David Brooks is a moron.

David Brooks, still not too bright

2007-10-10T17:41:00.000-04:00

Well, after almost a year of no Brooks, it turns out that he's still a moron. Though I have to give him some credit for sticking to observing social trends rather than using them to draw extremely tenuous inferences about politics. And there is at least some data present, and 2 whole references. Though I must admit to skepticism about this data point:

"People who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments — moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.

In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same."

What qualifies as becoming financially independent? Are 30-year-olds equally unlikely to have done all of those 4 things, or is just one skewing the data? And how about the 30-year-olds of 1960? Without this information it's unclear just how much this information actually tells us.

One problem (a common Brooks problem) is that his language is extremely general -- there is no suggestion that the "odyssey years" are only for the college educated -- yet something like this:

"The job market is fluid. Graduating seniors don’t find corporations offering them jobs that will guide them all the way to retirement. Instead they find a vast menu of information economy options, few of which they have heard of or prepared for."

Suggests that the "odyssey years" he is describing apply only to the children of the upper middle class and up. And while we're here, this paragraph would seem to conflict with one of Brooks's main definitions of the "odyssey years", that people in them are "delaying permanent employment." Well, one reason for that might be that permanent employment is hard to find these days, as Brooks makes abundantly clear in that paragraph i quoted above. For the poor, of course, permanent employment has always been difficult to find.

The main problem with this article, though, is that Brooks ignores or largely ignores at least two extremely important factors. The first one, which he at least acknowledges, is that the education level of women is rising. More educated women have fewer children, generally by having them later. This in turn pushes back the age of marriage (note that in 1960, the median age of first marriage was 22.8 for men and 20.3 for women: now it's 27.5 and 25.5). And since people get married later, they have more time in which they are not burdened by family responsibilities. Instead, they can try different careers, because they don't need to worry about the impact quitting their job has on their kids, or move around without having to discuss each movement with a spouse, etc., etc., etc. This is especially true for those from families in the upper middle and upper classes, as they are in no danger of serious financial problems. (In this vein, it's probably worth noting that the 30-year-olds in 1960 grew up during the Great Depression and WWII, which might have influenced their outlook to a certain extent).

Then there is the question of financial independence. First, consider this chart. Note that the average salary of a 25-34 year old male with a bachelor's degree has been roughly the same since 1980, and the average salary of a 25-34 year old female with a bachelor's degree has been roughly the same since 1990, with variations in both cases of about 10% max. Meanwhile, the cost of college has risen considerably: from 1992-2002, 40% at private colleges and 33% at public universities (ok, I'm not entirely certain if i trust wsws.org, but this isn't exactly a controversial point). So naturally people in their twenties are becoming more financially dependent on their parents to pay off increasingly burdensome college loans. Strangely, Brooks doesn't mention this phenomenon at all.

Instead, Brooks prefers to concentrate on some nebulous "spirit of fluidity" that is apparently suffusing these times, which leads him to some unfortunate writing. For instance, what does this mean: "Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, Wuthnow observes, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself." As far as i can tell, the first sentence tells nobody anything they didn't already know (wow, childhood is different from adulthood!), and the second one is pretty much meaningless ("everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself"? please). Sometimes i think that part of Brooks's problem is that this format is too short for him. Here, he wants to explore not only changes in the behavior of young adults from 1960-2007, but also the causes of those changes. This requires more than a few-hundred-word column. But mostly, i think that he's just not that bright.

Google-bomb the election!

2006-10-24T23:49:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm a lazy bastard who should post more often. However, for now you're going to have to be satisfied with this attempt at google-bombing (via digby) taken from here. It is, literally, the least I could do.

-AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Special non-Brooks edition: SusanG at Daily Kos

2006-06-17T19:51:00.000-04:00

I may be throwing in more non-Brooksiana as I get back on track with this thing: Brooks is just not easy to read on a regular basis. Back when I started, I was used to reading Brooks on a regular basis, in newspapers at home or online. But since I stopped updating this website, I have also stopped reading Brooks: I only see the print Times when I'm at home and Brooks's online columns are behind a pay wall. So it appears that over the last 9 months I've lost my Brooks tolerance: I read two deeply stupid Brooks columns and simply lose my desire to read any more. So I'll be taking this slowly as my ability to tolerate Brooks slowly builds back to its old levels. In the meantime, there is certainly no shortage of stupidity on the web, and today's effort, which has been bothering me ever since I read it, comes from SusanG at Daily Kos, and is entitled "Money is to Liberals as Sex is to Conservatives".

SusanG's hypothesis is that, well, liberals respond to money the way that conservatives respond to sex, that both groups are being stupid, and that there's nothing whatsoever wrong with liberal figures making lots of money. How does SusanG know that there's nothing wrong? Well, that part is not really explained. "I trust them, you see, to use their time and money wisely," she says, referring to various liberal bloggers who are making serious money now. " Liberals can handle money and its accompanying temptation, I'm certain." Why is she certain? Because liberals are perfect and infallible, I guess. Maybe SusanG looked into Kos's eyes and read his soul. At any rate, this line of reasoning should immediately dismissed as profoundly opposed to liberalism (and comes laden with hypocrisy given all the liberal mockery of the Bush administration's declarations that we should just trust them to do the right thing when confronted with questions about the Iraq war or their phone surveillance program), which ought to recognize that anyone, even a liberal, can be corrupted by power. And make no mistake, power is the real question here, not money or sex, and the failure to recognise that is the biggest problem with SusanG's screed.

SusanG doesn't try to actually determine why conservatives are so worried about people having sex outside of a traditional marriage, which is a shame because such an analysis actually reinforces her analogy (though it rather damages her conclusion). Conservatives are often anti-sex because of their religion: Christianity, as they see it, forbids such goings-on. But why should they care about other people doing things they are opposed to? "Because they are outrageous busybodies" is not an acceptable answer. What it comes down to is a question of power: deeply religious Christians believe that all power should lie with God and, of course, God's representatives on earth. By violating God's rules for conduct, including sexual conduct, people are aggregating to themselves power that should belong to God, and this misappropriation of power is deeply dangerous (since power that is not controlled by God will naturally fall to Satan). Thus what seems to outsiders to be a very disproportianate reaction to the idea of gay people having sex follows naturally from a philosophy about the proper distribution of power in society.

On the other hand, the liberal political philosophy holds that power should be equally distributed among the people. Recognizing the practical difficulties of doing this, however, it eschews the easy libertarian answer of simply taking power away from the government with the idea that the people will somehow get hold of it and instead opts for a twofold program of making the government more responsive to the people and then giving more power to the government. For liberals, then, a dangerous imbalance in the distribution of power in society occurs when an individual acquires far more power than other individuals, and the government is given power in order to prevent that. In the real world, this amounts to higher taxes on the rich, with the money being spent on programs to help the poor. Conservatives decry this is as redistributionist, but that is exactly the point: while conservatives only see money as money, liberals see it as power, and are attempting to ensure that the power is equally distributed. That is why liberals are wary of activists who become wealthy: they begin to acquire power for themselves and so have a tendency to lose sight of the goal of power for the people. It's certainly true that this wariness can be taken to extremes: as SusanG says, "But too often in progressive circles, an individual living anywhere above the federal poverty guideline is dismissed as "selling out" or being co-opted." (although, to be fair, SusanG is also exaggerating here). However, to attack these fears as baseless and worse, motivated by a belief on the part of the criticizer that given money, the criticizer would be unable to handle it and succumb to all his worse impulses betrays a lack of understanding that would make David Brooks proud. And to say "The fact is, money is a tool. In and of itself, it is absolutely neutral" is almost inexcusably foolish. Does SusanG also think that guns don't kill people, people kill people? If she can't see that this is ridiculously naive and facile, one wonders just what qualifies her to be a front page diarist at Daily Kos. It's important to remember that idiocy is not confined to one side of the political spectrum or to the "old media": anyone can be a moron if they work at it hard enough, and while SusanG is not in Brooks's class yet, she's clearly trying.

God, Brooks drives me crazy

2006-06-13T23:08:00.000-04:00

Brooks's latest column is all about how the brains of males and females are fundamentally different, as seen through the prism of their different literary choices, and that therefore feminism is wrong. However, what drives me crazy about this column is not its idiotic premise but the combination of Brooks's fundamental dishonesty and complete inability to construct an argument that makes sense. So for today's piece, I'm going to completely ignore the question of whether or not feminism is wrong -- or, more specifically, whether teaching girly books to boys is driving them away from education -- and focus purely on the basic dishonesties and idiocies of Brooks's argument.

Brooks starts off by talking about how airport bookstores are divided between men's and women's sections, leading nicely to a segue into how 400 accomplished women and 500 accomplished men in Britain were asked what their favorite novels were. The men's list was topped by The Stranger, Catcher in the Rye and Slaughterhouse-Five, while the women preferred Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Handmaid's Tale, Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice and Beloved. First of all, Brooks claims that the two lists diverge "starkly". Of course, it helps that he provides twice as many books from the women's list as the men's. Three titles is hardly enough to establish a pattern, and one wonders what the next few books on the men's list were, and for that matter on the women's list as well. Of course, since Brooks fails to mention where this study of the favorite books of accomplished people was published, it's impossible to check. (Brooks also claims that the books on the women's list are better than those on the men's list, a contention that a) largely a matter of taste (has he ever read "Middlemarch"?); and b) would seem to undercut the whole point of his column, inasmuch as he is, I suppose, an accomplished man, or at any rate the kind of guy who could easily end up in a survey like this, but would not be putting up stereotypically male novels). It would also be nice to know what kind of criteria define the people on this list and how they were chosen, not to mention how many novels each was allowed to select and whether the mentioned works won out by large or small margins (and if they form a large or small percentage of the total number of selections) but this kind of detail, which would allow us to evaluate just how accurate this list actually is as a basis for sociological criticism, is clearly not something that Brooks would even think of offering.

Having given us a datum that is essentially meaningless and possibly cherry-picked, Brooks then presents several explanations: "It could be men are insensitive dolts who don't appreciate subtle human connections and good literature. Or, it could be that the part of the brain where men experience negative emotion, the amygdala, is not well connected to the part of the brain where verbal processing happens, whereas the part of the brain where women experience negative emotion, the cerebral cortex, is well connected. It could be that women are better at processing emotion through words." Somehow, Brooks fails to mention any social explanations, even though there are two obvious ones. All the novels given by women are by women authors, but it hardly seems unusual that "accomplished" women would see prominent female authors as potential role models and also be attracted to novels featuring female characters in a society where sexism has hardly been eliminated (note, for example, that 100 fewer accomplished women than men were interviewed for this survey). Again, it would also be nice to know what these women are accomplished at, how old they are, etc., etc., to determine the likelihood of this explanation: if they're female athletes, for instance, we would probably dismiss it. It also seems rather likely that social pressures would tend to force women to give a list of "womanly" books as their favorites. I'm not even going to comment on potential explanations for the male list, as three works is far too small a sample size.

Brooks follows up with this: "Over the past two decades, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence that male and female brains work differently. Women use both sides of their brain more symmetrically than men. Men and women hear and smell differently (women are much more sensitive). Boys and girls process colors differently (young girls enjoy an array of red, green and orange crayons whereas young boys generally stick to black, gray and blue). Men and women experience risk differently (men enjoy it more)." Now, the first sentence here may well be true, but there is absolutely no way to tell from the rest of the paragraph. "Women use both sides of their brain more symmetrically than men": this is so vague as to be almost meaningless. Differences in hearing and smelling may well exist, but it's unclear what connection this has to intellectual/emotional questions. Boys and girls may well process colors differently, but again, what is the connection to questions of intellect and emotion, and why should I believe that young girls enjoying bright, girlish colors while boys prefer sober, manly ones has nothing to do with social conditioning? And finally, with the amazing revelation that men enjoy risk more, something which is certainly strongly connected to social conditioning, we have essentially abandoned any pretence of presenting evidence that the brains of men and women are structured differently. There is, in fact, exactly one piece of real evidence in this entire article: "Women who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which leads to high male hormone secretions, are more likely to choose violent stories than other women." And even this doesn't tell us much: how much more likely? Is it significant? Can we have a citation? This being a rhetorical question, of course: this is a Brooks column, after all.

Next, watch this rhetorical sleight of hand: we start one paragraph with "It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture." Then suddenly we move to "This wouldn't be a problem if we all understood these biological factors and if teachers devised different curriculums to instill an equal love of reading in both boys and girls." Note how the "could" in the first sentence has been dropped: all of a sudden, this conclusion is no longer questionable, and we wonder instead why teachers are so reluctant to use this obvious fact. The problem, according to Brooks, is that "there is still intense social pressure not to talk about biological differences between boys and girls" and "resistance, especially in the educational world, to the findings of brain researchers" (as well as an obligatory shoutout to Larry Summers). This may be true, but there's no way to know: Brooks presents no data to suggest that such is the case, or even that the findings of brain researchers have direct classroom applicability. Essentially, he is asserting that genetics forces men and women to have fundamentally different tastes in literature based on his survey of airport bookstores, a survey of 900 people in England, and one scientific result from an uncited paper.
And it gets worse. "Despite some innovations here and there, in most classrooms boys and girls are taught the same books in the same ways." Brooks tantalizes us with the suggestion that teaching different works of literature to boys and girls has been tried. Did it work? If not, why not? These questions are obvious ones to explore, but apparently they never occurred to Brooks.

Having made his contempt for the idea of supporting one's argument with data very clear, Brooks goes suddenly changes topics. "Young boys are compelled to sit still in schools that have sacrificed recess for test prep." Where is the connection between what books males are wired to prefer and the absence or presence of recess? Luckily, the next sentence makes it all clear: "Many are told in a thousand subtle ways they are not really good students." What this means is that Brooks is not really worried about whether schools are considering innate genetic preference for certain types of books: he is afraid that feminism has taken over the public schools. When he is unable to prevent his real worries from emerging, the result is even more intellectual incoherence than usual. Brooks manages to wrench himself back to the topic at hand by complaining about "new-wave young adult problem novels". Personally, I'm not a fan of these either. But Brooks makes no attempt to really address them, dismissing them by saying that they "all seem to be about introspectively morose young women whose parents are either suicidal drug addicts or fatally ill manic depressives." This is nice and cutting, but hardly counts as evidence: Brooks can't even supply one measly title. It's also worth noting that this attempt to get back on track just further amplifies the incoherence, as Brooks begins the paragraph complaining about a lack of recess and therefore elementary schools, while he ends by bemoaning education at the middle school level or above (unless Brooks's high school had recess: that might explain a lot, actually).

Now we move beyond school: "It shouldn't be any surprise that according to a National Endowment for the Arts study, the percentage of young men who read has plummeted over the past 14 years. Reading rates are falling three times as fast among young men as among young women." So says Brooks. (Note that he doesn't say whether this refers to fiction, books, or all reading, but for the sake of simplicity I'll assume that it does mean that young men don't read much fiction any more.) I say, what about video games and computers? I have, admittedly, no evidence (which puts me on par with Brooks), but it seems to me that there is a good chance that consumer electronics take up far more of the average young man's time than they did in 1992. Meanwhile, that young women don't play video games is practically a truism, and although the computer=nerd=not womanly equation is no longer really true, using computers a lot is still considered more of a male thing. And, of course, gender roles have always pushed boys away from reading books, as anyone who was a bookish boy can probably testify. There is further bad news: "men are drifting away from occupations that involve reading and school." Well, make that occupation, as Brooks only mentions teaching: "Men now make up a smaller share of teachers than at any time in the past 40 years." This particular piece of data is relatively meaningless: what we really want to know is a trend. After all, if the percentage of teachers who are male has been essentially constant over the past 40 years with just one dip now, it is impossible to infer anything (I could look it up, but I'm not the one who's worried about this, Brooks is).

Next, we bring up one Dr. Leonard Sax and his book Why Gender Matters. Incidentally, this brings us to the root of the column: Brooks read Sax's book and decided to write a column about it. Most likely, the various facts presented here without citations are simply blindly copied from the book. Sax is a "family physician and psychologist from Maryland", strangely enough, rather than a neuroscientist and brain expert, as one would expect from Brooks's talking up of "brain studies". Someone has probably debunked him somewhere, but I'm too lazy to check. Sax is apparently also big on single-sex schools: they'd be separate but equal! Well, his actual argument (according to Brooks) is that they would allow students to break free from gender stereotypes. This may be the case, but it seems a little strange given that his reading recommendations for boys appear to be dictated strictly by gender stereotypes.

Those reading recommendations propose that boys (presumably in high school) be given more Hemingway, Tolstoy, Homer, and Twain. I imagine that many high-school age boys would disagree. It's also worth noting that my parents made me read all these AND Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Bronte sisters, and I somehow managed to enjoy all of them (well, not Middlemarch so much, or Hemingway either). It's a wonder my poor male brain didn't melt down. Also, Tolstoy seems a little out of place here: Anna Karenina, for instance, is all about relationships and emotions and all of those touchy-feely things that boys hate, and so is War and Peace, really, though there is a war going on in the background. It's also worth noting that my ultra-progressive public high school in the People's Republic of Cambridge had me read the Iliad (or possibly the Odyssey: it was freshman year), The Stranger, and also Moby-Dick (which probably should be in there instead of Tolstoy). Brooks's head would probably explode. Anyway, I enjoyed those books, but I don't recall the other boys in my classes giving hosannas of praise for their long-awaited deliverance from the tyranny of Pride and Prejudice to the sweet embrace of the poetry of the ancient Greeks and 800-page novels about a man chasing a whale.

Also, there is more to school than reading fiction, as I recall. There is, for starters, math and science and history and foreign languages, none of which involve reading fiction (except for foreign languages, but there the books that are read are dictated by readability more than anything else). Perhaps there are significant male-female differences here too, but if so, it would be nice if Brooks mentions them: it seems a bit much to believe that boys are being driven from schools in droves simply because they find the fiction assigned in English class boring. Even English class also contains writing, grammar, and reading non-fiction and poetry. And, while Brooks probably doesn't remember high school that well, I only graduated six years ago, and I can assure him that most of the class, male and female, thought that all the assigned books were boring, with Jane Eyre bringing the exact same amount of revulsion, with essentially the same gender breakdown, as The Return of the Native or Native Son. This last is, of course, of no evidentiary value -- anecdotes of my high school experience are not data points -- but Brooks has this unfortunate tendency to drag others down to his level.

Finally, Brooks finishes up with a jab at feminism and "consciousness-raising". The connection between feminism and consciousness-raising and the schools has not been established, making the value of this last paragraph somewhat questionable, but at least it confirms what we earlier surmised: Brooks's main concern is attacking feminism, not providing an objective study of how different brain types in different genders affect preferences in literature. One can only wonder why Brooks neglected to attack multiculturalism and the teachers union in an effort to hit for the conservative bemoaning-the-state-of-modern-education cycle.

It could be argued that I'm not being entirely fair to Brooks here. After all, he only has a 900-word column: how can he fit in all the details, citations, and statistics that I demand? The answer is, of course, that if he can't fit them in, he should drop the points that require their support. He could then replace the lost claims with more details about his other claims, or simply allow his columns to shrink, possibly to haiku form, in which case there's a slight chance they might be worth reading. But I doubt it.

Aaaaand . . . We're Back!

2006-06-11T05:12:00.000-04:00

Lately, there's been an upsurge of popular demand -- ok, so it was only one person, but it was not my mother and one person is about 50% of my readers -- for more DBIAM. Intrigued by the idea that someone actually wanted more from this website, I took advantage of an idle moment to read Brooks's latest column and see if I could recapture the fervor of the early days. Well, let's just say that I have been forcibly reminded of just why I thought Ted's idea of starting this website was so brilliant. I don't know if it would be correct to say that this column plumbs new depths for Brooks -- as I believe I've mentioned before here, such is probably not possible, or at least not until Brooks throws off all restraint and begins openly calling for all true patriots to begin purging liberals -- but it's pretty damn low.

Brooks begins by saying that, as we all learned from the stories we were brought up on -- Brooks has apparently taken to heart those posters that say "Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten" -- evil contains the seeds of its own destruction. He then laments that in Iraq such is not the case: instead, the insurgents are winning precisely because they're so savage. Leaving aside Brooks's willingness to base his interpretation of world politics on the stories his parents told him when he was a child (and the fact that, while evil does contain the seeds of its own destruction, it often manages to be victorious for quite a while anyway, even in children's stories), there's another obvious story here that fits all the facts. In this story, a group of powerful people decide that the U.S. needs to invade Iraq. They have a number of different reasons -- some want to do it to help out Israel, some because of the oil, some because they think that the U.S. needs a bigger presence in the Middle East, some simply because they believe that a show of force is necessary to remind the world who's boss, and some because they are so stupid and naive that they think that democracy can imposed at the point of the gun and that once so imposed it will spread across the Middle East like, well, like something, but NOT like a bunch of falling dominoes, ok? We do NOT want to hear the d word, got it? Not to mention the one who is desperate to do something better than his daddy. Oh, and the ruler of Iraq is a bad guy who the American public is already conditioned to hate from the first Gulf War. And when 9/11 happens, they see their chance, and using a combination of lies, insinuations, and creative stretching of the truth, make many Americans believe that Saddam was at the very least involved with, if not directly responsible for, 9/11, and that he's getting ready to do it again, only with nukes. Alas for them, the same arrogance and overconfidence that creates a mindset that believes in American empire and lying to the public to make the case for war (not to mention causing the deaths of innocent civilians and American soldiers for no good reason) proves to be their downfall: after an initially victorious stage, it becomes clear that preparations for anything beyond the invasion were essentially nonexistent and that they were wrong in almost all of their assumptions about the war and its aftermath, and their project of creating a peaceful, democratic, and America- and Israel-loving Iraq that sells cheap oil collapses into civil war between religious and ethnic militias.

In this story, the vicious insurgency is the natural consequence of the American invasion. The hubris of the invaders leads them to believe that the Iraqis will become approximately the only country in history not to form some sort of resistance movement when invaded. Their incompetence leads them to completely ignore this possibility and Iraq's ethnic and religious fault lines, making the situation even worse. And their lies and rhetoric compound the error: conflating the war on Iraq with the so-called war on terror, they invite Iraqis to see Al Qaeda as friends and natural allies; larding their speeches with words like "crusade", they give ammunition the jihadis can use to claim that the war in Iraq is a war against all Muslims, further radicalising the population; telling the American people that the war "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months" and "The Iraqi people . . . view us as their hoped-for liberators" sets up the subsequent collapse of support for the war when, as any idiot could have predicted, both of these claims are demonstrated to be entirely false. The war, conceived in lies, error, and dreams of empire, is evil, no matter the good motives of some of its supporters, and it's pretty clear that in this case, evil does indeed contain the seeds of its own destruction.

But back to Brooks, whose despair over a three-year insurgency ignores the story of Sleeping Beauty, whose curse could not be defeated for a hundred years. Even worse, though, he apparently believes that if Jesus, Mother Teresa, and Ghandi had been running the United States and its military over the past few years, they could not have compiled as spotless a record as the Bush administration, and that all of the savagery in Iraq is due to the insurgents. "The defining feature of their violence is not merely that they murder, but that they torture those they are about to kill." Let's see, I remember reading something about Aba, or Abo, or Abu, Abu something. It's on the tip of my toungue . . . nope, it's gone. "Videos of such acts are posted on the Internet or sold in the markets of towns like Haditha." Because Americans would never dream of doing any such thing. "Far from motivating most Americans to fight harder, cruelty on this scale is unnerving. Most Americans simply want to get away." Except for the Americans at Haditha, or Hamandiya, or Ishaqi, or, most likely, a number of other occurences that we haven't yet heard about and may never hear about. Of course, the various Iraqi militias are considerably more vicious and bloodthirsty than the Americans -- Saddam didn't exactly encourage a brotherhood of man in Iraq -- but for Brooks to say "Because American troops come from the culture they do, they have not become the sort of people they would have to be to defeat the insurgents at their own game" is breathtakingly naive. After a while, the constant IED's and ambushes start to wear on you. You start to wonder if you're really fighting for the Iraqi people: they don't seem to be too grateful, do they? Plus, as Brooks says, the insurgents are filled with "blood madness." They're barely human, right? Completely crazy, anyway. The only thing they understand is force. We're hear to bring civilization, and by God, we're going to bring it, no matter how many of them we have to kill. Apparently, Brooks never read "Heart of Darkness" in high school (though his trouble with fairy tales suggests that Joseph Conrad may be a bit beyond his intellectual level).

Brooks follows up with some muddled thinking: "The insurgents' second great advantage is that they seem able to create an environment in which it is difficult to survive if you are decent." As evidence, he points out that every civilian is a possible suicide bomber. The connection between these two things is tenuous at best. Perhaps he means that one has to become a barbarian in order to survive? But then he spends two paragraphs discussing how most American soldiers are not becoming barbarians. In the end, it appears that this sentence sounds good but means nothing: a Brooks special.

And then we return to Brooks-land, where the United States bears no responsibility for anything bad that happens anywhere: "Similarly, in our debates at home we are searching for ways to exercise enough power to defeat the insurgents while still behaving in accordance with our national conscience. We are seeking a sweet spot that satisfies both the demands of power and of principle. But it could be that given the circumstances we have allowed the insurgents to create, that sweet spot no longer exists." Circumstances we have allowed the insurgents to create! Is the man mad? The circumstances are as follows: for years, Iraq has been ruled by members of an ethnic-religious minority, the Sunni Arabs. Not just under Saddam, either (whose regime the U.S. may have had a hand in installing and certainly propped up for years as a counterweight to Iran): the British installed a Sunni king and worked closely with the Sunnis when they ruled Iraq, and prior to that the Sunnis had been treated preferentially by the Ottomans. However, under Saddam, the oppression of Shiites and Kurds became worse, especially following the abortive Shiite rebellion immediately after the Gulf War. In the meanwhile, fundamentalist Islam gained steadily in Iraq, just as it has done throughout the Arab world, partly due to the discrediting of secular alternatives (through association with autocratic rulers sustained by Western powers: see, e.g., the modern history of Iran) and partly because it was encouraged by Saddam who hoped to use the anti-Western inclinations of fundamentalist Islam to prop up his regime and move the focus of popular discontent from him to the U.S. Then the United States invaded and overthrew Saddam and, symbolically (especially in a highly tribal society like Iraq) the Sunni Arabs. It was fairly clear that the new Iraq would not have nearly as big a place for the Sunni Arabs in it as the old one, and the Americans did nothing to dispel the impression, dissolving the Iraqi Army and allowing Shiites to move forward with hard-line deBaathification plans. American rhetoric also fueled Sunni paranoia about a war against Islam (furthering the radicalisation of the Sunni population and the legitimitisation of the jihadis as on par with the nationalist resistance in what was once one of the most secular countries in the Middle East), and the Americans did little to prevent Shiite militias from enacting reprisals against Sunnis for the long list of Saddam's crimes, or, really, to keep order and provide security, instead forcing people to turn to militias for defence. The result is a vicious and bloody sectarian conflict, and while we are certainly not responsible for the viciousness and bloody-mindedness (or not all of it), we do bear considerable responsibility for "the circumstances". But, again, as we know, the United States models its foreign policy on the life of St. Francis of Assisi, so clearly it cannot possibly be at fault for any of the bloodshed currently happening in Iraq, and it certainly cannot be the case that we are not winning because the war as it was conceived by the Bush administration was not winnable.

Finally, Brooks offers definitive proof that he is living in his own world with this: "The insurgents' third malicious advantage is that they have no agenda. . . All they have to do is destroy . . . ." This is only defensible because Brooks mashes the jihadis, Iraqi nationalists, and Shiite militias into one all-encompassing insurgency, and then claims that it has no overarching goal. Well, duh. However, each of the groups has an agenda, and at the moment, the agendas of the various Sunni insurgencies are the same: force the Americans to withdraw, which is best done by attacking them constantly and creating as much chaos as possible to make it clear that the Americans and the government they have installed will never be able to fully control Iraq. This involves lots of destruction, yes, but to claim that it's meaningless destruction is simply foolish and betrays a deep lack of understanding. "Every day they spread mayhem is a victory" Brooks writes, and this is true not because they are nihilists who rejoice in destruction, but because the spread of mayhem shows that the Americans are failing.

To this point, Brooks has been content to paint the Iraqis as blood-lust crazed savages while ignoring everything bad the U.S. has done in this war, including starting it. In other words, this is basically par for the course for Brooks. In the last paragraph, though, Brooks takes his game to a whole new level. "And so the hunger to leave Iraq grows. A dissenting minority is furious that so many Americans are willing to betray the decent Iraqi majority in order to preserve some parlor purity. And the terrorists no doubt look at our qualms not as a sign of virtue but of weakness, and as evidence that savagery will lead to victory again and again." Remember, only six paragraphs above Brooks wrote "Because American troops come from the culture they do, they have not become the sort of people they would have to be to defeat the insurgents at their own game." And "Indeed, the people who are most furious about what happened at Haditha are those marines who have been in similarly awful circumstances but who have not snapped, and who fear that their heroic restraint will be tainted or overshadowed by comrades who behave despicably." So, apparently, among those who are "willing to betray the decent Iraqi majority" and who are too weak to prove to the terrorists that savagery will not lead to victory are the U.S. Marines and Brooks himself. Of course, all the evidence suggests that the "decent Iraqi majority" is more than happy to be betrayed, and would not appreciate it if the Americans started to imitate the ethnic militias they are supposed to be controlling. But these are mere quibbles compared to what is really beyond the pale here, Brooks's suggestion that Americans who are unhappy about, say, Abu Ghraib or Haditha are seeking only to maintain a "parlor purity". I sincerely hope that the "dissenting minority" that Brooks speaks of is indeed a minority, and a tiny one at that, since it would be uncomfortable to live in a country with many people who believe that an opposition to torturing prisoners and massacring civilians is merely a veneer of high-mindedness. Of course, we can easily measure the size of this minority: it happens, not-so-coincidentally, to coincide with the fraction of the population that still supports Bush, about 1/3 of the country. I suppose that this is a large enough group that it deserves to have its views heard on the editorial page of the New York Times, though you'd like to believe that the Times would be willing to draw the line at its columnists suggesting, no matter how carefully, that what the U.S. really needs to do to win in Iraq is be more savage. But if you're naive enough to believe that, you're probably naive enough to believe that the media is actually liberal, or that David Brooks is a sensible conservative with worthwhile opinions, and if you believe that, you'll believe anything.

PS: I will try to update regularly over the summer, when I should be less busy, but I make no promises.

Column 2005-9-25 Commentary

2005-09-27T22:48:00.000-04:00

In his latest column, Brooks inexplicably lays the blame for the increasing gap between those with a college education and those without on the colleges. "The most damning indictment of our university system is that these poorer kids are graduating from high school in greater numbers. It's when they get to college that they begin failing and dropping out. " So says Brooks, despite the fact that a few minutes (ok, maybe more than a few minutes in his case) of thought should make the gaping hole in his argument perfectly clear. According to Brooks, these poor kids graduate from high school with essentially the same education as their more affluent peers: the problem is that colleges just don't treat them right somehow. The obvious rejoinder to this is that most poorer kids receive worse, often far worse, elementary and high school educations than the better-off, and that colleges simply expose these differences. At any rate, it should be obvious that some fault lies with the poor quality of public schools where most poor children receive what education they get. For example, we know this, from Bob Herbert via the Daily Howler: “By the fourth grade, low-income students read about three grade levels behind non-poor students." Will these children catch up to their wealthier peers? What do you think? And even if they don't catch up, a good number of these kids will graduate from high school, as we know from Brooks's (admittedly unsourced) claims. Even assuming that these kids remain only three years behind, it's no wonder that new college students who can barely read at a high school level are "failing and dropping out" in a college with any type of standards. And yet Brooks refuses even to acknowledge the possibility that the pre-college preparation of these poor children may be at fault: indeed, he explicitly states that "Crucial life paths are set at age 18 . . . ." Ok, so even Brooks can't completely ignore what's staring him in the face: he gives the necessity of being "academically prepared, psychologically prepared and culturally prepared for college" a throwaway line at the end of the column. But he, and "Thomas Mortenson of the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education", the only person whose work is cited in this column and so presumably the source for the whole thing, appear to be blaming colleges for failing to compensate for the abysmal performance of the lower levels of the public school system. Could colleges do more to help lower-income students? Yes, of course. But to concentrate on what they could do, while ignoring the far more pervasive and damaging problems with the public schools, is sheer idiocy. As such, is it any surprise that Brooks is embracing it?

Column 2005-9-22 Commentary

2005-09-24T14:05:00.000-04:00

In today's column, Brooks gives advice to the Democratic party. He feels the Democrats need to stop being angry and attacking Bush and concentrate more on wonky policy proposals. The fact that approximately nobody else thinks this -- and that, in fact, this is directly opposed to the successful strategies employed by the Republican party over the past few years -- forces one to wonder once again what Democrats would be stupid enough to take Brooks's advice on the direction of the party. Brooks is inspired to tell the Democratic party what it should do with itself by two speeches by prominent Democrats, Kerry and Edwards. (I urge readers to read both speeches and judge for themselves, btw.) According to Brooks, each speaker is responding to Hurricane Katrina in the only way they know how: Kerry with borderline-incoherent Bush-bashing, and Edwards with important policy recommendations. More fundamentally, according to Brooks, these two speeches represent an important divide in the Democratic party, between those who only care about attacking Bush and those who actually want to govern. Incidentally, Edwards's speech mentions Brooks favorably and Kerry's doesn't mention him at all. But I'm sure that this had absolutely no effect on Brooks's analysis.

If this strikes you as rather simplistic, that's because you're smarter than Brooks. "Edwards is not so obsessed with power struggles" Brooks writes, and indeed, therein lies the rub. Kerry is currently a politician who is ramping up for the 2006 elections, which will largely be run as a referendum on Bush and his policies. His speech is a highly political speech. Edwards, by contrast, will not be involved in those elections, or strongly involved in politics at all until 2007 at the earliest. Instead, he has plunged into the world of policy, and while he makes some attacks on Bush, the focus of his speech is on programs for dealing with poverty. There's not much partisan politics in it, but that's because, as even Brooks is forced to admit, Edwards is not a politician at the moment. The fact is that these two speeches complement each other. An effective Democratic party requires both the the political and the policy components, and to suggest that these two speeches are actually representative of two divergent strands of thought in the party is very simple-minded. It is also worth noting that the Democrats are not currently in the majority, and so the policy side will inevitably be smaller than the political side, especially in the current political environment where any Democratic proposal is essentially DOA.

Having explained why Brooks is wrong in general, let us examine how he gets the details wrong. Specifically, Brooks's analysis of Kerry's speech completely twists its meaning. Kerry begins his speech by saying "And that's what I've come to talk with you about today. The incompetence of Katrina's response is not reserved to a hurricane. There's an enormous gap between Americans' daily expectations and government's daily performance. And the gap is growing between the enduring strength of the American people -- their values, their spirit, their imagination, their ingenuity, and their willingness to serve and sacrifice -- and the shocking weakness of the American government in contending with our country's urgent challenges. On the Gulf Coast during the last two weeks, the depth and breadth of that gap has been exposed for all to see and we have to address it now before it is obscured again by hurricane force spin and deception." It should be clear to the meanest intelligence -- which, apparently, Brooks has yet to achieve -- that Kerry intends to talk about how the incompetence of the response to Katrina is not a fluke, but in fact is a function of the incompetence of the Bush administration as a whole, and that is indeed what he does. "There are many interesting issues raised by Katrina, but for Senator Ahab it all goes back to the great white monster, Bush" says Brooks. While he gets points for the metaphor, Bush is, after all, the president, and what is more a president who has consistently run on a promise to make America safer. When his administration badly bungles the response to a major natural disaster, that's an extremely interesting issue. To a politician, it might well be the most interesting issue: Bush's response, most notably putting his political point man, Karl Rove, in charge of the Gulf Coast reconstruction effort, certainly suggests that Bush thinks so. "Bush and his crew should have known the levees were weak. Bush and his crew should have known thousands of people would be trapped" Brooks paraphrases sarcastically, adding with a parenthetical sneer "(Did I miss Kerry's own warnings on these subjects?)" To which, again, the obvious response is that Bush is the president (not Kerry, who does not have access to all the information Bush can, or should, get from various agencies attached to his administration). And, furthermore, Bush is claims to be the security president, and a hurricane taking out New Orleans was rated one of the three catastrophes most likely to strike the United States. Someone in the administration probably should have known about the status of the levees. Somebody probably should have anticipated that people would have been unable to get out and made contingency plans to evacuate them. But, of course, nobody did. However, anyone can make mistakes. And the DHS is a new agency (even though the decision to fold FEMA into the DHS was made by Bush), so it's believable that even a consistently competent administration could foul this up. Which is why it is necessary for Kerry to point out that the administration, and the Republican party, have been, in fact, consistently incompetent. Brooks dismisses this with "Porn movies have less repetition than this," but in fact the repetition (of facts mentioned in other speeches, not this speech, so it's not even a very good metaphor) is exactly the point: when all the stupidities, incompetences, and corruptions are listed side-by-side, they can not be dismissed as isolated instances but must be regarded as part of a pattern. Brooks wonders disdainfully why Kerry continues to drag out the old "anti-Bush jabs", "DeLay jibes", and "Wolfowitz attacks": "Doesn't this guy ever get bored?" But, of course, Wolfowitz was spectacularly wrong about Iraq. Tom DeLay is entirely corrupt: hell, Brooks even wrote a column about it (see the archives). And Bush has screwed up so many things it's not even funny any more. Sometimes it's good to keep reminding people of the facts. Brooks concludes that "this is not a normal speech designed to persuade or inform, but a primitive rite designed to channel group outrage." He is, of course, wrong: the speech is intended to persuade people that Bush's record indicated that he is a bad president. Judging by recent poll numbers, people are starting to get the message: perhaps this is why Brooks is attacking the messenger.

Finally, the most inexplicable part of this column is that Brooks seems to think that Edwards's speech represents a less partisan, more centrist wing of the Democratic party. This strongly suggests that Brooks didn't actually read Edwards's speech. In the speech, Edwards praises the New Deal and points out that the War on Poverty, though it had some faults, was quite successful. He says "If you work full-time, you shouldn't have to raise your children in poverty." He wants to raise the minimum wage to at least $7.50 an hour and "give [workers] back a real right to organize." He proposes offering workers money they can use for down payments on houses, expanding the EITC to help families save, and subsidizing housing for poor people so they can move into better neighborhoods. Edwards also wants to give everyone their first year of college free. And how will he pay for it? Largely by raising taxes on the rich: repealing the Bush tax cuts for the richest 1% and changing the Alternative Minimum Tax so that it applies to only to the rich, as it was originally designed to. Now, this program certainly doesn't go nearly far enough, in my opinion. For one thing, Edwards barely mentions health care and is vague on just how a "real right to organize" would be achieved. Furthermore, why just one year of college? Why not four years for free? There are other shortcomings, but the fact remains that Edwards wants to raise taxes on the rich to pay for programs to lift the poor out of poverty. If that's not liberalism, I don't know what is. And if Brooks thinks the Democratic party is ever going to return to "Clintonian centrism", he is much mistaken. "Bush may end up changing the Democratic Party more than his own." Brooks opines. Well, that may not be true: Bush has had a major effect on his own party as well. But if Edwards will come to define the right wing of the Democratic party, Bush may have accomplished one good thing after all.

Column 2005-9-18 Commentary

2005-09-21T22:55:00.000-04:00

In order to really understand this column, it's important that you read Brooks's own words, so I'm going to do some direct quoting here:

"On Oct. 5, 1999, George Bush went to the Manhattan Institute and delivered the most important domestic policy speech of his life. . . . he also broke with mainstream conservatism as it then existed. . . . Then he bluntly repudiated the small government conservatism that marked the Gingrich/Armey era.

It's not enough to cut the size of government, Bush said, or simply get government out of the way. Instead, Republicans have to come up with a positive vision of "focused and effective and energetic government."

With that, Bush set off on a journey to define what he called "compassionate conservatism" and what others call big government conservatism. . . .

Over the past five years, Bush has overseen the fastest increase in domestic spending of any president in recent history. Moreover, he's never resolved the contradiction between his compassionate spending policy and his small-government tax policy.

But gradually and fitfully, Bush has muddled his way toward something important, a positive use of government that is neither big government liberalism nor antigovernment libertarianism. "

The rest of the column is a lot of fluff about how Bush's programs for the area devastated by Katrina are going to ~~give lots of money to important campaign contributors and politically connected corporations~~ turn everything into a conservative utopia of "enhance[d] individual initiative and personal responsibility" (the latter of which is, of course, only for poor people, not presidents). But the beginning is as egregiously ludicrous a description of Bush's domestic policy program as has ever been written, and surely ranks among the most moronic words Brooks has ever committed to paper. Bush's domestic policy (or, at least, the economic aspects of it), insofar as it doesn't involve giving money to corporations and the rich, is really quite simple. Prior to Bush, the two parties had roughly opposite philosophies: for the Democrats, tax and spend, and for the Republicans, don't tax and don't spend (I am, of course, generalizing like mad here, but then so is Brooks). Bush's (or, more likely, Rove's) idea was to combine the popular parts of these programs -- the spending from the former and the not taxing from the latter -- and make that their new program, what Brooks refers to as "big government conservatism" (with, of course, much of that spending going to the rich, corporations, etc., but we're not dealing with that now). Brooks remarks on the "contradiction" between the two parts of this program as if this is a knotty problem that will be resolved in time, but of course it won't be. Bush has no intention of raising taxes or seriously cutting spending: either would be politically unpopular, and since he cares far more about politics than policy -- after all, why else would Rove be in charge of the Gulf Coast rebuilding effort? -- political concerns about popularity ratings will trump policy concerns about deficits every time. Essentially, Bush's fiscal policy is to recklessly bankrupt the U.S. by throwing money at problems -- the Katrina response is the latest example in a long list, including Iraq and the Medicare prescription drug benefit -- while cutting taxes. Remember, this is a president who has never vetoed a spending bill. Regardless of the quality of the programs taking up this much money, this is simply not a sustainable course. And this is what Brooks is lauding as a "positive use of government". It's sickening.

PS: When one realizes that almost all the new spending is intended to give money away to corporations and the rich while simultaneously helping the Republicans stay just popular enough to keep winning, it really starts to look like the Republican party -- or at least the corporate elites who run it -- is simply looting the U.S. government, on the theory that by the time the crash comes, they'll be safely away and everybody else will be left holding the baby. Sadly, they may be right.

Column 2005-9-15 Commentary

2005-09-15T20:41:00.000-04:00

Brooks makes it easy for me with his latest, an actually funny column. Of course, not even Brooks could fail to be funny when the target of his satire is the Roberts confirmation hearing. This column is hardly perfect, but the nitpicks will be left as an exercise for the reader.

Column 2005-9-11 Commentary

2005-09-14T22:14:00.000-04:00

First, an administrative note: now that I'm a graduate student, my time has many more demands on it than before, and the recent trend in which my posts become shorter, more erratic, and, I fear, worse is likely to continue. Hopefully all five of my readers will be able to bear up under this crushing blow.

Brooks's latest column demonstrates conclusively that he has gotten over the devastation of Hurrican Katrina. How can one tell? Simple: he is back to spouting Republican talking points, in this case the claim that the failure of the Bush administration to deal effectively with the aftermath of Katrina is not their fault, but instead is due to the fact that government simply can't deal with something like Katrina. The government had a great plan, he says -- well, actually, he spends the first half of the column making fun of the bureaucratic nature of the plan, which makes his sudden approval of it rather surprising -- but government being government, all tangled up in bureaucracy and whatnot, it simply can't implement the plan effectively. This piece of propaganda would be more believable were it not that the implementation of the plan was so obviously screwed up that only a Brooks could believe that it could not have been done better. When the government leaders who are supposed to be in charge of the emergency response are getting information on the situation from the journalists who are interviewing them, it's hard to simply shrug one's shoulders and blame bureacratic inefficency. When the head of Homeland Security doesn't seem to know what he's supposed to do to set the implementation of the plan in motion (or possibly even understand the mechanism under which he acquires the power to do so), one starts to wonder whether, even if government can never be perfect, it can at least be better than this. (In the interests of balance, it must be noted that Tom Delay believes that government is currently running at peak efficiency. Which side of the argument this supports is left to the reader to determine.) When it becomes clear that the top staff of the agency which is intended to deal with situations such as this one was made up almost entirely of political appointees whose qualifications tended to have to do with managing political campaigns rather than natural disasters, and that its head appears to have achieved his position by dint of being the college roommate of the previous agency head, who achieved his position because he was a close associate of the president, one really starts to question whether bureaucracy is entirely at fault here.

Leaving these questions aside, though, this is a deeply pessimistic theory of government, and one that furthermore seems to be entirely at variance with Bush's, and hence Brooks's, ideas. After all, Bush has run on his ability to do big things with government, most notably keep Americans safe from terrorists. If government is unable to deal with a hurricane, it presumably can't do anything about a terrorist attack. And as for spreading democracy in the Middle East in order to defeat terrorism? If Brooks doesn't believe that it is possible for the American government to coordinate a relief effort to a relatively small area of the United States in a timely fashion, how can he, in good conscience, support a plan to reshape the political landscape of a large, volatile area of the world? Obviously, government would be bound to screw it up. Of course, a Brooksian government would be unable to do anything, except maybe pass tax cuts. Which makes it a perfect government to some movement conservatives, but most people believe government can do more. Even the Dobsons of the world think that government can effectively regulate morality, if nothing else. The fact that Brooks has been reduced to blaming the system for Republican failures -- once again proving that personal responsibility is only for the poor and non-white -- shows just how afraid Republicans are of this latest proof that they are incapable of governing effectively. "You might as well elect me, nobody else will do better anyway" is a slogan that may deter blame in the short run but is hardly likely to inspire confidence in the public.

But it is also worth noting that many movement conservatives truly believe Brooks's thesis -- for instance, everybody has heard Grover Norquists's quote about wanting to shrink government to the size where he could drown it in the bathtub -- and that this belief in the inherent inability of government to do anything is at least partly responsible for the complete incompetence the Bush administration has demonstrated. When people who believe that government can do nothing come into power, their convictions become self-fulfilling. FEMA will never be able to really deal with a big disaster anyway, so why not fill its top ranks with political operatives? The government would only waste this tax money: why not funnel it to major contributors? And when something big goes wrong, well, of course it did: after all, this is the government we're talking about here. Unfortunately for the movement conservatives, most Americans aren't going to simply accept that due to government shortcomings that nobody will ever be able to overcome, there will be nobody to help them for days in the aftermath of a major disaster. It is, hopefully, finally becoming apparent that when you vote for people who don't believe that the government can (or, for that matter, should) help you, you don't get helped. In the face of this fact, Brooks's claim that nobody can help you anyway is unlikely to be popular, especially when it's so obviously wrong. In this way, this column is actually quite encouraging: when the excuses are so poor, the excuse-makers are obviously in trouble.

Column 2005-9-8 Commentary

2005-09-10T15:24:00.000-04:00

In his latest column, self-declared conservative David Brooks proposes a massive program of governmental social engineering: the displaced poor of New Orleans, many of whom have lost everything, should be resettled in better-off neighborhoods around the U.S. How Brooks reconciles this proposal with his conservatism is unclear. Not that I'm complaining. Or rather, I am complaining, for several reasons. First of all, I don't think it's overly cynical to wonder about the difficulty of getting better-off communities to accept an influx of poor blacks. I'm also somewhat suspicious of Brooks's motives in moving so rapidly to the question of what is to be done now, and, what is more, addressing the one situation that was probably unavoidable: large numbers of poor refugees. This may well simply be reflexive cynicism on my part, and Brooks's naivete has been well documented, and if this were all this column would be fairly non-objectionable.

However, the column also suffers from Brooks's usual refusal to accept that poverty is not simply a product of societal bad habits. To Brooks, a society falls into poverty because its members get used to dropping out of school, having kids young, and committing crimes. After all, everybody around them is doing it, right? The obvious solution is therefore to move the poor people to richer neighborhoods where nobody drops out of school, becomes teenage parents, or commits crimes: once they see that doing those things is not a good idea, they'll be fine. There is certainly some merit to this argument, but it would be incredibly simple-minded to assume that this argument encapsulates the problem of poverty. The main problem here is that poverty tends to cause these behaviors, rather than vice versa. For instance, many people commit crimes because they are poor and need money. People drop out of school because they are poor and need to work a job instead. This is Brooks's biggest blind spot (which is a very bold statement, as he has no shortage): he sees only cultural explanations for everything and refuses to accept that economics may also play a role. He is incapable of recognizing that one of the reasons past programs along these lines were successful is because not only the cultural but also the economic influences were changed. The poor people were given better housing. Their kids went to better schools. Their new neighborhoods were better protected than their old ones. And all of this has nothing to do with culture and everything to with money (and, partly, race, but let's not get into that now). And this is, really, the most frustrating part of this column. In one way, this is a really good idea. New Orleans is likely to be uninhabitable for months, so most people won't be able to go back anyway, and this proposal would probably help them a lot. But in the bigger picture, this is, in many ways, an abdication of responsibility. After all, even Brooks would have to admit that the entire poor population of the United States cannot be resettled in richer neighborhoods. However, we can attempt to improve their lives by replicating the advantages they would receive in richer neighborhoods -- better schools, better housing, etc. -- where they actually live. That is the real way to defeat poverty, not resettlement programs that depend on a vast natural disaster to give them impetus. In the final analysis, Brooks deserves credit for proposing this idea: sadly, his prejudices make it impossible for him to go beyond it to an actual poverty-fighting program.

Column 2005-9-4 Commentary

2005-09-04T12:22:00.000-04:00

Today, Brooks predicts that the political culture is about to change significantly: that Katrina is the event around which popular dissatisfaction will crystallize, leading to a sea change which Brooks compares with the Reagan revolution. What's really amazing about the column is not that Brooks predicts a major political shift, but that he admits that there is significant discontent among the American people. He retains some foolish optimism -- he is still unable to comprehend that GDP growth is not the be-all and end-all of economic statistics, and that a supposedly strong economy is not helping everyone, as the steady rise in the poverty rate and slow decline in real median household income over the last few years makes clear (and, of course, Katrina is unlikely to be kind to the economy, especially as gas prices skyrocket) -- but overall there is a palpable air of gloom hanging over this column. Much of the piece is a litany of depressing pronouncements: "confidence in civic institutions is plummeting", "Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures", "this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade." While Brooks never mentions Bush or refers to the administration or Congress by name, it's an easy connection to make. After all, who has been president throughout this decade so far? It really seems that the hurricane has destroyed Brooks's confidence in the administration and possibly even in the Republican party as currently constituted: he's depressed enough that he can't even rule out the possibility of a "progressive resurgence" instead of one of his idols -- McCain or Giuliani -- taking over. And that is the amazing thing about this column: it's a conservative columnist writing "People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore." Brooks has gone off the reservation, and if the Republican's can't keep Brooks under control, what hope do they have?

Column 2005-9-1: Special 2005-8-28 Edition

2005-09-01T19:53:00.000-04:00

Today's Brooks offering is completely reasonable: Brooks points out that past floods exposed injustices and caused social change -- bolstering his argument with well-chosen historical examples -- and that we can probably expect something similar from Hurrican Katrina, given that most of the people currently suffering in the hurricane's aftermath are poor and black. This is all a pleasant surprise, allowing me to go back to his August 28 column, which I never discussed, and go over that one instead.

On August 28, Brooks presented a counterinsurgency strategy for the administration to use in Iraq. In essence, Brooks suggests that it might be a good idea to try to lock the barn door after the horses have left and the barn has been burned to the ground. I'm not going to dispute the merits of the Krepinevich "oil spot" strategy that Brooks likes so much (in which American forced would take over a handful of territories, largely abandoning the rest, and provide total security and cash in the areas they controlled, thus winning over the natives): for all I know, it would have worked (according to Brooks, it worked in Malaya in the 1950's and "other places" which are not specified.) But it's far too late to implement it now, not for military reasons (though there are certainly military difficulties) but for political ones. To be fair to Brooks, he is at least bright enough to recognize that this is the case. He points out that the "oil spot" strategy, relying as it does on a heavy troop presence and playing down American advantages in technology and firepower, is anathema to the Rumsfeld way of fighting wars. And he notes that the war has not been fought with an eye to the long term, but instead from one "turning point" to the next. However, he blames these problems on Rumsfeld and the "military brass" respectively, and turns to Bush as a man who has been misled by his advisors but who will be eager to correct his mistakes once he realizes them. Of course, the problems that Brooks mentions are intimately connected, and stem partly from the fact that the administration failed to make any preparations for a long-term insurgency (Wolfowitz: "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army.") and partly from the political imperatives of obtaining popular support for a pre-emptive war and maintaining that support as the stated reasons for fighting the war evaporated.

Recall that the war was to be over in "six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." It was sold as a quick little war that would show that America was invincible: the mighty American army would carelessly flick Saddam out of the way, expose his stocks of WMD's and ties to Al Qaeda, and leave the grateful Iraqis their very own democracy, all in less than a year, while the American people looked on proudly. Rumsfeld certainly wanted a chance to prove that light, mobile forces with overwhelming firepower were the wave of the future, but this vision of the war also required a small fighting force, partly as a demonstration of American might and partly so that the vast majority of the American people could sit on the sidelines and cheer without having to worry about loved ones in danger (or, far, far worse from a political perspective, the possibility of a draft). Of course, it took only a few months for this narrative to start to break down, and to break down in almost every possible way, leaving the administration with the problem of maintaining public support as it became clear that the war the public supported was not the one the U.S. was actually fighting. The democracy part of the war rationale, being the only part that had not collapsed irretrievably, was therefore elevated above the others, and to compensate for the fact that the war had turned from a preemptive strike to an exercise in nation-building, the administration constantly announced that we were winning and everything would be over soon. Well, they were a little more subtle than that: a series of turning points were each hailed as the sign of the imminent end of the war. Perhaps the administration even believed its own hype. At any rate, a "heavy troop presence" and an "acknowledge[ment] that this will be a long, gradual war" -- two things that Brooks thinks are required to implement this "oil spot" strategy -- were exactly what the administration did not want.

And at this point it is far too late to do anything about the situation. Disregarding the folly of thinking that a man who does not believe that he makes mistakes (or at least refuses to admit to them) would get up and essentially concede that almost everything his administration has done in Iraq thus far was wrong, and even leaving out the domestic political repercussions of saying that we need to completely start over in Iraq and prepare to be there for a decade at least with twice as many troops as we have at present, the plan simply would not work in the current environment. It would require more troops than we currently have in Iraq, and it seems unlikely that most Iraqis would welcome more American troops. It would require largely abandoning the political process that the U.S. has invested so much in, or at best leaving the Shiites and Kurds to govern themselves while the U.S. engages in massive counterinsurgency operations in Baghdad and the Sunni heartland. The constitution-writing process has no place in the "oil spot" strategy. Providing countrywide security for the referendum on the constitution is definitely counterindicated by the strategy. Attempting to reinforce the power of the central government throughout Iraq is also not compatible with it. Most likely, the result of a move to the "oil spot" strategy would be to further divide the Sunnis from the rest of Iraq, which is hardly the desired result. Keeping in mind that political considerations are always paramount with this administration, though, this analysis is completely unnecessary. Perhaps in ten years the strategy would have worked, but over the next few years it would be a political disaster, and that is why it will never be implemented.

It is notable, though, the Brooks is willing to admit that at the moment the U.S. is failing in Iraq. He is not yet blaming it on Bush, but perhaps he is simply setting himself up to desert the sinking ship. Brooks does have a certain amount of animal cunning, and with this column he acknowledges the problems in Iraq and presents a solution. It's an unworkable solution, to be sure, and Brooks may well be perfectly aware of that fact, but it allows him to say in a year or two that he saw the problems and pointed out what the administration should have done, but they failed to change course and so he has no choice but to regretfully abandon his support for the Iraq venture, an excellent idea sadly bungled. Of course, he may just be a moron who refuses to accept that the time for discussing strategies for winning is past: the U.S. has lost, and the only realistic thing to do now is to try to determine how to keep any further losses to a minimum. Either way, though, a respected conservative thinker like Brooks -- how he acquired the first and third of those adjectives remains a mystery -- has come out and said that the American occupation of Iraq has been horribly mismanaged from the beginning. It's another indication that the tide of public opinion is beginning to turn, and none too soon.

Column 2005-8-25 Brief Commentary

2005-08-25T19:49:00.000-04:00

Sadly, I lack the time to discuss all the problems with Brooks's latest effort, so I'm going to focus on the big picture instead. Also, in this case the big picture is extremely important, as Brooks is unveiling what will almost certainly become a common conservative tactic as the inevitable Iraq withdrawal approaches: declaring victory at the drop of a hat. Here, Brooks declares victory because a constitution has been written, or at least "exists in people's heads and in copies annotated with handwritten notes." It is worth noting that Brooks's premise is extremely flimsy, as the constitution has not yet been adopted (and given Sunni attitudes, may well not be), and even if it is it remains to be seen just how effective it can be in a country where every major political party is associated with a heavily-armed militia and political disagreements can quickly become full-fledged battles. Furthermore, it appears that the constitution will enshrine Islam as a major part of law, trampling on women's rights, and essentially split the country in three parts. This is hardly the beacon of democracy that we were promised. But the fact is that the reason why Brooks is declaring victory here is really irrelevant: desperate conservatives will likely start declaring victory whenever anything that could be interpreted as good news appears. What is really important is to point out that unless current conditions change drastically, victory in Iraq is unachievable. The administration launched this war for no good reason, didn't prepare for it, and has now almost certainly lost it, and those such as Brooks who will assert that some event suggests otherwise need to quickly disabused of any such notion. Army Major General Joseph Taluto describes the insurgency as "intrinsic" and, as noted above, political violence exists outside of the Sunni insurgency as well. Unemployment is around 50%. Power is out in Baghdad for 20 hours a day. And Iran is vying with the U.S. to express its appreciation of the new constitution. No WMD's were found. Saddam and Osama weren't best buddies after all. Neocons once derided those who said that stability should take precedence over democracy in foreign policy: now they're willing to endorse a semi-theocracy in the likely vain hope of achieving that previously mocked goal. While there are multiple scenarios in which the U.S. could declare victory in Iraq -- a perfect Jeffersonian democracy is not a requirement -- none of them have any resemblance to the reality there. It is especially galling, then, for Brooks to write that the U.S. has succeeded in Iraq. This goes beyond moving the goalposts: Brooks is busily stringing a volleyball net across the field and looking at the football as if he's never seen it before. Since achieving what they set out to accomplish is probably impossible, the administration and its cheerleaders are likely to take any hint of good news as an opportunity to declare that current conditions are actually what they wanted all along, and they must not be allowed to do so.

David Brooks is currently following Bush's example

2005-08-18T19:42:00.000-04:00

By taking as much of August off as possible. No word on whether he will refuse to speak to a mother who lost her son in the Iraq war as well.

Actually, I'm glad that Brooks is on vacation again, as I don't have time to deal with his idiocy right now, so I'm going to stop complaining.

Column 2005-8-24 Commentary

2005-08-14T17:52:00.000-04:00

To my shock, I actually found myself agreeing with today's Brooks column. Brooks thinks that the best way to reduce illegal immigration is to increase legal immigration, which makes sense to me. He points out that increasing the number of border guards isn't too effective, and ridicules the idea of "beer-swilling good old boys" going out to guard the border. The one thing he doesn't address is the demand side: penalties for corporations that employ illegal immigrants. Otherwise, though, a very reasonable column that even includes an endorsement of a bill co-sponsored by Ted Kennedy. How he manages to switch from dribbling idiocy to sense in a mere three days is completely beyond me.

Column 2005-8-11 Commentary

2005-08-11T21:03:00.000-04:00

(Update below)

Brooks's last two columns had reasonable moments, but in his latest column, Brooks falls back to his usual level. In it, he attempts to create the field of "cultural geography", which seems to simply be the study of cultures and why they are different. "Study why and how people cluster, why certain national traits endure over centuries, why certain cultures embrace technology and economic growth and others resist them" Brooks says to the hypothetical "18-year-old kid with a really big brain" whom he seems to think reads his column regularly in the search for any advice he can get from one of the greatest morons -- or rather, public intellectuals -- of our time. Frankly, this doesn't sound quite as revolutionary or interesting as Brooks seems to think it is. For instance, take the question about the persistence of certain national traits. It seems pretty obvious that insofar as traits do persist, they do so because the vast majority of people in any given nation were born there and inherited those traits from their parents, or, if not from their parents, then from other children and the parents of these other children, in the same way that the children of immigrants learn to speak the language of their new country without an accent. In fact, one might as well ask why certain nations keep speaking the same language for centuries. Of course, they don't: languages evolve over time, and the same is likely true for national traits. Before Brooks's question about why certain cultures reject economic growth and technology can be answered, he's going to have to give some examples of such cultures that aren't extreme religious groups engaged in a blanket rejection of modernity. Otherwise, the question doesn't seem to be worth asking. And finally, Brooks wants to know why people cluster. Luckily, I can answer that one too: because human beings are gregarious animals, and they are gregarious because they evolved from other gregarious animals. Presumably, what Brooks really wants to ask is why people cluster with other like-minded people, but I feel that this question practically answers itself. After all, this is not exactly a new phenomenon. Consider the Amish, or the Mormons, or the early Puritans. Artist colonies, such as Greenwich Village or the Left Bank, form another not particularly recent example. The human tendency to band together against those that are different is as old as humanity. So too are the two outsider responses: forming one's own group or assimilating. Modern technology makes it easier to find like-minded people and to form a group with them, et voila.

Brooks doesn't actually try to answer these questions right away, though: first, he reinforces his conservative credentials by attacking "the gospel of multiculturalism". Incidentally, most of Brooks's columns these days seem to have an attack on some conservative bugaboo -- the academy, Europe, multiculturalism, etc. -- shoehorned in for no particular reason. One has to wonder if Brooks's handlers are perhaps worried about his devotion to the movement and are making sure that he toes the party line. Whatever may be the reason, Brooks makes his usual sweeping assertions without providing a shred of proof, and then, having apparently convinced the Party bosses that he's not backsliding, is free to continue with his column and this gem of a statement: "But none of this helps explain a crucial feature of our time: while global economies are converging, cultures are diverging, and the widening cultural differences are leading us into a period of conflict, inequality and segmentation." First of all, I defy Brooks to identify any period of human history that could not be described as one of "conflict, inequality, and segmentation." In fact, one could easily argue that this period of human history has considerably less conflict than some quite recent ones, e.g. the Cold War. It's hard to argue that there is more inequality now than there has been before, and as for segmentation, it's unclear if segmentation enforced by distance is any better or worse than a more voluntary sort. Secondly, I would like to quibble with Brooks's claim that "cultures are diverging". In fact, I'd argue that at no point in human history have all the world's cultures ever been as similar as they are now. I'll try to avoid sounding too much like Thomas Friedman, but if I can see in a New York Times (no link, as the article is too old to be available for free) photograph of the interior of the Beijing (or possibly Shanghai) subway system the exact same IPod ad campaign that is visible in the T here in Boston, then it seems to me that cultural differences are not exactly widening. Perhaps in the United States the cultural difference between, say, Massachusetts and Mississippi is wider than it used to be (though I'm not sure about that), but Brooks is talking about a global phenomenon. All in all, this sentence definitely qualifies as one of the stupidest Brooks has ever written. It's a signal achievement, and I feel proud to have been associated with it, albeit only distantly.

Naturally, Brooks can't keep up this level of idiocy throughout the column, but he's clearly trying hard and produces some quite respectable work. For instance, we find that "People are taking advantage of freedom and technology to create new groups and cultural zones." And yet "Old national identities and behavior patterns are proving surprisingly durable." There would seem to be a contradiction between these two statements. The first suggests that people are abandoning old cultures for new, while the second asserts that those old cultures are actually not much damaged. But Brooks doesn't seem to see any conflict between these sentences: in fact, he presents them back to back, and appears to think that both provide evidence for his assertion that globalization and technology are not "bringing us together." Next, Brooks redefines "globalized" to mean "economically integrated". Now, while economic integration is certainly part of any definition of globalization, there's a lot more to globalization than that. There's the little matter of the root word, "global", for instance. Why does Brooks redefine "globalized" in this fashion? So he can say "We in America have been "globalized" (meaning economically integrated) for centuries . . . ." If economically integrated is what he means, then why the hell doesn't he just say so?

Brooks goes on to point out, in a tone of wonder, that there are lots of American subcultures and fewer cultural unifiers, even though America is so economically integrated. Actually, Brooks points out that the mass media market is heavily segmented, which is not really the same thing. For example, the advent of cable means that the television market is highly segmented, with channels for practically anything, but it's not as if there is no overlap at all between people who watch ESPN and those who watch the Cartoon Network. And, of course, mass media segmentation is a function of economic integration (and better technology). Again using television as an example, cable only works because the more esoteric channels can be pumped into almost every house in the country, meaning that the pool of possible viewers is large enough that even if only a small fraction actually want to watch the channel there are still enough viewers that the channel is viable. And what makes this wide pool of potential viewers possible is, obviously, economic integration.

So Brooks strikes out with his first example of something that future cultural geographers could ponder. His next is just very obvious: liberals tend to move to liberal places (for some reason, Brooks says "crunchy" instead of liberal: I suspect it's supposed to be an insult, but it's just too obscure to qualify), and conservatives to conservative places. Golly gee, whyever could this be? Moving right along before the impulse to bang my head against my desk becomes too strong, we find that people don't all work on farms or factories any more. Which is true, but the reasons for that are well-documented and have little to do with culture. This is followed by yet another blindingly obvious observation: military and civilian cultures diverge. This is also an awful example, since it has nothing to do with the cultural changes of globalization and everything to do with the fact that the United States has a volunteer army, which places the risk of dying in a war entirely on one segment of the population. Next comes another reference to political polarization, except that the geographic component has been removed. In fact, there isn't a geographic component to either of the last two examples, or to the mass media example, for that matter. Which really reduces Brooks to saying that some Americans live differently from others. If Brooks really thinks that this is an important trend that needs to be examined, he's stupider than even I thought.

Next, Brooks attempts to globalize his phenomenon. Here, he does a better job, painting a picture of anti-globalization advocates and the extremely religious -- ranging from the simply "orthodox" to Islamist terrorists -- banding together to form their own groups. But, again, there's nothing really complicated here. Modern technology allows people to choose to follow any ideology or religion they like and to get together with other people who make the same choices. Two hundred, one hundred, or even fifty years ago this was impossible, or at least very, very difficult. But today the world is full of highly literate people who control wealth that was unthinkable for most of human history. Their literacy means that they are not restricted to the beliefs they were brought up with. Their wealth allows them to communicate with others almost anywhere in the world instantly and travel almost anywhere in the world in a few days. Given all this, it would be surprising only if we did not see this kind of clustering of like-minded people.

Having spent most of the column bumbling about, Brooks finally shows why he thinks this "cultural geography" is significant. "Transnational dreams are faltering" he says, referring to European integration and, inexplicably, Arab unity. I'm pretty sure that Arab unity has been dead for a couple of decades at least. The United Arab Republic ended in 1961, and the Arab League is much closer to the Organization of America States than the E.U., so it seems that the dream of Arab unity passed the faltering stage some time ago. Of course, what Brooks really cares about here is attacking the E.U. This is fairly typical, as is the swipe at Europeans for not working more and Canadians for not having more babies (I guess that Brooks felt that if he kept piling on the Europeans, people would start to think that he has something against Europe or something). Admittedly, he phrases these in neutral language -- fertility rates and work hours are "diverging" -- but Brooks has spent enough time talking about how low fertility rates and insufficient work hours will be the death of Europe that it's pretty clear that he expects future cultural geographers to spend a lot of time analyzing just why the United States is so much better than Europe and Canada. And finally we have this: "Global inequality widens as some nations with certain cultural traits prosper and others with other traits don't." Perhaps Brooks's earlier attack on "the gospel of multiculturalism" was also intended to cover himself against the inevitable backlash of people wondering if it's just a coincidence that in this analysis the countries with bad cultural traits tend not to be those inhabited by white people, and that this means that the non-white people are entirely responsible for their problems. On the other hand, Brooks said in his denunciation of multiculturalism that "there are a certain number of close-minded thugs . . . who accuse anybody who asks intelligent questions about groups and enduring traits of being racist . . . ." And since imputing that whether or not nations prosper is entirely dependent on their cultural traits and has nothing to do with history is certainly not intelligent, it appears that he has no outs at all on this one.

Finally, Brooks tosses away any shreds of credibility he retains by citing noted psuedoscientist and moron Samuel Huntington as one of the people that potential cultural geographers should emulate. Huntington is the man who once said that South Africa was more content than France in the early 1960's, using some ginned-up formula that took statistics like the number of telephones per capita and turned them into a "satisfaction index". If you're not sure just how satisfied South Africa was during the early '60's, look it up. You could start by googling "sharpeville massacre". And just last year Huntington published a book in which he claimed that Latino immigration was undermining the Anglo-Saxon character of the United States and that Mexican values, such as laziness (okay, he didn't actually say that, but he did say "lack of ambition" and "acceptance of poverty") are incompatible with the proud Anglo-Saxon ideals that have made the United States what it is today. Brooks finishes his column with one last appeal to the youths: "If you are 18 and you've got that big brain, the whole field of cultural geography is waiting for you." All I can say is that if the eighteen-year-olds Brooks is addressing can't figure out that a field which is supported by Brooks and where Samuel Huntington is a figure to emulate is not something that they want to be associated with, they can't have that big of a brain after all.

Update: Courtesy of Sadly, No! we find that Brooks is even less revolutionary than we thought. A google search for "cultural geography" gives about 202,000 hits, the first one of which is to the Journal of Cultural Geography. So, um, it seems that this field is a little more established than Brooks thinks. Especially when one realizes that cultural geography bears more than a passing resemblance to anthropology. Could this column be Brooks's stupidest ever? Well, we're too lazy to go back and compare it to all his others, but in the true Brooksian tradition, we say yes it is, evidence and research be damned.

Column 2005-8-7 Commentary

2005-08-07T21:45:00.000-04:00

I don't know what's gotten into Brooks, but once again his column is full of actual facts, with actual sources cited. Actually, his column is practically all statistics, positive ones having to do with falls in domestic abuse, teen pregnancy, etc., etc., etc. Of course, once he gets done with facts, the column falls apart, but it still leaves two-thirds of a reasonable column, which is well above Brooks's average. He begins with: "According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of family violence in this country has dropped by more than half since 1993. I've been trying to figure out why." However, the column leaves a distinct impression that he's really not sure. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing: I was afraid he would simply give all the credit to the religious right. He then lists statistics and finally gives four "explanations" for why all these good things are happening, because he's a columnist and so not allowed to simply throw up his hands and declare that he has no idea what's going on. Sadly, his explanations are, for the most part, not based on nearly as solid ground as the rest of the column, and seem fairly inadequate anyway. His first explanation is that nobody believes any more that "the traditional family is obsolete, that drugs are liberating, that it is every adolescent's social duty to be a rebel." My guess is that exactly the same people who used to believe these things still believe them, and that this number was never very large, and still isn't. Since Brooks relapses here by not offering any evidence for this claim, my guess is apparently just as good as his. (And people may not believe that "drugs are liberating" any more, but none of the statistics he gives suggest a decline in drug use.) Next he posits that Americans have become better parents, and actually supplies evidence (an increase in the amount of hours parents spend "constructively engaging" with their children) to suggest that this is true, so I'll take him at his word. His third argument is that those under 30 are reacting against the "culture of divorce" and trying to lead more stable lives than their parents. I think it's a little too soon to be judging this -- in fact, way way way too soon to be judging this -- and no evidence is given either, so we'll discard it. Finally, "over the past few decades, neighborhood and charitable groups have emerged to help people lead more organized lives, even in the absence of cohesive families." This seems the flimsiest and vaguest of his explanations. What exactly does he mean by "neighborhood and charitable groups"? Is this where he sneaks the religious right in by the back door (and if so, why not just come out and say so)? Does he really believe that there were no such groups before, say, the seventies? And why can't he supply any facts to back up this assertion? Actually, he probably can't because it's far too vague, which simply reinforces its worthlessness. So, Brooks can't really explain why Americans are leading better lives, which is unsurprising, to say the least. And even if all his explanations were valid, they really wouldn't be able to cover all his statistics. His third explanation deals solely with divorce, and since the divorce rate is falling only very slowly, it wouldn't seem to provide much help. And really, which of these explanations accounts for a drop in drunk driving? Or child poverty? Or teenage pregnancy? But we can't complain too much: Brooks offering facts and then giving vague and pointless non-explanations for those facts is far better than his usual combination of idiocy and lies.

Column 2005-8-4 Commentary

2005-08-04T20:04:00.000-04:00

Amazingly, Brooks's latest column has some redeeming features. For starters, he breaks from tradition by presenting actual facts and, even more incredibly, citing actual sources. In yet another unusual development his point is actually interesting and well-argued. Brooks is claiming that terrorists are not peasants from backwards nations lashing out against America as the symbol of a modernity that is excluding them (actually, I can't really remember anybody making this claim, but I'll let that go: maybe this was Brooks's pet theory), but rather are largely from middle- and upper-middle-class families, well-educated and with good jobs, who are rebelling against globalization and latching onto jihad to give their lives meaning. These new jihadis are fundamentally products of Western, or at least modern, globalised society. Therefore, Brooks says, "democratizing the Middle East may not stem terrorism." Of course, his analysis strongly suggests that democratizing the Middle East will not stem terrorism, as it would not affect any of the factors he mentions as creating terrorists, but for Brooks to actually stand up and say anything that might be construed as direct criticism of the Iraq war is practically inconceivable. And, really, given that democracy is the solution for everything in the neocon vision, this is a pretty big break for Brooks. Brooks also points out that nationalists are in many cases distinct from jihadis, since the latter are a product of globalization rather than "springing organically from the Arab or Muslim world," and that the U.S. should work on separating these two forces. While these two conclusions are both quite reasonable, they don't go quite far enough, but we'll come back to that.

A more immediately obvious blemish is the fact that, to balance what might well be taken as criticism of the GWOT, or GSAVE, or whatever, Brooks throws in two (half-hearted) swipes against old targets. First, he claims that "[i]deologically, Islamic neofundamentalism occupies the same militant space that was once occupied by Marxism." Because people blowing themselves and others up in an attempt to bring about a return of the Caliphate in the Muslim world, insofar as they have any goal in blowing themselves up, is clearly exactly the same as people agitating (in some cases violently) for world revolution and proletarian control of the means of production. Actually, since the first goal is entirely spiritual, and the second entirely economic, it's hard to imagine two ideologies more opposed to each other. Brooks's only evidence for this claim is that both attract disaffected youths who are opposed to the system, a purely surface resemblance. He also claims that both movements use similar symbols, which would be a more important, if only slightly so, correspondence, but, tellingly, he can't provide any examples of this, though he does give examples of overlap in the recruiting pool and points out, quite pointlessly, that both Islamists and Marxists rail against imperialism and capitalism. In fact, this whole diversion is quite pointless -- it adds nothing to the analysis of Islamists, this column's topic, as they share no goals or methods with Marxists except in the most general sense (e.g., both attempt to persuade people to join their orgainizations). It really appears that the only reason to include it is to ensure that there is at least one criticism of leftists in the column.

A similar reasoning applies to Brooks's final conclusion (he gives three, the first two of which were discussed earlier), which is that what is really needed is more assimilation. Actually, I'm being charitable in assuming that Brooks intends for this to be taken as a criticism of European immigration policies, as otherwise there is absolutely no explanation of why this conclusion is included. The title of this column is "From Cricket to Jihad". Brooks spends much of it explaining that even assimilated Muslims become terrorists, despite their education and technical jobs. To quote Brooks from earlier in the column, "[t]hey give up cricket and medical school and take up jihad." So, essentially, after expending much effort to show that the pool of terrorists is largely drawn from assimilated Muslims, perhaps because of their assimilation -- after all, this conflict is presented as "a conflict within the modern, globalized world" and so presumably the jihadis can't be outsiders -- Brooks concludes that more assimilation is needed. Actually, this stunning illogic is fairly typical for Brooks: it's just that he is sufficiently reasonable in the rest of the column that it comes as a surprise.

But this both these problems pale beside the main issue that Brooks does not address. Assuming that these terrorists are striking a blow against globalization to give their lives meaning, we must ask why they choose to revolt against globalization in this fashion? Why not give their lives meaning by becoming radical leftists or anarchists (with the added benefit that they don't have to give up on their newly meaningful life so quickly)? Brooks does not even bring up this question in his column, but these studies of foreigners who tried to get to Iraq to fight the Americans (and some who got there and committed suicide attacks) sheds some light on the question. It turns out -- surprise, surprise -- that almost all of those studied had no terrorism background and had been inspired by the war itself. Combine this piece of information with the rest of Brooks's facts and we can see that his conclusions don't go nearly far enough. Democratizing the Middle East may not stem terrorism, yes, but the more important and obvious conclusion here is that attempting to democratize the Middle East by force will certainly not stem terrorism, and will almost certainly increase it. Similarly, while the U.S. should certainly try to separate jihadis and Arab nationalists, the worst possible way to do this -- in fact, the one way that is guaranteed to drive nationalists and jihadis into each other's arms -- is to invade an Arab country. In short, given what we know about terrorists, the Iraq war is a complete failure as a terrorist-fighting technique. I'm tempted to give Brooks, wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party that he is, some credit for even approaching criticism of the war, even though I'm sure that he read about these studies -- they were circulated fairly widely for a few days -- and it really doesn't take much to come to the conclusion that the Iraq war exactly the wrong move to stop terrorism (and for many other reasons too, of course, but we're just dealing with terrorism here). However, we must try to use carrots as well as sticks, and when Brooks displays vestiges of logical thinking, he should be encouraged for his successes, just as he is castigated for his failures. So we'll call this column a good start, and while I'm not sanguine about the likelihood of this being the precursor of some improvement on Brooks's part, I can still hope (and I need something to hope for now that it seems that the Times will never fire Brooks).

Column 2005-7-30 Commentary

2005-07-30T21:01:00.000-04:00

Well, Brooks isn't quite as lazy as I thought: he only took a few days of vacation this time. However, he comes back with a column about how great his son's AAU baseball team is, and how people should stop criticizing youth sports because, as he reasons with typically Brooksian logic, if his son's team is so good, all youth sports teams must be good. (It must be noted that his rhapsodic descriptions of youth baseball suggest that he fits the stereotype of the parent who is living through his son's athletic success to a T.) Combined with his previous column on the dangers of airplane travel with small children, it appears that either Brooks is remaking himself into a family-oriented columnist (another attempt to get himself removed from the op-ed page and perhaps moved to the Style section?) or is simply too lazy to write about any actual issues that might require actual thought or actual research, though this theory is undermined by the fact that Brooks never does any thinking or research anyway. But I should stop looking a gift horse in the mouth: Brooks is not tormenting his readers with his idiocy, and that's all that I could possibly ask for.

Non-Column 2005-7-28: Brooks is a Lazy Bastard

2005-07-28T17:18:00.000-04:00

I'm torn here. On the one hand, the less David Brooks, the better. And I need the time usually spent pointing out how much of a moron Brooks is for actual work associated with my actual life, such as it is. On the other hand, Brooks got back from his last vacation two frickin' weeks ago! And he doesn't exactly have the hardest job on the planet, either. Well, maybe he was exhausted by the effort of making his last column actually funny and had to take some time off to recover. On the whole, I'd rather have him gone: what really pisses me off is that he's likely to come back.

Column 2005-7-24

2005-07-24T21:38:00.000-04:00

Today, Brooks has chosen to be humorous. Instead of writing about something important, he chooses to write about the vicissitudes of traveling on airplanes with children. We must give credit where credit is due, however: he actually manages to be funny, which is quite a departure from his usual comic efforts. Also, I feel something of an undercurrent of rage in this column. Perhaps he is drawing on personal experience? Otherwise, there's not much to be said here. We await Brooks's inevitable return to moronicity on Thursday. In the meantime, you can go here for proof that Brooks has not decided to reinvent himself as a comedian.

Column 2005-7-21 Commentary

2005-07-21T22:38:00.000-04:00

In Brooks's Thursday column, we learn that Brooks wants to have sex with John Roberts, Bush's Supreme Court nominee. (Wait a minute, that's not right). Correction: in the Rude Pundit's Thursday column, he says that he wants to have sex with John Roberts. Brooks is not actually in love with Roberts, merely his nomination. This is hardly surprising, as it is impossible to imagine Brooks being critical about any administration nominee to the Supreme Court, up to and including James Dobson. Brooks really gives himself away with two sentences: one from the beginning of the column -- "President Bush consulted widely, moved beyond the tokenism of identity politics and selected a nominee based on substance, brains, careful judgment and good character." -- and one from the end "And most important, [Bush has] shown that character and substance matter most." Note first that Bush has "moved beyond the tokenism of identity politics": that is, he picked a rich white male ("the face of today's governing conservatism", as Brooks so nicely puts it). What's more interesting, though, is the fact that "Bush accelerated his search for a Supreme Court nominee in part because of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name, according to Republicans familiar with administration strategy." Apparently Bush dumped the long-term advantage of playing identity politics in favor of the short-term advantage of trying to manipulate the media (which didn't even work very well). But maybe Brooks, Rove's indefatigable defender (more on that in the archives), thinks that this is merely another way for Bush to demonstrate how much character and substance matter to him. After all, Brooks never specified whose character and what substance.

As for Roberts himself, Brooks does a nice whitewash. Look! Roberts submitted his wedding notice to the New York Times (according to Saturday's New York Times, his wife grew up in the Bronx, which might have something to do with it)! His wife is a member of a culturally heterodox anti-abortion group! And he lives in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., not the the Virginia ones! Clearly, then, he's not some crazy ideologue! The only real substance backing Brooks's claim that Roberts is not an ideologue is the assertion that Roberts "has done pro bono work on behalf of the environment, parental rights [and that's a hot-button liberal topic-ed.] and minorities." Unsurprisingly, the word "abortion" does not appear in this column. Neither does the phrase "Roe v. Wade". How Brooks hopes to analyze Robert's record without once mentioning his views on this key issue is beyond me (of course, Brooks doesn't actually present Roberts's views on any issue, never getting beyond platitudes about how "principled" and "rich in practical knowledge" he is). As a side note, Brooks states approvingly that Roberts is "a conservative practitioner, not a conservative theoretician", who is "skilled in the technical aspects of the law," but "doesn't think at the level of generality of, say, a Scalia." Exactly two columns ago, Brooks wrote that Bush should pick the candidate with the largest brain, a philosophical giant who would stun us all with the breadth and depth of his conservative theorizing (see below for more). So, in exactly one week, Brooks has completely abandoned every idea he set forth in that column without a peep of protest. Can you say "partisan hack"?

What is really fascinating, though, is the last part of the column, in which Brooks analyzes the effect of this nomination on the Democratic party, seeing a fight between the "Democratic elites" (for some reason, he refers to the centrists in this way) and the "liberal interest groups" (which appears to refer to the rest of the party). "The outside interest groups and donors . . . need this fight" Brooks says. They are "rolling out the old warhorse rhetoric" and "distorting Roberts's record . . . ." And to cap it all off, they insist that the balance of the court be maintained! How dare they insist that Bush nominate a non-crazy conservative like O'Connor, rather than a crazy one like Scalia! Brooks also makes the mistake of asserting that the balance of the court "never matters when a Democrat is president. This is a mistake because it invites a brief diversion down memory lane to the last time a Democratic president (one W. J. Clinton) got to nominate a Supreme Court Justice. Courtesy of Think Progress, we find that, amazingly enough, Clinton actually consulted with the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary committee, Orrin Hatch! Why, one might almost think that he took that "advice and consent" nonsense in the Constitution seriously! Furthermore, one of his nominees, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was pretty clearly a moderate (a study found that she voted with her Republican-appointed colleagues on the D.C. Court of Appeals more than with her fellow Democratic appointees). So much for balance, I guess. It goes without saying that Patrick Leahy, the current ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was never consulted on this nomination.

Who was consulted? Why, the crazy ideologues and holy warriors, naturally. And there lies the rub, for a day after Brooks attacked liberals who were making Roberts out to be an extreme conservative, the New York Times published an article detailing how the administration managed to convince its base on the lunatic Christian right that Roberts was one of them. Brooks does not assert in so many words that Roberts is no Scalia, but his claim that Roberts is not as broad a thinker as Scalia is undoubtedly intended to disassociate Roberts from Scalia. It is interesting, then, to find Leonard Leo, chairman of Catholic outreach for the Republican Party and someone "tapped by the White House to build the coalition for judicial confirmation battles", describing the process by which people came to realize that "'Roberts fit the president's standards as he set forth in his two campaigns' - a jurist in the mold of Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas . . . ." Brooks speaks of liberals "misrepresenting" Roberts's record, which makes one wonder what to think when Jay Sekulow, also picked to help sheperd the nominee through and "chief counsel of an evangelical Protestant legal center founded by Pat Robertson," who also worked with Roberts as a lawyer, says that he knows that "Roberts doesn't argue just to argue", and his heart was in all those cases he fought (including ones in which he argued that Roe v. Wade should be overturned). In fact, the Times article says that a central part of the case for Roberts was his record as a lawyer for Republican administrations. And no less a personage than James Dobson is quoted as saying "We believe the issues we care about will be handled carefully by this judge." So, either the administration has been baldly lying about Roberts's record and beliefs in an attempt to persuade Dobson, Robertson, and their minions to back him, or Brooks is simply casting baseless aspersions on liberals as part of an adminstration campaign to present Roberts as a moderate (with a wink to the Dobsonites) to make his confirmation easier. A tough call, admittedly, but given the loud outcries and veiled threats from the radical Christian right when the idea of an Alberto Gonzalez nomination was floated, I'm going to say that the second option is likely the correct one (after all, what is the name of this website?).

PS: Since Brooks didn't bother to actually address Roberts's record, I didn't either. However, if you're interested, you can download this pdf from the Alliance for Justice, or check out the always-good People for the American Way. Also, see this post for information about a recent and extremely disturbing Roberts decision. And don't forget that Roberts advised the Bushies during the whole Florida recount thing back in 2000.

Column 2005-7-17 Commentary

2005-07-18T21:52:00.000-04:00

To the unitiated, Brooks's latest might suggest that Brooks is a fair-minded conservative. He praises Robert Kennedy, after all, and Theodore Roosevelt, who is hardly an icon to today's conservatives. And while he does wholeheartedly endorse McCain and Giuliani, they are somewhat outside of the modern conservative mainstream, and certainly not beloved by the lunatic Christian right. This faux reasonableness is Brooks's greatest (and, for that matter, only) weapon, which is one of the reasons why we feel this blog provides a valuable public service. After all, immediately below this entry, you can read about Brooks's recent appearance on NPR in which he did nothing but disgorge talking points in defense of Karl Rove. The radio appearance was only a couple of days before the column, so either Brooks went through a complete about-face in those days, or he is not quite the reasonable being that his newest New York Times offering suggests. A quick survey of the archives would rapidly convince anyone new to Brooks that reasonableness is the last attribute that would be associated with him, and allow such a person to dismiss this column as a rather transparent attempt to keep himself in the good graces of his largely liberal readers.

From this perspective, one can note that Giuliani turned himself into a Bush shill in the months leading up to the election (and how much courage does it take to attack "self-indulgent edifice of urban liberalism"? For that matter, what is the "self-indulgent edifice of urban liberalism"?) and that John McCain is far more conservative then is generally acknowledged (see the Daily Howler for more on McCain). Kennedy was undeniably liberal, but he is also safely dead, and is praised for his courage in fighting the mob, rather than for fighting for any liberal cause, such as social justice. Brooks's paean to "courage politicians" sounds nice and appeals to liberals who still dream of a Republican party that does not regard all liberals as traitors, but it's merely a distraction. The real David Brooks is the one lying through his teeth (or, at best, mindlessly repeating Republican talking points) to defend Karl Rove, and it's important not to lose sight of this fact.

2005-7-15: Special NPR Edition

2005-07-16T14:57:00.000-04:00

(Hat tip to Dave for bringing this to my attention.) Apparently, Brooks is a regular commenter on All Things Considered on NPR, and on Thursday appeared on that show to answer questions about the Plame case, the Supreme Court vacancy, and the London attacks. Since his discussion of the Supreme Court vacancy was simply a rehashing of his most recent column (see below for more) and he merely gave some meaningless platitudes in answer to a question about the London attacks, we'll concentrate on his amazing ability to memorize RNC talking points about Plame. First, a transcript (by ear, so any errors are my fault, from here):

Host: David Brooks, is President Bush standing by his closest adviser, or is the absence of a vigorous presidential defense of Karl Rove more noteworthy, despite every other Republican offering a vigorous defense of Karl Rove?

Brooks: Yeah, I think the president is not inclined to leap into this thing where we know so little and when the investigation is still ongoing. It would stun me if George Bush were to walk away from Karl Rove, it would take a lot to pry that guy away from the other guy. And I must say, I'm not really one of those people who understands Roveaphobia, the idea that Karl Rove is the dark genius at the center of the universe. And I must say, the frenzy has gone on around us all week, I still don't know that there's a crime or anything particularly wrong going on here. Joe Wilson was going around saying that the Vice President sent him to Iraq, which turns out to be untrue, and Matt Cooper, from what we know of his memo, was looking into that story, and Rove said "No, it wasn't the Vice President who sent him, his wife's a CIA agent."

Host: If there's no crime, what's Judy Miller, from your newspaper, doing in jail right now?

Brooks: Well, she is there to protect a principle. The principle is that you don't reveal sources: that has nothing to do with crimes.

{Interval in which E.J. Dionne, the other analyst, speaks}

Host: David, one more point here.

Brooks: Well, I mean, we're in Alice in Wonderland territory. The idea -- Joe Wilson was the guy not telling the truth. He said the Vice President sent him there, that turned out from the Senate Intelligence Committee not to be true. He said his wife had nothing to do with him being sent, that turned out according to the Senate Intelligence Committee not to be true. Karl Rove, from what we know from Matt Cooper's memo, was the guy actually telling what happened.

Host: But on a more central pont, he said there's nothing to the Iraq looking for uranium in Niger story, and at that time, that was still the official line of the U.S. that there was an Iraq interest there.

Dionne: And Wilson turned out to be right on that the central point.

Brooks: Well, we don't want to get deep into that, but the CIA said that he did not look deeply into it enough -- the Iraq was trying to get Uranium but that's deep into the weeds it just shows how we're getting into Alice in Wonderland territory.

Before I continue, I just want to confirm that yes, Brooks really did say that Joe Wilson was going around saying that the Vice President had sent him to Iraq (it took me several listens to convince myself), but we'll generous and assume that he simply misspoke.

Now for the analysis. First, Brooks says that "we know so little" about this when in fact we know a lot. For instance, we know that Rove revealed Plame's identity to Matt Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine. The day after this NPR show, we found out that, at the very least, Rove confirmed Plame's identity to Robert Novak (however, Brooks may not have known about this at the time, so we'll gave him a pass for now). One thing we knew, then, beyond all doubt, is that Karl Rove revealed the identity of a CIA agent operating under nonofficial cover to someone not authorized to know that information. Did he do it deliberately? Did he know that she was a NOC at the time? That we don't know. Brooks is, of course, correct to say that "I still don't know if there was a crime . . . ." But what we do know is that Rove acted, at the very least, very recklessly in revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent and that his act certainly damaged national security. To me, it seems like this is plenty, but Brooks apparently is not satisfied.

It's interesting, though less germane, that immediately after talking about who difficult it would be to "pry that guy away from the other guy" (the guys are Rove and Bush) Brooks declares that he can't understand "the idea that Karl Rove is the dark genius at the center of the universe." Maybe he sees Rove as the good genius at the center of the universe.

Anyway, on to the completely false assertion that Joe Wilson went around telling people that Dick Cheney had sent him to Niger. Courtesy of TPM, we can quote the relevant material from his New York Times op-ed that began the whole thing:

"In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.

After consulting with the State Department's African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government."

Does Wilson assert that he was acting on Cheney's behalf? It doesn't seem so. According to the Daily Howler, the closest Wilson came to making such a statement was on CNN's American Morning, where he said: "Well, I went in, actually in February of 2002 was my most recent trip there—at the request, I was told, of the office of the vice president, which had seen a report in intelligence channels about this purported memorandum of agreement on uranium sales from Niger to Iraq." (emphasis from the Howler). The RNC talking points Brooks is using have a different Wilson quote, however, one taken from a different CNN program and nicely debunked by Josh Marshall. Wilson, in fact, never directly claimed that he was sent to Niger by Cheney, and Brooks is just plain wrong here. However, his constant pushing of this line does open the door for a very revealing quote, in which Brooks is paraphrasing Karl Rove: "No, it wasn't the Vice President who sent him, his wife's a CIA agent." This is so revealing because put this way, you can see that there is really very little connection between the two. Why not say simply say that Cheney didn't send him, it was an internal CIA matter? After all, Wilson was not exactly unqualified for this job: he had been acting ambassador to Iraq at the breakout of the first Iraq war and was commended for his service by President Bush the first. He had also served as a diplomat in West Africa for many years and helped direct Africa policyfor Clinton's NSC. His wife may well have recommended him, but she was not, after all, in charge of the CIA, and presumably he ended up going thanks to these qualifications rather than his wife's status. (Some conservatives, most notably Ann Coulter, have ridiculed a memo from Plame pointing out that Wilson knew the President of Niger and the Minister of Mines, because of course you would never want to send someone on a sensitive diplomatic mission who had actual contacts among people who might know the information he was supposed to obtain). Mentioning Wilson's wife was clearly unnecessary if all Rove wanted to do was warn Cooper off of a story. On the other hand, if he wanted to attack Wilson to prevent his story of no attempts to purchase uranium from Niger from being believed, the suggestion that Wilson only got his job through nepotism could come in very handy.

Next, Brooks gets asked why Judy Miller is in jail. Why, Brooks cries, that's a matter of principle! Certainly no crime is involved here! Well, that's why Miller chose to go to jail rather than talk to prosecutors. Why prosecutors want to talk to her so badly they're willing to send her to jail is another matter entirely, one almost certainly connected to some sort of crime.

Brooks then returns to his patently false claim that Wilson had said that Cheney sent him to Niger, and then makes the possibly true claim that Wilson asserted that his wife had nothing to with his being sent to Niger, finishing by asserting that Karl Rove is the one honest man in the whole story. Finally, Brooks attempts to dispute the fact that Iraq was not trying to purchase uranium from Niger before subsiding as he realizes that he really doesn't want to get into questions of weapons of mass destruction at this point. The best he can do is say that the CIA wasn't sure if Wilson did enough work to warrant his conclusion: this doesn't change the fact that it was still the correct conclusion. So, did Wilson deny that his wife had a role in his going to Niger? Possibly, but really, who cares? This is a minor point, and it's time for the big picture now. In the big picture, Brooks says that yes, Rove leaked the identity of a clandestine CIA operative working on WMD proliferation to the media, damaging national security, but that he was right to do so because otherwise the media might have believed Joe Wilson's lies (remember, this is Brooks's defense: Wilson did not lie about the main point, who sent him to Niger). What was so horrible about Joe Wilson's lies? They might have damaged the credibility of Dick Cheney and thus the administration. In Brooks's formulation, then, it's fine to hurt national security by leaking the identities of covert CIA operatives if that's what it takes to prevent people from thinking that the administration might have lied about something. And, really, this isn't very far from what actually happened, which was the damaging of national security by the leak of a covert CIA operative's identity to the media in order to prevent people from realizing that the administration was exaggerating the threat of Saddam's WMD's. In fact, Brooks has taken the accusation against Rove, mixed in a few attacks on Joe Wilson's credibility, and turned it into his defense of Rove. Which means that he has one thing exactly right: we are deep, deep, deep into "Alice-in-Wonderland territory."

Column 2005-7-14 Commentary: The Return of Brooks

2005-07-14T00:14:00.000-04:00

Today Brooks returns from his vacation anxious to persuade his regular readers that he has not lost anything during his two-week break and is still just as much of a moron as ever. He responds to those who are whispering that he may be growing soft or that the pressure of fighting of Tierney is getting to him by accomplishing the unprecedented feat of writing an entire column about who Bush should nominate to the Supreme Court without once mentioning ideology as a potential motivating factor. Brooks begins by pointing out that some say Bush should name a Hispanic or a woman. Harry Reid wants someone who's not too controversial, Arlen Specter wants a fresh face, and James Dobson wants another Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia. Except, of course, that Brooks doesn't mention Dobson, or any members of the religious right, despite the fact that they are undoubtedly exerting far more pressure on Bush than Arlen Specter, much less Harry Reid. The radical Christian right has hardly been keeping silent: mere hours after O'Connor resigned, the religious right began a preemptive trashing of Alberto Gonzales because Gonzales's views on abortion don't match the party line. In fact, abortion is likely to be one of the defining issues on which the battle over the next Supreme Court nominee is fought, and yet Brooks doesn't refer to it once in his column. The sheer, unmitigated cluelessness of not even mentioning abortion as one of the pressures that Bush is under strongly suggests that this column is intended to be a whitewash, especially as it's clear that Brooks has a particular "philosophical powerhouse" in mind, Judge Michael McConnell (and the fact that he is strongly conservative is a complete coincidence, of course). Only one other potential justice is even brought up in the column, and even she is mentioned only in passing. It's possible that Brooks believes that McConnell is the smartest and most accomplished judge in America, but it seems more likely that Brooks is trying to represent McConnell as an unideological judge whose value to Bush would lie in his philosophical abilities rather than his views on Roe v. Wade.

What philosophical abilities are those? Well, it seems that McConnell is opposed to the "Separationist" view in which church and state are to be strictly separated on the grounds that it is "not practical" and "leads inevitably to discrimination against religion." (Brooks here provides two examples of such discrimination, one of which is patently stupid). Instead, McConnell proposes a "Neutralist" view in which the government is, well, neutral about religion. Apparently this is some sort of philosophical breakthrough which has had vast influence: "in the past decade, courts have returned to the Neutralist posture McConnell champions." Or so says Brooks. No evidence is offered to suggest that the courts are actually making Neutralist rulings, or that, if they are, it is because of McConnell. To me, Neutralism sounds like an attempt to water down separation of church and state by essentially saying that if the government doesn't endorse religious speech, it's discriminating against it (or even a morally relativistic, politically correct way to excuse homophobia and similar viewpoints on the grounds that they're Christian viewpoints), but I'm hardly a legal scholar (and god only knows how Brooks has mangled, or, more likely, oversimplified McConnell's positions) so we'll assume that Neutralism is a perfectly legitimate theory. It does seem that McConnell opposes prayer in schools, so he's not a theocrat. But only barely. While giving an outline of McConnell's philosophical position, Brooks sadly neglects McConnell's record, so let's take a look at it, courtesy of the invaluable People for the American Way.

To start with, McConnell has criticized a number of Supreme Court decisions, such as the decision to strip Bob Jones U. of its tax-exempt status because BJU had banned interracial dating. According to McConnell, this is an "egregious" case of the court failing to defend religious freedom "from the heavy hand of government". McConnell is, of course, strongly opposed to Roe v. Wade, which he has compared to the Dred Scott decision (a good sign of a dyed-in-the-wool wingnut), and he has proposed that the Constitution's equal protection clause should apply to fetuses. McConnell also believes that one person, one vote is “wrong in principle and mischievous in its consequences.” (this in reference to key civil rights cases Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims). Not only does McConnell believe that racial discrimination is a-okay if it's religious, he thinks that nonprofit religious foundations should not be required to abide by federal labor standards (because apparently the minimum wage is deeply unchristian) and that there's nothing wrong with polygamy for Mormons. It's beginning to look like this "Neutralism" may actually require that the government not interfere with anything anybody wants to do as long as they claim that their religion requires it, which is an interesting way to interpret the separation of church and state. Need more evidence? McConnell has written that companies should be allowed to discriminate against homosexuals based on religious (or even non-religious) objections. And finally, McConnell has written an article in which he praised a judge for his "courage in defense of conscience" in essentially flouting the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances law, which rather damages the credibility of his protestations about how Roe v. Wade is settled law that he would never interfere with.

In short, McConnell is clearly a highly ideological judge who is very strongly opposed to abortion and believes in not just neutrality but special treatment for religion, as well as rather backwards views on civil rights. McConnell defended Robert Bork at Bork's nomination hearing, and McConnell doesn't appear to be that different from Bork. Brooks's attempt to present McConnell as a legal lion who cares only for judicial philosophy is laughable at best, although it strongly suggests that McConnell may be the next Supreme Court nominee. But Brooks does manage to reclaim his title of most moronic writer for the Times editorial page with ease, and that's something, isn't it?

Our amazing run of luck continues

2005-07-08T15:00:00.000-04:00

David Brooks is still on vacation! While he's gone, a couple of Brooksian tidbits:

First, from an article on whether or not conservative thinkers believe in evolution (a stupid question, really, as one can't really "believe" in a scientific theory):

"David Brooks, The New York Times (via email)

Whether he personally believes in evolution: "I believe in the theory of evolution."

What he thinks of intelligent design: "I've never really studied the issue or learned much about ID, so I'm afraid I couldn't add anything intelligent to the discussion.""

Well, at least he's willing to admit it for one topic.

Also, we learn from Liquid List that Brooks is approximately five feet tall. Not that this is really relevant to anything, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Finally, Brooks's absence has, surprisingly, failed to improve the tone of the NYT editorial page. Thomas Friedman's neo-liberal bullshit is now completely unreadable, John Tierney is really stepping up his efforts to displace Brooks (and I don't mean that in a good way), Kristof is succumbing to sensible-liberal syndrome, Dowd's replacements continue to range from ludicrously vapid to vomit-inducingly bad, Bob Herbert's latest column on the need for more fathers in the black community was below his usual standard and even Krugman's latest series on obesity fails to grip me. Not that this means that I want Brooks back, of course. Remember, things can always be worse.

Glory Hallelujah!

2005-07-02T00:34:00.000-04:00

Brooks is on vacation! I was going to say something snarky about how he already had an all-expenses-paid trip to Africa for which he had to write a mere two columns and why did he need another vacation now, but then I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Column 2005-6-26 Commentary

2005-06-26T21:30:00.000-04:00

Today's column represents a return to Brooks's usual shtick of writing about the differences between liberals and conservatives. In order to remove all traces of originality, Brooks chooses as his theme the decidedly shopworn idea that liberals are pie-in-the-sky idealists while conservatives are hard-headed and serious men who understand that life is stern and earnest. Inspired either by his recent trip to Africa or Jeffrey Sachs's Saturday op-ed in the Times, Brooks chooses to contrast liberal and conservative approaches to the problem of poverty in Africa, with Sachs representing the unworkable ideas of liberals and Bush the solid plans of conservatives. What's even more fascinating and revealing, though, is Brooks's full-on attack on the Enlightenment. Sachs, we are told, is "a child of the French Enlightenment." Note: the "French" Enlightenment. This and other not-so-subtle hints that Sachs is French (later on, we find that "Sachs comes across as a philosophe for our times") are a good sign that reasoned, rational discourse is not to be expected (but after all, reasoned, rational discourse is a product of the Enlightenment). The Enlightenment itself is dismissed as a time "when leading thinkers had an amazing confidence in their ability to refashion reality so that it would conform to reason." Sachs is apparently an "unreconstructed" Enlightenment thinker, a term with echoes of unreconstructed Marxism. While such attacks are only to be expected from the crazy Christian right, Brooks fancies himself a thinker, and to see him disparaging the Enlightenment in such a fashion is truly frightening, especially when one recalls that the ideas of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, even the French ones -- Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, to name three you may have heard of -- are central to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If even the supposedly thoughtful part of the Republican establishment is willing to turn on the Enlightenment (and perhaps soon its principles, such as individual rights, limited government authority, freedom of speech, and separation of church and state), the situation is even worse than it seems right now.

The rest of Brooks's column relies on misrepresenting Sachs and Bush, as can be easily seen by looking at Sachs's op-ed. " The Bush administration has nearly doubled foreign aid," Brooks says to counter Sachs's claim that the administration has abandoned Africa, but of course that represents total foreign aid. According to Sachs's piece, Bush's increase in aid to Africa consists only of a small amount of additional emergency food aid. Additionally, Sachs points out that Bush plans to offset the costs of forgiving America's portion of $1.5 billion a year of African debt by cutting other aid. Clearly, Bush is not planning to increase African aid very significantly, and as Sachs makes clear, most of what is spent goes to emergency food aid and paying for the salaries of American workers rather than actual structural investments. Using Sachs's numbers of $3 billion a year in aid and $2 per American spent on things like fighting malaria, we find that about 80% of American aid goes to emergency food aid and salaries. Both are important, of course, but they are not likely to solve Africa's problems, merely ameliorate the worst of them. Brooks hails Bush's Millenium Challenge Accounts and suggests that Sachs doesn't think much of them (they are "not dismissed by Sachs, but not heralded either.") To Brooks, the MCA's represent the conservative way of doing things, in which we learn from past mistakes, while Sachs, he sneers, merely wants to repeat the 1960's. Brooks does acknowledge that the MCA's have "been horribly executed", speaking specifically of a meeting in Mozambique where locals were frustrated by their inability to figure out what the Americans wanted in return for their aid and had thus received nothing over the past two years. What he doesn't mention, though Sachs does, is that the MCA program has disbursed almost nothing of the $10 billion it was supposed to give out over the past five years. And rather than ignoring the MCA's, the third part of Sachs's four-part program for Africa calls for them to be fixed and move toward actually giving out money.

As for the rest of Sachs's proposals, Brooks refers contempuously to "Sachsian grand ideas" and suggests that Sachs simply plans to funnel money into Africa and sit back and wait for poverty to end. In fact, Sachs says that "[f]oreign aid should be targeted to specific, measurable, achievable and bold goals." And "[t]he United States should help countries that are prepared to help themselves." He sets out four specific areas of investment in his op-ed: "growing more food, fighting disease, ensuring that children are in school and building critical infrastructure (including roads, energy services, water and sanitation)." His second point calls for quantitative goals to be set so that accountability can be enforced, and his piece is filled with specific goals to be met, such as the distribution of malaria nets, which Brooks mocks by saying "You can give people mosquito nets to prevent malaria, but they might use them instead to catch fish." Indeed they might, but not if you carefully explain to them what the nets are for and simultaneously, as Sachs proposes, help them to grow more food. And even if some do, does that mean that it's not worthwhile to give them out and save those who don't from dying from a completely preventable disease? In fact, for all of Brooks's talk of how Sachs is trying to "rescue [African societies] from above with technocratic planning" while ignoring individual Africans, it is clear from Sachs's op-ed that his plans largely work at the individual and community level and rely on giving people the opportunity to improve their own lives by distributing mosquito nets, helping them with farming techniques, or sending their children to school. Indeed, the program that Sachs describes as "[t]he only bright spot in America's policy on Africa", Bush's emergency anti-AIDS program, works in exactly this way, by distributing anti-retroviral medicines to Africans. Instead, it is Brooks, with his talk of "institutions, governance, conflict and traditions" who seems to be ignoring the people and concentrating on abstractions.

Of course, this assumes that the Bush administration has been acting in good faith and that Bush is going about the business of solving poverty in Africa as best he can according to his lights. While it is possible that such is the case, there is certainly room for plenty of skepticism. Consider the Millenium Challenge Accounts, the centerpiece of Bush's plan to help Africa. Sachs points out that "[t]he head of President Bush's Millennium Challenge Corporation [which administers the MCA's] recently resigned after failing to get the program moving." We noted earlier that the program has disbursed a tiny fraction of what it was supposed to, and that even Brooks admits that the execution was horrible and "[t]he locals had been given only the vaguest notions of what sort of projects the U.S. is willing to finance." At the very least, this makes it clear that the MCA's are not a high Bush administration priority. In fact, it's not impossible that, under the guise of encouraging good governance, the administration is hiding its poverty-fighting money behind layers of inept bureacracy and vague instructions. Sachs's charge that the administration has failed the world's poor seems a lot more credible when one considers how little it cares about its signature poverty-fighting program. Combine this with Bush's reluctance to increase aid and his plan to compensate for debt relief (the amount of which is, according to Sachs, only 6% of what is needed) by cutting aid in other areas, it certainly appears that fighting poverty to Africa is not something that is really important to the administration. Perhaps the difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals want to end poverty and conservatives just don't much care.

N.B.: Just as egregious is Brooks's flippant introduction: " Karl Rove has his theories about what separates liberals from conservatives and I have mine." Rove's "theory" is that liberals don't really want to fight terrorism: instead, they are all traitors who want to kill American troops. While it is too much to expect Republican party lapdog Brooks to repudiate this slur, he could at least have the common decency not to mention it.

Column 2005-6-23 Commentary

2005-06-23T21:10:00.000-04:00

In today's column, Brooks says that we should not dismiss the Iraq war too soon: we must be sure we have sufficient information to determine whether or not the war is winnable before we pass judgement. On one level, he is, of course, correct, but on a deeper level this is a profoundly pointless statement. To some people, the complete lack of progress over the past two years strongly suggests that this war is a lost cause. To Brooks, "we don't have the evidence upon which to pass judgment on the overall trajectory of this war . . . ." Who's right? Well, it depends on how much evidence is enough. If we don't have enough evidence until the country has descended into a four-way civil war, with Kurds fighting Sunni Arabs fighting Shiite Arabs fighting Americans, then we might be in Iraq for quite a while (or, perhaps, just a few months). Alternatively, if the situation stays much the same for the next year or two or five or ten, with a Sunni Arab insurgency fighting American and to a lesser extent Iraqi troops, a government with no legitimacy among the Sunni Arabs negotiating with Sunni Arab political leaders to try to get them involved, and a steady trickle of American casualties, then in ten years Brooks and his ilk could concievably still be arguing that a breakthrough could be right around the corner and it's too soon to say whether we can win. If no standard is set, no line is drawn to say that if things get this bad, we're leaving, then it is always possible to argue that we don't yet know if we can win, right up to the point where we lose.

These philosophical considerations aside, I'd like to give you some quotes. From May 18, 2004: "No other nation would be adaptable enough to recover from its own innocence and muddle its way to success, as I suspect we are about to do." From April 27, 2004: "These are the crucial months in Iraq. The events in Najaf and Falluja will largely determine whether Iraq will move toward normalcy or slide into chaos." From July 3, 2004: "This administration can adapt, and stick to a winning strategy once it finds it. . . . that makes the long-term prospects for success brighter than they appeared a few months ago." (from a column entitled "Bush's Winning Strategy"). Any guesses as to who is being quoted? Unsurprisingly, back when victory appeared more likely, as Sadr was defeated and the transfer of sovereignty was presented as the solution to our problems, Brooks was making sunny predictions. Furthermore, an overview of Brooks's columns from before then makes it clear that he thought that the insurgency would not last long (one column from September 2003 states that "the violence may not abate in Iraq until early next year"). As long as things were going his way and popular opinion was still behind the war, Brooks was more than happy to pass judgement without worrying if it was premature. But now that things are going badly, there are few prospects for improvement, and polls show that the public has turned against the war, Brooks piously urges us not rush to judgement.

Of course, Brooks is not the only conservative who has been guilty of making unsubstantiated claims about the progress of the war. Only this week Dick Cheney asserted that the insurgency was in its "last throes". Shortly afterward, General John Abizaid, the top American commander for the Middle East, completely contradicted Cheney by saying that the insurgency had not diminished over the past six months. Undaunted, Cheney went back to CNN and repeated his claim. Perhaps Brooks's column should be aimed at Cheney rather than those who are turning against the war. And this leads directly to one of the reasons that polls show "rising disenchantment with the war": the constant drumbeat of administration propaganda to the effect that the insurgents are "desperate", that we're about to win, that the transfer of sovereignty/the elections/the capture of Fallujah/the capture of Najaf is the key turning point and things will only improve from here on out led people to constantly expect victory. And things were just as bad prior to the war. Richard Perle said "A year from now I'd be surprised if there's not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush." Rumsfeld said the war "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." Cheney asserted "I think it will go relatively quickly... (in) weeks rather than months.” Before the war, the public was told that it would be fast and easy. Once we were well into it, the public was constantly told that we were on the verge of winning. The administration conditioned the American people to evaluate the war on a short timescale, and that is exactly what is happening.

Of course, had the public been told that the war would likely involve an American presence in Iraq for ten years at least, it would have been much less likely to support the war. Which brings us to the reason for the drop in the war's support that Brooks doesn't mention: the stated reasons for the war have been exposed as frauds. No weapons of mass destruction were found. No ties to Al Qaeda were unearthed. And the Downing Street Memo has made it very clear that Bush lied about the magnitude of the threat Iraq posed and his willingness to deal with Iraq diplomatically. As people start to realize that this was a war that didn't have to be fought, they are much less likely to support it. Which brings us to the most unforgiveable sin of this column, Brooks's use of Franklin Roosevelt's words to urge the public to stay behind Bush. Brooks quotes Roosevelt as saying "Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart. You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us." This is great, except that in World War II we were fighting enemies who were a direct threat and who attacked us first, rather than diverting our attention from the real threat to go to war against an old enemy who was reinflated into a deeply dangerous monster for reasons which are still unclear. Furthermore, this quote reflects a bargain that has two sides: not only must the public trust in the government in a time of war, the government must deserve this trust. When the entrance to war is surrounded by a nimbus of lies, it's hard for the public to retain the kind of trust in government that Brooks wants. And that's really the fundamental problem here: the public is realizing that people are dead because Bush lied, and they really aren't very happy about that. Brooks can talk about the need to stay the course and how Washington had no polls in Valley Forge all he wants, but that won't change the basic facts. Plus, Washington was there with the troops at Valley Forge. Bush's Top Gun stunt doesn't quite compare.

Column 2005-6-19 Commentary

2005-06-19T14:46:00.000-04:00

In today's column, Brooks sadly concludes that since entering the Senate, Bill Frist has lost his way. "These days he seems not so much the leader of the Senate conservatives, but someone who is playing the role" says Brooks. Frist "is behaving in ways that don't seem entirely authentic," as we can see from the Schiavo case, where Frist "did betray his medical training . . . to please a key constituency group." So far, Brooks tells us nothing we didn't already know: Frist has taken up the mantle of champion of the radical Christian right in order to bolster his chances at the presidency in 2008. It is nice to see this fact finally penetrating Brooks's thick skull, although it is also possible that the administrations has decided that Frist is a liability who must be discarded and the word has gone out to their mouthpieces (and Brooks is nothing if not an administration mouthpiece). However, it's most likely that Brooks's claim that Frist's behavior over the past few months "wasn't a case of cynical opportunism," followed by a description of Frist as apolitical and not particularly ideological until his arrival in the Senate and his rise to majority leader which makes it pretty clear that Frist is, in fact, a cynical opportunist, is simply a typical example of Brooks being a moron.

Column 2005-6-16 Commentary

2005-06-16T22:36:00.000-04:00

Having figured out how to solve the problem of AIDS in Africa, Brooks apparently considers his job there done, and today he abandons his excellent African adventure to return to doing what he does best: bashing liberal elites for everything he can possibly think of that's wrong with America. Today's episode features liberal elites being blamed for the decline of middle-class culture in America. How do we know that middle-class culture in America has declined? Well, back in the fifties and early sixties, Time and Newsweek used to do big pieces on topics like Abstract Expressionism, Hemingway, or "theologians like Abraham Joshua Heschel or Reinhold Niebuhr." Now, Time does cover stories on Jesus. Clearly, middle-class culture has declined, right? Well, if one assumes that all of middle-class culture is found in Time and Newsweek, then yes. Otherwise, you might have to consider the possibility that middle-class culture simply migrated somewhere else. Where did it go? Personally, I have no idea, but then again, I'm not being paid sizable sums to write about my cultural studies on the editorial page of the New York Times.

There is a similar phenomenon at work when Brooks places the death of middle-class culture in the mid-sixties (and I'm being generous here: try to reconcile "Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, middlebrow culture, which is really high-toned popular culture, was thriving in America" with " Middlebrow culture was killed in the late 50's and 60's"). How does Brooks come to this conclusion? Well, middle-brow culture existed prior to the mid-sixties. It doesn't exist today. Therefore, it was killed in the mid-sixties. And that's the whole argument. No studies are cited. No attempt is made to show that the cultural content of Time and Newsweek started to change in the mid-sixties. Brooks seems to have trouble telling the difference between saying something and proving that what you just said is correct.

Of course, this kind of confusion is only to be expected in a column where Brooks can't even stick with a consistent definition of his topic. What is "middlebrow culture"? Well, it's "really high-toned popular culture". But Time and Newsweek were writing articles "pitched at middle-class people . . . who aspired to have the same sorts of conversations as the New York and Boston elite." That sounds more like these people wanted to move away from popular culture and towards the elite culture of the East Coast. Doesn't Brooks even have an editor who could gently suggest that his column is completely self-contradictory?

Naturally, Brooks blames this problem on liberal elites. On the one hand, he quotes Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald attacking middlebrow culture, suggesting that intellectuals did their best to destroy it. There are two points to be made here: first of all, two people do not a movement make, and secondly, who are these guys anyway? On the other hand, Brooks also blames vague changes in pop culture: "It was no longer character-oriented; it was personality-oriented," whatever that means. Well, what it really means, of course, is that those bad liberals who created sixties pop culture destroyed the middlebrow culture with their selfishness. What's really amazing, though, is that Brooks absolves the media of all responsibility, asserting "it's not that the magazines themselves are dumber or more commercial (they were always commercial)." Really? The media has no responsibility for the content it puts out? Actually, to a certain extent this is true: the media -- and, in fact, all (or almost all) producers of cultural material -- is simply trying to make money by following the rules of the free market, something which you'd think that conservatives would appreciate. And this leads us to what is probably the real reason for the decline of middlebrow culture: the rise of television. The kind of middlebrow culture Brooks describes -- reading great books, going to see great art, discussing opera -- is in many ways incompatible with television. As television took over national culture, and began reaching towards the lowest common denominator (because people are more likely to watch something stupid than something that they can't understand), the death of Brooks's middlebrow culture was probably inevitable. Brooks would never so much as mention that this might be one of the reasons for the end of middlebrow culture because this is a story of market forces at work rather than liberal elites oppressing the common people, but that's hardly unexpected (here's another potential theory that Brooks would rather die than discuss: the decline of the middle class and the rise of income inequality in America over the last 30-plus years of conservative rule bears some responsibility for the death of middlebrow culture).

What's really strange about this column, though, is the fact that it was written by a man who routinely sneers at intellectuals and high culture in his columns. He has, in the past, derided the "university-town wing" of the Democratic party while extolling "Patio Man", who has left the inner-ring suburbs for the exurbs partly because he is uncomfortable with the cosmopolitan nature of the former (e.g., theaters that have the temerity to show foreign films). He praises red states where people (who are implicitly regarded as Real Americans) prefer hunting and NASCAR to book-learnin', don't think Woody Allen is funny, and eat meatloaf instead of "sun-dried-tomato concotions" (even if these characterizations aren't entirely correct). His various pseudo-analyses of the divides between Democratic and Republican voters inevitably leave intellectuals on the Democratic, and therefore wrong, side, and often take many of the defining traits of the Democratic voter base from its academic component. He is fond of attacking the lack of "intellectual diversity" in academia. And yet he writes that "artists and intellectuals have less authority [now]" as if he thinks this state of affairs is regrettable. If artists and intellectuals had any authority in society, not only would George Bush not be president, David Brooks wouldn't have a spot on the NYT editorial page, as it would have been given to someone who could actually think instead. Brooks knows this, and is an expert at promoting backlash anti-intellectualism among the ordinary people whose lack of respect for the culture he encourages them to denounce helps further the interests of the Republican party. And now he is complaining that these same people aren't interested in high culture? If irony wasn't already dead, Brooks just killed it.

On the other hand, the whole column could just be a not-very-subtle hint to Time and Newsweek that they need to raise the tone of their coverage, perhaps by publishing a piece by David Brooks, the foremost public intellectual of our time. After all, there has to be some reason for all those references to Time and Newsweek.

Column 2005-6-12 Commentary

2005-06-12T21:46:00.000-04:00

In today's column, Brooks reveals the true breadth of his genius: after a mere handful of days in Africa, he has already completely analyzed the problem of AIDS in Africa and discovered the only possible solution. Applying the full power of his mighty brain, Brooks rapidly identifies the logical flaws in all previous attempts to deal with this issue and then conclusively proves that the answer is to Christianize those heathen Africans. Technical expertise, with its fancy drugs and medical science, is all very well, but the real way to beat this disease is with missionaries. Small-minded men, envious of Brooks's capabilities, will undoubtedly be skeptical of his ability to prescribe an instant solution to a vast and complicated problem which he has been studying for less than a week, but they are merely embittered by the fact that they will never rise to the heights that Brooks scales with ease. These same men, hopelessly jealous of Brooks's intellect, will then resort to the last refuge of the petty-minded: facts. They will compare AIDS prevalence rates in 34 countries of sub-Saharan Africa with the percentage of the inhabitants of those countries that are Christians, using the profoundly secularist and un-American CIA World Factbook. They will point out that of the 11 nations with the highest AIDS prevalence rates, all but three are majority Christian, and two of those that are not are 10th and 11th on the list (if you decide that religions which are described as combining elements of indigenous beliefs with Christianity are not Christian, then five countries are not majority Christian). They will also note that of the five nations with the lowest AIDS prevalence rates, not one is majority Christian. They will wonder why, if Mozambique and Benin have the same distribution of religions -- half of the people follow indigenous beliefs, 30% are Christian, and 20% Muslim -- Mozambique's prevalence rate is six times that of Benin. And then they will smile smugly and sit back, certain that they have proved that there is very little connection between religion and AIDS in Africa. Naturally, Brooks will instantly discover the two gaping holes in their argument and dismiss it as the piece of illogical claptrap it is. Firstly, of course, countries with high AIDS prevalence rates are clearly not Christian countries, and so anyone from those countries who claims to be practicing Christianity is actually engaged in some heathen religion and needs to be converted to the real Christianity as practiced in God's chosen country. Perhaps Halliburton can be given a no-bid contract to bring the American God to the heathen. And secondly, of course, anyone who would advance such an argument clearly hates America. Or, maybe, Africa. This point may actually require more thought: AIDS in Africa may be trivial, but puzzling out the twisted motives of America- (or possibly Africa-) hating leftists is a problem that could perplex even the most powerful of brains.

Well, enough sarcasm. To be fair to Brooks, he doesn't explicitly call for a wave of missionaries, but the code words -- "evil", "sanctity of life", "faiths", "faithful", "abstinent", "creed" -- are there, along with a reference to the Book of Job. Furthermore, Brooks writes "The most subtle analysis of human nature I heard came in that church made of sticks" in reference to this exceedingly subtle analysis: "They say, "It is easier for those who have been touched by God to accept when a woman says no." They talk about praying for the man who beats his H.I.V.-positive wife, and trying to bring him into the congregation. They have polygamists in their church but say God loves monogamy best." It's extremely subtle, but reading between the lines it seems to me that these people think that God (and since it's a church, the Christian God) is the best bulwark against AIDS. Of course, the first thing these people talked about was condoms and safe sex, and it took them a while to "slip out of the language of safety . . . ." In fact, it seems not unlikely that Brooks is inflating the importance of their religious "analysis of human nature" to support his pro-Christianizing thesis. Recall now that Brooks is, in fact, Jewish. Well, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt: he may be a member of Jews for Jesus.

But the most ridiculous part of the column comes as Brooks argues that condoms and economic development are insufficient to defeat AIDS. First, he says that "Surveys [what surveys, he doesn't say] . . . show that a vast majority know where they can get condoms." But clearly they aren't using them, and therefore condoms just aren't good enough. Apparently, the condoms themselves are responsible for encouraging people to use them. The idea of working harder to convince people that they need to use condoms far more often just doesn't occur to Brooks. But this is not even as ludicrous as his argument that economic development won't help fight AIDS, which runs as follows:

"We have tried economic development, but that too is necessary but insufficient. The most aggressive spreaders of the disease are relatively well off. They are miners who have sex with prostitutes and bring the disease home to their wives. They are teachers who trade grades for sex. They are sugar daddies who have sex with 14-year-old girls in exchange for cellphone time."

So the fact that the not-quite-as-desperately-poor of Africa are exploiting the desperately poor for sex means that further economic development won't be good enough to curb the spread of the disease. Sure, maybe it would allow those 14-year-old girls to have cell phones of their own, and maybe those prostitutes could get actual jobs that paid as well or better as the sex trade did (or even any jobs at all: unemployment in Mozambique, where Brooks writes this column from, is 21%, according to the CIA World Factbook), but that wouldn't have an impact. And Brooks's examples are probably not the main vectors for HIV transmission. According to that pesky CIA World Factbook, Mozambique has (or had in 2003) 428,900 cell phones for a population of 19,000,000 (and only 83,700 non-cell phones). Maybe 14-year-old girls are trading sex for cell phone time, but who are they calling? And claims about teachers trading grades for sex also seem a little exaggerated in a country where only about one-third of women are literate (CIA WF again) and only 9% of females enroll in secondary school. In fact, this paper suggests that sugar daddies are not nearly as prevalent as Brooks seems to think, and that furthermore "these findings suggest that men who are sugar daddies are not more risky than other men with nonmarital sexual partnerships." Even more significantly, this study finds that "The odds of condom use increased by 20% with each additional year of education" and that "Other studies have found a similar association, and educated populations in Africa appear to have modified their sexual behavior in response to condom promotion and other prevention campaigns related to HIV/AIDS." Maybe massive Christianization isn't necessary after all. And finally, "Male partner's income was not associated with condom use . . . ." It's only natural that Brooks would want to blame the problem on elites (and they're probably liberal elites, too), but it would behoove him to check on some facts first.

Finally, I'd like to cite a study conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina. They compared an area of rural Zimbabwe with an AIDS prevalence rate of 15.4% with an area of rural Tanzania with an AIDS prevalence rate of 5.3%. They found that "Marriage is later, spatial mobility more common, cohabitation with marital partners less frequent, education levels are higher, and male circumcision is less common in Manicaland [in Zimbabwe]." And "Respondents in Kisesa [in Tanzania] started sex earlier and reported more sexual partners." Their conclusion: "Substantial differences exist between the contemporary sociodemographic profiles of rural Manicaland and Kisesa. However, these differences did not translate into measurable differences in the biologic or behavioral factors for which data were available and did not explain the much higher HIV prevalence found in Manicaland." Translation: Brooks is, always and forever, full of shit.

6-11-05: Special Stacy Schiff edition

2005-06-11T01:32:00.000-04:00

Maureen Dowd is on book leave, and she can't come back too soon (I never thought I'd say that). Her first replacement, Matt Miller, had good intentions but was determined to be bipartisan if it killed him and had an unfortunate tendency to evaluate Republicans by their words rather than their deeds which, e.g., led him to assert that Republicans really do want to help the poor. Apparently massive tax cuts for the rich accompanied by deep reductions in programs that actually do help the poor (not to mention bankruptcy "reform", tort "reform", etc., etc.) are just some form of tough love. This meant that his columns often read something like "Yes, the Republicans are destroying the country, but they don't really mean it, and if the Democrats would stop being such obstructionists, we could craft a nice bipartisan compromise that would solve the problem and make everybody happy." However, compared to his successor, Stacy Schiff, Miller is a genius. Schiff combines the worst characteristics of Dowd and Brooks, mixing the former's constant flippancy with the latter's bullshit sociology based largely on anecdote. Yet Schiff might be able to overcome this were it not for the fact that she lacks Dowd's writing ability and, amazing as it sounds, Brooks's sociological acumen. Yes, she's so bad she almost makes Brooks good (but only almost, of course: such a thing is impossible). And today's column is especially egregious since it's put up against a reasonable column from Tierney. When you can't even match Tierney, you know you're in trouble.

Today's Schiff column is about the problems people have when presented with fifteen kinds of dental floss. Apparently this is a real problem, known as "analysis paralysis at the point of sale." You could have fooled me. Why Schiff feels the need to write about this is entirely unclear, but rather than attempting to plumb those murky depths, let us move on to the substance of the column. Schiff begins with an anecdote: "E. B. White claimed he knew his wife was the girl for him when she referred to dental floss as 'tooth twine.'" Now, I never knew E.B. White or his wife and I've never heard this anecdote before, so it's possible that there is some missing context, but it seems to me that this little story suggests that White was captivated by his wife's unusual word choice, an interpretation which is strongly supported by the fact that White was a writer. In other words, this story has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the column (other than that it involves dental floss, which Schiff appears to be strangely obsessed with). And Schiff has the temerity to write "I take his point" when she clearly does nothing of the sort. But she is unfazed by the complete failure of her opening anecdote to connect to her main point and presses ahead to complain about the difficulties she experiences buying dental floss. She describes the process as "an exercise in frustration, or affluence-induced A.D.D., or option overload." I guess she must go to a much fancier drug store than I do. The CVS on the corner has three kinds of floss: unwaxed, waxed, and waxed with mint. You can also get varying amounts, and there are a couple of different brands (I always get the CVS brand, because it's the cheapest). As far as I can tell, floss is just not a very good example for her argument: it is, after all, simply a long piece of thread, and there are only so many ways to pretty it up. Toothpaste (which she does also mention), soap, or shampoo would be far superior examples. And since the only reason she starts with floss is because of the E.B. White anecdote which she obviously doesn't understand (or, even worse, in order to drag in the anecdote because of the floss connection), the beginning of the piece is calculated to make you want to tear your hair it.

The rest of the column isn't much better. Schiff asserts "We used to be one nation, undivided, under three networks, three car companies and two brands of toothpaste for all." This period lasted about 10 years. Unless Volkswagens, which I believe were reasonably popular in the sixties, were actually manufactured by G.M. and the whole German thing was just to make them appear exotic. And, of course, even if there were only three networks, there were a large number of radio stations (even larger, probably, than today when everything -- and I do mean everything -- is the same Clear Channel station). Not to mention newspapers and magazines. I have no idea what the toothpaste situation was like in the fifties and sixties, and frankly, I don't much care. Schiff then asserts that "This is a country in which 40 percent of the eligible population doesn't vote, but can be expected to maneuver its way through a sprawl of options every time it heads out for tooth twine." Because, you know, buying dental floss is approximately as momentous a decision as voting for president. Moving right along, Schiff describes the process of choosing between several product varieties as being "like a torture session with a demonic optometrist." Excuse me? What does this mean? Is she suggesting that having to read all these labels is causing an epidemic of eye strain? Does she just not like optometrists? Does she have personal experience with being tortured by a demonic optometrist to draw on? Does she have any clue what anything that she's writing actually means? (For those of you scoring at home, the answers were you're excused, nothing, i hope not, who knows, no comment, and no).

Further on, Schiff briefly mentions that there are actually good reasons for the presence of different varieties of toothpast-- "an aging population and the advent of the electric toothbrush" -- but doesn't let this stop her from engaging in further flights of fancy. "Both our refrigerators and our expectations are outsized" she opines. Apparently, she keeps her toothpaste in the fridge. And expects that she should have to choose between fifty different options. Or something. But she immediately tops this by declaring, "This is manifest destiny meets 'American Idol.'" I'm speechless. She follows with "The only thing that has not expanded proportionately is my brain capacity." No kidding.

Luckily, there's not much more of the column to wade through (or rather, to run through as fast as possible, as I can't take much more of this). "Hasn't Procter & Gamble heard about the dumbing down of America?" Schiff cries plaintively. Well, if they hadn't before, they've certainly figured it out by reading this column. One might even surmise that they're counting on it to keep people buying more expensive and fancier-looking brand name products rather than less expensive ones which are fundamentally the same. Much of the rest of the column is given over the pronouncements of some marketing guy from Harvard Business School and Paco Underhill, who probably isn't Bilbo Baggins's long-lost cousin, but should be (apparently, he studies shopping and has something called a "confusion index"). And Schiff finishes by proving conclusively that she does not understand the story she began her column with and referenced regularly throughout it, wince-inducingly writing "The market won't rest until it has located that last stalwart who isn't budging until he hears about cough-suppressing, posture-correcting, wrinkle-reducing, memory-enhancing, antioxidant dental floss. On the other hand, when he meets someone who shares that passion, he can be certain he has found precisely the girl for him." Thus ends one of the worst pieces of meaningless drivel I have read in a long time. And yet the most depressing part of the piece was not even written by Schiff. Instead, it comes below the column, and reads as follows: "Stacy Schiff, the author of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America" and a Pulitzer Prize winner . . . ." This woman won a Pulitzer? Well, let us hope that she won it by writing well, and that she has simply decided to throw away her chance to have columns appear on the Times editorial page -- the opportunity of a lifetime -- because, well, I don't know why she would do such a thing. However, the evidence at hand suggests that if anyone is stupid enough to do it, she is.

Column 2005-6-9 Commentary

2005-06-09T19:49:00.000-04:00

I have to admit that my first reaction upon reading today's Brooks column, in which Brooks goes to Namibia to see how AIDS treatment is going there, was to wonder what would happen when Kristof read it. Would he be flattered by this imitation? Would he go out and beat Brooks up? Would he sue Brooks for violation of copyright? It's easy to understand Brooks's motivations here: as John Tierney threatens to take over the niche of "moronic conservative columnist who occasionally tries to be funny", Brooks feels the need to expand into someone else's territory, and there really aren't that many options. He can't be Maureen Dowd for obvious reasons. Bob Herbert is too liberal. Being Paul Krugman would require actual intelligence. Frank Rich hates the Christian Right too much. That leaves only Kristof and Friedman, and presumably Brooks chose Kristof as being less likely to defend his territory, so off he goes to Africa. To be fair to Brooks, he's not copying everything that Kristof does: he's a lot more optimistic than Kristof is, though that may have something to do with the fact that he's not going anywhere nearly as dangerous as the places Kristof goes.

As for the column itself, it seemed pretty unobjectionable: Brooks does say "I came here aware of controversies about abstinence versus condoms in AIDS prevention programs, about U.S. aid versus multilateral aid, and now realize that all that nonsense is irrelevant on the ground" which sounded a little iffy, but on the other hand he asserts that "we should be redoubling our efforts," so things seem to balance out. Also, to my discredit, I don't know much about AIDS in Africa. Luckily, Jeanne d'Arc at Body and Soul does, and she can explain the problems with this column and why David Brooks is still a moron much better than I can. Having read her, I can also say that the second-to-last sentence of the column, which I skimmed over the first time I read it, stands out a lot more now. Brooks writes "Many are backed by money from the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, finally doing the work they've always dreamed of doing." Could he be going to Africa in an attempt to re-establish Bush's compassionate conservative credentials? Perhaps he's even trying to counteract Kristof's columns from Darfur, with their heartrending descriptions of atrocities and calls for Bush to take action, with his own upbeat series about how Bush is curing AIDS in Africa by sheer force of will. Or maybe he just wanted a paid foreign vacation. We insinuate and strongly suggest, you decide (hey, at least we're honest about it).

Column 2005-6-5 Commentary

2005-06-05T21:57:00.000-04:00

In today's column, Brooks asserts that "Watergate has become a modern Horatio Alger story . . . ." Apparently, Watergate is no longer about abuse of power or cover-ups: it's now the inspiring tale of a young man going from rags -- or, in Woodward's case, what Brooks apparently thinks is the modern-day equivalent, a Yale education -- to fame and fortune. Well, not really. I'm in a good mood today, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he's not being serious. If it wasn't for the recent epidemic of right-wing revisionism about Nixon and Watergate, I wouldn't have thought about it, but the attempts of people like Ben Stein, Peggy Noonan, and Pat Buchanan to elevate Nixon to a spot next to Reagan in the Republican pantheon are depressing enough to make anyone paranoid (once these worthies remember that Nixon set up the EPA, though, they'll drop him like a hot potato). The whole thing is part of Brooks's yearly column about the trials and tribulations of young people who have recently graduated from college and are realizing that the real world is very different. It's all harmless enough, I suppose. I do feel that Brooks could air his nostalgia for his lost youth somewhere besides the New York Times editorial page, but on the other hand, if he wasn't sighing for those golden days when he, like Woodward, was a struggling young reporter, he would be writing some godawful bullshit, so there's always a silver lining. This column also gets bonus stupidity points for airing Brooks's Yale envy, which is really getting sad. It's not like the man went to Podunk U. or anything: he did graduate from the University of Chicago. Of course, if he had gone to Podunk U., he'd probably spend all the time he now spends sucking up to Yale sneering at the Ivy League types who haven't made it to his empyrean heights, which wouldn't be much of an improvement. What would be a real improvement would be if he was removed from the Times editorial page altogether, but seeing as how Safire lasted for 30 years or so, I'm not holding my breath (let's see, so I'm past anger and denial: what comes next?).

Column 2005-6-2 Commentary

2005-06-02T15:35:00.000-04:00

Today's Brooks column makes the (typically) moronic argument that because Europe is having some problems, "large swathes" of liberalism have been discredited. There are two ways to approach this piece of stupidity. One could be camly reasonable, for instance by pointing out that the U.K. boasts a far more comprehensive welfare state than the U.S. while still having relatively strong levels of economic growth compared to the U.S. (U.S. vs. U.K. [the comparison should be made to the blue line in the U.K. chart, which represents annualized quarterly growth, rather than to the green bars which are quarterly growth]) and enjoying an unemployment rate which is, in fact, lower than the U.S. rate. One could also say that just because liberals believe that we should move more towards a European model doesn't mean that we must slavishly copy that model: in fact, it would be perverse not to try to learn from European mistakes. And one could note that specific parts of the European model -- single-payer health insurance, for instance -- are still a good idea even if the model overall is flawed (for more on why American health care sucks compared to every other industrialized nation, see this great series at Angry Bear). On the other hand, prolonged exposure to Brooks makes a less reasonable approach, one in which we talk about how the failures of the American system are discrediting large swathes of conservatism, more appealing. For instance, the child poverty rate in the United States is far higher than it is in any other Western country. And the United States also has an overall poverty rate that is higher than that of any other Western country (France, the conservative bete noire, has a poverty rate that is less than half of what is in the U.S.). Or how about the awful health care system we have here, with a child mortality rate and life expectancy that are, again, higher than any other Western country has. If Brooks ever reads his own paper, he might have noticed a recent series concluding that economic mobility in the U.S. is at best the same as it is in Western Europe, and is less than that of some European welfare states. Income inequality in the United States is more comparable to that of third world countries than it is to Europe, and despite high GDP growth, real wages in the United States have been stagnant since 1960 (while real wages have continued to grow in other Western countries). In fact, one might go so far as to say that Europe has simply made different choices than the United States has, choices that restrain growth and raise unemployment but also provide a higher quality of life and ensure that fewer people fall into poverty. Of course, this would require taking a nuanced approach to the situation and moving away from the conservative fetishization of economic growth, two things that are well beyond Brooks's capabilities.

Brooks was, apparently, inspired to write this column by the rejection of the E.U. constitution by voters in France and the Netherlands. To Brooks, this means that " Western Europeans seem to be suffering a crisis of confidence," and " Right now, Europeans seem to look to the future with more fear than hope." As opposed to Americans, 60% of whom think the country is going in the wrong direction. European electorates have lost faith in the their leaders, Brooks says, while the fact that a whopping 34% of Americans think that Bush shares their priorities (and 20% think that Congress does) suggest that American leaders and the American people are comfortably on the same page. To Brooks, the defeat of the E.U. constitution shows that Europe has lost "momentum": he argues that "It is happier to live in a poor country that is moving forward . . . than it is to live in an affluent country that is looking back." I think the stupidity of this sentiment speaks for itself.

Brooks then goes on to perpetuate the usual canards about how low the standard of living in Europe is. I have no doubt that there are averaging measures that place Europe's standard of living well below that of the United States, but this is simply more of the Bill Gates walks into a bar fallacy. If you have a bar, and Bill Gates walks into it, the average worth of everyone in the bar immediately increases by a few billion dollars, but of course this doesn't improve their life at all. And given that poverty rates in Europe are less, and often considerably less, than those in the United States, it's hard to believe that these standard of living comparisons are particularly meaningful. Brooks acknowledges this when he writes that "Once it was plausible to argue that the European quality of life made up for the economic underperformance," but of course now "those arguments look more and more strained . . . ." Why exactly it's so much of a stretch to say that the average person in Europe lives as well or better than the average American is mostly unclear. Brooks says that it is "in part because demographic trends make even the current conditions unsustainable," but fails to mention what the other reasons are, most likely because they don't exist. And while demographic trends in Europe certainly don't look good now, one can hardly blame the welfare state for that, as demographic trends look bad in all Western countries. "Public spending on retirees will have to grow by a third" in Europe, Brooks asserts, but here at home Medicare spending alone is expected to quintuple in the next 75 years. Brooks is free to advocate simply cutting old people loose, but I doubt that this argument will be very popular.

Brooks then returns to the assertion that Europeans are simply fearful, arguing that most of their fears are "mutually exclusive" and that "[t]he only commonality was fear itself . . . ." What were these mutually exclusive fears, you ask? Well, according to Brooks, they were "the threat of economic liberalization" (i.e., making European economies more like the U.S.), "the threat of Turkey" (which presumably includes general worries about immigration), "the condescension of the Brussels elite", and "the prospect of a centralized European superstate" (interestingly, Brooks doesn't mention the Dutch worry that the new constitution would interfere with their policies on marijuana and gay marriage, or the common worry that the constitution was insufficiently democratic, which would seem to be one of the more important fears that voters had). Apparently, Brooks thinks it's incomphrensible that someone could worry both about the condescension of the elites and the imposition of greater economic liberalization, or that the threat of Turkey could be compatible with fear of a European superstate. To a non-moron, though, it should be obvious that all these worries flow from a general fear that the new E.U. is being constructed without regard to what the people living in it want, and their incompability is a mirage of Brooks's fevered brain.

Brooks's next argument is "the core fact is that the European model is foundering under the fact that billions of people are willing to work harder than the Europeans are." Well, naturally billions of people are willing to work harder than the Europeans are. Not coincidentally, billions of people can only dream of living a European lifestyle. Essentially, Brooks seems to be suggesting that the Europeans need to let a large fraction of their people drop into poverty (and, if the U.S. is any indication, stay there) because lots of other people are even poorer. How this would help the situation is unclear, though it would, of course, greatly help Europe's rich people, and the Republican party probably has a certain amount of fellow feeling for the wealthy on the other side of the Atlantic.

Finally, Brooks, who would presumably define himself as a conservative, finishes up by denouncing the welfare state for breeding conservatism. Yes, this does indeed make no sense. Furthermore, a little over a month ago, Brooks wrote a column in which he said that the American people were innately conservative, which was why they opposed every major program the Republican party has put forward since Bush's election. Yet, strangely enough, in a more recent column about the differences between poor Republicans and poor Democrats, Brooks noted that "Eighty percent [of poor Republicans] believe government should do more to help the needy, even if it means going deeper into debt." Given the most Democrats believe the same thing, and there are probably at least as many, if not more, poor Republicans as rich Republicans, we find that Brooks believes that the American people are conservative because they are opposed to Social Security privatization and want the government to do more to help the needy. If this doesn't convince you of Brooks's intellectual incoherence, nothing will. Perhaps the real answer here is simply that people in Western countries, Europeans and Americans, have seen unfettered capitalism and want no part of it. With the exception of some of the elites, they can see the value of a safety net, and would, miracle of miracles, rather not dismantle it on the off chance that they get lucky and become rich enough not to need it. To Brooks, Western Europe has failed, or is in the process of failing, but the people who actually live there seem to disagree, and given Brooks's track record in analyzing American society, it's far more likely that they are correct.

Column 2005-5-29 Commentary

2005-05-29T18:46:00.000-04:00

Today's Brooks column is mostly just confusing. He presents a pseudo-Marxist view of a new kind of class war in modern America, one between the educated and the uneducated (it's actually framed as a manifesto delivered by the ghost of Karl Marx, but I'm just going to pretend that never happened), which has some merit as it is undoubtedly true that one of the great divides between the upper middle and upper classes and everybody else is the former's high education level. However, the confusing part is that it seems unlikely that Brooks would actually believe such an analysis. He himself states that "I don't belive in incessant class struggle," making it initially unclear just what the point of the column is. Furthermore, and predictably, Brooks's Marxism isn't very good: a real Marxist would not define classes by their education level, but regard the difference in education as a facet of the class struggle. To a Marxist (or possibly a neo-Marxist), education is simply a tool the capitalists can wield against the proletariat to preserve their power, a tool that is even more powerful in a post-industrial economy. In reality, Brooks's use of the class struggle metaphor simply cloaks his anti-Marxism. In Brooks's world, economics never significantly impacts people's lives: what's important is not money but culture, and in this column Brooks picks out one particular part of culture, education, as the difference between classes.

Much of the column is as incoherent as its central idea. The second paragraph discusses the distressingly small number of poor people who attend top colleges, even as financial aid plans get more and more generous. The third paragraph alludes to the increasing income gap between rich (fine, "educated elites") and poor. And in the next paragraph Brooks writes :"Members of the educated elites are more and more likely to marry each other, which the experts call assortative mating, but which is really a ceaseless effort to refortify class solidarity and magnify social isolation." Now, this is pretty clearly a joke. Not necessarily a good joke (though Brooks has done much worse), but a joke nonetheless. The whole paragraph, in fact, is not meant to be taken seriously. What are we to make of this juxtaposition? It gets even worse in the next paragraph, when Brooks begins with "The educated elites are the first elites in all of history to work longer hours per year than the exploited masses, so voracious is their greed for second homes," a clear joke, and follows with a serious social critique, "They congregate in exclusive communities walled in by the invisible fence of real estate prices, then congratulate themselves for sending their children to public schools." It's hard to tell whether Brooks is trying to draw attention to some serious issues with the occasional joke thrown in or simply feels that his pseudo-Marxist joke column needs a couple of serious observations to give it a real revolutionary flavor.

Similarly, Brooks speaks of the elites sending "their children off to Penn, Wisconsin and Berkeley, bastions of privilege for the children of the professional class." Penn, ok, though one wonders why he didn't choose, say, Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Princeton, in fact, would make a lot more sense, given that Penn is located in Philadelphia, a city which is not exactly a bastion of privelege, while Princeton is in an affluent suburb. Berkeley, though it is a public university and located in a city, is also barely acceptable. But (with apologies to any readers who are from or went there) Wisconsin? Is he kidding? UW-Madison is a bastion of privilege for the children of the professional class? Brooks, educated at the University of Chicago and deeply ashamed of the fact that he didn't go to Yale, surely did not select these universities at random, and once again we can only assume that he deliberately introduced this contradiction in order to encourage the readers not to take his column, or at least this part of it, very seriously.

Passing lightly over the obligatory digs at highly-educated liberals, we finally come to the end of the incoherency, signaling that we are about to arrive at what Brooks thinks is the real problem: nobody's doing anything about the failing school system. Oh, excuse me, that would require that Brooks actually face up to the fact that the steady decline of public school systems over the past 30 years is connected to the country's steady drift to the right over the same time period. Actually, failing public schools get only one sentence: the real problem, naturally, is the imposition of "a public morality that affords maximum sexual opportunity for [the upper classes] and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for those lower down." "Family structures have disintegrated for the oppressed masses," and that's what keeping them down. As we probably should have suspected from the first, Brooks is not really interested in education. What really bugs Brooks, as is the case with many of today's conservatives, is the sixties. Just as conservatives often think that everything that Bush has screwed up is actually the fault of Clinton, they have a tendency to believe that everything that's wrong today is the result of the sixties. In this case, the sexual revolution and feminism are blamed for destroying America's families, which in turn makes it less likely that poor children will graduate from high school, much less move on to college.

This ridiculously simplistic analysis is riddled with holes. To blame all the problems faced by poor children living in single-parent households on the fact that they have only one parent is ridiculous. The fact that the education level of the parent is likely to be low is also a problem. A poor family is less likely to be able to afford to purchase supplemental materials, or even just books, to encourage the child to study or simply to read. Poor children are, presumably, more likely to get a job in high school. And that leaves out the poor quality of schools in poor areas and the effect of racism on poor black children. But the biggest problem with Brooks's claims is that they rely on a mythical idea of an America in which all families had two parents, with a father who worked and a mother who stayed at home and took care of the kids. In reality, while America approached this ideal in the fifties, that was the only time in which the country has come even close. The fact is that the fifties were an extremely unusual decade, one in which the divorce rate fell for the first time in a century while marriage and fertility rates zoomed upward. Comparing family patterns in the fifties to any other decade is likely a pointless endeavor, so it's no surprise that Brooks does exactly that. He cites two statistics (with no source mentioned, naturally): in 1960, 75% of poor families were headed by a married couple, and now only a third are. Clearly, poor families are melting down, right? Well, interestingly enough, in 1960 one-third of all children lived in poverty. In 2000, that figure had been cut approximately in half, to 16.3%. In 1940, 10% of all children did not live with either birth parent. That figure is 4% today. In fact, in 1900 20% of all children were raised in orphanages. The percentage of children living in a two-parent household has been fairly steady at about 70% for the last few decades, and the number of married-with-children households has been steadily increasing since hitting a low in the 1980's. In 1957, there were more than twice as many births to 15-19 year old women than in 1983. In fact, unwed motherhood increased most sharply between 1940 and 1958, when it tripled. It leveled off from 1960-1976 before starting to increase again. Really, the very idea that teen pregnancy is a problem is a new development. It used to be the case that if a teenage girl got pregnant, she would simply marry the baby's father and they would both drop out of school. Only when it became necessary to graduate from high school and possibly even go to college to get a good job did teenage pregnancy become a problem. Brooks says that "Poor children are less likely to live with both biological parents, hence, less likely to graduate from high school," but poor children have never been likely to graduate from high school: it's simply that the consequences of not doing so have recently become more severe. And the connection between being part of a single-parent household and dropping out of school is important only in that a child from a single-parent household is far more likely to be poor than one from a two-parent household. Drop-out rates are 19% overall, and 13% for children from 2-parent families: the differences is almost certainly largely due to the effects of poverty. Additionally, it should be noted that half of all marriages in the fifties ended in divorce, mostly due to men leaving marriages, and that this phenomenon provided one of the major impetuses behind the birth of feminism.

Brooks tries hard to mask his anti-feminist, anti-sixties ideology behind a facade of toungue-in-cheek pseudo-Marxist rhetoric and concern for education, but that's clearly what's driving this column. His disdain for Marxism leads him to reject the idea that economic status can have a significant impact on one's life, and his dislike of the sixties counterculture causes him to fetishize the culture of the fifties and its most visible (if least real: 2 million married couples lived separately in the fifties, two million more wives worked outside the home than at the peak of WWII, and more people say that their marriages are happy today) component, the happy two-parent family, leading naturally to the conclusion that the sixties caused single-parent families and that single-parent families are responsible for everything that's wrong with life today. Put that way, it sounds, and indeed is, ridiculous: how could a columnist in a prestigious newspaper waste his space making such an argument? Sadly, in a column full of internal contradictions, written by an author who doesn't believe half of it and presented as if it came from the ghost of Karl Marx (and didn't Safire corner the market on columns from ghosts with his conversations with the ghost of Richard Nixon?), it doesn't stand out.

Column 2005-5-26 Commentary

2005-05-26T18:00:00.000-04:00

In today's column, Brooks says that it would be great if evangelicals and liberals got together to fight poverty, and I agree. Of course, it would also be great if somebody gave me $10000 tomorrow, and I have no reason to expect that any such thing will happen. But apparently Brooks seems to think that such an evangelical-liberal alliance is going to happen soon. He believes that evangelicals are moving away from the culture war issues like abortion and gay marriage and are concentrating instead on trying to help the poor both here and abroad, and that since liberals are the only other group that is "really hyped up about these problems and willing to devote time and money to ameliorating them," they will naturally side with evangelicals on these issues. And again, this would be an extremely positive development, and one that is certainly not inconsistent with evangelical traditions, but I'm just not convinced that it's going to happen, and Brooks offers no firm evidence to change my mind.

He talks up Rick Warren, author of the best-selling "The Purpose-Driven Life" and pastor of a California megachurch, presenting him as a new breed of evangelical leader more interested in fighting poverty in Africa than gays at home, but doesn't really make the case that Warren is actually more significant in the evangelical community than, say, James Dobson. He briefly mentions a couple of other names in an attempt to show that Warren isn't just a lone crusader, including Chuck Colson, convicted Watergate felon turned evangelical leader, who is "deeply involved in Sudan", and Richard Cizik, the Vice President of Governmental Affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, who is apparently "drawing up a service agenda that goes way beyond the normal turf of Christian conservatives," but these examples are even weaker than Warren's. He makes much of alliances between evangelicals and liberal NGO's in Africa, but, really, Africa is an extreme case. It's fairly easy to work together on the ground to provide basic necessities to people living in abject poverty while ignoring political beliefs the others have that may clash with your own, since in a country where average lifespans are around 40 years issues like abortion and gay marriage tend to fade from the apocalyptic significance they can assume in the U.S. Brooks claims that evangelicals are embarrassed by the leaders they have at the moment, but this claim is not believable until they get new leaders, or at the very least abandon the old ones. Brooks also asserts that evangelicals are starting to be more influenced by Catholic doctrines about the necessity of good works (which is slightly strange, as one of the basic ideas of Protestantism is that only faith is sufficient for someone to be saved), but simultaneously the Catholic Church has been adopting an ever-harder line on culture war issues and elevating the prominence of groups like Opus Dei which are not particularly interested in fighting poverty. Essentially, Brooks collects some circumstantial evidence, combines it with platitudes like "I see the historical rift healing between those who emphasized personal and social morality," and calls it a column. While I would be happy if evangelicals do decide that "you don't have to convert people; sometimes you can just work with them," I'm dubious about the chances of this actually happening. After all, missionary work is an important component of evangelical Christianity. Brooks does present one piece of hard evidence that such a cooperation may be possible on the legislative level: the Aspire Act, co-sponsored by Senators Jon Corzine and Rick Santorum. However, this act was first introduced in 2002 and got exactly nowhere: not exactly an auspicious omen for the new era of evangelical-liberal cooperation.

But the interesting thing about this column is not that it's an exercise in wishful thinking, it's that it's an exercise in profoundly liberal wishful thinking. If evangelicals were actually to decide that they really cared about ending poverty more than fighting culture wars, that would be a huge victory for the Democratic party and liberals. The entire Republican economic agenda would be knocked down at one fell swoop. A huge wedge would be driven between the evangelical wing of the Republican party and those Republicans who prefer to preach the gospel of laissez-faire economics and small government, and such a divide would be guaranteed to help the Democrats even if the evangelicals don't vote Democratic. And any real anti-poverty program would almost certainly increase the political participation of the poor, which would likely further benefit the Democrats. In short, the creation of the kind of alliance that Brooks describes would be a political earthquake that would likely destroy the Republican party as we know it. And after experiencing a shiver of pure bliss at the thought, liberal readers must wonder why on earth Brooks, who is nothing if not a Republican hack, is writing about such a thing, and writing about it so positively. Does he really think that it's inevitable and is using this column as preparation for a move to the winning team? Is he simply trying to warn his fellow Republicans, and simply deploying a stiff upper lip even as his heart breaks at the thought of his beloved party going down the drain? Both these theories are possible, but unlikely: instead, what's probably going on here is a whitewash. Evangelicals have started to scare people, especially moderates who voted for Bush out of a desire to kill terrorists, not because they wanted a theocracy. On issues like Terri Schiavo and stem cell research (not to mention the whole fight against activist judges), evangelicals, or at least their most prominent leaders -- Dobson, Falwell, Robertson, &co. -- have been adopting extremely radical positions that most Americans find foreign and scary, and the leaders of the Republican party, from Bush on down, have been jumping to conform to these positions. Naturally, this puts the Republican party in a poor light and contributes to steadily falling approval ratings for Bush and the Republican party in general. This presents the Republican party with a quandary: how to retain the loyalty of those who don't want a party that is in thrall to religious nutjobs while remaining in thrall to those same religious nutjobs (or, rather, appearing to remain in thrall to those same religious nutjobs by occasionally giving them symbolic victories on a very big stage and campaigning on their hot-button issues)? Well, one good way is to say that the old religious nutjobs are outmoded relics: the party is actually built on kindler, gentler (and cooler) religious nutjobs, who fight hunger and AIDS in Africa and hang out with Bono. If you say this loud enough and often enough, people may come to think of the Dobsons, Falwells, and Robertsons as being radical leaders with no influence on the Republican party. And what better place to disseminate this bit of propaganda than on the Times editorial page via David Brooks, noted observer of trends in red-state America?

Column 2005-5-22 Commentary

2005-05-22T21:07:00.000-04:00

5-23 Update: I find that I am forced to apologize for misjudging Brooks's column. I assumed that the column was so laughable because Brooks was a moron: instead, Brooks was in full partisan hack mode. Most of the column was really just window dressing, with the important part being the paragraph where Brooks delineated the compromise position. This compromise would allow votes on Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen, and William Pryor, the three most objectionable of Bush's nominees, in return for a couple of still objectionable but not as much so nominees being dropped and everybody promising to be good (the Democrats say that they won't filibuster judicial nominees except in extraordinary circumstances, and the Republicans promise not to invoke the nuclear option). This was important because the main goal of the column, in hindsight, was to establish this as a reasonable compromise, which it is not. It's a pure giveaway to the Republicans, who get to put in three truly awful judicial nominees and receive leeway to nominate further equally bad nominees (sure, the Democrats can filibuster in "extraordinary circumstances", but it's unlikely that any further nominees will be worse than Owens, Brown, or Pryor, so this gives the Republicans the ability to scream that the Democrats are violating their part of the agreement on any future judicial filibuster). Additionally, the Republicans aren't forced to go through with the unpopular nuclear option. In return, the Republicans give up a mere two nominees and promise not to use the nuclear option, a promise which is not particularly valuable since the Democrats have promised not to make its use necessary. A reasonable compromise would have shot down Owens and Brown at the very least and possibly involved resuscitating some of the rules, like the blue slip rule, which allowed nominees to be blocked without resorting to the filibuster. Of course, Brooks's masters were not interested in a reasonable compromise: as always, they were looking only for the appearance of reasonableness, and they appear to have found it, as this compromise has been struck. Incidentally, I am completely unsurprised to note that Lieberman appears to have been one of the key negotiators. The only hope is that Frist's masters are not satisfied (Frist was quick to note that he hadn't signed onto this compromise, and would Dobson please stop hurting him now?) and demand that Frist reject the compromise. To a certain extent, the Republican party has boxed itself in with a lot of high-flown rhetoric about the necessity to give every nominee an up-or-down vote, and Dobson+co. have invested a lot in the nuclear option, so it's still possible that Frist will decide that even this compromise is untenable. This would be the best possible outcome, as it might lose him all seven Republican Senators who negotiated the compromise, which would doom the nuclear option while allowing the Democrats to continue to filibuster Owens, Brown, and Pryor since the Republicans broke the deal first. Even Frist would seem to be sufficiently intelligent to figure thist out, but if the religious right can make him go on national TV and assert that AIDS is transmitted through tears and sweat, they may well be able to force him to lead the charge of the Lightweight Brigade and commit heroic political suicide for a mistake.

Today's Brooks column is actually one long joke (well, that's the charitable way of looking at it). Brooks is writing about the showdown in the Senate. He watches as the Senate Majority Leader, pushed by Dobson and his fellow members of the radical Christian right, leads the Republican party into an attempt to prevent the filibuster of a handful of extreme judicial nominees by declaring such a thing unconstitutional in order to circumvent the standard procedures for changing Senate rules. He observes Bill Frist obstinately reject any compromise offered by the Democrats, while proposing compromises which amount to the Democrats simply giving in. And then he blames the inability of the Senate to prevent this confrontation on the moderates. The silver lining here is that not even Brooks was able to twist the situation so as to suggest that it's entirely the fault of the Democrats, but this is still pretty laughable.

To start with, Brooks says that there are twelve moderate Senators currently trying to craft a compromise, six from each party. Brooks may not be up on his math, but the last time I checked twelve Senators do not come close to forming a majority. And presumably neither Harry Reid or Bill Frist are a member of the twelve -- the Majority and Minority leaders are generally expected to be fairly partisan -- or, for that matter, any members of the leadership on either side, so that any proposal which emerges will initially be backed only by those who devised it. Brooks sneers that "They can't just shove something through on the rough and dirty the way the partisans do," but the partisans can generally command more votes. Brooks then insinuates that the moderates are infirm of purpose by saying that "Some of the 12 felt compelled to check with their leaders and others in their parties, so nobody would feel offended or left out," but really, if there are only twelve of them, it seems that they would need to run any proposal by, at the very least, 39 Senators. Brooks further asserts that the moderates were spending too much time "looking for language that would codify every possible contingency" because "even moderates don't really trust one another." I can't speak to the degree of trust between moderates of different parties, but it seems pretty clear that the Democrats don't trust the Republican leadership at all, and since any compromise, to be a compromise, would require the Democrats to sign off on it, some fairly strong language to hold the Republicans to their would probably be required. And then comes the last unkindest cut: Brooks attacks the "gutless wonders" who were hoping for language to "protect them when the attacks start coming from the pressure groups on their own side." Of course, this ignores the fact that attacks are already coming and in at least one case have been directly endorsed by Frist himself. Furthermore, it's not as if there's just a couple of pro- and anti-filibuster groups involved: every conservative and liberal pressure group, from Focus on the Family to MoveOn.org, has made this a priority. Anyone who bucks the leadership on either side is likely to be the focus of a staggering number of attacks, including a likely primary challenge the next time they come up for election. And it's difficult to expect people to come out and stand firmly on principle in the face of millions of dollars worth of attacks for a compromise.

Brooks ends the column by bemoaning the general ineffectiveness of moderates, and it is indeed diffficult to understand why it is that a small group of moderate Senators are unable to persuade the partisan majority of the Senators in their party and its loudest and most powerful voices to abandon a cause in which they are fervently invested. But as always in Brooks's columns, he is covering for the White House. Dick Cheney has endorsed the nuclear option, saying that he is willing to cast his tie-breaking vote in favor of it if necessary. Karl Rove has come straight out and said that all compromises will be rejected (apparently, he is the new Senate Majority Leader). The White House is clearly 100% behind the drive for the nuclear option, and to expect enough Republicans to break ranks to allow a compromise is extremely wishful thinking. If Brooks really wants a compromise, he would do much better to attack those who have the power to force one through, namely Frist and Bush. But since his real goal is to deflect the blame for the coming Senate shutdown from the Republican party and Bush, his attack on the moderates makes a certain kind of twisted sense.

Column 2005-5-19 Commentary

2005-05-19T21:11:00.000-04:00

I'm fairly busy right now, and Brooks gets enough right in his column that I don't feel there's anything I can really sink my teeth into, so this commentary will be pretty short. Anyway, this whole Newsweek flap is fairly stupid. After all, Newsweek is hardly the first organization to report a story without accurately sourcing it. But because some Taliban used this report as an excuse for violence in Afghanistan and Afghan soldiers and police, unused to the concept of dispersing crowds peacefully, fired at protesters who were protesting against the Afghan government and the American occupation as much as against allegations that Korans had been flushed down toilets at Guantanamo, right-wingers cried "Newsweek lied, people died" and the administration did everything but demand that the editors of Newsweek appear to beg for forgiveness in sackcloth and ashes for having the temerity to publish such a story, apparently because it's obviously not credible (we will beat, rape, and kill prisoners, but we would never flush the Koran down the toilet). Naturally the left had to respond to these stupidities, and most did get the point that the right and the administration are trying to use this to further suppress the press, but some got caught up in defending Newsweek, which is too bad since they screwed up, and the veracity of the Koran-toilet allegation, which is too bad because it would be much more productive to focus on worse abuses, such as the murder of two prisoners at Bagram Air Base documented in Friday's Times. The whole thing has been completely blown out of proportion, and I don't feel like writing any more about it.

Column 2005-5-15 Commentary

2005-05-15T20:43:00.000-04:00

Today's Brooks column is deeply frustrating, in that it makes the reader want to reach through the page, grab Brooks, and shake him until he stops being so, well, moronic. Brooks's basic thesis is that poor people vote Republican if they have an optimistic, Horatio Alger outlook on life and Democratic if they don't believe that hard work will get you ahead. Which is a reasonable jumping-off point for analysis, but Brooks doesn't even try to get off the ground, instead pronouncing this to be "the big difference" between poor voters in the two parties. Apparently, Republicans are just optimists and Democrats are just pessimists, and that's all there is to it. First of all, it appears that Brooks, as often seems to be the case, has not even read the newspaper that he appears in, which has quite recently published a series of articles on economic class in America that show that there just isn't that much social mobility in the U.S., and that there is less all the time. In fact, social mobility is lower in the U.S. than it is in Scandinavian welfare states or in Canada, and about equal to what it is in Britain and France. So it appears that the poor voters who vote Democratic are more correct here than their Republican counterparts. This might even suggest that they are less likely to be carried away by grand concepts like "land of opportunity" or "war on terror" or "ownership society" or "compassionate conservatism" and more likely to look for substance in their political parties, which would definitely move them in the direction of the Democrats.

But even this issue is a diversion from the main question, which is: Why do these people think the way they do? For example, in what way is race a factor? For it is a factor: even Brooks recognizes it when he points out that "Bush won the white working class by 23 percentage points in this past election." And this is where the frustration starts to set in, because he neglects to note that Kerry won the black vote by 77 percentage points, and presumably the black working class vote by a similar or larger number. And surveys suggest that Kerry won the Latino vote by 30 or more percentage points (and the Asian, Arab, and Native American votes by similar margins, but they are not nearly as large as the black or Latino vote). Perhaps the optimism of their attitudes is not the only difference between poor Democrats and poor Republicans. In fact, this racial difference may contribute to the difference in attitude. Would anybody be really surprised to find that blacks and Latinos are less likely to believe that "most people can get ahead with hard work," as the survey asked? But race is hardly the only factor potentially affecting whether people are optimistic about the possibility of succeeding through hard work and determination. Religion is another: Bush won born-again Protestants by a 78-22 margin, so presumably there is a good chance that the average poor Republican is an evangelical Protestant of some denomination. And it would not be shocking if evangelicals felt that, what with being saved and all, they have a good chance to succeed if they simply work hard (is it necessarily the case? I don't know, of course, but Brooks doesn't even bother to consider the possibility). Most likely, both of these factors influenced the degree of optimism in the outlook of Democratic and Republican voters. And these are well-known differences between the electoral base of Democrats and Republicans, one of which Brooks even acknowledges in his column before cluelessly sailing on to set up one of his stupid dichotomies.

Yet Brooks manages to generate more frustration as he goes on to say, with a naivete that would be charming if it didn't make the reader want to strangle him, that, amazingly enough, poor Republicans don't trust the rich and big business. Well, gee, ya think? As if every Democratic campaign ever hasn't been run at least partly on the premise that if we can only get the Republican-voting poor to realize that the Democratic party is actually the party that defends the working man from the predations of big business, the Republicans will be swept from office (and these campaigns are often lost due to the Democratic party's failure to actually defend the working man from said predations)? "If the Ownership Society . . . means putting their retirement in the hands of Wall Street, they become queasy," Brooks opines. Funny, a lot of people figured this out several months ago when polls indicated that Bush's Social Security privatization plan was deeply unpopular, or even back in the 90's when the business-friendly Republican Medicare reform plan went down in flames. "Eighty percent believe government should do more to help the needy, even if it means going deeper into debt." This is exactly the kind of thing that has progressives tearing out their hair. Books, most prominently Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?, have been written to try to explain this phenomenon. But apparently Brooks has only just been exposed to these ideas, and his expression of childish wonder as he examines them is the only thing that stops the reader from hauling off and punching him in the face. Well, that and the fact that he isn't actually there.

But it is Brooks's conclusion that is most exasperatingly ridiculous, as he actually calls for the Republicans to adopt poverty-fighting programs. Has he been paying no attention at all to Republican domestic policy programs over the past few years? Does he not realize that this is the party of tax cuts for the wealthy and tougher bankruptcy laws for the poor? Did he somehow miss the budget which included cuts for Medicaid, food stamps, home heating assistance, child care and development block grants, and Head Start? Or perhaps he thinks that these programs are mostly used by the middle and upper classes? For crying out loud, in his own column he points out several times that the views on government assistance programs that are held by poor Republicans are not shared by their richer brethren. "Only 19 percent of affluent Republicans believe" that government should do more to help the needy (there's something about debt attached to this, but given the rate at which the Republicans are piling up debt, it seems unlikely that the debt part is the killer). Only 26 percent of "affluent Republicans" think that big business has too much power. And who controls the Republican party? Surprise, surprise: it's rich people and big businesses! (No, not evangelicals, or at least not in the ways that count, unless abortion and gay marriage were banned and I just missed it). Might this have something to do with Republican reluctance to pass programs intended to alleviate poverty? Just maybe? Or maybe, just maybe, the poor who vote Republican are motivated more by issues of national security, religion, and nativism than they are by their belief that the Republicans are "the party of optimistic individualism." Just a thought. But then, that's the problem, isn't it: Brooks doesn't do much thinking. Manipulation of data to obtain the results he wants, yes. Determinedly ignoring facts that don't fit his theories, of course. But actuall thought, very rarely.

But then, we shouldn't be too surprised about this. After all, the Times obviously hasn't put much thought into the composition of their editorial page (could John Tierney be any more superfluous? And how sad is it that he makes me wish Safire were still there?), and this lack of thought has obviously affected the more weak-minded members of the editorial page crew, of which Brooks is the foremost and weakest-minded. At one point, perhaps, this could have been remedied, but it's too late now: Brooks's fragile mind has been damaged beyond repair, and the only way out is to fire him.

Column 2005-5-12 Commentary

2005-05-12T17:55:00.000-04:00

Today's Brooks column is slightly sad. He only actually wrote two-thirds or so of it, excerpting the rest from various interviews about John Bolton with random people at the State Department. And his conclusions are anti-climactic: Bolton's chances for nomination have improved because "Bolton has a professional sense of limits. He'd push his views, and push hard. But after he'd had his say, he would almost always bow to the dictates of the organization." So, basically, he'd push his wrongheaded views, which were completely unsupported by the available intelligence, as hard as possible, until the rest of the State Department sat on him, at which point he'd concede ungracefully. Sounds like just the man we need at the U.N. Or how about this piece of unqualified support from Brooks: "The speeches he gave on controversial subjects were generally cleared." Generally cleared, you say? Shouldn't ALL the speeches he gives on controversial subjects have been cleared, what with him being a fairly important guy and all? Brooks also points out that Bolton didn't cause anybody to be fired, which is another black mark against him, as it suggests that Bolton was actually fairly ineffective: he spent all his time in the State Department fighting with, well, everybody, but couldn't even get anybody fired? But all these are merely excuses: the real reason that Brooks backs Bolton is that "Often when Bolton was pushing back at his colleagues, he was trying to defend the president's policies from dissenters at State." Bolton was fighting the good fight at the State Department, "pushing back" against those traitorous career diplomats who didn't believe that Iraq had WMD's or ties to Al Qaeda, resisting those who would point out that there isn't any actual evidence that Cuba or Syria have bioweapons programs, and generally acting as the President's point man. Bolton's nomination to be Ambassador to the U.N. can probably best be regarded as a military promotion: Bolton is now graduating to a higher grade of diplomatic warfare (he's not necessary at State any more, anyway, now that Colin Powell has been discarded). Bolton is Dear Leader's man, and that's all his supporters care about. Unfortunately for them, there are some Republicans who still hold the quaint view that people should be qualified for the posts they are nominated for, so the pro-Bolton crew are forced to argue that Bolton is a good, professional man who just gets a little carried away. By contrast, the rest of us see him as a dangerous, possibly insane bully who should be kept as far away from American foreign policy as possible. But Bush has "enormous stakes" invested in Bolton, and he and Cheney are hammering away to force his nomination through. That's why the "tide is turning": Bush is burning his political capital to pressure Republican Senators to support Bolton, and so far, they're folding (although Sen. Voinovich (R-OH) has announced that he will oppose Bolton on the floor, if not in committee).

The question of whether or not Bolton should be the next ambassador to the U.N. is best addressed by going to www.thewashingtonnote.com and browsing the archives, but for those of you who are too lazy to do so, here are some interesting posts (yes, I'm being lazy, but so is Brooks, and anyway all the facts are at thewashingtonnote.com and there's no point in my simply transcribing them).

Bolton fiercely fought intelligence analysts when they objected to his attempts to claim that Cuba had a bioweapons program (more).

Bolton threatened the INR (the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau) when the INR disagreed with him on an analysis (more).

Bolton refused to disburse money to allies (members of the late coalition of the willing, even) if they wouldn't sign an agreement protecting U.S. forces overseas from the authority of the ICC, even though all the countries were excused, either because they were in NATO or the coalition of the willing or both, and then refused to give out the money for some months even after being overruled by higher-ups (more). I guess this is more of his professionalism.

Bolton fought and fierce and protracted battle with intelligence analysts when they refused to approve his exaggerated assertions about Syria's pursuit of unconventional weapons (more).

Bolton appears to have set up his own small intelligence bureau to produce intelligence to fit his preconceptions, similar to, though considerably smaller than, Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans (more).

Bolton lied under oath during his confirmation hearings, claiming that he had never sought to have an intelligence official fired, when he clearly attempted to do just that on at least two occasions (more and more).

Bolton regularly harassed underlings in the State Department, sometimes for trivial reasons (more).

Bolton upset senior State Department officials to the point that Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, ordered that Bolton not be allowed to give speeches or testimony unless Armitage had personally approved it first. The immediate cause of this seems to have Bolton's speech of July 31, 2003 that nearly broke off the six-party talks with North Korea (but since, according to Brooks, Bolton always defends Bush's policies, I guess Bush must not have cared that much about the six-party talks that much after all). That speech was approved, but the person who approved it was subsequently the target of Armitage's wrath. Bolton also attempted to prevent Mohammed ElBaradei from being reappointed as the head of the IAEA, and lied about the extent of his opposition to ElBaradei under oath. (more; more on ElBaradei; more on Bolton's controversial North Korea speech).

Bolton may have used NSA intercepts to spy on State Department colleagues who disagreed with him (more).

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw specifically requested that Bolton be left out of nonproliferation negotiations with Libya, and Bolton did practically nothing about A.Q. Khan proliferation network, even though arms control was part of his job description (more).

And finally, Bolton kept important information from Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell (more).

While a president should certainly have a certain amount of leeway in his appointments, a bare minimum of qualification is important, and it's unclear if Bolton could be any less qualified for this spot. Brooks, of course, could not be less qualified for his spot, but, sadly, we're used to that by now.

Column 2005-5-8 Commentary

2005-05-08T22:45:00.000-04:00

My first thought on reading yesterday's John Tierney column was that Tierney had set a new standard for mendacity by supposedly respectable conservative columnists writing about Social Security, beating out even Brooks's previous efforts in this regard, but then I decided to reserve judgement until Brooks got a chance to strike back. After all, Tierney has been mounting a fierce challenge to Brooks for possession of his niche as a pseudo-reasonable conservative columnist with a penchant for analyzing American culture. Two weeks ago, Tierney neatly swiped the idea of writing a column about some study suggesting that being fat wasn't as dangerous as had been thought from Brooks. Last week, Tierney wrote a column about how much better red-staters are than blue staters. And now Tierney comes out with a column in which he lies through his teeth about Social Security, thus proving that he can do everything Brooks can. Surely Brooks would not take this lying down? Somehow, I picture this whole thing as being one of those nature programs, with a guy with a British accent narrating as the two male columnists circle each other, hackles raised and teeth bared. Will the older male be able to respond to the challenge, or will he back down and be driven out? Well, with today's column, Brooks responded, serving notice that he has not yet weakened sufficiently for Tierney to supplant him. Anybody can lie about Social Security, but it takes a truly special talent to lie, smear and distort the Democratic position, AND distort the Republican position all in the same column. "You have learned well, John," Brook says, "but you are not a Jedi yet."

Brooks starts off by saying "Don't listen to them when they tell you how to be virtuous. They're faking it." Where has he drawn this lesson from? Surprisingly (or rather, unsurprisingly), not from the radical Christian right, but from the Democratic party. The Democratic party certainly has many flaws, but what's bothering Brooks is that after much rhetoric directed at Bush about making "shared sacrifices for the common good", caring for the poor, not the rich, and "imposing fiscal discipline", they are objecting when Bush calls for so-called progessive indexing of Social Security benefits. A bit of background for those of you unfamiliar with the idea of progressive indexing: it means that the benefits of the "better off" are cut, while everybody else's are preserved. The first sign that progressive indexing might not be quite as friendly as it sounds is that the "better off" are defined as all those earning more than $20,000 a year. For the average worker, earning $37,000 a year, benefits are currently scheduled to make up 36% of pre-retirement income, but under Bush's plan would be reduced to 26%. For a worker making $58,000 a year, benefits would be reduced by 13% of pre-retirement income. After that, though, cuts become less and less significant, to the point that someone making $1,000,000 would stand to lose only 1% of pre-retirement income in cuts. So the middle class would take the brunt of the cuts: benefit for the rich would also be cut, but since the rich don't need the money, it wouldn't hurt them. Furthermore, Bush's plan encourages workers to put sizable portions of their payroll taxes in private accounts, effectively borrowing against their future benefits and thus cutting those future benefits even more. The end result of this plan would be that many of those in the middle class would not even recieve Social Security checks, turning Social Security into welfare for the elderly poor, and, of course, once programs are only used by the poor, they're easy to destroy. And Social Security was not designed as a welfare program: that's why everybody, even the very rich, receives Social Security checks when they retire. Conservatives seem to have trouble understanding this, so it's worth reiterating: Social Security is an insurance program. It provides insurance against a member of the family becoming disabled and being unable to work, against a member of the family dying, and against people being unable, through bad luck or bad planning, to support themselves in their old age. It's not simply for poor people who would otherwise be eating cat food: it's also important for the middle class, who would otherwise be able to retire only if they were willing to accept a sizable decrease in their standard of living. This is why Democrats oppose so-called progressive indexing.

Brooks, of course, ignores these facts and simply lies about the whole issue, starting when he claims that Bush "has asked us to make a shared sacrifice for the common good." As the numbers suggest, this sacrifice would not actually be shared by the rich. Instead, most of the sacrificing would be done by people making from $20,000-$60,000 when they retire, people who could probably use an extra few thousand dollars a year. Even more ridiculously, Brooks says "Why should programs for children and families be strangled so Donald Trump can get bigger benefit checks?" Given the size of the checks, Trump won't even notice if they stop coming. But what's really mystifying is that Brooks suggests that Social Security benefits going to Donald Trump are being taken away from programs for children and families. Under Bush's plan, benefits taken from Trump would be given to the elderly poor. Children and families don't enter into it. Such programs are being strangled, of course, so Trump can pay smaller income tax checks, but Brooks doesn't seem to want to mention that. Brooks pretends to be flabbergasted that Democrats wouldn't jump at this chance to redistribute wealth, but most of the redistributing would be from the middle class, especially the lower middle class, to the poor, which is not exactly what the Democrats have in mind. There are proposals, largely made by Democrats, so they don't get much press, for wealth transfer down the income scale -- for instance, by reinstating the estate tax, which falls only on the very wealthy, and using it to cover part of the Social Security funding gap -- which would actually transfer significant amounts of wealth, but this is not one.

This is bad enough, but in the next paragraph, Brooks surpasses himself. First, he asserts that Bush "has made the hard choices" by "facing up to the fact that there are going to be benefit cuts". Actually, making benefit cuts is not really a very hard choice, since that is the default option: if nothing is done, benefit cuts happen. The hard choice would be to figure out some way to preserve benefits intact at currently scheduled levels by raising taxes, but naturally any such idea is anathema to Bush. Brooks then goes on to grossly insult the intelligence of his readers by asserting that in calling for cutting Social Security benefits, Bush has offended various Republican party constituencies. Supply-siders, for instance, are apparently aghast that Bush would cut Social Security benefits. Who knew that they were holding out for a tax increase on the rich to cover the funding gap? The fact is, the Republican party has always disliked Social Security and tries to eliminate it on a regular basis, only to get kicked in the teeth by the voters. Right now is one of those eliminationist periods -- if you don't believe that the Republican party really wants to get rid of Social Security, consider this excerpt from the platform of the Texas GOP: "The Party supports an orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts, and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax." -- and the whole party will back Bush until it becomes clear that phase-out is impossible, at which point the whole thing will probably be dropped, possibly because the Republicans have lost their congressional majorities.

Presumably aware that he's skating on thin ice here, Brooks goes back to bashing Democrats. First he takes the idea of shared sacrifice, a theme used by Democrats to suggest that cutting taxes in wartime is a bad idea, and twists it to suggest that Democrats should be jumping for joy at the idea of sacrificing Social Security benefits, since that will help fight terror, apparently (if your Social Security benefits are not cut, the terrorists have already won!). Then he accuses the Democrats of "making demagogic appeals to people's narrow self-interest." The hypocrisy of this is fairly stunning -- i.e., par for the course for Brooks -- given that Bush has attempted to sell his plan by appealing to naked self-interest, reassuring the elderly that their benefits will not be cut while luring the young with visions of vast private accounts (neither group has believed him, showing that naked self-interest only goes so far). And what do these demagogic appeals consist of? Well, they appear to consist of statements of fact. Nancy Pelosi points out that the benefits of middle-class seniors will be cut, which is completely true. Representative Sander Levin says that this is the biggest benefit cut in the history of Social Security, which is probably true. It's unclear what is demagogic about this.

Brooks also attacks "sober chin-pullers", by which he means the fiscally prudent and those who are worried about deficits. Why aren't they applauding Bush's plan? Well, it might have something to do with the line of thinking espoused by noted Communist Warren Buffett, who says "There is no question that the Bush Administration is ignoring the most serious economic problems facing America and that they are more interested in ideological driven issues. The most serious fiscal issues are: the General Fund deficit, the current account / trade deficit, and health care. Why are we talking about Social Security?" By now, the "sober chin-pullers" have presumably figured out that the Social Security problem is not that big of a problem -- in fact, if growth is faster than the not-particularly-optimistic predictions we have at present assume, it may not be a problem -- and are worrying about more important issues. And Brooks finishes up by condemning moderate Democrats for not supporting means-testing of Social Security, as they supposedly have for the past 20 years. Excuse me, but didn't conservatives used to be all about balanced budgets? And small government? And states rights? I could have sworn that those were important parts of the Republican ideology is recently as, oh, 2000.

Brooks then finishes by claiming that the Democrats don't have any productive ideas, only "half-truths from the peanut gallery." This is a lie: there are Democratic plans, only since they don't stand a chance in hell of passing, given that the Democrats are in the minority, the Democrats don't get a chance to present them. Brooks then accuses the Democrats of doing nothing but opposing the Republicans, casting the issue as being between a party with a "governing mentality" and a party with an "opposition mentality". Of course, since the Republicans are governing, and the Democrats are in the opposition, it's not particularly surprising that this is the way things are. Brooks seems to have forgotten, in fact, that the current Republican majorities were created by the Republicans simply standing fast and saying no to Clinton's health care reform. No Republicans came forward with constructive ideas then, or attempted to lead: they simply opposed with all their might, and were rewarded with lasting majorities in the House and Senate. Brooks also asserts that parties with the governing mentality absorb their rivals' ideas (actually, he says good ideas, but progressive indexing is not a good idea), thus driving their rivals to the edge, and indeed, we all remember how well that worked for the Democrats in the 90's with welfare reform and a balanced budget.

So, what can we learn from this column (no, we already knew that David Brooks is a big fat liar, so that doesn't count), other than that John Tierney has no idea what he's gotten himself into in putting himself up against Brooks? Mostly, we can learn that the Republican party is desperate. They know that private accounts are a sure loser, as we can tell from Brooks not mentioning them once. They know that Democrats are standing firm against Bush's plan, which is why Brooks talks hysterically of Democrats "betraying an animating ideal." And they know that their moderates won't go along with privatization without Democratic support, which is why they are so desperately trying to attract some. Because, really, all this discussion of progressive indexing is besides the point. It's certainly an awful idea, but the centerpiece of the plan is still private accounts, and those are still phase-out by another name. Nothing has changed except that some window dressing with progressive in the title has been added in the hope of attracting Democratic support, and the fact that such support is still being withheld is driving Republicans crazy. And last but not least, we -- or at least the editorial staff of the Times -- can learn that every time they print a Brooks column, a puppy dies. Maybe that will persuade them to fire him.

Column 2005-5-5 Commentary

2005-05-05T21:15:00.000-04:00

In this column, Brooks once again proves conclusively that he is dispatching these pieces from some other reality. In Brooks's reality, militant secularists are overrunning the country, driving anyone who dares so much as mention religion from the public sphere with hooting and catcalls. Politicians who mention God or their faith are mercilessly harassed until they crack under the pressure and publicly reject religion in speeches filled with excerpts from Bertrand Russell and Voltaire. A nation-wide, well-organized lobby of atheists constantly presses for the passage of laws banning the teaching of religion, as well as spear-heading campaigns to remove the phrase "In God we Trust" from our money and to end the practice of swearing in the President on the Bible. The occasional meek protests by evangelicals are shouted down, complete with insinuations that fundamentalist Christians are not real Americans. If this doesn't sound like America to you, congratulations: you are living in the real world (although given the way things are going, congratulations may not be in order). In the real world, which Brooks doesn't seem to have touched base with in quite some time, there are some "militant secularists", but they are far outnumbered by the hard-core fundamentalists who are fighting to turn America into a theocracy. In the real world, Pat Robertson can go on tv and claim that activist judges are the greatest threat the United States has faced in its 400-year history, proving that not only is he completely insane, he's completely ignorant of the most basic facts of American history (or perhaps he just can't subtract; after all, 2005 and 1776 are very large numbers, and Pat Robertson is not very bright). In the real world, the radical Christian right is attempting to block the teaching of evolution (and, if they can get that through, plate tectonics, the Big Bang, and then presumably practically all science), drastically reduce the power of judges and eliminate their ability to review any question having to do with religion, run roughshod over the separation of powers in order to interfere in private matters, prevent women from having access to birth control (not to mention their attempts to ban abortion and homosexuality) and eliminate the separation of church and state and the right to privacy. In the real world, politicized evangelicals are proposing to radically reshape our society and establish a Christian version of the Taliban.

The radical turn that the Christian right has taken is obvious to anyone who is paying attention to the political scene, from which we can deduce that Brooks is doing no such thing. In his column, he refers to "militant secularists" and their "bland relativism", the "smug ignorance" of one Robert Kuttner, and "the forces of selfishness and subjectivism" (since these forces are to be balanced by evangelicals, they are presumably secular). Meanwhile, the "orthodox believers" have "conviction". Sure, "we're a little nervous about the perfectionism that often infects evangelical politics, the rush to crash through procedural checks and balances in order to reach the point of maximum moral correctness" and "sometimes evangelical causes can overflow the banks defined by our founding documents." But "the evangelical tradition is deeply consistent with the American creed" (who knew that the American creed included homophobia?); plus, the evangelicals have "moral rigor" (a ridiculous statement, incidentally: the phrase "moral rigor" is meaningless, and evangelicals are not necessarily more moral than other people simply because they claim to be evangelicals, as the televangelist scandals of the 80's demonstrate) and are partly responsible for "a great wave of internal improvements that transformed the country". It seems to me that Brooks is just a tiny bit biased in favor of the evangelicals here. And yet he admits that the evangelicals have a tendency to ignore the laws in order to impose their moral vision and that they are "overflowing the boundaries of our founding documents" -- i.e., ignoring the Constitution. Meanwhile, what are those bad secularists doing? Well, uh, the ACLU is fighting the constant usage of the sacred vocabulary in the public sphere (which, of course, is not true: the ACLU attempts to prevent the public sphere from being completely overrun by the sacred vocabulary). At least Brooks doesn't descend to the claim that secularists are trying to destroy Christianity by forcing people to say "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas", but really, can't he see what's going on here? This is, in fact, even worse than if Brooks had no idea what was going on (ok, so I was exaggerating earlier): all the facts are in front of him, yet somehow he is unable to put the pieces together.

Naturally, if this material was presented on its own, its patent absurdity would bring it down, so Brooks links everything to Lincoln, a man who "wrestled with faith, longing to be more religious, but never getting there." Brooks sees Lincoln as being firmly in the middle of the culture wars, where by firmly in the middle Brooks means right next to the evangelicals, though not approving wholeheartedly of everything they do. This is interesting, as Lincoln is a man who said "The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." Perhaps Lincoln wanted to be more religious, but he appears to have recognized something that Brooks has not: religion is not the same thing as evangelical Christianity. (This is especially confusing because Brooks is, after all, Jewish). Evidence of Lincoln's peculiarly personal approach to religion abounds: when Lincoln first ran for office, he was dogged by charges that he was "an open scoffer at Christianity" or at least not entirely orthodox in his beliefs. He is the only president who never joined a church. Then there is his Second Inaugural Address, full of quotes like this one: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other." The whole speech is suffused with the feeling that God's plan may not be exactly what anybody, even Lincoln, thinks it is, and is especially a warning to the North (and, presumably, the Radical Republicans, who were in some sense the radical Christian right of the day) not to assume that its victory in the Civil War gave it a monopoly on truth or a sudden ability to divine God's will.

Lincoln is, of course, an excellent figure for Brooks to select, only not for the reasons that Brooks thinks. Unlike today's radical Christian right, Lincoln did not automatically assume that he had all the answers or that he knew God's will. He did not claim that the Bible was literal truth and should be the highest law of the land: after all, he must have known that the Bible was being used to provide support for slavery. Furthermore, Lincoln never tried to impose his religious views on others, insisting that they should remain private. It appears, according to Allen Guelzo, whose biography of Lincoln Brooks quotes, that Lincoln was, in his own way, an intellectual who came to his moral beliefs at least in part by reading books and thinking about what he had read, something which is anathema to the Dobsons and Robertsons of the world. Consider, finally, this Lincoln quote: "The subject presented in the memorial is one upon which I have thought much for weeks past, and I may even say for months. I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other class is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me; for, unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I can learn what it is I will do it! These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right." It is hard to imagine the Lincoln who appears in this quote having much sympathy with today's evangelicals.

It should be noted that the only evidence Brooks gives in favor of his view of Lincoln is that Lincoln told his cabinet, when he announced his intention to, well, proclaim the Emancipation Proclamation, that he had made a vow to God that if the Union won at Antietam, Lincoln would present the decree. This is interesting as this story appears to be practically unsourced (as is his wont, Brooks doesn't source it). For instance, Brooks quotes Lincoln as saying as this meeting that "God had decided the question in favor of the slaves", but a Google search for this quote produces exactly two hits which are not quotes from this column, neither of which state a source for their quote. Google is certainly not all-knowing, and it is possible that new scholarship has revealed this hitherto unknown episode, but it is instructive to examine the timeline that most sources give for the Emancipation Proclamation, one which is rather different than Brooks's. Lincoln first broached the idea of emancipation to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and Secretary of State William Seward on July 13, 1862, and presented it to the full cabinet on July 22. There was no talk of God at this meeting: instead, Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, applauded the Proclamation's military value and Montgomery Blair warned of possible adverse consequences for the fall elections. Lincoln wanted to issue the Proclamation immediately, but Seward persuaded him to wait for some good military news, as otherwise "it may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help." And while Lincoln's strong belief that slavery was wrong, arising at least in part from his religious beliefs, was an important motivation behind the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, it was not the only one. The Proclamation had, as Stanton recognized, considerable military value, as it struck directly at the basis of the South's economy and ensured British backing for the Union.

But of all the ways in which Brooks twists Lincoln to suit his purposes, this sentence is undoubtedly the most ridiculous: "When great leaders make daring leaps, they often feel themselves surrendering to Divine Providence, and their strength flows from their faith that they are acting in accordance with transcendent moral truth." The freethinkers, atheists, and Deists who founded this country -- Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Madison, Franklin, Paine, Hamilton -- would (if they were alive) disagree, in many cases fervently. Furthermore, it is entirely possible to have faith that one is "acting in accordance with transcendent moral truth" without being religious. Brooks is merely recycling the tired old canard that atheists have no concept of morality. What would actually be accurate, or at least more accurate would be to say that "When great leaders make daring leaps, their strength flows from their faith that they are acting in accordance with transcendent moral truth." Religion can be involved, but need not be.

Finally, Robert Kuttner deserves better than to be dismissed as smugly ignorant for proposing that the culture war is now "a contest between enlightened reason and dogmatic absolutism". First of all, it should be made clear that Kuttner proposed no such thing: this formulation is Brooks's. The column to which Brooks appears to be referring is here: Kuttner doesn't even refer to the culture war, a much broader phenomenon than that which he is discussing. Instead, Kuttner attacks the radicals on the far religious right who wage war against science, history, and all forms of intellectual effort when they conflict with what the radical Christians believe to be the revealed truth of the Bible. Just what Brooks feels is objectionable about this is unclear, especially since Brooks, as noted above is Jewish (and, judging from his picture, not Orthodox). As always, the only possible conclusion is that Brooks is flacking for the Republican party, doing his best to put a moderate face on the religious extremists who wield an ever-growing amount of influence over the party. Sadly for Brooks, the Republican party has long since stopped being the party of Lincoln.

Column International Worker's Day 2005 Commentary

2005-05-01T21:24:00.000-04:00

Reading this column should give those brave souls who regularly venture forth into the wilds of David Brooks's writings a strong feeling of deja vu. Blah blah blah compromise, blah blah blah civility, blah blah blah special interest groups are bad, tied together by the insistence that both Republicans and Democrats are equally at fault: if the reader finds this familiar, it's because it is the basis of every column that Brooks writes about politics these days. I don't really feel like going over familiar ground again, and anyway I've already covered the main points of this column that need to be addressed -- the Democrats are not abusing the filibuster, the radical Christian right is the main force driving the move towards the nuclear option -- in a previous piece, so I'm just going to make a couple of key points here. First point: while civility and compromise are important in the Senate, they are important solely as tools for governing, not as ends of their own. Senators are not elected to be civil and compromise: they are elected to govern. Second point: if one party has blocked a handful of extremist court nominees using the only tool available to it and the other party is attempting to overturn years of tradition to remove that tool at the behest of a group of radical Christians who want to turn the country into a theocracy, the second party is to blame for the situation. Brooks does his best to hold up the fiction that radical leftist interest groups are pushing the Democrats just as hard as the fundies are pushing the Republicans, but the fundies keep undermining him by holding events like Justice Sunday to air their claim that the filibuster is being used against "people of faith". Who knew that the 200 or so Bush nominees who were confirmed in his first term were all atheists? And remember that in Clinton's second term the Republicans prevented 65 nominees from obtaining floor votes by various methods, all of which they eliminated as soon as Bush became president. The Democrats, by comparison, have blocked exactly ten nominees, and all of them because they would make bad judges. This last point sounds obvious, but during Clinton's second term the Republicans would often deny hearings to Clinton appointees simply because something Clinton had done -- his continuing to exist, for instance -- had annoyed them. Really, these two points are all you need to understand the fundamental dishonesties of Brooks's approach.

Finally, a historical note: at the end of the column, Brooks urges that the Senators look back to Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser. Interestingly, Clay's reputation for compromises stems from his involvement in the Missouri Compromise and Compromise of 1850, both of which were ultimately futile attempts to patch over the fundamental differences between the pro-slavery South and the anti-slavery North. I'm not sure if this is exactly the model Brooks thinks the Senate should emulate. Also, it should be noted that Clay was extremely partisan at times and waged a political war with Andrew Jackson that was easily as bitter as anything between Democrats and Republicans today.

I apologize for the general shortness of my recent posts, but life has me by the hind leg, as they say. I hope to resume regularly scheduled service shortly.

Column 2005-5-28 Commentary

2005-04-28T21:41:00.000-04:00

Today, Brooks addresses himself to a topic about which I know little: the impending demographic crisis in Russia. Due to the pressures of watching the NBA playoffs -- er, working, right, working -- I lack the time to flesh out my knowledge beyond one article in the New Yorker. On the other hand, that article in the New Yorker certainly seemed to back everything that Brooks has written here (in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that Brooks read the same article and then just looked up some statistics to flesh out his column), and since there's no official Republican party line about Russian demography, there's no real incentive for Brooks to lie about this subject. Unfortunately for Brooks, he soon strays from a straight recital of the facts to foolish and obviously stupid generalizations. While it is impressive that he manages to get half of this column right, the second half is all-too-typical of Brooks's usual idiocies.

The problem is that Brooks is extremely puzzled as to how the horrible things he talks about -- the high death rates, low birth rates, low life expectancy, health care system in shambles, etc., etc. -- can be compatible with the high rate of economic growth Russia is experiencing. You can almost hear the wheels whirring as Brooks tries to figure out how it is that economic growth is not rescuing the country from its other problems. Unable, like all conservatives, to face the fact that a rising tide does not always lift all, or even most, boats, Brooks instead chooses to blame this paradox on Russia's totalitarian past. Which would be, though a nice example of a conservative blind spot, reasonable if he didn't also choose, for no apparent reason, to generalize this problem in to something he calls "Post-Totalitarian Stress Syndrome". He goes on to theorize some more about his syndrome, but there's really no point in reading it, because it's obvious that he had simply made it up and it is not applicable beyond Russia. Consider, for instance, the other states that formerly made up the Soviet bloc. They all have problems of one sort or another, but none have problems similar to Russia's. In fact, some are doing quite well: for instance, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary seem to have thrown off 40-odd years of Communist domination much more easily than Russia has. Or consider Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all of which are doing considerably better than Russia despite a history that has been practically identical to Russia's over the past couple hundred years. The idea that all states recover from totalitarian regimes in the same way is patently ridiculous: Russia's problems are, for the most part, uniquely Russian.

Brooks then goes on to assert that we would be seeing something similar in Iraq, even if the insurgency were under control, which is possible but stupid. After all, the war in Chechnya is certainly not helping the mortality figures, and armed conflict is often a result of "profound social chaos". It is quite likely that there is no scenario in which the fall of Saddam Hussein would not have resulted in some sort of insurgency or civil war. But what Brooks really wants to do is predict the downfall of China. Not that he has anything in particular to base this prediction on: there are lots of old people, he says, and lots of young men without anything to do. But because of totalitarianism, China will pay a price! Or, perhaps not. After all, we do have the examples of Taiwan and South Korea, both East Asian nations that made transitions from dictatorships to democracy without too much internal conflict. Of course, China faces a very different situation, but then China also faces a very different situation than Russia did. For one thing, the problems Brooks cites have to do with a surplus of people: Russia suffers from a shortage. And then there's the fact that China's geopolitical position, culture, and history are all very different from Russia's. The only similarity between them is the rule of a totalitarian state with an ideology loosely based on Communism, and while this is an important similarity, it's a little much to say that it will trump all the differences.

It's really sad that Brooks can't get his passion for wild generalizations about culture under control even when writing about international affairs. Somehow, though, I have trouble summoning up any sympathy.

Column 2005-4-24 Commentary

2005-04-24T00:21:00.000-04:00

In the interests of preserving what's left of my sanity, I'm not going to comment on today's column. I assure you that it's not simple laziness: in fact, the strain of reading this column once left me drained for hours. Brooks has made an art form of unfunnyness, and I mean that in the worst possible way. Please don't bother reading today's column: it won't even give you a nice dose of outrage. Unless, that is, you're an atheist who is wavering in your lack of faith, in which case today's offering from Brooks will certainly confirm for you that there is no God.

Column 2005-4-21 Commentary

2005-04-21T18:30:00.000-04:00

With a column as completely devoid of any redeeming characteristics as this one, it's hard to know where to begin. (Actually, that's not true: begin with Michael Berube.) Ok, so Brooks does get one thing right: he makes the correct argument for not disposing of the filibuster. But the rest of the column ranges from arguments that are stupefying in their idiocy to outright lies. Perhaps the best place to start is with this claim: "Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better." If Brooks really believes this, he is probably certifiably insane. Can he really think that the radical Christian right will just quietly die back and stop agitating if Roe v. Wade vanished from the political scene? The obvious consequence of such a move would not be to send the abortion question back to be discussed civilly, or even uncivilly, as would undoubtedly be the case, in state legislatures. Instead, the radical Christians would immediately propose a bill banning abortion in Congress. It would pass the House and face a filibuster in the Senate, and if Brooks thinks there is a lot of pressure on the Republicans to abolish the filibuster to get a handful of judges confirmed, consider the pressure if the result of the nuclear option would be the far more tangible result of a bill banning abortion. And, of course, if the bill gets passed, it would immediately go through a court challenge which would probably end with it being struck down, leaving us in essentially the same place. If the bill doesn't pass because of the filibuster, the focus would shift briefly to the states, until Massachusetts or one of the usual blue-state suspects passed a law allowing abortion, which would immediately face a court challenge. Once it makes it to the Supreme Court, this law would probably be upheld, and then, guess what, we're in exactly the same position again. Striking down Roe v. Wade would change nothing in the abortion fight.

But the real problem with this idea is that the stakes have moved beyond abortion. The Christian right will no longer be satisfied with simply overturning Roe v. Wade. Consider the April 7-8 conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith", held in Washington, D.C, and attended by many prominent conservatives: "two House members; aides to two senators; representatives from the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America; conservative activists Alan Keyes and Morton C. Blackwell; the lawyer for Terri Schiavo's parents; Alabama's "Ten Commandments" judge, Roy Moore; and DeLay, who canceled to attend the pope's funeral." Phyllis Schlafly, another prominent attendee, said that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion overturning the death penalty for juveniles was grounds for impeachment. One Edwin Vieira said that his "bottom line" for dealing with judges was taken from Stalin: "[Stalin] had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem.'" The full quote, of course, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." And don't think Vieira didn't know that. But this conference was about more than inflammatory rhetoric: one of its main purposes was to promote the Constitution Restoration Act, also known (or should be known) as the No Church-State Separation Act. The most ridiculous clause is the following: "Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government." The rest of the Act is equally offensive, but with this it is clear that the new goal of the Christian right is a theocracy. And the fact that this Act could even be introduced into Congress shows just how close we are to the fulfillment of this goal. The end of Roe v. Wade would not halt these people: abortion is not their only grievance any more. There is a vast litany of potential hot-button issues that could replace abortion as the motivating power behind this drive towards theocracy: gay marriage, contraception (especially the morning-after pill), the display of the Ten Commandments or other Christian imagery in public places, prayer in schools, etc., etc. For Brooks to state that the reversal of Roe v. Wade is sufficient, or even necessary, to restore civility to politics is ludicrous: the Christian right will be satisfied with nothing except the legislation of their interpretation of Christian morality, and those of us who don't believe that God is the source of government, but, as this musty old document says, hold that it derives from the consent of the governed, will continue to fight them.

It is almost as stupid to point to Roe v. Wade as the source of all political acrimony today. It was certainly one source of incivility, but hardly the only one. For instance, here's an article from the Eagle Forum about how the Warren Court "fueled the Culture War into an inferno and then placed the federal judiciary squarely in the white-hot center of the conflagration." Strangely, Roe v. Wade wasn't until 1972, three years after Warren retired. And what is the Eagle Forum? It's the radical right-wing organization of prominent conservative Phyllis Schlafly. Perhaps abortion is not quite as central to the radical agenda of the Christian right as Brooks seems to think. In fact, there are a number of similarities between the attacks on Warren by the far right in the fifties and sixties and the attacks on judges by their ideological heirs today. He was denounced as a Communist by the head of the John Birch Society. At one massive rally, a speaker prefigured Edwin Vieira by declaring that impeachment was too good for Warren: he should be hanged. The fact is that the right-wing war on the courts has been going on for a long time, and for good reason: in order to establish a theocracy, the courts will have to be neutered or replaced en masse with Christian conservatives.

Sadly, Brooks's column only goes downhill from the collapse of his main thesis. Consider his claim that "[the Roe decision] took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts." This is obvious nonsense. The issue was put in the courts by Jane Roe, whoever she was. The Supreme Court would have to rule on it at some point, and no matter what Brooks thinks, the basis of that ruling would be the justices' interpretation of the Constitution. If the justices felt, as they did, that the law (a Texas anti-abortion statute) was unconstitutional, they had no choice but to so rule. They could not say "Well, this statute is unconstitutional, but we feel that it would be best if the issue was left to the legislature where a compromise reflecting the centrist consensus can be worked out." And if Brooks had actually read the decision, he would know that it allows states to regulate abortion after the first trimester, as long as an exception is made for the health of the mother. Presumably, this reflects the kind of centrist compromise that Brooks thinks exists (unless Brooks is even crazier than we think). And it's interesting that Brooks feels that legislative compromises would have been regarded as more legitimate than a judgement passed down by the highest court in the land. Does he really believe that the first bill passed by a state legislature allowing abortion would not have been immediately challenged in court? Remember, the Supreme Court, a body which exists purely for the purpose of determining whether legislation is consistent with the Constitution, held that legislation banning abortion is not constutitional. I'm not sure how one could exceed that in terms of legitimacy.

Brooks then states that "Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion." This is a gross misrepresentation. The actual decision stated that "State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure on the mother's behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy." Essentially, Blackmun asserts that abortion falls under a right to privacy which derives from the 14th amendment. This is not at all the same thing as inventing "a right to abortion" out of whole cloth. Certainly, nowhere in the Constitution does it say that a woman has the right to an abortion. But then again, neither does it say that a woman has no right to an abortion. That is, at least in part, why we have a Supreme Court: so that issues such as this one, to which the Constitution does not directly refer, can be adjudicated. Also, it's interesting to note that abortion was legal in the United States until the middle of the 19th century, so it's not as if the Founding Fathers didn't have the opportunity to express an opinion on this issue at the time the Constitution was written.

Brooks also asserts that Roe v. Wade "imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation." Well, I guess it all depends on what nations Brooks feels are comparable. Apparently, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden are all not comparable as all have abortion policies that are more liberal than the United States's. And as the decision does allow abortion to be heavily regulated after the first trimester, and banned in the third, as long as an exception is made for the health of the mother, that would presumably bring us into line with most First World nations.

What were the consequences of this, according to Brooks? Well, apparently "religious conservatives" felt that "their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists." This is, frankly, stunning in its idiocy. What democratic rights had been usurped? The right not to have an abortion? The right to protest against the existence of abortions? The right to believe that abortion is a sin? No, the "right" that has been usurped is the right to impose one's religious views on other people, and I'm pretty sure that this right is not enshrined the Constitution. If a group's religious beliefs lead them to believe that black people are inferior -- and remember, the Bible was often called upon to provide a justification for slavery -- and the Supreme Court says that the Constitution disagrees, does that allow them to claim that their democratic rights have been usurped? Or, more to the point, does that require anyone in their right mind to sympathize which such a claim? Not only is this idea that democratic rights were lost stupid, it's wrong: the decision could be overturned democratically with a constitutional amendment. But Brooks's formulation of the grievance of religious conservatives, that "their democratic rights had been usurped", really shows just how hollow their case is. Abortion is an entirely private affair. It cannot be argued by any stretch of the imagination that an abortion impacts the lives of anyone outside of the family of the woman who chooses to have an abortion. Murder, for instance, is banned because it might happen to us against our will, but no one in the United States will ever be forced to have an abortion against her will. So there is no sense in which anti-abortion protesters can be said to be losing any rights from legal abortion. Their position is based entirely on the contention that abortion is morally wrong, this contention is drawn entirely from their religious beliefs, and therefore to ban abortion would be to violate the separation of church and state in an extremely clear-cut fashion by imposing the religious beliefs of some on all.

Brooks next claims that Roe v. Wade caused liberals to lose touch with the working class because "they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views." This is nonsensical: the whole point of Brooks's piece is that Roe v. Wade injected a lot of acrimony, much of it about abortion, into the national consciousness. Abortion was the topic on everyone's lips. Yet somehow the Democrats managed to get away with never having to discuss their views on abortion. And despite talking about abortion so much, the working class apparently didn't actually care what politicians thought about it. There are plenty of reasons why the Democrats have lost touch with the white working class, but abortion is probably not the most important, and the fact that polls consistently find that a majority of the population supports Roe v. Wade would seem to support this.

Furthermore, Brooks says, both political parties have become "dominated by absolutist activists." Indeed? What, exactly, does an absolutist pro-choice activist look like? This view even over-simplifies the Republican side of things: the Christian right is much more than simply a bunch of anti-abortion activists. Furthermore, polls show that Americans think that the Democratic party is closer to their views on abortion than the Republican party, 45-35, and that any Supreme Court justices who are nominated should uphold Roe v. Wade, 50-34. Given these numbers, it seems that the Democratic party actually reflects the views of a majority of Americans and that it is only the Republicans who have been hijacked by extremists. But we shouldn't be too surprised: it's practically standard operating procedure for Brooks to conjure up a false equivalence between the Democratic and Republican parties. Sadly for him, no matter how hard he tries, he can't cover up the fact that the Democratic party reflects the views of most Americans on abortion, and the minority of hard-core activists on the Republican side are responsible for just about all of the lack of political civility he deplores.

Brooks also casually drops off the claim that abortion is never the subject of judicial confirmation battles: instead, some other pretext is sought. This sounds like an attempt to suggest that the judicial nominees the Republicans are currently seeking to push through are perfectly fine except for their anti-abortion views, so just to set the record straight, here's Alberto Gonzales attacking the right-wing judicial activism of Fifth Circuit nominee Priscilla Owen (this woman is too much of an activist even for the Attorney General who dismissed the Geneva Conventions as quaint); a wide-ranging report on D.C. Circuit nominee Janice Rogers Brown, who is probably certifiably insane; a brief discussion of the record of Eleventh Circuit nominee William Pryor, the man who complained when the Supreme Court ruled that "handcuffing a prisoner to a hitching post and denying him clothing, water, and even bathroom breaks" was cruel and unusual punishment (no wonder he was nominated by Bush); and a press release on D.C. Circuit nominee Thomas Griffith, who practiced law in Utah for several years without a license (I really feel that that one speaks for itself).

Brooks then comes to the filibuster, and breaks out the Big Lie (there's always one in these columns): "Up until now, minorities have generally not used the filibuster to defeat nominees that have majority support. They have allowed nominees to have an up or down vote." This is partly simply misleading: minorities, including groups of Republicans currently in the Senate and fighting to destroy the filibuster, have attempted to use it to defeat nominees before, but failed. But in a larger sense this is a lie. During the Clinton Administration, there were a number of ways to keep nominees from being approved without resorting to the filibuster. There was the blue slip system, by which senators were allowed to overrule the appointment of judges to courts in their home states. There was a rule stating that if any Judiciary Committee member objects to a nominee, at least one minority member must support the nominee. Anonymous floor holds could be placed on nominees to prevent votes. And many nominees were simply denied hearings, even nominees with bipartisan support. Clinton even consulted with Republican Senators on nominations, especially nominations for courts in their home states. As a result, Republicans did not have to resort to the filibuster to stop judges they disapproved of: such nominations simply died in committee. As a result of these tactics, in 1999-2000 19 of 32 Clinton appeals-court nominee were prevented from receiving votes (by contrast, Democrats have blocked 10 of 52 Bush appeals-court nominees in his entire first term). But when Bush assumed the presidency, all the rules that the Republicans had used to slow nominations during Clinton's terms were eliminated. Unable to fight nominations in committee, the Democrats were forced to resort to the filibuster, and the Republicans have now decided that even this is too much power over nominations.

Aside from Brooks's blithe assertion that the Republicans have the right to eliminate the filibuster, he is mostly right about why the Republicans should not eliminate the filibuster. But once past that explanation, he oversimplifies things. It is not abortion activists who want the filibuster gone: it is religious conservatives who want far, far more than the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And he does a nice job of suggesting that the Democrats would carry out their threat to shut down Senate business if the Republicans deploy the nuclear option because otherwise their pro-choice activists would eat them, which is nonsense. It is the Republicans who are being pushed to the nuclear option by the radical Christian right, and if they do kill the filibuster, the Democrats will fight back because they believe that, even though they are the minority party, they do have some rights in the Senate (as opposed to the House, where Democrats have no rights at all). Abortion is really only a secondary motivating factor now: it might well be that the Terry Schiavo controversy has (if only temporarily) surpassed abortion (and gay marriage) as the number one right-wing complaint about activist judges.

In his final paragraph, Brooks declares "The entire country is trapped." This is correct: the problem is that Brooks claims that we have been trapped by a handful of Supreme Court justices, and by extension all women who want abortions. Because that is really what it comes down to: at some point, some woman was going to sue because the law of the state she resided in prevented her from making a decision about what she could do with her own body, and the Supreme Court would hold that no state law could interfere with her right to control her body (the decision is more complicated than that, of course, as has been pointed out above, but for this argument, simplicity will suffice). This is a truly classic and disgusting blame-the-victim approach, which Brooks attempts to hide by saying that we need to have a "democratic abortion debate." But why is such a thing necessary? If such a debate should result in a majority deciding that they are more qualified to regulate women's bodies than the women themselves are, would that make them right? In fact, such a situation is exactly one where the courts should step in, according to Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Papers 78: "This independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humors, which . . . the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves, and which . . . have a tendency, . . . to occasion dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community." So no, we are not trapped by Supreme Court judges, or by women who want the right to control their own bodies: we are trapped by extremist fundamentalist Christians who are attempting to impose their beliefs on the entire country.

And, apparently, the Times, and its readers, are trapped by Brooks. Perhaps he has compromising photographs of the Times editors? Maybe they owe him vast sums lost at the weekly editorial and op-ed pages poker game? Or does Brooks have supernatural powers that allows him to prevent the Times editors from discerning just how shitty his work is? Today's column is a mass of lies, distortions, and idiocies, and it's hardly the first to match that description, yet it is extremely unlikely that Brooks will be fired for it.

Special non-David Brooks edition

2005-04-20T18:58:00.000-04:00

Well, it turns out I'm not as busy as I thought this week. Or, to put it another way, it was too hot to work today (M.I.T. doesn't seem to have their air conditioning going yet, though it's hard to blame them since it's only April) and everybody else left early, so I did the same. However, Brooks's latest was pretty reasonable, and I'm getting a little sick of Brooks (that is, sick of reviewing Brooks: I've been sick of Brooks since about two nanoseconds after reading his first Times column). Plus, I read this attack on Juan Cole (Professor of History at the University of Michigan and blogger), by one Ephraim Karsh, which is easily as moronic as anything David Brooks has come out with, so I thought I'd take a crack at it for a change of pace, rather than digging up some old piece of Brooksiana (notwithstanding the fact that Giblets has already covered this topic in far superior fashion).

The basic thesis of this work is that Juan Cole, a highly respected historian and president of the Middle Eastern Studies Association of North America, is purveying Arabist misconceptions and, more importantly, "conspiratorial anti-Semitism" on his blog about Middle Eastern affairs. Skipping lightly over introductory material which serves largely to suggest that Professor Cole has engaged in his blogging at least in part to raise his personal profile, the first real argument of the piece is that Cole subscribes to the "Arabist orthodoxy" that "Many of the problems of contemporary Arab societies are . . . ascribed to the legacy of Western colonialism." Further, "The West is blamed for (allegedly) carving the defunct Ottoman Empire into artificial entities, in accordance with its imperial interests and with complete disregard for the yearning of the indigenous peoples for political unity." Now, I am not an expert in Middle Eastern studies, but this seems to be a quite reasonable contention to me. After all, much the same thing happened in Africa, and even in Europe (surely no one would assert that Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia were natural countries with sensible boundaries): why should the Middle East be any different? To refute these claims, Karsh asserts that local leaders often played an "active role" in reshaping their regions. This may be the case, but from a strictly common-sense point of view, it would seem that the interests of the imperial powers would be likely to override those of the locals should they come into conflict. And even if this were the case, any local leaders were unlikely to be thinking of the indigenous peoples as a whole, but rather of the prospects for their own gain. Karsh also attempts to refute Cole's claim that "the Middle East suffers from having small countries imposed by Western colonialism" by pointing out that Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Egypt are all bigger than Great Britain. Well, you don't have to have a PhD in history to see that this argument is completely ridiculous. The situations of, say, Egypt and Great Britain are in no way analagous. Also, if we examine the context of the quote, we see that Cole is, in fact, referring to countries like Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the U.A.E., etc., which are undeniably quite small. Would it be better for the Middle East if Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Persian Gulf Emirates were all the same country? Would that have made more sense? Perhaps not, but simply asserting that Syria is larger than Great Britain is not an argument that the answers to those questions should be no. And, of course, at the time Britain actually was larger than any of the countries it created, given that it still controlled a vast empire, including India, a fact that seems to have slipped Karsh's mind.

Karsh then asserts that there has been "no real discussion of the veracity of this blame-the-West hypothesis since . . . the mid '30's", and that one Elie Kedourie (who he describes as an eminent historian) was shunned by the "denizens of Middle Eastern studies" for attacking the "blame-the-West hypothesis". All this means exactly nothing, of course. There has been no real discussion of the creationist hypothesis in evolutionary biology for years, and those promoting it are shunned. Does this make them right and indict evolutionary biologists as close-minded? While this is an extreme example, it seems equally extreme to absolve Britain for all responsibility for the problems suffered in a Middle East that Britain largely shaped. According to this (extremely friendly) biography, Kedourie was a big fan of empire in general and the British empire in particular and blames the problems of the Middle East on the "resurgence of its own despotic tradition". Which is certainly one thesis, and one that my general lack of knowledge on the subject prevents me from dismissing. On the other hand, Karsh makes no real effort to defend it, or, really, to present any sort of alternative to the arguments of Cole and the Arabists (I should note at this point that I have no idea if Cole's arguments are really Arabist, but I assume that Karsh wouldn't keep calling them that if there wasn't a least a strong connection).

This trend of presenting no alternatives continues when Karsh talks of how these Arabist misconceptions prevent "a correct prognosis" of the causes of 9/11. He dismisses the Arabist claim that "September 11 as a response to an arrogant and self-serving U.S. foreign policy by a fringe extremist group whose violent interpretation of Islam has little to do with the actual spirit and teachings of this religion." What is the correct explanation? Well, Karsh doesn't really seem to want to give one, which is not actually too surprising, as judging by the phrase "Ignoring centuries of Islamic jihads against those deemed infidels and the deeply illiberal elements of Islam," Karsh thinks the reason is that Muslims are evil. That may be a slightly simplistic interpretation of what Karsh thinks caused 9/11, but only slightly. After all, we could turn Karsh's argument around and use it to discover that Eric Rudolph committed terrorist attacks because he was Christian and Christians are evil. We could point to a history of Christian holy wars, down to the conflict in Northern Ireland, and the existence of deeply illiberal elements of Christianity. And we would be completely full of shit. Hell, we could probably use the same argument on Jewish terrorists: after all, the Bible glorifies a number of holy wars (against, e.g., the Philistines), and there are decidedly illiberal Jewish elements, such as the settler movement. Actually, this argument is applicable to almost any religion. There may, of course, be more to the argument that Islam makes people terrorists (though I strongly doubt it), but Karsh fails to present it, and really, the fact that there are millions and millions of Muslims who are not and never will be terrorists would seem to be an important argument against this hypothesis.

At this point, we get to the real meat of Karsh's argument: Cole is an anti-Semite. Karsh first claims that Cole's anti-Semitism manifests itself in that Cole is wrong in claiming that anti-Semitism in the Arab world is a response to Israel and in blaming Israel for the Middle East's problems. He constructs his argument on the latter point entirely from two quotes taken from a review of Bernard Lewis's "What Went Wrong" by Cole (wrongly identified as a blog post). The first quote, ""rather than saddling a small, poor peasant country with 500,000 immigrants hungry to make the place their own," sounds bad, especially as Karsh prefaces it with "it would have been preferable for the British to have simply accepted Jewish refugees", and leaves out Cole's actual words, "While one certainly cheers the British for giving refuge in Palestine to Jews fleeing Hitler, it would have been nobler yet to admit them to the British Isles". Given that the idea of sending the Jews to Palestine -- especially the Balfour declaration, declaring British support for a Jewish homeland -- was at least in part a product of British anti-Semitism, Cole would seem to be at least partly correct here. He may underestimate the extent to which the Jews wanted to go to Palestine, but Karsh probably underestimates the extent to which the formation of Israel was an "ordinary colonialist project". After all, just because many of the settlers wanted to be there doesn't mean that it's not colonialism and the natives are not being oppressed: see, e.g., the early history of the United States. The second quote -- "the rise of Israel put pressure on Arab budgets, when a different sort of neighbour might have allowed them to invest the money in more fruitful areas than the military" -- while more damning, is also taken out of context: it is a small part of an argument that the lack of industrialization in the Arab world is not a direct consequence of Islam. Not a very convincing part of that argument, to be sure, but there is just one sentence discussing this claim. It is certainly not intended to explain Arab militarism.

By contrast, Karsh's claim that Cole is wrong that Israel is solely responsible for Arab anti-Semitism actually has a multitude of facts to back it up, though most of his specific assertions tend to be about fairly recent events and thus do not really refute Cole's claims. Is Karsh correct? Well, I don't know for sure, but Bernard Lewis doesn't think so. And a brief Google search found no dissenting voices. I wouldn't want to declare an academic controversy finished simply because I can't find anything to support one side on Google, but Bernard Lewis is a fairly well-known voice in the field, and it seems that the case may not be as open-and-shut as Karsh thinks.

After this, Karsh throws all attempts at academic argument to the winds and simply accuses Cole of being anti-Semitic, largely by taking more quotes out of context. He claims Cole asserts that U.S. foreign policy is "controlled by a ruthless Zionist cabal implanted at the highest echelons of the Bush administration", using, in Cole's words, "sneaky methods of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of intelligence". But in fact, when he uses those words, Cole is referring to the neocons, who are undeniably controlling American foreign policy. And immediately afterwards, Cole points out that the person most guilty of using these tactics is Dick Cheney, who is not Jewish. Karsh gives a whole paragraph to the fact that Cole despises Ariel Sharon, which is really irrelevant (as is his snark about how this loathing "comes from a historian priding himself on his dispassionate and evenhanded approach": obviously, he would be more evenhanded in an actual paper, but this is a blog, for crying out loud). Then Karsh makes a big deal out of Cole supposedly substituting the term "Likudniks" for "Neoconservatives". Yet a search of Cole's site turns up a mere nine hits for "likudniks", compared to 101 for "neocons". Karsh makes much of Cole's statement that "if Sharon and AIPAC decide that they need the US government to take military action against Iran, it is likely that the US government will do so." According to Karsh, "in Cole's fertile imagination, there are no limits to Sharon's domination of the White House." But once again he has taken Cole out of context. Later in the same paragraph of the piece that quote is taken from, Cole says "So it isn't that AIPAC can snap its fingers and make something happen in Washington. But it can put together powerful coalitions and leverage its influence through policy allies, which does tend to make things happen." And given the strong pro-Israel views among the evangelical community and the likely support from such a venture from major oil interests and neoconservatives, it's hard to disagree with this. Karsh also laughs at Cole for speculating that the attempt to capture Muqtada al-Sadr in April 2004, which sparked two months of violence, was caused by al-Sadr objecting loudly "to Sharon's murder of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the clerical leader of the Hamas Party." But in his actual post, Cole goes on to say that al-Sadr "had promised to be the right hand of Hamas in Iraq, and to open Hamas offices all around the country." So it was more than simply loud denunciations of the assassination. And that "The CPA had been tempted to go after Muqtada on more than one previous occasion, but it appears that cooler heads, like Gen. John Abizaid, had prevailed." So perhaps the idea of al-Sadr becoming closely associated with Hamas prompted the Americans to act. Note further that the killing of the four Blackwater mercenaries in Fallujah were declared to be revenge for the assassination of Yassin. Apparently, that event had more reverberations in Iraq than Karsh is willing to accept.

Karsh's most ludicrous paragraph deserves its own special treatment. Karsh asserts: " Cole provides no proof whatsoever for this conspiratorial thinking--there is none. During Saddam's 25 years in power, Iraq killed not a single Israeli. Nor has a single American soldier ever been sent to fight on Israel's behalf. It is therefore complete nonsense to suggest that the United States would go to war to defend Israel, rather than its own national security." First of all, if Saddam never killed any Israelis, it wasn't for lack of trying. And it's interesting that Karsh doesn't note that Saddam paid the families of suicide bombers, as that was the main tie between Saddam and terrorism. And while it is true that no American soldiers have ever fought on Israel's behalf, that's probably because Israel didn't really need the help. Furthermore, it is possible to help a country win a war in other ways than simply sending soldiers: a country can send money, over $80 billion in the past fifty years, and weapons, about $7 billion worth in the past decade alone. But to state that the United States would never go to war to defend Israel is ridiculous. Of course the United States would go to war to defend Israel, if it felt that it was necessary. In fact, some Israelis have suggested that one of the primary motivations of the Iraq war was to improve Israel's security.

Unsurprisingly, Karsh's argument boils down to this: Cole opposes the right-wing Israelis, their policies and their enablers in the U.S. government, and therefore is anti-Semitic. (Yes, many of those enablers are Jewish, but if we had a Democratic government with a liberal President and Israel had a Labor government, most of the people determining America's Middle East policy at the Feith-Perle-Abrams level would be left-wing Jews.) And this leads us to the real reason Karsh writes this article: to identify modern Judaism with the Likud party, and thus to establish that to criticize Likud and its policies is to be objectively anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. And this makes me angry, because I'm Jewish (well, ethnically Jewish), and I object to Likud's policies and the war in Iraq. There is no sense whatsoever in which Likud and Ariel Sharon can be said to speak for me, and yet by equating Cole's criticism of Likud and its ideological allies with anti-Semitism, Karsh is implying that, in fact, my views are exactly the same as those of Likud's, or should be. This is an insult to me, to my Jewish relatives and friends (all of whom oppose Likud and the Iraq war), and in fact to all Jews, in the United States and even in Israel, who object to Likud policies and to the war in Iraq. And given that American Jews rejected the Republicans, despite the close ties between them and Likud and the Iraq war, by large margins in the last election, I would guess that this group is easily a majority of American Jews. Perhaps Karsh will pause and consider that before he next accuses someone of anti-Semitism for suggesting that ideological allies of Likud control much of America's Middle Eastern policy. Perhaps he'll even apologize. Personally, I'm not holding my breath.

Column 2005-4-17 Commentary

2005-04-19T22:33:00.000-04:00

Amazingly, Brooks has come out with another eminently reasonable column: this one has the thesis that 50 Cent rapping about blow jobs does not mean that the youth of America are engaged in a vast orgy. He even makes the point that this exact same thing (no, not 50 Cent rapping about blow jobs, people talking about the degeneracy and general no-goodness of the younger generation) has been happening for years and years, and yet somehow we manage to make it to the next generation without the apocalyptic collapse of American culture. While the column is not all good, I'm too busy right now to go into its minor idiocies, so I'll leave their extraction as an exercise for the reader (max five pages, please. This will count for 25% of your final grade.)

So over the past two months, Brooks has been averaging one good column a month. In other words, he's on a hot streak. I just wonder if he'll repudiate the thesis of this column in a couple of weeks, the same way he repudiated his corruption column. It's less likely, since this column is unlikely to interfere with his partisan hack duties, but if Tom DeLay proposes the Get That Smut off the Airwaves Bill (and at this point DeLay will do anything to keep attention off of his corruption scandals), all bets are off.

Column 2005-4-14 Commentary

2005-04-14T21:29:00.000-04:00

First of all, I wish to allay any fears you may have had that Brooks's Sunday column portended a three-Brooks-column week. In fact, the Times was simply reorganizing its columnists to make room for the addition of one John Tierney. On the basis of exactly one column, I can say that Tierney, while not too bright, isn't quite the moron that Brooks is, so don't expect a companion anti-John Tierney blog to pop up any time soon, unless someone else is willing to write it. Anyway, Tierney is completely unknown outside the Times, while the sad truth is that there are people out there who think that Brooks has important and interesting insights into modern American culture.

Hopefully, this column will help these people realize the awful mistake they are making. First of all, it's obvious that Brooks wrote it in about fifteen minutes. The fact that there are no typos or grammatical howlers proves only that the Times has enough self-respect left to edit for spelling and grammar. What other conclusion can one come to, given that Brooks put almost no effort into writing this column? Supposedly, Brooks is defending Bolton, but he spends exactly two sentences on this defense, saying that "it is ridiculous to say [Bolton] doesn't believe in the United Nations." Apparently, this is a "canard spread by journalists who haven't bothered to read his stuff and by crafty politicians who aren't willing to say what the Bolton debate is really about." Well, for one thing, the Bolton debate is about more than simply whether or not he believes in the United Nations, but even if we let Brooks simplify it down to this one point, not one shred of evidence is presented to suggest that Bolton believes in the U.N. After all, mounting an effective defence of Bolton would require a lot of work, especially as it's not really possible. Instead, Brooks summons up some strawmen who are attempting to create a world government by pushing "creeping institutions like the International Criminal Court." And he then proceeds to argue against them by unleashing his latent black helicopter fantasies. Brooks generally doesn't strike you as the type of lunatic who goes out to Idaho to form a militia to defend against the coming U.N. invasion and shows you the locations of the concentration camps for U.S. citizens which he has deduced by decoding the backs of cereal boxes, but apparently all conservatives have a strain of this kind of thinking running through them, and rather than doing any actual work on this column, Brooks simply unleashes his paranoia. It's not that his arguments are usually much more coherent than this, but usually you feel that he actually put some thought into them. Maybe he just forgot that his column is now on Thursday and had to put something together at the last minute.

For instance, there's the case of Bolton. Apparently, it's nonsense to say that Bolton doesn't believe in the U.N. I wonder how Brooks explains this statement, then? “It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so—because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States.” Or how about this one: "The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." Sure seems like Bolton doesn't really believe in the U.N. all that much. Or how about this: "If I were redoing the security council today, I'd have one permanent member because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world." Brooks began his career with Jesse Helms, another notable U.N.-basher, so this is hardly surprising. But it is hardly the only reason why Bolton's nomination has garnered so much opposition. For instance, Bolton says that he opposes negotiations with rogue states: "I don't do carrots." In fact, he very nearly completely undermined the opening of the six-party talks with North Korea by giving an inflammatory, though true, speech that was not approved by the State Department or the State Department's chief North Korean envoy, Jack Pritchard. The North Koreans responded with a statement in which Bolton was referred to as "scum", and Pritchard was treated to a tirade by the North Korean envoys. Pritchard responded by reiterating that only the President and the Secretary of State could make U.S. policy, which salvaged the talks, but when Bolton found out that Pritchard had not defended him, he was infuriated and pressed for Pritchard to be fired. It should be mentioned that his was only part of a pattern of Bolton undermining American policy towards North Korea. Less than a month later, Pritchard stepped down, only days before the talks were set to begin. It could be a coincidence, but Bolton was undoubtedly close to the President: he worked for Bush and Cheney in the 2000 campaign, and was a big enough player to be sent to Miami-Dade County to stop the counting of ballots. And Bolton has a history of attacking people who opposed him: in 2002, when the chief bioweapons analyst for the State Departent prevented him from claiming in a speech that Cuba had a bioweapons program because the evidence was too shaky Bolton attempted to have the analyst fired. Unsurprisingly, Bolton also has a history of pushing shaky intelligence: he was one of the main forces behind the claim that Iraq was attempting to obtain uranium from Niger. Furthermore, Bolton has been described an "anti-diplomat" and as a "kiss-up, kick-down" person by former State Department officials. The one good thing that can be said for Bolton is that he's consistent: sadly, he's consistently crazy.

Of course, Brooks doesn't even bother trying to address the above body of evidence. Instead, he invents some people who, frustrated by the difficulties of imposing an immediate world government, have decided to go at piece by piece by, shockingly, trying to impose a few basic rules on the world. These crazy people believe that "a world of separate nations, living by the law of the jungle, will inevitably be a violent world." In order to avoid this situation, they champion creeping institutions like the ICC, which is so dangerous to sovereignty that its charter was copied wholesale to provide the basis of the Iraq Special Tribunal that will try Saddam. First of all, it seems pretty obvious that a world of separate nations living by the law of the jungle will indeed be pretty violent. A cursory glance at history should confirm this. What people are actually saying is that the community of nations is much like a community of ordinary people: it needs rules to keep it in order. Brooks believes this too, he just thinks that there should be only one rule: you do what the U.S. tells you, or we overthrow your government in the name of freedom. Brooks and all the neocons who think that the U.S. needs to project its power in the name of democracy are firm believers in "global governance", they just feel that the U.S. needs to provide governance to the globe rather than having the governance be provided by some wimpy consensus. Also, it should be noted that exactly nobody treats General Assembly resolutions as an emerging body of interational law. Hardly anybody even knows what the General Assembly does, since it's entirely meaningless. If Brooks had said Security Council resolutions, he might have a point, but that's what happens when you dash off your columns in a quarter of an hour. Anyway, since all Security Council resolutions have the U.S. imprimatur, it's unclear why Brooks would oppose them.

Having established his global government-pushing straw men, Brooks proceeds to list five reasons why Americans will never accept global government. The first one is reasonable, though Brooks presents it strangely: he says that Americans will never accept global government because it is undemocratic. This suggests that global government is inherently undemocratic, an obviously ridiculous notion. What he really means is that "there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust." This is completely true and is the main reason why nobody is pushing for a global government. After making this fairly reasonable statement, Brooks lets his fears of black helicopters take over and devotes the rest of the column to stupidity and outright falsehoods. His second reason why Americans will never accept a global government falls in the former category: he asserts that it invariably involves corruption because of a "lack of democratic accountability." This is exactly backwards, of course: the corruption occurs, at least in part, because the U.N., not being a government, has no accountability at all. Were the U.N. to become an actual government, democratic accountability would be introduced and corruption would be reduced, though, of course, not eliminated, as a brief inspection of Tom DeLay's record would reveal.

His third reason is an outright lie: "we love our Constitution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it." Brooks may not realize it, but there are already international institutions in place that impose international laws that take supremacy over the constitution. Those institutions are the WTO and NAFTA, and I'm sure that Brooks strongly supported U.S. entry into both of them. Instances of NAFTA or the WTO overruling U.S. laws are extremely numerous, but apparently David Brooks hasn't heard of any of them. Of course, that's one of the problems with writing your columns in 15 minutes: it cuts down on your research time, leaving you unable to establish whether or not your assertions are actually backed up by any facts. On the other hand, it may be that Brooks doesn't mind if laws establishing labor or environmental methods are overruled at the behest of business groups, even if it comes via an extra-Constitutional mechanism such as the WTO. Also, it should be noted that the authority granted to the Internation Criminal Court is hardly sloppy. And Europhobic Brooks can't resist the temptation to get in a dig at Europeans for allowing "transnational organizations to overrule [their] own laws, regulations and precedents." Perhaps Brooks simply hasn't heard of the European Parliament or the European Constitution, which are designed to include the "laws, regulations, and precedents" of the member states, standardize them, and add democratic accountability to the whole structure?

Next, Brooks makes the claim that "these mushy international organizations liberate the barbaric and handcuff the civilized." This is truly ludicrous: having spent the previous few paragraphs establishing firmly why the U.N. should not be given any actual power, he now complains that it is unable to firmly assert itself. International organizations are only "mushy" when the member states refuse to give them a backbone. If the U.N. was more like a government, with the power to tax and raise armies, it could do more than simply aim resolutions at Milosevic. Since it is not, it is completely reliant on the richer member states to carry out its foreign policy. Brooks says that "forces of decency" are "paralyzed as they wait for the 'international community,'" but it would be more accurate to say that they are using the international community as an excuse for inaction. Of course the U.N.'s resolutions against Milosevic or Sudan will be ignored if it is clear that no one is willing to actually back them up with force. If, for instance, the United States had made it clear that it was willing to take energetic steps to stop the killing in Darfur -- if Bush had come forward and said that the U.S. wanted a Security council resolution authorizing an arms embargo and possibly other sanctions as well as a large force of peacekeepers, that the U.S. would foot some sizable part of the bill for said peacekeepers, and that the U.S. would supply planes from carriers in the Persian gulf to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur and give the peacekeepers air support and help with their logistical problems -- things would have been very different. France and Britain would have backed such a resolution, and China and Russia would probably have been reluctant to oppose it if it was clear that the U.S. was really behind it. More money would have been found and the situation might well be much better. Instead, while Bush makes a few speeches denouncing the violence in general terms, he makes it fairly clear that Sudan is not nearly as close to the top of his priority list as, say, Iraq. The result is that the African Union deploys some peacekeepers, but has difficulty due to its logistical deficiencies, the Chinese are emboldened to quietly fight anti-Sudan resolutions in the Security Council due to their demand for Sudanese oil, and progress is very slow. And for Brooks to claim that the international community can "handcuff" anybody is ludicrous: after all, if such was the case, the U.S. would never have invaded Iraq. Really, what this amounts to is that Brooks wants an institution that works only if the U.S. is active in it, and then complains when it doesn't work when the U.S. is not active.

Finally, Brooks says that the American people "will never grant legitimacy to forums that are so often manipulated for partisan ends." One wonders if Brooks has been paying any attention to the proceedings of Congress over the past, oh, 200+ years. Because if he has, he would realize that Congress has been manipulated for partisan ends fairly often. What he is really referring too is the General Assembly's penchant for passing anti-U.S. and anti-Israel resolutions. However, since the General Assembly has no power and its resolutions are essentially meaningless, this is pretty irrelevant. In fact, the General Assembly's lack of power probably contributes to the passage of these resolutions: since no member state will ever worry about their content, they are free to pass anything they feel like.

Brooks finishes up by misrepresenting Bolton's position on the U.N. and engaging in what appears at first to be some more demolishing of straw men: "We will never be so seduced by vapid pieties about global cooperation that we'll join a system that is both unworkable and undemocratic." But a bit of thought reveals that this statement is just wrong, or correct only if we assume that pushing free trade does not fall under the heading of "vapid pieties" and that the WTO works. Otherwise, he already have joined a system that is decidedly undemocratic and has the authority to overrule the Constitution. Yet, strangely enough, Brooks doesn't mention it once in this column. However, given the sheer number of mistakes in this column, it's hard to muster up much outrage over this omission. If the Times isn't going to fire Brooks, couldn't they at least demand that he put more than fifteen minutes of effort into his columns?

Column 2005-4-10 Commentary

2005-04-10T18:29:00.000-04:00

First of all, I want to say that if the Times is going to start moving Brooks's column around (or, God forbid, giving him three columns a week), they really ought to notify me first. It seems only fair that if I'm going to have to write two Brooks reviews in a weekend, I ought to have advance knowledge of this fact so I can prepare myself. Luckily, this column continues Brooks's series of auditions for a spot outside of the editorial pages. Following his rejection by the Sports section, he has now set his sights on Arts and Leisure with a column in which he attempts to review Saul Bellow's oeuvre. Given that this is Brooks we're talking about, it's probably completely idiotic, but unlike Brooks, I don't attempt to talk about subjects about which I know nothing (well, at least not as often as Brooks does), and Bellow is one of those subjects. I read Henderson the Rain King in high school, and tried Herzog recently but didn't get anywhere with it, so I am completely unqualified to comment on Brooks's analysis. However, there are a couple of things that I feel I can mention without presuming on a knowledge of Saul Bellow that I don't possess.

The screamingly glaring un-Bellow-related point is that Brooks makes the whole column an exercise in Euro-bashing. Essentially, he takes the fact that he doesn't know much about culture in Europe these days and takes that to mean that there isn't any such thing. "Quick, what book is the talk of Berlin? Who is the François Truffaut of our moment?" Brooks asks, but the fact that he, and presumably most readers, doesn't know the answers to these questions does not mean that European culture is no longer important: it just means that Brooks and his readers are typical clueless Americans. What makes this most interesting is that he says that Bellow's work came out of a revolution against European cultural elitism: i.e., Bellow was revolting against the fact that no one in Europe cared what book was the talk of Chicago, or who was the D.W. Griffith of Bellow's moment. Given this context, it is rather strange that Brooks can't see that he is now engaging in the exact same phenomenon, only in the opposite direction. At one point, the cultural centers of the world were Paris, London, and Berlin (yes, I know, I'm being Eurocentric, but I'm simply meeting Brooks on his own terms). Now they are Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. This does not mean that European (or Asian, or African, or Latin American) culture is now somehow insignificant, just as American culture was not worthless in the 19th and early 20th century when European culture was the dominant world influence. It's not particularly surprising that Brooks would use his arrogance and ignorance as the basis for a sweeping assertion about European culture, but given the thesis of his column, it's slightly disappointing.

Also, Brooks says that the Bellow defined Americanness as the idea that "we can all grow up to be noble," which "acknowledges the virtue of aristocratic greatness and reconciles it with equality." All fine and good, but in the next paragraph Brooks says that the "comic twist" Bellow put on this idea is that it often detaches his characters from reality. Brooks refers to this fairly dimissively, but this would seem to undermine his claim that Bellow has somehow elevated "the American scramble for success" to a more spiritual plane. Rather, it suggests that Bellow is trying to make a point about the impossibility of achieving this ideal and is actually making fun of American society and its emphasis on success. It's possible, of course, that the comic twist is simply that, a comic twist, but if it shows up in every one of Bellow's books, we'd have to at least consider the possibility that it's an important part of Bellow's philosophy. At least, we would if we have any intellectual honesty, but then we wouldn't be David Brooks, would we?

Finally, I don't think Brooks is going to pull of a transfer to Arts and Leisure with this column. He does his best, but he needs to stop slipping into his usual culture schtick and stick to the topic at hand. My prediction is that he tries out for the Business section next. Or perhaps he'll stick with the arts but try music or movies instead. There's a slight possibility that the Times will fire him first, but I'm not holding my breath.

Column 2005-4-09 Commentary

2005-04-09T22:25:00.000-04:00

Today's column offers the amusing but sadly all too rare spectacle of Brooks coming into contact with reality. This time, reality informs Brooks that the American people disapproved of the Schiavo spectacle, that they don't like Social Security privatization, and that Americans are growing steadily more suspicious of the rampantly and unapologetically corrupt Tom DeLay. In his last column, Brooks laughed off Democratic claims that the Republican message machine was responsible for their success by saying that this was simply a Democratic attempt to deflect attention from their bad ideas. Without ever seeming to be conscious of the irony, he now claims that Republican failure is caused by the "conservatism of the American people." All the Republican ideas are good, it's just that the American people are unwilling to adopt new ideas. At the same time, he describes the Republicans as "the transformational party" (tacitly admitting that conservatism and the Republican party no longer have much to do with each other). So apparently, the conservative and suspicious of sudden, revolutionary change American people have elected Republicans for six years running because the Republicans are going to transform things. And, as we know from Brooks's last column, the main reason that people follow a party is because they like its philosophy, so the conservative American people are voting for the transformational Republican party because they want change. If your head hurts now, think what Brooks must be going through. No wonder he has to write something deeply trivial every few columns: being a partisan hack is more of a strain than it would seem.

The rest of the column isn't much better (or, if you're looking for comic relief, it's just as good). Apparently, the conservativism of the American people means that they want decisions like the Schiavo decision to be made at the local level. So, according to Brooks, conservatism means not interfering with personal decisions and "imposing solutions from afar, based on abstract principles rather than concrete particulars." Well, that second part would seem to eliminate the entire Republican agenda, which is inspired purely by ideology and has nothing to do with "concrete particulars" or "discernible reality". But then again, as Brooks has admitted, the Republicans are not a conservative party: they are a transformational party, and as they attempt to transform American into a quasi-theocracy dominated by big business, they aren't going to let any facts get in their way. Additionally, it must be their crazy conservativism that causes Americans to be, for whatever reason, reluctant to let the Republican party run roughshod over the separation of powers and the rule of law in order to make a political point (for more, see here). And they don't approve of Republican congressmen making threats against judges who disagree with them. For some reason, Brooks forgets to mention this, but it may just have slipped his mind.

The next place where the conservatism of the American people pops up is in their resistance to privatizing Social Security. If not wanting to have Social Security destroyed is conservatism (remember, the Republicans are transformational, not conservative), then yes, the American people are conservative. Brooks would like us to believe that Americans resist private accounts simply because of a reluctance to try something new, but in fact polls have shown over and over that the more people learn about private accounts, the less they like them. Private accounts are a truly bad idea, and the American people aren't that dumb: given the chance, they can figure this out. (I apologize for linking to myself so often, but it's easy to do, and there are links to actual good websites in those columns.) I'm not going to discuss why private accounts for Social Security are a bad idea here, mostly because I've done it before, and you can undoubtedly find many more lucid analyses by people with actual backgrounds in economics on the web. But the fact is that they are, that Americans are starting to realize that this is the case, and that Brooks is unwilling to accept either of the previous two facts.

Finally, Brooks thinks that the conservatism of the American people causes them to dislike Tom DeLay. Americans dislike "leaders who perpetually play it close to the ethical edge." They distrust "leaders who, under threat, lash out wildly at beloved institutions like the judiciary." They don't approve of "leaders whose instinct is always to go out wildly on the attack." This would seem to rule out practically all the leaders in the Republican party, but we'll stick with DeLay for now, and with what Brooks doesn't mention: Americans don't like leaders who are deeply, hopelessly corrupt. Here's a quick list of Delay scandals that have been firmly confirmed (the DNC can only afford to put the confirmed ones on their website). Brooks also seems to have forgotten about the column he wrote a couple of weeks ago about how corruption is endemic in the Republican party. He's correct about one thing, though: "If DeLay falls, it will not be because he took questionable trips or put family members on the payroll." Indeed not. If he falls, it will be because he is a cesspool of corruption. Aside from the fact that DeLay has been bought by a number of corporations, there are serious questions, which Brooks himself raised in his previous column, having to do with connections between DeLay and Jack Abramoff, a former lobbyist with very close ties to DeLay, and Michael Scanlon, who used to be DeLay's spokesman, both of whom are now under federal investigation. Other Delay aides have been indicted for corruption by a grand jury in Texas. And this corruption extends beyond DeLay: for instance, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert also has close ties to Abramoff. For now, the focus is on Delay, but he is merely the center of a network of corruption in the House Republican leadership, and any serious investigation into DeLay is likely to bring down the entire leadership: after all, why else would they be stepping up to defend him? Aside from pressure from the fundies, of course, who seem to be determined that if Delay goes down, he will take the entire party with him. In fact, Brooks is probably acknowledging these issues by downgrading the wholesale corruption he previously condemned to "questionable trips" and "family members on the payroll". The attempt to throw Abramoff, Reed, and Delay over the side and pretend that all the corruption is now gone has been abandoned as impossible, leaving only a desperate defense of an increasingly untenable position.

Brooks is also correct that this is not good news for the Democrats yet: their poll numbers are also down, but his hysterical talk of death spirals is a sure sign that he recognizes the potential this has to drag the Republican party down in the long run. Furthermore, his assertion that the party is now being led by "the highly educated and secular university-town elites who follow Howard Dean", which will prevent their ever regaining power, is highly dubious. For one thing, Dean has been practically invisible over the past few months. What Brooks is really worried about is the possibility that all the white working-class voters who have been leaving the Democrats will realize that the Democrats actually represent their beliefs better than the Republicans. In fact, many voters are experiencing buyer's remorse: this transformational party is not what they thought they were getting. They didn't vote for a party that would interfere in personal decisions, take away their Social Security, and steep itself in corruption. Brooks's swipe at Dean is a desperate attempt to keep the white working-class voters who are leaving the Democrats from actually thinking about Democratic policies. It's of a piece with Republican strategy, which has been to smear the Democrats as soft on terror, anti-God, and generally out of touch with the common man. Once the common man realizes that the Republicans may not actually be in touch with him -- after all, they are trying to take away his Social Security and legislate Christian morality on him (not just the homophobic parts, all of it) -- he may start to question all Republican propaganda, including the question of whether the Democrats are actually a bunch of secular, pointy-headed academics, and once this questioning process begins, the Republicans are in real trouble. Brooks gets to the heart of the matter when he calls the Republicans a transformational party, where transformational is a euphemism for radical. The Americans didn't elect the Republicans to completely dismantle the social safety net and legislate morality, and now that they are realizing that this is actually what the Republicans have planned, they are understandably somewhat upset. Brooks's desperate bleatings about "prudence" and "public opinion . . . is always worth respecting" are calls for restraint addressed to a party that, by his own admission, has no intention of restraining itself. They can only be regarded as clumsy attempts to provide camouflage for the party as it goes about its radical agenda. After all, the party's two core constituencies, the religious right and big business, want big changes, and they will continue to push for them no matter how many swing voters it alienates. After the election, many progressives wondered how it was that voters didn't seem to see the radical agenda that the Republicans and Bush were promoting. How could they not see what they were voting for, we wondered. Well, they're starting to see now.

The most stunning part of the column, though, is Brooks's call for a new face for the Republican party. Who does he think needs to step up? Why, no other than Dennis Hastert. This is as shocking admission by Brooks that the Republican party is in serious trouble. The usual roster of big names -- Rumsfeld, Cheney, DeLay, Frist, McCain, Jeb Bush -- are apparently all tainted. Brooks even admits that Bush is now actually unpopular and that talk of a mandate is now just so much talk. Instead, Brooks calls for Hastert, who is the Speaker of the House but is almost completely unknown outside of political circles. In effect, Brooks concedes that right now, it is better if no prominent Republicans are in the public eye (even Ahnold has his troubles). This is especially interesting when one recalls that Hastert became speaker after Newt Gingrich resigned following Republican House losses in 1998. After it was revealed that Gingrich's most likely successors, Bob Livingston and Henry Hyde, had had extramarital affairs, Hastert was pushed forward as a candidate, largely because he was completely unknown and so lacked the negatives that the Clinton impeachment attached to the Republican House leadership. The fact that Brooks thinks it's necessary to do something similar now, except instead of just hiding away the House leadership, he wants to hide away the leadership of the entire party, is a sign that the party expects some serious fallout from its actions. The mere fact that Brooks thinks that Bush, inaugurated mere months ago, needs to get out of the limelight may signal that Bush's lame-duck status has arrived already. The Republican party is in full retreat, and the Democrats need to press the attack.

While Brooks's column is worthless as a piece of writing, it does signal that a certain amount of panic is developing in Republican circles. The problem with being the party that doesn't care about reality is that reality cares about you. The Republicans appear to be on the verge of finding this out the hard way. Brooks, however, appears to be at leisure to ignore reality to his heart's content. On the other hand, this column suggests one reason why the Times might keep him around: every once in a while, his unintentional comedy value is off the charts. Still, in balance I'd say it's not worth it. We can only hope that the Times comes to the same conclusion.

Column 2005-4-05 Commentary

2005-04-06T22:06:00.000-04:00

(note: this should have been up yesterday, but blogger and my web connection took turns dying)

Brooks's latest addresses the idea, which has been steadily circulating in liberal circles, that a major component of the Republican successes of the past 20 years or so has been the perfection of their message machine. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and their cohorts work together with ruthless efficiency to blanket the American public with conservative doctrine, while Democrats struggle to get their ideas out. Anybody who says "But what about the liberal media?" at this point is instructed to go to www.dailyhowler.com and not come back until you realize that "liberal media" is simply a weapon conservatives use to prevent almost all substantive criticism of the Republican party in the media. Brooks does not use the liberal media canard to refute the idea of the conservative message machine: instead, he resorts to an argument that is, amazingly, even more ridiculous. In fact, Brooks says, conservatives argue all the time: they are "split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly." Indeed, he urges liberals to argue more amongst themselves. According to Brooks, it is the liberals who march in grim uniformity, toeing the party line, while conservatives drift along in happy, productive disunity. To anyone who knows anything about politics, such an assertion is ludicrous. One of the most surprising results of the Schiavo case was the development of small cracks in the previously impenetrable Republican front. Meanwhile, the longstanding tendency of the Democratic party to split into bitterly feuding factions is well known, and is in fact exploited by the Republicans: the centrist to center-right DLC vs. the left wing, as represented by MoveOn.org, is only the most recent fight. The main problem is that the Democratic party is the original big tent party, a melange of unions, environmentalists, feminists, blacks, gays, Jews, academic liberals, secular humanists, etc., etc. While these groups have interests that overlap sufficiently to allow them to work together most of the time, when it comes to something like foreign policy there is a tendency for this unity to fracture. Also, liberals tend to focus on ideas rather than power: not that conservatives are focused solely on power and have no ideas (well, not all of them, at any rate, I think), but they are better at realizing that sometimes it's better to band together to elect someone with whom everyone can agree on most issues than to fight over a few issues and end up with someone who agrees with you on practically nothing (for example, there was this guy named Nader who ran for president four years ago).

Considered logically, then, Brooks's assertion that the Republicans are constantly squabbling while the Democrats march in lockstep is ridiculous. But then one reads the rest of the column and realizes that Brooks has made an elementary error: he has conflated conservative Washington pundits with the Republican party as a whole. The evidence for his assertion that conservatives are constantly fighting (aside from quoting Whittaker Chambers, who died in 1961) is the following: "The major conservative magazines - The Weekly Standard, National Review, Reason, The American Conservative, The National Interest, Commentary - agree on almost nothing." The problem here is that the vast majority of Republicans don't read these magazines, and really don't care what they have to say, in the same way that the vast majority of Democrats don't read The Nation, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, and all the major liberal magazines. As per usual, Brooks's elitism has caused him to make a serious error: he looks at minor philosophical squabbles among the conservative elites and sees the Republican party as a whole as engaging in healthy, informed debate. In fact, the rank-and-file of the Republican party are listening to Rush Limbaugh and his ilk on talk radio, watching Fox News and often quite conservative local television stations, such as those owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, and reading ultra-conservative newspapers like the Wall Street Journal or Washington Times, which make up, to the surprise of nobody but Brooks, the extremely effective Republican message machine. And its effectiveness is enhanced by a process of positive feedback in which its success drags the rest of the media rightwards -- a phenomenon that is most pronounced in cable news, where CNN and MSNBC are doing their best to out-Fox Fox (especially the latter, which employs both Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough) -- allowing the conservative message machine to move further right without seeming crazy. This is what liberals both condemn and envy; this is what they regard as one of the main reasons that the Republicans have had such success recently; and this is something that Brooks completely fails to address in his column. Clueless elitism or sneaky, underhanded dodging of the question? Like a certain "news" channel, we report, you decide.

Having ignored the point the liberals are making, Brooks goes off on several tangents. First, he claims that you can see evidence of conservative feuding by looking at changing conservative attitudes. Naturally, he postulates no mechanism by which arguments among conservative elites cause the opinions of Republicans to change, and also fails to acknowledge that the percentage of Republicans who are interventionists, the example he chooses, might be influenced by events such as 9/11 which have nothing to do with arguments within the Republican party. But his evidence for a change in Republican attitudes is actually very shaky. "Once, Republicans were isolationists," Brooks declares, as if this was received wisdom. But what about Nixon, who escalated in Vietnam, went to China, and was so unpopular he was re-elected to a second term? What about Reagan, who was so invasion-happy that he even invaded Grenada? What about Bush the First, who invaded Panama and Iraq (yes, he only got one term, but that was because of the economy)? And Vietnam intervention started on Eisenhower's watch. When Brooks says that Republicans were once isolationists, is he referring to Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover? And if so, is he willing to concede that overall changes in the U.S. might have more to do with the less isolationist nature of the party than debates within the conservative movement? And then we have his claim that according to a CBS News/New York Times poll, "most Republicans . . . believe the U.S. should try to change dictatorships into democracies when it can." I believe that Brooks is referring to this poll (pdf version with actual questions and responses broken down by party here), and the actual figure is 51% of Republicans. While most is technically accurate, the image of a firmly pro-interventionist party that it conveys is not accurate at all. But hey, what's a little intellectual dishonesty when you're evading the entire point of the argument you're supposedly refuting anyway?

Brooks next contends that, essentially, conservatives are cool because they argue about philosophy. Apparently, conservatives spent all their time arguing about philosphy (Brooks namedrops shamelessly here, incidentally: fine, you're educated, we get it already) since the modern conservative movement was formed while the Democratic party was so firmly entrenched in power there was no point in the Republicans thinking about policy, and this gave their movement intellectual credibility and helped recruit people. Apparently, it wasn't ideas like tax cuts, bombing the hell out of godless Communists or brown people (or sticking them in jail if they happen to be in the U.S. already), and saving America from the gays that appealed to the ordinary people who vote for the Republican party: instead, they were thoughtfully agreeing with reasoned arguments about how the ideas of Burke and Aquinas should be applied to the modern world. If this doesn't exactly ring true, that's because Brooks has once again taken refuge in his elitism. Conservatives in Brooks's circle may well have read all the philosophers he mentions, but the vast majority of people in this country have not, and most of those who voted Republican in the last election would probably disdain Brooks as one of those pointy-headed academic types were he to start spouting off about Hayek. After all, Bush is on the record as saying that his favorite philosopher is Jesus, and the growth of the Christian right, one of the major forces behind the ascension of the Republican party in the last thirty years, owes nothing to any of the philosophers Brooks cites or is likely to cite. Interestingly, one of the philosophers Brooks cites is Alexander Hamilton, and yet we heard nothing from Brooks when the Republican party ran roughshod over the independence of the courts, something Hamilton endorsed as absolutely necessary for the kind of government he had in mind in Federalist No. 78 (of course, Brooks could be suggesting that the Republican party has weighed the Founding Fathers and found them wanting, but it seems unlikely, or at least unlikely that he would admit it).

Brooks's elitism also shows as he laughs at liberals for being influenced by postmodernism and multiculturalism, since everybody knows that only dead white males have anything important to say about government, but it is most obvious in his tacit assumption that it is necessary to have read lots of philosophers to be able to think about government. There's nothing wrong with "being acutely conscious of their intellectual forebears" but Brooks seems to have confused awareness with not only understanding of these philosophers but also with understanding the world. It is one thing to read Aquinas and think about his arguments in order to expand your mind: it is something else to read Aquinas and then attempt to apply the ideas of someone who was writing in the thirteenth century directly to the modern world. And being familiar with philosophers is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for thinking about government and society. Similarly we find that Brooks actually asked the head of a liberal think tank who his favorite philosopher was. The inanity of this question is well-nigh unsurpassable. It would be equally relevant to ask the head of the physics department at M.I.T. who his favorite physicist is, or, since there is no indication that this man was a philosopher or trained as a philosopher, asking the president of M.I.T. who her favorite physicist is. But if one realizes that Brooks has confused philosophers with philosophy, the question makes perfect sense. What Brooks doesn't understand is that the point is not to have a favorite philosopher: the point is to have a philosophy, one that may well have been informed largely by one philosopher, but which should most likely include the ideas of several as well as some of one's very own. And personally, I'd rather have the heads of liberal think tanks be experts on health care than philosophy, as the former is more likely to have a significant impact on my life than the latter.

This viewpoint does offer potential explanations for some features of the modern conservative movement, though: it certainly seems to be buried in the past, which would make sense if it spent its formative years reading and debating philosophy without ever attempting to think about how that philosophy applied to policy or the modern world. It would also explain the abysmal failures of Republican policy over the past few years: all the thinkers, or what passes for thinkers, in the party know is philosophy, so they're really winging it when it comes to policy, and have a tendency to place their policy above reality. Of course, one should not put too much credence into Brooks's contention that academic philosophy is the backbone of the modern conservative movement, but the attitude that Brooks is describing might contribute to certain aspects of the movement. One thing this attitude does not explain, however, is the success of the Republican party. And Brooks's advice to liberals that they spend the next few years sitting around and arguing about Thomas Pain, John Dewey, and Isaiah Berlin is ridiculous. While the Democrats could certainly use a more coherent philosophy behind their policy message, and reading some of these guys probably wouldn't hurt, it's not guaranteed or even that likely to help, either. Any party that is overly dependent on academic philosophers to craft its message is unlikely to get very far, so it's a good thing for Brooks that the Republican party actually had other sources for its ideas.

Brooks has plumbed a different (not new, as that wouldn't really be possible, just different) low in this colum, the whole point of which seems to be for him to casually refer to as many philosophers as possible. While this is more evidence for the theory that Brooks is ashamed of having gone to the University of Chicago and wishes he had gone to Yale instead, it doesn't provide much of a basis for a column. Of course, this hasn't stopped Brooks in the past, but at some point someone at the Times is bound to realize what is going on here, right? Right? Okay, so probably not, but a man can dream, can't he?

To The Readers

2005-04-04T19:45:00.000-04:00

(Update: It's here! Scroll down to read our latest offering.)

Yes, all five of you. I just want to apologize for the delay in posting the usual witty, incisive, and insightful review of Brooks's latest abomination. I know that the light has been driven from your lives over the past couple of days; that you check this website, trembling in a fever of anticipation, every five minutes, only to be cast down into a deep depression when you find nothing new (update: SiteMeter informs me that such is not the case. Apparently, you guys are a bunch of lazy bums). Well, I'm sorry to have to withhold your fix for another day, but I felt that, out of respect for the Pope, I ought to hold off on my attack on Brooks for a few days. (What? April Fools Day was Friday? Whoops, my bad.) Actually, the delay has two reasons: first of all, this latest column proved to be the straw that broke Ted's back. He could no longer remain silent in the face of Brooks's continued idiocy, so the next review will be about half Ted, which is good, but since we live a few hundred miles apart, the necessary collaboration delayed things some. However, the main reason that the next review won't appear until tomorrow is the NCAA tournament, which, combined with a busy Sunday, has held me back. Incidentally, I picked UNC before the tournament started, and they better win, because they're about the only part of the tournament that I did pick right. But how will I get through the next 24 or so hours, you cry? Well, if you get the shakes, you can always go through the archive.

Column 2005-4-02 Commentary

2005-04-02T18:44:00.000-05:00

In this column, Brooks takes an idiosyncratic -- one might even say idiotic -- look at intelligence reform. Brooks knows what's wrong with the CIA: it tries to hard to be scientific. Apparently, the American intelligence community is insufficiently touchy-feely. It needs to try harder to empathize with our enemies, to imagine how we appear to them and how they will interpret our actions. That's interesting, as I had been led to believe that people who did that were liberal softies, and that our enemies have only one motivation: they hate freedom. Regardless, Brooks argues for an "intuitive generalist" approach to intelligence, claiming that the "scientific method" used by the CIA, though seemingly authoritative, is actually counterproductive. Instead, analysts should be sent off to study "Thucydides, Tolstoy and Churchill to get a broad understanding of the full range of human behavior." Brooks doesn't mention whether or not they should also study something directly relevant to their specialty, but we'll be generous and assume that he simply forgot. And Brooks goes so far as to back up his argument with a source, so you know that he's serious (though in true Brooksian fashion, he can't even cite his source correctly: for Donald Zagoria, read Alan Whiting throughout). Strangely, though, his source is a paper by a Yale undergraduate discussing the CIA's failure to correctly predict China's willingness to negotiate with the United States in 1970. And that's really all you need to know about this column: Brooks constructs his entire argument on the basis of one 35-year-old data point. Well, nobody will ever accuse him of being overly scientific.

Brooks's first problem is that the CIA is not using the scientific method. In fact, if the CIA was performing rigorous experiments to test its hypotheses, they would probably have a considerably better record than they do. Sadly, it's difficult to concieve of an experiment that would test the hypothesis, that, for example, North Korea has eight nuclear weapons, that doesn't involve the fiery destruction of Seoul and Tokyo. Therefore, to claim that the CIA is using the scientific method to come to its conclusions is completely incorrect. What Brooks says the CIA is really using is the pseudo-scientific method, as perfected by Samuel Huntington. This method involves quantifying as many of the things you are talking about as you can so that your work looks scientific, even if the things you attempt to turn into numbers cannot really be quantified and your attempts to do so give nonsensical results. The prime example of this (or at least the one that springs readily to mind) is Huntington's claim that South Africa was a satisfied society in the early sixties under apartheid, based on a calculated "satisfaction index". (Huntington backed up his claim by stating, in flat contradiction of the facts, that there had been "no major riots, strikes, or disturbances" in South Africa.) However, it should be noted that Brooks offers no real facts to back up his claim that the CIA has fallen into the Huntington trap. There is a lot of rhetoric about "bloodless compilations of data by anonymous technicians" and "systematic, codified and bureaucratic" processes, but no actual facts. Which is too bad, because this is the strongest part of Brooks's argument: social science's attempt to be scientific are inherently doomed to failure because of the inability of social scientists to do controlled experiments. Sadly, he presents no non-anecdotal evidence to show that American intelligence analysts have gone down this blind alley.

This is not too surprising, though: after all, Brooks barely provides any evidence to back his claim that a more intuitive method is necessary. Aside from his 35-year-old story about China, he "justifies" this intuitive generalist b.s. almost exclusively with this sentence: "Individuals are good at using intuition and imagination to understand other humans." Apparently, Brooks believes that if Malcom Gladwell writes a best-selling book about something, that makes it right (and Gladwell's book, Blink, is actually about the value of first impressions; I don't think even Brooks proposes that intelligence analysis should be based entirely on the first impressions of the analysts). This sentence is so general as to be meaningless, and ignores the fact that individuals can also be abysmally bad at using intuition and imagination to understand other humans. For evidence of this, we need to go no further than our own President, who said, back in June 2001, that "I found [Putin] to be very straightforward and trustworthy. . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul." Not only did Bush's intuition fail him, his first impression was also wrong. Maybe we shouldn't base all of our intelligence analysis on this intuition stuff after all. Incidentally, Brooks's claim that his "intuitive generalists" are more "modern and rigorous" than the pseudoscientists is ludicrous, unless he's using some new definition of rigorous (or of intuition). Imagination and intuition involve going outside of the rules and making leaps that cannot be justified by strict logic: i.e., the exact opposite of rigor. But perhaps Brooks is simply trying to lead by example. There is no certainly no rigor and a whole lot of imagination in this piece of social analysis.

Brooks finishes his column by saying that he'll know that reform has happened "when there's a big sign in front of C.I.A. headquarters that reads: Individuals think better than groups." This may confuse those of you who believe that the point of this column is to agitate for a more intuitive approach to intelligence analysis. Apparently, you haven't been paying attention to the column. Remember, intuition and imagination are key: Brooks practices what he preaches and makes a "novelistic judgement" not from any logic or evidence but from his "broad understanding of the full range of human behavior" gained from reading Tolstoy and Churchill. Personally, I think that a good judgement of whether or not reform has worked would be performance-based, but I guess this kind of naive, surface-level thinking is why I don't have a column at the New York Times.

There are also very good reasons for Brooks to disdain a performance-based evaluation of the CIA. For one thing, he might have to talk about mistakes more recent than 1970, such as the intelligence community's confident assertion that Iraq had WMDs. There was, in fact, a big report published about that quite recently: Brooks even mentions it in his column (he refers to the "presidential panel on intelligence"), though he doesn't say what exactly the report was investigating. In fact, Brooks somehow manages to write a column about intelligence reform without mentioning Iraq's nonexistent WMD's or 9/11, even though most calls for reform of the CIA were based on its bogus claims about the former and failure to prevent the latter. The reason that Brooks chooses to cite a 35-year-old mistaken analysis that didn't even have serious consequences is because neither of these two modern intelligence failures fit into Brooks's argument. The question of whether or not Iraq had WMD's did not require reading Thucydides and Tolstoy, and to answer it did not require imagination or intuition. All it required was an objective analysis of the evidence. All of Brooks's intuitive generalist methods -- gaining a deep understanding of Iraqi society, for instance -- were irrelevant. In fact, it seems all too likely that the problem was not that analysists lacked imagination and intuition, but that they had too much (especially of the former). It is instructive to note that Brooks's column on the Duelfer report (laughably entitled "The Report That Nails Saddam") dismissed the finding that there had been no WMD's as a small part of the report that had been blown out of proportion by partisan Democrats. Instead, Brooks focused on parts of the report that revealed that Saddam really, really wanted WMD's and that he was gaming the oil-for-food program and the sanctions in an attempt to restart his program. All true, and exactly the kind of things that an intuitive generalist would focus on as proof positive that Saddam had a weapons program, but the fact remains that there was no weapons program, and Saddam was not an immediate threat and would not have been a threat for some years.

So, if a lack of intuition was not at fault, why was the intelligence so wrong? Why, for instance, did the U.S. ignore the work of U.N. inspectors that refuted most of the claims they made about Saddam's WMD programs prior to the war? Why did the intelligence community base its assertions about Saddam's extensive biological weapons program on a single defector, codenamed Curveball, whose reports were never verified and whose credibility was cast into doubt as long as ago as May 2000 when his very first interview by an American revealed that, contrary to the information the Department of Defense had been given, he spoke excellent English, and that he was likely an alcoholic? Why was it that the CIA did not meet Curveball until March 2004, and that the CIA did not figure out that Curveball had been out of Iraq during the time he was supposedly working on bioweapons until January 2004? It's not as if Curveball was a bit player: according to the recently released report, "Virtually all of the Intelligence Community’s information on Iraq’s alleged mobile biological weapons facilities was supplied by a source, codenamed 'Curveball.'" But somehow the CIA neglected to make any basic checks on their source, despite doubts about his authenticity, until long after the war. What could have caused such incompetence? Might it have been administration pressure?

Similar questions arise when one considers the other intelligence failure Brooks ignores, the fact that the CIA and FBI were caught flatfooted by September 11. Intuitive generalism doesn't help here, either, since even the old-fashioned way of doing things figured out that Al Qaeda would try to attack in the U.S., or so one would gather from the title of the August 6 PDB "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.". In fact, warnings that Bin Laden was planning an attack involving one or more airplanes, quite possibly as weapons, dated back to 1998. The FAA issued several warnings of imminent hijackings in 2001, and the NSA reported a large number of communications suggesting the possibility of an attack. In fact, in July 2001 the FAA, FBI, and INS were warned that terrorist attack was coming soon, and this warning was taken seriously enough that non-essential travel by countererrorism personnel was suspended. And yet the administration took no other action. Perhaps 9/11 could not have been foreseen or prevented, but the administration could at least have made an effort, rather than largely ignoring counterterrorism.

Thus, it appears that Brooks's mystifying omission of the WMD and 9/11 questions is actually susceptible of a perfectly reasonable explanation: Brooks is, as usual, acting as an administration shill. He places all the blame for intelligence failures on "epistemological" problems in the intelligence community dating back at least 35 years, thus neatly deflecting attention from the fact that the main fault in both cases lies with an administration that manipulated or ignored intelligence to suit its purposes. The problem is not that the CIA occasionally fails to read the minds of foreign leaders correctly: mind reading is difficult, and my guess is that the CIA is just about as good at it as anybody else in the game. The problem is that the CIA's intelligence analysts were not allowed to do their job, or ignored when they did if their conclusions were not what the administration wanted to hear. Brooks is correct when he says that "the problem is not bureaucratic," but it's not epistemological either: it's political, and won't go away until the administration does too.

Since it's become traditional, I'll ask: how much longer does the Times plan on allowing Brooks to use its editorial page to lay down smokescreens for the administration? And surely I'm not the only one who feels that Brooks attacking the CIA's intelligence failures is a serious case of the pot calling the kettle black?

Column 2005-3-29 Commentary

2005-03-29T21:39:00.000-05:00

Brooks's latest column is an interesting departure from the norm. Not because it is completely trivial -- God knows that Brooks has written completely trivial columns before -- but because it lacks the usual features of Brooks's completely trivial columns. Brooks's musings on whether he should abandon being a Mets fan to root for the brand-spanking-new Washington Nationals (for those of you who are not au courant with the baseball scene, the Nats used to be the Montreal Expos) are far more self-indulgent than usual. There is no attempt to make a connection to the ongoing moral decay of the country, or even of the liberal part of the country. Brooks doesn't even try to be funny (or if he does, he's even worse at it than usual). Even Maureen Dowd tries to connect her most self-centered columns to a national trend or a political event: Brooks doesn't even try to suggest that other Washingtonians are suffering a similar crisis. Was he simply at a loss for a topic this week? Is he attempting to segue from the editorial pages to the sports pages? Perhaps that's the explanation. After all, the constant intellectual dishonesty must get to him. Having to parrot the party line in almost every column cramps one's creativity. And it's much less problematic to predict the wrong team to win the N.L. East than to predict the existence of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and there is no need to write a column after the season about how the Phillies' third-place finish actually vindicated your expectations.

Regardless of Brooks's motivations for writing this columns (he can't resolve any personal crises, no matter how small, without first writing a column about them?), he can't escape my criticisms by writing about baseball fandom, as I am just as qualified to write about that as about politics or culture. Where by qualified, I mean that I have a computer and some free time. Actually, I do have a solid eighteen years of being a Mets fan under my belt -- among my first memories is one of watching the 1986 World Series, and when I was four I could tell a policeman that my favorite player was Keith Hernandez -- compared to about five or so of really caring about politics, so I will probably never be more qualified to write about a Brooks column, unless Brooks starts writing about math, physics, or the works of P.G. Wodehouse. Anyway, let me just say that I really do hope that Brooks decides to start rooting for the Washington Nationals, because I'd prefer not to have him as a fellow Mets fan. In fact, when I started reading this column, my first reaction was horror at the thought that I might have to actually give Brooks a bit of grudging respect, since he was, after all, a Mets fan. Luckily, the fact that he is considering switching allegiances to the Nationals, just because they happen to have moved to town, removes the necessity for any such action. In fact, my respect for Brooks has never been lower. Well, that's not strictly true, as it couldn't actually have fallen, but let me just say that I'm not surprised that Brooks is the kind of fan who would contemplate moving from one team to another. He probably rooted for the Yankees AND the Mets when he was a kid, too.

Brooks posits three sources for fandom. The first source is location: you are a fan of the team from where you live. Having moved to Washington, Brooks says, it is only natural that he become a Nationals fan. This is patently ridiculous. To abandon a team just because you have moved is one of the worst forms of treachery. I have not lived in New York City since I was six years old, yet I have never been tempted by any other sports team. My grandfather has lived much of his life in the Midwest, yet he did not stop being a Giants fan simply because he no longer lived in New York, or even because the Giants stopped living in New York. Even the metaphor Brooks gives for this kind of fandom, patriotism, breaks down. Many immigrants maintain a loyalty to their home country. Their children may be Americanized, but they speak the language they brought from the old country and try to keep as many of the traditions as they can. Not that it would be relevant if all immigrants immediately assimilated one hundred percent: it would still be wrong to change team loyalties just because one no longer resides in the same city as the team.

Brooks's next way to explain fandom is that "the love of a team is primarily a psychological connection. It is a bond forged during a lifelong string of shared emotions - the way I felt when Tommie Agee made that diving catch in 1969, the way I have suffered through the disappointment of Mo Vaughn." And he is, for once, absolutely correct. This is fandom, created from the exhilaration of Robin Ventura's grand slam single and the crushing disappointment of Kenny Rogers walking in the winning run the next day. It is a bond strong enough that not only can't you stop watching a meaningless September game against the Expos, you get increasingly caught up as it goes along, become excited as the Mets rally to take the game into extra innings, and then cast down as the Expos win anyway. However, Brooks is not entirely correct when he says that to abandon the Mets would be to abandon himself and send him off on "a life of phoniness and self-alienation." For if he is contemplating, even for a minute, becoming a Nationals fan, then his bond with the Mets obviously isn't very strong. It's not even as if this is August of 1993, or even 2003, when the Mets were down and not going anywhere, and one could excuse a bout of doubt caused by depression, as long as the doubter recanted afterward. But the Mets are (probably) on the way up: they won't win the division this year, unless everything breaks right, but in 2006 and 2007, watch out. If Brooks is contemplating leaving the team this year, and at this time, when everything is bright and full of promise, nobody has been injured (well, except for Steve Trachsel, but he's not irreplaceable), and everybody is excited about the upcoming season, then he clearly just doesn't care that much.

Brooks's third reason why one becomes a fan is devotion to a philosophical ideal: i.e., for Yankees fans, pure hatred of all that is noble and good, (Brooks says, "All cower before the greatness that is Rome," but I like my formulation better), for Red Sox fans, "nobility through suffering", for the Cubs, "It is better to be loved than feared", and for the Mets "God smiles upon his darlings". This is, frankly, bullshit. First of all, it applies only to a handful of teams. What ideal do the Mariners embody? The Reds? God help us, what ideal do the Devil Rays embody? Secondly, this is applicable only to particular eras. The Yankees may be the Evil Empire now, but back in the 80's and early 90's they were busy sabotaging Don Mattingly's Hall of Fame case by sucking. The whole "nobility through suffering" meme for the Red Sox is a product of the 1986 World Series, which spawned the idea of The Curse of the Bambino. And the Mets haven't really been about miracles since 1969. Sure, there was Mookie Wilsons's grounder through Buckner's legs, but the 1986 team was a well-constructed team with some very good, and even outstanding, players that was expected to compete. The 1969 team really came out of nowhere: the Mets won 100 games in 1969, after setting a team record in 1968 when they won 73. And the 2000 World Series appearance had nothing miraculous about it. Actually, one could argue that, if one allows for negative miracles, the years after 2000 were pretty miraculous. The Mets acquire sure-fire Hall-of-Famer Roberto Alomar, .300 hitter and Gold Glove second baseman, and he immediately sucks! It's a miracle! But somehow, I don't think that this is what Brooks is going for.

Unsurprisingly, this is the type of love Brooks has for the Mets. He doesn't care about the team, just some ideal that they once represented and now no longer do. While it's great that the Mets teach Brooks that "miracles happen and the universe is a happy place", what this means is that Brooks doesn't actually care about baseball, much less the Mets. Instead, he's desperately searching for a team that embodies his philosophical vision of a world where miracles happen. To which all I can say is, good luck and good riddance. Oh, and don't become a Nats fan: with their bullpen practically nonexistent and their lineup full of holes, it's going to take direct divine intervention for them to win anything this season.

Why the Times allows this to continue is beyond me. Are they really paying for Brooks to wonder whether to abandon the Mets (in the pages of a New York newspaper, to boot)? Can they at least prevent him from wasting his space on trivial topics? Or prevent him from wasting his space altogether by giving it to someone else?

Column 2005-3-26 Commentary

2005-03-26T15:37:00.000-05:00

Well, Brooks's last column was a nice change of pace, but today things are back to normal. Today sees Brooks take on the Terry Schiavo case by using one of his favorite column structures, the false equivalence: in this case, he draws a false equivalence between the arguments of so-called "social conservatives" (actually fundamentalist Christians) and so-called "social liberals" (actually most Americans). Before we go any further, let's make one thing clear: the "social conservatives" Brooks refers to are extremists whose views are not shared by most Americans. Polls have consistently shown that most Americans believe that Congress should not intervene in this case, that Congress is intervening purely for political advantage, that the decision to remove the feeding tube was the correct one, that if their spouse or child was in Terry Schiavo's state they too would remove the tube, and that if they were in a persisent vegetative state, they would not want to be kept alive (this last viewpoint was endorsed by more than 80% of respondents). Even self-identified evangelicals are evenly split between supporting removing the feeding tube and demanding that it be kept in. "No wonder many of us feel agonized this week, betwixt and between," Brooks says at the end of today's column, but it appears that this is not actually the case, or not the case outside of Brooks's social circle.

Brooks begins his column by claiming that "The core belief that social conservatives bring to cases like Terri Schiavo's is that the value of each individual life is intrinsic." Which explains the massive evangelical demonstrations against the death penalty and the war in Iraq. Who could forget the protests by fundamentalist Christians when the news that over a hundred prisoners had died in U.S. custody abroad was released? Or the vigils held outside the Texas state capitol when Governor Bush signed a law allowing doctors to deny life support if they believe that it is useless, even if the family wants to keep the family member alive? Oh, that's right, no such protests actually happened. Apparently, individual lives have intrinsic value only when they are the individual lives of brain-dead white women, and not when they are, for instance, black babies. In fact, National Right to Life, which is helping to lead the fight to keep Terry Schiavo alive, helped write the Texas Futile Care Law under which Sun Hudson was removed from life support. And it's hard to reconcile the belief that life has intrinsic value with statements such as this one, by extreme right-wing talk radio host Hal Turner, or with the arrest of a man who tried to steal a gun to help Schiavo, or the man who put a bounty on the heads of Michael Schiavo and a federal judge who refused to order Schiavo's feeding tube to be reinserted. But if the hypocrisy of the foot soldiers in the pro-Terry fight is stunning, the hypocrisy of the leaders, such as Tom Delay, Bill Frist, and George W. Bush, is even worse. For instance, Bush finds the Terry Schiavo case of such importance that he is forced to cut short his vacation to return to Washington and sign the bill moving her case to the federal courts. Those of you who can remember as far back as December may recall that it was several days after the tsunami struck before Bush could be bothered to leave the ranch and return to D.C. Tom Delay isn't even trying to hide his politicization of this case: "This is exactly the kind of issue that's going on in America, that attacks against the conservative moment, against me and against many others." Or consider this statement from the head of the Traditional Values Coalition: "What this issue has done is it has galvanized people the way nothing could have done in an off-election year. That is what I see as the blessing that dear Terri's life is offering to the conservative Christian movement in America." And note further that the money to pay for Terry Schiavo's medical care for the past 15 years has come from two sources: a malpractice settlement against the doctors who orginally treated her and Medicaid. If the Republicans had had their way years ago, neither source of funding would be available, or would be greatly reduced.

Some "social conservatives" base their assertion that Terry should be kept alive on the contention that she is actually not in a persistent vegetative state, so it is worth pointing out that every single reputable neurologist who has actually examined her personally, as opposed to looking at a view minutes of videotape, has concluded that she is in in a PVS. A representative example of the non-reputable neurologists (leaving out the diagnoses of such people as Frist, who is a heart surgeon) who have examined her is one Dr. William Hammesfahr, touted as a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine (yes, you read that correctly), who was disciplined by Florida in 2003. Another common source for allegations that Schiavo is somewhat conscious is Carla Iyer, who was Schiavo's nurse in 1995 and 1996, but Ms. Iyer is so lacking in credibility that Schiavo's parents never even called on her to testify. Others point to a 260 second video clip in which Terry Schiavo appears to be responding to stimuli, ignoring the fact that the tape was created from four and a half hours of footage. And then there are the affidavits -- ably debunked at the previous link -- by 17 "experts" who claimed that Schiavo could be revived on the basis of the above video clip and various news reports. The facts are quite simple: Schiavo was bulimic, her heart stopped due to a potassium imbalance, her brain was denied oxygen for up to five minutes, and as a result her cerebral cortex was liquified (this link has a CAT scan image of Schiavo's brain). This kind of brain liquification is irreparable: the brain tissue is just gone. Consequently, Schiavo cannot perform any higher brain functions, and will never be able to again. She cannot even swallow, which is why she requires a feeding tube (one wonders if the people arrested as they tried to bring her cups of water understood that if they actually put that water in her mouth, she would have choked to death). From a strictly biological viewpoint, she is alive, but from any other perspective she has been dead for years.

And this leads directly to Brooks's definition of a "social liberal" as one who believes "that the quality of life is a fundamental human value." Whether or not this is true, it is completely irrelevant to this case. Schiavo cannot be said to be living except in a strictly biological sense. Her higher brain functions are gone and will not be coming back, and as those higher brain function include things like consciousness and personality, it is entirely reasonable to say that Terry Schiavo, the person, is dead, and all that remains is a collection of cells being kept alive artificially. In fact, the best reason for Schiavo's feeding tube to be removed is to allow the people around her to accept the fact of her death and move on: it makes no difference to Schiavo, who cannot even feel hunger or thirst. And even if Brooks is right about "social liberals" in general believing that quality of life is more important than living, the conclusions he draws from this assertion are as unwarranted as they are vague. This argument is "morally thin", according to Brooks, but it is really unclear why. Perhaps he thinks that this argument can be generalized to the point where the ability of serial killers to kill becomes a quality-of-life issue, in which case the only possible response is to laugh in his face. It seems fairly reasonable to me, and according to polls, to most of the American people, that if it is obvious that someone is going to die, and that they are suffering considerably, and they decide that they would rather die now than hang on through a few more agonizing months, then they should be allowed to die. Similarly, if someone has lost consciousness and will not regain it, and family members or a living will make it clear that they would not wish to continue existing on life support, they should be allowed to die, in accordance with their wishes. Naturally, if the available evidence suggests that they would want to be kept alive, they should be kept alive as long as possible, but the option to choose death should be there, and there is nothing morally thin about that. In fact, one could argue that it is immoral to prolong someone's life against their wish if they are suffering. And whatever happened to the conservative shibboleth of personal responsibility?

But the real reason that Brooks brings up the morality argument is so he can dismiss the liberals questions about "jurisdictions, legalisms, politics and procedures" as mere attempts to change the subject. This allows him to ignore the extent to which the Republican Party is ignoring basic Constitutional principles in its attempt to pander to the extremists of the religious right, or rather to keep Schiavo alive. Tom Delay, Bill Frist, and George W. Bush are combining to undermine the independence of the judical system in the United States, an attack on a basic Constitutional principle that is all the more amazing for coming not in a time of war (like Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, for instance) or national emergency but to prevent a brain-dead woman from dying. From the pinkos at usinfo.state.gov, we find that "The independence of the federal judiciary and the societal agreement that its pronouncements must be honored is a hallmark of the American political system." According to the American Bar Association, "An independent judiciary with judges who decide issues under law without fear or favor is a necessary means by which to accomplish both real and apparent justice for all." Some guy named Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper No. 78 that "The complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution." By using the powers of the legislative and executive branches to overturn a decision in the courts -- a decision that, moreover, went through multiple courts over a period of seven years -- the Republican party is, at the behest of the religious right, doing its best to destroy one of the basic principles of American democracy. The legal analyst for CBS calls this law "the most blatant and egregious power-grab by one branch over another in my lifetime." And Brooks dismisses liberal unease about this as an attempt to "shift arguments away from morality and on to process." There are certainly moral questions involved, but the fact that the independence of the judiciary is being compromised is not exactly unimportant.

The Schiavo case gives Brooks a chance to pontificate on morality, and there's nothing Brooks likes better than a chance to pontificate on morality, especially if it gives him the opportunity to talk about how immoral liberals are. And that's especialy understandable in this case, because the alternative is to try to explain why a Republican Party that supposedly opposes big government is intervening in a family matter. Or why a Republican party that is supposedly conservative is attempting to undermine the basic Constitutional principle of judicial independence. Or why a Republican Party that supposedly supports states' rights is attempting to take the authority to resolve this case from the state of Florida. Or how the religious right obtained such a chokehold on the Republican Party that it could go ahead with this issue despite massive opposition from the American people. But that would require that Brooks actually look at what the Republican Party is, rather than what he thinks it is, and it appears that he exhausted his quota of that for this year in last Saturday's column on corruption. Well, at least we know what to expect now: more of Brooks making excuses for the Republican party, no matter what they do. Unless, of course, we get lucky and the Times decides to fire him.

Column 2005-3-22 Commentary

2005-03-22T19:30:00.000-05:00

For once, I have nothing to say. In a good way. Today's Brooks column is spot on. In fact, it's so spot on it makes you wonder why somebody who can see the Republican party this clearly is so blind to so many of its other deficiencies. The one criticism that could be made of this column is that Tom Delay is in this cesspool of corruption up to his neck, if not higher, yet his name only gets mentioned twice in the column. On the other hand, Brooks makes no attempt to cast this as an isolated case of a few bad apples. I urge you to read the column if you haven't already, both as a pointed indictment of the straight-up corruption that infests the Republican Party at the moment and because this may well be the only time I will ever urge you to read a Brooks column.

Additionally, Tom Delay should take note: this is a warning that some Republicans are ready to turn on him before the taint of corruption become too obvious and widespread. If Delay decides to fight it out, don't be surprised to see more and more Republicans, including elected ones and likely starting with Bush or people who can be expected to speak for Bush, distancing themselves from him.

However, this by no means lets the Times off the hook. The guy has been a columnist for over two years, and he's delivered one good column. The success rate is not exactly stunning.

Column 2005-3-19 Commentary

2005-03-19T15:54:00.000-05:00

It appears that David Brooks was too lazy to come up with a new column topic for this column, so he just read the criticisms of his previous column, figured out a way to circumvent them, and rewrote it. The last column was too obviously partial to the Republicans, so Brooks works harder on hiding his partisanship. The last column lamented the failure of Social Security reform, but Social Security really isn't a problem that requires immediate intervention, so Brooks instead talks about the coming crisis in entitlements. Finally, the solution to the problem that Brooks obviously favored in the last column, privatizing Social Security, would not actually help, so this time Brooks doesn't even propose a solution, settling for a prophecy that someone who has a solution will eventually show up. The result is one of Brooks's sneakiest columns, where it is very important that the reader not simply analyze what Brooks does say but also keep a close watch on what he does not say.

For example, Brooks talks of two waves combining to cause vast problems for America, the two waves being entitlement spending and political polarization. While political polarization is certainly a fact of politics at the moment, it is hardly of the importance of the coming growth in entitlement spending. Rapidly increasing health care costs are going to be a fact for some time to come due to steady increases in life expectancy and constant increases in what medicine can treat (or at least, so we predict by extrapolation). Political polarization is a function of the views of the voters and could change at any time. Brooks may seriously believe that the current atmosphere of polarization is unlikely to change anytime soon, but the real reason for his making it one of the two waves is that he can shift some of the blame for the partisan deadlock afflicting politics today on to the Democrats from the Republicans and still appear even-handed. What he does not say, of course, is why there is so much polarization in politics, because he does not want to admit that it is the result of a decade-long Republican effort. He does not talk about the scorched-earth tactics of the Republicans who refused to even consider a compromise on Clinton's health-care plan. He ignores the anti-Clinton witch hunt of 1996-2000. He does not mention the profoundly un-democratic fashion in which the House Republicans run the House of Representatives. He leaves out the Republicans' unprecedented mid-decade redistricting efforts in Texas, Colorado, and now Georgia. No mention is made of how Bush consistently refused to hold up his end of deals with Democrats on bills such as No Child Left Behind, or of the Republicans' bitter attacks on those who actually make deals with them. Instead, he simply presents political polarization as a fait accompli, and then proceeds to chide both parties for being so polarized, allowing him to appear evenhanded even as he heaps far more blame on the Democrats than they deserve. In exactly the same manner, Brooks decries "the emergence of rigid donor and activist bases in each party that use their power to inflict Stalinist party-line orthodoxy on potentially independent leaders," but again fails to give the whole story. In reality, such a rigid base is a very recent development in the Democratic party and has arisen as a response to the effectiveness of the Republican establishment (which Brooks describes with remarkable accuracy). This can be seen most easily in the Republican party's dealings with what's left of its moderate wing, as exemplified by the constant attacks on Arlen Specter over the past year. Brooks's cries of polarization are simply attempts to deflect attention from the fact that the Republicans are not even trying to be bipartisan any more, and the Democrats are naturally reacting by becoming more insular.

The two examples of polarization he gives reinforce this point. First, he cites the Social Security debate again, calling it a "straightforward problem compared to Medicare" and wondering why Congress is deadlocked. Well, we've covered this ground a few times before, but once again, it's deadlocked because the Republicans refuse to consider any idea without private Social Security accounts, even though that would amount to phasing Social Security out and would not even solve the problem they claim to be worried about, as well as being massively unpopular. To blame the lack of progress with Social Security reform on political polarization is deeply misleading, giving as it does the effect of making it appear that the Democrats are just as responsible as the Republicans. His other example is the looming fight over judges, where again the accusation of polarization is used to suggest that blame should be assigned equally to both sides of the aisle. In fact, a glance at the records of the three judges that the Republicans are currently trying to get through the Senate suggests that the Democrats are perfectly correct to try to filibuster them and the blame here should accrue only to Republicans who are trying to push unqualified partisan hacks through to top judicial positions (and these judges were the ones who were thought to have the most bipartisan support).

But the most blatant example of how Brooks's faux evenhandedness really serves only to disguise his partisanship comes when he examines how both the Democrats and the Republicans will become obsolete as the coming entitlement crisis challenges their raisons d'etre. According to Brooks, the goal of the Democratic party is to pass "domestic programs that address national needs - like covering the uninsured." I guess I must just have missed John Kerry's fiery speech calling for national health insurance and making that the centerpiece of his campaign. Obviously, this is a massive oversimplification. Similarly, Brooks claims that Republicans "owe their recent victories to the popularity of tax cuts", and that this is "a core reason for being." Again, a massive oversimplification, and one that ought to make the reader suspicious. Why on earth would Brooks peddle oversimplifications so ridiculous that even he knows they are wrong? The answer is, again, to appear to be evenhandedly attacking both parties for fiscal irresponsibility, and thus to hide the sizable role that the Republican fiscal irresponsbility of the past four years has played in exacerbating the entitlements crisis. Once again, let me direct you to the following table of tax revenues as a percentage of GDP, where you can observe that 2004's tax revenues were the lowest percent of GDP since 1959, and 4.6 points lower than the 2000 value. It should also be noted that the war on Iraq has cost over $150 billion, and is almost certain to cost at least as much more before it is over. What does this have to do with the rapidly spiraling cost of entitlements? Well, one way in which Clinton hoped to address the problem was to save money by running surpluses. The saved money could be kept to help at least cushion the impact of increasing Medicare spending. Some of you may even recall Gore talking about a lockbox in the 2000 campaign, which meant that surpluses of the Medicare trust fund would be saved rather than spent, and running surpluses reduces the pressure to spend this money (and the surpluses from the Social Security trust fund as well). Furthermore, spending on interest on the federal debt is one of the major drivers of federal spending. In fact, according to this 2002 CBO fiscal policy paper, by 2075 interest spending would actually outstrip Medicare as a percentage of GDP. Since then, projections of Medicare spending have gone up considerably, but Bush has also cut taxes further, and the report assumes that revenues will stay at a steady 19% of GDP, when they have actually fallen to 16.3% of GDP. Thus, interest payments on the federal debt would present a fiscal challenge very close to that of Medicare by 2075. Therefore, a logical approach for the government to take would be to run surpluses in an attempt to at least prevent the debt from growing, and if possible to pay it down, and so reduce some of the funding pressure on future governments which will have to deal with Medicare expenses at a level at least five times today's. Alternatively, the government could take the Republican party approach and piss the surplus away with tax cuts so as to make the argument for getting rid of Medicare when it gets more expensive easier to make (see here for examples of Republicans realizing that the tax cut orthodoxy might not always be the best policy).

It should also be noted that Brooks's constant references to entitlements is, at the very least, intellecually dishonest, as the entitlement crisis is really a Medicare crisis, and to a slightly lesser extent a Medicaid crisis. Brooks talks about entitlements because the Republicans are determined to get rid of all of them, and so try to hide the fact that Social Security is really in relatively good shape (compared to Medicare and Medicaid) by combining all three programs into a single entity, "entitlements", which is in serious fiscal difficulty. For a nice illustration of this, see Chart D in this official summary of the 2004 Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds report. Medicare is projected to be 14% of GDP by 2078, more than twice Social Security's 6.6%. This represents an increase of 11.3% of GDP for Medicare and an increase of 2.3% of GDP for Social Security. Obviously, Medicare cost increases (and also Medicaid cost increases, which according to the above-cited CBO report are expected to increase more than fourfold to 5.3% of GDP) are driving the increase in entitlement spending, with Social Security, despite the all the sound and fury that has been expended on it over the past few months, really not being all that important. This, if nothing else, should convince all political observers that the Republican party is determined to destroy Social Security: if they were really worried about entitlement spending, they would be talking about Medicare, and certainly would not recently have passed a major increase in Medicare spending.

Interestingly, though, Brooks has no solution to propose. He talks vaguely of an "anti-politician" emerging to "crash through the current alignments and bust heads", of current politicians deciding to "reorient their careers" (whatever that means), and of Americans growing "even more disenchanted with the political status quo", but he has no ideas on how to deal with Medicare and Medicaid, or at least none he'd like to share. Or, more likely, none he really wants to think about. For the fact is that there are only two real options: either the steady advances of medicine will be available in the future only to the rich until they are no longer even close to cutting edge, or the government will have to raise taxes considerably so it can afford to pay for ever-improving medical treatments for the middle class and poor. Given that the non-rich outnumber the rich, and the idea of creating a medically-advantaged and longer-lived overclass is probably not one that the American people are likely to support en masse, the second option is almost certain to be the one that is chosen, likely through a series of small tax increases, especially on corporations and the rich. It is possible, of course, that medical advances and increases in longevity will slow down considerably, or even come to a stop, but most likely any such development would be associated with other changes which would render the argument over how large Medicare should be moot. Brooks is probably not too dumb to figure this out for himself, and naturally this revolts him to his Republican hack's tax-cut-loving core. So he consoles himself with visions of a Schwarzenegger or a Perot riding in a white horse to slash the size or government. More likely, though, is the arrival of another Roosevelt to preside over a new New Deal. At this point, even corporations like GM are calling on the government to take on more of the costs of health care, as these costs put them at a disadvantage compared to European and Japanese auto makers that don't have to pay for health care. Brooks does not propose a solution because even he can see what's coming, and he's hoping that if he doesn't think about it, it won't happen.

I can't think of a clever, or even not-so-clever, way to tie in a call for Brooks to be fired with the topic of this column. Jeez, won't the Times just fire him already? What exactly are they waiting for?