Both Sides Duet

Today Mr. Brooks' add one more forgettable link to his now nearly-infinite chain of lazy, puckered, O tempora! O mores! columns.


As I have written one million times before,  the particular "issue" around which Mr. Brooks hangs any given sickly garland of Centrist rags doesn't matter in the slightest, because whatever the putative problem may be, you can be damn sure by the time you've rattled to the end of Mr. Brooks' 800 word corduroy Centrist road, the real problem will have been identified once again as a failure of morals and/or traditional values.


This will always, always, always be followed by Mr. Brooks' universal diagnosis: for Problem X, there are are two-and-only-two sides to blame -- Liberals and Conservatives -- and that blame is apportioned exactly 50/50.

"Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before childrearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class."

If numbers are involved, readers will then be presented with a simple and completely false budgetary option in which they get to decide which Liberal program serving the needs of non-super-rich Americans needs to be decimated if we are to save ourselves from "national suicide".

"The political system directs more money to health care for the elderly while spending on child welfare slides."

Like Mr. Brooks' "Both sides are equally to blame" lies, his budgetary lies are always little masterpieces of fraudulent framing: always presented as inexorable, zero-sum choices. Mr. Brooks will, of course, never even hint at the horribly inconvenient history behind our budget woes: the series of disastrous Republican policies -- from Iraq to the Bush tax cuts -- each of which shoved this country ever-deeper into the current state of financial peril about which Mr. Brooks now regularly soils his Ronald Reagan Underoos. Neither will Mr. Brooks mention the equally inconvenient fact that he wholeheartedly supported each of those catastrophically stupid decisionn.


Luckily those pesky facts are all buried safely far away in a distant land called The Past on whose rocky shoals most pundits never set one soft pink little toe and which happily leaves Mr. Brooks free to set the terms of the debate any way he pleases.


Finally, no stand-issue David Brooks column about morals and the budget would be complete without a warning to politicians (And this this means you, Barack Obama!) that they need to -- for love of Almighty God, Alan Greenspan and all that is Holy -- stop talking about how my super-rich patrons and the transnational corporations they run have skull-fucked this country nearly to death class already!

"Political candidates will have to spend less time trying to exploit class divisions and more time trying to remedy them — less time calling their opponents out of touch elitists, and more time coming up with agendas that comprehensively address the problem."

There are, of course, still whole tankards of stupid to be wrung out of Mr. Brooks' cold lump of million dollar prose, but I'm sure Mr. Pierce will get around to stomping those grapes sooner or later, so for tonight here endeth the lesson.


UPDATE:  More from around the internet


Dean Baker of The Center for Economic and Policy Research delights in the fact that David Brooks has finally noticed what has been evident to everyone else for decades, but wonder how Mr. Brooks proposes we solve the problem of  Class Inequality without talking about it ?


The First Casualty is also curious about why someone who has been handed the New York Times as a pulpit can use it so badly:

"What makes it so infuriating is that Brooks has a pulpit at the Times, and he consistently uses it to chide Obama for being too enthralled with the idea of government, too ambitious with his proposals, too far left for the nation. But then one day Brooks wakes up to discover inequality, and…yup, turns out marriage norms are the problem."

The short answer is that Mr. Brooks is using his influential perch at the New York Times exactly as his tiny clique of incredibly wealthy patrons want him to use it.




For the sake of balance, I should note that David Rea haz a deep, deep sad over how mean and unfair Mr. Brooks' commenters can be:

I propose an experiment: have both David Brooks and Paul Krugman write columns about some aspect of social policy that is off their usual agenda, then switch bylines. Put Krugman's name on the Brooks piece, and vice-versa. (I would have suggested Gail Collins, but her writing style is too distinct.)


I'm betting NYT readers will fall for it. They'll trip over themselves in their gushing agreement with "Paul" and spew bilious hatred at "David". Especially the regular responders who are really just shilling their own blogs & web sites...

Meanwhile, Kevin Drum expresses his cautious concern with "David Brooks' Strange Preoccupation With Single Parents"  (complete with those graph thingies that all the kids are talking about these days):

...
It's not 100% clear from Brooks's column, but it sounds as if the problem here isn't that working class families are doing any less than before. The growing gap is caused by the fact that affluent families are doing much, much more. This is similar to the trend of growing income inequality in America: the problem isn't that the working class is making less money than they used to, the problem is that their incomes have been sluggish while incomes of the well-to-do have skyrocketed.


This makes me skeptical of Brooks's favored explanation for the parenting gap: the growing number of single parents in America...

Investing in Kids notes this intriguing incongruity between the print edition of Mr. Brooks' column and the online edition:

(By the way, there are some interesting variations between the online version and the print version of Brooks’s column. The print version asks conservatives to accept “higher taxes” and does not mention benefit cuts as an option. The online version adds that liberals should be “morally tough” about marriage as a social norm, which is not mentioned in the print version. I assume the online version reflects Brooks’s more recent editing.)

I am more than a little amused at the thought of Mr. Brooks' staggering to his feet after a savage, all-night Aspen Ideas Festival ether frolic with Mr. Alan Greenspan and Jeffrey Goldberg,  patting down his pockets and gummily going over his brutal-hangover mental checklist:


"Keys?  Check.  Wallet?  Check.  "Hot, Flat and Crowded complimentary condoms and breath mints?  Check. Blame the hippies?  Che...  Wait...wait...wait  just a minute.  Shit!  Shitshitshit!  It was right here.  In my hand right here!"


At that moment Mr. Brooks' phone tells him that he has an urgent text from Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.


"What does he say, Siri?"


"Text reads "Dear David.  What the FUCK?!  AOS."  Would you like to reply?"