Commenters are egging me on to write about Bobo, so here goes:
The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our meritocracy. The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.
Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment.
As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.
Corruption “crept in” and wasn’t present 100 years ago when Grotton had smaller rooms? I might accept the idea that corruption has gotten worse in finance over the last 30 years after investment banks went public. But to claim — without evidence — that it’s worse now than during the ’20s? Or that contemporary elites are worse than those of the Gilded age (Bobo specifically mentions the greatness of WASP elite morals in the 19th and 20th centuries)?
And what is Bobo’s solution to the crisis of ethnic infiltration of the establishment? “I want to keep the current social order, but I want to give it a different ethos and institutions that are more consistent with its existing ideals.”
How does one accomplish this? By writing columns? By using the bully pulpit? What? He opposes nearly all government regulation, so what’s the mechanism by which we change our ethos and institutions?
It’s the usual conservative multi-tiered argument. Our elites are awesome because they are Galtian superheroes and only a hippie would disagree. Maybe our elites aren’t that awesome but with lower taxes and less gubmint regulation, the economy would be so good no one would care. Okay, our elites suck but there’s nothing we can do about it except hope that WASP morality comes back somehow.
In the end it all points to the same thing: accelerated income inequality, the destruction of the middle-class, the empowerment of the corporatocracy.
Amanda in the South Bay
Are you sure its good for your health to be reading Bobo? An intervention might be in order.
Culture of Truth
Paul Krugman is Really Tired of Trying Reason With You People
“Jeff Sachs, who really should know better, joins the chorus of people denouncing Keynesian ideas as crude and “simplistic”.
“….the next time someone calls me crude, I’m gonna punch them in the face.”
jwb
Not touching that link, but the palpable nostalgia for “the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network” that somehow inculcated an ethos of responsibility is comically nonsensical even for him.
lacp
So Brooks believes we need more people willing to take on The White Man’s Burden? Jesus.
BGinCHI
No Doug, it’s simpler: Bobo’s diagnosis for the problem of corruption is to ignore what causes people to act corruptly and to then jump straight to an old-fashioned British “stiff upper lip” solution.
It’s paternalism. Period. And worse, it’s Tory paternalism.
Southern Beale
I hear that a lot from wingers, actually. That’s a favorite fantasy of theirs, all of the libraries and museums and hospitals the Robber Barons founded, as if to say: the onwership class was so benevolent, look how they took care of the community! As if the isolated examples of a handful of wealthy plutocrats makes all the other crap alright.
I mean, shit. It’s “charity not taxes” all over again. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.
Culture of Truth
Groton housed the children of billionaires in cubicles to prepare them the rigors of a life in the CEO’s office? Come again?
BGinCHI
I can’t get over this:
Shorter Bobo: millions died and were harmed each and every day, but these guys knew what responsibility meant!
NotMax
A paean to noblesse oblige.
“6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle” — and no salad bar.
What a brown-nosing maroon.
Culture of Truth
If incoherent nonsense ever goes for $100 a bushel, I want harvesting rights to Bobo’s brain.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Not that I disagree with any of this but you should really leave Bobo to driftglass and Charlie Pierce. Safer on your blood pressure.
We should treat him the same way we treat Sullivan: no click thrus and utter contempt.
schrodinger's cat
Bobo stands for Balding old boob, as I said in the thread below, Bobo is proof positive that meritocracy does not exist. The only thing Bobo is good at is comforting the comfortable, and being a disingenuous shill for the rich.
tomvox1
Yeah but he Brooks did give us an awesome new word of the day: “scrupulosity”. Sort of like truthiness, I imagine. Such as:
It’s fun to use in a sentence–try it!
joeyess
Those three paragraphs made me facepalm so hard that I may have to contact a neurologist.
Such wankery has never been written in such detail or with such care.
Bulworth
I had to click on the link to make sure that Bobo actually said this.
BGinCHI
@tomvox1: “Bobo heaped three scrupulosities of shit on my ice cream cone of contempt for his thinking.”
aimai
Jeezus christ did he really just blame the Jooz for the end of “white shoe” dominance in every field?
Fuck him.
aimai
aimai
Jeezus christ did he really just blame the Jooz for the end of “white shoe” dominance in every field?
Fuck him.
aimai
BGinCHI
@tomvox1: “Bobo heaped three scrupulosities of shit on my ice cream cone of contempt for his thinking.”
sb
@Bulworth: You and me both. Not that I don’t trust Doug and all but, jeebus, that’s just…
Yeah, I’m at a loss for words.
Matt McIrvin
“Scrupulosity” usually means a kind of guilt-drenched religious mania. It’s not a positive thing. The Catholic Church and the old mainline Protestant churches actually recognize it as a disorder.
Walker
Man that sh*t reads exactly like Hobbes defense of the monarchy.
Culture of Truth
You know else was racist, sexist, and anti-semitic but showed great leadership skills???
sb
@Bulworth: You and me both. Not that I don’t trust Doug and all but, jeebus, that’s just…
Yeah, I’m at a loss for words.
Culture of Truth
You know else was racist, sexist, and anti-semitic but showed great leadership skills???
redshirt
I’m getting a tingle up my leg…. wait, wait. N/m. It’s a heart attack.
sb
@Bulworth: You and me both. Not that I don’t trust Doug and all but, jeebus, that’s just…
Yeah, I’m at a loss for words.
Culture of Truth
You know else was racist, sexist, and anti-semitic but showed great leadership skills???
Culture of Truth
Bobo’s next book:
Seven Leadership Secrets of Sexist, Racist, Anti-Semites
schrodinger's cat
Has anyone noticed how bashing meritocratic elites suddenly became fashionable, in some circles, after Obama became President. Before that it was called the American Dream.
Ed Drone
Speaking of taxes, read this:
I’m glad to be a part of his family, partly because I get told, “Read this” when one of his columns comes out, and my wife hands me the I-Pad.
Ed
schrodinger's cat
@aimai: I was surprised too, isn’t Brooks Jewish?
The Moar You Know
That is some world-class trolling by Bobo there. Time to up your game, Doug.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That’s both jaw dropping and hilarious from Bobo; “you know all these people I told you were so wonderful, well they really just a bunch of bottom sucking spoiled brats”
Who know Bobo was a dirty fornicating hippie?
danimal
The difference between the elites of yesterday and the elites of today is that yesterday’s elites made a scrunchy face and feigned concern as they stole your money, dignity and civil rights, while today’s elites consider it an accomplishment, write a best-selling Regnery book and appear on FoxNews.
JoeShabadoo
So he is basically waxing poetic about the greatness of royalty while pouring on the word merit like A1 in hopes of it covering up the rotting meat of his argument.
Shorter Bobo:
“The problem isn’t that we have a king, the problem is the king doesn’t realize his own majesty.”
Ed Drone
Somehow the link disappeared:
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/13/thank_god_for_taxes/
Sigh. I can’t make anything work these days.
Ed
ted
See, the real problem is that they think they’re hippies! Damn, stinky hippies!!! Who knew that the problem with Wall Street is that it’s full of Occupy ideology!
Oh, the brain, it hurts.
BGinCHI
@Culture of Truth: Henry Ford?
Matt McIrvin
This kind of thing is the reason why I am a bit bothered by people claiming that modern-day nutty conservatives aren’t real conservatives, and we used to have better conservatives in the old days.
This attitude displayed here is the real old-fashioned conservatism, the conservatism of Buckley, and it’s completely obnoxious. Brooks sees the problems of modern society as arising from a lack of stable hierarchies in which higher and lower people know and happily accept their place.
Since overt racism is now taboo, he regards it as an unfortunate defect of the old system, but one that we could surely avoid in a reconstruction of it. The eternal underclass would still exist, it just wouldn’t be racial.
rlrr
@Culture of Truth:
You know else was racist, sexist, and anti-semitic but showed great leadership skills???
Nixon – not the answer you were going for, bit it fits…
Elizabelle
I see the NYTimes frontpage headlined Brooks’ op ed “Why Elites Stink”.
Did Mr. Brooks include himself in that category?
I have met the gentleman in person and have to say, he was not putting off a stench.
Of course, it was relatively early in the day.
Walker
As a follow-upto my comment:
He is clearly taking the Hobbsian side in the Locke versus Hobbes argument. And that puts him as clearly opposed to the founding fathers as you can get. It should disqualify him from ever saying anything authoritative about America ever again.
Scott S.
@schrodinger’s cat: He’s got his, fuck all the other Jews.
beltane
David Brooks is quite the self-hater, isn’t he. The sole reason anyone should feel nostalgic for the days of the racist, sexist, anti-semitic old boys network is that it would have deprived David Brooks of all influence in the world or at least the world beyond the confines of whatever “ethnic” daily Brooks would have been relegated to.
What a loser.
cmorenc
Bobo exists so you won’t be tempted to waste your time reading and writing critiques of second-class wankers like Megan McArdle. Instead, you can read and critique a bona fide national champion wanker like Brooks, still a waste of time, but at least the amusement isn’t quite so much like shooting fish in a barrel, and more like, well…picking croutons off an Applebee’s salad bar.
Jay in Oregon
@Southern Beale:
More accurate, I think.
slag
@ted: When it comes to blaming hippies for all the world’s problems, Bobo’s philosophy is: If it feels good, do it. Which means, of course, that Bobo is a closet hippie (per his own definition of hippiedom). And just like any closeted person, he rails tirelessly against that which he cannot admit to being.
Martin
Every time you quote Bobo, my opinion of Chris Hayes goes up.
Baud
If we didn’t have death taxes, more people could afford to send their kids to Groton.
karen marie
@joeyess: Well, since the last Bobo column anyway.
And I must say, he has a lot of fucking nerve tut-tutting about lack of morals in “elites.” He demonstrates a complete lack of morals every time he opens his yap or puts pen to paper.
Quaker in a Basement
Um, Brooks? Gatsby–ever hear of him?
jrg
Shorter Bobo: back when the elites were all WASPs, everything was OK. Diversity has brought us elites that don’t know their place.
Yes, I’m sure that when the scumbags at Enron were joking about fucking grandma over, they really thought they were getting one up on the man.
japa21
I am looking forward to Pierce’s disemboweling of this mess. I realized that it was all BS as soon as I saw the phrase “meritocratic elite”. We don’t have a meritocracy system in this country and Bobo is a perfect example of that fact.
redshirt
Did we ever learn the name of the Senator/Congressman with his hands all over Bobo’s inner thighs?
Chris
This, again, is why I fucking hate these people. We lavish them with praise as “job creators” even when they don’t create any and as “those who worked hard” even when half of them inherited the money from mom and dad, then we’re told that the real problem is that our society isn’t class conscious and pro elitist ENOUGH. We give them the lowest tax rate since the 1920s, break the budget rather than dare to offend them by raising taxes to their previous lowest rate, then we’re told that they’re “taxed enough already” and want more. We give them a health care plan they themselves came up with and their current star implemented, and they scream socialism and extremism.
There are no ideas, there are no policies, there aren’t even demands or ultimatums. There’s just them, and Emmanuel Goldstein, and the purpose of politics is for their boot to stamp on their chosen scapegoat’s face, forever.
Petorado
So elitism cannot fail, it can only be failed. And this failure comes because the elites are being made self-conscious of their elitism by the lesser classes. So if the lesser classes would just shut their yaps, the elites could assume their morally righteous duties of presiding over us … and breaking up the businesses that employ us, finding ways of adding new fees to our essential services, getting tax breaks for business practices they would do anyway, and raiding our 401K and pension accounts for their personal enrichment.
… Bobo is such an insufferable ass.
amk
Great piece dougj. Any chance you can e-mail this to that most non-meritocratic fucker ?
Nylund
The only difference between the elites back then and the elites now is that information on their terrible deeds is more likely to made public now.
Back then, you had to wait until the building the workers were locked inside of caught on fire and the young women all died before knowing what monsters they are. In the information age, we laypeople are often more privy to what happens behind the curtain.
beltane
@Chris: The hubris of these people has pushed me much further to the left than I ever could have imagined a decade ago.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Elizabelle: It’s an example of Russell’s paradox: If he had included himself, the article would have been invalid, but by not including himself, it’s incomplete.
PeakVT
today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network
Is Brooks one of those self-loathing Jews I keep hearing about?
Liberty60
Anyone who tries to peddle the “Old Guard Elites were somehow Betterer” crap should be given detention and assigned readings of the people who wrote as actual living witnesses to the Olde Timey Elite Age; people like Twain, Dickens, Wharton, and Austen.
Read closely, and you can see their protrayals of the scummy self serving behavior of the Elites then was not one bit better than now.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@slag: I thought that was a Randian. Hippies are more communal: If it feels good for the group…
hueyplong
This latest is so patently offensive that presumably Pierce is somewhat taken aback and needs to step away for a while before posting about it. I’m afraid we’ll read that Moral Hazard has been pushed beyond canine endurance and will lift a leg on the oriental rug at the Club.
Violet
Were they beaten on their naked behinds for any transgressions? Does David Brooks get a tingle up his leg at the thought of such things? It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
Nylund
Despite what Brooks things, the Romneys and Diamonds of today have no more and no less noblesse oblige than the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. “Behind every great fortune is a great crime,” isn’t a recent saying. Our Galtian overlords have always been crooked.
Or, to translate the original French more accurately: “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.”
With time, it has simply become a bit harder to pull off those crimes without some of the information leaking out.
hep kitty
Well you can always trust the free market!
frapalinger
Deep down, Bobo puts more of the blame for the Holocaust on Rosa Luxemburg than Hitler. Garaunteed. He’s probably an even bigger appologist for the Czarist pogroms – it’s the Perchiks of the world that brought the Cossak hammer down. All in all, he’s just a huge self-loather that wants to be a WASP. He went to high school in the Main Line here in the Philly ‘burbs and probably didn’t fit in real well with all that olive skin, brown hair and brown eyes. I’m guessing he tried to fit in by adopting their sociopathic politics. That is perhaps where this nonsense really comes from. Small wonder Bobo loved Bush so much – he too had an ax to grind with his parents – liberal New York Jews. Wow! I’ve just totally solved the Bobo puzzle. Where’s my job at esquire?
frapalinger
Deep down, Bobo puts more of the blame for the Holocaust on Rosa Luxemburg than Hitler. Garaunteed. He’s probably an even bigger appologist for the Czarist pogroms – it’s the Perchiks of the world that brought the Cossak hammer down. All in all, he’s just a huge self-loather that wants to be a WASP. He went to high school in the Main Line here in the Philly ‘burbs and probably didn’t fit in real well with all that olive skin, brown hair and brown eyes. I’m guessing he tried to fit in by adopting their sociopathic politics. That is perhaps where this nonsense really comes from. Small wonder Bobo loved Bush so much – he too had an ax to grind with his parents – liberal New York Jews. Wow! I’ve just totally solved the Bobo puzzle. Where’s my job at esquire?
jwb
@japa21: It’s already up.
Liberty60
OT:
OK folks, fun’s over-
McDonnell Declares Bain Off Limits
bootsy
@JoeShabadoo: David Brooks makes a case for the Divine Right of Twats.
Redshift
A bit of an antidote for that horror: Thomas Friedman edited down to nothing but metaphors.
(Figures of speech, technically, not just metaphors, but still.)
hep kitty
Once gain, Brooks shows he has the finger on the pulse of Fictional America!
KG
It’s really simple… in the old days, the peons didn’t invest in the stock market, so the only money in it was elite money, their own money, of course they were more careful with it. In the last 40 years, as the rest of us got into the market, the elites started playing with someone else’s money and knew that even if that money lost, they’d still get their fat ass paycheck and (more importantly) their bonus checks. It’s much easier to gamble with what is perceived as someone else’s money – why do you think casinos give big fish markers?
JGabriel
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PeakVT:
Actually, Brooks is a self-loathing Canadian who grew up in Peter Cooper Village, Manhatttan.
It’s being a conservative born and raised for the duration of his childhood amidst successful sociaIist programs and experiments that really gnaws at him in the declivities of the night and makes him identify with the Applebee’s Salad Bar crowd, lest people think his success is due to the liberal governmental advantages he grew up with and devoted his adulthood to denying to anyone else.
.
KG
@Liberty60: somebody’s trying to get that sweet sweet Veep spot
ETA: previous comment stuck in moderation
frapalinger
@aimai:
Yes, see comment #70. It’s all the jews fault. Especially his nouveau-riche Jew father who sired an Jewish son that had no friends at the WASP high school he went to in the Main Line.
Brachiator
Shorter Bobo: Peasants just don’t understand that it’s hard out there for an oligarch.
Interrobang
@Nylund: Well, there is the point that when those young women all died even the famously corrupt state government of the time and the local elites did something about it so it didn’t happen all over again. These days, they just accept compensation payouts as a “cost of doing business,” buy a few more regulators, and hire more shadowy front groups like ALEC to make sure they’re legally never in the wrong. If they have lost anything, it’s their sense of shame.
On the other side, the non-elite have also lost the sort of rabble-rousing partisan press that helped keep the fat cats’ sense of shame sharpened. I note Brooks didn’t exactly mention that part of it, while he was busy wittering about Grotton.
redshirt
@beltane: Right there with you. I used to be pretty laid back when it came to all things political. I grow ever more radicalized and involved – thanks to the Wingnuts.
scav
@Liberty60: yes, working their way down to the single relevant standard of comparison: PANTONE® 9182, a tone I’m sure BoBo would very much favor (in small quiet 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle rooms).
jl
Josh Marshall has a shorter and better, more informative post about leadership
A Losing Battle
TPM Editor’s Blog
Josh Marshall July 12, 2012
” Running my own little company and him being a bona-fide high-flyer, I never imagined I’d be in a position to teach Mitt Romney a basic lesson about corporate governance and running a business. But here goes: The CEO is in charge and he’s responsible for what happens in the company. ”
…
” It’s a separate and interesting question why an acting CEO was never appointed if Romney was off in another state for years working full-time doing something else. ”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/07/a_losing_battle.php
Jay C
Breaking News!!
David Brooks writes fatuous crapola in NYT Op-Ed!
@Culture of Truth:
No, back in the Good Olds, Groton (like the British “public schools” on which it was modeled) housed the children of billionaires in cubicles so as to assuage their parents that they were getting a “quality” education worthy of their status: i.e. Spartan accommodation and forced egalitarianism while maintaining a constant underlying reinforcement of their “inherent” elitism.
Brooks is far better at sociology than he is at history: and he’s not even that good at sociology…
JGabriel
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Liberty60:
From the article:
Just disregard the period 1977-2002. Mitt’s running on his successful record at Bain, not his record of outsourcing and off-shoring at Bain!
.
GregB
For instance when those good old racist boys down south buried those rabble rouser civil rights young’ins Cheney, Goodman and Schwarner they ended up employing dozens and dozens of workers who dug their corpses from a damn. Thus providing good paying work and the ethic behind that work and the moral lesson of not rabble rousing.
Don’t get me started on the Emmitt Till employment bump.
Brachiator
Here’s a little something about the 99 percent from a tax and accounting site about the wonderful world of income inequality:
The Pew Trust study on Economic Mobility Across Generations makes a number of sobering observations:
Pursuing the American Dream uses the most current data to measure mobility by family income, wealth, and personal earnings to reveal how closely tied a person’s place on the economic ladder is to that of his or her parents’. While a majority of Americans exceed their parents’ family income and wealth, the extent of their absolute mobility gains are not always enough to move them to a different rung of the economic ladder. Measuring both absolute and relative mobility, some of the highlights of the research include:
Eighty-four percent of Americans have higher family incomes than their parents did.
However, those born at the top and bottom of the income ladder are likely to stay there as adults. Over 40 percent of Americans raised in the bottom quintile of the family income ladder remain stuck there adults, and 70 percent remain below the middle.
African Americans are still less likely to exceed their parents’ income than are whites and they are more likely to be stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder across a generation.
A four-year college degree promotes upward mobility from the bottom and prevents downward mobility from the middle and the top.
runt
This will all be solved by the Confidence Fairy’s twin cousins, the Leadership Fairy and the Followership Fairy. With steadfast voting and enough tax cuts, the moral and decent age of the robber barons will return. No need for the guvmint to do anything.
lgerard
I get this all the time from my more conservative friends who complain about “the decline in morality”
When I point out that if morality is in decline, it most be doing so from some apogee in the past.
I then ask the simple question: “When was the golden age of morality in this country/”
I have never got a sensible answer to that one.
Chris
@beltane:
Same. If nothing else, I’ve come to a far better understanding of why things like the French and Russian revolutions happened. It’s not that people want them or have any illusions about them, in fact they’ll put them off for far longer than warranted. But when the elites simply won’t stop, there eventually comes a point where you say “ANYTHING has to be better than this.”
Rosalita
and Charlie Pierce doesn’t disappoint!
WereBear
I believe he did.
This is not analysis, or sociology, or even punditry. This is Bobo’s fantasy:
… he is a tweedy young gentleman riding around in his shiny new flivver, wearing a raccoon coat and sipping discreetly from a flask, while a doe-eyed flapper eyes him up and down, liking what she sees in this strapping Aryan fellow all set to inherit his father’s manufacturing interests…
It’s all these freaks do, these shills and con artists and psychopaths. They sell fantasies right out of those crumbling picture books and dime admission “flickers” and those grade-school tales of manly farmers and virtuous maids or even Leave It to Beaver.
It is all fantasy, it was always fantasy, because Andy Hardy was everyone’s American fantasy life at one time. It seeped into the culture. It didn’t matter that he was played by Mickey Rooney, a fatherless vaudeville child who performed to keep himself and his mother fed, and his girlfriend was Judy Garland, who was kept topped up with amphetamines and put to sleep with downers by a studio system created by Louis B Mayer; a penniless immigrant Jewish person.
Everybody loved that version of America. The fools bought into it.
aimai
@Nylund:
I used that as the epigraph on my dissertation about property rights in Nepal. I picked it up from The Godfather but I believe its Balzac. He had a bunch to say about this from some time ago.
aimai
Violet
@JGabriel:
He’s trying to do a Jedi mind trick. “This is not the corporate record you are looking for.” Don’t think it’s gonna work.
Comrade Dread
Well, normally, I’d say religion, but I’m guessing most of them are of the church of St. Ayn Rand or Republican Jesus and are perfectly okay with looting, lying, and pillaging because it shows they’re great men unrestrained by the ignorant moralizing of the sheep.
randal sexton
Income inequality leads to tumbril rides.
John M. Burt
@Southern Beale: Regarding “charity vs. taxes”, I must side with Jewry (and Jesus) over Protestantism: helping your neighbors is not something nice you can do if you happen to feel like it, it’s an ironclad obligation.
Judge Crater
Brooks is a colossal ass. How do his editors read this shit without gagging. Really, are the powers that be at the NY Times so out of touch that they find any of his “ideas” anything but fatuous and irrelevant?
Ghastly. Instead of Anthony Lewis, or even William Safire, we get Friedman, Brooks and Douthat.
jake the snake
If I should ever meet David Brooks, I would have only one question. Split, swallow or pearl necklace?
burnspbesq
FTFY
jl
@Judge Crater:
” Really, are the powers that be at the NY Times so out of touch that they find any of his “ideas” anything but fatuous and irrelevant? ”
It’s very reliable opinion/analysis product suited to the reader’s taste. The bland generalities avoid unpleasant controversies. And Brooks is superb at product placement for the NYT in the broadcast media.
I really don’t see the problem.
kd bart
I’m telling you. The second night of The Republican Convention is going to feature a speech from Hologram Jay Gould on the virtues and superiority of Gilded Age Economics.
Alex S.
The first seven paragraphs are interesting. There are some good perceptions in there, and then it falls apart, no, it collapses like a black hole. Brooks tries to argue that a meritocracy is a hereditary system because of social structures, his usual shtick. But at the same time, he says that our elites are brats because they are new on the scene. So either his social observations about elites working harder and sending their kids to piano lessons etc.. are wrong, or meritocracy is not a hereditary system. After all, how have our elites risen to the top when the previous meritocracy should still be ruling, thanks to their supposedly superior education skills?
Well, that and Brooks’ elites resembling Nazis….
Liberty60
@aimai:
Here is the American Conservative to answer your question:
Origuy
@Judge Crater:
Objection, Your Honor. Assumes facts not in evidence.
xian
@aimai: he’s a been a self-hater since he became buckley’s protege despite the gentile ceiling at NR.
MCA1
I can almost sympathize with where he’s coming from, because, yes, better and more competent fucking elites, please. But it’s how he gets there and what’s underlying it and the ridiculous pretzel-twisting he does to get there that’s so bothersome.
Here’s his mindset: “I’m a Boomer. We Boomers can’t deal with the fact that we’ve sold out en masse, Bob Dylan was right, and most of the troubles we have in this country are the fault of us, the Boomers, and our 30 years of strip mining the economy while pretending to be navelgazing. As such, and given that I think Boomers and Boomer culture and ethos should pervade everything, I’ll come up with an elaborate rationalization. Here goes: We’re all still rebels in our hearts of hearts, and therefore simply afraid of being seen and criticized as “The Man.” So much so, in fact (and so modest, to boot, also, too!) that even those of us who’ve become “The Man” can’t or won’t embrace it. This gives me a sad, because back in the day, “The Man” was awesome. Unfortunately, he was so tinged with anti-semitism and racism and sexism and snootiness (fault: Liberals!) that we overlooked how otherwise fucking awesome he was, in his embrace of moral authority and responsiblity. But, you know, racism, sexism, and all that – they’re dead. We’re diverse now! Also, too, because of all of the Boomers (no credit: Liberals). We’ve cleansed ourselves. Therefore, all we really need is to convince today’s Man that all he/she needs to do is embrace the authority the peons place on them and start leading.
All of this allows him to completely miss the bigger picture: the elites can get away with fucking anything these days, they don’t fear any accountability/repurcussions/true financial hardship when they fail, and are completely disconnected from the rest of the society, and so feel no need to be anything other than money-hogging pricks who look down their noses at anyone not fortunate (in their eyes, awesome, smart and hardworking) enough to have $25 mil in the bank. They couldn’t possibly be asked to come back and govern the rest of us, because they and their entire generation are infinitely self-absorbed, self-satisfied, and incompetent. (Bobo’s response to that, of course, would be: well, what about Mitt Romney? Spiritual poobah, worth a quarter of a billion, and HE’s engaged! He’s taking up the yoke of noblesse oblige, so you should vote for him!)
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us? (formerly MarkJ)
You guys are all missing his point entirely:
That’s the key point right there. We should start housing our current Wall Street, Corporate, and Media elites in 6 by 9 foot rooms for 6 year or so to teach them proper morals. I think federal prison cells are about that size. It may not be Grotton, but I bet they’d learn some lessons. It’s an idea with some merit, I think.
ottercliff
Ah, now I understand, Bobo: “corruption that has now crept into the world of finance” and it seems Harvard and the Ivy League seem to have something to do with it.
ottercliff
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us? (formerly MarkJ): I agree. With Jerry Sandusky for roommate and frat brother.
Brachiator
@Jay C:
Brooks also apparently believes that readers of his column who are not alumni of Groton or similar schools might ever take a little Wiki stroll.
But of course, where you find “muscular Christianity” and weird Spartan living conditions you are going to find sexual repression and buggery.
Roy G.
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us? (formerly MarkJ): It took until comment 109, but you beat me to it!
THIS is what is missing – the threat of serious time for serious crimes. Remember all the ‘Law and Order’ Rudy Giuliani loving conservatives authoritarians? Oh yes, they wholly agreed that ‘The Broken Window’ theory of Law Enforcement was right and true and that those street criminals needed to be locked up, stat.
That was for the little people – for the elites, the neutering of the SEC in finance and Iran-Contra scandal for the pols sent the message loud and clear that laws were for little people without big money war chests and squadrons of lawyers.
Jon Corzine in chains would be a nice start, followed by Bob Diamond and the rest of the Rogues Gallery of the TBTF Criminal Elite.
chuck butcher
The Boomers sold out theme assumes some stuff that isn’t at all in evidence – like that most of them weren’t there to begin with. I was raised in Central Ohio by professionals, went to HS at a County HS that was 80% children of professionals and there were a handful of crazies like me that rebelled seriously. Maybe they liked Dylan or The Doors or Airplane but the words were just music (bands did make money from them). Hippies were noisy and noticed, not common. Anti-Vietnam didn’t mean membership in anti-establishment – not wanting to get killed for Dow’s profits or having your upward mobility interupted by service is not the same thing nor does it predict future views of anti-extablishment.
The amount of stupidity today regarding young Boomers is damn near astonishing – accurately, the vast majority of Boomers bought into the system as it was and simply continued on. Brooks engages in the same stupidity that the “sold-out” do – amplifying something out of all reality.
chuck butcher
@chuck butcher:
Not to in any way minimize the stupidity of Brooks…
Chris
@Roy G.:
It’s an interesting and curious contradiction in RWA types, that while they have a rigid, fanatic, Javert like obsession with The Law as it pertains to common folk, they also believe the people at the top should have as little restrictions on their actions as humanly possible, if any. (No regulations for the people who control the economy, no oversight for people waging wars or gathering intelligence, no accountability for the clergy).
Joe Buck
I’ll give Bobo this much: there used to be a sense of noblesse oblige among large parts of the wealthy that seems to have vanished along with Rockefeller Republicanism. I think, though, that part of the reason is that there used to be a serious threat to the wealthy coming from communism and democratic socialism, giving those guys an incentive to keep the working class (at least, working-class whites) from suffering too much. That’s gone.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us? (formerly MarkJ)
@Joe Buck: I’m reading There Is Power in a Union by Philip Dray right now, and compared to the gilded age, and even into the 1930s, the working classes haven’t even begun to suffer yet. The idea that the elites were so much kinder and gentler and more responsible back then is utter bullshit. They hired vigilantes “private detectives” and roughnecks to bludgeon people who went out on strike. The work day was 12-14 hours 6-7 days a week. They paid peanuts.
We’ll get back to those days before too long if current trends continue, but it was worse back then, which doesn’t exactly support Brooks’s argument. He’s a terrible historian.
Chris
@Joe Buck:
Not to pile on, but this doesn’t seem right to me. “There used to be noblesse oblige” – yeah, but not from everyone. I think “noblesse oblige” simply means “not all rich people are assholes.” Just as not all rich people today are. We remember the good ones, but I suspect their peers viewed them with the same contempt that their descendants today have for George Soros and Warren Buffet.
Sgaile-beairt
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us? (formerly MarkJ):
They sent AIRPLANES to knock us down like dogs when we struck against their dark satanic mills. Damn right we aint seen nuthin yet!
No i’ve never forgot that picture in my high school history book, of the gummint biplanes bombing my by-sweat-shared forbears…never will either!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
shep
The only decent elites we’ve ever had (and they were bastards too) knew that the rule-of-law was the only thing that kept elites from being bigger bastards than they were. But Brooks doesn’t.
Nutella
@Sgaile-beairt:
That’s why the RWAs want to make sure that school history books don’t include that kind of information any more. Just cheerful stuff.
Wasn’t it Tennessee recently where they tried to take out anything about some of the Founders being slave owners?
Herman newticks
Cripes! Maybe if our elites weren’t so corrupt, we wouldn’t have the terrible followship problem he pointed out last month. Idiot
dirge
So, let me get this straight…
1. Our current elite are less diligent, intelligent and moral than they were in the era of Jim Crow and robber barons, and certainly much less so than they were in the golden age of the fifties.
2. Those same incompetent elite are currently receiving a larger proportion of this country’s wealth than they ever have in the history of the country. Certainly much, much more than they got in the fifties when they deserved it more than they do now.
3. Our perfect modern capitalist market system guarantees that everyone, most especially the elite, gets paid exactly what they’re worth.
4. The above three statements are perfectly consistent with one another because what’s the matter with kids these days?
5. We should make everyone work harder.
6. Freedom.
7. If we take stuff away from the poor and middle class, they’ll work harder.
8. Get off my lawn.
9. If we give more stuff to the rich they’ll work harder.
10. Knowledge economy.
11. You should’ve planned ahead and saved up before your back gave out. Pay for it your damned self, boy.
12. Back in my day we had to walk 10 miles to and from school. Uphill. Both ways.
13. The world is flat.
14. The deficit needs to be our highest priority, before bridges, schools and hospitals, but after six digit salaries for senescent, fatuous rent boys who publicly jack off in the opinion pages of the New York Times. Also, bank bailouts.
15. Seriously, if our elite is in decline, why are they getting richer?
16. Fuck you, pal.