink of fiscal disaster, and 2) have taken every opportunity to express disdain for the values and lives of the vast majority of the population. The prejudice against his class which Brooks feels is real – and deserved.
And then there’s Brooks’ baffling and continued infatuation with President Obama, whose perfect pant leg transfixed Brooks from the very beginning. Astoundingly, Brooks describes Obama as a pragmatist “still capable of greatness.” Only someone with a serious man crush could look at Obama and not see a rank left-wing ideologue trying to socialize America – and failing spectacularly.
Brooks is singular is his talent for wrapping his self-superiority in a pungent package of preening faux humility, as when he actually told Rose that he believed in “epistemological modesty,” saying in other words that he doesn’t know much but in a way that leaves you little doubt that he knows way more than you do.
Or so he thinks. During the interview, Brooks made several statements that were flatly wrong on their face, as when he told Rose that great social reform historically takes place in times of economic growth. Huh? The New Deal, anyone, the most radical social change in our history instituted during our worst financial crisis? And Brooks has repeatedly shown himself to be in the thrall of preposterous academic theories, such how you can tell that a four-year-old will one day graduate from college based on whether or not he eats a marshmallow.
Brooks is especially fascinated by recent research concerning the human mind: apparently, academics are beginning to discover that humans are often motivated by visceral, rather than rational, forces, and that this explains many a bad choice. Memo to Brooks: Yes, some people do stupid and crazy things because some people are stupid and crazy. This would come as news only to an intellectual.
The interview with Rose was painful for me to watch. Not only have I often read and enjoyed Brooks’ columns, but I myself am partially a product of the same Ivy League coastal culture. I went to school in New York City; I work in Washington D.C.
But I have been singularly unimpressed with the people I have encountered in those elite meccas. Thankfully I was also born and raised in the Midwest, and can thus saywith authority that people on the coasts are not better, wiser, or more capable than the rest of us in “middle America.”
But they are in fact exceedingly given to folly, and particularly prone to destructive and dangerous ideologies, the consequences of which they then inflict with inimical glee upon the rest of the nation.
It’s high time that middle America rethink allowing these people to govern us.
Big Government
