David Brooks and Me

I am a fan of David Brooks, a journalist you may know from his many years of writing, from The Wall Street Journal to the New York Times. Prior to a William Buckley appearance on the University of Chicago campus, Brooks was writing satire for the campus magazine, The Maroon, and hilariously wrote of Buckley that “In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping.”

That did much to endear me to David, as I have always personally felt that William Buckley (on Firing Line and elsewhere) was the perfect definition of sanctimonious self-centeredness.

But we are different in some ways, David and me

I am 26 years his senior and had a career in the business world when success was easier and we paid our taxes, while his is in journalism. Our roots are deeply planted in dissimilar national soil, mine in the late years of the Depression and World War Two, his in Woodstock and the sexual revolution.

When I was ten-years-old, I remember bugging my parents for a WWII-style bomber jacket of leather and sheepskin. They cost nine bucks at the time and we didn’t have nine bucks. Dad bought me one anyway and I left it on the playground at school the very first day I wore it. I don’t know what David’s childhood memories are, but I know the sixties, when he was born, are societally different from my thirties remembrances.

We have our conservatism in common

Those who know me will do a quick double-take on that, but I am deeply conservative in the definition of actually conserving such things as clean air, potable water, respect for our political opponents and a leg up for those whose bootstraps are too frayed to do the job. I feel David and I may be alike in that.

But you know, it’s hard to find that definition any longer under conservative. Webster’s Dictionary gives preference to: an adherent or advocate of political conservatism (or) a member or supporter of a conservative political party.

Despite Everything You Think You Know, America Is on the Right Track

That’s the title of the David Brooks article from The Atlantic that caught my eye, the reason for this commentary and I recommend it to you. It’s deeply researched and well presented, although it raised my eyebrow here and there.

“Yes, America is a wounded giant—but it always has been, and the case for optimism is surprisingly strong,” he writes. Wonderful opener.

“Negativity is by now so deeply ingrained in American media culture that it’s become the default frame imposed on reality. In large part, this is because since the dawn of the internet age, the surest way to build an audience is to write stories that make people terrified or furious. This is not rocket science: Evolution designed humans to pay special attention to threats.”

By gad, sir, you have nailed it quite accurately.

“When Gallup recently asked Americans if they were satisfied with their personal life, 85 percent said they were, a number that has remained remarkably stable over the past 40 years. But when Gallup asked Americans in January 2022 if they were satisfied with the direction of the country, only 17 percent said they were, down from 69 percent in 2000.”

Fascinating, it seems we loved the sin then, but are not so crazy about the sinner now

“…the people who are most pessimistic about the country are not the working class but highly educated and affluent people—the people, that is, who spend more time engaging with news media. The American right, for instance, finds itself in a state of perpetual apocalyptic alarm these days… it’s the affluent white Republicans who watch Tucker Carlson and believe the nation is on the verge of total destruction. Many of them believe that radical action, even violence, may be necessary to save it.”

Hmm, so does that mean it’s the billionaire class who are to blame, those who bought-off our Senators and Representatives, off-shored our industry for profit, fouled our air, food and water (again for profit) and ran off to tax-havens?

Wow, David, have I read you correctly?

Perhaps. But only perhaps

Brooks claims that the first problem with all this pessimism is that it is ahistorical. Every era in American history faced its own massive challenges, says he, and in every era the air was thick with gloomy jeremiads warning of catastrophe and decline. I had to look up jeremiads, but he’s pretty much right. Pick any decade in the history of this country, and you will find roiling turmoil. I’m not all that sure that ‘roiling turmoil’ is my idea of the America I once knew and still love, but I’ve seen my share over all or part of ten decades.

“But in all of those same decades, you will also find, alongside the chaos and the prophecies of doom, energetic dynamism and leaping progress. For example, the current historic moment is frequently compared with the 1890s, another period of savage inequality, rapid technological disruption, pervasive political dysfunction, and controversial waves of immigration. Someone alive in 1893—as unemployment surged from 3 percent to almost 19 percent among working-class Americans, as populism rose and spread, as class conflict and horrendous poverty became more rampant—might easily have concluded that this country was coming apart. And yet, the 1890s didn’t lead to American decline—they led to the American Century.”

Unless, of course, you think the American Century pretty much defined American decline

It’s probably unfair to David to remind the reader that the American Century he celebrates included two World Wars, a major depression, two more fruitless wars of aggression, the McCarthy Hearings, the Nixon resignation, the Clinton impeachment, the assassinations of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as the rise of the CIA, the Pentagon, the military-industrial-complex, the World Trade Center attack and the beginning of three wars in the Middle East.

That’s not to mention the creeping realization of American Empire.

But, what the hell, Benjamin Franklin warned us a Republican form of government would be hard to keep.

David’s article is well worth the read.