David Brooks Says

Noticing all the correctly closed links in the first 2 lines of this post, I bet that you guys have a preview command so you can avoid stupid mistakes, like this or this. This 2nd class citizenship for the rest of us has got to end!

What do we want?
A preview option!
When do we want it?
NOW!

Another of the BoBo quotes from MY

They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.

Is the drive around Bethesda to take kids to piano lessons really longer than the time a low-income worker in SE DC spends on the bus journey to a job?

So Oscar Wilde was wrong?

Rona(rf) Also, what does the (rf) stand for? I’ve been wondering.

@8
My surname F*tzgerald (I’m hiding the i for privacy )

CR: Actually, Yglesias’s column seemed particularly bad in that respect. As I understand it, the heart is:

“Is the Brooks family breakdown consigning them to misery? Does he need a good dose of bourgeois paternalism from the rest of us? Or does he recognize now that money is really useful in papering over lots of different kinds of problems, and maybe working class kids would be better off if they and their parents had more of it?”

Now, maybe Brooks himself has changed his mind about everything, but I don’t see why any of this is contrary to what he argued earlier. Does he need a good dose of bourgeois paternalism from the rest of us? Of course, he said in the quote right above that we all do! Is the Brooks family breakdown consigning them to misery? Condemning to misery is too strong (and anyway, I don’t know how old his children are), but I imagine a Brooksian can claim that, all things being equal, they can be expected to have significantly worse life outcomes.

Frankly, I find this line of argument bizarre. Suppose Mavis Crooks, a wealthy pundit, wrote: “Society is too lax on health and safety, as a result of which many people, primarily the poor, are forced to work in dangerous working environments, whereas the wealthy have better conditions.” Then, later, Mavis loses her hand in a workplace accident. How on earth would this undermine her argument, or make her need to engage in self-reflection? I suppose you could argue that she should realise that the unsafe working environment isn’t just a problem for the poor, but if in fact these accidents disproportionately affect the poor (and they do), then you can see why that’s her focus.

Were I to be uncharitable, I would suspect that this is just a lot of people who hate David Brooks for other reasons, and now just crowing at the fact that he is getting divorced.

Salem, but in his quotes in the post above he contrasts the decadent “common people” against the disciplined “meritocratic elites”. Leaving for a moment aside the falsehood of it, he is definitely a proud member of the latter group, so how come he’s getting divorced?

Brooks’ premise, as MY points out, was (and pretty much always is, afaict): It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.

The elites, in Brooks’s telling are virtuous (phenomenally productive), and the masses are villains, who live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

MY is pointing out that, if you have substantial resources — was the couple’s new $4 million home just too small for the two to them? — divorce is merely sad for the couple and their children, while, for poor people, divorce can be economically devastating, curtailing investments in a child’s education, etc.

Much of the economic elite in Brooks’ New York and Washington circles are irresponsible parasites working hard every day as vampire squid. Brooks, himself, is, at best, a hackish drone with an elastic relationship to truth. The policies of this self-congratulatory elite have devastated the economy, taking jobs, homes, pensions, and education away from the poor and middle class, to fund their own lavish Gilded Age II lifestyles. And, then, Brooks apologizes for the devastation, with pieties about bourgeois values.

Is there anything else needing explanation? I’m here for you.

Slum

Marc: Only if you believe that divorce is some act of God, rather than a mutual decision between two people that a relationship isn’t salvageable. His entire point was that we needed social pressure to keep marriages intact, the implication being that people were getting divorced even though they shouldn’t.

Well, does that apply to him? Or only to the helots?

Firstly, I don’t know anything about David Brooks’ marriage, but you know very well that divorce is very often not a mutual decision. And, as you also know, the destructive behaviour Brooks is against is not merely divorce per se, but all the behaviour that leads to divorce – adultery, spousal violence, substance abuse, etc etc. Secondly, divorces – and decisions generally – are definitely not acts of God, but rather are shaped, in part, by the institutions and structures in which those decisions are made. And it’s precisely those institutions and structures which Brooks wants to change – look at the quotes. He isn’t saying – “Look at those helots, who don’t know how to behave.” He’s saying “It is a tragedy that we have a broken society such that people are encouraged to behave this way – the government needs to help them.”

So yes, that should definitely apply to him.

That’s why I made the analogy to a workplace accident. A workplace accident isn’t an act of God either – like a divorce, it’s not a result anyone chose going in, but it’s not a random occurrence, it’s an outcome of the institutions and structures in place. If there are a lot of accidents going on, it’s not necessarily bad luck, and it’s not necessarily because the workers are careless, but it is a sign that maybe you should change the safety rules.

Corey Robin: In other words, Brooks believes that divorce and family disruption is a major casual factor making people poor and keeping them poor. The example of Brooks’s own life, Yglesias is saying, shows that that is not the case… When rich people divorce, their kids’ material life chances aren’t affected.

But what example? How do you know this won’t hurt his children? Yes, if you assume that David Brooks is wrong, that divorce isn’t a major factor in life outcomes, then the fact that his children won’t be hurt is evidence against his position. But of course David Brooks is wrong if that’s your starting assumption. Where’s the new evidence that would change anyone’s mind? It’s not like Brooks is the first wealthy person ever to get divorced. If one of Brooks’ children grows up to be chronically unemployed, will you change your mind, and say “It must have been because of the divorce, Brooks was right all along?” Of course not, you’ll say it’s pure anecdote – and you’d be right to do so.

Bruce Wilder: The elites, in Brooks’s telling are virtuous (phenomenally productive), and the masses are villains, who live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

If it’s about virtue and vice, why does Brooks say the problem is “organizations and structures”? You make this weird segue in which you say Brooks is describing the masses as villains, and the nature of their villainy is… they live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive. What? Brooks is in fact arguing the exact opposite of the position you take. He doesn’t blame moral villainy at all, he’s saying they have a bad environment. And look at Brooks’s remedy – it’s not “Punish the helots,” or even “Pull your socks up,” it’s societal and governmental intervention to fix those communities and provide better structures and incentives. And frankly, this is a rather left-of-centre approach to problems of negative behaviour, which had it come from anyone other than David Brooks would be enthusiastically applauded on this board.

Ack, messed up html.

Bruce Wilder: The elites, in Brooks’s telling are virtuous (phenomenally productive), and the masses are villains, who live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.

If it’s about virtue and vice, why does Brooks say the problem is “organizations and structures”? You make this weird segue in which you say Brooks is describing the masses as villains, and the nature of their villainy is… they live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive. What? Brooks is in fact arguing the exact opposite of the position you take. He doesn’t blame moral villainy at all, he’s saying they have a bad environment. And look at Brooks’s remedy – it’s not “Punish the helots,” or even “Pull your socks up,” it’s societal and governmental intervention to fix those communities and provide better structures and incentives. And frankly, this is a rather left-of-centre approach to problems of negative behaviour, which had it come from anyone other than David Brooks would be enthusiastically applauded on this board.

“The policies of this self-congratulatory elite have devastated the economy, taking jobs, homes, pensions, and education away from the poor and middle class, to fund their own lavish Gilded Age II lifestyles.”

I wish I could have this written in the clouds over Wall Street and D.C.
Bravo Bruce.

“societal and governmental intervention to fix those communities and provide better structures and incentives,”
meaning,
“hectoring single women, being a professional moral scold of other people’s private lives, and doing anything, any desperate thing, to distract attention from the causes of economic inequality. Say anything, so long as you manage to exculpate the richest among us.”

Indeed, he does not merely engage in moral hectoring in order to distract us from the root causes of the problems. He actually hectors us if we so much as *mention* the root causes:

“It’s wrong–wrong! I tell you, wrong!–to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.”

Sorry–this guy has always been a despicable apologist for the elites, telling his own false morality tales in order to protect the wealthy predators from just punishment for their crimes. Nothing left-of-center about this guy–he may pretend to cite sociology now and then, but it always turns out to support the Republican cause du jour.

What Brooks has done, to correct the analogy, is inveigh against unsafe workplaces, and then lose a hand to a machine that he refused to have repaired. Remember, Brooks is always the manager, never the worker.

Which, in his mind, is why he’s better qualified to tell workers how to live their lives than they are to decide how to live their lives.

Is he a hypocrite or did he not understand his own marriage?

Almost certainly he didn’t understand his own marriage. It’s not like he understands any other form of social relationship: if it worked ever, at all, it was by chance.

Do not judge lest ye be judged.

Another Brooksian view of our world from one of Yglesia’s links (called The Great Divorce): “Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe.” (http://nyti.ms/1i2leYC)

Tribes – upper and lower… with the upper being “phenomenally productive.” Yes, at theft, fraud and a very, very skewed sense of values – shared by Brooks.

From the same disgusting essay: “The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.”

First of all, I’d love his data for the divorce rate in that upper tribe of his – I’ll bet it’s not as pretty a picture as Brooks likes to paint.

Second, a return to the 1950s? That pre-feminist, pre-civil rights era where women were drowning in that “problem with no name” and it was okay to murder a 14-year-old for smiling at a white girl? Those were the days! At least those were the days for those lucky enough to be “upper tribesmen.”

“My use of the term, “villains”, in its archaic sense, as a synonym for serfs, may have been a challenge to some readers’ reading comprehension skills, for which I offer no apology.”

I mean you are free to use whatever obsolete vocabulary you like but don’t be surprised when people misunderstand you.

/Totally agree with you on Brooks.

Hey Bloix, are you one of his kids?

“I’m not judging people who get divorced.”

Neither are the other posters here, or at least that is how it seems to me. They are judging someone for being a hypocrite and a tool of right wing interests, not for getting divorced.

How do you know this won’t hurt his children? Yes, if you assume that David Brooks is wrong, that divorce isn’t a major factor in life outcomes, then the fact that his children won’t be hurt is evidence against his position. But of course David Brooks is wrong if that’s your starting assumption. Where’s the new evidence that would change anyone’s mind? It’s not like Brooks is the first wealthy person ever to get divorced.

Well, yes, Brooks isn’t the first wealthy person ever to get divorced. That’s sort of the point. Matt Yglesias knows a lot of children from affluent but broken families. So do I, so does Corey, and so, I think, do you. Speaking only for myself, I also know a lot of children from non-affluent broken homes. Mostly, the former manage a lot better than the latter, and, by and large, do OK; the latter have it a lot harder. While I would not hold my anecdotal knowledge, or that of others, up against rigorous study, I am unaware of any such study that contradicts what we see in common life.

@36:

I thought to remark on B.W.’s etymology, but I decided, nah, why bother? Either people get it or they don’t and selective reading is by no means unheard of in these comments.

Okay, so Corey Robin is demonstrating once again that he can’t follow an argument. The answer to “what about you, you big fuck?” is, “I raised three kids in a stable family environment for 27 years. I didn’t father three kids by three different women who I drop in on once every month or two to disrupt their lives and then disappear for a while or maybe forever. That’s what about me, you stupid piece of shit.”

@39

Are you not trading in cliche and caricature a little there? You’ve just created a narrative around Brooks marriage (apparently) solely from a few occurences within your own social circle.

“I raised three kids in a stable family environment for 27 years. I didn’t father three kids by three different women who I drop in on once every month or two to disrupt their lives and then disappear for a while or maybe forever. That’s what about me, you stupid piece of shit.”

Yeah, you’re doing it again. Trading in caricature and cliche. an you quantify how prevelant this phenomenon is?

#48 @Ronan(rf) – I don’t know anything about Brooks’ marriage. Who’s leaving who? Did someone have an affair? Have they been estranged for a long time? Is this mutual? Is he relieved or torn up? I have no idea.

What I do know – anecdotally, true – is that delayed divorce is a thing. I suspect it’s more common than it used to be for a whole list of reasons applicable to middle-class people: more women work and can manage financially without a husband; families have fewer kids to support; people are healthier longer; people expect more out of their later years; divorce is no longer stigmatized.

Brooks of course is not middle class – he’s rich. The rich have been divorcing for a long time without much in the way of consequences. (Hey, unfair! The rich get to do stuff that the rest of us can’t afford to do!) But Brooks is not divorcing like a rich person – he’s divorcing in a middle-class way.

Anyway, what I was trying to say was that Brooks liked to celebrate the horrible fifties-style marriage as a model for poor people today. It doesn’t surprise me that he can’t manage that kind of life. I don’t know why he can’t, and I don’t know if he was a hypocrite or a fool for saying that others should.

“he speaks in such banal generalisations that his opinions have no practical value.”

They have immense practical value for the conservative project. They lull the median voter into a chin-stroking daze of inactivity. “David Brooks is so moderate, so thoughtful. He sees that our country has problems, and he sees that there is nothing anyone can do about them, except to blame the blahs for their wanton immorality. I’m so glad I listened to him on NPR! I had been considering the possibility that the US has been systematically looted by the Koch Brothers and the Wall Street gangsters, but now I see that I was wrong. I’m so glad he explained it to me!”

He’s useful, alright–immensely useful to his paymasters.

51: my first impulse is to add that comment to the sidebar of my blog, but perhaps I’ll sleep on it first. Well done.

My use of the term, “villains”, in its archaic sense, as a synonym for serfs…

I would have gotten it if he had spelled it villeins..

I’ll raise a glass of 2buck Chuck to both Anderson and David Brooks. It can’t be fun to lose a marriage, however necessary the divorce may be.
Brooks’ position contains a general truth, that family disintegration and poverty and crime rates are statistically linked, the same way family stability and economic well-being and positive citizenship are linked, but it ignores the diametrically opposite experiences of being an affluent father – not parent, father – and a poor one. And how much guilt the despair of poverty centers on the father.
It attacks manhood in visceral, atavistic ways. When your family’s barely enduring or failing to endure economic hardship, and you’re the dad, it’s almost all your fault.
Poverty disintegrates.
There’s a Darwinian catch, that the ones who aren’t breaking under the pressure are fitter for the condition, and the system. Horrible logic that leads equally directly to feral gangs, or to a kind of voluntary enslavement.
You can’t refute that without repudiating the system that’s creating and maintaining the imbalance, the same system that’s rewarding, in Brooks’ ghastly phrasing, the “upper tribe”.
There’s nothing static yet about the imbalance, it’s increasing, and moving toward total polarity.
It looks like the expectation of the “uppers” is that as total polarity’s achieved the “lowers” will have no means of redress but subservient begging, or rebellion. And surveillance algorithms will nip any possible revolutions in the bud.
The flaws in that expectation are getting clearer by the day.

Anderson, I’m sorry to hear you’re getting divorced. That’s shitty all around even if the eventual outcome is happier people 2 years down the road. Best luck.

Bloix, I do think you’re allowing your (perfectly natural) feeling that you wouldn’t want people talking smack about you behind your back if you happened to get divorced for reasons they could never understand color your views. See, none of that means we shouldn’t be talking smack about David Brooks. David Brooks has repeatedly, with po-faced seriousness, and to the actual detriment of America’s well-being (if he lulled anybody to sleep when they had their hand on the regulatory tiller somewhere, and I do think he did) talked smack about every other damn person getting divorced in America who made less than $200,000 a year. And quite without hedging. As Corey notes, he didn’t say ‘the problem is that people do this during crucial years of child development,’ or ‘people do this because they are entirely victims of societal forces.’ No, he has gone on at length to say, rather, ‘the upper tribe of Americans are meritocrats who practice marriage virtuously, and if they get divorced–[here we may insert, it’s rare, they have good reasons different from the reasons the lower tribe has, etc.]’ while ‘the lower tribe get divorced at alarming rates (psss–because they are sluts and stuff), and are creating a new underclass of children whom it may be difficult or impossible to educate.’ He’s just gone around, giving talks along with Bill Clinton at glittering dinners while the wait staff glide around thinking bitter thoughts, talking shit about other people’s divorces all the goddamn time, for at least…10 years? 15? He is a useful idiot preaching economic Calvinism, in which the number of nannies a family employs is a demonstration of their moral worth. Since, in a just world, it would be acceptable for David Brooks to be drowned by a deadly hippopotamus, it can hardly be the cause that it is wrong to talk shit about his divorce, the former being so much more serious than the latter.

Frankly, it’s bloody hard to understand what the hell Brooks is banging on about. Little wonder that so many stories are being constructed on his behalf (whichever side of that particular process that we, each, might be beavering away in our various Comment Mines).

I reckon, though, that he might just be gifting to Us All, a bit of Christmassy flapdoodle – something vaguely along the lines of Orwell, sort of like “Politics, Aspiration and Brookian Language”. He must know the following GO gem by heart and must avidly hold to its principles; so he’s just gotta be yanking our chains, just funning us?

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

(Orwell, G., 1946)

As to the OP. Divorce, family breakdown and all. The man actually makes a living out of this f*ckwittery? Thank the Invisible Alpha-male in the Sky for people like Annette Lareau:

Americans tend to resist the notion that they live in a society of social classes. Most people describe themselves as middle class. When asked about social divisions, many readily discuss the power of race, but the idea of social class is not a systematic part of the vocabulary of most Americans. Nor is there a set of widely discussed beliefs, as in earlier decades, of the importance of eliminating poverty or narrowing gaps in social inequality.

Looking at social class differences in the standards of institutions provides a vocabulary for understanding inequality. It highlights the ways in which institutional standards give some people an advantage over others as well as the unequal ways that cultural practices in the home pay off in settings outside the home. Such a focus helps to undercut the middleclass presumption of moral superiority over the poor and the working class. And a vocabulary of social structure and social class is vastly preferable to a moral vocabulary that blames individuals for their life circumstances and saves the harshest criticism for those deemed the “undeserving poor.”

(Lareau, A., 2003. Unequal Childhoods: 256-257)

Brooks does talk about class. Give him that. But. It’s clear, in the most ungenerous and pernicious terms. Unenlightened Swab.

64: thank you, Belle.

C’mon, Brooks is full of shit, but Bloix is right. Brooks isn’t talking about childless singles or childless divorced couples here. The point of underscoring low affluent divorce rates is to make a contrast with unwed parents in the postmodern slum tribe, and talk about what kind of environment kids grow up in. Broken homes underwrite “poverty culture” specifically by being so bad for the kids. That is explicitly the mechanism that Matthew Yglesias identifies and is poking at in his post, because Matthew Yglesias reads the Brooks piece like a normal person and not someone antecedently committed to parsing it as not having to do with childrearing at all. However, if Brooks stayed married til his kids were out of the house, it really does go some way toward dispelling the charge of hypocrisy on that narrow thing. Maybe there is a critique distilling some of his other weird sayings about marriage that goes through, but this ain’t it.

@64

I would pay serious money to watch Belle demolish the useful idiot, Brooks, in an extended conversation.

The delayed divorce has become something of a middle-class norm that values the raising of children over personal fulfillment.

And as a child of such a middle-class couple, I say, divorce away and get some personal fulfillment. Growing up in a family where your parents don’t love each other and there’s little other than barely-restrained conflict in the air is NOT a healthy family life. Getting divorced and trying for happiness is not selfish, it’s sensible.

Sticking around in a situation of unhappiness, and bringing your children up in that atmosphere may seem on the surface to be selfless, but it leaves your children without any model of a healthy adult relationship that they can take into adulthood.

I know that’s a very personal and individual experience, but if anyone’s think of recommending parents stay together for the sake of the children, just shut up.

Corey@43:
“Anytime anyone has tried to prove some version of the ‘culture of poverty’ idea [..] they never line up statistically.”

I would be interested in reading more about it: can you recommend some (not too long) reading?

@55: does anyone else find that whole list of stats–arranged around/described in terms of women–irritating, to say the least?

Look, rea, when you raise a child in a properly stable, upper-tribe, Burkean home environment, there’s no reason why a 9 year old can’t become a mature, socially productive 30 year old in only 5 years.

Say a prayer for the poor kid–as much as I’m happy to see his dad suffer, I honestly can’t bring myself to snark about the poor damned 14 year old collateral damage.

Well, I think Yglesias’ point is the important one: the 14-year old will probably face some tears and turmoil and therapy, but in fact his socio-economic status is pretty much guaranteed to be rosy for life. He’ll still go to Yale and get a high-paying job on Wall Street and make a ton of money.

That’s the real deep hypocrisy at work in Brooks: he claims that what determines life-outcomes has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with personal virtue. And he claims to know something about sociology. But in fact the sociological literature shows that life-outcomes, in today’s post-Reagan, class-war economy, are almost entirely determined by your parents’ economic status.

The Republicans do everything they can to loot the non-wealthy and guarantee that the children of the wealthy will be wealthy, and Brooks has done everything he can to help.

And part of what he has done to help is to say, “there is no class warfare–it’s just the fault of those shiftless poors for being shiftless.”

Straightwood: that’s very sweet of you! No one would welcome the opportunity more than I.
Katherine: I’m so sorry to hear you too are going through getting divorced, and with a kid whom I know to be pretty young. I am glad to hear that you and your ex are doing your best to keep your child’s life stable and I will be thinking of you also.
rea: how dast you bring facts into a discussion concerning Mr. Brooks! Next thing we know you scallywags will be pointing out that everything he says in his book “Bobos in Paradise” is false, such as his chucklingly good-humored account of trying to ask where the ‘best restaurant in town’ was in a variety of places in the alleged Midwest, I think, was where he allegedly visited, and being directed to the supposed Applebees or the Red Lobster, and try as he might to spend more than $20 on an entree (or a meal, he waffles) he failed, order howsoever many strip steaks as his gall bladder and the purse of the New York Times would tolerate. And then some rapscallion found out that the ‘surf and turf’ meal at Red Lobster, consisting, as so many things in life (such as the foam used to protect electrical wiring on underwater drill rigs, and your alcoholic uncle’s nose, and miniature marshmallows) of equal parts steak and lobster, cost $28, and who was laughing then! But do you know what David Brooks said? He said, ‘you don’t understand humor!’ Also, ‘is that how you want to start your career, all snarky?’ So think twice before you bring any facts to the thought leader guy, pal, is what I’m saying, bub.

Yes, the use of “tribe”. It’s one of those cases where someone who ought to know better, instead believes that he knows *so much* better, that he could not be accused of anything unseemly.

We just went through this with Richard Cohen, who thought that his unquestionable reputation for liberal rectitude (that he hears from voices in his head) would insulate him from any charge of impropriety when he wrote that “People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex” at the thought of interracial marriage. How could anyone possibly think that he, Richard Cohen, could be racist, just for saying this? Wasn’t it manifest that he was only giving voice to the unenlightened prejudices of people far more benighted than himself?

Brooks is an old master at that con as well: publicize the ugly rhetoric of the Republican id, but pretend to do it in scare-quotes, so that you maintain your plausible deniability. “It’s those other people–the low-class people in Applebees–who think that the blahs belong to a different tribe. Not me! I’m far too enlightened to look at the world that way. I’m just putting things into terms that they would understand, and representing their Weltanschauung. There: how could anyone who knows that word be a bigot?”

While Brooks is a hack, this thread and the previous one strike me as a whole lot of throwing the baby out with the bathwater–that is “culture” is dismissed wholesale as a smokescreen–a concept useful only for defending privilege and stigmatizing poverty– in favor of the reality of “economics” by numerous commentators here. The rich do alright because they’re rich; the problem of poverty and its reproduction has nothing to do with culture, and is simply a matter of economics. It’s 1975 again and we’re “blaming the victim” to even mention culture. The distinction between the concept of culture as mere “ideology” and the reality of material facts couldn’t be drawn more starkly–it’s almost old-school Marxism at work. I don’t want to give Brooks too much credit, but at least he seems to be interested in the relationship between economic class and culture, and tends to see those things as bound up with one another, even if many of his formulations are based on unsupported and generalized claims about “upper” and “lower” tribes and other nonsense. Brooks’s writing is full of critical appraisals of the ironies of American upper-middle class life (see Bobos in Paradise, for instance) in terms that make him a cheap knock-off Daniel Bell , so it’s hard to see him a simply a disparager of the ways and mores of the “lower tribe”. If so, why is he writing in such acerbic terms of “thought leaders,” who are certainly not of the “lower tribe”?

DBW @ 4:35,
Indeed. For example, from 1850-1970 both NYC and the City of Chicago had a culture of providing universal free public education to all children (and no small number of adults) within their borders, and did so at a decent average and often very high level. And “we” agreed to pay the taxes, build the infrastructure, and provide the moral and cultural support to make that possible. Then around 1970 “we” decided to start cutting that support drastically and let our public school system rot both physically and culturally. I wonder why that happened? Anything to do with a certain 1954 court ruling working its way through society?

DBW–

“throwing out the baby with the bathwater” only in the sense of “we’re talking about X on this thread; we have talked at length about Y on other threads.”

There are plenty of people around here willing and able to talk your ear off about culture and its effects on culture.

But right now we are discussing a guy whose role in the propaganda-sphere it has been to *pretend* to be an expert on culture, and then brow-beat anyone who brings up economics. Remember:

“It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites.”

Thou shalt not discuss class warfare! Thou shalt only talk about culture, and then in a way that insists that our tribe is doing it right, and their tribe needs to be scolded, hectored, and impoverished, while we plunder their pensions and shred their safety net.

If this thread seems a bit one-sided, it is because we are discussing someone who has insisted on one side.

Sounds like a redo of Hogarth as Beer Street and Wine Lane

Cranky Observer @ 90

Then around 1970 “we” decided to start cutting that support drastically

Evidence please? Something showing spending per student would be good–I somehow missed the point in the per-student spending trend line where it decreased dramatically.

Oldster@92:
Well, if the response to Brooks’s one-sided proclamations is to insist, no it’s the other one-side, then I think my point stands. Your explanation sounds a lot like “he did it first, so I’m justified in my equally one-sided view.” Instead of saying that Brooks gets the relationship between culture and economic class wrong, and that it might be better to characterize that relationship in X or Y way, I see a whole lot of dismissal of the very idea that culture has anything to do with issues of economic class, and that its primary use as a concept is ideological–to bash the poor for their pathological behavior or to celebrate the rich for their virtue. Even Brooks doesn’t consistently use the culture concept in this way. I guess the question for me is what it is about David Brooks that brings out the economic determinism in his critics? Why shouldn’t his critics respond to glib faux sociology by providing a more sophisticated sociological and cultural vision, rather than fall into the trap of saying that culturalist arguments are mere obfuscation preventing us from seeing the simply reality of economic forces? Of course, maybe David Brooks isn’t worth arguing with, but two long threads about him suggests that’s not the response he provokes.

I don’t doubt that Brooks is getting divorced for reasons that are good and sufficient to him and/or his current spouse. But you might think that the experience would convince him that the lower tribes are also not just waking up one day and saying “I think it would be fun to get divorced today”, that their divorces also grow out of real problems in their lives and those problems will not go away if they don’t get divorced. In some cases the problems will get worse if they don’t get divorced.

Some of those problems, of course, would go away if they had money like Brooks’s (although obviously not all, since it didn’t work for him). Bourgeois values are no substitute for a bourgeois pocketbook, and the actual facts on the relative importance of the two to outcomes for children is pretty clear, if Brooks would bother to look at it.

If you step back and look at the big numbers on income distribution in the USA, around 1980 you see the results of a concerted political effort to cap the income of the middle and lower classes and direct the fruits of all further economic growth into the pockets of the 1%. This effort was abetted by the creation of a cadre of propagandists posing as researchers, independent journalists, and “commentators.” David Brooks is one of them.

Almost every one of his columns asserts that nothing should be done to change the just and natural concentration of wealth in the hands of the upper “tribe.” He cherry picks references to economic statistics and sociology research to support this position, while disregarding all contrary data. Brooks is a disgusting hack who masquerades as a thoughtful observer. He has earned a reserved place in the ninth circle of Hell.

Being surreal is never pointless; after all, spandex tabasco sauce car parks.

Belle Waring @ 103

If your comments here are any guide, you are never pointlessly surreal. Having rowed along in your wake from Pogo’s swamps to Lee Kwan Yew’s novus ordo seclorum, I gotta say such new voices make for a very joyful noise to at least one pair of very old ears. Long may you wave….

@DBW 98
What Belle W. said @105.
Or to put it another way, the point here is not that “culture” is always used ‘ideologically’ or must be used in that way, but that Brooks uses it in that way.

As to “what is it about Brooks that brings out the economic determinism in his critics?” — the more relevant question wd be: How can someone who has expended so much energy arguing that what the poor lack is “social capital” not expect to bring out the ‘economic determinism’ in his critics?

The problem w Brooks is that many of his sources themselves have fairly transparent ideological agendas. He has rummaged in often dubious sociology, which (as Straightwood observed) he has used selectively, and the result is predictable.

Belle Waring: Got it. Look, I have no brief for Brooks–he’s a smug hack in my book, too. I just think that the best counter to bad (evil, if you want) thinking is better thinking. As far as I can see, Brooks’s critics oblige him by tending to fall into the very stereotype of the left critic he sets up. But since you think I’ve misplaced my comments, and they are not appropriate for a comments thread on Crooked Timber, I’ll head on over to my prep session for the Moynihan Report. I’m running about 50 years late.

I think Brook’s article would read a whole lot different to the modern eye if it were written in the 1950’s about the prosperous Protestants versus the Catholics. Or the White Man vs. the Black. This is just another in a long line of pious self-serving justification for injustice that in the end culminates in assertion of divine right. Nothing new here, move on.

OK, so I’m posting this absolutely flabbergasted that no-one has beat me to it:

David Brooks says:

That he wants to know
Why he’s given half his life
To people he hates now

David Brooks Says
What country shall I say is calling
From across the world?

But he’s not afraid to die
The people all call him Alaska
Between worlds so the people ask him
‘Cause it’s all in his mind
It’s all in his mind

[…]

He asks you is it good or bad?
It’s such an icy feeling
It’s so cold in Alaska,
It’s so cold in Alaska
It’s so cold in Alaska

I’m just wrecking the joke here, right? Just too dim to get aboard the subtlewagon?

“It seems to me that pointing out the economic issues that Brooks routinely sweeps under the rug is a perfectly natural counterpoint to Brooks’s own sweeping of those issues under the rug.”

He is not sweeping them under the rug. They are front and center, it’s what this is all about: “It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite.”

In his world everyone is paid according to their productivity, in his world this is how it should be, and in his world the “upper tribe” is phenomenally productive. In his world everything is almost perfect, except for the “lower tribe” being, alas, morally corrupt. If only the “lower tribe” stopped being hedonist assholes, everything would be totally perfect.

robotslave, thanks so much for that. You made my day.

@ SamChevre: Your anecdotal evidence is nice and useful, but irrelevant to the wealth axis in a model predicting success. The comment you’re responding too (and, on the flip side, David Brooks) isn’t singling out groups like you mention for success comparative to similar groups – it’s stating that when you go across that particular spectrum you get notably different outcomes, which is true.

So it’s not a great support of the “wealth doesn’t matter” argument to try and pick at it with equivalence stories at particular points along the spectrum, because there’s still a larger trend (based on wealth) you haven’t explained.

robotslave: +10,000 YOU WIN THE THREAD!

LFC: Yglesias doesn’t claim that Brooks’ divorce invalidates Brooks’ arguments. Rather, Yglesias claims that Brooks’ arguments are invalid and mentions Brooks’ divorce by way of illustrating one way those arguments are invalid, i.e., they unduly neglect or minimize the *economic* contexts in which social “behaviors” take place.

Actually, Yglesias claims that Brooks lacks self-awareness because his divorce should cause him to question whether his arguments are sound. Thus Yglesias writes At the same time, I really do think it [Brooks’s divorce] puts the question of self-awareness squarely on the table….If Brooks were a truly self-aware columnist, I think this is the issue he’d be revisiting in light of the breakdown of his own marriage.

Of course I doubt Brooks’s children lack an organized family, stable relationships with their parents, good parental role models, and so forth. Brooks mentions many different factors that are indicative of many children growing up in poverty who do lack those things – but that doesn’t imply that any one of those factors by itself causes dysfunction. Yglesias, though, absolutely needs to read Brooks’s argument this way – otherwise he has no legitimate reason, thin veneer though it is in this case, to talk about Brooks’s divorce.

Yglesias’ statement that Brooks views “marital stability per se…as the key [emphasis added] to the elite class’s ability to reproduce itself” is a bit overstated, but if one replaced “the key” with “one of the keys” or “a key” it would be accurate enough…

Styling marital stability as “the key” is what allows Yglesias to knowingly tell us that Brooks should be “revisiting” his view of the importance of marital stability in light of his divorce. It’s also not simply a “bit overstated” but fundamentally wrong. It confuses one of many broad statistical indicators (divorce) for phenomena Brooks thinks to be linked with a lack of social capital with what Brooks thinks to be a perpetuating cause of dysfunction (the actual lack of social capital).

You’d have to read Brooks with a singular lack of charity to conclude that Brooks believes only marital stability matters, and that loving parents, lots of enriching activities for children, stable relationships with children, and so on, don’t matter. Yet somehow, despite Brooks explicitly discussing many things other than marital stability that matter, Yglesias manages to pull out “marital stability is the key.” And that conveniently allows Yglesias to make Brooks’s divorce an issue.

There’s nothing remotely smart or insightful or frankly worthy in Yglesias’s post. It’s a catty gossip column in a cheap vinyl “Concerned Criticism” costume.

Brooks is a Straussian who has fun putting on those not in the know. It’s all a joke to him. Hypocrisy is vice’s tribute to virtue, and all that. We will never know what went on behind the closed doors of his marriage – if it was a real marriage.