Comments are slow at G2A today, so I am going fishing over at MinnPost. Eric Black posted the following A cri de coeur over what the Republican Party has become . Now if you read me occasionally you will know that I agree with David Brooks often. So Greg picking on him required a response.
"He's REALLY trying but try as he might, Mr. Brooks can't separate himself from the party whose attitudes and actions he completely agreed with,... until they led (as it seemed inevitable they would, to many non-Republicans),... to their natural end: Donald Trump.
As is the case with everything David Brooks writes,... what he's really writing about is HIMSELF (without the mental/emotional sensitivity to realize that's what he's doing). Mr. Brooks, sadly, seems to lack the ability to imagine what it would be like to be anyone but himself,... nor does he possess the ability to realize that his own motivations may be based on internal factors of which he's seemingly incapable of making himself aware.
He can't understand where the discomforts of his life are coming from, so he projects them outward onto other people and groups and describes those OTHERS as wrestling with the issues he can't acknowledge or wrestle with within himself.
That being the case, he, once Trump is gone, will support the Republican Party without reservation,... right up until it crowns a NEW Trump,... at which point he'll be Shocked! Shocked I tell you! that such a thing could happen (again),... and sorry, Frank, I couldn't resist borrowing from "Casablanca" after your fine example. He has a lot of company within the ranks of the Republican Party,... and a good deal in the Democratic Party, too, though the issues they wrestle with are quite different." Greg
"Now I am not happy with many of Trump's behaviors and comments, and yet given a choice between him and Hillary... I would likely vote for him again. Even though it seems I spend half of my blog time calling him out for his lack of character and lies.
The reality is that the GOP has a pretty big tent. From a fiscal moderate, libertarian like me to the crazy folk like Roy Moore. So given our 2 party system, Brooks and myself will stick with the team that is closest to our belief system. And we will expend effort trying turn the ship...I just never understand why Liberals feel the need to personally attack Conservatives no matter how moderate they are. Or why Conservatives feel the need to personally attack Liberals. Can't we all just along? 😈
Now I assume you are a Liberal, does this mean that you support Antifa's illegal actions? Do you agree with the folks on the far Left who would happily turn the USA into a socialistic Democracy? Atlantic: Antifa
Now I am guessing that moderate liberals have many of the same challenges as the Bernie supporters keep trying to pull the Democratic party to the far left. They try to explain that extremist positions quickly lose a popular mandate... But the tails on the Left and Right seem to be pretty successfully wagging the dog..." G2A
21 comments:
Wiki Brooks
CJR David Brooks
Limbaughs Strange Take
This reminded me why I stopped listening to Rush...
"But perfect polarization, Trump has it. In fact, I would actually say that there is a greater percentage of people in the country that love Trump than hate him. I think the idea that half the country hates Trump is overblown. "
It is amazing how Limbaugh can pull "more people love Trump" out of these approval / disapproval ratings. I mean I dislike the even though his results seem okay so far. There definitely is no love here... :-)
David Brooks is a bad, sloppy writer who fails to recognize how his own badness and sloppiness and reliance on stereotypes has influenced the conservative movement which he now derides.
This classic 2004 takedown of Brooks' book Bobos in Paradise gets to a lot of the essential points about Brooks' writing.
Philly Mag: David Brooks Boo-Boos in Paradise
Brooks seems to acknowledge that he has been wrong in the past and continues to learn. Any notable errors you can point to in the last 5 years?
And please note you would likely say many of those things about my writing... So I am guessing your view may be biased against many of us slightly right of center folks.
I think he continues to miss the point. Like this summer, he did a column about how things like fancy Italian sandwiches cause inequality.
Vox David Brooks
"And please note you would likely say many of those things about my writing."
Indeed!
"So I am guessing your view may be biased against many of us slightly right of center folks."
No! As I said above, it's about bad, lazy, stereotype-riddled writing. There are plenty of good conservative writers who don't make those mistakes even if I disagree with their opinions. Reihan Salam, Charles Marohn, and Oren Cass are a few examples.
Well let's look at David's full piece...
Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.
How they’ve managed to do the first task — giving their own children a leg up — is pretty obvious. It’s the pediacracy, stupid. Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life. As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids.
Upper-middle-class moms have the means and the maternity leaves to breast-feed their babies at much higher rates than high school-educated moms, and for much longer periods.
Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
As life has gotten worse for the rest in the middle class, upper-middle-class parents have become fanatical about making sure their children never sink back to those levels, and of course there’s nothing wrong in devoting yourself to your own progeny.
It’s when we turn to the next task — excluding other people’s children from the same opportunities — that things become morally dicey. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.
The most important is residential zoning restrictions. Well-educated people tend to live in places like Portland, New York and San Francisco that have housing and construction rules that keep the poor and less educated away from places with good schools and good job opportunities.
These rules have a devastating effect on economic growth nationwide. Research by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti suggests that zoning restrictions in the nation’s 220 top metro areas lowered aggregate U.S. growth by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009. The restrictions also have a crucial role in widening inequality. An analysis by Jonathan Rothwell finds that if the most restrictive cities became like the least restrictive, the inequality between different neighborhoods would be cut in half.
Reeves’s second structural barrier is the college admissions game. Educated parents live in neighborhoods with the best teachers, they top off their local public school budgets and they benefit from legacy admissions rules, from admissions criteria that reward kids who grow up with lots of enriching travel and from unpaid internships that lead to jobs.
It’s no wonder that 70 percent of the students in the nation’s 200 most competitive schools come from the top quarter of the income distribution. With their admissions criteria, America’s elite colleges sit atop gigantic mountains of privilege, and then with their scholarship policies they salve their consciences by offering teeny step ladders for everybody else.
I was braced by Reeves’s book, but after speaking with him a few times about it, I’ve come to think the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.
Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.
American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”
In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.
To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.
The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It’s not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it’s the cultural codes.
Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.
Sean,
Now what do you disagree with exactly?
Being at heart a "back woods farmer boy", I totally get what he is saying. Though I have the money, education and self confidence to ignore all the pomp...
However if you have not the self confidence, money or education, I perfectly understand how the snobby outer suburb and uptown folks could intimidate and exclude you.
And I know they work hard to keep their schools "excellent"... Both for their ego and the good of their children. Which means encouraging the challenged to go else where.
By the way, I remember now why I rarely comment on MP... My comment still isn't there... :-)
Besides his horribly condescending tone towards his "friend", there's a lot wrong with the piece. Brooks isn't entirely off-base -- there are certainly some class-based social divides. But the answer to inequality isn't going to be teaching kids in North Minneapolis about Italian cured meats.
Because that's not the cause -- the cause is an entrenched system that is built to create income inequality and hasn't fully reckoned with institutionalized racism and sexism. The answer is going to be about actually implementing policies that help working-class families overcome the barriers that hold them back -- providing good jobs, having well-funded K-12 schools and making it more affordable to get a college education, providing a safety net as a cushion during times of instability, etc. -- not about the social cues. And Brooks and his ilk have been woefully short on policies that address these problems in meaningful ways.
What is condescending about this? He sensed her concern and gave her an alternative... I could very much doing the same thing for my Mother in Law who likes simple things...
"Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.
American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”
So as a good Liberal you seem to be saying that these Paul's will just change if we spend more of Peter's money on them.
providing good jobs
having well-funded K-12 schools
making it more affordable to get a college education
providing a safety net as a cushion during times of instability
etc
Please remember that this was tried from 1967 until ~2000, and all it did was make the single Parent household disaster much worse and give Bureaucrats /Teachers bigger salaries and more job security.
"Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”"
Instead of inviting his "friend" in, he allowed her to exclude herself. He could have said, "soppressata is salami", but didn't.
Now do you have any policies that require the recipients to really change their beliefs, habits, knowledge level, etc in order to get fiscal or service aid?
As Jerry would say... Incentives to NOT get pregnant early... Incentives to get and stayed married... Incentives to get and stay employed...
When I was young I thought my Parent's were very annoying the way I would get lectured whenever I was lazy or irresponsible... Now I realize that is what true love is!!! It is caring enough and being willing to force people to improve, even when they don't see why they should.
Where as it seems you would prefer to only help those who already know they deserve better and are willing to work for it.
Remember the story about my Ethiopian friend who I just had lunch with. He had to work his butt off but he found many US services and programs that supported his getting an engineering degree. However unfortunately he has many friends who are still working at the parking ramps, etc.
"Please remember that this was tried from 1967 until ~2000"
No, it wasn't. Sorry.
Just as an example:
"making it more affordable to get a college education"
In 1979, the average college tuition for one year at a public university could be paid for with 191 hours of minimum-wage work. In 2013, it took 991 hours. That's the difference between a part-time summer job and working full time for half the year. (And that's just tuition, which only about half of the total cost of college.)
Source: Atlantic: Myth of Working Your Way Through College
Yes it would have been a good opportunity to help her learn.
But is it his job to act like "the adult" and force that discomfort on her?
Now if he was giving her money like our government does, I would agree.
As her empathetic friend, I would go for making our time together enjoyable for both of us.
"Now do you have any policies that require the recipients to really change their beliefs, habits, knowledge level, etc in order to get fiscal or service aid?"
I've stated my position on this literally dozens of times.
"But is it his job to act like "the adult" and force that discomfort on her?"
Is his job just to bemoan these situations or to, you know, actually do something about it?
USN College Funding Programs
IHE College Assistance
USN Mixed Story
Yes you have and every time you seems to disagree with yourself by stating expectations like this...
providing good jobs
having well-funded K-12 schools
making it more affordable to get a college education
providing a safety net as a cushion during times of instability
etc
Please note that they are just more expenditures with no accountability.
And worse yet, like Jerry's voucher dream. It may help those poor students with good Parents and drive, but it will do pretty much nothing for the belief, habits, behavior, etc limited majority.
By the way, he is not bemoaning anything. He is simply stating an example of how this "boutique culture" of ours can make a lot of people uncomfortable.
"Yes you have and every time you seems to disagree with yourself"
No, I'm just summarizing. Do I have to write every caveat and condition over and over and over again to satisfy you?
No you do not.
However every time I will probably question how you plan to hold the bureaucrats, teachers and recipients accountable for results.
I mean these are pretty HUGE investments you are recommending... Especially since they are coming from the wallets of other citizens... I hope there is a good return on investment.
I remember when Joel used to advocate for handouts so artists could pursue their dreams without having to worry about healthcare, college costs, etc... He did have such a nice dream as long as he wasn't paying for it...
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