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.
I discussed this in my November 2024 article on Medium: My Identity is a 'Luxury Belief', and Other Reasons Trump Won
Regarding Brooks's August 2023 column, which I discussed in my Medium story & in one before it, see this article on Vox: "I regret to report the economic anxiety theory of Trumpism is back: In David Brooks’s new column, he asks the American elite if they’re the baddies. But he’s actually telling them a comforting fiction. Zack Beauchamp, Aug 4, 2023
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.
Richard Hanania, Rising Right-Wing Star, Wrote For White Supremacist Sites Under Pseudonym. Hanania is championed by tech moguls and a U.S. senator, but HuffPost found he used a pen name to become an important figure in the “alt-right.” Christopher Mathias, Aug 4, 2023, Updated Aug 7, 2023
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)
(This image is from an article by Judd Legum on May 8.)
The Washington Post says:
"The version of the video that Collins shared is credited to Richard Hanania, someone who previously espoused white supremacist views that he has since said he disavows. In sharing the video, Hanania wrote, 'This video from Ole Miss is beautiful, but guys, please put away the phones. Be in the moment when you’re mocking the Hamas loving fat girl.'"
After the 2024 election: "if a lack of empathy was what swung voters i think the party that made lacking empathy their central political tenet might have lost" — Peter on Bluesky
if you live around conservatives, a common bumper sticker reads “liberalism is a mental disorder.” you’ll see effigies of dem politicians, unhinged screeds about satan-worshipping dems written on lawn signs. this stuff gets ignored while any hint of condescension from liberals is treated as endemic
— Peter (@notalawyer.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 4:27 PM
On which point, see: Outrage over offending red America highlights a major double standard in media: Right-wing media clutch pearls after a Republican strategist mocked Trump supporters on TV. But when Trump attacks millions of Americans, they and mainstream journalists simply accept it as normal. Parker Molloy, Media Matters, January 30, 2020
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
Similarly:
"Even people who despised Trump only really seemed to despise the grotesqueness of him; when it came to the authoritarian abuses he proposed, they weren't only on board, they saw these abuses as necessary, even intrinsic to safety. For example, try suggesting that the answer to ongoing systemic nationwide open corruption and brutality in policing is to maybe not fund the police as if it were a wartime army. Or suggest that maybe we don't need to spend all our money on the military industrial complex. Or suggest that a country that imprisons people for profit as part of a growth industry needs to engage in prison abolition.
* * *
...what I mean by "a spiritual sickness"—a preference within a society for lies over truths, and a preference within society's norms and institutions and laws to show preference to those who believe the lies over those who tell the truth. I began to suspect that—while we should work for political change, and while we ought to work to make our laws just, and their application and enforcement fair—it wasn't going to be enough to simply readjust the mechanisms of our existing order. We were going to have to do something foundational about our underlying beliefs—the architecture of our collective belief that defines and determines the shape of reality upon which that order sits. And then we were going to have to translate those beliefs into actions that reflected those truths—this particularly if we are in that specific subset of we to whom our society's norms and institutions and laws show preference and deference: men, and "white" people, and wealthy people, and employed, and able-bodied, and straight, and Christian, and so forth."
— An Interview with Author A.R. Moxon About 'Very Fine People' (with Parker Molloy), May 2024
Sarah Kendzior says ("The King," Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter, Substack, Sept 12, 2024):
"Americans are forced to live forever on the precipice, while politicians and pundits feign opposition for profit. They need you to see Trump as a novel and singular threat, instead of a long-time player in multiple corrupt networks — because they inhabit those same networks, as do their financial backers.
My guess is that you, dear reader, would like autocracy to actually be defeated — in the form of Trump, and in general.
But that is not what The Autocracy Cottage Industry wants. They would rather join the Trump administration and then write tell-all books about crimes they witnessed but did not stop. They would rather pass the same repressive policies Trump did but cloak them in gentler rhetoric. They fundraise off your fear."
For the "Vichy Democrats or Never-Trump Republicans or the predatory scammers surrounding them," Kendzior goes on, "there is only Trump and Not-Trump. Your thinking must never extend beyond that binary." That is, if Trump does it, it's bad; if anyone else does it, it's licit.
Kendzior continues:
"[Harris's] warm response to Dick Cheney’s approval should be greeted with alarm — particularly when war criminals are welcomed into the Harris fold while antiwar protesters are rejected.
It is obvious what happened even if some are reluctant to cop to it: Bush-era Republican operatives, unable to function in the chaos of MAGA, saw an opportunity to remake the Democratic Party, which had been lurching to the right since the 1990s, and took it. They left receipts: the conservative Lincoln Project is Harris’s fourth biggest donor. Change in Democratic Party policy is determined by donations — not only the Lincoln Project’s — and then rationalized with the Trump/Not-Trump binary."
On May 10, 2024, Trump complained that he has a gag order in his hush-money election interference trial: "Everybody can say whatever they want. But I'm not allowed to say anything about anybody." (CNN) More precisely, Trump can't publicly comment on the judge's family, the district attorney's family, court staff or their families, prosecutors or their families, or prospective jurors or their families. Why? Because it puts those people at risk, and such intimidation can prejudice the outcome of the trial. Defendants in criminal trials are not allowed to threaten or pressure people who have a role in their trial. That's what Trump is complaining about when he says "I'm not allowed to say anything about anybody."
To campaign, you do need to explain things to people
Seriously, y'all. It's not helping your cause.
— -πππ‘ (@moxiest.art) Apr 21, 2024 at 2:16 PM
[image or embed]
Legitimately had someone say "this shouldn't have to be explained" and like, bro, do you not understand what campaigning is?
— -πππ‘ (@moxiest.art) Apr 21, 2024 at 2:26 PM
Being civil to enslavers means covering up their crime?
George Washington enslaved people. "This is an extensively documented fact," CNN reminds us. And yet Trump, on June 22, 2024:
During a speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a conservative Christian group, Trump criticized proposals to change the names of schools, military facilities and other places that honor slaveowners and Confederate leaders. (Under President Joe Biden, the Army has renamed nine installations that had been named for Confederate generals.) And Trump said, “How about George Washington high school? ‘We want the name removed from that high school.’ They don’t know why. You know, they thought he had slaves. Actually I think he probably didn’t.’”
What is the point of denying slavery? To be extra nice to the enslavers?
This is slavery denialism.
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