Thomas Zimmer ("Moralizing Nostalgia Leads to Bad History – and Helps the Anti-Democratic Right" Substack, August 22, 2023) calls David Brooks "a prime example of a vacuous pundit class with a regrettably large influence that presents itself as reasonable and above the fray while only ever preaching the gospel of status-quo preservation." This particularly regards his September 2023 feature for The Atlantic, “How America Got Mean.” Brooks's 11,000-word article is based on "pervasive longing for a golden past that never really existed," as Zimmer paraphrases it; Americans used to grow up, Zimmer goes on to paraphrase Brooks, within a "system that trained 'the heart and body' rather than just the intellect, made sure people understood there was an 'objective moral order' that is beyond individual perspective, and emphasized personal virtue above all else." But then came political liberalism that concerned itself with fighting oppression and abandoned interest in "moral reasoning." Those people now, as Brooks puts it, seek to "fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism." Concerned with getting themselves recognized, people are unable to pursue a common good. And so what Brooks is doing is asserting a different kind of individualism. He says people should stop pursuing their political self-interest and instead develop their own moral character to fulfill their own soul. Then, somehow, a political common good will emerge. Brooks doesn't, as Zimmer points out, attempt to reconcile his theory with the simple observation that U.S. political life was not in fact more egalitarian before the mid-20th century when supposedly, according to Brooks, interest in moral formation crumbled.
What's going on here is that, according to Zimmer, Never-Trump Republicans ought to "engage in critical introspection over the question of how the party they used to support – in David Brooks’ case: for decades – ended up uniting behind Donald Trump," but it's easier for them to blame "secular amorality" rather than themselves.
(I left a comment on the Substack post.)
In a follow-up article, "Why America’s Elites Love to Decry 'Polarization,'" Zimmer recommends Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized but says it has a big problem: "what the author lays out is, by his own admission, not adequately interpreted as 'polarization.'" The Republicans are racially homogeneous, so they tend to radicalize. The Democrats are diverse, so they can't be extremist, because they have to hold diverse interests to together. Klein therefore refers to the phenomenon as “asymmetrical polarization.” Zimmer doesn't think this term makes much sense. Why use the word "polarization" at all? The two sides aren't the same, as "there is no liberal version of Fox News and the rightwing media bubble, the Democrats don’t have a Trump, and there is no equivalent on the Left to the influence of reactionary and white nationalist forces inside the GOP."
"The nostalgic longing for a supposedly better, pre-polarization era shines through even in generally excellent work, such as Steven Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s investigation of How Democracies Die", a 2018 book in which the authors "settle on a warning against the dangers of 'polarization' and combine it with praise for the mid-twentieth-century consensus era that was supposedly characterized by 'egalitarianism, civility, sense of freedom.'"
Similarly, according to Zimmer, Jill Lepore in These Truths (2018)
"laments the emergence of radically partisan media on both left and right resulting in what she calls 'mutually assured epistemological destruction'. The metaphor is striking — but it hinges on the questionable characterization of Fox News and MSNBC as equally partisan and extreme. When Lepore gives a detailed account of Rush Limbaugh's outsized influence on conservative politics or the machinations of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, it becomes clear that there are simply no equal counterparts on the Left. And yet, the narrative of polarization indicates that there should be, and encourages the search for (false) equivalence. Ultimately, it primes people to accept a politics focused on turning the clock back to a supposedly better past – before all the nastiness..."
Why say that Right and Left are polarized if it's not really true? Well: "For elite centrists, the 'polarization' framework and all the talk of radicalization and extremism 'on both sides' is a way to legitimize and re-assert their own status at the top." In other words, if you portray yourself as standing in an objective place, safely apart from two ridiculously warring factions, you defend the superiority of your own perspective and whatever it is you want to say.
This is about recovery from "the fracturing of the white elite consensus in the 1960s." Woe is us:
"Is there nothing America’s elite can agree on anymore? There is: Polarization is the problem! 'Polarization' is so attractive partly because the interpretation confirms the unease with which America’s elite has looked at the contentious developments that have shaped the country since the 60s – providing alleviation by legitimizing the nostalgia for 'consensus.' Blaming 'Polarization' never breeds contention, it makes everybody nod in approval; it engenders unanimity. That’s the genius of the polarization narrative: It provides the language for a lament that blames nobody and everybody, and satisfies the longing for unity – which it constantly fuels in turn! – by offering a consensual interpretation; it is elite consensus re-established through the back door."
I left a comment on this one too.
Note: I wrote about Why We're Polarized" on Books Are Our Superpower (unpaywalled "friends link"), and I wrote about How Democracies Die on this blog.
Brooks (and others) have argued that leftists should learn to make friends with people who don't share their beliefs. A.R. Moxon represents (while criticizing and satirizing) a view that Brooks put forward in another recent essay, describing it as a "gnostic idea" of a mind/body separation in which politics doesn't affect one's social life at garden parties:
"They’re a bloodless thing, politics, abstract, almost administrative sometimes. Making decisions about who you associate with based on political views is apparently like getting into a screaming fight over an improper stapling methodology on one’s TPS reports, or ending a friendship over pizza toppings. And at other times, political views are sacrosanct, holy, something you shouldn't ever even bring up much criticize, the most special and personal part of a person’s belief structure, something that a decent person would be no more likely to critique, much less reject, than they would be likely to tell a new mother that her baby is ugly.
I have noticed that whether political views are trivial or sacred seems to depend on the point the professional mourner of crumbling civility is trying to make in the moment, in order to bolster civility. They are usually trivial when we are meant to make friends despite them. They are usually sacrosanct when we try to point out what they are.
But some of us have notices that politics are neither of these things, have noticed that politics are where power is arranged and distributed, and have been listening not to the civility mourners or the supremacists they defend, but rather to the many people who are directly harmed by harmful policies driven by harmful political views, who have no luxury to believe in false separations. They know that politics are, in fact, a matter of spiritual alignment, and that spirit not something to do with ghosts, but with the blood and guts of how collective belief touches their lives."
(To which I left a comment on Mastodon: "'No one will be friends with me' seems a cousin of 'I’m being canceled.' In both complaints, the supremacist objects to a lack of attention or fame they feel they’re inherently owed, though it be a kind of attention they may not truly want, since when it's given to them in a genuine form along with any criticism, they persist in their original complaint ('everyone’s intolerant and hostile,' 'I’m being canceled') and tack on another: “my right to free speech is being violated." The box did not allow space for the sentence with which I wanted to conclude: "Because criticism violates their purported right not to be criticized, a right they implicitly claim is the true meaning of free speech.")
To bring it back to the "blood and guts":
Jude Ellison S. Doyle (discussing other writers and not mentioning Brooks specifically) coins the term "Reasonable White Guy Voice". Doyle describes it as
"a tone of affable, detached professionalism and erudition, mixed with just enough in-group references to seem contemporary — the voice of someone who owns both a worn-out Black Flag t-shirt and a framed diploma from Harvard. The voice is medium-deep, medium-rich, personable, unaccented; it emits a consistent, low, diffused warmth, like the pink glow coming off a Himalayan salt lamp, but never strays into a register that could be considered emotional. Emotion would undermine its credibility, which is immense. Niceness without empathy, opinion without emotion, credibility without vulnerability, is what Reasonable White Guy Voice is all about.
* * *
...the people most taken in by RWGV are not the reading public. ... The intended audience for this performance is other journalists, who mistake Reasonable White Guy Voice for intelligence and authority because it’s what they’ve been taught to strive for in their own work.
* * *
Reasonable White Guy prose is not only written by white guys, but it is always written for white guys, because that is the worldview it’s meant to capture: That of someone so insulated from the world and its suffering that he can watch as it burns and not feel a thing."
(I left a comment on the Medium article.)
A further comment I wish to make: Doyle wrote that "Being a Reasonable White Guy might make some truths more available, but it will also obscure others from view. ... A truth is a fact within its proper context." I'd add that, when we don't have context, we can't point out when someone is talking like a mob boss. The mob boss never publicly says "I offed that guy" in exactly those words, and instead says "It's too bad what happened to him," and everyone knows he's taking responsibility — or, at least, he's gloating that he'd gladly off someone else in similar circumstances. He's not expressing empathy for the victim. His words have a meaning that isn't literal and self-encapsulated; their meaning comes from the context. So when we lack context, we can't interpret threats or warn others of them. Authoritarians communicate publicly with each other, and their victims are silenced by being told approximately: Well, the authoritarian didn't say that. He didn't say what you're accusing him of saying. He expressed empathy and sorrow. And so language is scooped up by the powerful and its power-plays are denied to anyone who doesn't already have power, thereby further disempowering, abusing, and victimizing them. This makes it difficult to have a truth-based discourse about important things.
Oh, and an update on Hanania:
Here's Ken White, weighing in on Hamish McKenzie of Substack defending his choice to speak with Hanania: "Taking everyone at their word that they’re not a Nazi, and deciding to accept that they mean racist things in non-racist ways, is a value judgment too. It’s a decision; you can’t plausibly spin it as a refusal to make a decision." (Ken White, "Substack Has A Nazi Opportunity," Dec 21, 2023)
Sources
"Richard Hanania and the Reasonable White Guy Voice," Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Medium, August 16, 2023
"If You Want To Be Friends, Then Why Aren’t You Friendly?": A look at one of the most alarming and pressing problems of our age: the much-lamented fact that "the left" won't be friends with "the right," over "political views." The Reframe (Substack). A. R. Moxon. August 26, 2023
"Moralizing Nostalgia Leads to Bad History – and Helps the Anti-Democratic Right" Thomas Zimmer, Substack, August 22, 2023
David Brooks on political polarization, New York Times, March 2, 2019
Why America’s Elites Love to Decry “Polarization”, Thomas Zimmer, Substack, September 25, 2023
Related to which, my essays on Medium:
When we disagree on politics and I lose a friend, and Yet another pro-discrimination argument (on Brooks and Jonathan Rauch).
See also: For some Never Trumpers, the main problem with Trump is his aesthetic or his tone, not his fascism. Some people believe they have nothing at stake. So for them, "the fundamental problem with Trump has always been that he is gauche. The 14th amendment remedy is also gauche. So, to them, it is no better than reelecting Trump."
Dave Karpf, Bluesky
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