I Don’t Know Whether This Point Needs to be Belabored …

When I read about this after I got up for the day, I mostly just thought that, rather than contributing some new ideal, what David Brooks is actually doing is lamenting that the days of the policy initiative as he has outlined are gone. Talk up an emergency, deny regular due process (or speed it up unsafely, and argue from authority with however much fig leaves required. David Brooks certainly does not have in mind any sort of effectual resolutions wrt global warming. No catfood commissions for petro companies!

To me, a good example is the Oregon Pay It Forward Initiative that got talked up everywhere around this time last year. It got dressed up in liberal clothes, credited to an at least nominally liberal organization (Oregon Working Families Party), and there were votes and commissions…The thing though, was that the purpose of such a blitz was to undermine the energy for other referendum efforts that focused on forcing Oregon to raise taxes so as to support higher education better. If Pay It Forward keeps momentum through passage, it probably would represent a huge shoving of risks onto college students, since it was more or less a backdoor privatization of the state university system.

There are other, less ambitious (but still awful)gambits, like the use of eminent domain to restructure mortgage as advocated by Mortgage Resolution Partners–state effectively acts as MRP’s partner in gifting them with mortgages at pennies to the dollar, at the original lender’s expense. Plenty of snazzy websites, lots of talk about evil bankers and populism good! But they don’t want the title to your house, no sirree! Just that mortgage!

These projects have gotten off the ground much slower than they used to, in the glory days of Alan Greenspan’s era in the ’90s and early aughts. Time was, you could get people to go for a lottery, just like that! NAFTA could be managed, and the fringe of the folks at Seattle WTO protest are put as the driver of all opposition. Today, it’s a lot harder for people to use Jenny McCarthy as a tu quoque when leftist dissent about how technology is handled pops up. We’ve heard it all before. We remember when charter schools had some genuine leftist support, or that we used to think Ross Perot was pretty cool, instead of a paranoid, controlling, creep.

David Brooks misses the younger, less cynical version of us. He definitely misses the version of us that could buy into the “both sides do it frame”, or that conservatives could be at all honest–about anything. Technocracy has been losing legitimacy, and Brooks is very concerned.

My question is why you all keep thinking what David Brooks says is worth arguing about.

I’m going to repeat an old rant.

For many years I’ve been a supporter of the local homeless shelter, and nodded along in approval with the sentiment that this was in some sense a better, less self-aggrandizing sort of charity than supporting the arts or my alma mater. In the aftermath of Katrina, after hearing Bush proclaim that private efforts were the most appropriate way to handle the situation, I came to a different conclusion: this ought to be regarded as a public responsibility, best funded by taxes.

Charity ought to be frivolous, mere vanity, not something desperate people have to depend on. Nevertheless, I continue to tithe, because we’re a long way from being a just society.

So, if I got this straight, the point can be summarized as “We need elitists, top-down reforms that push for the kind of supposedly democratic reforms that are in reality just more neoliberal bullshit, lest some real bottom-up reform comes and implement something actual people want”

@bad Jim:
Even if we were a just society, you might want to continue tithing. I think we can all agree that democracy is slow, and state actions are seldom nimble, except in times of war. (This is a feature, not a bug!) Charity has the potential for some speed and flexibility. Charity can be a great R&D lab for emerging justice; the state is potentially better at institutionalized justice.
Of course, much of “charity” is simple social positioning by those with social position. I wonder how much money I would have to contribute to Dear Old Alma Mater in order to have my name inscribed on every urinal. Probably much more than I would need to get my name on a football stadium.

Our daughters are curious about what is going to be underwater when they are old, and Singapore’s highest point being 400ft above sea-level, well. But then one thinks, they have all these really quite huge areas of undeveloped land (huge relative to the size of the island as a whole and huge when one considers the value of the privately developed condos on similar land, or the public housing.) The government of Singapore releases chunks of State land in yearly batches, announced some time in advance, which grow and shrink as the gov’t tries to heat or cool the property market, fiddling ever-more-finely with the knobs. I am confident that groups of technocrats are gaming out various dike-schemes as we speak. I idly wonder whether they won’t maybe be able to build vast structures on nano-material-enchanced re-bar stilts, a reversion to a kampong at 1:1000 scale. Brooks and his ilk always clearly envy Singapore’s government and its ability to form elite commissions and then push through their suggested changes, right to the end. It has its virtues, of course, but it is of limited application outside a closed city-state. I’m not sure even it can stand up to the mighty forces of the sea. But otherwise your whole nation becomes homeless? This is a tangent to the OP, the point is that Brooks (like Safire and Buckley) has a hard-on for LKY. But that ain’t how the United States’ democracy is set up; no, not at all.

1) It’s Rick Falkvinge, sorry for the typo

2) Currently reading Karatani on Arendt and Isonomia in opposition to liberalism and democracy

3) As usual, liberals and democrats are projecting their own elitism and authoritarianism onto the right.

Our daughters are curious about what is going to be underwater when they are old,

Quite a good site, if you haven’t seen it: worldunderwater.org

For people who worry about the demise of representative political parties etc, I wonder what they think of the potential rise of UKIP ? Who do represent positions popular in society (opposition to immigration, Europe and political elites), who appear to be responsive to dissatisfied and marginalised constituents, and who developed from the bottom up by some complicated fusion of local dissatisfication and nonsense.
I would think it’s a good thing, personally. (possibly)

Paul Krugman should offer Bobo an elite commission on tax policy consisting of Krugman, Thomas Piketty, and Joseph Stiglitz.

Brooks, like much of America, has gone mad.

“Democracies tend to have a tough time with long-range planning.”

I thought we hated long-range gov’t planning – left it for the Soviets.

“In some ways, these governments look more progressive than the Western model; in some ways, more conservative. In places like Singapore and China, the best students are ruthlessly culled for government service.”

Here too! But only after a stint at Goldman Sachs…

And is Brooks suggesting that the US emulate China? Did I miss the news that China is no longer a communist state? What is Brooks talking about? Why doesn’t Sulzberger fire Brooks?! Is it because he’s not as “mercurial” as Jill Abramson? I don’t understand any of it…

Paul Montgomery 05.21.14 at 8:14 am

” My question is why you all keep thinking what David Brooks says is worth arguing about.”

It’s like analyzing Pravda to figure out what the elites are doing; only a fool believes that they mean what they say; only a fool or a liar will state that they believe what they say.

The best description of David Brooks is my experience with him – he wrote a dumb comparison of ‘red states’ vs. ‘blue states’ (by comparing two counties in a blue state!).
In elucidating the virtues of ‘red states’ he stated that he had been unable to spend more than $20 on dinner there, despite repeated tries, and asking around. The reporter writing a critique of that book lived nearby and didn’t believe it. He gets off the freeway and takes the main road into town, and sees a Red Lobster. He has dinner there, and tells the waitress about the $20 limit; she laughs.

Brooks was caught flat-out lying, and I’ve seen nothing from him since which makes that only a lapse on his part.

Oh, he knows what it is and how it works just fine. Bobo just does not like it, because it does not reliably produce the results he and the plutocrats he services desire.

bianca s.
Didn’t you have a book event on democracy a little while back? It doesn’t seem to be listed on the page.

Yes, CT did have such an event: it was on Knight & Johnson’s The Priority of Democracy. ( I remember it b.c it’s the only CT book event for which I actually read the book. I bought Red Plenty but have only dipped into it, so that doesn’t count.)

“And, to create opportunities for private profit — let’s not forget the juicy part”

As Atrios says, grifters gonna grift.

Certainly it’s possible for a kind of paternalism to claim to be the protector of populism, and for a kind of populism to claim justification from submission to proper elite authority. In that case, what the people want is right because the people listen to the elites. What dissenters want is wrong because it’s neither proper submission nor proper alignment with elite consensus. (This is logical but makes it difficult to describe certain individual cases, especially where elites justify their actions in terms of democracy, or the reverse. The fact that it’s so perfectly logical might raise doubts about its accuracy, also.)

http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/2014/05/mouthbreathing_machiavellis

Brooks isn’t an idiot. He’s a genius. This entire article is in code.

It’s about the Tea Party, yo.

Brooks knows what “democracy” means. He just doesn’t like it.

… All this “the great and the good” sounds like he’s cribbing Cicero, whose politics Brooks seems to share in large part. And indeed, Brooks and Cicero are annoying in the same way. Just imagine Cicero without the rhetorical gifts.

Luckily for Brooks, his tongue & hands are unlikely to end up nailed to the front door of the NY Times.

This is very similar to the right-libertarian call for greater “freedom and liberty” through the dismantling of the public sphere, which means the dismantling of democracy. If everything is privatized and the private sector becomes the only sector, or close to it, then there is no democracy. Democracy can not exist without a public sector — unless we internalize one after generations of a fully democratized society, and the state “whithers away.” A fully privatized society, OTOH, just means Chomsky’s “private tyranny.”

The Ron Paul’s of this world would rather people (as in, the rich) get to do exactly as they please without interference from the public, from any democratic controls, so they can be as despotic as they please. Of course, despotism comes in many forms, so it must be prevented whether public or private. But at least with the public sphere, and at least in theory, we all should have control over that to prevent that despotism. No such chance exists in an all privatized society. And in an all private society, which has internalized hierarchy in the form of business arrangements, despotism is built right in. A business is set up to foster despotism in the form of “the boss.” From there, it’s a matter of degrees. In an all public sphere, OTOH, and again, at least theoretically, hierarchies are minimal and we all have equal say under the law, making despotism far more difficult to establish, defend or expand.

And on Brook’s charities. The combined charitable spending on all food programs for the hungry in America is roughly 5 billion. They can not handle the problem. Government can. Private charities can not.

J Thomas,

China was never communist. Nor were they ever socialist. No nation state has ever been either. They were state capitalist, from the beginning. As was Russia, Cuba, North Korea, etc. etc.

Communism is the absence of the state after socialism/democracy has been fully internalized, naturalized, normalized for a society. And socialism is the apotheosis of a fully democratized society, including the economy. Again, this has never happened in the modern world, obviously.

Good breakdown on that (state capitalism theories) here, from Marcel van der Linden.

I’ve just been reading C.B. Macpherson’s ‘The Politics of Possessive Individualism’, which seems germane here. M resolves the apparent contradiction between Locke’s apparent support for ‘majoritarian’ democratic authoritarianism and his defence of individual rights (esp. property) by pointing out that, for Locke, ‘civil society’ simply does not include the labouring classes. Democracy by and for the propertied classes has no contradictions to resolve; it’s purpose is to protect the status quo.

When someone like Brooks (or most liberals, for that matter) talks about democracy, it always seems to me that what he is saying is completely logical — so long as you understand that his definition of democracy implicitly exlcudes the proles, whose duty is to follow thier ‘community leaders’. ‘The greatest part cannot know, and so must believe.’

@44 Moses Finley’s ‘Democracy Ancient and Modern’ is worth reading, though it’s only the work of a hoary old classicist and probably doesn’t count as part of the ‘literature’.

Tocqueville does make the distinction, but it’s easy to confuse. The spirit of democracy is morally ambiguous, but here to stay. The Americans are successful at it because they have free institutions such as the township which require local knowledge. Each person can apply to the public sphere what he/she knows about the local conditions and about self-interest well understood. Charities/benevolent associations were a large part of the America that Tocqueville was writing about and he considered free association almost unequivocally positive. So Brooks is trying to encourage more free institutions responsible to the people who will take responsibility for them and doing it badly.

I am writing this because freedom does not only include the idea of local knowledge (also includes the idea of rights and various other things) but principally because I finished Democracy in America all of last week.

I’d also like to know where Judt is anti-democratic. Have read two of his books and several of his articles, most recently, Ill Fares the Land, which is excellent. He makes a good case for his social democracy, though I don’t think he goes nearly far enough. But I don’t recall him being anti-democratic.

Very good article by Hal Draper on Marx and Democracy, his definition, etc.

Marx on Democratic Forms of Government

An excerpt:

Throughout the history of the socialist/communist movements, one of the persistent problems has been to establish the relation, in theory and practice, between the struggle for socialism and for democracy (or democratic rights), between socialist issues and democratic issues. Every distinctive socialist current or school has had its own characteristic answer to this problem. On one extreme end of the spectrum is the view (held consciously in theory or expressed in practice) which puts the advocacy of democratic forms in the forefront, for their own sake, and subjoins the advocacy of socialistic ideas as an appurtenance. (From the Marxist standpoint, this is merely the leftmost wing of bourgeois-democratic liberalism extruding into the socialist spectrum.) On the other extreme is the type of radical ideology which counterposes socialistic ideas – in the sense of anti-capitalist views – against concern with democratic struggles, considering the latter as unimportant or harmful. Every conceivable mixture of the two approaches has cropped up too, but they all form a single family insofar as they are mixtures, (For example: in the tension between socialist aims and democratic means, is your concern 50-50, 60-40, 30-70, etc.?)

Marx’s approach is qualitatively different from this sort of eclecticism, and does not attempt to establish a sliding scale of concern with the two sides of the duality. For him, the task of theory is to integrate the two objectively. The characteristic answer to the problem emerging from Marx’s theory was already heralded in his notebook critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right [2], where he sought to show that “true democracy” requires a new social content – socialism; and it will be rounded off with his analysis of the Paris commune, which showed that a state with a new social content entailed truly democratic forms. Marx’s theory moves in the direction of defining consistent democracy in socialist terms, and consistent socialism in democratic terms. The task of theory, then, is not to adjudicate a clash between the two considerations (a hopeless job once the problem is seen in that light), but rather to grasp the social dynamics of the situation under which the apparent contradiction between the two is resolved.

Patrick is correct, David Brooks is “only kidding”.

“China was never communist. Nor were they ever socialist. No nation state has ever been either. They were state capitalist, from the beginning. As was Russia, Cuba, North Korea, etc. etc.”

Plume, you can if you want reserve “communism” for something which has never ever happened. But most people use it to talk about state capitalism.

I have a point, and I want to express it in metaphor.

Imagine that there are a lot of people who think that wild boars ought to wander around wherever they want to, eating whatever they can. The boars will get big and fat, and these people believe that when the boars are fat it’s good for everybody. Wild boars deserve to eat anything they can get, and anything that gets eaten by boars, deserves to be eaten by boars.

They are convinced that when people try to herd boars the result is bad for the boars and therefore bad for everybody. You cannot possibly find as much food for your boar herd as the boars can find for themselves roaming wherever they want to go. Trying to herd the boars is inefficient and counterproductive, it never works.

Somehow they believe that the reason China used to be poor was that the Chinese spent too much time herding boars, and when they see China rapidly gaining wealth it must be because the Chinese have given their pigs the freedom to do whatever they want.

But really, what the Chinese have done is put their boars in pens and feed them a whole lot. The boars get big and fat quickly. And when the boars grow fast, foreigners want some of the good results so they send to China food and medicine and everything to help boars grow faster, in exchange for the Chinese saying they have part ownership of the boars.

So when I hear somebody say “Ever since Deng, the pigs in China have been free!” I want to say, no wait, maybe you’re fooling yourself because you want to believe it. I don’t really care whether the Chinese ever did a whole lot of swineherding, and I don’t care whether they publicly announced that the pigs belonged to everybody. The thing I think is important is that in fact the pigs in China are not really free, even today.

Let’s see. Democracy is the rule of the people by the people.
Okay.
So if you’re not really an “of the people” kind of person, or you’re a member of a powerful minority that thinks it’s superior to the majority, that democracy business could be unpleasant, even dangerous, for you, depending.
Also it would limit your ability to take advantage of the people to their disadvantage, because the more powerful the people become the less they’ll be inclined to tolerate predation on themselves.
It’s one of the founding matters of the US, right?

But there’s a knowledge thing in there.
How do the people know what’s good or bad for them?
They get information from each other, through systems of information – media, mostly.
So hey, if we can get to the information first, get to the systems of information ahead of them, we can still tolerate democracy, because we can choose what they see, and what they don’t, we can design what they think about what they’re seeing, and thus what and who they will predictably vote for.
And that was American democracy in the latter 20th c.
A majority whose ideas about the world were shaped virtually entirely by a minority voice that had gained the trust of the majority by its ubiquity, its central place in the American home.
A majority who were confident of their independence and freedom of thought, because they were being told that constantly, by a voice they trusted.

So then the internet changed all that, for about a decade and a half, but then everything went bananas. And now it’s bananas all the way up.
Contempt for the majority by an elite minority is pretty common in human affairs, evidently. It often correlates directly with power.

Human worth is now measured financially, not personally, not by good people, not by sensible people, but publicly by the degraded laws and the degraded values of a culture formed to order and implemented with force by a contemptuous minority.

In light of that Brooks placing himself and his ilk clad fellow elite above democracy makes great sense.
You don’t want children remodeling the house, especially if they aren’t your kids.

Ceterum censeo: stop wasting so much blog time and space on discussing right wing lunatics. It really suffices to say they are lunatics (from time to time, that is, not every second blog post) and move on.

In his last writings, the late Kenneth Minogue “Democracy is a process.” The wordsmiths (a.k.a. “intellectuals”) of today’s world, such as David Brooks and John Mickelthwait, etc., all conjecture Democracy as a “condition;” usually as comprised of unspecified or assumed relationships.

“Democracy is a process.” As a process it is *one* of the “tools” for the operation and direction of a social order. It is the *use* of the tool which determines its effects. The use of that tool, and its effects, are, in turn, determined by the characteristics (qualities) of the members of the polity, which thus determines how that tool is used as well is the objectives for its use.

Most of the suggestions occurring to the wordsmiths relate to the substitution of *other* tools for the operation and direction of the social order. The suggestions for commissions, committees of the “great and good” are all implications of inadequacies of the polity to use the tool of the Democratic process.

Perhaps the real questions are: Is the Democratic process a tool of limited use? Are we attempting to use the tool for too many or inappropriate tasks? Are there inadequacies and can they be corrected in the polity which has access to the use of this tool? In the case of the United States, has there been a change in the characteristics of the members of the polity that has changed the uses made of the tool of the Democratic process?

Are we not seeing evolution and devolution rather than revolution?