Several readers have asked my opinion of David Brooks’s latest column, in part because for the first time since publication, he mentions my book. I’m glad to see it there, but I don’t think that’s the part worth discussing.
I’ve long argued that the key to understanding David Brooks is that he hates the culture war. I’ve heard him say on panels more than once that he finds it exhausting, counter-productive, and clichéd. Obviously, he’s got good reason for his weariness. The culture war is exhausting. The problem is that his frustration with the culture war produces certain tendencies in his analysis. He will frequently condemn both sides equally. Or he will apportion blame between both sides equally. Or he will conclude that both sides are really mirror images of each other. Or, as he did to a certain degree in BoBos in Paradise, he will jump to the conclusion that the culture war is over because he wants it to be. In yesterday’s column, he opts for the “mirror image” argument:
David argues that the Tea Parties are like the New Left of the 1960s. It’s an interesting comparison. Here’s part of it.
There are many differences between the New Left and the Tea Partiers. One was on the left, the other is on the right. One was bohemian, the other is bourgeois. One was motivated by war, and the other is motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart.
But the similarities are more striking than the differences. To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.
These days the same people who are buying Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” on Amazon.com are, according to the company’s software, also buying books like “Liberal Fascism,” “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,” and “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.” Those last two books were written by David Horowitz, who was a leading New Left polemicist in the 1960s and is now a leading polemicist on the right.
But the core commonality is this: Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.
Again, it’s interesting. But when he says the “similarities are more striking than the differences,” I think he gets it backwards. The differences are more striking than the similarities.
For starters, I think he’s just wrong about Alinksy. The main reason Alinsky is hot right now with many conservatives is that, thanks to Beck and Horowitz, many are convinced that Obama is an Alinskyite and so many believe that you can’t understand Obama without understanding Alinsky.
Second, his Amazon citation is at best selective. I went and checked the “customers also bought” feature for Rules for Radicals and found that customers also bought (in addition to the books David listed): The Constitution of the United States, American Progressivism: A Reader (R. J. Pestritto’s excellent and purely academic book), A Conflict of Visions by Tom Sowell, The Real Thomas Jefferson, The Road to Serfdom, and Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine.
(When I checked for what customers also bought for my books’ page I found, among other titles, Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States of America, Bill of Rights and Constitutional Amendments, The collected writings of both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, Bill Bennett’s multi-volume history of the U.S., Free to Choose by Milton Friedman, Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, and Richard Epstein’s How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution.)
One of the reasons all of this is relevant is that the basic arguments and outlook of the Tea Parties are simply and profoundly different from the outlook of the New Left. The Tea Partiers are not in any meaningful sense Rousseauians. They certainly don’t reject original sin in any serious way. And I suspect if you asked many of them they would say that the American people deserve their share of blame for the financial mess we’re in. They do believe, I would bet, that America is a basically decent nation that has drifted into a kind of soft-despotism or Nanny-statism. But that vision isn’t Rousseauian, it’s De Tocquevillian.
Moreover, I wonder: Did the original New Left really believe in the mass innocence of the American people? I though the New Left spelled America with three Ks (Amerikkka) and insisted that this was a corrupt country that needed to be transformed from the inside out. The Tea Partiers, fundamentally, love America. The hardcore New Lefters, simply, did not.
Indeed, that brings us to another difference between the New Left and the Tea Partiers. David writes:
Because of this assumption, members of the Tea Party right, like the members of the New Left, spend a lot of time worrying about being co-opted. They worry that the corrupt forces of the establishment are perpetually trying to infiltrate the purity of their ranks.
Because of this assumption, members of both movements have a problem with authority. Both have a mostly negative agenda: destroy the corrupt structures; defeat the establishment. Like the New Left, the Tea Party movement has no clear set of plans for what to do beyond the golden moment of personal liberation, when the federal leviathan is brought low.
Except the New Left is no longer anti-establishment. It is largely part of the establishment. The New Left has tenure now. New Left proteges and offspring — Michael Moore, Oliver Stone — make successful movies about how evil America is. Its adherents appear regularly on Sunday talk shows. They staff the Justice Department. They become Green Jobs czars (until they are exposed) and prominent pastors. And, some would argue, the New Left recently seized the Oval Office.
I’m sure Brooks disagrees with that, but the fact that Obama was far more influenced by Alinsky than Reinhold Niebuhr should at least be of interest to Brooks given how much of Brooks’s fondness for Obama appears to stem from Obama’s fondness for Niebuhr.
Towards the end, Brooks offers this rhetorical flourish:
Both the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.
Some Tea Partiers may get all sorts of things wrong. No doubt conspiracy theories find fertile soil at Tea Party rallies. But unlike the New Left, they do not believe in starting over with a plan hatched from a new cultural avant-garde. They believe in getting back to basics. They take the founding, the Declaration, and the Constitution seriously. That’s why they’re reading books about these things, about first principles and about American history. They believe, perhaps too conspiratorially at times, that the Left has taken the country down the wrong path (and I basically agree with them, by the way). The New Left had no interest in restoring the founders’ vision. They wanted to overturn it completely. They had the Rousseaian vision of starting over, of beginning from scratch with their own utopian schemes.
That vision, albeit tempered by responsibility and technocratic conservatism, is one shared by many in the Obama administration and by many of its fans outside the administration (indeed, Brooks’s colleague Thomas Friedman believes that we need to start the calendar at Year One with the new Energy Climate Era or some such). It was Obama who wanted a “new declaration of independence.” The Tea Partiers like the old one just as it is, thank you very much. And that spells all the difference in the world.