The Conscience of An Elite

Revolutionary Brooks (graphic by Kat Garcia

 New York Times columnist David Brooks peered into his magic mirror recently and had a Eureka! moment. Could it possibly be that he and his righteous bipartisan group of anti-Trump resistance fighters themselves could have had a role in the rise and continuing popularity of Donald Trump?

 Brooks, who has made a whole career out of demonizing the poor in his biweekly columns, has belatedly come to the realization that the disdain that his elite class harbors toward the "lesser people" is what contributed to mass resentment and the American turn to right-wing populism.

"What if we're the bad guys here? Brooks disingenuously mused, much to the chagrin of more than 4,000 responding Times subscribers - whom the Times has relentlessly indoctrinated over the last six years that the only thing they ever have to hate and fear is Trump himself, as well as his hordes of fascist Trumpies. The only thing that has sustained the liberals of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) since Hillary Clinton was trounced in 2016 are the fumes of their own moral rectitude, which is all the justification they need for the financial gains they've accrued at the expense of the have-nots. It was not neoliberal austerity policies and the offshoring of jobs that created Trump supporters, they insist. It is their incipient racism and deplorable stupidity they display in voting against their own economic interests. And besides, many Trump voters, if not wealthy elites themselves, are tacky uneducated small-business owners, like the used car salesman who rips off other uneducated people for a living.

Wealthy Democrats themselves cannot possibly be racist, because not only did they vote for Barack Obama, they still revere him. Since Obama and other Black people are now more often elevated to positions of power, it makes it so much easier for "woke" elites to ignore the worsening structural racism and class inequality that directly supports their own lives and lifestyles. Their self-declared wokeness enables them to become the same kind of censorious, reactionary authoritarians they accuse the more extreme Republicans of being. Brooks sounds like a born-again woke liberal himself when he writes:

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

Brooks counted more than 900 times that Obama used the word "smart" to describe his policy decisions, ascribing its use as a way of dissing non-educated people. (I have a different interpretation, included in my published comment to his opinion piece, reposted below).

Brooks goes on, accurately enough:

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago.

The big tell that Brooks is blowing so much hot air is that he offers no policy solutions in the way of wealth redistribution, higher taxes on the rich, a debt-free college education and affordable housing, guaranteed single payer health care, and increased Social Security and disability payments to begin to stem the resentments that have given rise to Trump. Instead, he merely aims to "raise awareness" among the self-satisfied and comfortable liberal class. As long they merely acknowledge their privilege and they tone down the scolding just a tad, the have-not crowd will shut up and magically fall into line.

Brooks is an even worse phony that he was before anti[Trumpism bit him in the ass, when he openly but so delicately and obliquely blamed the poor for their own plights. It's just as bad to concern-troll as it is to scold while annoyingly continuing to praise one's own inherent goodness In fact, it's even worse.

Here's how I responded to Brooks' straining effort at constipated wokeness:

 Brooks, falsely correlating higher socioeconomic status with higher intelligence, completely ignores the plight of college-educated debtors. They were fed the line that "smart" people were destined for success. And the exact opposite has turned out to be true.

 Politicians like Obama were wont to use the word "smart" in conjunction with cuts to the social safety net. Another neoliberal buzzword I've come to loathe is "common sense." Translation: if you don't believe in austerity, you just are not getting with the program. You aren't a credentialed expert. Another similar catchphrase is "sharing the sacrifice" which posits that taxing rich people at slightly higher rates would balance out gratuitous cuts to food stamps and Medicaid.

Sure, we're all in this together, even as the richest billionaires at least doubled their wealth since the economic collapse of 2008 and the Covid pandemic.

Trump is very much the creation of the neoliberal thought collective. Anti-Trumpers can roll out any number of indicted hideous Trump-heads on their shiny golden legal platters, but most people, too worried about their next rent payment or the next unexpected health crisis, could not care less at this point.

Thank goodness for the (brilliant but starving) writers' strike, and for Cornel West being one of the few remaining voices of moral rectitude.

  

He's So Vain

 (optional soundtrack.)

Poor Barack Obama. He went to all that trouble to break up the ragtag Occupy Wall Street movement during one hippie-punching, pepper-spraying police state week back in the fall of 2011. And now it's all come back to bite him in the ass.

 The elders of the Democratic Party thought that they'd accomplished, if not the death of OWS, at least its co-optation. After all, Obama handily won re-election the following year. But mirabile dictu!  Occupy, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Fight for 15 and other activist groups have sneaked right back in to occupy the Democratic Party itself. The national conversation has been hijacked by an FDR liberal named Bernie Sanders, who might end up not only succeeding Obama, but dealing the coup de grace to the entire Neoliberal Project of the Reagan Revolution and the Clintonoid Third Way.

Democracy is rearing its ugly head again, and Obama is reportedly very, very nervous about this whole revolution thing. Even with his legendary genius IQ -- augmented lavishly by the Deep State brains of the CIA, the NSA and the FBI  -- he never saw Bernie Sanders coming.

Empress-in-Waiting Hillary Clinton's gross corruption and incompetence has let him down, big-time. He is probably kicking himself for so ever cutely attempting to co-opt her as his Secretary of State, thereby keeping a dangerous political enemy close. Without that patronage fillip, she would only have been a First Lady, an unaccomplished Senator, and a failed 2008 presidential candidate. Without Obama's own arrogant willful blindness to her private Internet account and her use of public office to enrich her family slush fund, she might have even been fired halfway through her frequent flier marathon as his ineffectual Good Will Ambassador.

Obama has only himself to blame for the rise of Bernie Sanders and socialism as the default position of a whole lost generation of over-educated, underpaid, deeply indebted young people who have never known a day when this country has not been at war. And for that accomplishment alone, I think he should be allowed to keep his Nobel Peace Prize.

Since it would now appear unseemly to either actively campaign for Hillary Clinton, bring in Joe Biden, or directly criticize Bernie Sanders, Obama must look to other reliable sources to get his message of displeasure out. So he has turned to his exclusive cadre of journalists and opinion-writers to be his off-the-record conduits of the Obama Story he wants the public to hear.

Over the weekend, Carl Bernstein (both a White House insider and Hillary Clinton biographer) went on CNN to announce how very, very upset the president is about the ongoing bitter Democratic primary. It's hurting Obama's precious legacy. If Bernie Sanders beats Hillary, that legacy might go up in flames. Obama's corporate coup (the TPP) might be dust. His market-based health insurance kludge might morph into a single payer Medicare for All plan. Wall Street and corporate felons might actually be prosecuted instead of being granted the tax breaks and cabinet and government advisory positions to which they have become accustomed.

Therefore, said Bernstein, the White House wants all the people to realize how absolutely imperative it is that Hillary Clinton be elected to succeed Barack Obama:

 
 Obama wants to broadcast the fear-mongering message that Sanders's socialism is out of touch with mainstream America -- despite the fact that millennial voters themselves overwhelmingly identify as socialist. As Bernstein tells it on CNN, Hillary's problem is not that she accepted money from Goldman Sachs and other banks: it's that she doesn't know how to feign proper humility before the public.

 The Washington insider wisdom is that Bernie isn't electable, and Hillary isn't delectable.

In other words, she can't do the "I feel your pain" head-fake as well as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

So, cue right-of-center David Brooks, not only an esteemed member of Obama's inner circle of off-the-record pundits, but often described as the center-right president's particular favorite columnist.

Brooks wrote an elegiac piece titled "I Miss Barack Obama" in today's New York Times. The accompanying photo shows Obama wand'ring lonely as a cloud to the Oval Office, embowered in a princely burst of flowering foliage in lieu of the more obvious crown of laurels. 

  Brooks channels presidential angst in all its froth and narcissism. Barack's greatest fear is not for the dire fates of ordinary people. It's that all his genius will be for naught, given Hillary's tanking numbers, the Republican clown car, and the specter of Bernie Sanders succeeding him.

Brooks mawkishly allows that while he often has had to pretend to disagree with Obama for partisan tribal purposes, the current occupant of the White House stands head and shoulders above mere mortals.

But over the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply.

The first and most important of these is basic integrity. The Obama administration has been remarkably scandal-free. Think of the way Iran-contra or the Lewinsky scandals swallowed years from Reagan and Clinton.

There are no mass media-reported scandals because the Obama regime has been rightly described as the most secretive in modern history. We know few details of his drone assassination program, for example, or his own closed-door fundraisers, or what went on behind the scenes of the orchestrated crackdown on Occupy, or the suppression of the 9/11 report section dealing with the Saudi royal family's role in the attacks, or the suppression of the CIA torture report. And those are just the scandals that come immediately to my mind. (For a full accounting of his first term, please see the "Obama Scandals List" on my Blog Roll.)

Meanwhile, Brooks manages to destroy his own homage by displaying some unintentional colorblind racism, fawning over the Obamas as one of those "respectable" black families. Barack and Michelle have displayed "superior integrity," Brooks gushes. "You'd be happy to have them in your community." (Apparently they would be that rare black couple who would not lower Brooks's property values if they moved next door to him.)

Brooks would not like Bernie Sanders to live within a thousand miles of him, because he is "so blinded by his values that reality doesn't seem to penetrate his mind." He would rip health care away from thousands (SanderScare) and even worse, rip the wings right off the insurance raptors!  Obama, on the other hand, knows his proper place in the grand white supremacy scheme of things.  He also doesn't "wallow in the pornography of pessimism."

Obama always presents a rapturous, G-rated Pollyannish picture about how great America is, how much the economy is improving, how much he loves peace even as he rains down his bombs and orchestrates his secret coups. Because if he told the truth to people -- the truth that their lives and prospects suck because of the unfettered capitalism he enables -- then the people might just stage a revolution.

Oh, wait.

Overcoming Sickly Inhibitions, the David Brooks Way

David Brooks As Doctor Pangloss (graphic by Kat Garcia)

David Brooks, resident hack of the Neocon Thought Collective, echoed that granddaddy of all neocon hacks, Norman Podhoretz, in his column today. He attempted to put a cheery Panglossian spin -- with some truly creepy eugenic baseline undertones -- on war, suffering and death.

It was Podhoretz who wrote that post-Vietnam, fed-up Americans needed a lot of guidance and prodding in order to "overcome the sickly inhibitions against the use of force." He actually cast aversion toward war as a disease rather than as a rational human response. Noam Chomsky explained the classic fascist propaganda techniques used to sell and re-sell modern American military aggression in his own classic volume, "Media Control":

"There were these sickly inhibitions against violence on the part of a large part of the public. People just didn't understand why we should go around torturing people and killing people and carpet bombing them. It's very dangerous for a population to be overcome by these sickly inhibitions, as Goebbels understood, because then there's a limit on foreign adventures. It's necessary, as the Washington Post put it rather proudly during the Gulf War hysteria, to instill in people respect for "martial value." That's important. If you want to have a violent society that uses force around the world to achieve the ends of its own domestic elite, it's necessary to have a proper appreciation of the martial virtues and none of these sickly inhibitions about using violence."

Just as the Vietnam Syndrome was temporarily overcome by the propaganda of the media-political nexus to justify the invasion of Iraq, so too is the bellicose thought collective trying to overcome the Iraq Syndrome to justify a turbocharged surge in the wider Middle East War, which Pope Francis has aptly called a "piecemeal World War III." 

Just as they justified Iraq by co-opting the 9/11 terror attacks, so too are they co-opting the Paris massacre to bomb, bomb, bomb again. And again. And some more. With no end in sight.

Enter David Brooks with his fascist, bizarre "Tales of the Super Survivors", which aims to convince us that suffering and catastrophe and terror are really good for us:

It’s horrible, of course, but over the past few years the findings of academic research into the effects of these traumas have shifted in a more positive direction. Human beings are more resilient than we’d earlier thought. Many people bounce back from hard knocks and experience surges of post-traumatic growth.

In the first place, post-traumatic stress disorder rates are lower than many of us imagine. According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only about 13 percent of the first responders on 9/11 had symptoms that would qualify as a stress disorder. Only about 13 percent of the people who saw the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in person experienced PTSD in the next six months. The best general rule for all of society seems to be that at least 75 percent of the people who experience a life-threatening or violent event emerge without a stress disorder.

There are actual uncomplaining people out there, seemingly ground into psychic mulch only to bounce back fully formed, and so full of joy that they spread the Pollyannish gladness to everyone around them. They are virtual latter-day Übermenschen wearing happy face emojis.  Brooks gushes on,

 That is to say, they have positive illusions about their own talents, and an optimist’s faith in their own abilities to control the future. But they have no illusions about the world around them. They accept what they have lost quickly. They see problems clearly. They work hard. Work is the reliable cure for sorrow.

Optimism, altruism, and the ability to tell a good story as you work till you drop are the Brooksian cures for all that ails the maimed, the stabbed, the bombed, the troubled, the naked and the dead.

My published comment:

The theme of today's sermon from Mount Plutocrat: Get over yourselves, plebs!

Voltaire wrote a scathing masterpiece on such phony optimism in the 18th century. His anti-hero, Pangloss (who it's fun to envision as our favorite chin-stroking pundit-philosopher who gets paid to go on champagne-soaked $120,000 vacations for the rich) advises Candide that despite earthquake, plague, poverty, capitalistic predators and corrupt priests, this is still the best of all possible worlds. The French Revolution ensued, of course. People were as sick and tired of the sanctimonious claptrap that Voltaire satirized as they are now.

Fast forward to the postmodern Age of Terror, and Brooks grotesquely enthuses that only 13% of 9/11 first responders came down with PTSD in the first six months. 

 Duh. As most grief experts will tell you, reaction to trauma is often delayed for years or decades. Six months is still the numb stage for a lot of people. Brook's little guide to "l'optimisme" also doesn't factor in the cancers and other diseases just now manifesting themselves from that event. And forget about the hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi victims of American wars of aggression who didn't get to see another sunny side of life.

This is the age of terror, all right. It's the economic terror of a deregulated plutonomy that's scaring us, impoverishing us, and quite literally killing us.

And Brook's Rx is resilience and story-telling?

Mr. Brooks: please get over yourself.

 When Brooksian Resilience Bites You in the Ass, Be Strong and Carry On

Vampire of the Vanities

(graphic by Kat Garcia)

The conventional wisdom that the writing of New York Times columnist David Brooks sucks has taken on a whole new meaning with his most recent mishmash of a piece, titled The Big Decisions. The fact that he deliberately hides the conservative source of the funding for the author whose book on "transformational research" he peddles is just one of the problems with the column (more on that later.)

It's what poses as the subject matter. Let Count Brookula speak for himself:

Let’s say you had the chance to become a vampire. With one magical bite you would gain immortality, superhuman strength and a life of glamorous intensity. Your friends who have undergone the transformation say the experience is incredible. They drink animal blood, not human blood, and say everything about their new existence provides them with fun, companionship and meaning.

Would you do it? Would you consent to receive the life-altering bite, even knowing that once changed you could never go back?

The difficulty of the choice is that you’d have to use your human self and preferences to try to guess whether you’d enjoy having a vampire self and preferences. Becoming a vampire is transformational. You would literally become a different self. How can you possibly know what it would feel like to be this different version of you or whether you would like.

Vampire Hunter D then seamlessly segues into how the choice to become a vampire is similar to the choice of becoming a parent, or joining the military. He shares links for a North Carolina philosophy professor named L.A. Paul and her alleged research into the "transformative experience." As Brooks tells it, she has concluded that life's major decisions are better made with your gut than with your rational mind. In other words, you should be more like George W. Bush, who readily admits to having invaded Iraq based upon his intestinal rumblings. Brooks seizes upon the Orwellian discovery (in the halls of academe, no less) that ignorance is strength, and he enthusiastically slithers into another one of his favorite haunts: the mysticism of moralism. (for thee and not for him and his ilk.)

Our moral intuitions are more durable than our desires, based on a universal standard of right and wrong. The person who shoots for virtue will more reliably be happy with her new self, and will at least have a nice quality to help her cope with whatever comes.

Totally maddened by this drivel, I then clicked on Brooks's link to his philosopher to see if he was just making this shit up. And way, way down at the bottom of her page, in small print, is the notice that a billionaire's trust fund (the Templeton Foundation) has awarded her and some Notre Dame professors a multi-million-dollar cash grant to delve into "transformations". From there, it is ridiculously easy to follow the money into the true, religious right anti-science agenda of this grantor. (Whenever you feel puzzled by a David Brooks column, it is always best to look beyond the gobbledygook and search for the cash connection. You will usually not be disappointed.)

 I will let my published comment to his column tell the rest of the story: 

 Following the links to L.A. Paul and her book, we learn that her research on the "transformative experience" is funded by a $4 million grant from the Templeton Foundation.

As Nathan Schneider wrote in "The Nation," this billion-dollar foundation also finances research on the "virtues" of the free market, intelligent design, and the inclusion of religious curricula in medical schools. It donates heavily to such conservative think tanks as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

http://www.thenation.com/article/god-science-and-philanthropy/

 Templeton's written purpose "is to encourage the top 1/10 of 1% of people and thereby encourage all people that progress in spiritual information is possible, desirable, can be done, and will be done."

Enter David Brooks, and his endless advice to the elite lovelorn, coupled with his relentless moralizing to the huddled masses.

In today's edition is the very subliminal message that all of you ladies on the Pill, or who might (gasp) even be contemplating an abortion, just go ahead and take the plunge into parenthood and maybe even some Brooksian nirvana on the side.

Left behind in the new "sharing" economy? Consider joining the military. Because let's face it, they're the only jobs the GOP is willing to fund.

 How vampires factor into all of this is anybody's guess. Maybe it's because the GOP make it their life's work to coddle the plutocrats sucking the rest of us dry.

David Brooks is an integral part of the corporate-funded media/political/academic nexus, which is in the business of hiding the perfidy of late capitalism within the muddy churn of the "marketplace of ideas." It remains unaccountable to the public, because its various agendas are rarely in the public interest. It is just surprising that Templeton is so honest about its true purpose of instructing the elite how best to "trickle down" its plutocratic gospel to the masses. Brooks is the power broker, selling the agenda of the robber barons of free market conservatism -- which is now in especial overdrive with the imminent arrival of Pope Francis on American shores. The pope, you may recall, made a recent reference to capitalism as a great big pile of steaming dung.

Thus does David Brooks turn to "spirituality" as co-opted by neoliberal vulture capitalists, movement conservatives, and other "thought leaders" suffering from a galloping case of Dark Ages nostalgia. And he gets paid mega-bucks to do it, while more real journalists are being eased out of newsrooms every single day. But, as Brooks glibly says, at least they'll be "left with a nice quality to cope with whatever comes."

The subtext of his Cotton Mather-lite column is "Go &%@% yourselves, plebes!"

Always look for and read the fine print. Always follow the money. Whenever possible, disinfect the vampires with the sunlight of exposure.

(A necklace of nice quality garlic bulbs wouldn't hurt either.)

Kinder, Gentler Points of Blight

David Brooks got the 3 a.m. phone call from the Board of Overlords:

Culture wars and right-wing wedge issues are Out. Diversity and loving-kindness are In. Otherwise, Ted Cruz might win the nomination and lose to Hillary Clinton. So enough already with the bigotry and the religious paranoia. Up with Obama-style centrism (social liberalism balanced with economic conservatism.)

Taking a page from the postmodern GOP playbook (see my previous post) Brooks told the reactionary Christian Coalition wing of the party to stuff it for awhile, and play the part of Obama-style community organizers. It worked once for a Democratic corporatist, so why shouldn't it work for a Republican corporatist too?

Of course, this synopsis is only the crass political subtext of today's New York Times column from the Pundit to the Plutes. Telling moralizers like his colleague Ross Douthat to stop moralizing over the scourge of birth control and gay marriage, Brooks moralized:

These conservatives are enmeshed in a decades-long culture war that has been fought over issues arising from the sexual revolution. Most of the conservative commentators I’ve read over the past few days are resolved to keep fighting that war.

I am to the left of the people I have been describing on almost all of these social issues. But I hope they regard me as a friend and admirer. And from that vantage point, I would just ask them to consider a change in course.

Otherwise, rich Republican politicians might lose a few, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio might plummet from 350:1 to 348:1 under a Clinton restoration, and there might not be any more Scalia clones to amuse us to death once the original disappears into a puddle of bile. So think before you hate, haters!  Here's the Brooksian formula as dictated by the Wall Street wing of the party:

Social conservatives could be the people who help reweave the sinews of society. They already subscribe to a faith built on selfless love. They can serve as examples of commitment. They are equipped with a vocabulary to distinguish right from wrong, what dignifies and what demeans. They already, but in private, tithe to the poor and nurture the lonely.

The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other. Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life.

Notice how Brooks strains to emulate Obama's "We Shall Overcome" eulogy. He even dips into Biblical anaphora -- the rhetorical device often used by the president (and preachers) which repeats the first part of sentences over and over again  -- "those are the people" -- for maximum emotional, moralizing, co-opting impact.

Here is my published Times response to Rev. Mr. Brooks:

 They thought their southern strategy to suck up the votes of poor white people was safe for all eternity, until a mass shooting in a Black church made everybody notice what a hateful symbol the Confederate flag truly is.

Their sustained ACA-repealing dog-whistle, sending the message that Poors and Blacks don't deserve to live, just got a big wad of gum stuck in it, courtesy of the Court.

And marriage equality becoming the law of the land in all 50 states? It's been a perfect trifecta of loss for the GOP.

So what to do, now that the rebel yell is losing its oomph? The GOP changes course overnight, resurrecting the stale Poppy Bush-era propaganda of "compassionate conservatism" This column is a very cute way of both endorsing Jeb! and repudiating such losers as Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee. There's an election to be won, bloodthirsty Neocons waiting to claw their way back into power, fear to be struck into the hearts of America in the name of "national security."

While reciting his Christian litany, Brooks is very careful to emphasize that love for the poor will be purely voluntary. The hyper-rich will not be taxed as they "tithe and nurture" on their own private terms. Opportunity will still abound for pathologizing poor people as conservatives dellcately venture into "underprivileged areas" for daytime photo-ops, and then slash the social safety net to ribbons under cover of darkness.

Brooks's litany of hypocrisy is the smell of GOP desperation in the morning.