David Brooks, the Tea Party, and Our Political Future

I am a David Brooks fan. I have pimped his new book, The Social Animal, like it was a 19 year-old crack addict from a broken home. At one point, I owned work and home copies of Bobos in Paradise. And I completely agree with his latest column on the sad state of our political parties and leadership heading into the next election:

Voters are certainly aware of the scope of the challenges before them. Their pessimism and anxiety does not just reflect the ebb and flow of the business cycle, but is deeper and more pervasive. Trust in institutions is at historic lows. Large majorities think the country is on the wrong track, and have for years. Large pluralities believe their children will have fewer opportunities than they do.

Voters are in the market for new movements and new combinations, yet the two parties have grown more rigid.

As a diagnosis of our current predicament, this is about as good as it gets. And I would endorse most of his proposed solutions, too:

This reinvigoration package would have four baskets. There would be an entitlement reform package designed to redistribute money from health care and the elderly toward innovation and the young. Unless we get health care inflation under control by replacing the perverse fee-for-service incentive structure, there will be no money for anything else.

There would be a targeted working-class basket: early childhood education, technical education, community colleges, an infrastructure bank, asset distribution to help people start businesses, a new wave industrial policy if need be — anything that might give the working class a leg up.

There would be a political corruption basket. The Tea Parties are right about the unholy alliance between business and government that is polluting the country. It’s time to drain the swamp by simplifying the tax code and streamlining the regulations businesses use to squash their smaller competitors.

There would also be a pro-business basket: lower corporate rates, a sane visa policy for skilled immigrants, a sane patent and permitting system, more money for research.

But this post isn't meant to be a standing ovation for Brooks. In fact, I have a large criticism: he indicts the two parties for not doing anything that will get America out of its mess. He seems ready to acknowledge (if only indirectly) that his past support of Obama has not panned out, and the Democrats don't have a plan to get us out of this mess. And yet, when a grass-roots movement arose that wanted to push to make big changes (many of which are compatible with Brooks' wish list, he thumbed his nose at it. Here's his reaction to the Tea Party in an older column:

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.

You can get more details here, and it is pretty obvious that Brooks found something distasteful and lowbrow when he looked at the Tea Party.

And there have certainly been times when the Tea Party has lived up to the caricature painted of it in much of the media: the Truther movement, which is well-represented within the Tea Party, is just a silly waste of time, and men carrying visible firearms at political rallies sends a horrible message no matter what the law says, or their intent was.

But all political movements, especially those that bubble up from the bottom, are going to have loons. They will all be excessive in their thinking or their rhetoric from time to time. But you know what would help? If thinkers like David Brooks engaged with these movements to give them focused, more powerful thinking, instead of trying to strangle them while they're still in the cradle.

The Tea Party emerged out of a concern that government spending and the intrusions of the nanny state would sap the nation's vitality and destroy the American Dream. That doesn't sound all that different from the concerns Brooks outlines. Maybe if he can look past the rough edges, and get over his distaste at their lack of intellectualism, he'll find they have a lot in common.

A Brief Bit of Self-Promotion

I'm proud to announce the first step has been taken on a path that will undoubtedly have me joining the ranks of the Bard himself as a colossus of English letters. That step comes courtesy of Necon E-Books, which has seen fit to publish one of my (very) short stories as a winner of their March flash fiction contest, and will also include it in their end-of-year anthology.

If you have a second, definitely go check them out. My story took its inspiration from the idea that some of the large computing networks we are creating are for shockingly trivial, and even anti-social, activities. Readers of this blog may also enjoy another story featured: "HEALTH CARE 2016", by Jan Kozlowski. It offers a humorous yet vivid take on where our desire to cut costs in the health system could take us.

Enjoy, and any feedback on the piece is welcome in the comment section.

Retreating to Psychology

My daily reading tends to cycle rapidly between political commentary and sports writing. Today, I read two pieces that demonstrated to me just how much of my life I am wasting on reading other people's dimestore psychologizing about public figures of all sorts. First, here is Maureen Dowd on President Obama:

His arrogance led him to assume: If I build it, they will understand. He can’t get the gratitude he feels he deserves for his achievements if no one knows what he achieved and why those achievements are so vital.

Once it seemed impressive that he was so comfortable in his own skin. Now that comfort comes across as an unwillingness to be wrong.

And here is Bill Simmons on Dwayne Wade:

The overthinking-it-but-maybe-I'm-right explanation: Maybe everyone slowly realized during the preseason, "Good God, LeBron is MUCH better than Dwyane. What do we do? How do we handle this? Do we wait for Dwyane to admit it? Do we ... wait, what do we do???"

Maybe Wade can feel it. Maybe his competitive juices are kicking in. No, no, we're equals. He's not better than me. We're equally good. Look, I'll show you. Maybe it's just been the elephant in the room for six weeks. Maybe deep down, everyone knows the Heat can't take off until Wade has his "You can be chairman and CEO, I'll be president and COO" moment. It goes beyond who gets to take the last shot. It's about the dynamics of basketball. It's about someone emerging as the emotional leader, the spine of the team, the guy who says over and over again, "I got this." And you can't keep saying that if you're looking over your shoulder worrying that someone else is saying the same thing. It's like a fly ball in the outfield. Eventually, someone has to call it.

In case you don't feel like clicking through to the whole pieces, I'll give you a summary. Dowd's point is: Obama was too cocky and believed his own hype and now he's paying for it. Simmons' point is: Both LeBron and Wade are used to being the star, and one of them is going to have to defer to the other if they are going to succeed. Both of these themes are so obvious and well-worn that if they had written their pieces without resorting to pop psychology, they wouldn't have been much longer than those sentences.

Why is psychological speculation so compelling to readers? Sadly, I can only answer the question by resorting to it myself: readers today are overwhelmed by how complex and challenging things have become, so they take comfort in speculation as to behavioral drivers that they can easily understand. We may not be able to figure out an agenda that will both help the country and appeal to Obama's political base, we may not be able to envision an offensive system that will maximize the combined talents of LeBron James and Dwayne Wade, but we can presume that we understand what's going on in the heads of famous people, and that makes us feel smugly superior to them. At least I'm not as cocky as the President (or Dwayne Wade).

There are writers who make more substantative arguments: Walter Russell Mead is a great example of someone using historic and strategic insights to help his readers understand what is happening in the world right now, and what might happen in the future if certain trends continue. His recent post about the sorry state of our politics, and the structural weaknesses of both parties that keep them from addressing our major problems, was compelling and avoided cheap point scoring. But as long as we continue to indulge our collective intellectual laziness by analyzing why our public figures don't behave exactly as we'd like, we will remain hopelessly far from finding new solutions to our tired problems.