Category Archives: David Brooks

Is it 2016?

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I thought of the 2016 election as Bobo vs. anti-Bobo.
David Brooks himself writes,

over the past two decades, the rapidly growing economic, cultural, and social power of the bobos has generated a global backlash that is growing more and more vicious, deranged, and apocalyptic. And yet this backlash is not without basis. The bobos—or X people, or the creative class, or whatever you want to call them—have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying Brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech. Worse, those of us in this class have had a hard time admitting our power, much less using it responsibly.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Brooks concludes,

The bobos didn’t set out to be an elite, dominating class. We just fit ourselves into a system that rewarded a certain type of achievement, and then gave our children the resources that would allow them to prosper in that system too. But, blind to our own power, we have created enormous inequalities—financial inequalities and more painful inequalities of respect. The task before us is to dismantle the system that raised us.

The essay struck me as somewhat off base. Sometimes he describes bobos as 1960s liberals. At other times he describes them as wokists. They cannot be both simultaneously (many may have been both sequentially).

Brooks writes,

The creative class has converted cultural attainment into economic privilege and vice versa. It controls what Jonathan Rauch describes in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, as the epistemic regime—the massive network of academics and analysts who determine what is true. Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed. The web, of course, has democratized tastemaking, giving more people access to megaphones. But the setters of elite taste still tend to be graduates of selective universities living in creative-class enclaves. If you feel seen in society, that’s because the creative class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not.

But the wokists do not really believe in truth. They tell you what is ok to believe, and they do not care so much about empirical truth in the old-fashioned sense.

Did David Brooks go Straussian?

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This NYT column is a sandwich. It starts and ends with a denunciation of conservatives for continued support for Donald Trump and continued “flight 93” thinking. But in the middle are these two paragraphs:

Over the last decade or so, as illiberalism, cancel culture and all the rest have arisen within the universities and elite institutions on the left, dozens of publications and organizations have sprung up. They have drawn a sharp line between progressives who believe in liberal free speech norms, and those who don’t.

There are new and transformed magazines and movements like American Purpose, Persuasion, Counterweight, Arc Digital, Tablet and Liberties that point out the excesses of the social justice movement and distinguish between those who think speech is a mutual exploration to seek truth and those who think speech is a structure of domination to perpetuate systems of privilege.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Given an NYT audience, if you want them to pay attention to those paragraphs, wouldn’t you have to hide them in the sandwich?

FITs update

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I already have a list of over 200 intellectuals for the Fantasy Intellectual Teams draft. Thanks for your suggestions. More are still welcome. You are not limited to any proposed team.

I should say that the way a fantasy draft works, owners take turns drafting players. You cannot just say “Tyler is on my team.” Somebody else could pick him first. So if there were 10 owners of these 18-intellectual teams, and there are 200 to choose from, then you can be sure to wind up in the last rounds drafting some folks that were put on the draft list by me or someone else but who you would not have intended to draft as of now.

One scoring issue that I am wrestling with is name recognition. The goal of FITs is to increase name recognition for intellectuals that deserve it. That might suggest downgrading anyone who has high name recognition among, say, Ivy League social science professors. So David Brooks, Jared Diamond, or Daniel Kahneman would not help your score, because they already have plenty of name recognition among Ivy League social science professors. Someone like Joe Rogan, who enjoys mass name recognition, does not lose points, because I guess he has low name recognition among Ivy League social science professors. And Rand Paul has name recognition among elites, but not as an intellectual, so he does not lose points for that. Note that I am not pushing Joe Rogan or Rand Paul for high draft choices.

But another possibility is to ignore that issue. I want my FITs to be people who are great role models as thinkers. I want my children to model their thought processes after my FITs team. If that means Steven Pinker or Joseph Henrich, so be it.

In fantasy sports, a “sleeper” is someone gets overlooked by other fantasy owners during the draft, so that you can pick the player up in a late round. As one commenter pointed out, in fantasy baseball you win the draft by picking good sleepers. In FITs, Jim Manzi is an outstanding sleeper.

But somebody who has a cult following in a particular realm is not necessarily a helpful sleeper. How to score Gary Taubes, for example? He gets credit for going against conventional wisdom in the field of diet, but otherwise I don’t think he has much value in the draft.

I am not inspired by FITs candidates that you like for “mood affiliation” reasons. I enjoy Victor Davis Hanson as a writer, but I know what one of his columns is going to say before I even read it. That is a bad sign. And he is too uncharitable to those with whom he disagrees.

One reason that my choices skew so far to the right is that I see those on the left relying much more heavily on mood affiliation. Few left intellectuals are charitable toward, or even aware of, important conservative arguments.

FITs who have influenced my view of the world are way up there in terms of draft choices. This can be true even though I reject important parts of their view of the world. Robin Hanson has never convinced me that uploading someone’s brain into a computer is going to be a big thing, but he has convinced me of all sorts of other important ideas.

Handle’s criteria are also on target.

Thoughts on the state of things

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Two essays by eminent observers.

1. David Brooks writes,

the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice.

. . .The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.

Brooks argues that a decline in social trust does not just happen all by itself.

High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.

Like Yuval Levin, the Brooks sees our only hope as building formal institutions.

Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild trust depends on our ability to join and stick to organizations.

2. Francis Fukuyama writes,

The issue here is thus not whether progressive illiberalism exists, but rather how great a long-term danger it represents. In countries from India and Hungary to the United States, nationalist conservatives have actually taken power and have sought to use the power of the state to dismantle liberal institutions and impose their own views on society as a whole. That danger is a clear and present one.

Progressive anti-liberals, by contrast, have not succeeded in seizing the commanding heights of political power in any developed country. Religious conservatives are still free to worship in any way they see fit, and indeed are organized in the United States as a powerful political bloc that can sway elections. Progressives exercise power in different and more nuanced ways, primarily through their dominance of cultural institutions like the mainstream media, the arts, and large parts of academia. The power of the state has been enlisted behind their agenda on such matters as striking down via the courts conservative restrictions on abortion and gay marriage and in the shaping of public school curricula. An open question for the future is whether cultural dominance today will ultimately lead to political dominance in the future, and thus a more thoroughgoing rollback of liberal rights by progressives.

This is part of a new project of Fukuyama’s, called American Purpose. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I have quoted the paragraphs with which I most disagree. Fukuyama’s entire essay is excellent, and almost every paragraph was tempting to excerpt. But I put a greater weight on cultural breakdown–see the David Brooks essay–than political breakdown, and so I am more concerned with the threat from the left.

On Mary Eberstadt’s latest book

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In a review of Primal Screams, I wrote,

When a tribe is formed out of families, members feel secure in their status. One’s identity is established as a father, mother, sibling, uncle, aunt, or grandparent.

In contrast, when a “forced pack” is constructed out of isolated individuals, there are constant struggles to resolve the uncertainty over who belongs and where members fit in relation to one another. Eberstadt suggests that under such circumstances:

… some people, deprived of recognition in the traditional ways, will regress to a state in which their demand for recognition becomes ever more insistent and childlike. This brings us to one of the most revealing features of identity politics: its infantilized expression and vernacular.

Her thesis, about which I raise doubts in my review, is that young people turn to identity politics to try to address needs that are unmet in today’s weak family environment. I can imagine Eberstadt reading the David Brooks essay to which I referred last week and coming out with her own primal scream.

David Brooks on family structure and community support

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Summarizing a long essay, David Brooks writes,

the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems—with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force—stem from that crumbling. We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time.

I live in a nuclear-family bubble. Among my friends, divorces are rare, and children out of wedlock are unheard of.

So I imagine that the converse is true. There must be people who hardly know any nuclear families.

Brooks writes,

The percentage of seniors who live alone peaked around 1990. Now more than a fifth of Americans 65 and over live in multigenerational homes. This doesn’t count the large share of seniors who are moving to be close to their grandkids but not into the same household.

The friends my age generally have married children, with grandchildren. All of us feel that we have won at life. I don’t think Brooks appreciates that spending time together with your spouse and your grandchildren pretty much takes care of the “need to belong” problems that his “forged families” try to solve.

I think that pretty much every advice column and advice book fails to take account of grandchildren. Certainly not Eli Finkel. True, there is nothing you can do in your youth to guarantee that your life will culminate in a stable marriage that includes grandchildren. But there are paths that you can go down that lead in a different direction, and I recommend trying to stay off of those paths.

Brooks and other social analysts see humans as wanting to care for others and to be cared for by others. If you need to be straightened out when you are messing up, or if you need help, or if you need a shoulder to cry on, it’s good to have people who are there for you.

Your church or your synagogue used to provide that, but nobody is joining any more. I wonder why.

1. Perhaps people are substituting other forms of togetherness, so they can do without church affiliation. But then presumably Brooks wouldn’t have a story to tell about how bad things are nowadays.

2. Perhaps people, or at least many of them, don’t really value togetherness the way we think they ought to. Bowling alone is a revealed preference. The chart that Brooks finds “haunting” shows that there are ten nations with more than 16 percent of households living alone (the U.S. is not one of them), including such supposed havens for happiness as Denmark (the leader in solo households), Finland, Norway, and Switzerland.

3. Conservative sociologists, of whom Yuval Levin is the heir, would in part blame the growth of government, particularly remote government, for usurping some of the roles of churches and synagogues, including providing relief for the poor. This lowers the status of churches, so people feel less inspired to join.

4. Perhaps the causality runs from having a nuclear family to being motivated to seek out community. We need to go back to the issue of the decline of nuclear families.

5. Maybe the bonding rituals at church–prayers, sermonizing–are too time-consuming these days.

Whether Brooks’ ideas about forged communities take off depends on which of these explanations is most important. If your money is on (2), (3), and (4), then attempts at creating community togetherness are fighting the cultural tide.

What is David Brooks up to?

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John R. Wood, Jr. writes

Tribalism, Brooks argues, is appealing because it helps forge a type of community. But “it is actually the dark twin of community. Community is based on common humanity; tribalism on common foe.” Americans everywhere are seeking relationship. But “weavers” do so by embodying the virtues of empathy, generosity, “radical hospitality,” and “deep mutuality.” In Brooks’s view, a powerful communitarian ethos is swelling across America, challenging the blights of isolation and polarization.

Brooks’ latest book, which touts the joy that one obtains by serving one’s community, is not making much of a splash, as far as I can tell. I think there is a lot of resentment of the fact that he has turned toward preaching after divorcing his wife and subsequently marrying a much younger research assistant. Granted, the second event came too late to have directly caused the first. But Brooks presents his divorce in terms of the suffering he experienced, as if he thinks it helps enhance his credibility as a moral teacher. He comes across as unaware that others might perceive matters differently.

If you actually look at what Brooks is advocating and doing, it has merit. He is suggesting that we get to know our neighbors and also acquaint ourselves with people who are outside of our comfort zone. Invest less in grand politics and more in personal connections. That approach seems to have considerable upside and minimal downside.

But I doubt that any one political culture is “swelling across America.” I think we are splintering. It is no accident that the 2016 Republican Presidential primary and the 2020 Democratic primary produced large numbers of candidates. If we had a proportional-representation electoral system, there would probably be a dozen parties.

V.S. Naipul’s A Million Mutinies Now captured the splintered state of culture in India. I have read a similar book on Israel. Was it Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land, or was it something else? Anyway, I think we see something similar in Europe as well as in the U.S. Instead of the revolt of the public, we are seeing a million revolts.

A conference on moderation (Martin Gurri watch)

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I attended this event on the 25th.

There are two videos, one for the morning talks, and one for the afternoon talks. If you watch the video for the afternoon talks, near the end, close to the 4 hour, 11 minute mark, I ask the last question at the session that featured Tony Blair.

My father would have been proud. He always liked to measure the social distance that he traveled from his childhood with Yiddish-speaking parents in the St. Louis ghetto. Finding me in the same room with the former British Prime Minister would have given my father lots of nachas, so to speak.

My review of the conference overall:

David Brooks gave a lucid, entertaining opening speech. About minute 44-45 in the video, he gives an account of contemporary progressiveness that could come straight out of my three-axes model.

Earlier, he cites Andrew Delbanco’s The Real American Dream, which argues that America has had three phases of animating cultural idea. Until around 1830, it was “God.” Americans were fulfilling God’s will. From then until World War II, it was “nation,” meaning manifest destiny for the United States. After the war, it became the “self.”

Brooks argues that the individualism of the latest phase has reached its end as a successful animating idea. We need a cultural paradigm shift. He suggests that what might work better now is a form of communitarianism, in which we care about children (not just our own), the dignity of work, our local living places, and racial and social integration. We need for politics to be less important.

In the end, his “politics of love,” as he calls it, is easy to ridicule, and he recognizes that. But he tries hard to justify his proposal.

The first panel was “Why isn’t the center holding?” and it included Martin Gurri. Not surprisingly, I found Gurri’s remarks the most compelling. But I think he also came through to people in the audience who were not as familiar as I am with his views.

Frances Lee did make the interesting point that as political parties separated on ideological grounds (recall that 60 years ago, the Democratic Party was an amalgamation that included Northern African-Americans and white segregationists from the South where African-Americans were kept from voting) and elections became close enough that either party could win, party loyalty has strengthened. There is fear that if you work with the other side, you are helping them win, and this fear is expressed very strongly in the primary-voting public.

I got to ask a question at this panel. I wanted to make the point that the political divide is a subset of a broader cultural divide. It’s about the 2 hour and 9 minute mark. I don’t think anyone wanted to answer the question, but Brink at least helped to clarify what I was trying to get at.

The next panel struck me as less focused. I did note that Damon Linker cited a poll that suggests that in the 2×2 quadrant of left/right and social/economic issues, the least populated quadrant among American voters is the libertarian one of socially on the left and economically on the right. Will Wilkinson expressed doubt that any poll holds for very long, because American voters are volatile on the issues. Yascha Mounk suggested that demagogic politics is on the upsurge because people want contradictory things (I would say that in economic jargon, they don’t appreciate trade-offs), and politicians must try to cater to that.

The third panel turned me off quite a bit. Often, the discussion veered into philosophical and historical trivia. When it got back to present-day reality, it seemed to consist mostly of ritual expressions of contempt for Mr. Trump. At one point, Professor Levy implied that the Republican Party as an institution would benefit by having a prominent conservative Senator utterly denounce Mr. Trump. While I think that it would help to have a Republican challenge Mr. Trump in the primary in 2020, that challenge should serve to articulate what mainstream Republicans want the party to stand for. The challenger should in no way denounce Mr. Trump but instead should commit to supporting whoever the party nominates in the general election. And, no, William Weld does not get my endorsement for the role.

Denouncing Mr. Trump as Mr. Levy recommends would amount to the political equivalent of a suicide bombing that fails to even approach its target. Mr. Trump does not depend on establishment support in the way that President Nixon did. When Nixon lost the establishment, he was gone. But today a politician’s personal brand is more important than establishment support. See Tyler Cowen’s column on the young Democratic congresswomen. In general, hearing Professor Levy’s pontifications reminded me of the refrain, “You want more Trump??? This is how you get more Trump.”

In the hallway, Elaine Kamarck, a Bill Clinton Democrat who has written a book on primary politics, expressed her view that the winner of the Democratic nomination in 2020 will be someone who drives down the “center-left lane,” as she called it. I suggested that the convention might arrive with 12 candidates each having 8 percent of the vote. She ridiculed that possibility. If there had been time, it should have been possible to formulate a bet. A simple one would be, “A center-left candidate will arrive at the convention with more than 40 percent of the delegates.” Presumably, she would bet for this. I would bet against it. I would not bet more than a few dollars, because she knows much more than I do about the subject. That is what would make it fun if I won.

What do I think of the overall project of reviving a “third way” or a moderate center? I was skeptical going into the event, and I remain skeptical.

I would like to see a more moderate tone in politics. But oddly enough, Levy speaks for me when he writes,

if “moderate” is the name of a substantive position, then it risks being nothing at all, or at least nothing stable, only something defined with reference to the shifting sense of who counts as extreme.

I look at the “shifting sense of who counts as extreme” differently than he does. To me, it looks like the Overton Window is racing full speed to the left. In fact, the window has moved so far to the left that I think most young Democrats see Blair and Clinton as far right-wingers. Consider that when Barack Obama ran for President, he was against gay marriage, and by the time he left office his Administration was pushing trans-gender bathrooms. Consider that President Clinton took pride in balanced budgets and gave thought to fixing entitlement programs*, and now we have Larry Summers and Jason Furman writing that with interest rates so low the government should do a lot more borrowing and spending. And of course, socialism is now a yeah-word and capitalism is a boo-word among Democratic politicians.

After Munich, Winston Churchill said,

for Czechoslovakia and in the matters which were in dispute has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course.

I cannot support a moderation that amounts to serving the left’s victuals course by course. Get the Overton window to stand still, or maybe move it back to the right a couple of notches; only then we can talk about moderation.

*one of the event’s panelists, I believe it was Damon Linker, suggested that Clinton was getting ready to propose entitlement reform until a certain #metoo episode weakened him politically

Voices of moderation

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1. Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute writes,

To win in 2020, Democrats should resist the urge to turn the House into the new headquarters of the anti-Trump resistance or to initiate battles over legislative priorities favored by party liberals that have no hope of passage.

My own sense is that we will not see much moderation in the Trump era. Neither Mr. Trump’s non-college-educated male supporters nor his college-educated female antagonists are likely to respond to an appeal to moderation.

2. Brink Lindsey and Niskanen Center co-authors write,

A moderate is one who is grateful for both liberalism and conservatism, and hopes for — and tries through their own work to move toward — the best version of each, in part in service to improvement in the other.

Their manifesto runs to 18 pages, including footnotes, and it is not consistent in tone. Notwithstanding the sentence quoted above, there is quite a bit of straw-manning in the earlier sections, including using epithets like “market fundamentalism” and “democratic fundamentalism.”

David Brooks read the Niskanen manifesto and gave it the sort of review that Lincoln Steffens once gave to the Soviets. Brooks writes,

I felt liberated to see the world in fresh new ways, and not only in the ways I’ve always seen them or the way people with my label are supposed to see them. I began to feel at home.

The way it looks to me, the Niskanen Center occupies a sort of John McCain place in the media firmament. That is, the NYT will give it points for moderation whenever it breaks with conservatives. For example, it’s fine for the Niskanen Center to attack climate denialists.

But suppose the Niskanen Center came out with a plan for a sustainable long-term budget and attacked those who are in denial about the projected deficits in our entitlement programs. If that wins plaudits from the NYT, then I might begin to feel at home.

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David Brooks sours on Bobos

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he writes,

If you base a society on a conception of self that is about achievement, not character, you will wind up with a society that is demoralized; that puts little emphasis on the sorts of moral systems that create harmony within people, harmony between people and harmony between people and their ultimate purpose.

These days, I find myself thinking more and more about issues of morality and character. In particular, I think that trying to emphasize social opinions rather than personal character does not work well.