The Brooks Fallacy

 This is another post examining how those on the political right see the world. In a recent New York Times column entitled ‘The Materialist Fallacy’, David Brooks, who describes his conservatism as ‘Hamiltonian’ and regularly criticises free-market fundamentalism, discusses the decline of social capital in the United States.

He begins with the idea that social cohesion since 1962 is not what it was between 1912 and 1962. So far so good, although his puritanical obsession with marriage rates and out-of-wedlock births is rather grating. He then discusses three explanations for this decline offered in recent decades: a liberal one (focused on the lack of working class jobs), a libertarian one (which blames the evils of ‘Big Government’), and a neo-conservative one (which sees the decline in “traditional bourgeois norms” as the culprit). After a digression into some recent research findings about social cohesion, Brooks proceeds to provide an apologia for the social norms-centred, ‘neo-conservative’ explanation.

According to Brooks, the ‘liberal’ view, which blames the decline in working class jobs for the decline in social capital, is “a crude materialism that has little to do with reality.” In other words, the same charge of ‘materialism’ that has always been levelled by the right at anyone who dares question the reasons for economic inequality. He also overlooks the myriad ways in which conservatives destroyed social capital among working class people, for example, by stifling the ability of unions to organise with the Taft-Hartley Act, or by enacting economic policies designed to favour the financial sector and inherited wealth over the manufacturing sector.

It is in his fifth from last paragraph that we get the ‘Mitt Romney moment’. “I don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost,” Brooks writes, “it still doesn’t make sense to drop out of high school.” That’s the modern Republican Party: “not concerned about the very poor” and “don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost.” It takes a particularly ideologically blinkered person to compare 1962 with 2012 while hand-waving away the end of the Keynesian Consensus and the rise of neo-liberalism, while at the same time explaining the economic dislocation caused by those events as the result of some rejection of Judeo-Christian values and ‘bourgeois norms’.

There is something odd about the assertion that modern society suffers from a lack of ‘bourgeois norms’: surely the world today is as dominated by the values of the middle classes than ever before. In addition to left-wing political parties and trade unions, there were once cultural institutions run by the working class itself – schools, co-operatives, libraries, labour exchanges, sports clubs, cinemas, and more. In the nineteenth century, socialists in the north of England operated schools which openly proclaimed their desire to turn young minds against society’s rulers. In the 1920s and 1930s, socialist sports federations held multi-sport gatherings which were larger than the Olympic Games. Before the First World War, Americans could go to a socialist-run cinema and watch a socialist propaganda film. There are no longer any equivalent institutions which can serve as incubators for any set of oppositional values. The aspirational and individualist ‘bourgeois norms’ are shared by virtually all – even 50 Cent entitled his first album Get Rich or Die Tryin’.

Brooks’ penultimate paragraph is the scariest. He discusses how to “rebuild orderly communities”:

“This requires bourgeois paternalism: Building organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly rather than irresponsibly and, yes, sometimes using government to do so.”

In other words, Brooks’ ‘Hamiltonian’ conservatism isn’t above using the state as a blunt instrument to force white, middle-class, aspirational, corporate, Judeo-Christian values down our throats.