David Warsh: Brooks's thin-sliced baloney
Every columnist occasionally has a housekeeping day. Hard-working David Brooks, of The New York Times, is no exception. Last week Brooks offered nine, count-em, nine grand narratives packed into a single 866-word column, the material currently on his desktop cleaned up and put away, presumably to get ready for another week.
Four of these sources of identity were from a “superbly clarifying speech” by George Packer, author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. Not four, mind you, but the four. Depending on who doing the telling, Packer said, the American story is to be understood as fundamentally libertarian (“free markets and free minds”), or a matter of globalization (technology regnant), of multiculturalism (overcoming bigotry), or of isolationism (make America great again).
Since none of these narratives offers a basis for governing in the 21st Century, Brooks noted two more, found in an essay by Michael Lind, “The New Class War,” which appeared recently in a new maverick conservative journal. If you haven’t seen it, American Affairs, is worth a look, as is Jacobin, a new left-wing counterpart.
The transatlantic class war between neoliberal elites and working-class populists that produced the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump must evolve as “cross-class settlements” in one of two ways, wrote Lind. Perhaps a banana-republic world is here to stay, a Latin American model in which populists perpetually battle oligarchs and their managerial allies.
Alternatively, Lind wrote, the sort of social contract that guided Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore in the years after 1945 might emerge, different in details but similar in spirit: “cautious, suspicious, military-inflected development…” occurring within the borders of four great blocs: the U.S., China, perhaps India, and a politically divided Europe, the sort of world that George Orwell envisioned in Nineteen Eight-Four.
Stimulated by Lind, Brooks adduced two slight variations, both of them descended from the original civic myth that Brooks described in a column a couple of months ago, namely the Exodus story. In that account, national unity in the U.S. had long depended on the shared experience of having at some point left the Old World for the New, of having ventured into a wilderness in order to join in the creation of a shining example to all humankind. But that story depended on a high degree of national self-confidence traditionally buttressed by religious conviction. For one reason or another, it no longer worked. An American “identity crisis” was at hand.
Hence Brooks offered two new possibilities for going forward. One of them was to embrace Lind’s mercantilist model of the U.S. as one contender among several in a multipolar world. “In this, to be American is to be a member of the tribe, and the ideal American is to be a burly protector of the tribe,” which Donald Trump aspires to be.
The other story that Brooks envisaged is about “the talented community,” a celebratory image of America as “history’s greatest laboratory for the cultivation of human abilities,” a generous, open, welcoming society in which “everything is designed to arouse energy and propel social mobility” – in short, “an Exodus story for an information age.”
I have a narrative, too, but it isn’t suited to the space or time I have today. So much, then, for this columnist’s housecleaning day.
David Warsh, a veteran economic historian and business and political columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first ran.
Robert Whitcomb: Mr. Brooks finally discovers that the natives are restless
In an April 29 column by The New York Times’s David Brooks headlined “If Not Trump, What?’’ he writes that to understand Donald Trump’s GOP popularity (and by implication Bernie Sanders’s among Millennials):
“{I]t’s necessary to go out into the pain. I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own. It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable….’’
“….Up until now, America’s story has been some version of the rags-to-riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through pluck and work. But that story isn’t working for people anymore, especially for people who think the system is rigged.’’
How little effort much of the elite have made to know the plus-90 percent of the nation who aren’t. You’d think that big-time journalists would try to talk more to “everyday Americans,’ at least for show. But media celebs such as Mr. Brooks are addicted to the money, privilege and ego-gratification that go with spending most of their time with the rich and/or powerful. Meanwhile, many business/economics journalists have been fired to help maintain media outlets’ profit margins. So rigorous, data-driven coverage of socio-economic changes has declined in the media that American most look at in favor of, well, nonstop coverage of Mr. Trump’s latest insults. (I’m a former business editor.)
Mr. Brooks, et al., now seem to fear that massive social unrest is coming unless members ofthe “middle class’’ think that they will get a better deal. (Of course, many low- and middle-income people could help their situations by, for example, avoiding having kids out of wedlock and other disorderly behavior linked to poverty. They could also vote.)
The nub of the problem:
Government data show that American economic productivity in 1945 -1973 rose 96 percent and inflation-adjusted pay 94 percent; in 1973-2014 productivity grew 72.2 percent and inflation-adjusted pay 9.2 percent, with almost all of the growth in 1995-2002.
This suggests that the folks owning and/or running companies have become much less willing to share. At the same time, tax laws remain very skewed in favor of investment income over earned income. This keeps reinforcing a plutocracy based on inherited capital and privilege. The Sunday New York Times weddings section displays this crowd in all its glory.
Meanwhile, the elite’s disinclination to share has slowed economic growth by constraining most Americans’ purchasing power.
The very rich have increasingly sequestered themselves from the poor and the middle class through, among other things, jet travel, globalization, the Internet and gated communities. Thus they’re less likely to see and be embarrassed by extreme divergences of wealth. Ever more large local enterprises are owned by far-away companies and/or individuals rather than by people in the communities where the companies operate. The local employees are mere numbers on a screen rather than people whom senior executives and major shareholders might awkwardly encounter on the street.
In some of the burgs where my family have lived over the past century, such as Brockton, Mass., when it was a shoe-making capital, and Duluth, Minn., an iron-ore and grain shipping port, my relatives who were executives, factory managers and the like would encounter a wide range of the population daily, from rich to poor. Now, the descendants of these folks who have not yet drunk away the old money made in these places tend to spend six months and a day enjoying tax avoidance in Florida , and those who own and/or run largeenterprises with operations in places like Duluth and Brockton may never visit them at all.
Out of sight, out of mind.
But now there’s the glint of pitchforks in the sun. It’s too bad that the leading spokesmen for the new “populism’’ are con man Donald Trump (see: www.trumpthemovie.com) and a naïf like Bernie Sanders, who doesn’t understand the need to always encourage entrepreneurialism to raise living standards. As for the Clintons, all too often they act like establishment grifters.
Anyway, we need capitalism, but adjustments are long overdue.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a former Providence Journal editorial page editor, a former International Herald Tribune finance editor and a former Wall Street Journal editor, oversees New England Diary and is a partner at Cambridge Management Group and president of Guard Dog Media, based in Boston.