Another, quite spectacular example of “revealed”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001446.html “preference”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001447.html theory in action. This time, it’s “David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/opinion/06BROO.html?hp, who uses Bush and Kerry’s privileged backgrounds to prove that Americans prefer to be ruled by blue-bloods.
bq. we don’t actually want to be governed by people like ourselves. We want the bloodlines.
It all goes back to primate social structures, you see.
This is almost so asinine an argument as not to be worth the refutation. Brooks doesn’t admit the possibility that ‘blue bloods’ might have structural advantages that go beyond commoners’ genetically hardwired instinct to yank forelocks in the presence of their superiors – money, connections anyone? Nor does he bother trying to explain how his thesis can be reconciled with viable Democratic candidates (Edwards) from humble backgrounds, or, indeed, Presidents like Clinton. Like Dan Drezner, I was quite pleased when the NYT gave Brooks a slot; some of his longer stuff is well argued and interesting. However, his op-eds have been a huge disappointment; sugary candy-fluff for the most part, but with a hard, bitter little center. The Times could and should do better.
{ 34 comments }
Rousseau 03.06.04 at 6:27 pm
Ummm, I dislike Brooks as much as the next guy, but the whole opedit is just a joke, right? He’s making a lot of jibes about how both parties choose elites and a couple sentences about antrhopological half-theories that obviously don’t apply in modern society. I’m sure he agrees with your explanation for why we have those priviliged candidates (it’s the obvious one after all), but didn’t feel like going into that territory today. Just satire.
gowingz 03.06.04 at 6:32 pm
Clinton is an anomaly according to Brooks’ model- remember his moral downfall?
Must have been genetic!
woodturtle 03.06.04 at 6:49 pm
That guy Brooks is right. It’s not just that we want bloodlines, but we sure like a good-looking party type ceremony, plus it makes us happy when we get the free-spending right winger types to pay us plenty.
Remember the inauguration of Jimmy Carter? Many respects to Jimmy Carter, but when you say the men can just go to inauguration with nice suit coats, it was just too bad for the tuxedo side. Think of all the lost revenues in tuxedo management! I am surprised that no one brought this up instantly! Shows very much lack of concern for the small business sector.
Tom Slee 03.06.04 at 7:18 pm
rousseau:
After reading your comment I went and read the Brooks op-ed. And maybe it is just me, but I fail to see anything in the tone or content to back up your idea that it is satire. I wish I could believe you. Really I do.
nnyhav 03.06.04 at 7:34 pm
Call it “Krugmania.”
Henry 03.06.04 at 7:40 pm
I very much doubt that it’s a joke; this is an argument that Brooks has made before. I’ve no doubt that he’s trying to be a little provocative; I also have no doubt that he actually subscribes to some version of this idea.
Mike Jones 03.06.04 at 8:03 pm
“We” (the people) don’t necessarily want bloodlines, but it sure seems like “they” (the Washington insiders – including the press) do. It’s much simpler than actually having to think about whether someone’s competent if you can just point to their genetic bona fides.
Jon H 03.06.04 at 8:49 pm
Brooks’ Times columns are more of a “Cockroach Cluster”, I think.
david 03.06.04 at 9:03 pm
When did Brooks ever write something long and well-reasoned? He has sucked forever.
drapeto 03.06.04 at 9:23 pm
When did Brooks ever write something long and well-reasoned?
It is not for you to question when, it is but for you to twitch in flattery of any and every rightwing nut lest the other rightwing nuts accuse you of narrow-mindedloonyleftism. You can parse out the sociological explanation.
Henry 03.06.04 at 9:41 pm
Drapetomaniac, I’ve heard this line before from you, and frankly it’s childish and insulting. When I say that I’ve liked some of Brooks’ previous stuff, I’m not trying to cosy up to the right as you imply; I’m stating a fact as I see it. I find some people on the right to be interesting and thought-provoking; if this doesn’t fit into your picture of what a card-carrying member of the left should do, that’s your problem. It’s bad enough having to deal with rightwing fruitcakes like Keith Burgess-Jackson telling me that I’m advocating leftwing opinions to advance my academic career, without having to put up with this kind of nonsense from other lefties.
toni 03.06.04 at 10:15 pm
Is anyone a social psychologist here?
I understand that one may envy Brooks for not having to defend a thesis against peers in an op-ed, but isn’t his thesis a modified expectation states theory?
As in, Kerry has the height, he has the occupational prestige, he has the wealth, he has the attractiveness, he has the whiteness, he has the maleness, he has the intelligence — therefore?
We who see small groups manipulated by these characteristics (or do it ourselves) all the time shouldn’t be surprised. Why did Kennedy beat Nixon on TV and lose on the radio?
Maybe I’m giving Brooks too much credit, but to me a bloodline theory just foregrounds a dimension of expectation status.
As to whether it goes back to primate social structures, that’s an irrelevant snipe. Nothing in expectation status theory depends on whether it goes back to the 1850s or to primates.
mcpeepants 03.06.04 at 10:53 pm
I can think of no counterexamples to Brook’s theory, other than Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, Eisenhower, Truman…
Skip 03.07.04 at 12:34 am
I give Brooks some credit here. Though its a sour op-ed, my hunch, and its just that, is he’s right that neither candidate would survive the rough and tumble of a parliamentary system. They are where they are largely due to their priveleged background and the nature of our political system. “Bloodlines” is a euphemism here.
Sour piece, yes. Revealed preference theory? That’s stretching it.
david 03.07.04 at 12:36 am
Snotty comment from me, but I was serious. I haven’t read much by Brooks, but the BoBos stuff was awful, and I remember well an Atlantic Monthly article on overachievers at Yale which was pernicious bullshit — all about how these kids work so darn hard because their parents are so darn worried about their success, not a moment’s concern for privilege, the whole thing packaged by Michael Kelly as an astute exploration of what to do now the “we” are all “rich.”
So, which ones of Brooks were once good? Not meant to be a challenge, I’m just wondering.
toni 03.07.04 at 1:00 am
A lot of cases there. Presidential, party primary, and so on. Some predate media that sends a face-to-face impression to the voter. I don’t know how one would score the cases on their status characteristics, and on how close a race was before the status characteristics took effect.
Carter v Ford, Carter wins, counterexample?
Carter v Reagan, Reagan wins, counterexample?
Nixon v Humphrey, Nixon wins, counterexample?
I’m not so sure.
Clinton — that may be one. But Clinton’s exceptional.
Eisenhower and Truman predate TV mostly. The better the TV reception, the more likely a status characteristics effect, if face to face impact is a stimulus. Brooks’ theory has credibility in California. Democratic primaries weren’t bad tests — hardly anyone knew any candidate before seeing them on TV.
Still, I don’t think one should be dragged into defending Brooks for not raking over evidence, if the theory’s credible. I’m not for saying it’s bloodline, but hey, that’s close enough to what’s really going on — status characteristic flaunting, not issues.
Ian Welsh 03.07.04 at 1:07 am
While I agree that Brooks has stunk it up as a NY Times columnist I don’t think it’s that much of a departure from his previous work, which was always pretty vacuous (see Bobo’s in Paradise and the Organization Kid, for example).
http://www.la-mancha.net/archives/000077.html
TK 03.07.04 at 3:31 am
While I think the average American is a great deal more populist than Brooks credits them for, I also think the press is quite the other way. I have long thought that their hatred of Clinton, and absurd subservience to Bush, is only explicable in terms of class envy. Clinton was a brilliant prole who made them feel like the privileged, underachieving slackers most of them are, and they hated him for it, while Bush’s manifest mediocrity elicited ludicrous comparisons to Churchill and an all-round swoon. As a mental exercise, swap their class backgrounds and try to imagine the result. Bush would be mayor of Snopesville, TX, at best, and a joke to the press even there, while Clinton would be revered as a peer of FDR.
Clearly there are wrinkles to the idea. Republicans do like to dress up as jes’ folks, and voters may pretend to want “someone they’d like to have a beer with”, but look what jez folks did when they actually got one of their own (more or less)–Jimmy Carter. That honeymoon ended fast. (And the press swoon over the “return of class” when Reagan ousted him, similar to the rhetoric that ushered in Bush II, gives the lie to the notion that Reagan figured in the public mind as some kind of Frank Capra figure.)
Mankind left the jungle around 11:55 PM in anthropological time. It’s absurd to think that we aren’t still carrying around with us a lot the psychological baggage that served us on the African savannah and jungles of Borneo. Nearly every presidential election can be predicted simply by looking at which candidate is taller. We aren’t as free of ape psychology as we’d like to think.
But Brooks is still a twit.
drapeto 03.07.04 at 7:18 am
Drapetomaniac, I’ve heard this line before from you, and frankly it’s childish and insulting. When I say that I’ve liked some of Brooks’ previous stuff, I’m not trying to cosy up to the right as you imply; I’m stating a fact as I see it. I find some people on the right to be interesting and thought-provoking; if this doesn’t fit into your picture of what a card-carrying member of the left should do, that’s your problem.
Not that it’s material to the point, but being described as a “lefty” is loathsome to me.
You fit perfectly well into my picture of what a white lefty does do. And the fact that your defense of your taste for David Brooks is to preen on your judiciousness proves my point. Your response is always to suggest that I’m being sectarian — that’s precisely what I suggested your enthusiasm for David Brooks is there for and you’ve demonstrated my case.
If you can wrap your mind around the concept that someone can be judicious and be unimpressed by David Brooks and your taste for him, do let me know.
Barry 03.07.04 at 3:09 pm
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.
Henry 03.07.04 at 5:50 pm
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.
Henry Farrell 03.07.04 at 5:57 pm
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.
Jim Miller 03.07.04 at 6:20 pm
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.
Brian Weatherson 03.07.04 at 6:27 pm
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.
Barry 03.07.04 at 7:46 pm
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.
dsquared 03.07.04 at 11:07 pm
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.
Conrad Barwa 03.07.04 at 11:22 pm
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.
bza 03.08.04 at 12:11 am
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.
Barry 03.08.04 at 1:39 am
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.
Thomas 03.08.04 at 3:43 am
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.
wanderer 03.08.04 at 6:34 am
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.
cheney_usa 03.08.04 at 7:16 am
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
GMT 03.08.04 at 4:33 pm
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…
Buffalo Gal 03.10.04 at 3:45 pm
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.
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