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If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

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Tick tock motherfuckers!

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

He really is that stupid.

Consistently wrong since 2002

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You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / A funny thing happened on the way to the Applebee’s salad bar

A funny thing happened on the way to the Applebee’s salad bar

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Everyone’s been egging me on to tackle Bobo’s latest. I’ll summarize: the librul arts types who are protesting Wall Street excess should instead focus their anger on all the Red State monosyllabic young bucks going back for seconds and thirds at the Applebee’s salad bar.

Today, college grads are much less likely to smoke than high school grads, they are less likely to be obese, they are more likely to be active in their communities, they have much more social trust, they speak many more words to their children at home.

[….] [T]he fact is that Red Inequality is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

Dean Baker (via) points out that the college/non-college socioeconomic divide began around 1980 and has not widened much recently (Bobo conveniently quotes stats from 1979), but my point is a different one: what the fuck are OWS supporters like me supposed to do about people whose diets and parenting techniques Bobo dislikes? Go lecture them on his behalf?

Bobo — if I’m reading him right — says that the problem is that there’s too many non-college-educated fly-over country people and that they’re not eating right or raising their kids right. Isn’t this a natural place for government to expand access to education, health-care, and programs like Head Start? And isn’t it reasonable to ask that the wealthiest Americans, who surely make a lot of their money off these oh-so-tragically dumb, fat, poorly raised fucks, help foot the bill for it?

Also too, I can no longer understand who the real heroes and villains are for conservatives anymore. I gave up long ago with foreign policy, I can’t tell who’s Hitler and who’s a brave Churchillian protector of freedom, but I thought I knew a hawk from a handsaw within the confines of Our Republic. I can’t tell anymore. I know that college graduates from “blue states” are lazy, trustafarian slime, but now I know that non-college graduates from “red states” are fat, lazy, chain-smoking slime. Maybe this isn’t so complicated, maybe in Real Murka, a college degree makes you good, in the decadent enclaves on the coasts, it makes you bad.

I suspect it is a good deal more complicated than that though.

Reader Interactions

69Comments

  1. 1.

    Emdee

    It’s not more complicated than that. A college degree is good provided it doesn’t make you vote Democratic. If it does, it’s bad.

  2. 2.

    Jenny

    “they are less likely to be obese,”

    Bobo is NOW attacking fat people, after his love affair with Christie….

    BWHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAH

    Whadda pisser

  4. 4.

    ericblair

    I’m not sure either. I mean, FREEDOM! and PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY!, right? All the icky red staters are that way because they want to be, right? And we wouldn’t want Big Gummint to tell them how many deep-fried Mars Bars to have for breakfast, would we? So what’s his problem?

    Sometimes the contempt for the marks just pops out, I guess.

  6. 6.

    Jenny

    It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock.

    How dare he attack Bristol Palin and Dick Cheney’s gay daughter for having children out of wedlock.

  7. 7.

    SiubhanDuinne

    I like a man who can slip in a Shakespearean allusion whilst ripping Bobo a jagged new one.

  8. 8.

    Baud

    I know that college graduates from “blue states” are lazy, trustafarian slime, but now I know that non-college graduates from “red states” are fat, lazy, chain-smoking slime.

    Yes, we are just all slime to him and those of his ilk.

  12. 12.

    Lurking Canadian

    I think you are overthinking it. I think this is just another example of “You plebes don’t know how good you have it.” Like how the poor people aren’t poor because they have colour TVs, or how the hipsters on food stamps aren’t poor because they buy rabbit at the farmer’s market.

    This is “You OWS college-educated losers think you have it rough? You should look at the methheads down at Applebees, then you’d be grateful for your $4 job at Starbucks.”

  14. 14.

    jwb

    The point is to sow dissension so no one notices as the oligarchs walk off with everything that’s not nailed down.

  15. 15.

    MikeJ

    Nothing would make Bobo happier than having coastal liberals tell uneducated red staters they’re fat and stupid and the cause of all of America’s problems.

  16. 16.

    RossInDetroit

    @cathyx:

    So let me guess, the 1% are all svelte, smart, educated, handsome and virile, just like Bobo.

    Yeah, he covered that. Took a whole book. Also they have a distinctive odor.

  18. 18.

    soonergrunt

    The problem, DougJ, is that the Republican party and the conservative movement themselves are fracturing.
    The rich Koch conservatives don’t give a shit about abortions among the unwashed masses and they never have.
    The poor cultural conservatives first hated the blacks and now the messicans (and always teh ghey) but even they are starting (just barely mind) to see that the guy who drives by in the chauffeur-driven Cadillac and gives money to pastor Simspson doesn’t stay for the prayer meeting. And little Hank Williams Jr. Smith told his daddy, JimBob BillyJoe about how Pastor Simpson pulled down his pants to make sure the sign of the devil wasn’t on him and that just don’t seem right. JimBob BillyJoe liked his time in the Marines, but he didn’t make a lot of money and they wouldn’t let him roll a splif every so often like a good ole boy should, so he got out. Of course, that journeymen’s electrician skill he picked up isn’t needed back home in Cowshit Hollar since they stopped building houses, so he keeps having to go on relief.
    Meanwhile, the Defense Hawks just don’t give a shit if there are gay servicemembers just so long as killing the brown people can continue, but they’ve noticed that the cost of bullets and missiles keeps going up and up and up and that new plane seems designed more to line the pockets of the board and shareholders of Lockheed Martin than to actually kill the enemy and defend Israel.

    So the problem for you is to figure out which Republican to whom you are addressing your questions, and then the answers will begin to make sense.

  20. 20.

    Baud

    The economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley Heim have done the most authoritative research on who these top 1 percenters are.
    Roughly 31 percent started or manage nonfinancial businesses. About 16 percent are doctors, 14 percent are in finance, 8 percent are lawyers, 5 percent are engineers and about 2 percent are in sports, entertainment or the media.

    That adds up to 76%. So anyone want to guess who the other 24% are.

  22. 22.

    Samara Morgan

    I suspect it is a good deal more complicated than that though.

    not really. There is even a name for this phenomenon in Conservidom. Its called Salam-Douthat Stratification on Cognitive Ability, invented by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in their book Grand New Party.
    Its on page 154.

    From my perspective it is, however, fairly complex. It has to do with red/blue genetics, rubberbanding, Right Wing Authority tendency, conservative backfire effect and the Savannah Principle.
    overparameterized.
    :)

  24. 24.

    Short Bus Bully

    Shorter Bobo: “The animalistic virility of the lower classes is stopping the economic recovery.”

  25. 25.

    DougJ

    @Jenny:

    He has a bunch of kids. I hope the FBI is tracking them, because we could have a Boys From Bethesda situation on our hands.

    They are all clones of Edmund Burke.

  29. 29.

    Raven (formerly stuckinred)

    And from right here in Georgia”

    ATLANTA — Four suspected members of a fringe north Georgia militia group have been charged with plotting to buy explosives and planning to manufacture a deadly toxin to attack government officials.

    The U.S. Attorney’s office said Tuesday the four elderly men were part of a group that tried to obtain an unregistered explosive device and silencer and plotted to manufacture a biological toxin called ricin.

  31. 31.

    lacp

    Actually, he isn’t making any point at all. The whole piece can be reduced to “Hey! Look over there!”

  33. 33.

    Suffern ACE

    O.K. I’ll give it a try. “Red people, hear me! You Quit being so unequal.”

    I’m thinking they’ll be forming a think tank next to work out their policy preferences that will suitably protect their interests.

  34. 34.

    Samara Morgan

    To synopsize SD Stratification, liberal academic “bias” against the IQ-challenged religion-saturated spawn of fly-over country ensures that redstate youth never get invites to the elite ivies from whence cometh the most of our elite governance.
    Periodically McMegan and Chunky Bobo propose some sort of IQbussing for the children of Real Murrica.
    never comes to anything.

  39. 39.

    soonergrunt

    @Raven (formerly stuckinred):
    I’m sorry, but that’s just lololol.
    I keep having images of them falling asleep in their “planning meetings” and a couple of them pissed off about the gubmint interfering with their Medicare. I hope they charged their hoverrounds before they went to the buy. It would be a shame if they had to be carried to the squad cars.

  42. 42.

    sb

    Doug, you know I love your Brooks takedowns. But I’m afraid even you have to take a backseat to what Charles Pierce did to him today. If Brooks reads Pierce, he better have a fainting couch nearby.

  43. 43.

    MeDrewNotYou

    (Bobo conveniently quotes stats from 1979)

    WTF?! I’m supposed to take an article that uses 30yr old stats seriously? I’m surprised Bobo doesn’t just go ahead and say that this Ronald Reagan fella’ should be elected next year. (I think I earn bonus points for this since President Obama is ‘the black Jimmy Carter.’)

  44. 44.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    This is what jumped out at me when I read his piece this morning:

    In these places, the crucial inequality is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. It’s between those with a college degree and those without. Over the past several decades, the economic benefits of education have steadily risen. In 1979, the average college graduate made 38 percent more than the average high school graduate, according to the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke. Now the average college graduate makes more than 75 percent more.

    What amazed me is that he doesn’t get that these multiples are nothing compared to what most people with college degrees make and what the people at the top make.

    If the people making $20 million were making “75% more” than most college graduates, then the graduates would be making more than $11 million a year, and does he think they’d all be complaining about that?

  45. 45.

    Rick Massimo

    Bobo—if I’m reading him right—

    There is no such thing as reading Bobo right. He writes wrong; you can’t make it right.

  46. 46.

    Raven (formerly stuckinred)

    More from the big city paper:

    Thomas, who lives in a two-story home on two acres of property in Cleveland, was described in affidavits as a leading speaker at the meetings. He discussed having a “bucket list ” of government officials, business leaders and members of the media who needed to be “taken out” to “make the country right again,” the affidavit said.

    Thomas also said he was a military veteran who had been to war and had taken a life, and said he could do it again, the affidavit said.

    “There’s no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly illegal: murder,” Thomas said during a meeting in March, according to the affidavit. “…When it comes to saving the Constitution, that means some people gotta die.”

  47. 47.

    Baud

    @Bill E Pilgrim: The perverse philosophy of these people is that, because there are so few super-wealthy people, they aren’t worth paying attention to. Hence, the “crucial inequality” in Bobo’s world is between different classes of the masses.

  49. 49.

    Yevgraf

    Goddamn. Just fucking goddamn.

    This assclown has been the main stumbling block in this state for several years, and is the true face of the white conservative activist side of the GOP. I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with him on a professional level before, and this is, unfortunately, a solid display of his basic personality.

    http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20111101/NEWS01/311010046/David-Williams-assails-Steve-Beshear-over-participation-Hindu-prayer-ceremony

    Senate President David Williams lambasted Gov. Steve Beshear Tuesday for participating in a Hindu prayer ceremony last week at a new manufacturing plant site in Elizabethtown, saying the governor was worshipping “false gods.”
    …
    At a campaign stop at a Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant in Bullitt County, Williams, who is running against Beshear in the governor’s race, told about two-dozen supporters that Beshear’s decision to take part in the prayer service “should put his judgment in question.”
    …
    In an interview, he accused Beshear, the son and grandson of Baptist ministers, of worshipping “false gods” and said he hopes members of the Hindu faith convert to Christianity.
    …
    “I was very careful in saying that I don’t criticize anyone, you know, that is a Hindu,” he said. “It’s their right to be a Hindu person if they want to. … As a Christian, I hope their eyes are opened and they receive Jesus Christ as their personal savior, but its their business what they do.”

    Mitch “The Bitch” McConnell has been campaigning for this toad. His commentary needs to get plastered to every fucking goober GOPer that has made a campaign stop with him.

  50. 50.

    Bnad

    If you live in these big cities, you see people similar to yourself, who may have gone to the same college, who are earning much more while benefiting from low tax rates, wielding disproportionate political power, gaining in prestige and contributing seemingly little to the social good. That is the experience of Blue Inequality.

    i.e. an NYT newspaper columnist’s envy of the 1% he cultivates relationships with but is much poorer than and can’t go to the Essque Zalu with.

  51. 51.

    RossInDetroit

    The 1% are the man behind the curtain and the government is The Mighty OZ. They just don’t want anyone to know they’re back there pulling the strings. Thanks to the SCOTUS CU decision they just got a whole lot more leverage to pull with.

  52. 52.

    scav

    Are the aristocrats reduced to throwing their base out of the sleigh as it races across the frozen taiga on a moonlit night, hoping to distract the pursuing wolves?

    Too bad the Occupy movement isn’t accomplishing anything, huh?

  54. 54.

    RossInDetroit

    @Steeplejack:

    That was a good one. Money quote:

    Look, I understand that some people find the notion that we’ve become an oligarchy — with all that implies about class relations — disturbing. But that’s the way it is.

    Pretty strong for a NYT blog. Good for him.

  55. 55.

    batgirl

    Okay, I refuse to read the Bobo piece but I just checked out Charlie at Esquire and some horrendous excerpts.

    If you live in these big cities, you see people similar to yourself, who may have gone to the same college, who are earning much more while benefiting from low tax rates, wielding disproportionate political power, gaining in prestige and contributing seemingly little to the social good.

    I’d like to know what city he lives in that he benefits from low tax rates. I won’t even touch the other bull. Okay, maybe I will. There has been study after study showing how a very small percentage of the population living in the flyover states actually has more political say in our Congress. And where the frak does he get to decide that the people in the cities contribute little to the social good.

    But it gets better.

    Then there is what you might call Red Inequality. This is the kind experienced in Scranton, Des Moines, Naperville, Macon, Fresno, and almost everywhere else. In these places, the crucial inequality is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. It’s between those with a college degree and those without.

    Okay, I know Naperville. WTF is he talking about. I just checked census numbers. 66% of the Naperville population 25 and over have at least a bachelor’s degree. 66 frakking percent. The city of Chicago? 33%.

    I see Bobo gets his facts the same place every other Republican does, his ass.

  57. 57.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Baud: Oh I know that his “point” was “there are so many more of these people that this must be where the real problem lies”, or, to turn it around the other way, “Oh come on, there are so few people in the top 1% that they couldn’t possibly be taking in enough money to be causing the problem!”

    Uh David, that’s the whole point….

  58. 58.

    Steeplejack

    @Steeplejack:

    (FYWP!)

    ETA: In his 2006 piece that he links to in the blog entry above, Krugman makes the “inequality” argument more explicitly: if it were just a matter of going to college, we would have seen college-educated people’s incomes go up over the last 30 years at a much higher rate than others’. In fact, this did not happen. What did happen is that the top 1 percent’s incomes went way up, and the top 0.1 percent’s incomes went way, way up. How does Bobo explain that?

    Krugman (from 2006):

    What we’re seeing isn’t the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we’re seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.
    __
    I think of Mr. Bernanke’s position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It’s the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group—that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don’t have these skills.
    __
    The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.
    __
    So who are the winners from rising inequality? It’s not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.
    __
    A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, “Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?,” gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn’t a ticket to big income gains.
    __
    But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that’s not a misprint.
    __
    Just to give you a sense of who we’re talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year [2006] the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn’t give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it’s probably well over $6 million a year.
    __
    Why would someone as smart and well informed as Mr. Bernanke get the nature of growing inequality wrong? Because the fallacy he fell into tends to dominate polite discussion about income trends, not because it’s true, but because it’s comforting. The notion that it’s all about returns to education suggests that nobody is to blame for rising inequality, that it’s just a case of supply and demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate inequality is to improve our educational system—and better education is a value to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip service.

    And Krugman also demolishes (in today’s piece) Bobo’s “red state/blue state” argument, too.

    One last point: I see that David Brooks is arguing that the oligarchy issue, if it matters at all, is a coastal phenomenon, not the issue in the heartland. Let me point out, then, that we have one country, with a tightly integrated economy. High finance is concentrated in New York, but it makes money from the United States as a whole. And even when oligarchs clearly get their income from heartland, red-state sources, where do they live? Okay, one of the Koch brothers still lives in Wichita; but the other lives in New York.
    __
    Put it this way: having much of the wealth your state creates go to people who are in effect absentee landlords, whose income therefore shows up in another state’s statistics, doesn’t mean that you have an equal distribution of income. Out of state shouldn’t mean out of mind.
    __
    Look, I understand that some people find the notion that we’ve become an oligarchy—with all that implies about class relations—disturbing. But that’s the way it is.

    Suck on it, Bobo.

  59. 59.

    Villago Delenda Est

    What did happen is that the top 1 percent’s incomes went way up, and the top 0.1 percent’s incomes went way, way up. How does Bobo explain that?

    He would explain it, but he’s busy.

    He’s got David Koch’s member in his mouth.

  60. 60.

    Linda

    Well, it’s official. Conservatives have been widening their circle of shame-blaming–from dark welfare mamas, to private sector union members, to cops and firemen, to their voting (if not their funding) base–red state citizens. They are now eating their own seed corn. I guess they figure if voting restrictions are tight enough, blaming their own constituents won’t matter much, because qualified voters might narrow down to the Koch brothers and stockholders in Walmarts.

  61. 61.

    slag

    what the fuck are OWS supporters like me supposed to do about people whose diets and parenting techniques Bobo dislikes?

    Isn’t that the problem with every major Republican policy position? They’re all incredibly impractical. Even the most intrusive ones–anti-abortion, anti-gayness, etc. You can’t legislate that stuff…no matter how hard you try.

  62. 62.

    Apikoros

    as an excercise in pedantry, for those who do not know the difference between a hawk and a handsaw…

    A hawk

    A handsaw

    I’ll bet the hawk was new to you, wasn’t it? :-)

  63. 63.

    Bruce S

    Honestly, I’d rather the New York Times just re-hire William Kristol to deliver the real goods – reminding us unequivocally that current “conservatism” is an instrument of the Devil. That would be much more of a public service than Bobo’s gibberish.

  65. 65.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    Everyone’s been egging me on to tackle Bobo’s latest.

    how do you define “everyone”?

  66. 66.

    TG Chicago

    Is Bobo trying to claim that graduating college makes you less likely to smoke? How does that work? Is there an anti-smoking class that I missed?

    I don’t think so. But it appears that Bobo missed some lessons explaining the difference between correlation and causation.

  67. 67.

    Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937

    I’m guessing that “tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college” and the “nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility” are related to the “zooming wealth of the top 1 percent”.

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Trackbacks

  1. […] DougJ is probably my favorite Professional Left David Brooks hater, although it is indeed a crowded field; but in response to Bobo’s most recent piece, I think he’s guilty of over-thinking things and giving the man more credit than he deserves: […]

  2. […] response to Bobo’s most recent piece, I think he’s guilty of over-thinking things and giving the man more credit than he deserves: Bobo—if I’m reading him right—says that the problem is that there’s too many […]