Plenty of ink has been spilled on David Brooks channeling of poor little Paulie Ryan’s bruises. All of the scorn and ridicule is fair. David Brooks is an innumerate hack propelled by some actual skill, but lots more good luck and well timed sychophancy into a position of influence in which he can do real damage.
But I don’t want Brooks’ jaw-dropping:”let’s do lunch” inanity to obscure the fact that the column as a whole is almost a type specimen of the kind of fundamental intellectual dishonesty that characterizes his work pretty much across the board.
My usual response to something like this would be roughly 4,000 words of high dudgeon.** Real life intervenes however, to everyone’s benefit, so I’ll just hit a few of the high spots in a column so full of wrong it could power Sarah Palin’s teleprompter for a year.
The first, and in some ways the most significant failing in this piece actually does emerge in that “why won’t mean Obama coddle some guy who’s trying to kill everything his administration has done.” The high Broderism is obvious — did anyone ever doubt that Brooks was going to grab for Broder’s mitre with all the ravenous zeal of a hyena in an abbatoir?
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But the deeper problem lies with what Brooks reveals here of how he views his relationships with sources.
For many reasons I share with our own Aimai a reverence for I. F. Stone. As she and I have discussed him off-line, one of Stone’s most significant attributes was his view of sources. They were tools, in the neutral sense of the word…not friends, never people whose regard for you mattered.
Here’s Stone himself on how he did his job of conveying a world-view through facts:
My idea was to make the Weekly radical in viewpoint but conservative in format. I picked a beautiful type face, Garamond, for my main body type, and eschewed sensational headlines. I made no claim to inside stuff—obviously a radical reporter in those days had few pipelines into the government. I tried to give information which could be documented so the reader could check it for himself. I tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible. I also sought to give the Weekly a personal flavor to add humor wit and good writing to the Weekly report. I felt that if one were able enough and had sufficient vision one could distill meaning, truth and even beauty from the swiftly flowing debris of the week’s news.
For Brooks — not so much.
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The implication running through his work, and certainly the offending column — at least as I read it — is that we, his readers, should accept Brooks’ authority because of his personal connection of Paul Ryan, that emotional understanding that enables Brooks to grasp Ryan’s (notional) interior life, his beliefs and motivations.
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That’s not how its done. In fact, a desire to be welcomed and valued by the players condemns one to being played. It’s a death sentence if your goal is to do journalism, to be someone who can recognize and reveal uncomfortable truths. Once you care what the people whom you cover think of you, you’re finished.
In Brooks’ case, it seems to me that he consciously conspires in his own capture. But even so, there are costs that he can’t avoid. Much of what is stupid and wrong in his work (and there’s a lot of it) derives from the way he’s convinced himself that what he believes and feels is true, before or without ever delving into the facts behind the feelings. His “friends” assure him of his wisdom, which seems to be good enough for him, and the result is that odd feeling of weightlessness and divorce-from-reality that threads through his increasingly forgettable work.
For some examples, just from this one column, let’s look at Brooks description of the five things that Paul Ryan believes.
First, he believes that aging populations, expensive new health care technologies and the extravagant political promises have made the current welfare state model unsustainable. Fundamental reform is necessary or the whole thing will collapse, here and in Europe.
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Second, he believes that seniors and the middle class cannot be excused from the benefit cuts that will have to be imposed to rebalance these systems. Third, he believes that health care costs will not be brought under control until consumers take responsibility for their decisions and providers have market-based incentives to reduce prices.
Fourth, he believes that tax increases should not be part of these reforms because the economic costs outweigh the gains. Fifth, he does not believe government can nurture growth and reduce wage stagnation with targeted investments.
There is the overt problem that these “beliefs” are brought to us not from Ryan — no quotes, no links to speeches, no nothing — but rather from Brooks himself, playing the ventriloquist. This is a conventional hack novelist’s trick: you put all the best speeches — the ones that convey what you really think — into the mouth of the character you like best (see Galt, John, e.g.).
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But beyond that, there is another conspicuous failure of writing and reasoning here. It too turns on the word “believes.”
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When Brooks uses that strategic term, he is saying that what matters is what Ryan accepts as true, not what is.
The moment one lets the spell of his easy-listening prose break, though, it becomes obvious that Brooks wants us to then draw real world conclusions based on these “beliefs.” Once that shoe drops, it becomes clear that one can — and thus must — put Brooks’/Ryan’s claims to the harsh test of empirical tests.
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Which, because of reality’s well known liberal bias, is not pretty.
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For example: until Ryan, and Brooks, can explain why the Scandinavian countries are able to deliver first class health care and outcomes at lower cost to all their population, the first of the Ryan articles of faith must be judged false.
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You could say that the American system as currently organized cannot do so — that’s obviously true. But that just shifts (or should) the question from deciding, as Ryan does, to whom to deny care (who to allow to die before their time) to the real issue: how to advance the health care reform in this country begun last year to the point where we can approach the outcomes of our competitors.***
Note here one more bit of Brooks’ rhetorical trickery. For four out of the five avowals in Ryan’s canon, Brooks stops with the one-line statement of faith. Here, though, he adds a second sentence, presented as a declarative statement: “Fundamental reform is necessary or the whole thing will collapse, here and in Europe.”
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Brooks might argue that it is clear from context that this not something he’s claiming himself — it’s still what Ryan believes. But the effect of slipping a bald line like this into the midst of a list of contingent claims is to give that one statement more authority, and Brooks is too skilled a writer not to know this. The point, of course, is to advance a claim not in evidence in the hopes that no one will ask him for its bona fides.
I’m asking…or rather I’m telling him that the collapse he predicts is far from being a law of nature. “The math” tells us no such thing.
I’ll try to speed this all up from here. Onto number 2 in Brooks’ version of the Ryan catechism, that the middle class and the old must sacrifice benefits (die early) to close the health care cost gap. Really? Actually, this is wrong in at least two ways. First, as lots of folks have noted, there are a number of different paths to control deficits. The choice is one of values, not, again, of “the math.”
Second, it once again conflates a fiscal issue with one of substantive policy: there are approaches to containing cost that examine, for example, the incentive problems that arise from paying by the procedure and not the patient. Here Brooks, using Ryan as his ventriloquist’s dummy, takes as given that the only path to cost control is a broad benefit cut. Again, on the face of it, a lie. (Note, I’m not saying that health policy alone can reduce the rate of medical inflation; just that the assertion that there is only viable approach to doing so — radical rationing (old poor people must die) — is based on nothing but ideology contradicted by experience.
And so on. You can hit the same highlights with the other three: all of them rely on assumptions not in evidence and are either contradicted or compromised by readily available data. I won’t go through the exercise here, leaving that to you readers, and I’ll similarly skimp on the fictions on Brooks’ version of Obama’s thinking, noting just one deceit/howler. He writes:
Obama does not believe in relying on market mechanisms to reduce health care costs. Instead, he would rely mostly on a board of technical experts, who would be given power to force their recommendations upon Congress.
Two things: note the asymmetry between “does not believe” and “would rely…on.” It would be correct to say that Obama recognizes that market mechanisms are one tool to control health care costs — this is why, for example, he viewed health care exchanges as a critical element in the health care reform. It would also be correct to say that Obama’s administration, like most Americans, understands that the “market” in health care is so far from that economist’s spherical cow, the “free market,” as to require real regulation and oversight — in which that independent board would play an important role. It is wrong to say that Obama’s administration sees that board as its primary tool for cost containment.
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This cod-on-a-slab flopping around in an effort to paint an utterly economically conventional President as some socialist dupe highlights Brooks’ problem: modern conservative economic, policy and social ideas are based on a religious commitment to a few revealed ideas. To defend them is difficult-to-impossible if one actually does the work to see what, say, actually happens to revenues at different tax rates (number 4 in the theses that Ryan/Brooks nails to the door above). So, if you are Paul Ryan you simply ignore the data of the last thirty years, and if you are David Brooks, you happily serve as an amplifier for such fictions in the service of the false narrative.
This is what makes Brooks such a disastrous member of our power-elite. He is, he says, one of the vital “Hamiltonians, who believe, with Ryan, in market mechanisms to allocate resources and control costs and also, with Obama, in government’s ability to selectively nurture prosperity.”
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In itself that sentence is an insult to poor Alexander Hamilton, whose grasp of English prose was sufficient to avoid contradicting himself in the space of a score of words or so. But it’s real purpose is not to make sense, nor to make a meaningful historical connection. Rather, it is, again, to put the willfully know-nothing Brooks in a position that the reader will accept as above the fray.
But facts do matter. And that is why friends do not let friends get misled by David Brooks.
*See this:
<div align=”center”><iframe title=”YouTube video player” width=”480″ height=”390″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/iesXUFOlWC0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
**So it’s roughly 2K. Sue me.
***I’m not going to go medieval on the other sin Brooks commits here: conflating medical care for the aged and the disabled with “welfare” as it’s been popularly maligned. Welfare has already been framed as theft by the (undeserving) poor (with all the overtones of race and crab-barrelling that form such a large part of the Koch-ist propaganda machine). Social insurance, available and availed on by all is something that the American people by a wide margin (unsurprisingly) tend to value. The hope of the right is that such support could be undermined by the guilt-by-association burden that would come if somehow we could all be persuaded that the provision universal health care to the aged is somehow going to lead to more moochers eating my steak or something. Brooks is trading in such class/race war code words here, and should be ashamed of himself. Which statement, of course, also contains an assumption not in evidence: that Brooks possesses the capacity to experience that emotion.
Images: Lovis Corinth, In the Slaughterhouse, 1893.
Caravaggio Saint Jerome, c. 1605-1606.
Gary
If you are going to mispell sickophancy, at least mispel it right, as I here.
Yutsano
First thing: first painting = amazing. Just anbiguous enough that you have to think about it before the subject comes to you.
Second point: Brooks, despite his claims, is not a journalist He’s a columnist. Columnists have much different priorities and agendas than journalists. Brooks is a mouthpiece, nothing more, nothing less. Whatever original thought he’s allowed to interject is by permission from his corporate masters. That’s all.
piratedan
it’s a travesty that a national columnist/pundit/purveyor of deep thought such as Our Miss Brooks cannot imagine any other reality outside of his own as having any validity.
Why is it that all of these hacks are looking back instead of looking forward?
Are they that friggin’ scared?
ChrisB
Brooks is far more dangerous than other conservatives because of his veneer of reasonableness which gets him on shows like MacNeil/Lehrer (I know the show’s name has changed but like Al Franken I prefer the original). You never see a rebuttal like this in any mainstream forum.
ppcli
I just wanted to say that the title of this post might be the most brilliant thing I’ve ever read.
dricey
It was disgusting watching Brooks on PBS News Hour Friday evening. He actually had the shameless gall to sit there and say that the rest of us must share the sacrifices we demand of the rich. And Lehrer nor Shields called him on it.
d. john
Tom,
You hit it way out of the park with this one.
Excellent post. Bravo
piratedan
@dricey: damn, and here I was thinking it should be the other way around, the rich should be dealing with the sacrifices I’m (we’re) already making.
d. john
@dricey:
they were afraid they might hurt the lying hack’s widdle fee fees
d. john
/me plays the world’s smallest violin for Paul “Bring out your dead” Ryan and David “fucking” Brooks
The Bobs
I’ve been paying into SS and Medicare for 33 years. Every time I hear that they are entitlements I want to scream. The press prints this lie time after time without questioning it. So it becomes accepted truth.
The Republic of Stupidity
Hard to go wrong w/ Carravagio, Tom…
No… no… take your time… do it right…
CARVE that farker up completely… Brooks deserves it… when someone has the gall to write shite like this…
… he deserves to have such silly, pretentious claptrap shoved right back up his nostrils…
“Selectively nurture prosperity”? I think using the word ‘sophistry’ would be appropriate here…
I think I just indiscriminately hurled all over my keyboard…
Davis X. Machina
@ppcli: Hear, hear! (Shuffles feet, rattles copy of Order Paper.)
Ann. B. Nonymous
Whenever I think of Brooks, I remember that bizarre anecdote about a Republican senator feeling up his thigh at a dinner party. Did he lean into Brooks’ ear and whisper, “Are you cut? I like that.”
d. john
@The Bobs: Me too.
Once you let them call SS an entitlement, you’ve already lost the debate.*
This shit is so fucking Orwellian and yet everybody on teh Teevee does it. Maybe that’s why I haven’t owned one in at least a decade – at least one that gets a signal.
Get real assholes. The moment you attempt to privatize or otherwise kill SS, I’ll be jumping on board with the inevitable and HUGE class action lawsuit against the fed govt. I expect a check for the amount OWED to me, should you attempt to eliminate or fundamentally change the SS system. Fuck you if you think I’m not owed it. Fuck you with a sharp stick.
*Just like when you call undocumented workers a dehumanizing and inaccurate term like “illegal” (a civil infraction BTW, not criminal)
Citizen_X
For a left-wing example, see Ernest Everhard (you read that right) in Jack London’s The Iron Heel. London’s no hack, though: the book moves the reader briskly–hell, ruthlessly–along through its bloody climax. But every time he describes the incisive workings of fearless Ernest’s mind, laying all before him speechless, I can only think, “Who are you really praising here, Jack?”
Nevertheless, I’d still recommend the book.
Davis X. Machina
@d. john: Given the present Court’s ‘creative’ approach to issues of standing, I wouldn’t get my hopes up….
Martin
Imagine my surprise when that first painting was titled ‘In the Slaughterhouse’ and not ‘Frolicking Republicans’.
sublime33
I am waiting for this proposal for the health care issue – Government subsidizes and promotes smoking among those over Age 50. It will take a few years before the bad health effects start to show, so these people won’t get sick on their employer’s watch. And they will die earlier, saving social security payouts. And it helps the tobacco industry, a good old American industry. Sure the slow painful death will cost money, but a lot of them were going to die a slow painful death anyway – just a few years later. Can David Brooks consider this a serious proposal?
4jkb4ia
The holiday wishes would have included Levenson if I hadn’t forgotten him.
Elia Isquire
Brooks’ kind of mendacity reminds me a lot of Jim Cramer. Unfortunately there can never a political meltdown equivalent to financial one of 2008 that causes Brooks to go on various talk shows and say “Paul Ryan LIED to me!!!! :'(“
cwolf
Wow –
You make it sound much more complicated than in my simple view
which is that BoBo is a Groupee.
jake the snake
@sublime33:
I think the correct term is “a modest proposal”.
JGabriel
The title pun is so awful it’s genius. I love it. Kudos.
.
Jim Kakalios
You quoted Brooks as saying: “Second, he [Ryan] believes that seniors and the middle class cannot be excused from the benefit cuts that will have to be imposed to rebalance these systems.”
This may indeed be what Ryan believes. Hwoever, where in Ryan’s budget proposal does he recommend sacrifices for current seniors? All of his changes to Medicare, etc. do not kick in for another 10 years. He deliberately shields today’s seniors from any of the sacrifices that the rest will face.
Though perhaps there is some aspect of the budget proposal with which I am unfamiliar where he does demand sacrifice from current seniors.
Jim Kakalios
You quoted Brooks as saying: “Second, he [Ryan] believes that seniors and the middle class cannot be excused from the benefit cuts that will have to be imposed to rebalance these systems.”
This may indeed be what Ryan believes. However, where in Ryan’s budget proposal does he recommend sacrifices for current seniors? All of his changes to Medicare, etc. do not kick in for another 10 years. He deliberately shields today’s seniors from any of the sacrifices that the rest will face.
Though perhaps there is some aspect of the budget proposal with which I am unfamiliar where he does demand sacrifice from current seniors.
Dead Ernest
What a pleasure…
The writing of Tom Levenson – one of the best reasons for the invention of the written word.
Thank you Tom.
driftglass
If you need a Photoshop to go with that very fine spanking, please feel free… :-)
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2011/03/mein-fuhrer-i-can-walk.html
Mnemosyne
@The Bobs:
The weird part is, by any reasonable definition of the word, Social Security and Medicare are things that you are entitled to. You paid your money in, you supported the system, and now you are entitled to benefit from it yourself.
And yet Republicans, representatives of the super-rich, have somehow convinced their voters that they’re not entitled to benefit from Social Security.
Dead Ernest
Thinking you intended the word ‘one’ between ‘only – viable’?
Truly an excellent analysis Tom.
You have a remarkable skill; allowing me to be more delighted with the insight you offer than sorry for myself (or reflexively dismissive of you) being reminded, again, that I am too dull to capture and express that perspective myself.
Davis X. Machina
@Jim Kakalios: He deliberately shields
today’s seniorsanyone his compadres might have to meet running for re-election in a swing or near-swing district, for the foreseeable future from any of the sacrifices that the rest will face.Yutsano
@Mnemosyne:
Almost. They’ve convinced Americans that there are those less deserving of Social Security than they are, so it should be cut so THEY don’t get it, even though every American worker pays into the system. So they’re more than willing to cut off their own noses just to make sure the others don’t get sparrows. To horribly mangle a metaphor. :)
Jim Kakalios
@Davis X. Machina: Ah, yes, the Brave Sir Robin of Janesville, Wisconsin.
asiangrrlMN
Tom, this smackdown was delicious. Brooks is nothing but a rentboy for the likes of Paul Ryan. He’s there to carry the luggage, so to speak. Brooks disgusts me in that I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s saying is bullsheetrock, and yet, he’s promoting it for all he’s worth, anyway. Nice filleting of a soulless hack. And, that first painting is sublime.
Dead Ernest
@Yutsano:
bjacques
Excellent! Before I finished the post, I would have thought that slaughterhouse painting was by Sue Coe…
@Mnemosyne 29:
I’d think I’d at least be “entitled” to the money I’ve been paying into Social Security all these years, at least as much as Brooks believes his Galtian heroes are “entitled” to our unstinting praise when they succeed and our still-unstinting praise and a bailout when they lose.
Speaking of Brooks and his uebermenschen, maybe smearing oneself with their pheromones at the next protest will instill in cops and horses panic and an unreasoning desire to submit.
Uloborus
@Yutsano:
Yeah, the sell is ‘You’re paying more money into Social Security and Medicare than you’ll ever get back. Lazy Others are getting more out of those programs than they pay and laughing at you.’ Of course, this is totally untrue, but that’s the politics of resentment for you.
Janus Daniels
“… Brooks was going to grab for Broder’s mitre with all the ravenous zeal of a hyena in an abbatoir…”
SO good to have you here!
d. john
@Jim Kakalios: your mistake was reading the word “current” into that statement. The word wasn’t used.
Gozer
Brooks is a somewhat genial sociopath.
Whenever I read one of his columns I can always hear the common refrain of the unsuspecting neighbour: “But he always seemed like such a nice man.”
Jim Kakalios
@d. john: You are correct. Though in my defense, when Brooks writes “that seniors and the middle class cannot be excused from the benefit cuts …” it certainly implies that Ryan’s plan is asking something of seniors, as in, those who are seniors today, and not those who, in ten years time, will be seniors.
It may be a small thing on top of the other faults, but Brooks is not a very good writer. It often is a chore to slog through to the end of his column. Which I never find to be the case for Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman, Joe Nocera or Frank Rich, even when the latter two had much longer weekly pieces.
Marmot
Just got around to reading this one late in the day. Thanks Tom. I’ve disliked, distrusted and dissed Brooks since I can remember. It’s time to sully his reputation with more of this.
It’ll be interesting to see if Brooks has even the stunted sense of shame that Sullivan shows after a good thrashing. Does Brooks ever acknowledge criticism?
Tom Levenson
Thanks to all in the thread as usual, with a special shout out to those who liked the title. Punning is, of course, the lowest form of humor, and you’re welcome. ;)
PIGL
@Mnemosyne: But the lower classes who have paid into these programmes are by no conceivable means entitled to the payout. The funds have been reallocated to much better uses, vis lining the pockets of the ruling class, who otherwise might have had to pay some taxes in recent years. One would not want that realisation stalking the land by night, would one?
One fights an enemy; one hates a traitor; and one wishes Quislings should only DIAF.
mclaren
Tom, I find your posting of a painting of one of America’s interrogation chambers highly offensives. Sure, this sort of thing goes on routinely now, but, hey! We’re at WAR! They want TO KILL US! We face an EXISTENTIAL THREAT!!! But small children could see this and be traumatized. So it’s inappropriate here.
What?
Wait–that’s a painting of a slaughterhouse, not an American torture chamber?
Oh. Sorry. Go on with what you were saying, never mind.
karen marie
Every time I see a new piece by Brooks on the NY Times’ FB feed, I post a link to this post.
Tom Levenson
@karen marie: Heh. Thanks.
ABL
i love this post, tom!