``Oh, he turned a long time ago. I remember a paper he wrote years ago about how in today's America nobody has any real economic grievances anymore, since we're all so rich, so the Democrats shouldn't talk about economic issues...'' SA
``Yup, I remember that too. His argument seems surreal - has anyone taken him apart, or should I set myself to that task?'' Doug
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(Wrote this before reading the re-named thread.)
Please do. The question is what venue. Notice the kinds of studies and supposed `data' he cites, all very pollyanna stuff with promising neoliberalism ringing in his ears. There are the obvious weak points for an empirical attack mode which is your forte. So, maybe two versions. One quick and dirty and sent to the Letters to the Editor, and the other longer and more developed for LBO or whatever. I think it is worth the effort because he represents at least in my mind, a detached from realities mode that is very common. Weren't you going to study the new elite, yourself? What happened to that project?
Brooks opens with 60% of Americans think the US is in decline. Of course what that means to a right wing Christian and what that means to me is not evident.
Brooks has always seemed off the hook. I use him, when I listen to him or very occasionally read him as indicative of the bright hopes wing of the neocon-neoliberal mind set. He must share that with Obama and Duncan. On particularly nasty issues like Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the finance meltdown, he turns cautiously optimistic with a lot of provisional nonsense. If this or if that turns out...blah, blah, blah.
I'll I try some psychoanalysis. The entire project that Brooks represents is demonstrably in ruin. For example the Republican party is whatever its election potential, been effectively destroyed as an ideology from the monstrous Bush II decade. Brooks' effort to soft sell the US, particularly the Republican wing with its positive entrepreneurial spirit to its empire building for the freedom in the world is all become nightmare feedback loop with history.
Brooks opens this decade with Bobos in Paradise. That was the year that his new upper class decided to steal a presidential election for the popular vote loser, or sit on their hands. Then there was the history of the whole decade as one public atrocity after another unfolded, while Brooks's new hero class preceded to screw each other and the lower more desperate orders out of every billion they could, while blasting about in Iraq, Afghanistan and anything labeled Muslim in front of it.
It was a long decade of intellectual trivia much like Brooks himself, coming from out our ruling elite scribblers, while the Bobos in power slaughtered hundreds of thousands, striped the constitution and bill of rights, violated most of the UN charters, and engaged in the worst sort of propaganda war. Pretty despicable. Then Brooks's heroes ended it all with a global financial meltdown. Their solution? Blank checks for the financial Bobo's followed by IOUs for the rest of us. And it ain't over as the next decade promises austerity to strip out the last vestigial remnants of the public (that is our) sector goods and services, converting the `savings' to cash for more Bobos to play with in the next decade.
It's time for a new Bobo's book, Bobo's Reloaded. Here's the cover art:
http://www.hegel-system.de/de/gif/Gruen.jpg
So, yes Brooks is delusional. But it's the scope and depth of his delusion that interests me, mainly because I think it is a wide spread and shared world at the heart of the US universe---from the class that seems to rule our society.
Just for fun, try reading this review of Bobos in Paradise by Brad Delong, with the jaundiced eye of history:
``I read the cover flap of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, David Brooks's work of "comic sociology"--a (much funnier and wittier) updating of C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite. I chuckled at the cover flap's pointing out that the "Bobos"--bourgeois bohemians, Brooks's semi-acronym for America's new dominant class--
...I thought: "Bingo. This guy David Brooks has just reduced me to a sociological category." I thought "this is a book to pay attention to...''
At the end Delong comes back to a very qualified note:
``But what is the connection between Burke's "natural aristocracy" (which existed mostly in Burke's own fantasies) and the SUV-driving, $500 hiking boot-wearing, satisfied lawyer who will drink only shade-grown coffee who is the ideal type of Brooks's Bobo? The resemblance between Burke's fantasy and Brooks's Bobo exists only in Brooks's mind. And it is the fact that Brooks cannot quite make the leap--cannot quite feel toward what he sees as America's new aristocracy the way a conservative should--that makes the book feel, in the end, a little bit unbalanced...''
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Articles/reviews/bobos.html
Delong's implied position that `us' liberals have a better grasp on the intellectual and real world is pretty amusing, since that alternative to the universe Brooks inhabits, is now in power and we are getting to watch how the more sensible and practical liberal Bobo's rule.
>From my view this wing of the Bobo's is just as delusional and
celebratory as the other. A local paper announced on Saturday, ``US adds
162,000 jobs'', and goes on, ``In another bit of good news, the
unemployment rate held steady in March at 9.7 percent for the third
consecutive quarter.''
I'd call that Bobo Summers optimism. Since when is a recession level unemployment rate (in California about 12 percent) holding steady for three quarters a bright note?
Just read this, ``And, on factchecking by Sasha Isserman, revealed to be rather inventive..'' and the link. Hmm, don't know. Isserman had a good idea, let's go see. But then Brooks is sort of right to say, hey this is pop sociology for media. I make it light and snappy, easy reading, not too deep. So what, kid?
CG
