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David Brooks… — 15 Comments

1. Brooks is an ignorant jackass, no matter his worthless intellectual credentials. That’s all they are.

   Emotionally, the man never quite graduated sophomore year in Prep School. He made Obama his “favorite teacher” and there is no other one he can glom onto now. Until one comes along, and the ignorant jackass brownies up to the next favorite teacher, we’re stuck with his Obama fixation.

2. The ∅bama we got is the ∅bama David Brooks supported. The ∅bama David Brooks wishes we had now is but a flying pig-ment of his imagination.

3. For the great politician is not only a speculator and millionaire, but also a pop singer; he is not only a great chess player, but also a great actor; he is not only a despot, but also a toady; he not only prostitutes others, but is himself a great prostitute. Weininger

   The demand for equality of rights made by socialists of the subjected caste never flows from a sense of justice, but instead from greed.–If someone holds bloody chunks of meat near an animal and then yanks them away until finally it roars: do you think that this roaring signifies justice? aphorism 451, “Justice as a Party Lure”

   Crowds exhibit a docile respect for force, and are but slightly impressed by kindness, which for them is scarcely more than a form of weakness. Their sym-pathies have never been bestowed on easy-going masters, but on tyrants who vigorously oppress them. It is to these latter that they always erect the greatest statues. It is true that they willingly trample on the despot whom they have stripped of his power, but this is because, having lost his strength, he has re-sumed his place among the weak, who are to be despised and not feared. The type of hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instills them with fear…. Should the strength of an authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from servitude to anarchy. Gustave Le Bon (1841—1931) The Crowd, book I, ch. 2, section 4 / the “feminine character” of the masses..

   According to Fascist doctrine, it is the state that gives form and consciousness to the nation. The state, on the other hand, is no abstract and impersonal object in Fascism; it is rather the tool of a political elite, the most valuable part of a “nation.” Fascist racial doctrine even goes one step further: 1 his elite is predestined to re-assume the heritage of the higher race and tradition that is present in the national makeup.

   The beginning of the disintegration of the traditional sociopolitical structures, or at least whatever was left of them in Europe, occurred through liberalism.

   Following the stormy and demonic period of the French Revolution, the principles espoused by the Revolution first began to act under the guise of liberal-ism; thus, liberalism is the origin of the various interconnected forms of global subversion.

   Let us begin with the egalitarian premise. It is necessary to state from the outset that the “immortal principle” of equality is sheer nonsense. There is no need to comment on the inequality of human beings from a naturalistic point of view. And yet the champions of egalitarianism make equality a matter of principle, claiming that while human beings are not equal de facto, they are so de jure: they are unequal, and yet they should not be. Inequality is unfair; the merit and the superiority of the liberal idea allegedly consists of not taking it into account, overcoming it, and acknowledging the same dignity in every man. Democracy, too, shares the belief in the “fundamental equality of anything that appears to be human.”

   I believe these are mere empty words. This is not a “noble ideal” but some-thing that, if taken absolutely, represents a logical absurdity; wherever this view becomes an established trend, it may usher in only regression and decadence.

   Men Among The Ruins / Personality, Freedom, Heirarchy

   How are we doing on regression, PROmoting reGRESSIVE policies, and decadence?

   this has been a tiny excerpt of a 319 page book…

   but i guess how many have read this…

4. It is interesting reading the comments in response to Brook’s article. The consensus seems to be, “It is all the Republicans fault. If only they hadn’t been such obstructionist we’d be enjoying full employment and a budget surplus now.”

   I’m always amazed to read things like that. On which planet do those people live?

5. I couldn’t discuss Burke with Obama and Brooks, but I am smart enough to know that businesses won’t hire or expand if they can’t predict their energy and health care costs next year. I also figured out that you don’t tell the enemy when you are going to leave the battlefield. No, I don’t talk like them, and I’m proud of it. They both should have devoted their attention to fiction and left the real world problems to grown-ups.

6. kaba,

   It must be in another galaxy.

7. Landslides can turn one machine out and put another in; revolutions sometimes abolish a particular machine altogether. The democratic revolution set up two alternating machines, each of which in the course of a few years reaps the advantage from the mistakes of the other. But nowhere does the machine disappear. Nowhere is the idyllic theory of democracy realized. Certainly not in trades unions, nor in socialist parties, nor in communist governments.

   There is an inner circle, surrounded by concentric circles which fade out gradually into the disinterested or uninterested rank and file.

   Democrats have never come to terms with this commonplace of group life. They have invariably regarded it as perverse. For there are two visions of democracy: one presupposes the self-sufficient individual; the other an Oversoul regulating everything.

   Of the two the Oversoul has some advantage because it does at least recognize that the mass makes decisions that are not spontaneously born in the breast of every member.

   But the Oversoul as presiding genius in corporate behavior is a superfluous mystery if we fix our attention upon the machine. The machine is a quite prosaic reality. It consists of human beings who wear clothes and live in houses, who can be named and described. They perform all the duties usually assigned to the Oversoul.

   The reason for the machine is not the perversity of human nature. It is that out of the private notions of any group no common idea emerges by itself. For the number of ways is limited in which a multitude of people can act directly upon a situation beyond their reach. Some of them can migrate, in one form or another, they can strike or boycott, they can applaud or hiss. They can by these means occasionally resist what they do not like, or coerce those who obstruct what they desire. But by mass action nothing can be constructed, devised, negotiated, or administered.

   A public as such, without an organized hierarchy around which it can gather, may refuse to buy if the prices are too high, or refuse to work if wages are too low. A trade union can by mass action in a strike break an opposition so that the union officials can negotiate an agreement. It may win, for example, the _right_ to joint control. But it cannot exercise the right except through an organization. A nation can clamor for war, but when it goes to war it must put itself under orders from a general staff.

   The limit of direct action is for all practical purposes the power to say Yes or No on an issue presented to the mass.

   For only in the very simplest cases does an issue present itself in the same form spontaneously and approximately at the same time to all the members of a public. There are unorganized strikes and boycotts, not merely industrial ones, where the grievance is so plain that virtually without leadership the same reaction takes place in many people.

   But even in these rudimentary cases there are persons who know what they want to do more quickly than the rest, and who become impromptu ringleaders.

   Where they do not appear a crowd will mill about aimlessly beset by all its private aims, or stand by fatalistically, as did a crowd of fifty persons the other day, and watch a man commit suicide.

   For what we make out of most of the impressions that come to us from the invisible world is a kind of pantomime played out in revery.

   The number of times is small that we consciously decide anything about events beyond our sight, and each man’s opinion of what he could accomplish if he tried, is slight.

   There is rarely a practical issue, and therefore no great habit of decision. This would be more evident were it not that most information when it reaches us carries with it an aura of suggestion as to how we ought to feel about the news.

   That suggestion we need, and if we do not find it in the news we turn to the editorials or to a trusted adviser.

   The revery, if we feel ourselves implicated, is uncomfortable until we know where we stand, that is, until the facts have been formulated so that we can feel Yes or No in regard to them.

   When a number of people all say Yes they may have all kinds of reasons for saying it. They generally do.

   For the pictures in their minds are, as we have already noted, varied in subtle and intimate ways.

   But this subtlety remains within their minds; it becomes represented publicly by a number of symbolic phrases which carry the individual emotion after evacuating most of the intention.

   The hierarchy, or, if it is a contest, then the two hierarchies, associate the symbols with a definite action, a vote of Yes or No, an attitude pro or con.

   —

   A concrete choice had to be presented, the choice had to be connected, by the transfer of interest through the symbols, with individual opinion.

   The professional politicians learned this long before the democratic philosophers.

   And so they organized the caucus, the nominating convention, and the steering committee, as the means of formulating a definite choice.

   Everyone who wishes to accomplish anything that requires the cooperation of a large number of people follows their example.

   —

   But the essential fact remains that a small number of heads present a choice to a large group.

   one page excerpt from a 221 page letter!
   [and you guys think i am long… sheesh]

   by the way, the letter/book was written in 1921…
   [anyone recognize it without googling parts?]

   🙂

8. Probably true ex-pat. Perhaps it was just my imagination, but I could swear that I heard the distant screams of logic being tortured while reading the comments there.

9. Is it possible that Brooks doesn’t know that Obama is a socialist as are his friends? Can Brooks not know that Zero is constitutionally incapable of acting like the man in the scenario? He still doesn’t get it.

10. The incandescence of the hatred for Bush in say 2003 or 2005 (i.e. the hatred not tied specifically to election years) always puzzled me a bit. I never got that hot in the 1990s although I surely despised Clinton (socialized medicine, phoniness, sodomizing a woman young enough to be his daughter – at work).

    In retrospect, there is some logic to the creepy sycophancy of supposedly hard-boiled journalists for Obama during the campaign – and after the election. The Left wants a fuhrer. They don’t trust individualism – even in themselves, they want the American experiment in self government to end.

    If Bush neither took the country to war nor endorsed capitalism (lackluster as his free market impulses were), if Bush had been a milquetoast RINO indistinguishable from someone like Dukakis, the left would still have hated him because he would still have been an impediment to their desire for self immolation and the cheap, easy satisfaction of obedience to a leader who mouths (so-called) progressive principles. Look, Ma! No effort on my part and I’m a good person. (Ignore the bodies.)

11. Someone needs to tell Brooks the old saying that it’s better to keep quiet and be thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt.

    Criminy, what a pathetic effort.

12. Never trust a man who admires the crease in a narcissist pants.

13. “the one that doesn’t exist and never did.”

    You can’t put it more concisely than that. Well said.

    David Brooks really does need to grow up.

14. The most disturbing part of that fantasy / article is that the the strategy that he suggested as what “could” have been successful is so mind numbingly idiotic that any attempt to fisk it might render a sane person brain damaged. It

    This is the representative of the conservative view for the NYT? Are you freaking kidding me?

15. I read Brooks’ March 2001 Bobos in Paradise and its praise for the supposedly nonpartisan pragmatic Clintonista yuppie class.

    After watching how those nonpartisan pragmatists reacted to the Bush presidency, I lost interest in Brooks.

    (The foregoing is meant as disparagement of Brooks; it is not meant as support for the Bush presidency.)

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