The Poor Feel Like a Bag of Sand

Watching David Brook trying to explain  "work" or "poverty" in the pages of the "New York Times" really is semantically indistinguishable from Steve Carell attempting to explain sex in "The 40-Year Old Virgin": every time he opens his mouth to show off his bed cred



what comes out are a string of embarrassing noises assembled out of the fragments of what he has heard other people saying :

The essential truth about poverty is that we will never fully understand what causes it. 

There are a million factors that contribute to poverty, and they interact in a zillion ways.

and

The list of factors that contribute to poverty could go on and on, and the interactions between them are infinite. Therefore, there is no single magic lever to pull to significantly reduce poverty. The only thing to do is change the whole ecosystem.

If poverty is a complex system of negative feedback loops, then you have to create an equally complex and diverse set of positive feedback loops. You have to flood the zone with as many good programs as you can find and fund and hope that somehow they will interact and reinforce each other community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood.

The key to this flood-the-zone approach is that you have to allow for maximum possible diversity.

...

Of course one really good, battle-tested anti-poverty program on which most of the golden age of Murrican Values was built is known as a "good-paying job" with "security" and "strong labor protection" that provides "Americans" with a "future" towards which they can "plan" and in which they can have "faith".  But for America's Leading Reasonable Conservative Public Intellectual it is neither fun nor safe to talk about that  stuff (mostly because just beneath the surface of that conversation lurks the ever-present danger of accidentally mentioning the 30 years of Conservative economic policies which destroyed  the golden age of Murrican Values.) Much easier for Mr. Brooks to lay down 800 words of faux badass rat-a-tat pop sociology jive about the po' that he picked up on the street.

Unfortunately the "street" on which Mr. Brooks picked up his urban blight slingo winds past the dull, dark, and melancholy House of Murray before cutting directly through beautiful, downtown Davos, and when he tries to sound like he knows what he is talking about all that shines through -- as bright and shiny as a new, fiat currency penny -- is his complete lack of any frame of personal reference:

Let’s say there is a 14-year-old girl who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the love and sense of purpose that go with motherhood, rather than stay in school in the hopes of someday earning a middle-class wage.


You have no idea what factors have caused her to make this decision, and you have no way of knowing what will dissuade her. But you want her, from morning until night, to be enveloped by a thick ecosystem of positive influences. 

You see, as America's Leading Reasonable Conservative Public Intellectual, Mr. Brooks desperately wants to write big, heroic paragraphs about Centrism (which is all he ever writes about anymore) and the plight of the wee, downtrodden people of Supply Side Brigadoon, but since Centrism is a fraud and since Mr. Brooks hasn't the slightest fucking clue about poverty, what comes out of his keyboard sounds as idiotic as Willard Romney talking about being unemployed, or Newt Gingrich talking about morality.  And since Our Mr. Brooks definitely does not want to talk about the complete devastation 30 years of Conservatism has wreaked on the middle class, the working poor and America's manufacturing base, he instead  opts to lazily extrude 800 words of gabble-gabble nonsense out of the giant hole where his human experience ought to be.

Of course, over in the Better Universe, a fraud like Mr. Brooks would be collecting a paycheck by thanking me for shopping at Costco after swiping my receipt for tube socks, a pallet truck of mac and cheese and a ten gallon drum of maple syrup with a Magic Marker.

But in this Universe -- for reasons that passeth all understanding -- Mr. Brooks has been handed a "Guns of Navarone"-sized megaphone planted permanently atop a giant pile of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.'s money.

Which is a tragedy, because the essential truth about Conservatism is that we will never fully understand what causes it.

There are a million factors that contribute to  Conservatism , and they interact in a zillion ways, but at the root of this tragedy is our nation's broken wingnut welfare system.

Let's say there is a young Conservative male person who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the enormous wealth and influence that go with rolling out of bed twice a week and jerking 800-words of oligarch bait into the pages of the New York Times, rather that developing any real skills or doing anything resembling real work.

You have no idea what factors caused this young man to choose a life of telling lies about hippies and poor people to banksters and the Wall Street money changers, but you're pretty sure that trying to appeal to his conscience is never going to work, because this soul-dead plutocrat knob gobbler has discovered that there is big money in ignoring the grotty details of the real world in favor of abstract Conservative principles which he can mindless apply in all cases, consistently and uniformly.

Also don't bother throwing technocrats at him because it is a fact universally acknowledged as being true by  America's Leading Reasonable Conservative Public Intellectual technocrats are always wrong about everything:

Technocrats are in the business of promulgating rules. They seek abstract principles that they can apply in all cases. From their perspective, a rule is fair when it can be imposed uniformly across the nation. 

Technocratic organizations take diverse institutions and make them more alike by imposing the same rules. Technocracies do not defer to local knowledge. They dislike individual discretion. They like consistency, codification and uniformity.

But the tragedy of Mr. Brooks' choice to spend his life suckling the Wingnut Welfare teat are not confined to his life alone: by the nature of what he does and who he serves means that Mr. Brooks exerts a terrible and destructive influence over the rest of us.

So what to do?

Sadly, the list of factors that contribute to Conservatism could go on and on, and the interactions between them are infinite. Therefore, there is no single magic lever to pull to significantly reduce Conservatism . The only thing to do is change the whole ecosystem.

If Conservatism is a complex system of negative feedback loops, then you have to create an equally complex and diverse set of positive feedback loops. You have to flood the zone with as many good writers as you can find and fund and hope that somehow they will interact and reinforce each other community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, blog-by-blog.

The key to this flood-the-zone approach is that you have to allow for maximum possible diversity.

Which unfortunately these days appears to consist of Paul Krugman, Charlie Pierce and me :-)