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.

Rinehart's poem

Western Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart has composed a poem and had it engraved on a boulder somewhere outside Perth. It’s a paean to rent-seeking capitalism that made me want to throw up. I reproduce it here for the purpose of amusement, as well as to shed some light on how Australia’s elites think:

The globe is sadly groaning with debt, poverty and strife
And billions now are pleading to enjoy are better life
Their hope lies with resources buried deep within the earth
And the enterprise and capital which give each project worth
Is our future threatened with massive debts run up by political hacks
Who dig themselves out by unleashing rampant tax
The end result is sending Australian investment, growth and jobs offshore
This type of direction is harmful to our core
Some envious unthinking people have been conned
To think properity is created by waving a magic wand
Through such unfortunate ignorance, too much abuse is hurled
Against miners, workers and related industries who strive to build the world
Develop North Australia, embrace multiculturalism and welcome short term foreign workers to our shores
To benefit from the export of our minerals and ores
The world’s poor need our resources: do not leave them to their fate
Our nation needs special economic zones and wiser government, before it is too late.

The poem’s content demonstrates the thinking of modern-day conservatives, and specifically the class of rent-seekers who make up WA’s mining elite. The idea that “hope lies with resources buried deep within the earth” is an implicit swipe at any efforts to establish a more secure manufacturing base in Australia, and would have the petro-tyrants of Riyadh, Tehran, and Caracas nodding in agreement. The line after that, extolling the virtues of “enterprise and capital” is pure Ayn Rand.

Following on, she tells us of jobs forced offshore and investments not made because of “political hacks” and “rampant tax”. No doubt she has been taking lessons from Republicans across the Pacific, as this matches their ‘job creators’ rhetoric. Then, we get more amusement from her assurances that prosperity is not “created by waving a magic wand”. Apparently she is too stupid to see the irony of this, as extractive industries are all about this – it’s things such as industrial policy which are hard work. (In the early United States, for example, Jefferson’s export-driven ‘yeoman farmer’ vision was more magic wand-like than Hamilton’s economic policies.)

The poem ends with accusations of prejudice against miners, workers, and foreigners on the part of those who don’t unfailingly support her industry. The idea that the corporate elite is more in touch with the working class than its critics is plain old right-wing culture war resentment, straight out of the Sarah Palin playbook. One of the most revealing lines, however, is her call to “welcome short term foreign workers to our shores”. This is where we see the conservative mind at work. Short-term, so that they are more vulnerable; permanent migrants might unionise and secure pay rises. The final line, calling for “special economic zones” reveals her intention, and that of Australia’s corporate elite: to turn this continent into one massive low-wage, non-unionised, undemocratic, unequal hellhole like Dubai or the Jim Crow South.

Make no mistake: this is the anti-Hamiltonian, anti-Keynesian, anti-manufacturing, anti-democratic, and anti-union vision which the Ayn Rand cultists who run this country, and every other, are hell-bent on imposing upon us. We must stop them before it is too late.