Jim Sleeper: David Brooks is misguided
Occasionally people ask me why I'm so hard on New York Times columnist David Brooks, who some of them find quite insightful and others so irrelevant they can't understand why I get angry at all.
At last, I've found a way to explain it. It's all there in his column of today, "The Culture of Debt." I'm sure that many of my correspondents will find the column reasonable on first reading. It captures everything that is wrong with this man and his ideas -- and maybe with readers who believe him.
Brooks, a self-described conservative and sometime practitioner of" comic sociology," author of On Paradise Drive and creator of the all-American working-class type"patio man," knows he has to say something about the devastation raging through countless recently-viable neighborhoods like the one in Cleveland featured on Bill Moyers' Journal last Friday night.
Brooks knows that millions of the very homeowners he's been rhapsodizing may lose not only their present homes but any prospect of owning homes again. But he never comments honestly on the information presented by The Nation economics editor William Greider and public officials in Ohio, in one of the most riveting and instructive Moyers shows I've ever seen.
Brooks makes what we have to presume is an individual, moral decision to deflect the truth and, indeed, to lie. He shifts from comic sociology to pathetic sociology in order to do it. All sobriety, he wrist-slaps predatory lenders but sticks it, more in sorrow than in anger, of course, to the hapless, desperate homeowners who sat listening politely to smooth talkers they'd allowed to offer them fistfuls of" cash back" for signing their savings and hopes away.
Citing a Times story about a woman whose home was foreclosed in the current tsunami, Brooks frets that Times readers posting comments on whom to hold accountable have been talking past each other: Blame the predatory lenders, one side says. No, says the other side, blame homeowners who lacked enough grown-up self-restraint to say,"I can't do this deal," or"I'd better not go there."
Brooks, fresh from his latest deep reckonings in sociology and political philosophy, announces a way out of this either-or debate by proclaming a"third position... held in overlapping ways by liberal communitarians and conservative Burkeans." (Whenever he does this, he is about to drown truth in euphemisms and plausible half-truths that are rather like the ones that predatory lenders tell.)
Brooks's truism-drenched"third position" starts"with the notion that... individuals don't build their lives from scratch. They absorb the patterns and norms of the world around them. Decision-making -- whether it's taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry -- isn't a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.
"According to this view, what happened to [the borrower who's been dispossessed], and the nation's financial system, is part of a larger story. America once had a culture of thrift. But over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded."
So blame the culture. Blame the individual decision makers. Blame both. Step back and remember that the individual and the society are interdependent. This is a shell game on the edge of an abyss. Since Brooks goes on to talk about our individual responsibility for eroding norms, let's hold him individually responsible for his decision to play this game.
1. Brooks lies about how the devastation occurred. An"unspoken code has been silently eroded, he reveals. Silently, David? Marketers of all kinds have spent billions for 40 years telling Americans they deserve a break today and that marketers from McDonald's and credit-card companies to mortgage lenders will give it to them instantly. This has been the most monumental, unrelenting campaign to destroy a culture the world has seen, barring perhaps the fascist and communist propaganda juggernauts of the 1930s. Our own governments are in on it, not just via de-regulation but with lotteries.
What more does Brooks need to know before he'll take a responsible personal decision to write in his column that decency hasn't"silently eroded" but has been clamorouly assaulted? Hello? Last year in New Haven, we wound up saying"Hello?" four or five times an evening during the dinner hour to callers from local mortgage lending companies. How hard is it for David Brooks to imagine that poorly-educated people, desperate for cash and barely meeting their mortgage payments, would take those calls?
It's hard to tell, because, while Brooks makes absolutely sure to finger, ever so deftly, the faiblesses not of those who made personal decisions to join in these assaults but of the woman in the Times story, who,"after her divorce,... went on a shopping spree to make herself feel better," he tells us nothing about decisions made by her many white-collar assailants.
Ever since I wrote The Closest of Strangers after spending the better part of a decade in black north and central Brooklyn, I've had a reputation for not letting poor people off the hook for bad decisions that were ultimately, irreducibly, matters of personal responsibility. Drawing from intimate experience you can read about in the book, I've rebuked some liberals for refusing the pay disadvantaged people the elementary compliment of holding them to the same standards of decency and self-control to which they'd hold their own children. I don't need cheap sociology from Brooks; I need the candor of a talented writer's honest reflections,
2. Brooks lies about the true sources of the devastation. With caveats and cameos, Brooks keeps readers focused on the erosion of norms among the borrowers more than the lenders. I hold him personally responsible for telling us nothing true about the nature and origins of the tsunami of cultural degradation he's purporting to assess. It was unleashed by corporate capital and, politically, by the Republican Party whose deregulatory, bailout, and other corporate-welfare tactics Brooks has defended shamelessly for a decade..(I'm not letting Democrats off the hook; Chuck Schumer, as a New York Senator, played a big role in deregulating Wall Street and the banks.)
3. Brooks lies about the fact that most of the individual decisions and responsibility in this crisis were not made by homeowners. This columnist, so fastidious in noting that the foreclosed homeowner hasn't always behaved responsibly, doesn't find a single emblematic, instructive anecdote to illustrate the moral irresponsibility of those who sought her out and zoomed in on her.
Why not? Brooks might tell you that he was quoting a Times story that didn't provide that information. But that's not what I'll bet is the reason. It's that he didn't even think of putting a spotlight on those people. It just doesn't fascinate him. He never gets around to it. This mental blank amounts to a lie, because it is derivative of his lying about where and how to hold people to account for what is happening.
Brooks doesn't tell us a thing about individual responsibility for decision making that must be charged to, say, the stressed telemarketer even more than to the stressed owner (both have lost their dignity, crushed by the tsunami.) Not a word about the individual irresponsibility of the mortgage executive and his consultants and lawyers who designed the campaign, or about the sharpie salesmen who visited the homes whose equity they were about to steal while sitting politely on the targets' sofas, or of the bankers who bought up the mortgages and foreclosed.
Brooks doesn't ever mention the politicians, fed by all these predators, who eased the miscreants' way in more ways than I can count.
Didn't these people make any of the individual decisions which Brooks tells us have had ripple effects on social norms? How can a Burkean conservative be silent about this? When Brooks writes that a culture of responsibility has"silently eroded," isn't his own silence about all this part of the reason? What does he think his job is?
The closest he comes to telling the truth is in the following paragraph, which begins by blaming both sides equally, if euphemistically, for irresponsible decisions. But tell me who you think Brooks expects you leave the paragraph blaming -- and then watch the Bill Moyers Journal segment, please, and see how he is lying:
"McLeod [a foreclosed homeonwer] and the lenders were not only shaped by deteriorating norms, they helped degrade them. Despite all the subterranean social influences, there still is that final stage of decision-making when individual choice matters. Each time an avid lender struck a deal with an avid borrower, it reinforced a new definition of acceptable behavior for neighbors, family and friends. In a community, behavior sets off ripples. Every decision is a public contribution or a destructive act."
Again, notice how this has been tllted. Brooks doesn't wonder about predatory lenders' own shopping sprees, stealing sprees, or other compulsions."Norms changed," he shrugs,"and people began making jokes to make illicit things seem normal. Instead of condemning hyper-consumerism, they made quips about"retail therapy..." He ends up damning the desperate homeowner and the predatory lender with fine impartiality.
On the Moyers show, William Greider offers a far better explanation than Brooks does of how norms change and cultures decay: He describes the virtual repeal of laws against usury, or the kind of predatory lending that, like loan-sharking, virtually enslaves borrowers or squeezes them to death. ending,
But Brooks would rather have keep us focused on the individual responsibility borne by homeowners and a few of the nastiest predatory lenders than he would have us notice the multi-billion dollar corporate capitalist advertising campaign that promotede the culture of debt, or the massive deregulation and government bailouts that have made usury an unstoppable and devastating assault on the America he pretends to defend but on which he really feeds, week after week. Where is the national greatness? Where is the social contract? Where, indeed, is the intellectual leadership?
Brooks can't do better because he is an intellectual usurer. He palms off dollops of Burke and Oakeshott to wrap the people who are destroying the American republic -- and all of us who are targets of their systemic depredations -- in bromides about a kind of moral responsibility which Brooks does not himself exercise.
His pseudo-scholarly ruminations flatter some readers and are always suspiciously easy to follow; they're the intellectual equivalent of" cash back" on an easy loan of false knowledge that leaves you feeling"had," empty-handed,and politically demoralized in the end. That is what Brooks does: He charms you up the garden path toward a politics that is nowhere.
What perversity drives him to it, I don't know, but the crime itself cannot be doubted. How does this Burkean look at himself in the mirror? How do his employers and talk-show hosts?