Phony Populism

David Brooks is probably correct to argue that there’s more to Obama’s backlash than race. But his explanation is misleading and self-indulgent.

In his version of events, the assorted tea-partiers, birthers and townhall trolls aren’t just the Republican fringe, they’re the American populist movement, and what they’re protesting is:

a government of the highly educated … [which] includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals.

It’s the righteous anger of Jeffersonians against financial and political elites.

While that may describe supporters of, say, anti-Fed zealot Ron Paul, the 2008 Republican primary results show those are small minority.

David Brooks wants to cast the Obama backlash as a bipartisan phenomenon, ideally one going back to the dawn of America. Congressional voting patterns show differently. The much simpler explanation is that the G.O.P. hardcore are freaking out, just like progressive Democrats did when George W. Bush rolled out his post-9/11 agenda.

Brooks almost certainly remembers that Bush bailed out Wall Street before Obama did. I’m sure he’s aware that the A.M.A. and insurance industry are elite, with top-dollar lobbyists on payroll to prove it.

There are plenty of perfectly consistent, conservative reasons to freak out at the Obama agenda; that should be adequate without needing to claim, as well, that G.O.P. hardcore are today representing “the people against the elites” or some other grand dialectical conflict that only exists on op-ed pages.

Inkblots

If we can’t trust the people and we can’t trust the elites, who can we trust? How can change be effectuated? This is one of the problems National Affairs is going to have to think through in the years ahead.

Another is: Can the state do anything to effectively promote virtuous behavior? Because when you get into the core problems, whether in Washington, California or on Wall Street, you keep seeing the same moral deficiencies: self-indulgence, irresponsibility and imprudence.

When David Brooks gets into the core problems, he keeps seeing the same moral deficiencies: self-indulgence, irresponsibility and imprudence. Surely, other moral deficiencies are out there (violence, avarice, morbidity, power-lust, etc.), but these are the ones he lights on, failures of childhood discipline a stereotypical “your dad” would reprimand you for.

Though not as florid in its Freudian auto-exegesis as this anti-Obama screed by Michael Knox Beran, it’s still a pretty telling inkblot. A columnist’s job is hard, of course; to construct a pleasing, digestable story out of something as broad as “society” or “gender relations” or “politics” takes finesse, especially as every factual assertion will be challenged by some two-bit with a blog.

In many ways, there’s no safer vantage than your own private subjectivity.

But a columnist, like a critic, must also pretend to objectivity if he’s gonna see a wide audience. If it’s his subconscious he’s trawling for bodies, he’s gotta claim to be society’s dumping ground. Which is fine, but society is ultimately big beyond your power to conceive, and self-differing within — which is why the aforequoted paragraphs are so hilarious in their unreflective specificity.

You go looking, as a matter of professional pride, for society’s disease, but mostly you find your own. (Self-indulgence is David Brooks’ projection, just like “anti-realism” is mine.)