This might be the most David Brooks thing David Brooks has ever written. I thought he was going to get into a substantive discussion about the corrosive effect of income inequality. I was holding out hope until about halfway into the article. Then he dropped the "both sides are equally at fault", and it only got worse. The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids. Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive.His solution? Maybe the rich folks and poor folks could spend time together so they can "spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement", if you know what he means, wink wink. Damn that post-modern society! Always screwing things up!
Oh God, not that "bourgeois bohemian" crap again. "Bobos in Paradise" isn't one of those ideas that get better with age. Incidently there's a small movement on the right to glorify what they call "bourgeois virtue." Like Gandhi said of Western Civilization, "hmmm, it might be worth trying someday." (The scholar who coined the phrase, by the way, is a transgendered libertarian economist now named Deidre McCloskey, after 55 years or so of being Don McCloskey. Based on her memoir, I'd say that Don had the worst Mid-Life Crisis EVER.
Well he's right in a way, but this is not new. The salt of the earth always did grow up fast, more than we cautious college-oriented types. I guess the difference is the salt was banging at age 16 and married at age 18 in 1970s, whereas now it's banging at age 16 and not getting married at all. Oh, that "tribe" lingo sets my teeth on edge.
Here's Charlie Pierce fisking the hell out of it: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/david-brooks-charles-murray-6649112
Anyway, to the point at hand. Create an economy where an 18-year old HS grad can reliably land a job that enables him to support a wife and children, and my goodness Mr. Brooks will be astounded how much morality improves. In brief, union busting destroys "family values."
The fascinating part of all of this is that it completely ignores the real salient point - we had a massive elites vs. non-elites disparity until the 20s, then the middle class caught up as the taxes on the rich were increased and the economy grew. But then the slide started. I wonder what happened since then that has changed things.........
The Republicans have handled this one very adroitly. They tore down the legislation that helped to create the great middle class, then they have reasonably successfully blamed the Democratic "elite" for not caring about the middle class. Well played, gents.
I was going to say Roe V. Wade, plus legions of unaborted illegal immigrants, but Teh Gheys get the job done, too.
When David Brooks writes "modern" or "bohemian", he obviously means the 60's, specifically Civil Rights and Great Society. So "post-modern" to him is "uppity black people" and "broads in trousers" and "lower class people with color televisions" and "men going to work not wearing hats". I get the sense that when David Brooks gets lonely, he Photoshops his face onto Norman Rockwell paintings and jerks off.
Brooks is always half onto something, only it's never what he thinks. The half that's correct in this essay is how wrong everybody (including the hippies themselves) were about the hippies. The hippies didn't change traditional society. They upheld it. Now that would be an interesting essay, how money & material success co-opted the hippies and gradually led them to become the bastions of traditional society. As for this post-modern mish-mosh thing, I don't know what Brooks is about with that.
So the mental imagine I got here was David Brooks sitting in front of a Norman Rockwell painting jerking off, but painted in a Norman Rockwell style. So disturbing.
All depends how you define it. I'm using Brooks' definition of morality, which is that white working-class people are getting more divorces and having more children out of wedlock now than in the past. I'm saying that's related to good jobs disappearing for white high school male grads.
Well he could just turn around and blame feminism for pretty much instantly doubling the workforce and not making women have to stay with shit dick dudes.
Yeh, I think they fail to understand that most of the butt raping in the Catholic church took part when we still had conservative social values, that most child rapists hold extreme social conservative views, and that, according to the Catholic Bishops own study, child butt raping declined after the church got all liberal, instituted Vatican II reforms, and allowed in the openly gay cohort. Damned liberalism!
Yeh, or stay married to the men who raped their children, for example. Or how liberal child advocacy groups and feminists pushed for tougher laws against sexual abuse while Republicans defended keeping things like legalized spousal rape. If people really want to talk about how things were better in the 50s they need to also talk about how in the 1950s police often encouraged families to treat pedophilic incest as a "family problem" that shouldn't be solved by the courts. And they also need to be reminded that mandatory reporting laws, to the extent they go today were either non-existent in the 50s or or very weak to begin with. Further, they also need to realize that we have much tougher laws on the books about child sexual abuse and rape than we ever had in the 50s.
Not to mention it is completely false. Through the payroll tax cut debate we clearly see that the Republicans are more than willing to raise taxes on the bottom 98%. Their no new taxes pledge only applies to the top 2%.
No no no, David Brooks does not blame liberals any more than he does conservatives. He is not a petty partisan. He blames everything on modernity, you see. And by "modern", he means "liberal".
I thin David Brooks is now writing David Brooks parodies. I'm not sure what other conclusion I can reach when his column opens with The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic tumult but also of impressive social cohesion.
Neo-conservatives had a more culturally deterministic theory. Many of them had been poor during the Depression. Economic stress had not undermined the family then. True. Thank you, FDR.