Category Archives: David Brooks

The authoritarian moment

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David Brooks writes,

progressives are getting better and more aggressive at silencing dissenting behavior. All sorts of formerly legitimate opinions have now been deemed beyond the pale on elite campuses. Speakers have been disinvited and careers destroyed. The boundaries are being redrawn across society.

There seems to be a bit of a trend. Putin is getting more authoritarian. Erdogan is getting more authoritarian. Xi Xinping is getting more authoritarian.

I know I’m not saying anything original here. But I wonder what it will take to turn things around.

Jordan Peterson and other public intellectuals

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David Brooks writes,

In his videos, he analyzes classic and biblical texts, he eviscerates identity politics and political correctness and, most important, he delivers stern fatherly lectures to young men on how to be honorable, upright and self-disciplined — how to grow up and take responsibility for their own lives.

I have a few reasons for being less than fully bought into Peterson.

1. He is a spellbinding speaker but his first book, Maps of Meaning, was turgid. There is something disconcerting about the fact that his ideas seem to come across better in a format that allows for less editorial polishing. I noted this in December of 2016, when the Peterson tsunami was just forming.

2. Some of his ideas are mystical and sound really strange.

3. He gains some of his stature by attacking post-modernists who are intellectual weak, at least in the way that he presents them. For me, it is more impressive to take on stronger opponents than weaker ones.

He may now be over-rated by his fans on the right. But he is badly, badly, under-rated by smug leftists whose ability to understand opposing viewpoints pales in comparison with his.

Using the three-axes model, I put Peterson firmly in the conservative camp. He sees civilization as fragile and precious, and he is animated by the civilization vs. barbarism axis.

Rather than propose a list of public intellectuals that I think are influential, or important, or prominent, let me just list a few public intellectuals that I admire and trust, in the sense that I think that they really try to be careful to honor opposing viewpoints and try to avoid committing intellectual swindles.

–Jeffrey Friedman. Does he even count as a public intellectual? He is an intellectual, all right, but his writing is often steeped in academic jargon, and he is not a familiar figure, even to the highly-educated portion of the public. His journal, Critical Review, has pieces written by top minds, and yet his own contributions often tower over theirs.

–Steven Pinker. You can get a better education in the humanities by reading The Blank Slate than by taking any freshman humanities course at any university, I would bet.

–Tyler Cowen. Tyler has an unmatched ability to offer ideas that are surprising and original. He takes risks, sort of like an intellectual venture capitalist, if you will. Some of these start-ups don’t make it, but he picks enough winners to more than make up for the failures.

Friedman, Pinker, and Cowen all stand out for being non-tribal or even counter-tribal. They challenge and annoy their most likely allies, rather than offering a steady diet of reinforcement and comfort.

David Brooks on the siege mentality

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He writes,

The siege mentality starts with a sense of collective victimhood. It’s not just that our group has opponents. The whole “culture” or the whole world is irredeemably hostile.

As Handle points out, Brooks seems to be siding with Yuval Levin in what I call his debate with Victor Davis Hanson. My thoughts:

1. It is possible for both sides to believe that they under siege. Palestinians can believe that the Israelis want all their land. Israelis can believe that the Palestinians want to drive Jews out of Israel. Each side can point to evidence that seems convincing.

2. But that does not preclude the possibility that one side really is under siege and the other side really does wish for the other side to either adopt the “correct” religion or be annihilated. My father, whose family escaped Cossack pogroms in Russia and who had relatives murdered in the Holocaust, used to say that it is not always wrong to believe that there are people out to get you.

3. I am still reading Colin Woodard, who describes the Puritan mindset as a belief that they are the chosen people and everyone else should be like them. If you suppose, as does Woodard, that progressives are the descendants of the Puritans, then they are quite capable of being intolerant. Woodard says that the Puritans saw it as their mission to reform the sinners who were all around them. Puritanism has a propensity both to feel under siege (by the sinners) and to make others feel as though they are under siege.

The art of thinking reasonably

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David Brooks starts out talking about Richard Thaler, but he moves on to recommend a forthcoming book by Alan Jacobs, called How to Think. Brooks writes,

Jacobs nicely shows how our thinking processes emerge from emotional life and moral character. If your heart and soul are twisted, your response to the world will be, too. He argues that by diagnosing our own ills, we can begin to combat them. And certainly I can think of individual beacons of intellectual honesty today: George Packer, Tyler Cowen, Scott Alexander and Caitlin Flanagan, among many.

My thoughts.

1. Read the column. It sounds as though Jacobs focuses on tribal dynamics. I expect his themes will overlap with my own Three Languages of Politics. The book will be tomorrow, and unless I am put off by perusing a sample or other reviews, I expect to read it.

2. Thaler’s focus, which is irrational (in the economic sense) individual choices, differs from Jacobs’ focus, which is how social context can influence us to have an unreasonable attachment to our opinions. In that sense, the Thaler opening is a head fake, and I think that the column would have been better without it.

Off-topic: marriage and grandchildren

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I do not attach any political or economic significance to what I writing about in this post. Ordinarily, that would be clear, but this blog usually deals with political economy and these days people can find a political dividing line in just about anything.

Here is the background:

1. Tyler Cowen said that both he and David Brooks enjoyed Eli J. Finkel’s The All-or-Nothing Marriage.

2. I read the book. I thought that the research methods were good (they included some controlled experiments) and the author’s synthesis of others’ research was very competent.

3. From my perspective, the book seemed off base. While I was reading it, my daughter sent an adorable video of my one-year-old grandson sitting in his high chair, taking food off his tray and reaching down to hand it to their dog. Dog and boy are clearly delighted with themselves. The video vividly illustrated what the book is missing.

4. I got around to reading the David Brooks column, and it turns out that he also rejects the thrust of the book, although perhaps less vehemently than I do.

Very briefly, Finkel views marriage as an institution that has evolved to move up the Maslow hierarchy. Prior the industrial revolution, it was about survival. Once material needs became more secure, it was about love in a highly gendered society–the man as bread-winner and the woman as home-maker. With more gender equality, marriage now is about mutual self-actualization.

I see marriage in a larger context of relationships, including the extended family and the community. Finkel is focused solely on the couple. Children only get mentioned once, when Finkel says that they are big time-sink. Grandchildren are not mentioned at all. My own informal research says that grandparent couples are happy couples. Some of that is selection bias–if you stuck it out as a couple long enough to have your grandchildren born, you are in good shape as a couple. But I think that some of it is that if you have children, then you want grandchildren, and when they arrive you feel real joy and satisfaction. Finkel’s self-realization blather is beside the point.

The 1960s and the present

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David Brooks draws an analogy.

So in the late 1960s along came a group of provocateurs like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the rest of the counterculture to upend the Protestant establishment. People like Hoffman were buffoons, but also masters of political theater.

He goes on to suggest that President Trump is playing a similar role today. While I agree with much of what he says about the current cultural struggle, Brooks is not old enough to really remember the 1960s, and I don’t think he has his history right.

What Brooks calls the Protestant establishment was not brought down by Abbie Hoffman. It brought itself down, largely because of Vietnam War guilt. Think of Robert McNamara as the canonical figure. The Protestant establishment lost its arrogance. Its denizens engaged in soul-searching. They became tentative and uncertain.

What Brooks famously labeled bourgeois bohemians (Bobo) and what he now refers to as today’s meritocratic establishment is not feeling so wracked with guilt. Instead, they are mostly circling the wagons and doubling down on arrogance. For example, mainstream economists will tell you that heroic macroeconomic policymakers saved the country in the wake of the financial crisis. I think that the policies only served to bail out investment banks. Maybe I am wrong about that. What strikes me is how vehement and closed-minded the economics establishment has become on this issue. Instead of trying to see what can be reasonably inferred from observation, they are working backward from the elite-friendly conclusion to analysis that justifies it.

In the 1960s, much of the establishment rightly or wrongly viewed itself as discredited. It yielded its authority, and new cultural and political power structures emerged. Today, I don’t see the same sort of humility and self-doubt afflicting the Bobo elite. It seems to me that the most likely outcome of the current cultural struggle is that the Bobo power structure will return to power–with a vengeance.

Four political parties

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In the NYT, Peter Baker writes,

Although elected as a Republican last year, Mr. Trump has shown in the nearly eight months in office that he is, in many ways, the first independent to hold the presidency since the advent of the current two-party system around the time of the Civil War.

If so, that is because the two-party system has fractured. Of course, the U.S. electoral system is highly conducive to two parties. But I would say that right now there are four.

1. Hard left. Sees socialism as a term with positive connotations and capitalism as a term with negative connotations. Does not see anything wrong with refusing to allow conservatives to speak in public.

2. Bobo center. Strongly favors lenience on immigration. Liberal on social policy. Generally content with the status quo on most economic issues, but worried about inequality.

3. Anti-Bobo heartland. Strongly favors restrictive immigration policy and “America first” foreign policy and trade policy. Very suspicious of the other three parties.

4. Conservatarians, meaning conservative-flavored libertarians or libertarian-flavored conservatives. I don’t count the fringe folks on the alt-right–they are electorally irrelevant and out of the picture. There are some Republicans in Congress who are conservatarians, but not any that I know of on the alt-right. Conservatarians worry about unsustainable fiscal policy, the power of the regulatory state, and a loss of key values, such as individual responsibility and respect for freedom of speech.

Note that you might not consider yourself to be in any one of these parties. Note that in the wake of the Trump ascendancy many libertarians feel more comfortable in the Bobo center. But I am more comfortable with the conservatarian crowd.

The Democratic Party is a fragile coalition of the hard left and the Bobo center (plus some ethnic groups that may or may not be reliably Democratic going forward). The Republican Party is an even more fragile coalition of the anti-Bobo heartland and conservatarians. Individually, none of these four parties is anywhere close to a majority. Even a landslide win in 2020 by Democrats (or, less plausibly, by Republicans) will not mean that a majority favors anyone’s agenda.

With the debt ceiling deal, President Trump showed a willingness to break with the conservatarians. My guess is that they will end up patching things up and working together, but the message that the President is sending is that he thinks that the conservatarians need him more than he needs them.

There is a good chance that the Democratic nominee in 2020 will cater to the hard left. If so, then this will give the Bobo center the sort of discomfort that the conservatarians feel with the Trump phenomenon. William Galston’s recent piece foreshadows this. It will also make it difficult for the conservatarians to abandon Mr. Trump.

Re-reading David Brooks

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Almost twenty years after it first appeared, I review Bobos in Paradise.

What Brooks might have foreseen, but did not, was how this Bobo project would play out as it gathered momentum. In the last two decades, we have witnessed the acceleration of the long-term trend toward expansion of the more abstract-oriented industries, such as finance and entertainment, and a decline of the more concrete-oriented industries, such as manufacturing and mining. As a result, the cultural influence of Bobos has soared. The Bobos became insistently cosmopolitan on issues of immigration and foreign relations, increasingly aggressive in their assault on traditional ideas about gender, and increasingly eager to stifle the speech on campus of those with whom they disagree.

David Brooks on what moderates believe

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He wrote,

Politics is a limited activity. Zealots look to the political realm for salvation and self-fulfillment. They turn politics into a secular religion and ultimately an apocalyptic war of religion because they try to impose one correct answer on all of life. Moderates believe that, at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish. But it cannot itself provide those beautiful things. Government can create economic and physical security and a just order, but meaning, joy and the good life flow from loving relationships, thick communities and wise friends. The moderate is prudent and temperate about political life because he is so passionate about emotional, spiritual and intellectual life.

I like the entire column, but especially this paragraph. I care more about my family and folk dancing than I do about politics. And I think that if everyone cared mostly about their relationships and their hobbies, the world would be a better place.

Note that I schedule my posts several days in advance. I think that this makes me write more moderately than I would if I were racing to give my immediate reaction to things.

David Brooks on the case for moderation

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His column concludes,

Over the next few months I’m hoping to write several columns on why modesty and moderation are superior to the spiraling purity movements we see today. It seems like a good time for assertive modesty to take a stand.

Of course, for Brooks to say this is dog-bites-man. When Paul Krugman says it, it will be news.

I remain extremely pessimistic about the political outlook.