Comments on: Revealed preferences redux

By: Buffalo Gal

Buffalo Gal — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 15:45:32 +0000

tk and bza – you have it right. The Repubs like to pretend to be populist, while in fact embodying the most elite faction of society. Bush has already aired a smear ad portraying Kerry as an effete, out-of-touch rich guy. Brooks is reinforcing the theme. Unfortunately, too many Americans eat this up with a spoon.

By: GMT

GMT — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 16:33:53 +0000

So, it’s not because money = speech that the aristocracy usually wins, it’s because we like it that way? Reminds me of an early 20th cen. book (the name of which escapes me now) that claimed people of color were more under the influence of gravity, since they usually wound up on the lower, more poorly drained side of town. …right…

By: cheney_usa

cheney_usa — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 07:16:22 +0000

Check out his source of expertise: Lionel Tiger: Attack missionaries: http://www.nypress.com/14/20/news&columns/humanfollies.cfm Decline of males: http://anthro.rutgers.edu/faculty/tiger/publications/declineofmales.html

By: wanderer

wanderer — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 06:34:09 +0000

I think Brooks is making an accurate observation about the electorate in order to demonstrate, with a healthy dose of sarcasm in the three final paragraphs, an exasperation with the status quo (while helping Dubya out a bit too). Americans DO accept elite dominance. Although some non-privileged individuals, see Clinton or Edwards, make their way to the top of the political ladder, most politicians begin there and stay there. The public voices no objection, and instead acquiesces to the pandering of the elites, who claim to understand their cultural and personal circumstances. Although genuine socio-economic advancement through hard work is respected and rewarded, the elite are not “punished” or thought less of for merely claiming their birthright. Instead, the people fantasize about Camelot and its related elements: what Brooks identifies as “the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before the New England summer homes.” Although Brooks focuses on Kerry – unsurprising given his loyalties and his intention to bolster Bush’s tactic of portraying Kerry as a Massachusetts liberal – I give him credit for his acknowledegment that the Republicans play the same game, in paragraph 3. Essentially, I think that he makes a valuable point, one worth contemplating, despite his added motive of attacking Kerry.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 03:43:38 +0000

bza seems to be the one closest to the mark. This is a wonderful column, as an attack on John Kerry. Everyone knows George W. Bush is a son of privilege—what did they say? he was born on third and thought he hit a triple? (Or did they say that about his father?!?) The son of a president, the grandson of a senator. Everyone knows that. So the effective counter to that, politically speaking, is to point out how much Kerry has in common with that—that he too is rich and privileged. That both Kerry and Bush have led a life that isn’t anything like mine. The supposed sociological insight? A thin reed to hang the column on. There has to be something there, right? He already wrote this column on Dean and Bush (mentioning that Bush’s grandmother was in Dean’s grandmother’s wedding and discussing Dean’s Park Avenue life). He probably wrote a similar piece—-I really am just guessing—on Gore and Bush in 2000. Someone check the Atlantic Monthly archive, while I check the Weekly Standard.

By: Barry

Barry — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 01:39:10 +0000

bza, that’s been my opinion for a while. Brooks is a very dishonest, very partisan person who figured out that a thing coat of ‘reasonableness’ paint would take him a long way.

By: bza

bza — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 00:11:42 +0000

I think most of the comments here have misread the thrust of Brooks's piece. It ostensibly criticizes both parties for indulging in the politics of artistocracy, but it does so in quite unequal terms. First, the column touches on Republicans but spends much more time in criticism of Democrats. Second, Republicans are described as wanting a candidate who owns a ranch "the size of Oklahoma" and engages in a display of manual labor. That's not so damning, and indeed he doesn't even mention Bush by name here. Kerry, though, is mentioned by name, and is painted as effete, thin-blooded, and decadent. One of the objects of criticism comes off much worse than the other. This is shrewd rhetoric: it cons unaware readers into thinking they're listening to an relatively objective commentator even as one's view of the Democrats is being framed in prejudicial terms. As icing on the cake Brooks gets to enjoy the reputation of being relatively unpartisan even as the material effect of his writing is dependably to the Republicans' advantange. This is a variation of a technique he's used for a long time. In his appearances on the News Hour he frequently could be heard criticizing Republicans, but it was almost invariably criticism that concerned their tactical decisions; he rarely touched on the substance of Republican positions or painted prominent Republicans in a personally bad light. Not so when he came to speak about Democrats. As a result, one wouldn't discount his remarks as partisan in intent, even as the impression one took away would be consistently favor the Republicans. So I wish we wouldn't speak of Brooks as "reasonable": that's merely his schtick, and it's a deeply manipulative pose.

By: Conrad Barwa

Conrad Barwa — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 23:22:14 +0000

This time, it’s David Brooks, who uses Bush and Kerry’s privileged backgrounds to prove that Americans prefer to be ruled by blue-bloods Bit odd, given that if my memory serves me correctly, in the first years of the Republic the only class of Free Whites who would be denied citizenship were European aristocratic immigrants who would refuse to surrender their titles in exchange for American citizenship – the argument being that Americans as a people and the USA as a republic abhorred the kind of hereditary-caste systems of political privilege that such institutions perpetuated in the ‘Old World’. Still I suppose one could argue that this was a couple of centuries back and a lot has changed since then.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 23:07:25 +0000

Lads, this column is actually a bit more pathetic than you realise. What’s happened here is that Brooks has picked up on the traditional quadrennial press release issued by the publishers of Debrett’s pointing out that in every Presidential election since the war, the candidate with more “royal blood” has won. It’s not even orginal bullshit.

By: Barry

Barry — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 19:46:57 +0000

Brian, you must understand – in the USA in 2000-2003, speaking the truth to power was considered by many to be crazy. Of course, these many were generally Republicans.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 18:27:32 +0000

Krugman ‘extreme’? On a pretty fair number of political debates he’d be on the right-wing side of the debate in Australia. On health care his position is closer to the Libs than the ALP, on trade possibly the same (though it depends on who’s running Labor at the time) and definitely the same on the importance of balanced budgets. To be sure he was against the Iraq war, but so was everyone except a few Liberal die-hards. Krugman has centrist views and argues for them vigorously without playing the phony ‘everyone in the debate has a good point’ game that journalists feel compelled to play even when it’s blindingly obvious that one side has no point at all. If the Kerry administration starts putting forward crazy economic policies, or sane health policies, expect Krugman to be arguing just as loudly against them as he’s arguing against Bush-backed craziness now.

By: Jim Miller

Jim Miller — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 18:20:29 +0000

Well, I’m not a big fan of David Brooks, but he has improved the op-ed page, which given Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman, was not hard to do. Barry and Henry may wish to read my post, months ago, in which I suggested, tongue in cheek, that Krugman’s columns were written not by Krugman, but by a grad student trying to destroy Krugman’s reputation. Though I was joking, the idea does explain a lot about his columns, including the poor writing and the uncorrected errors. Krugman is consistently among the five most partisan columnists, so I don’t think “mainstream” is quite the right word for him. I think Ann Coulter is the only one who consistently beats him, which will give you an idea just how extreme Krugman is in his commentary. It is not that his ideas, such as they are, are so extreme, it is that his columns are warped by what seems an almost pathological hatred of the Bush adminstration.

By: Henry Farrell

Henry Farrell — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 17:57:13 +0000

Barry – I think parts of “Bobos in Paradise” are quite astute. I don’t buy the main argument – but Brooks can be a quite clever cultural commentator. I agree though that he doesn’t even begin to compare with Krugman, in shorter or longer form. There are bits of Krugman that I don’t agree with (I think that he can sometimes be too gung-ho on globalization), but for a long period, his pieces in the NYT were the only effective mainstream voice of opposition to Bush administration policy that I was coming across; the Democrats were flaking out.

By: Henry

Henry — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 17:50:57 +0000

Yes – you’re quite right – I am saying that your comment is sectarian. Of course someone can be judicious and unimpressed by David Brooks, but that’s not the claim that you’re making. What you’re claiming – and this fits into a series of snide jibes that you’ve been making here – is that because I don’t say that everything that Brooks has said is shit, I’m a sell-out who’s pandering to the right. This is not an argument; it’s a cheap dimwitted slur that’s intended to sidestep argument. As is your comment that I’m a “white lefty,” which is simply pathetic. Grow up.

By: Barry

Barry — Sun, 07 Mar 2004 15:09:36 +0000

Henry, a good point has been raised – when did Brooks write good stuff? The NYT column limitations aren’t an excuse for anybody. Krugman has done some of the best financial and economic writing on this administration in NYT columns, of the entire mainstream US media.