As Marshall McLuan said, “the medium is the message.” We have this scarcity mentality arising at a time of (because of?) new modes of communication. It is not that these modes just transmit the message, they *shape* it. If you have time the following podcast from BBC’ 4’s “Seriously” is fascinating:
http://pca.st/episode/60c5a956-1765-46bd-a078-e606b464a0a8
8
A life long Democrat, with a New Left, community activist focus, I never thought I'd feel alienated from the Party I've worked so hard for. But advocating listening to our citizens to better understand their needs and quoting Tip's "All politics is local" at the last CA Party Convention - where I was a delegate - only got me attacked as anti-progressive on one side and someone against party harmony on the other.
So I would go farther than David. The political philosophical premises of western domocracy are rooted in an 18th century notion of unalienable rights and the distinction between civil society and the political realm that serves it. Those premises have collapsed in the face of Western everday behavior patterns and with them the behavior needed to sustain democracy.
The almost Marxian distruction of the petit bourgeoise in an era of disruptive technological change (internet, AI, etc.) has transformed community to include online groups of people who have never met and friends to include bots who click buttons without anyone having any real idea of who either party to the "transaction" really is.
Re-read the Federalist Papers (especially #10) and American political thought up to WWII. Our nonpolitical life is not their civilian society. That world is gone and we now reap the whirlwind. Our dilemma is rooted in the lack of creative but coherent Western political thought. As Hannah Arendt realized, this is the same problem poised by Heidigger's support for Nazis.
26
Although Brooks talks about Republicans vs. Democrats - we already have fracturing amongst the GOP with the still present Tea Party - and between the old guard of the DNC (Pelosi, Schumer) and the progressives (Sanders, Ellison). It's very easy to imagine the disenchanted, disenfranchised Sanders followers forming their own party. The creation of multiple parties - may be happening sooner than you think and I for one can't wait.
24
As Steve Earle famously wrote, “I was born in the land of plenty, now there ain’t enough.”
4
Nationalism is not perfectly legitimate.
2
Mr. Brooks,
Thanks for this well-written article; you help me to understand better what is now happening in your country.
I had this bad feeling about this resurgence of political extremism.
I believe that the decision of United Citizens vs FEC was the flashing point of the appropriation by the billionaires of your democratical institutions, including the GOP and, to a lesser extent, the Democratic Party.The Gerrymandering and Russia's hand help too.
The alternative Trump/Clinton always was a lose-lose situation for the people but, despite the end result, Clinton got the majority of the popular votes.
November 2018 will be a test for the viability of the democracy in the US; good luck and Godspeed ...
20
If anyone is to blame the scarcity mentality in the United States, it is the Republican Party, especially since 1994. The GOP's Greek chorus insidiously affirms that the government can't help anyone, that we should be grateful for trickle-down and that many of us are too dumb, too lazy or insufficiently entrepreneurial to succeed.
No surprise that the national view is bleak and a scarcity mentality rules.
23
Jack (below) puts his finger on the problem with this otherwise very smart column: Brooks's false assumption that the clan warriors of the right have equally savage opponents in the left, There is no equivalent on the left to the relentless propaganda and rage of Sean Hannity, Fox and Friends, Rush Limbaugh, etc. Rachel Maddox commands a big audience but she also asks her guest to point out any errors in her version of events. The Fox News crowd shouts down or cuts off anyone who diverges from the party line. The royal road to Trump's serial mendacity was paved by the clans of the right, not the clans of the left. Mainstream journalists like Brooks seem to think false equivalency and objectivity are the same thing,
60
So, this may lead to a European-style multi-party scheme--great! It's over-due; high time we had more choices and broke out of the box of just party A or party B. It's long amazed me how advanced countries like Canada can create new parties seemingly over night (and gain power!), while we stay fossilized in our two-party "system"--desperate for more choice, and starved for creative ideas. We need more choices to generate the constructive energy our politics needs.
36
Excellent article.
I would note that National Review in the 1960's through the mid 1970's was interesting to me. I read it regularly. It was surely the most effective magazine anywhere in the defense of Jim Crow. Blacks were not just an inferior culture, they should submit to Whites. If ever a Black got elected the officials must illegally not certify the win, and an all-white jury would never convict the officials. If one did get into office anyway, the cartoon "The Jig [a more insulting term than Nigger] is Up." showed a crowd of very happy Whites looking Up at the dangling bare feet of an elected Jig. And frequently on radio and tv (usually right after news of violence against those trying to get Blacks allowed to vote) as well as in print William F Buckley noted that throughout the South Black children's education was funded at a fraction of what White's was. If Blacks got the vote they would want to raise taxes to improve their children's education. And WFB, Jr said that he would never object to a man trying to keep his taxes from going up, obviously endorsing the violence. I remember him even adopting the Black Panther slogan, "By Any Means Necessary."
As a Southerner for Civil Rights, I found that interesting. Quite evil, but interesting.
24
"Eventually, conservatives will realize: If we want to preserve conservatism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors. Liberals will realize: If we want to preserve liberalism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors."
Let's be even clearer: Clan warriors seek to control people, all people, who may stand in their way. People are a commodity, and can be bought, sold or otherwise disposed of. Fascist mercantilism of the rawest kind.
12
The USA entered a new era, way back in the 1930s. A crisis showed up at a regularly scheduled 70 year interval...in the form of a Great Worldwide Depression. Laissez Faire Capitalism was failing. Market dynamics were forcing wild swings between abundance and scarcity. There were simply more people living in the same space with no frontier outlet.
...
And thus our American style application of Keynsian Theory began.....the New Deal. Govt regulation intensified. Govt investment in private industry was carefully managed to "prime the pumps" of the economy, now guided by a semi-govt organization called the Federal Reserve. The American New Deal was hardly any different than the others...British Socialism. German Nazi Fascism. Soviet Communism.....all various interpretations of the JM Keynes economic model. The one difference.....Americans were more practical minded, intent on upholding individual rights, using only what ideas worked and mindful of separation of powers.
.....
As the New Deal became institutionalized.....two political parties developed a symbiotic relationship.....two pillars of society stabilizing the massive Bureaucratic System....two opposite wings of the same soaring eagle.......tho' nowadays we often see only two opposite cheeks of the same ugly rear end.
....
The Republican Party has had its mask ripped off.....and is effectively destroyed. This is how America works......but now people will begin to realize that the DNC is the same as the RNC.
3
I see many of your points but for God's sake stop trying to blame this on the liberals. "Decent liberals and conservatives will eventually decide they need to break from it structurally." Are you saying that minorities in this country just need to subscribe to the prosperity gospel? It's like the guy with the sick brother who's told by a Christian Scientist the brother only THINKS he's sick. The next time they meet, the CS asks, "So how's your brother?" "Worse," comes the answer. "Now he thinks he's dead."
18
In many ways, Trumpism is just “Newtspeak” coming home to roost. Newtspeak? I’m talking about Gingrich’s GOPAC memo and his thesaurus of vilification against Democrats, to the extent of banishing the adjectival form “Democratic” because it sounds too positive. Orwell wasn’t that far wrong with 1984; he just had his dates off by a decade.
32
And still Democrats refer to their opponents as "GOP" - Grand Old Party.
Accept their terms, and you're halfway to losing the debate.
Words matter. Why won't Democrats use them properly? We're the educated ones, right?
4
This Hobbesian mentality is ironic considering the U.S. is by far the richest we've ever been, with household net worth around $100 trillion today (that's $760,000 per family if split evenly). It's been hitting records since 2013.
While the logical counter is that we have a very unequal distribution of wealth (the bottom 50% of families average $11,000 net worth), Republicans consistently support policies to make that worse, Trump's tax cuts being the latest example (about 35% of the benefit goes to the bottom 80%, before considering spending cuts). Deregulation is another way money shifts to the top, as it makes companies more profitable and they send those profits to rich shareholders (the bottom 80% have about 8% of stock wealth).
The inability to grapple with this inequality issue is what ails our Republic; instead of fighting for better policy, Republicans blame immigrants, who have nothing to do with it.
If it were up to Democrats, we'd have higher taxes on the rich, Medicare for All, and paid-for tuition. Immigrants would be welcome. The country would be much more unified.
Mr. Brooks, it's time to stop the false equivalence!
56
It's not just enabling Trump: for example, the Iowa Republican party remains curiously silent on Steve King's constant racist statements.
16
"They" will realize?
"Something new"?
David Brooks writes like a man in hasty retreat from the disaster he helped to create. Now "they" have to do "something" about it.
27
Don't write another word, Mr. Brooks, until you admit that you voted for it.
All of it.
Confess your complicity, and then let's talk.
28
David, I always looks forward to your analysis with Mark Shields on NPR. That said, I have to strongly disagree with your statement on the pillars of conservatism. Many commentators have tried to enlighten you re: the idea that conservatives judge people only by their character. I'd like to address a few other pillars you mentioned.
The rule of law... the letter of the law is more to the point, in fact, conservatives embrace a fundamentalist interpretation of our constitution like they do with the Old Testament. It's a cruel and strict interpretation that necessitated the battles for suffrage, civil and human rights.
Moral decency... Old Testament morality is more accurate.
Fiscal responsibility? Conservatives have been more about dismantling regulations to enable their dream of an unfettered free market which led to our Great Recession. I don't think that was very responsible. Additionally, they dreamt of and now have lowered taxes not just on business which I support, but also on the very very rich. They don't like taxes which support infrastructure and public education and prefer to privatize all of it. Again, not very responsible.
I hope you consider that the pillars you mentioned are more idealist than reality based.
25
Oh, I am so glad that I am not David Brooks, thinking that I should delve into such issues and so deeply and so well. I won't pick nits about this topic other than to say, "Thank you for keen insights, David."
1
I am not sure we will ever give up the two-party system. Major changes do not come out of intellectual curiosity. My guess is these two parties will transform into new rhythms and we will forget about Trump as we forgot all about Bush.
3
Nice piece. One possible refinement. Even if abundance is gone, that need not mean scarcity, at least in this harsh form. Sufficiency – especially some notion of enough for all – is more abundance-like in its implications, and perhaps a sufficient aspiration to keep things moving forward in these dark times.
8
False equivalency much, Mr. Brooks?
Liberals VS Progressives VS Third Way is just coalition politics. Liberals are unlikely to split from the Democratic Party. To do what? Vote Green? Yes, many Progs did just that in 2016, but not as many as Conservative Dems flipped for Trump. Died in wool Liberals like me? Not likely.
The Republican Party, on the other hand, was already stolen from Conservatives. Trump is our first and hopefully only Tea Party president, with all the loony tea-baggage that implies. The equivalency is false in part because the GOP is already transformed and regular Conservatives lost to the wingnuts.
The other side of the aisle is a different animal. Sure the Progressive wing of the Democratic coalition pushes left. Good for them. Good for America. I too wish we had more champions of the progressive ideals that studies show most Americans believe in. But we have nothing like the Tea Party in ascendancy that the Republicans are plagued by.
In short, Mr. Brooks, you may be half right. If you decide to leave your party, might I suggest an alternative? We Democrats have a big tent. Come on over.
14
David,
If the National Review is more interesting now than ever before, I can’t imagine how bad it was. Since the beginning of the Trump presidency, I have been going regularly to the National Review to try to see how that group of conservatives is reacting. What I have observed is a consistent message: the NR staff consider themselves the hypocrisy police.
As you pointed out, after you get past the tweets, the President is acting as a traditional Republican corporatist. Nothing the NR says challenges Trump’s approach any more than Fox News does. With the exception of the Charlottesville fandango, Jonah and the boys (literally) have stayed true to what Mr Goldberg claims as their MO: challenge the Left. Where are the new ideas?
5
Yes, as difficult a period as this has been, it has created a window for a centrist, third party to emerge. It will embody the ideal of the compromise politics that used to exist in this country. It will encourage all people to engage in a conversation to exchange ideas, with the prerequisite to be respectful of each others' opinion, as we decide on what is the acceptable path forward.
If you build it, they will come.
4
Brooks evades, or misses, the key point of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The "country" was an artificial construct arising out of Wilsonian utopic vision of a post-WWI Europe. Same with, say, Czechoslovakia. But what they found was it took an autocrat in the person of Tito to hold the warring ethnic groups and factions together. When Tito died, they began tearing each other to bits. We are seeing this all over the planet as multiethnic artificial constructs dissolve into "failed states." The combination of democracy and a multiethnic construct is one of the hardest political entities to maintain. Check the US in fifty years.
12
David, "we" don't have a "scarcity mind set." Trump and his followers do, and the vast majority of Republican officeholders are now cynical fellow-travelers, going along with him simply in order to loot the poor and middle class, redistributing OUR wealth to the 1% that keeps them in power through Citizens United dark money and gerrymandering. The majority of Americans did not vote for Trump or even for republicans. The system is rigged and is no longer a democracy, and is in steady decline. Meanwhile Democrats still believe in the American Dream and the American Ideal. We support immigrants because we believe that America, like love, can only be realized by sharing it. We believe our country can provide health care for all, retirement and a decent social safety net. We believe in the rule of law, regardless of the party of the offender. We believe in FACTS and TRUTH. We believe that America can afford the best infrastructure in the world (raise the gas tax already -- 10 cents a gallon would be nothing to most Americans). We believe that government is necessary to civil society, and in the importance of (sensible) regulation, as demonstrated by the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, consumer protections, etc. Democratic officeholders are not perfect by any means, but by and large they take their responsibilities to the public seriously (as Republicans once did). A multi-party system in the US is a pipe dream. We just need to elect Democrats and fix this broken system!
23
So, if liberals get angry about the things that David Brooks admits Republicans are doing, they are just as bad. In continuing to promulgate the false equivalency narrative, Brooks is every bit as corrosive of the fabric of civil discourse as Limbaugh or Hannity or Alex Jones.
36
I do not know where to begin dissecting this column.
First off Brooks should look at a graph of low taxes on high income earners and the wealthy and the earnings of the middle classes. Basically the graph looks like a suspension bridge spanned from 1928 to now. As taxes go down the bridge becomes the reverse for incomes and the wealth of the middle class. What does that tell us? Tax cuts for the rich don't work. There is more data for anyone who wants to research this trend. So my comment is that the feeling is scarcity is compounded by our current political ideology.
Brooks totally ignores the effects of BIG MONEY in our elections, and the goal of the gop to undermine government. Government has been effective on many levels on not much on others but in his philosophical conservationism we were better off in the 1750"s.
I ask Brooks do you think that the Kochs and the wealthy of this nation have all the answers to the issues we face. Democracy is hard and citizens need to be engaged.
27
I am not at all sure multi-party parliamentary style government is immune to the tribal political extremism which broke apart Yugoslavia and is breaking out here. Look at Israel - many parties, but that hasn't brought consensus, it has given disproportionate power to the ultra-religious.
We need sane, well informed voters who care about other citizens, not just themselves and their tribe. And who can discern between facts and alternative facts.
1
Brook cooped MLK when he wrote that republicans believed this... "the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin." This is the most ridiculous thing Brooks has every spewed.
6
The Right just won't stop co-opting Dr. King. It's their own particular type of virtue signalling.
4
Read the Guardian's piece on Finland for a vision what a modern abundance mind-set (and good governance) can produce, in a country with far poorer natural endowments than the U.S. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/12/safe-happy-and-free-does-f...
6
Ugh. Why does Brooks need to over-complicate things in order to defend some Republican ideal, in which only he still believes? Since Reagan, Republicans have been the party of white greed and brown scapegoating. Anti-minority, anti-science, anti-fact, anti-Democrat explanations for all our woes have completely replaced any "can-do" which ever existed in the party. Government is the problem, remember? False equivalence, which tars the Dems well beyond their faults, only enables additional wealth and power grabbing by the Fox News favorites. Give it up Brooks, the Republican party in which you believe(d) is/was a fairy tail. They are the problem. Them and Fox "Propaganda", who have now even invited the Russians into the scam.
20
Sorry guys, ex-liberal here.
David Brooks is right on the money. It is the rabid liberalism people like myself no longer could follow into its extreme dead end that brought us Trump.
It is you guys who better wake up and put the finger on your own nose.
Otherwise, we are going to be in for another 4 years of Trump and I cannot believe any of you want THAT, do you!?
7
"...liberalism goes from a creed that values individual rights and deliberation to one that values group separatism and intellectual intolerance."
And here we go with the false equivalency. It's like saying "you're not being tolerant toward my intolerance, so therefore you're the intolerant one!" I suppose liberals should just sit back and allow conservatives to roll back women's rights, LGBTQ protections, and safeguards against police brutality. But you'll surely point out a group of campus protestors shouting down poor Charles Murray and call it a draw.
13
Here's the thing, though. The last three Democrats to be elected have been fairly centrist candidates- more socially liberal than their Republic counterparts, but budget focused, continuing the ongoing wars, fairly tough on immigration. The last two Republicans have moved us so far to the exclusion/ spend everything on war and defense end of the spectrum that we can see a reasonable center from where we stand. Suggesting that this is a national ideology rather than a crisis created by ever more extreme ideologues on the right really doesn't serve us well when it comes to solving the problem.
13
Chicken hawks, like Trump, are not warriors. John Kelly’s anti-immigrant (esp non-white anti-immigrant) is not a warrior’s ethos. Mattis’ embrace of the beltway over Soldiers is not a warriors ethos. And definitely McMaster’s refusal to resign his commission is not a warrior’s ethos. It is that of opportunists.
5
Is it a scarcity mind set (dominant perception) or scarcity (fact)?
2
President Macron in France was elected on a self depicted “nor right -nor left” program. Both sides having slowly lost people’s trust, he took advantage of it
1
The two-party system ended last November. Trump killed it, and thankfully, won.
2
The spectacle of so many thoughtful conservatives at a crossroads raises interesting questions. How do we resist the illiberal excesses of the GOP without bolstering Russian intelligence and far right media efforts to undermine the legitimacy of representative govt? Would a new Burkean party where Brooks, Frum, Krytsal, Sasse, Flake etc. feel at home attract enough traditional conservatives, independents, centrist Dems to put up a fight on matters of national importance? Or would it be a flash in the pan that quickly dissolves into irrelevance. Though I disagree with many things these folks believe, I respect their stance on core principals and wish them luck in finding or founding political institutions that reflect their voice.
4
I read a fair number of comments and am surprised that no one commented on the one obvious thing in this essay - people have a scarcity mentality because things ARE scarce for most of us. Income inequality is the worst it has been since the Gilded Age, wages are stagnant and pensions almost unheard of, job security is a thing of the past and the general trend is a race to the bottom. The 1% have siphoned off the majority of the benefits of our capitalist system to themselves - we see scarcity because there IS scarcity. Until that is addressed, we can have a bazillion political parties and it will not matter. Those who have the gold will make the rules.
10
"Resources are limited. The world is dangerous. Group conflict is inevitable. It’s us versus them. If they win, we’re ruined, therefore, let’s stick with our tribe. The ends justify the means."
This is all the exact flip-side to Obama's viewpoint on the world. He constantly spoke of unification, being stronger together, not being afraid of the world or each other. But somehow the propaganda machine at Fox, and his sworn enemies in Congress (McConnell), managed to drown him out and overcome his message.
I take issue with your equivalence, in saying there is a siege mentality on both right and left. It is definitely there on the right -- it underlies all they do. But where is it on the left? I see only people trying to right this wrong.
6
Let's not forgot the Democrats contribution to this scarcity mindset.
We are running out of oil
We are using all of our natural resources
Population is going to kill us all
Global warming is going to kill us all
Why give an example, but site only one side (the republicans). the problem is on both sides, not one side. If you are going to tell a story, make it one that uses examples from both sides. So the article becomes a political one, not actually a story at all. Just more blather about how the Republicans are killing us all. The democrats and republicans are both hurting themselves and the electorate. they both do it. If the NY Times can't get this through their head and stop acting like the Alt-Fox news site, then they are no better than Fox. Get this NYT...you are no better than Fox.
3
What is especially appalling about the current Republican party is the cynical way they trash Trump privately, anonymously, "off the record", while supporting him and his policies publicly. Cowardly. But more than that, it is extremely destructive to the democratic process, values, and institutions.
12
The first step to getting beyond the two party system is getting beyond the simplistic tropes of the `op-ed pundit mentality.' For example, your tired assertion that the GOP has been the party of "fiscal discipline" has no historical grounding. Starting with St. Ronald Reagan, every GOP POTUS has exploded the national debt with tax cuts for the rich. Reagan tripled it, W doubled it; Trump's budget of cruelty is merely more of the same. The only use the GOP has ever had for "fiscal discipline" is as a rhetorical weapon. Having run up the debt they suddenly sober up and remember their "principles," calling for the elimination of programs that help to the most vulnerable among us in the name of "fiscal responsibility." If we want to get beyond the Punch & Judy show, let's start by throwing out the worn out cliches of political journalism.
6
The pre Trump republican party is already dead. It is no longer the party we all knew. Because, the party has been hijacked or hypnotized into some movement. Mr. Brooks - the heading of your article leads to the misunderstanding that we are either moving towards a one party rule or even a multi party system.
If you feel we are being pushed into a one party rule, perhaps, that is already happening. With both houses of congress together with the executive branch, forming from the same party, the opposition party is virtually non existent. From tax reforms, the proposed changes to immigration, infrastructure improvements, recurring debt and deficits, are all coming from the same party. And, the changes by way of deregulation, climate change, changes to trade agreements. We should not forget where we stand today on foreign policy. All these areas have lists of questions. The voice of opposition has become passive or gone into irrelevancy. Whether it is conservatism or liberalism, what good is it if it does not do much to meet the needs of the people. We are the greatest country on earth. Yet, we have continuing and ever growing problems with income inequality and people's health care, to name a few.
Will a multi party system do better for the country? Who Knows? We have not tried it. The politicians, may like or dislike the idea. The people may, one day, come out and call for that option.
2
Insightful and articulate, rising above duality and partisanship. So sad that multiple forces conflated to produce Trump.
2
Hmmmm. So what the U.S. needs is to have more parties, representing more points of view, and perhaps adopt a more Parliamentary-Style system. Somehow adopting such a system will free us from the overbearing control of ideologically driven "creeds", or "clans".
Because their has never been an instance of a parliamentary government full of multiple competing ideologies sliding into totalitarianism, has there?
1
the reality here is that the old Paradigm is burning down. Part of that is dysfunction and part of that is the old structure simply crumbling under the weight of change it cannot accommodate. The reality is we ventured the Maelstrom. This particular Maelstrom being one which includes artificial intelligence virtual reality and a host of technological change which is going to call on us to be different people than we were when we entered it. I'm not sure how it will turn out but I am sure America will not look anything like it looked just a few years ago a few years hence.
3
Actually, the 'rule of law' ended in 2003 when Congress ignored the U.S. Constitution when President Bush locked up citizens for an extended period without evidence and turned their back when the president used a like to justify going to war.
3
"Even with all the structural barriers, we could end up with a European-style multiparty system."
That would be great, but you haven't explained how this could happen.
3
In all due respect Mr. Brooks, the two-party system is alive, but certainly not well. Actually, I believe since Trump decided to run and win the Presidency, there is now a third-party that has no concept as to what the truth is and only believes Trump's constant lies and fake news. I pray for this country who I gave four years of my life during Vietnam. Over 58,000 fatal casualties occurred during the war, did these brave men and women give their lives for naught, I hope not.
5
Another compelling essay from Mr. Brooks......Now, bring on the Centrists.
4
Who are the "clan warriors" on the left? What is this false equivalency? There is already a party with an inclusive, optimistic view of the future and it is called the Democratic Party.
21
The Democrat and Republican parties are one and the same two headed snake.
5
I see the sun rising. Please let it not be an illusion. I’ve felt for a long time that there is a wide middle that could rise up and demand common sense governance. I categorize myself as a fiscally conservative, socially compassionate person ...not hard-nosed and not a pushover. I know the gray areas are wide and will forever be fuzzy and I believe many, many others feel the same way. So, let’s do this. The time is right to build a common sense, principled, value driven party.
15
Turn on the TV and you will see how the public space has been degraded
Add to that social media which is being used by foreign agents, Russia, as we speak and understand that the great rational middle, is stunned, and is losing its voice, the free press, which is less and less, print media. How are we the great grey masses going to rise up? I would like to be optimistic, but the speed of this bewildering drop into barbaric unreason is breathtaking.
1
I'm reading these comments and they reflect the same ignorance about America as Brooks has shown. Any amateur historian knows that America's history is cyclical. We have waves of immigration, then periods of nativism and isolation. Times of rampant, unfettered economic growth and rising inequality, then times of equalization and mass consensus. The transitions can be very rough and are often accompanied by national crisis, but that doesn't mean that the changes aren't necessary and inevitable. Rest assured, countrymen and countrywomen. This too shall pass.
2
We absolutely need to get a third party, at the very least, as a viable and serious choice for our electorate. I feel my soul and conscience being eaten at with the current state of our government. We need an alternative party to counter the moral decline in both the Republican and Democratic parties, more so in the Republican party. Here is an idea, maybe Barak Obama, Joe Biden, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore can get together and hatch something.
1
I would say Amy klobuchar, Susan Collins, Amy McGrath (if she gets in) kamel a Harris, Tammy duckworth, gabby gif fords and yes even Hillary Clinton. Why continue to limit those looked to for answers to half the sky holders?
2
Yet another simpleminded Manichean mind set analyst from Mr. Brooks.
2
The conservative values you speak of never existed since the 60s
Its all propaganda
It’s always been racism, sexism and such to distract from a money grab for the wealthy
6
As the demographics of the US continues its shift, there eventually will be 3 significant parties, just like in Canada. The Conservative Party, which in Canada is misnamed and is a centrist equivalent of the mainstream US Democratic Party. The Liberal Party, which is like the Sanders wing of the Dems and the New Democratic Party (NDP) which even further left of center.
David Brooks really must have had his (conservative) head in the sand if he thinks folks weren't warning about Reaganism, trickle-down, the folly of using our military to impose our will on numerous countries, the GOP's race-baiting, the failure to win a war on a noun (War on drugs, now expanded to a few other nouns).
He was too busy applauding St. Ronnie to hear the discourse. Reagan might have won two elections by decent margins but the left was hollering about the dangers loudly and clearly. And it's been downhill ever since.
Why does the NYT keep employing a columnist whose articles are debunked by an overwhelming majority of commenters with as much difficulty as one would have playing chess with a 2 year old toddler?
6
Dear Mr. Brooks:
It has been said many times of the postmodernist condition that the model that most fully expresses its order is the rhizome, like a strawberry plant or a lichen. Such structures begin someplace, then branch out in a way that allows the new growth, or the daughter, to live independently of the parent. Cut a rhizome off from the plant that brought it into the world, and both do just fine. Not so with the tree model, which exemplifies the order of patriarchy, of rationalism and, I think, of dualism. It seems to me that in many of the analyses you put forth, dualism is always at the root of the discussion. So much of what you write--eloquently, often with a kind of heartfelt poignance that reveals how much skin you truly feel you have in the game--depends on binary oppositions, on drawing lines in the sand and then describing each side of the line. Even as you--in my view, very properly--talk about how the present order is disintegrating, you seem to look for understanding in the dualism that characterizes and may, in fact, be the primary animating force behind that very order you see falling apart. What if what comes next is not about dualism? What if there is an order of understanding that is more like a strawberry plant than a tree? How would that look, and how would one talk about it?
1
Without meaningful campaign finance reform, I fear for our democracy.
4
When this realignment becomes the new norm, I hope Rush Limbaugh is remembered as the venomous snake that started all this completely unnecessary fear and loathing.
2
What Tripe. Please provide some examples Mr. Brooks.
SSG
1
This false equivalency of the far right with the far left is absurd. Other than the ridiculous "safe spaces" on college campuses, what has the far left done to undermine democracy and the rule of law? I don't see liberals demanding that their religious beliefs should be the basis of law, or denigrating the FBI, the CIA, and the justice department, trying to obstruct an investigation into Russian interference in our election. It's not liberals who are trying to restrict voting. Not liberals who are denying science and at the same time upending clean air and water regulation to bring back the economically unfeasible coal industry. Not liberals who gave an enormous tax cut to the rich, followed by an enormous spending bill that will triple the deficit at the worst possible time, all so that they can gut what is left of the social safety net. It is not liberals who are breaking up families throwing hard working tax paying immigrants out of the country at a time when we actually need an expansion of the labor force to lift potential growth. And it is certainly not liberals that support our current lying bullying misognist racist seriously under informed president. It was not liberals that supported Citizens United, turning our democracy into an oligarchy. Finally, it was not liberals that founded the first fake new organization known as FOX News, that was a Rupert Murdoch who hired republican political operative Roger Ailes to run it.
5
Mr. Brooks, you have outlined one way that our political system can evolve, and that is by becoming a multi-party system. That may be, but our political system can also devolve into a dictatorship, and unfortunately that is actually much more likely.
I'm pretty sure the electoral college system prevents a "European style" multi party government from ever taking hold in the USA.
Actually, there is nothing wrong with the multiparty system and I suspect you know this. However, when there is a two party system in a so-called democracy that is not diligent therein lies the problem.
Reagan was an actor who was afraid of community. He was not a Christian because the original Christianity was built and supported socialism. But Reagan did use Christianity to bridge to Oligarchy. So you are not talking about Republicans and their values; you are talking about oligarchs disguised as republican's with values. Here's a heads-up: any actual democracy is actually an ongoing revolution without bloodshed. That's because it represents every single person under its umbrella. Yes it will be similar to a drunk wandering up the street towards home after all the bars close, but it will not be ruled over any more than a drunk will be be. Democracy is proof positive of evolution. Something work and others don't. In the long run it is going to be the adaptable citizens who survive and create the future while they also bequeath power to individual rights. This is all of which no Republican candidate has ever done. The Republican party is not the law & order party; it has never been. It has always been the party of extreme exclusion. I suggest it serves a purpose. Let it continue. Meanwhile, multi-parties should bring in the future while upholding those human rights we gift ourselves.
David, don't panic. The two party system is not dead nor is it likely to die soon. We have over 200 years of history with our two party system. It has worked well in the past and will continue to do so. It provides us with a stability that other countries do not have.
Just because one party changes its agenda does not mean that it will ultimately fail. Both parties have changed ideologies over time: the GOP started as a reaction to the then status quo parties who were doing nothing about slavery; not even curbing its extension. The Republicans next became the party of the Gilded Class & wealth until Theodore Roosevelt made it more progressive and environmentally active than the staid Wilson led Democratic Party. Later, it became the Conservative Party of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Now it has become the party of reaction to the Clinton/Obama/Warren Liberal Democratic Party.
The Democrats evolved from a white supremacy & segregation party early on
on until now it is the party of liberal activism and big government. Each party serves as a check on the other. The Republicans will eventually shake off the Trumpian reaction to all things Obama and we will survive the incumbent president like we have his 44 predecessors.
The USA is more important than any president. Perhaps we ought to adjust our mindset away from an all encompassing presidency and focus on the million things that occur every day that makes our country a better place to live.
2
Bernie should run for President as their party candidate.
It's time!
Stop with the false equivalency. Liberals may have responded to conservative tribalism but it is absolutely false to claim that both sides are equally egregious. Did liberals ever pull a trick like conservatives did with Merrrick Garland? Bork at least got his hearing and a vote. And now we have to forever follow the McConnell rule of not allowing a vote during an election year if your party controls Congress but not the White House. If the democrats pull the exact same trick, will the Republicans not cry foul? Of course they will. Only one party welcomes white supremacists, anti LGBT bigots, and anti semites. Is it liberal tribalism that we stand against that? And only one party would ever not only allow, but embrace a man like Trump. Yours, David.
9
The scarcity mentality of which Mr Brooks writes has been imposed from above, and Republicans have a lot to do with it. We've had decades of Republicans in office telling us we cannot afford many of the things that make for a decent society, including universal healthcare, excellent low-cost or free education, jobs that pay a living wage, and safe homes and neighborhoods. We are told instead that every individual must pull himself up with his own bootstraps -- often by people born on third base who think they got there on their own. Corporations and wealthy people who have bought the Republicans' attention have lost a sense of responsibility to the society which afforded them their money or their success (not necessarily the same thing). They resist contributing in the way that previous generations did, through payment of taxes which go, in part, to the provision of public goods. Public goods are on the wane, replaced by rampant privatization -- the movement of what used to be public into private hands.
No wonder there is a scarcity mentality. Our government, in the control of Republicans, wants to take things like Medicare and Social Security away and make life more difficult for millions of Americans. This is not a new trend. Republicans have been trying to impose scarcity on a majority while preaching that the market will fix everything (it never has) since at least the Reagan administration.
6
What is the need to strudy more philosophy?
While some governing is like rocket science, the rest should be easily understood by anyone with the modicum of political knowledge gained in civics class. Just run the show like a business, fire those who don't perform and stop electing an always changing bureaucracy.
The guessing game we are still playing is far too costly and the process is rife with corruption. Governance is a job and should be considered as such rather than the anointment and coronation it has become. Contributions open the door to malfeasance and holds strong appeal to the less than honest which every large donor knows is part of the deal.
Want something new? Hire executives and stop trying to elect the rapacious. Why we still roll the dice every couple of years with the hope those we elect don't crap out on the toss doesn't make any real sense. Sounds good, looks good and feels good, but governance is more those amorphous feelings and the window dressing with which they are presented.
We and the rest of the world have been playing this social game long enough to understand what works and what doesn't and it is nearing time when a mistake or miscalculation can and may very well be disastrous.
Drop the guess work before this bad act brings the curtain down on all of us.
Yes it's time to form that middle of the road 3rd party, if for no other reason then to defeat tribalism on both sides. At the one hand the incredibly naive (or maybe just plain stupid?) Democrats are demanding open borders to "stop the tears" down the Statue of Liberty's eyes! And on the other hand the entirely corrupt Republicans who insist enriching their already filthy rich friends, obviously for their "cut".
Both existing parties bent upon screwing and squeezing the middle class out of existence.
2
I never understand Brooks's logic. He spend three-quarters of this column TRASHING Trump and Republicans ... and then castigates "the left" for slamming Trump and the GOP for precisely the same reasons he just did. And who is this "left"? Sixty-five percent of the country thinks Trump is unfit to hold office, and majorities opposed the Trump/GOP tax cut, immigration plans and budget proposals. Are we all on "the left"? Maybe "the left" is actually the center.
2
Brooks needs to be more forthright about the analysis of what has happened to the Republican party. Trump hasn't debased the GOP. The GOP has gradually debased themselves for over 40 years, starting with the response to the civil and voting rights laws of the 1960's which was the racist and divisive southern strategy. It went downhill straight into Trump.
The GOP, like the Democrats, is a coalition of differing interests (libertarians, religious conservatives, fiscal conservatives, know-nothing anti-immigrants, anti-communist globalists, Wall Street/Financial Sector conservatives, pitch fork reactionaries, etc.) But one thing was for certain, the Wall Street Conservatives and the anti-communist globalists controlled the GOP agenda and direction of the program, until Trump. They have now lost control to the know-nothing anti-immigrant and pitch fork reactionaries, and they don't care as long as they get their tax cuts, deregulation, and control of the courts.
So please, do not equate the Democrats with the GOP. There are certainly problems with the Dems but we find ourselves with a GOP completely beholden to someone with strong authoritarian instincts that flies in the face of American traditions. What Bin Laden couldn't do on Sept 11, the GOP is doing with Trump.
2
The right always likes to say both sides are at fault.
But it is the Republican Party that has used identity politics and benefits mostly from it.
1
Please stop with your false equivalences. Liberal people are not in any way comparable to the lunacy that consumes the conservative GOP. Anybody who could support the lying gas-bag "president" Trump is an embarrassment to our country.
I could not have said this better. Thank you, David Brooks.
Here's the plan; get as much money to the rich as possible, turn a blind eye to offshore tax havens, run up the government debt.
Then have the US default. The resulting depression will provide those with cash (not necessarily $US) a great opportunity to buy both government and private assets at rock bottom prices.
Jobs will be more like indentured servitude.
All that's left to do is have the constitution changed so titles like Duke, Lord and yes, Baron, can be sold, along with permanent, inheritable tax breaks for the new aristocracy.
That is our future if we don't vote on November 6, 2018.
1
Word has it that the harmless white powder sent to the home of Trump Jr was what remains of the Constitution.
Ethno-Centrism seems always to bat last. Much of the fault can be laid at the doorstep of that tower of moral jelly, Paul Ryan and the Senate's own amphibian in chief, Mitch McConnell. They haven't a vertebra between them. Deliver tax cuts to the donor class, and Trump can rage away with a white hood on, and no one would lift a short finger.
1
Well it seems that Brooks is an untraditional conservative, one who believes in progress and human improvement of mortal life. He is following in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt rather than Ronald Reagan or G.H.W. Bush. The traditional conservative from the age of enlightenment liberal still justified the inequities of the existing order because of the perpetual circumstance of scarcity. Scarcity was the justification for the cultured and civilized well to do accepting the impoverishment and ignorance in which most of mankind lived in the 18th century and letting it be. Only by keeping ample resources for themselves could they preserve the wonderful culture passed on to them to keep and to pass on to future generations. It took the great wealth creating engines of the 19th century and the social revolutions that followed to bring in the notion that all could have what they needed and still there would be plenty to allow the cultivation of high culture and the improvement of man.
Right down to this day, there are plenty of arch-conservatives who still believe that men are inherently base, brutal, and selfish and that there is not sufficient means to provide all with the means to satisfy their needs and to improve themselves to make them civilized, so they argue bitterly against redistributing the wealth equitably. Reagan talked like a progressive but his policies were classical arch-conservative -- the result of his conversations with arch-conservative corporate leaders.
1
This is just a complicated, over-erudite way of saying moderates in America have been frozen out by Tea Partiers on the right and Identity Politics Warriors on the left.
The first party with enough gumption to put up an honest, decent, dignified candidate who straddles the 50 yard line of American cultural, fiscal and moral values will have produced the next transforming figure in American history. And the New York Times will attack that person from Day One for not being activist enough on Transgender Rights, Climate Change, and amnesty for illegal immigrants.
1
David Brooks demonstrates one more time (as Bret Stephens demonstrates every time) that it's impossible for a conservative columnist to avoid invoking (false) equivalence. Republicans are nasty but Democrats are just as nasty. (Pedophiles are nasty but accusers of pedophiles are just as nasty.)
Okay, let me give Brooks some ammunition:
(1) The First Amendment is not the exclusive possession of white men.
(2) The Second Amendment is not the exclusive possession of white men.
(3) Ferocious rage is the not the exclusive possession of white men.
John Kelly was wrong; the Civil War wasn't caused by lack of compromise but by the willingness of the Confederate States to destroy the Union so they could keep their slaves. Compromise would have been a sin.
As it would be today.
2
The Republicans gave the country identity politics going back 50 years to the Southern Strategy and then Reagan trickle-down economics and culture wars.
They have never been serious about things like healthcare, poverty, education.
They use their excuse of free-market ideology to make their donor class more wealthy.
When Republicans fix healthcare and poverty, I'll vote for them.
Germany is known as a manufacturing country and they have faced the same globalization we have.
After 35 years of Reaganomics, we have an opioid crisis.
1
I'm with Brooks on his statement of the problem. He needs remedial education in our American political system if he thinks the two party system is going away. We need to fix the one we have, one party at a time.
I would add only one thing to the dynamics of building a new party. What the bicameral system has given us is a polarity, a black and white mind-set - full of reactionary, holier-than-thou, politicians and constituents. Just as black and white thinking is considered rigid-thinking (a form of mental illness) in psychotherapy; it also applies to group dynamics. The solution is looking in the other (so-called) grey areas, alternative perspectives, etc., to generate a flexible cognitive style. In this case a third party that has the flexibility to weigh all solutions, mind-sets, dogmas, and American "isms."
1
Any person who says the party of Reagan — the party that ruthlessly crushed a union and destroyed its members’ livelihoods — had an abundance mindset is certifiably insane. The Reagan era decisively ended a period of cooperation between capital and labor, and set loose the wealthy to prey on the weak.
8
I take issue with your characterization of liberalism as valuing group separatism and intellectual intolerance.
People of color and non-christians are not separate groups, or "identities"--they are valued members of our community. Their issues matter to us and deserve our attention. Period.
As for intellectual intolerance, get out of the Beltway. Go to the middle of the country, and notice who feels afraid. It feels like we are at some sort of crucial fork in the road. Only a short time ago, I would have defended Donald Trump's right to talk like a Nazi or KKK member, while being appalled at the content of his speech. But now that Trump is in charge, his rhetoric toward his opponents makes me feel like I've been a chump. The freedoms he was offered are not reciprocated. His opponents are "enemies of the people," "treasonous," and should be "locked up." (Just to hit a few highlights, there's more every day.) His voters endorse this--imagine living in such a place.
Are we supposed to be so liberal that we let an autocrat like Trump and his white supremacist pals destroy what our ancestors built and everything that is important and unique about America? The radical rhetoric is not new--but Trump has brought it right into the White House and into the heart of the government.
His voters have proclaimed that "political correctness" is finished, while failing to recognize that the veneer of civility and political norms protected them as much as it did anybody else.
4
Another conservative engaging in a "both sides do it," "this all started recently" fantasy that the current administration is something other than the logical endpoint of fifty years of ugly Republican race-baiting and advocacy for the very wealthy. Yes, the right used to be more polite and gracious. No, it hasn't changed in its basic objectives or in its use of racism and nativism as motivators for its base. Giving up dog-whistles for overt racial hatred is a matter of degree, not of substance. The problem is not some abstract "scarcity mentality." The problem is the Republican Party's status as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the richest 10th of 1 percent of the public, plus its addiction to the use of racism and nativism to bring the masses along. The sainted Ronald Reagan was not full of "ideas," as some today are wont to remember. He was all about lowering taxes (and its handmaiden, reducing spending), when he was not campaigning (as he did in the mid-1960s for governor) on the evils of "welfare queens." Guess what race the welfare queens were supposed to be? And George H.W. Bush had no problem using the Willie Horton ad with its picture of a scary, black rapist, to assist his ascension to the highest office in the land. When did Mr. Brooks ever resist these forces before now? Give me a break.
All Trumpists to win the day, and there will be an end to more than the two-party system.
Shame on you, David!
Halfway to reality, but you just couldn't make the final leap. Trump is not the problem, he's only a symptom. Even before Trump the Republican Party was doing such as:
Gerrymandering (yes, some Democratic states did it also, but not nearly as many or as ruthlessly as Republicans).
Restricting voting opportunities - demanding unnecessary ID's, restricting voting hours and avoiding vote by mail.
Corrupting the economy to provide almost all the rewards to the already wealthy, rather than sharing with workers (therefore helping to create the zero-sum mindset you deplore).
Fighting science on m any fronts, but especially on Global Warming.
Yeah, Trump is even worse, but he didn't come from nowhere, and there's good reason he ended up in the Republican Party rather than as a Democrat (which he was previously). So drop the ridiculous false equivalency. Yes, the current Republican Party really needs to die, and hopefully a better partner/opponent can grow in it's place, but if you're going to claim that the Democrats need to go also, at least provide some reasons why. See if you can come up with any as good as the entirely valid ones you have for the Republicans, else please concentrate your fire where it's deserved.
1
Mr. Brooks premise--that politics of the 1990s was defined by a sense of abundance--is superficial. In actuality, the decade continued the Reagan credo that, if you are having problems, it's because of "those people." The only difference is that the Clintons appropriated the narrative. The backdrop behind all of Bill Clinton's legislative victories--the crime bill, welfare reform, deregulation of telecom and Wall Street, was that the playing field had tilted too much towards "those people," and laws were needed to level the field so that southern white folks could have a chance again. This doesn't sound like the politics of abundance to me.
I disagree that there is a decay in contemporary liberalism, admittedly afflicted by a rational siege mentality, remotely comparable to the distillation of racist, nativist avarice to which the vehicle, long illegitimately calling itself "conservative," has succumbed. This deeply casual and determinist analysis has no right to lament the passing of philosophy, for this reason. Yet I do not deny that tribalism is a challenge to the party aligned with liberalism, even though it is palpable that consciousness of this threat is part of why that party is so often mocked as "disorganized." You want proof of philosophical vitality? There it is.
Brooks still can't get over both-sideism! Where are the clan warriors among liberals? Hopefully he does not mean BLM!
It is only the GOP that needs to break up soon, hopefully they won't take the country with it.
1
Kuddos to Brooks for acknowledging the breakdown of our political discourse but his contention that there is some kind of equivalency of blame between the two parties is ridiculous. Referencing his "scarcity mindset" he states "Under the influence of this mentality, evangelicalism turns from a faith into a siege-mentality interest group that reveres a pagan immoralist. Under the influence of this mentality, liberalism goes from a creed that values individual rights and deliberation to one that values group separatism and intellectual intolerance." He got the first half right. However which party has driven wedges with its policies and messaging? The Right has for decades used fear of the "other", resentment of the poor, and contempt for institutions designed to support the common man like Social Security, Medicare, the EPA, OSHA, and recently Net Neutrality and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Which party is looking the other way as Russia invades our election machinery? Which party tirelessly works to cull voters who may vote Democrat?
Which party has fiction-based news outlets like Fox, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh? Fake news is the brainchild of the Right and they use it to discredit legitimate information. Trump is the face of this strategy.
The Left is naive with some of its ideas, but as long as the public is led to believe that the philosophies of both parties are equally to blame the fox will continue to chew its way into the henhouse.
1
Since when did “global engagement” become a “pillar of conservatism,” 1948?
Conservatives and Liberals are just not the same. Going back to Barry Goldwater the Republicans have opposed civil rights and have used racism as a way to corral voters. The Republicans have only supported tax cuts and less regulation as a meaningful position. Democrats by their very nature are various interest groups who loosely hang together.
David Brooks makes the simple complex. It seems to me that Mr. Brooks is lost in space. What we see in the relublican party today was in part created by Brooks and those like him who were able to support and apologize for prior republican versions of stupid policy and politics. It has gone on so long that Mr. Brooks cannot recognize his party but that doesn't stop from still being partisan when it suits him.
Time to make a choice Mr. Brooks. Which side are you on? The moral or the immoral?
What strikes me about this essay is the wholesale, fantastical reimagining of history. The "pillars of conservatism" Brooks describes are a joke.
Rule of law? Conservatives have only ever respected the rule of law insofar as it protects their patrimonic hegemony. They loved the FBI when it was on their side, against Dr. King, the American Indian Movement, student peace groups, and other progressive, leftist organizations.
Fiscal discipline? Please. Trump & Ryan's latest tax breaks for the rich trace their roots to Reagan's tax cuts, which started America on its path to historic levels of inequality, and also launched the modern era of ever growing deficits. It was Reaganism that brought us the voodoo economics of the Laffer curve and the almost religious belief that despite common sense and all evidence, tax cuts result in higher revenues.
The moral decency of conservatives has always been rooted in hypocrisy. From Jim Baker to Jimmy Swaggart, it has always been do as I say, not as I do.
And the final one, based on Dr. King's words is perhaps the most offensive. Racial dog whistles and the conscious exploitation of racism has been the true pillar of conservative political strategy since at least Richard Nixon. It was Reagan who brought us the imagery of "welfare queens". Bush the elder brought us Willie Horton.
The truth is that Trump and Trumpism is the apotheosis of the modern conservative movement, not its betrayal.
Abundance vs Scarcity, Dynamic vs Static, Democratic vs Authoritarian,
Gobal vs Local. Wait a minute. Democracy is Local, isn't it? So Authoritarian must be Global. Continuing now, Liberal vs Conservative. Yes, Democracy is Liberal, so Authoritarian must be Conservative. So that's why the Evangelicals side with Conservatives, they are both Authoritarian! The foundation of Liberal Democracy is the rejection of Authority, and the embrace of Plurality.
The Plurality and Diversity of Opinion vs the Singularity of Authority. Thanks David.
Sounds like Brooks is talking about Clinton's "deplorables " . Conservatives and Liberals began to think they were thought leaders and " the elite ". Found out voters don't care for them or what they think. America will not be the same for a long, long time.
Sorry Mr. Brooks but the two party system isn't going anywhere. Not only will those within the one party, two-faction business party (as Noam Chomsky concisely calls it) never relinquish their power by breaking up their consolidated positions, their corporate masters will never allow them to even contemplate that possibility. The mere premise that even the ideologically principled members of each party will someday wake up to the potential rewards of widening our democracy is at best dubious and at worst delusional.
1
Where to begin...repeal Citizens United....
2
The problem we have is not the two party system but the way it has evolved. It is within many adults memory when the two party system was more theoretical than actual. Figures like Republican Senator Jacob Javitts were more liberal than many Democrats. As a Political Science student I learned that in reality there were four or five actual Congressional parties operating under the guise of two. Unfortunately our system has been "parliamentizded" adopting many of the drawbacks of that system without any of the strengths. It could be argued both our Parties have some blame in this, but the Republicans are much more at fault. Party discipline has become much more important, and bi-partisanship has increasingly become a fault not a virtue, much more like a parliament. The Republicans have made routine use of the previously little used filibuster to undermine the majority's program even when they are in the minority, so unlike a Parliamentary system a majority did not rule. Throw in the unprecedented stunt that McConnell pulled regarding the Merrick Garland nomination that just invites a similar response when the Democrats have the majority, and its no wonder that the government is so dysfunctional.
2
Mr. Brooks still tries to frame this problem as a symmetrical one between left and right; a balanced one between the current state of the Republican and Democrat parties. This "mentality" is asymmetrical and infects only the GOP and the right. The cries from conservatives and the right that the fringe left are culture and race warriors? Mostly people fighting for equal rights. They are not asking for special treatment or to be placed above others.
1
In the Obama years, we had the Chief Executive telling everyone "You Didn't Earn That!" This doesn't demonstrate confidence in the abundant marketplace. This doesn't cheer on dynamic entrepreneurs. It's a sword-strike at the heart of honest hardworking Americans.
Then we had the same Chief Executive telling those of us who actually did Earn what we earned that we will be forced to give up even more of it, to pay for those who actually Didn't Earn health insurance. Yet another sword-strike at the heart of honest hardworking Americans.
This armada of destructive philosophy comes from Regressive elements: Liberals.
1
Mr. Brooks posits optimistically, and perhaps naively a future where people break radically from current Republicans and Democrats and re-establish a conservative democracy. Unfortunately we do not have to look far from Venezuela, to Poland, Hungary or Turkey to see another alternative, degeneration into a one party predominant illiberal shamocracy or oligarchy. I never thought another civil war would be possible in our country, but if you look at how divided electoral maps are, and how current trends exaggerate differences, denigrate politicians willing to compromise and the willingness of one party to delegitimize and disenfranchise the voters of the other party, while still very unlikely, I no longer regard open conflict as impossible.
In retrospect & hideous as things appear with the US party-politics, the success of Sen. Sanders campaign was encouraging:
A genuine voice with resounding grassroots support from individual real people, founded first in getting corrupt influence out of elections, egalitarian foundation of rights to basic college education & healthcare, aided by a fair-share support from the ultra-rich.
Bernie was an inspiring & well-supported alternative to this gilded-age corporatist neo-aristocracy with its apocalyptic myth that unfettered mega-greed begets trickle-down crumbs to workers.
Bernie's basic premise proposed a corrected course in keeping with the happier democracies in this world & his pro-worker ideas would have garnered bipartisan support among the populace.
Hopefully we get another chance for a candidate with Bernie's popular & beneficial ideals before the USA falls apart into an angry, bitter rusting mess.
1
The scarcity mentality is based on reality: as the few help themselves to an excessive and ever-growing share of the county's wealth, the rest of us become more vicious and greedy (and tribal) in fighting for a portion of what is left.
I don't share Mr. Brooks' optimism that this will change.
2
David, look to the Old Dominion: we have a long history of both being radical and fighting tyranny. Right now, we are doing the latter. I've never been prouder of my home state than I am, right now.
Remain strong and fight evil. The Midterms are coming, and we need to send a message to the Sociopath and those in his party who now have decided, suddenly, to do his bidding.
The Republican Party is at war with most Americans.
It has mental lightweights on the most important committees.
Good God, Brooks, the problem isn't the "scarcity mindset". It's the conservative mindset that has produced SCARCITY ITSELF. Time to re-examine your core values, dude.
1
Months ago, I wrote several drafts of a writing called, “The Republicans Become a Fringe Party.” At its heart is an insight David Brooks notes here. It goes deep. Deeper than political actors on today’s creepy, disheartening stage.
It reaches down to our core perceptions and beliefs. Forget liberal and conservative tags--it's now “transcenders” and “retreaters.”
Doesn’t every human age live in the midst of uncertainty? And isn’t this queasy feeling many have grown accustomed to always a response to change? Change in human terms gives us a choice: we can confront uncertainty and the ambiguous life it offers or retreat to what has given us a false sense of security.
2500 years ago, a spiritualist from India, Siddhartha Gautama (later the Buddha) outlined this stark situation. It is a false choice precisely because there is only change. He called it impermanence.
Our choice then is how well can we live with impermanence? Will we hunker down to more desperately hold onto what we’ve got? Or face down uncertainty and say with a loving heart, “Cosmos, throw all your uncertainty at me and I’ll do the best I can. My self-confidence tells me I cannot do anything better.”
I’m with the troubadour of my age, Bob Dylan, “Your old road is rapidly agin’/Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand/for the times they are a-changin.” If we want to improve human life, we can BE the new world; or get out of the way and let others do it. This is our real choice.
I hadn't realized that Conservatives had a lock on "moral dcency" - thank you, Mr. Brooks, for pointing that out.
I don't want to dismiss a thoughtful column out of hand but there is a whiff of "I would never vote for a democrat". Why is this the end of our two party system? The big reveal has been that Republicans don't hold anything more sacred than they hold their own power to instruct and control the private lives of citizens. The gray-faced hypocrites standing in the background of photograph after photograph ostensibly showing their "triumph" make me sick. There is no triumph in passing (by a mere pence) a bill that hasn't been written
My goodness, what planet was David Brooks living on during the last half-century? He claims as key principles of conservatism moral decency and judging a person by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin. Has he never heard of Lee Atwater, Nixon's 'southern strategy,' conservative standouts like Jesse Helms and his many Dixiecrat peers who switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party after the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960? Does he not know that long ago the old Confederate states and their allies led the way to modern conservatism? Give us a break, David. Some of us have memories and have read some American history.
The Two-Party system coffin is being carried on two sets of shoulders. It was Democratic Party Political Correctness that elected Trump in the first place. This was denied by a monocultural media and academia then and is being denied now.
I can appreciate your the sentiment, but take issue with much of what David Brooks has written... I do believe he's trying to come out of the closet of Republicanism but can't quite face it- so, he tries to recast the Republican Party as something it hasn't been in a generation. I do agree with one point though: The two-party system needs to die and I'm ready for something else.
3
" Republican politicians have had to say goodbye to most of the pillars of conservatism: .... the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin."
This is a joke, right ? A comment meant sarcastically ?
One, and the perhaps only benefit, of the spectacle of Republican behavior during the years of the Obama administration and the rise of Trump has been the exposure of the GOP for what it really is.
The most destabilizing development in American democracy has been the re-alignment of conservative media, away from practices of objective journalism (i.e., conservative-but-credible newspapers like the WSJ, etc.), toward Breitbart and related infotainment networks (i.e., Fox News, where opinionators like Hannity are not distinguished from journalists in the News Division).
Civic communication requires a common language and a base-line of mutually-accepted fact. With alt-narratives disputing even scientific facts (e.g., AGW, vaccination, etc.), the space for effective policy debates disappears.
I am increasingly pessimistic that the West as we know it will survive this (dis)Information Age...
1
I agree with every word of this exceptionally important and insightful piece by Mr. Brooks. This will come as a surprise to some, since I am a torch-bearing firebrand from the "enemy" tribe. He and I agree on one issue more fundamental than taxes or immigration. Fire must be used as a tool, especially in the face of overwhelming pressure to wield it as a weapon.
Since Mr. Trump is president and we're using the word 'scarcity 'a lot here
to describe his administrative approach , lets look at the definition:
shortage
dearth
lack
want
under supply
insufficient
meagerness....etc.
Sounds like a perfect adjective David.
Every editorial from Brooks that's not a self-immolating mea culpa should be rejected by his editors. Period. It's the Republican intellectuals who eviscerated the country with tax cuts and laissez-faire ideology, and now they want to abandon what they've created: a racist, know-nothing, ethno-nationalist cult of personality around the Great Leader, with a conservative press that makes Pravda look independent! You folks own this Mr. Brooks.
I suppose it’s reassuring for Mr. Brooks to cling to false equivalency and gauzy memories of Ronald Reagan when the rest of his world is crumbling, but sometimes it does seem like a teenager clutching a childhood teddy bear. Every time it looks like Mr. Brooks is finally starting to comprehend things, he backslides into tribalism himself with his straw man caricature of liberals.
Then what did you mean by writing, “The underlying conditions of scarcity are only going to get worse”?
Societies can function linearly when they believe that they know all relevant variables and limits.
Donald Trump is the natural result of what Ronald Reagan started. Reagan fought every program that benefited working and poor Americans. He announced that government was the problem, not a force for the good of society. He was appealed to the racist element with his "welfare queen" claims. He fought the minimum wage, unions, worker protections, and social safety net programs. He tripled the debt with his massive tax cuts for the wealthy. He fought environmental protections. He was given a "mulligan" for Iran Contra. He was for forced school prayer, vouchers and tuition credits for private schools. He championed trickle down and supply side economics.
Trump and the modern Republican Party are the natural result of Republican policies begun and/or encouraged by Reagan. Republicans have used the right-wing propaganda machine of the last 30 years to bring the country to where it is today. Only the wholesale rejection of the Republican Party will solve the problem.
1
Brillian writing David Brooks. You ended, "The scarcity mentality is eventually incompatible with the philosophies that have come down through the centuries. Decent liberals and conservatives will eventually decide they need to break from it structurally. They will realize it’s time to start something new."
We definitely need a change, and you are correct in pointing out that scarcity will get worse, (since overpopulation and climate change continue to get worse.)
One of your commenters is right, that to equate the two parties is a false equivalence. If our democracy can survive the fascists now trying to make it a GOP one party system, there will be a renaissance of Democrats and Independents for at least 8 years. The republicans will either listen to voices like yours and clean themselves up, or be replaced, if we are lucky and successful, with a more environmentally aware conservative party.
x
David Lindsay Jr. is the author of "The Tay Son Rebellion, Historical Fiction of Eighteenth-century Vietnam," and blogs at TheTaySonRebellion.com and InconvenientNewsWorldwide.wordpress.com
I agree with David Brooks assessment. Fox News and its supporters appear to be the cause of much of the fear and hatred that now dominate many Republicans' mindsets. There are people I know who watch only Fox News several hours each day. They are inevitably the most angry, negative people I've met, convinced that everyone and everything is out to get them. I believe this underlies the negative cultural changes across the U.S. that Brooks' article describes.
1
I am concerned that we may be facing the beginning of the end of the United States, not just the two party system. The reason is that in the back of my mind, I have a feeling that even if we vote out the current administration that the Trump 35% will not accept it, to the extent of violence and revolution. I could totally see Trump refuse to leave on claims of voter fraud, a claim he already has used when he won! His base will believe and do whatever he says. I would like to think that we are stronger than this.... but there are a lot of things I would like to think about our country that continue to be challenged. I would like to say I am over-reacting. But considering the general disregard for the Constitution by the administration, I wonder if I am justified in thinking I am over-reacting?
2
Multiparty democracy won’t happen in the US without radically changing the electoral system: Preferential voting in the House and massively enlarging the Senate (at least 4 per state who could be elected at once on a proportional basis - so you’d need only 25% of the vote to win a seat).
As long as any vote for a third party is a wasted vote you will never escape your current two party paralysis. The winner-takes-all system in place currently is a big part of your scarcity mentality.
1
Vote 4 the Bull Moose Party
It is difficult to imagine the other path, but I cannot help but wonder if something good will come from this period.
Do you remember how the Republican Congress made life miserable for Obama ?
What if Hillary had won ? Would we be on a good path ?
If this is a watershed moment in American politics, a time when things change, then maybe it will be worth it.
Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. In any case, compared to the Obama years, things have clearly gotten worse.
None of this would be happening without the duping (fake news) of a large segment of the voting population and then skillfully gerrymandering the system so that we are actually getting a tyranny of the minority. The duping part is ingenious, as people continue to vote against their interests, exemplified by president’s budget unveiled yesterday that will hit his constituency hard.
Take a moment and listen to Bruce Springsteen’s 2007 song “Magic” where he addressed the art of deception during another presidency. The words are haunting:
"I got a shiny saw blade
All I need's a volunteer
I'll cut you in half
While you're smilin' ear to ear
And the freedom that you sought
Driftin' like a ghost amongst the trees
This is what will be"
This is what will be
Doug, you realize that if you suggest that people are easily duped, and must be protected from bad information, they you must also mean that democracy is a farce, right?
Not at all. Democracy is the best form of government compared to all others. But rarely have our citizens been so deliberately and yes, effectively barraged with a sustained tsunami of misinformation. My hope is that people wake up to this. They did at another time, during the McCarthy era of the ‘50s. We’re at that inflection point today.
I'm sure some think otherwise but I think the reason the republicans have allowed an anti-immigrant stance to dominate their conversation is because they know that across the board the various minority populations that live in this country will not vote for them so this is about maintaining power by creating divisions and thereby destroying the foundation on which the country was built.
"Trump (..) insists on perpetual warfare — against all comers. Stuck fighting his wars with him, Republican politicians have had to say goodbye to most of the pillars of conservatism: rule of law, fiscal discipline, global engagement, moral decency, the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin." Trump tested the waters with "I prefer people who don't get captured" about John McCain, with no word of protest from Republican veterans in the Congress.
In his book, Marvin Kalb describes how, in 1956, people wondered why nobody spoke up during Stalin's terrors. They were all afraid.
Ronald Reagan was a charismatic man with a smiling face and sunny disposition. He was also notoriously incurious and had a heart of stone for the vulnerable. He was elected during a period of profound national funk caused by Jimmy Carter’s ineffectual administration, combined economic stagnation with inflation, loss of the Vietnam war, rapidly rising oil prices, and Nixon’s resignation. He was lucky in that new oil fields in Norway, Mexico, and Venezuela came online and put downward pressure on oil prices. Reagan wanted to abandon the one China policy and recognize Taiwan, which would have and did enrage China. The Republican Establishment, especially GHW Bush, persuaded him to continue Nixon’s China policy. Before summit meetings with foreign leaders, he would skip the briefing books and watch TV instead. HIV was a new disease that was not well understood at the time that was causing an epidemic of death. Reagan did not think that controlling and studying it was a priority. When the Marines that he sent to Beirut in 1983 were blon up in their barracks by Palestinian terrorists, he skidadadled. Because of his careless degegulation leading to reckless investment, 1,043 out of the 3,234 savings and loan banks failed requiring $460B taxpayer bailout.
The rot started 37 years ago.
1
American Conservatism used to mean "moral decency, the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin." Really?
You're talking about Conservatism of the Republican Party? The party that campaigns on "welfare queens" and Willie Horton, that has counted on race-baiting for votes for forty years?
You almost said something smart today, David. But those Reagan-colored blinders must be permanently glued to the side of your head.
Accurately predicting what people en masse or individually will do is easy. People, like all animals, will act in accord with what they believe is in their interest...90% of the time.
The Republicans of 2018 will stand behind Trump because they believe that it is in their interest to do so. The only ones who have been openly critical of Trump are those who are not seeking re-election or, in McCain's case, are facing imminent death. And even verbal condemnation does not amount to anything of consequence. All that legislators can do is vote, and only Republicans voted for the tax cut. One didn't because there were enough votes for the bill to become law without it.
Democratic senators were no different 20 years ago in finding Clinton not guilty after his impeachment. In so doing they provided Republicans ammunition for similar behavior in defense of Trump.
That said, history has a way of acting independent of prediction. Trump is in office now, but things could happen to take him out in short order.
Is the two-party system at an end? No, there is no two-party system now - it's the Money Party.
2
Thank you David Brooks. A multi-party system is the only solution to the current political crisis in the U.S.
The critical first step is that everyone vote for the party that represents their interests ( democrat, conservative, labor, green, religious, etc).
The top two parties attempt to form coalitions from the remaining parties and the second and final election is held.
We must have major structural change in our political systems if we are to survive as a viable democracy. Both parties have let us down.
We must begin this process immediately and the media must allow the other parties ( labor, green, etc.) a voice.
As David paints it, conservatives good, liberals bad. I’m a liberal and I am very concerned about morality and frugality. But I also believe in giving, in the need to care for our fellow person - which, to me is part and parcel of ethics and morality.
We are indeed a very divided nation. We are also heading down the road to being a Failed Nation. Presidential systems are not so resilient as parliamentary systems. And ours is showing its age and its inability to shed the inherent dysfunction of a presidential system.
Unless we reform our system of government, we may be doomed.
2
It sounds like David Brooks is seriously asking for a Parliamentary form of government. I've never quite understood how much our winner-take-all system is built into the Constitution itself versus in subsequent laws and precedents. Still, I am pretty certain that this change would require some amendments.
If so, David Brooks' proposal can join a long list of ideas that might be great if only we could amend the Constitution. Good luck with that.
6
The dichotomy is not abundance mindset versus scarcity mindset since both seek to conquer the world's resources at whatever cost. Whether we have the courage to step back and live in harmony with the planet, and show leadership in doing so, would determine whether this experiment in democracy proceeds and adapts or fails.
5
The voter that sits in the 'sensible middle' between the two parties has known this reality for quite some time. As both parties have moved further to the 'extremes', the average American that is raising kids and paying taxes sees both parties not interested in the welfare of the middle class. Improving education, healthcare and public safety are what is most important to my family. Neither party is doing much to help my family (as we are neither rich nor poor).
The election of Trump is 'strong proof' that the two party leaders are hard of hearing due to the banter of lobbyists and partisans n Washington. We need parties that represent the average American who is struggling to survive.
3
The Balkanization of the country has been catalyzed by the fragmentation and democratization of the media landscape. Not all that long ago, people worked from nine to five then returned home to watch the evening news on one of the three major national television networks. Centrist news anchors, all widely admired, respected, responsible journalists, acted as a gyroscope to keep the ship of state on an even keel through turbulent times.
Today, even when we are not toiling at our desks till late into the night, we have opinion silos like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Facebook news feeds, Russian propaganda Twitter bots, and numerous web sites hosting an echo chamber of extremist vitriol.
The existing two major parties hold the polity in a vice grip. Third party candidates serve merely as spoilers for the major party candidate closest to their views. Recall Ross Perot and Ralph Nader.
Now with gerrymandering and wholesale voter disenfranchisement, no way forward is apparent.
7
David Brooks is both right and wrong. There definitely is an abundance mindset. This abundance mindset largely applies to the product of traditional husband and wife nuclear families who work hard, are intelligent, obey the law. Sadly, the vast majority are not part of this member class. This natural sorting out in nature is accelerating, much as it always has. Some call it assortative natural selection. Anyone is welcome to join this class o abundance people, but they will need to do what is needed. Anything less will ensure them a life of scarcity and struggle. Choose wisely.
3
By the way, I've been conservative. And these "values" that Brooks trots out (rule of law, fiscal discipline, global engagement, moral decency, the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin) were never, NEVER exclusive to conservatism much less "pillars" of it. Conservatism was about simplistic thinking, simplistic solutions, and Trump is just the natural progression of that. When I matured to understand problems were far more complex than conservatism made them out to be (and thus required more complex solutions), I became a liberal. Brooks would do well to mature the same way.
43
I would not be quite so harsh with Mr. Brooks, but extremely well put. While we obviously we have people who ignore the complexity of some problems distributed across the political spectrum, doing this has become an addiction for conservative politicians and their "spokes media" (WSJ Editorial page, FOX, ......)
Sorry, but liberalism is as capable of reducing the world to a simplistic set of circumstances amendable to a simplistic set of solutions as conservatism is. Generally, those at either extreme of the liberal or conservative divide are the ones who engage in these ideological flights of fancy.
Brooks can't become a liberal.
He makes his living as a conservative columnist.
Perhaps after he retires.
But Brooks probably knows that with the Paul Ryan plan, he can't count on Social Security so he will probably keep going for a while.
1
No. I refuse to succumb to the drum beat of negative press, thinking, actions that we see all around. I am not a Pollyanna, I see the problems and recognize that they are serious. I also know that society is what we make of it, in other words, we decide what our reaction to events will be. I am not going to further the cold, cruel, coarse, culture that I see around us.
Think of it as an act of protest if you must, but by treating those around us with respect, kindness and engaging in a civil discourse about the direction of our nation, especially with those with whom we disagree, we can change the course of our culture. I would urge you to take up the challenge of becoming a living example of what is possible. Just as the Olympians inspire us in the field of athletics, let us work to inspire others by demonstrating in our own lives what a civilized society looks like. Will we fail upon occasion? Of course. But that is also part of life, how we deal with failure is one of the clearest indicators of "Who I am," and "This is what I consider important enough to risk failure."
3
I agree with most everything here. The one thing that does bother me is Mr Brook's (and may others) insistence in referring to the GOP as "Conservative." By what yardstick are they Conservative in the manner of Locke, Burke, William Buckley, Podhoretz, etc.? They lack any guiding principle beyond winning elections, winning at all costs, and skewing the economy towards the extremely wealthy. That's not Conservatism: It's the erosion of democratic standards and norms. I don't know what word might more accurately define them, but for sure, Conservative ain't it.
20
Mr. Brooks draws a false equivalency between conservative "clan warriors" and liberal "clan warriors". He overlooks or disingenuously avoids noting that the clan warriors are at the heart of the Republican Party, abetted by those who are indifferent to the warriors yet supportive of them so long as their conservative agenda (lower taxes, less financial and environmental regulation, etc.) is also served. The Democratic Party is influenced by clan warriors to a far lesser extent; its clan warriors are listened to but seldom drive the party's legislative agenda. Brooks would realize this if he focused more on actions taken by the Republican Congress than the discussions within his National Review echo chamber.
It is far easier to talk about nebulous theories ("abundance mind-set" vs. " "scarcity mind set") than it is to analyze concrete policy options that may generate bipartisan support if properly considered and communicated. Perhaps advocating a return to a mixed economy where the government plays an important but limited role would be more productive than finding pseudo profound ways to state the obvious.
5
maybe the parties are struggling because they're outdated. maybe the interconnected world where ideas can flash instantly around the world has moved on past these institutions.
4
"Even with all the structural barriers, we could end up with a European-style multiparty system" So, what's wrong with this system? It is doctrine that the more points of view contemplating an area of reality--in this case our country-- the better the chance of arriving at the truth. The monopoly of knowledge held by our two-party system is what has led us to scarcity--the dearth of ideas and freedom.
9
Quoting Brooks: "evangelicalism turns from a faith into a siege-mentality interest group that reveres a pagan immoralist."
Perhaps Pence and his evangelical brethren should be reading their favorite book more carefully, especially Jeremiah 5:21 "Hear this, you foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear."
Hypocrisy abounds in these foolish and senseless people. Praise the Lord but kneel to Trump. Amen. Sad.
20
Republican Principles are the fuel for fear mongering.
Wondering who Mr. Brooks is talking to here. Is this essay likely to change the mind of anyone who is currently an adherent or enabler of the Trumpism that is at the heart of the problem he describes? Can anyone identify a writer or commentator who can do so?
2
In 2017 we heard lots of brash talk about America's need for more than two political parties. — INCREDULOUS!! — Imagine a presidential race with five parties. It would be possible a candidate could win with 21% of the voters. That party could be the extreme right. Fascists. ...Democracy over.
The two-party system works best. Especially for the Executive Branch. The primaries work well to form a consensus of like-minded ideologies. To pick a candidate it requires compromise.
3
We are already there. Trump won with 24% of the eligible electorate voting for him. Gerrymandering and the twisting of the national electoral process (including Russian influence) have put a clear minority ideology in power.
I am not certain that a multiparty system would "create a consensus through compromise...creating equal opportunities for all to succeed." There were 42
political parties represented in the German Reichstag in 1930 or so. One became dominant and outlawed all the rest.
6
'Pallas' may not know, but most European democracies work excellently with a multi-party system. This kind of political system fosters a tendency to compromise, so we do not run into the kind of ludicrous crises which happen in America. For a number of reasons, there is no need to recall Germany and the rise of Nazism. But maybe that is the only alternative 'Pallas' knows about.
Scarcity? The US is richer than it has ever been. The problem is not scarcity, it is the perception of scarcity. It is about the distribution of wealth. Here is where the Republicans are really destructive. Their war on government is really a war on the capacity of the state to take from the rich to make life better for everyone else. This is what terrifies the Koch brothers and others like them. This is why conservatism has become so completely identified with both anti-statism and incredible greed. it bears saying that traditional conservatism was about conserving society. If that meant good government programs and state intervention, so be it. Modern conservatism is about the destruction of society, or the belief that there is no society, there are just individuals and the wealthy are entitled to keep everything they have and the rest are entitled only to suffer in silence. This is not the recipe for a sustainable society.
18
AGAIN with the false equivalencies, David. Can't you see—okay, maybe you just can't—that it has been YOUR party that has driven us over this cliff of intolerance, greed, racism, tribalism...sheesh, the list just goes on and on. And it appears to be a cliff, meaning we probably can't crawl back up. It's too steep. And it's YOUR party—and your blind loyalty that perversely kept you from seeing it over the past two decades—that will be remembered by history as the cause. Assuming there will be anyone who cares enough to read about it, assuming we won't most of us being scavenging for food and shelter in our post-apocalyptic world.
14
When was it EVER a "pillar of conservatism" that a person should be judged by the content of his/her character rather than the color of their skin? It was the liberals who sought fairness regardless of color ..... never the conservatives.
12
David, when are you going to address the large elephant in the room? When are you doing to change parties instead of writing in support of Republicans who have been trying to pull the wool over their supporter's eyes for years. Trump did not cause this mess, he is the end result of a carefully crafted message the Republicans have been spewing for years.
12
Has government of the people by the people and for the people actually perished from the earth? And to think it was a Republican who once articulated such ideals David should be writing about the devolution of Republicanism.
7
There was NEVER a two party system in the USA
,
It has been always a One Pary system with pretensions a thrartu I’mowet pretending that the other party was a real party witth a genuine interest in the wFare of the other.......then both parties leaders or reps went out a real luxurious dinner ?...never sparing anything when it came to that
It was, still is until further notice, both parties playing The Democracy game
Should any blame be attributed it was primarily the fault,inaction, for giving upgenuine support to,a genuine secon party
2
I know this is not your main point, but will you PLEASE stop using Paganism this way? [Under the influence of this mentality, evangelicalism turns from a faith into a siege-mentality interest group that reveres a pagan immoralist.] It misrepresents historical Paganism and certainly doesn’t represent contemporary Paganism. So, what is a Pagan stance in these times? To envision and strive to build bonds of friendship (φιλία) as a citizen of the cosmopolis and to create a culture that gives primary value to developing virtue/excellence (ἀρετή). In general, your “conservative” worldview seems rather Aristotelian to me and, as an Hellenic Pagan, it resonates strongly.
5
While David Brooks is one of the last of the conservatives that have not leave of his common sense, he still falls into the trap of egalitarianism among the parties.
"As the Right pulverizes the Left, the Left feels the need to pulverize the Right." Has this ever happened? The Right has called us progressives Traitors for not applauding the president Trump. They have called us treasonous for not "Supporting our President (Bush) and the Troops"
They have attack dogs of various levels of sanity questioning our very right to live and breath on this earth. Donald Trump thinks that "Second amendment people can solve our Hillary Clinton Problem". Alex Jones seems to never lose standing with his violent following. Sean Hannity, the most popular talking head on TV shares his stage night after night with conspiracy theorists without merit and without evidence. ( Seth Rich investigation or the interview with Jeff Rovin) David Where are the Left's warriors? Name them... ( Its OK I'll wait.......) As the Right wing gets more rabid and conspiracy theories like Benghazi and Uranium one are debunked their answer is to fall deeper into the hole. A hole where the truth doesn't matter and the more fantastic the accusation the more likely it is to make onto network T.V. The Left has tried to respond with accurate reporting. Outlets like the Times, Washington Post and MSNBC may be countering the fantasies of the Right but that does not mean that both sides are equally valid.
10
Excellent piece. Well done Mr Brooks!
1
I appreciate David Brooks' thoughtfulness. The two party system is failing us. While the system is working exactly as it is designed, both parties set the rules for themselves and have all the power and behave in ways that protect their self interest at the expense of implementing solutions to solve our most vexing problems.
Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School and a colleague did a recent analysis of the situation and have put forth common sense and achievable solutions. Here's a link to their analysis (the executive summary is all you need to read) https://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Pages/default.aspx. No matter your party affiliation, it should make sense.
Solutions include implementing non-partisan redistricting, non-partisan primaries with ranked-choice voting, and eliminating partisan control of House and Senate rules, processes, and norms.
I am as disgusted with Trump as anyone, but getting behind the furthest left candidate to counteract him is not the long-term answer. Taking steps to diminish the power of the two parties - which have been driven to the extremes at the expense of the middle - is.
2
Wait just a minute. What about Grover Norquist, his tax pledge, and the plan to reduce government until "it can be drowned in a bathtub"? This has been the Republican strategy for decades and is designed to provide the pretext for eliminating all social programs from the New Deal forward. They haven't been exactly shy about their ends, either. Who would vote for this? Not enough people evidently--thus the Southern Strategy and the whole politics of division that's been their trademark.
8
And then there is Greece where every person is his own party.. We’ve seen how well that works out, haven’t we? Every citizen votes though.
2
There may be a scarcity mentality, but there isn't real scarcity in this country. There is just vast income and wealth inequality, so that many must live with government-imposed scarcity in their own lives. Of course, such people are susceptible to race-baiting. As for race-baiting, it didn't start with Donald Trump. There was Nixon's Southern Strategy, Reagan's welfare queens driving Cadillacs, George H.W. Bush's Willie Horton commercials, Bill Clinton's Republican-supported racially tinged welfare and criminal punishment enhancement, George W. Bush's grotesquely inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina, and congressional Republicans' virulent opposition to anything Obama. Why would Republicans denounce Trump's race baiting? It is exactly what they believe. We may possibly end up with multiple parties, but first we cannot allow leaders to turn us against one another.
3
Republicans do not have a "scarcity" mentality. But Democrats certainty do. ALL of their causes stem from fear: Climate change, carbon emissions reduction, water rights; habitat preservation, poverty reduction; gun control. All stem from fear of limited resources or fear of freedom. Republicans want to USE the minerals and water and land to PRODUCE things and create wealth. Its much simpler than you think.
You’re wrong. There’s a lot more money, jobs, profits and frankly, future, in solving climate change, promoting green energy, public healthcare etc than in old world dying tech, fuels, greed and inequality.
I think you are substituting “fear” for science and fact.
Interesting fear comment. So conservatives do not fear immigrants? Seems like stoking that fear is precisely how the GOP sustains its base. Of course, its not all immigrants but rather those from certain s hole countries whose skin color is different from white and therefore quite easy to identify visually. Immigrants have MADE this nation and the majority of them will continue to do so by bringing great drive and determination for a better life despite the minority who are 'Bad Hombres.' I am a progressive and the only fear i have is for our democracy who is under an existential siege by the current administration and its Congressional enablers.
Will "starting something new" come before a complete suspension in democracy and/or civil war? In the current climate of tribalism, very doubtful. The political system has been too corrupted by special interests for the American people to have their voices heard and impart any meaningful change to the system.
1
"Decent liberals and conservatives will eventually decide they need to break from it structurally. They will realize it’s time to start something new." I cannot wait.
2
yeah, nice attempt at some moral equivalency. It is the republican party that is devoid of almost all principles. It has utterly abandoned truth, facts and evidence. We can't even discuss issues because the realities don't even come close. The greatest danger to our nation as defined by the Pentagon is climate Change, which the GOP doesn't acknowledge. No time for the GOP go conduct a metamorphosis. the only way that will happen is for it to be purged in the next two elections. Swept from power like a disrespectful child scolded and sent to the corner.
2
I have always hated the 2 party system. It does not allow for those belifes consist of a mix of both parties belifes such as my own, and forces us to chose one radical side or the other.
1
This all proves you can lie to the American people and not only get away with it but be rewarded for it with more power. Thus when we say the power rests with the people who serve as the ultimate check and balance on the government we counted on "the people" to be an informed and interested electorate, motivated to preserve the nation and the principles on which it was founded and provide legitimacy to the government. If the people can be lied to and they are aware of it and are willing to go along they have abdicated their responsibility.
1
Has it occurred to anyone that this country might have reached a point from which there is no return? For a democracy to survive it needs an educated and involved populace. That doesn't exist today. I fear things will only get worse in America, not better. In the end the people get the government they deserve.
4
If there has been a change from a sense abundance to a sense of scarcity, it might have something to do with the massive increase in wealth at the top and a corresponding hollowing out of opportunities for the rest of us. Any illusion that we were not in a class war or that most of us were losing that war disappeared in the Great Recession of 2008.
8
When has "the left" in this country ever pulverized the right? The left can't even find a unifying platform to run on. The leaders of the left are clueless on what their party stands for. The right have frequently have frequently taken this country to the edge of oblivion every time they've controlled government, only for the left to come in and attempt to fix whatever mess was created. Frankly, I hope for the day when the left learns how to fight back.
6
"Today’s Republicans are happy to trade away their fiscal principles if they can get their way on immigration, which is what they did in last week’s budget deal."
The Republicans have never had any fiscal principles besides greed. Greed for their patrons, greed for their industries, and greed for themselves. On the contrary, they haven't "traded" anything, they been the same duplicitous, phony, "it's okay when we do it" party for decades, and this latest tax "deal" is all the evidence you ever needed. They only have principals when the wind blows against their interests, and simply abandon them when power falls back their way.
The Republican party much more resembles the mafia, or the oligarchs of Russia these days, little more than a group of racketeers intent on taking what they can, when they can, from whomever they can. If the law, constitution, or morality get in the way... well, they got their tax cut right?
What more evidence could you possibly want than handing the majority of a $1.5 trillion dollar deficit increase to the wealthy and then coming to attack programs that benefit the least fortune Americans to do it.
Fiscal principles - HA! Just watch what they do, not what they say. You'll learn everything you ever need to know about Republican principles. They've got principals alright, just not the ones you write about.
14
A scarcity mentality? Really? There is no dearth of wealth in this country, collectively the richest in the world. Our problem is that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few hundred families, while millions of families fight daily battles of food insecurity, insufficient shelter, precarious access to healthcare, inability to obtain an education without bankrupting themselves. The US suffers a morality and empathy scarcity, at least among our political class and the obscenely wealthy donors who pull their strings.
11
The two party system was in trouble when it started costing a Billion dollars to run for an election that pays $400k a year for a potus or $174k for a Congressional seat.
Donors have become the priority in this country. The newest Tax Cuts rewarded those wealthy donors who helped pay for Republican campaigns. And those R donors actually threatened to withhold their future donations if they weren't rewarded with big Tax cuts as they were promised.
Donors want kickbacks and favors and it's getting worse because they aren't donating to help the country, only to help themselves.
It's a political merry-go-round especially this year and highlighting how far we have fallen. The majority party is failing its job and using their offices to please the potus so they can get re-elected if they need his help.
There's no ethical standards any longer in a party that sucks up to a potus for their re-election. No wonder over 40 people in the Republican party are leaving office.
6
End Citizens United! Corporations are not "people". It should never have been passed, it precipitated the downfall of the two party system.
Absolutely. Unless that happens, we can talk, talk, talk about how bad the parties are and nothing will change, money is a factor.
We can thank John Roberts court for CU and opening the door to the tsunami of money influencing politics.
Congressional members are no longer Public Servants, they're Power Brokers.
Dear David, Thank you for once again reinforcing the notion that you have absolute knowledge about the way things are going, must be tough being you. Personally, I would take a sane, healthy mind in the White House. What do you think? Speak you own mind just once, it could be refreshing. Clueless in Oregon. RAW.
4
As so often happens with such rather lazy punditry, substituting for sound analysis, Mr. Brooks overlooks the fact that indeed, we have a very vigorous two party system.
But reality doesn't matter, does it? Just patting onesself on the back and saying "I am so much smarter than the hoi polloi," that's the role of people like Mr. Brooks today, as they themselves see it.
2
Brooks the forest because he is distracted by the trees. There are two things driving the GOP today and scarcity is not one of them:
1. Racism.
2. Smash and grab as many resources for the super rich as possible.
That's it. Misogyny, fact-denying, a love afffair with guns, and merger of church and state are all there, but far distant from the first two priorities.
8
Just more 'good people on both sides' from Mr. Brooks. No, liberals and conservatives are not mirror images. Fringe views on separatism and intellectual intolerance present in some corners on the left and barely hinted at by Democratic politicians are not equivalent to the front and center bigotry and idiocy promoted by the leader of the Republican party and supported by nearly every single member of the Republican caucus.
No Mr. Brooks, there is no equivalence between the Democrats and Republicans, just as there is no equivalence between Heather Hayer and the Trump supporters that murdered her.
The Fox News driven 'scarcity mindset' that ignores the Obama boom and creates it's own fictional universe is not mirrored on the other side. There is a party of bad guys in America today. Brooks enables him every time he writes a column that minimizes their wrongness and attempts to paint the Democrats as somehow equivalent.
Despite his milquetoast never-Trumpism, Mr. Brooks is on the wrong side of history.
12
Republican politicians are "stuck fighting [Trump's] wars with him."
Is someone holding a gun to their heads? Do they not have the power to choose like the rest of us? The Republican Congress could stand up the President when he engages in the sorts of behaviors Mr. Brooks so clearly despises. Why excuse the moral turpitude of the Republican leadership?
4
I have hated the 2-party system and the money driven party lines for years. It is already time to separate from the "clans" on either side. As a friend said to me yesterday, "I want to be your mayor, not your Republican Mayor or your Democrat Mayor, just your mayor who works for what is best for our community." I am so good with that.
I am ready for the change to multi-party now. Let's start with overturning Citizens United.
5
The only "something new" required to duly sustain order whence a more perfect union is perpetually formed MOVING FORWARD is the long-overdue startup that old white guys are already being disenfranchised as the new lame duck demographic. Not since Jefferson Davis has Trump's bent on "nice people on BOTH sides" of deliberate divisiveness has survival of the fittest been more subservient to evolution's better option of adaptability to change. After all, when having died in vain can't even be spared from our Gettysburg dead, how will the "warrior mentality" of our 5-Deferment of Chief ever incubate successors?
1
Conservatism is just another excuse to complain and hate. I despise it. I am not that way. I still believe in striving, in hoping, in advancing, in becoming a better man and a better nation. We are abundant, not scarce, if people would just take the time to turn off FOX news and notice how wonderful America is.
1
What Brooks calls a “scarcity” mentality is better identified as “zero-sum.” It’s important to clearly associate this with the GOP, and not to share the blame, as Brooks would like to do, with the Democrats.
The GOP’s zero-sum mentality stems directly from the fact that the party explicitly and primarily represents a subset of Americans, white Christians, that see themselves and their culture as under attack by waves of non-white, non-Christian invaders. They are defending a shrinking empire that they see as an entitlement. This explains the compromise of principle, the lying and the hardball politics in what feels (unnecessarily) like a fight to the death.
In contrast, anyone who has listened to Barack Obama’s words, from his pivotal 2004 speech to the present, or the collection of speeches at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, know that the Democratic philosophy is easily summarized as “we’re all in this together.” Democrats believe that if we work together, everyone will benefit.
Democrats want to share the wealth, defend the social safety net and guarantee equal opportunity.
With stark, photo-negative effect, GOP policies benefit the rich, create a sink-or-swim existence and exacerbate income inequality.
Demographic trends say the GOP will lose this battle, but until the end, it will fight like a caged animal.
11
Brilliant idea. Both political parties are hopelessly corrupt and should go the way of the Whigs.
1
Why is restrictionist immigration good in theory? If you observed Japan, they are going to be unable to support social programs, due to low birth rate among Japanese citizens.
Immigrants bring their hope by having more children, working to move upward and generally bring more wealth to the country. Yes, it should not be unlimited, and should be a vetted process, but if we have a stagnant birth rate and an aging population, we will never be able to improve our social problems.
Saint Reagan was never what you nostalgic R's make hime out to be. He was a tax-cutting, deficit spending, front man. He either was complicit in Iran-Contra, or was duped by the puppet masters behind him. This is what we face now. An ignorant and base President who is being played by the people behind him.
Brooks, when are you going to realize that there is no longer a Republican party that you still claim to belong to?
2
Reagan was a traitor to his fellow actors; he went on to destroy Community Health Centers in CA; he progressed to the WH where he fought against a health care system for all, supported Thatcher and her dubious Falklands war, allowed a man to undermine democratic governments in Central America, gave us Erlichman and Haldeman, two criminals; then he finally left office with Alzheimers and never knew the destruction he caused. He was never a "good" man; he avoided the draft by making grade C war movies, impersonating those who were actually fighting. He was unable to memorize his lines as an actor; he was never able to memorize his lines as President; he was the perfect tool for the Republican Party. Charming? No, he was not. He was mean, and so was Nancy who governed behind the scenes.
In the DVD release of his film, “Fiddler on the Roof, “ Director Norman Jewison provides important insights about the power of demagogues. The exteriors of the film were shot in 1971 in the former Yugoslavia, specifically in Croatia. At the time of filming, Jewison notes that the component ethnic groups—Croats, Serbs, Slovenians, Montenegrins, Macedonians, Bosnians—got along extremely well. There was intermarriage among the ethnic groups and no obvious ethnic hostility. All groups worked well together on the film. He could not conceive of that country exploding apart along ethnic lines twenty years later. Yet the underlying ethnic hatreds were present in 1971, hidden under the surface of Tito’s police state. After Tito died and Communism fell, the country split along ethnic lines with ethnic cleansing and other brutal atrocities triggered by opportunistic demagogues. For those of us who remember, it was really bad. All it took was the right conditions and the right demagogue. The important point is that the same thing could happen here.
5
This speck of hope is barely visible on the horizon, but it is there. If Brooks sees it, it must be there.
The triumph of moderatism over extremism. Nothing quite like it. Or........... so far we've been somewhat lucky or we haven't seen extremism penetrate our day-to-day life yet.As long as this holds there won't be much impetus to change. Our politics will continue to entertain. Yesterday it seems that a chemistry professor was forcibly deported in front of his two daughters. I only heard about it as background noise. This is what we have to watch for. Not knowing anything in particular about this professor may be worse than hearing the screaming. Does anybody out there, or you, Mr. Brooks, know anything about this? Hopefully this is not the beginning of our nightmare.
1
Mr. Brooks intellectualizes everything. This is not a philosophical, or even a ‘political’ problem. This is potentially a matter of life or death for millions, even billions. Each and every American must ask her or himself why he or she can even remotely tolerate a movement, and evidently now a political party, which so obviously models itself on the one in Germany in the 1930’s and ’40s, the one that empowered a regime which murdered tens of millions and which hundreds of thousands of Americans sacrificed their lives to defeat.
5
Again with the false equivalency!!
It is not the Democratic party that accepts "alternative facts". It is not the Democratic party that supports a child molester for Senator. And it is not the Democratic party that is willing to look away while a foreign power subverts our elections because they are the beneficiary of that subversion. No it is the entire Republican party, from their leadership in Congress to evangelical voters who think the end justifies the means. (My question to them...what would Jesus think of their moral relativism). No Mr. Brooks, as much as you would like it to be so, there are not two sides to this argument. "Conservatives" like you made a deal with the devil. Now we're all getting burned.
10
The only clear pay-offs from Republican/Trumpian policies seem to be enormous deficits, pollution, a volatile stock market, a bloated military budget and less economic and political influence internationally. Aren't we lucky?
2
Could it be Republicans, Democrats and Independents from now on? It would make America Great Again.
1
David, there is no real equivalency here.
The corrupting of American ideals by Republicans has been underway ever since Ronald Reagan became POTUS and some would say since 1964, in the ashes of Goldwater's loss to LBJ. Ronald Reagan's trip to Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1980, George Herbert Walker Bush's Willie Horton ad and George W. Bush's bogus wars all tore at the American body politic.
The GOP has a multi-decade project going to fully repeal the New Deal and they don't care how they get there. Fear, racism, misogyny, moral and financial bankruptcy, cultural anxiety and tribalism and now treason are all perfectly good tools in their quest to return us to the first Gilded Age, forever.
We don't need additional parties. We need one party, the Republican party, to stop destroying America.
7
SInce when has a pillar of conservatism been the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
4
The divisiveness of the GOP and the identity politics of the DNC are both financed by the political spending of corporations thanks to the abomination known as Citizens United. So long as corporate America can prevent any kind of solidarity among working Americans they can continue their subversion of our democracy with an end game of rewriting the constitution by corporations for corporations. Will multiple parties save us from oligarchy? Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats seem to be up to the task.
2
I read your list of "pillars of conservatism" and wondered. I consider myself liberal and I believe strongly in rule of law, global engagement, moral decency and the idea that character is important and skin color is not. Do you think these traits are only held by conservatives?
3
The beginnings of such a third party could exist now.
Let the Jeff Flakes, the Bob Corkers, the Susan Collins of the Senate align themselves with the Democrats who worked with them to short circuit yet another government shutdown, the likes of Claire McCaskill, Heidi Heitkamp and Ben Nelson. If the twenty or so Senators who met in Collins' office to actually listen to each other and work out a deal all left their respective parties and created a new one, they would be the Senate power brokers and effectively force compromise on Schumer and McConnell. The same thing would be more difficult in the House, but do-able.
This would be a far more effective and patriotic action than resigning or voting along party lines.
1
David Brooks is so close to finally realizing the underlying conclusion and reality of what he is writing in this article: That the Republican Party is simply not a conservative party. In fact, the general political title of "conservatism" is entirely disconnected from historical conservatism. The modern right is defined by three equally radical viewpoint groups today: Corporatists/Plutocrats, Authoritarians, and Theocratists. While these three groups have recognized their partial overlap, mostly based in the fact that they all help facilitate Plutocracy, the have also completely rejected the legitimacy of any and all other viewpoints or political order. Worse still, it is exactly the two-party system that has created the necessary tools for this to happen.
Brooks is so committed to his weak corporatism, masquerading as a self-invented "centrism," that he is literally incapable of accepting the reality before his eyes. It is the right, and only the right, that has radicalized so extensively that long held conservative positions are now considered "liberal." Has the left become more socially liberal, yes, but they have simply called for conservative government solutions, such as treating all fairly and equally. Conservatism is not traditionalism nor theocracy. The single biggest problem with our two party system is that by and large most people simply see the parties as identity groups devoid of policy. This has allowed the Radical Right to hijack the GOP from conservatism.
1
There's only one thing that will end the two-party system:
The end of the Electoral College.
4
Yes. If we went with a national vote, we would have a qualified former First Lady, Senator and Secty. of State as President, despite the GOP debunked "talking points". Hillary Clinton put her tax records on line for the public to see; where were Trump's tax records showing a 250M loan laundered through The Bank of Cyprus and Deutsche Bank, money from Russians in London who stole that money from their country's treasury. Why is Trump so loyal and defensive about a known adversary to the United States? Why was he willing to throw NATO away, in order to give Putin access to the Balkans? Trump is not calling the shots; look to Tillerson and his oil interests, Zinke and his oil interests; in fact, look at the oil funded plutocrats now in Trump's Cabinet, because they are dictating his policies, including threatening the fragile Arctic. He is happy flying to private golf courses, eating McDonald burgers and fries, and getting two scoops of ice cream. This is a man incapable to rising to his office; he never was capable; he never was anything other than a grifter. He violates the Emolument Clause every day he is in office.
Multi-party can't happen as long as there is an Electoral College. Presidential elections might routinely be thrown to the House of Representatives to settle.
3
Mr. Brooks, this may be one of the most important pieces you have written. The scarcity mind-set will get worse with the deepening divides between rich and poor. You are absolutely correct about the demise of the two party system. It is failing. I hope that sometime soon in the future the Electoral College will be gotten rid of, and candidates who have the most votes become president. Maybe someday we will have a House and Senate made up of men and women more reflective of the diversity in this country.
1
You might be lucky to end up with a European style multi party system. The other choice being offered is a one man system.
1
In this observer's estimation, a third party, or even worse, multiple parties, would be a disaster for our republic because it would increase the likelihood that a fringe candidate would be able to corner enough votes to sneak in under the radar and rise to power, as happened here in Maine in 2010 and again in 2014.
Because the vote was split three ways Paul LePage was able to ascend to the governorship with only 37% of the votes. This could happen to either party, in either direction.
If we had a half way educated electorate which would vote for the good of the country instead of narrow self interest and ideological (im) purity, we might just avoid this kind of dystopian disaster.
3
What you call the warrior ethos is in fact more a tribal ethos or mindset. Because a true warrior always respect his opponent, for he never knows when his enemy will become the ally (todays opponent is tomorrow's ally). When Alexander the Great reached India he had more people in his army coming from the ranks of those conquered along the way that he originally started with...
1
The "scarcity mindset" takes hold when your paycheck doesn't get bigger but your basic expenses do, and the only way to keep what you've got is to work more hours or get more education for which you have to borrow money and pay interest while still working as much as possible to pay your living expenses for two to eight years. There is no real "scarcity" of money and the things it can buy, but the price you have to pay, in labor and in debt, to get it keeps getting higher and higher. The essential problem is distribution of resources and wealth. It's just like food. Every person on the planet could have enough to eat if it was produced and distributed with the singular goal of feeding everyone. And the other problem is greed and the inability of most Americans to say, "I have enough." But our greed-driven, capitalist, consumer economy would collapse if enough people said "Enough." It's complicated.
1
False equivalence once again. Weaponized partisanship has been adopted as political strategy by Republicans only. When one side limits debate exclusively to their own narrative, negotiation and compromise become impossible.
When one party goes off to bizaro world, and actively attacks the other not just for their beliefs but for their personal motives, what white flag can be waved by the party that still resides in normative society?
Trump is only the next iteration of what began with Gingrich. Have you forgotten how McConnell denied a sitting president his constitutional duty to nominate a Supreme Court justice? Republicans have been mercenary for over decades now.
Polarized? Hardly. Only one party has gone off beyond the Right Pole.
1
Since when it is a "pillar of conservatism" that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin? Who opposed abolition? Conservatives. Who opposed integration (and still do, if they told the truth)? Conservatives.
4
Let's not put words into people's mouths.
"Today’s Republicans are happy to trade away their fiscal principles if they can get their way on immigration".
Nope. Today's Republicans are happy to trade away their fiscal principles if it benefits their party and their corporate donor class only.
1
My my question to David Brooks is "why do you still consider yourself a Republican?" Your views do not seem conducive to their actions. Ever since Gingrich or even earlier, the GOP has consistently put party over country, with the capper coming when McConnell and the senate refused to perform their constitutional duty re SCOTUS.
1
Mr. Brooks, I am usually with you, but this is a bit of a dodge. The only domestic threat to our democracy is the Republican Party, its media engine, and most especially, its President. Their attacks on the norms and procedures of Federal government, beginning under the previous administration, have taken us to the brink.
5
Imagine this:
11:59pm Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020
Biden/Romney – 64%
Trump/Pence – 21%
Warren/Booker – 15%
What follows is a vision for a shift from our two party system that starts at the Executive Branch and from the Center. Two established leaders with courage and nothing to prove.
These 2 people will need to be nationally recognized, experienced leaders. They need to be obviously driven by a patriotic vision of America; have a long running respect for each other; and be able to attract a legion of top caliber advisors/cabinet members in all areas of domestic and international social and economic policy.
They will also need to attract private sector donors who are willing to provide resources… NOT for influence around specific legislative items, … rather, their sponsorship will be based upon how they trust these two people will lead the country.
The Breakthrough-the tough part
One needs to come from the Democratic Party, the other from the Republican Party. They would break from their respective parties, form an independent party. They would run a campaign agreeing in advance that though the TICKET would run for re-election to a 2nd term; they would agree to ‘flip-the-ticket’ for the 2nd term campaign, that is, they would switch the Presidential and Vice-Presidential roles. Imagine the political, commercial and academic talent that would be drawn to join such an unprecedented political ‘rebalancing’ with a 3rd party NOT DRAWN FROM THE FRINGES, BUT FROM THE CENTERS.
3
“The scarcity mentality always ends up eating the host philosophy because it operates on a more fundamental level of the psyche.”
Brooks is missing the failings accompanying what he terms “the abundance mind-set.” Abundance unchecked, mindless in its competitive materialism, breeds greed. It also underpins itself with a defense against a fair arbiter to stand between the destructive inclinations of abundance and those of scarcity, to wit, a democratically constituted government.
There is only one party in the United States that has worked to undermine, to dissolve government, and that is the greed-based Republican Party.
If the two-party system is hanging by a thread, if scarcity fears and clannish actions characterize this moment in our history, the blame clearly lies with the party that brought us Reagan, Gingrich, deregulation, corporation money as speech, the Tea Party and Trump.
3
Until Congress gets money out of elections permanently through legislation that will withstand the Citizens United test, we will continue losing our democracy to plutocrats.
2
No, the "scarcity mentality" is exactly what's needed now in a time of accelerating climate change, and a failure to demand that the third world get a grip on population growth. Finite clean air, finite clean water (Capetown, South Africa, is the place to watch), finite energy resources. What you can't demand is that the first world, mostly but not completely White, for reasons the sociologists debate, commit cultural suicide and drastically lower their standard of living so that we can all live at some miserable third world level. It won't happen, and the UN (the West must take in their "fair share" of refugees says Mr. Guterres), and some good hearted media representatives such as Mr. Brooks should start thinking about alternatives. Israel is out there right now looking for donations to build a clean water plant for Gaza. You can always send a personal check, Mr. Brooks, but don't count on gratitude after the West spent eighty years supporting incompetent governments, feeding their people, and not demanding an end to violence. Thank goodness America got a grip on reality before we reached the point of accepting nations such as Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan as nuclear powers. We may still have a chance to avert nuclear catastrophe against, oh, you remember, our own people? The ones who pay taxes, join the military, and support Western governments with their votes?
2
If the GOP is leading the scarcity charge, why are they proposing so much new spending? Or, at least, deficit spending, now set to mushroom? I don't follow in the particular. More generally, the argument seems about right. The new Manichaeanism.
1
I admire most of David Brooks' essays, but I'm wondering if he is developing some heavy mood swings. The last essay on "Changemakers" was warm/fuzzy and optimistic. This one is dour and gloomy. Perhaps in his next piece he can analyze how upbeat changemakers can mitigate the "scarcity mentality" "perpetual warfare" and tribal politics?
1
Mr. Brooks omits how Conservative policies create the conditions of scarcity, from which they clearly benefit. Their rich-favoring tax cuts, dynasty-favoring inheritance laws, weakening of retirement systems and employment protections, all the things they've done which have caused an inexorable shift of our nations wealth to the very richest. That they successfully exploit those conditions for even more power in an evil, self-perpetuating cycle is simply too depressing.
1
The Republican Party has not changed because of Trump, other than to exaggerate the trends that were already in place. Trump is the end result of what the Republican Party has fostered over decades.
Race baiting in the Republican Party are rooted in the Nixon administration. Reagan used it and so did Bush HW.
Tax cuts as the be all and end all began with Reagan. Bush W. was happy to carry that ball even further. The anti-deficit crowd have been screaming about drowning the government in a bathtub since those halcyon days of conservatism you remember so fondly.
You'd love to escape from complicity in this fiasco, David, but you can't. Your hands are deep in it.
2
If we have corporations running our lives, do we need any government at all? Whether Republican or Democrat, doesn't it seem that private interests are calling the shots? Worse than this, we seem to be content.
The two-party system will not change until we change the electoral system.
Single member district systems, with plurality voting will have two parties. Period.
Maine has a Republican governor because two Democrats split the Democratic vote and LePage won with 38% of the vote.
It is our only "law" in political science. I don't care what cultural analysis anyone is doing.
You will not find a single - not even one - professor of American politics who would agree with anyone's analysis that this will happen.
If you are in doubt (most people are), please, please, please google Duverger's law on youtube. They will explain why. This is a nice fun one that I show my class. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
What would have to happen for Brooks' analysis to be correct is severe lack of rationality on the part of the parties. They would have to collude and conspire to completely ignore (and perhaps insult) a huge part of the electorate, which would otherwise bring them votes, out of sheer principle to exclude so-called "clan warriors." Democrats and Republicans conspiring about anything at all is exceedingly unlikely. And out of principle? And risk losing elections? Nope.
3
Love your response Mark, you are 100% correct. This country has been a race to the bottom, by ever Republican Administration, since the election of Reagan.
2
What we desperately need are structural changes in the way our political system functions, by constitutional means if necessary. That includes an end, first and foremost, to our deeply dysfunctional Congress. We have way too many members of both the House and the Senate that not only put party before country, but also party before district or state and party before those they represent. To fix this, we need an absolute end to partisan gerrymandering, a recognition by the Supreme Court that the framers did not intend the First Amendment to enshrine plutocracy, and a mandate that Congress act responsibly and on time when it comes to fiscal affairs. We also need to recognize that having thinly populated states with the lion's share over public policy is a sure path to division and, eventually, disunion.
That means we must get rid of the Electoral College. Two of the last three Presidents got a minority of the popular vote. That means they do not command even a majority of public sentiment, let alone a consensus, and it also means that our parties are gaming the system to maximize the votes of 270 random individuals instead of focusing on the needs of this country.
Finally, we need a national referendum and initiative process so that the people, when Congress fails to act or acts in a foolish manner (as it has so often lately), can overrule their representatives. Democracy can't exist in a system where lobbyists and billionaires rule.
We can choose: fix it or the nation ends.
2
A way more than averagely thought-provoking Op-Ed from someone whose warning voice might have been a tad louder 16-26 months ago ... when it might have made a bit of a difference.
Unfortunately, it strikes me very much at variance with both US history and that of other nations. OF COURSE, we can point to times - some very calm, some clearly crisis-laden like WW II - when in democratic nations, pitched battles between the parties gave way to genuine co-operation.
But whether it's Italy or Britain or Israel or Germany - and no doubt others - during my not short lifetime, there has almost always been the INS and the OUTS as in in-power and ... would-do-ANYthing to get BACK in power.
Were they as "venomous" as Mitch McConnell or - arguably - Bernie Sanders?
Hard to say, but readers do well to think carefully of what I believe was fairly "sound history" in "The Darkest Hour." Maybe, this part was exaggerated, but the members of the Opposition were told to applaud only if a signal was given.
I actually CAN understand how DJT was hurt and angered by the Democrats "sitting on their hands" at his recent S.O.T.U., but while that's emblematic of all that Mr. Brooks broods over, it's neither NEW nor "record-breaking."
Similarly, both of the U.S. major parties have ALWAYS been "big tent" kinds of thing, ... and in that as there was a budget deal between them just last week, reports of the end - or impending end - of the 2-party system in the U.S. strike me as WILDLY premature.
Mr Brooke writes one column per year that makes all the rest worth testing. Today's that day, for which thanks. Question is, when does the next year begin? Guess we'll have to keep reading to find out!
Thoughtful commentary. Unfortunately, the conservative / Republican clan no longer cherishes the "democratic way of life." It realizes that the plurality of American people does not want much of what it stands for, so it has adopted the undemocratic means it needs to get and retain power: the suppression of the right to vote; gerrymandering; blatant dissimulation, deception and misinformation; the abandonment of checks and balances and long accepted principles, procedures and courtesies of governing; and the dissolution of the rule of law. You ask for liberal intellectual tolerance. What is there to tolerate of the conservatism/Republicanism of the right? Fiscal responsibility? Family values? Ethical transparency? Justice for all? Show me an honest and principled conservative and she/he shall have every right to speak.
1
The ironic fact about the "scarcity mindset" is that the U.S. has never been richer, with a household net worth approaching $100 trillion, about $750,000 per family if divided evenly. Unfortunately, with conservative policies creating inequality, the bottom 50%of families only average $11,000, with roughly the bottom 30% net debtors. The top 1% have 40% of the wealth, vs. 25% pre-Reagan.
Republicans voting against their own economic interests have created a situation where the rich see their wealth go up from tax cuts (the top 20% get 65% of the benefit or more), from stock buybacks (the top 10% have about 90% of the stock wealth), and increasingly concentrated and anti-competitive industries. The poor get peanuts while cheering to "Make America White Again."
Obama showed the path: Higher taxes on the rich to fund subsidies or Medicaid expansion for the poor, in this case 20 million more with healthcare. We should expand that further to education, so we get our middle-class kids through college debt-free.
The money is there to get us back to a win-win philosophy, but with Republicans voting against the economic interests of the bottom 99% it's tough to get there.
2
It's true that the major political parties have changed since the 1990s: both have moved to the right. Without substantial opposition by the Republican intelligentsia--- indeed sometimes with their acquiescence--- demagogic outlets like Fox proliferated, a fact that Mr. Brooks has conveniently omitted. Along with these media outlets, a glut of rightwing forums, bloggers, and other echo chamber organs also arose.
The most professional of these are backed by rightwing big money. Publication last week of the tax filings for the Mercer Family Foundation is a good example of the broad and deep influence peddling rightwing billionaire ideologues are waging. Among $19M in 2016 contributions, there are six and seven figure donations to anti-climate science, anti-union, anti-public education, anti-immigrant, etc., as well as more generic rightwing organizations like Heritage Foundation.
(https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4360099/Mercer-Family-Foundat...
Multiply this by the growing number of activist rightwing billionaires and you get a sense of the scale of rightwing money invested in molding American popular opinion. (This does not even include hidden political contributions covered by the Citizens United decision.)
Conservative intellectuals are of course complicit here. Not only do they stand by and encourage this manipulation of the public because it has helped their side to win. In many cases, the billionaires pay their salaries.
2
The Presidential system is dead. Rewrite the Constitution from zero.
Our political and social systems should be inclusive, not exclusive.
Voting rights should be a inclusive - everybody should have that right from birth or from naturalization.
Lets not be afraid of a national identity system - follow Estonia.
National Heath Insurance not Employer based Health system.
Progressive Taxation.
Six month leave with full pay to cover birth.
Full coverage for education from early child care and education to college.
And more.
All these things are not even revolutionary - many other countries have them. The US is myopically out of step with progress.
1
Republicans did not suddenly succumb to a scarcity mentality or adopt a warrior style. They have been about the business of circumventing and even subverting American democratic values since the days of Nixon. It comes from the pure desperation of a minority party eager to stay in power, and not from some lofty conservative goals or principled views.
1
The two party system is a consequence of first-past-the-post voting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law.
As long as this doesn't change, new parties will either (1) close down quickly (2) continue to exist as small, obscure organisations on the fringes of the political landscape, or (3) replace one of the existing parties - as the Republicans did in the 19th century.
1
Mr. Brook paints a beautiful portrait of a pre-Trump Republican Party that embraced multi-culturalism and a hopeful vision for all people. Sadly, the portrait is a fiction.
Since the realignment of the southern dixiecrats and Nixon's southern strategy - including a series of race-baiting bigoted essays by your revered Ronald Reagan - the GOP has been a party of white nationalism. It has changed its views on many things, but not with respect to its commitment to a Euro-centric state that makes all people of color feel like visitors rather than citizens.
When history books are written about this period of time, I hope they are written with more honesty than what we see from repenting Republicans in the era of Trump.
1
Our system's rules leads to a two party system. The electoral college with winner take all state electoral votes discourages third party candidates. Single member house districts discourage third party challenges. In both of the above cases three candidates results in winner who might not have won otherwise. Wilson was elected president when Roosevelt and Taft divided the Republican vote. Our system encourages coalition building before the election and not after, as happens in Europe. We may see a realignment with many educated whites joined by various "minorities" in one coalition vs. as coalition built around less educated whites.
Older people tend to gravitate towards the scarcity mind-set: I remember paying ground beef at $0.99 a pound and the $3.99 a pound price makes me feel poor. However, my nephew has no problem with paying $3.99 for a pound of ground beef because he is 30 years old. Could it be possible that the abundance mind-set felt by Mr. Brooks in the 1990's was a reflection of his younger age then? In the 1990's the baby boomers were younger. more energetic and more positive. Now, the baby boomers are mostly old, and this decaying group of citizens may be fueling the scarcity mind-set. Our political leaders are all too old. We need the young and energetic people to rise up and overthrow the old people in the GOP and the DEM parities or to start new parties. Could the younger people bring back the abundance mind-set if they are given the power and the responsibility to govern?
1
Sorry, David, but your prediction is unlikely. Yes, a minority of the Establishment GOP (you included) has realized that you can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors. Unfortunately, that’s about all you’re going to get. Trump’s base, which far outnumbers the aforementioned minority of the Establishment GOP, will continue to align itself with the clan warriors. You can not create an viable/effective third party with only a minority of the Establishment GOP.
1
Back in the 1990s there was an unconscious abundance mind-set? Sure there was, among readers of the Wall Street Journal. The good ol' abundance mindset somehow skipped over the dispossessed, those who were losing health insurance because of soaring premiums or pre-exising conditions, those whose 401Ks and home ownership were destroyed by Wall Street and others who wallowed in the Brooks abundance mindset. And by the way, unlike Republicans, liberals are not interested in pulverizing: they just want fairness and justice in a country that could afford both if it wasn't 100% focused on shareholder prosperity.
3
"Democratic capitalism provides the bounty....The key Republican narratives were capitalist narratives about dynamic entrepreneurs and America’s heroic missions."
Therein lies the great conceptual, historical, and policy error that prepared the ground for Brexit, UKIP, Geert Wilders, Marine LePen, & Co. Democratic capitalism _provided_ the bounty for a large swath of the society. But the less-than-democratic capitalism that began under Reagan and in the 1990s funneled the bounty to a small elite, who used their increased with to further undermine democracy. Less-than-democratic capitalism is characterized by false narratives used as propaganda, e.g. the assault on Social Security using dubious and incomplete statistics and quivers of anecdotal evidence to legitimize union-busting. And then there's administrative means, a quiet "re-regulation cloaked under "deregulation" that caters to wealthy interests at the general expense. The historical and conceptual lies here: the welfare state isn't the vanguard of the proletariat, as Republicans seem to think, but really the final piece in the puzzle of industrial capitalism. The welfare state evened out the worst aspects of capitalism, making it tolerable for most and in so doing, reinforced the legitimacy of "democratic capitalism" and nation-states. One of our last remaining hopes is that some of the rights thinkers will realize the mistake and their role in perpetrating it and help us turn back before we fall over the cliff.
3
Did I just read an otherwise thoughtful column by David Brooks where he quotes from Martin Luther King's most famous speech, citing his excerpt as a "pillar of conservatism?"
Mr. Brooks has been alive for all of the half century since we heard of Dr. King's hope for his children that they might someday "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Claiming that sentiment as a pillar of conservatism would be laughable if the reality were no so tragic. From the Southern Strategy to the current day, the cynical Republican politics surrounding racial issues has been sadly consistent.
3
General Kelly's statement regarding a possible compromise to end the Civil War told me more about Trump's Administration than Trump's own semi-literate speeches. There was no need, or support for a "compromise" with slavery wherein human beings were held in chains and used as farm machinery, housed in huts with dirt floors with little ventilation, bought and sold in open markets with captured human beings in the Caribbean. The degradation of fellow human beings has no defense, now or then. That is why abolitionists were able to muster the power of Northern money and patriotism to defeat this disgrace to any free Republic. Yes, the North needed Southern cotton, and that perverted the Reconstruction era, allowing slavery to move into new territories. That time is gone for good, despite what Kelly thinks might have been a better resolution. I had a good neighbor who was a former Marine; he would have been appalled at Kelly's statement; he served with black Marines. I prefer to believe my neighbor represents the Marine Corps, not General Kelly.
Just out of curiosity, I'd like to ask Mr. Brooks if he was -- at the time of the good old Reagan years -- unaware of Reagan's use of the southern strategy in winning the Presidency.
If he was not, then he simply wasn't paying attention. If he was, then he seems to have missed a simple fundamental truth. There is absolutely nothing new or radical about Donald Trump's form of conservatism. It's simple traditional American "conservatism" carried to its' logical conclusions. Put another way, the only thing new about Trump is that he simply has -- for lack of a better word -- the chutzpah to articulate what most conservatives have been thinking all the time.
1
I always appreciate your philosophical perspective on world issues and your ability to perfectly time the discussion that is critical for the moment. I agree with your prediction of the demise of the two party system in American politics and I disagree with comments about you being optimistic..you merely see the process unfolding. In your analysis, the evolution of a U.S. parliamentary form of government would be an organic process that occurs as the extremes of each party are either atrophied or worse, politically cannibalized. Or, maybe we can simply return to leading from the center as we have for decades?
End the 2 party system... Easy expand the House of Representatives in the 40s the House voted to stay at 435 added 3 reps for DC. Since then the US has almost tripled in size with 1300 members the People would get better representation and smaller parties would have a chance.
Here's my fondest wish: that every African American woman of legal age makes sure she is registered to vote; that every African American woman in the US takes responsibility for making sure everyone in her household is registered to vote; that every African American woman takes responsibility for making sure that everyone in her household goes to the polls on election day, even if she has to take them there herself.
And I wish that every African American who thinks that there is no way their vote counts or that they will get anything out of it, follow these directions: go to the polls, be logged in as having shown up to vote, find a blank line on the ballet and fill in all the bubbles all the way across or go into the booth and pull the lever without actually choosing anyone.
Send a message that the two party system works well enough. Just give us candidates worthy of serving as legislators and states persons worth voting for.
Observe the "pillars of conservatism" according to David Brooks:
1. "Rule of law," as exemplified by Richard Nixon
2. "Fiscal discipline," as exemplified by Ronald Reagan
3. "Global engagement," as exemplified by George W. Bush
4. "Moral decency, the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character etc." as exemplified by Donald Trump.
3
Please, the Republican party has been hopelessly corrupt for years. The Republican party began to go off of the rails decades ago when a cabal of extreme wealthy reactionaries started a propaganda campaign to undermine trust in government and install a blind faith in "free" markets in order to increase their wealth and power. It was divide and conquer. Slowly but surely they started to wrest control from old line conservatives in the Republican Party. Reagan was elected President. Then Gingrich and his allies took over the House. Now it rules all three branches. Put aside the veneer of ideology (and a thin veneer it has become) and it has one true interest: to weaken government and the Republic until it is a shell that does one thing and one thing only - advance the interests of the majority owners of our nation's wealth and property. There are still some hold outs in the Democratic party, but frankly they too seem on the same path, a few steps behind, but getting there. Bipartisan scarcity mentality my foot. It's bipartisan, extreme, laissez-faire economics and politics that is the problem here.
1
Incredibly, Mr. Brooks tells us the whole problem of hyper-partisanship started in the Balkans. One wonders, though, how he can omit even a mention of George Washington's warnings about the spirit of party some 250 years ago. There is likewise no mention of the civil war. The problems of party are not a recent phenomenon and although they may be exacerbated in times of perceived scarcity, they can also thrive in hopeful times. The solutions require constant vigilance, not just a (temporary) philosophical realignment.
Independent candidates and parties stand almost no chance - the electoral system is rigged to preserve the two-party status quo. Instead of dreaming about reforms that the current power brokers will never permit, it's time for popular *takeover* of the major parties. In 80%+ of congressional districts, the November vote is predictable -- gerrymandering ensures that the seat is safely in the hands of one party or the other.
What's NOT predictable is who the candidates will be for each party. A mere 10% of the voting public could mobilize to disrupt the status quo and support outsider candidates. Relatively modest numbers are sufficient to win primary elections. The Tea Party achieved great success with this formula: a small number of passionate advocates, mobilized to promote their 'outsider' candidates in the primaries.
Instead of recruiting liberal reformers to run as Democrats in hopelessly gerrymandered districts, progressives would be better-served to recruit and support middle-of-the-road, responsible Republicans to fight primary battles (supported by crossover independents and democrats) against the incumbent Republican extremists. Change your party registration to whatever label gives you leverage in local elections (I did) ! It's realistic to work toward a Congress with a wing of moderately progressive Republicans, willing to work on bi-partisan policies. It's not realistic to expect election reform that empowers independents to wield significant power.
1
I’m always curious when I read these forecasts of doom to the two party system. They never discuss the Constitution and how two party rule follows from it though not expressly required by it. Hard to get to 270 with a multiparty system but I guess letting the House of Representatives select our President is only slightly less democratic than continued application of the Electoral College.
How about cleaning up the GOP? There were a few Never Trumpers with integrity. Where are they now? Report for duty, please, because Constitutional amendment is a challenging prospect.
Gee, David, complicit much?
4
no, David, it's not economic policy, or classical liberal values, but racism, pure and simple. you choose the Republicans when they proved this, back when the South left the Democratic Party, lacking insight your complicity in failing to fully address one of our nation's original sins, and now can see that the cancerous tribalism has metastasized into a national facist party. Remember the Maine? Remember the Reichstag!
3
What scarcity? Unless you mean inequality, where country club fees are doubled to $200,000 while Haitians on temporary visas toil for the same $10 per hour? The Angry White Idiots of the upper midwest abandoned democracy and sanity to vote for an oligarch who promised them he would give them back all the jobs and money they've allegedly lost to NAFTA, put that uppity Obama in his place, and feed immigrants to the lions? There are Balkan problems in the Balkans and the former Eastern Bloc, but they have the excuse of growing up under Stalin. What's our excuse for electing Mussolini? Look no further than the "rise" of Fox News, just before the advent of Reaganism, which in perverted and exaggerated form is still the gospel of the GOP. The only real "scarcity" is of empathy, and now decency as well...
10
I wonder if David is a little bipolar. In a recent column he was bashing native born Americans for underperforming in the face of global competition. Now this. Which is it?
3
Not sure what you are talking about. I like ice cream and playing basketball. Not bipolar. It is possible to hold two entirely unrelated thoughts without being considered bipolar.
Yes, Brook recently did today write a thought provoking piece that pointed out that native born Americans were underperforming in the face of global competition. And today he explored facets of our two party system, including the reasons that it might happen. To unrelated thoughts; not bipolar at all.
1
I don't believe it's called "bipolar"; I believe it's called "two faced."
Two very different things like ice cream and basketball are not what LB was commenting on. It was DB's tendency to cite opposites to support a point of view. That's two-faced.
Uh.... so all this NOW is a shock after Atwater/Manafort and Willie Horton 1988? Just smear the democrat (Dukakis) and because HW Bush is not an out right racist/a fiscal crazy, all was well 'till Trump ??!!!
2
Another dreary smear of the left for the sins of the right. Yes, there are crazies on the left, but the Democrats are not an ideological party that fits Brooks' description of an anti-democratic warrior tribe. it's just more shallow, sloppy pseudo-whatever masquerading as analysis.
5
We can't end up with a European style multiparty system you doofus --we have a winner take all, plurality electoral system.
1
Please explain the liberal position that you find divisive and anti_American.
Could it be universal healthcare?
Equal treatment for minorities.
Rights for gays?
Food for hungry children?
A government not run by Putin?
The police killing little black boys playing in the park?
What liberal position do you find so extreme?
9
Gee, how much time do you have?
- Blind unqualified support of unions, who bankroll the Democrats, particularly teacher unions who prevent any educational progress if it threatens one single teacher's continued employment or exposes that teacher to any meaningful accountability.
- Complete opposition to any openminded review of personal injury litigation, including the impact that unjustified awards have on the the high/rising costs of healthcare. (No coincidence that personal injury trial attorneys almost exclusively support Democrat candidates!)
- Proliferation of more and more protected classes. Soon it will be impossible to terminate or elect not to hire a prospective employee without risk of litigation, even if caught stealing or other legitimate cause, unless the individual is white, male, heterosexual, right-handed, perfect-eyesight, no physical handicap, no psychological issues (including occasional bouts of anxiety, taller than average (because they enjoy statistically enjoy an advantage economically)... All others will have protected status.
Not enough time in the day to list them all!
1
When does a narrative become propaganda? “ the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Republican politicians could have denounced the race baiting but remained silent” is certainly a profound bit of evidence. What is the Southern Strategy, the “War on Drugs” if not institutional racism that persists throughout the GOP? The GOP golden age under St. Reagan produced 38 indictments in the Administration and years of confusion and fear among foreign leaders and policy makers. Daddy Bush gave us race relations the GOP way with Willie Horton. W gave America a false corrupt war in Iraq, torture, turned the investment community into a gambling casino and blamed the crash on Black Americans for buying homes they could not afford, and the GOP has perpetrate the endless war to prop up oil prices, and suck tax dollars for “defense” while abandoning veterans, while killing 4 million Muslims and embracing “Christianity” and institutional male supremacy.
Just a few particulars in answer to the logical fallacy that works for the GOP: false equivalence. Cleverly, subtly David knits Democrats into the fabric of corruption as if they too are racists? Misogynists? American Taliban?
Conservatives and conservatism that does not include racists, and male supremacists, and Christians who have a dispensation for cruelty, hatred, and greed? Who is left if the go away?
Be honest David. Like the Confederacy, the GOP is just criminal.
5
"Stuck fighting his wars with him, Republican politicians have had to say goodbye to most of the pillars of conservatism...."
Baloney, David. No one is "stuck" with Donald Trump. Each and every Republican in the House and Senate has free will. If they have abandoned their "ideals" (as you call them), it's because they want to. They care more about keeping their gerrymandered sinecures than serving the American people.
Which makes them traitors, as well as ethically bankrupt. The GOP should re-name itself The Collaborators Party. Because that's all it is these days.
At Nuremberg, the Russians wanted Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister of Armaments, sentenced to death. The British and Americans wanted to acquit him. Speer argued that in fact he deserved a term of imprisonment, for collaborating with evil instead of opposing it. He served 20 years in Spandau before being released.
It says something about our Republican Party when Albert Speer dwarfs it as a man of principles.
7
The Republican response to the Civil Rights Movement became clear when the senile Great Communicator thought he saw a welfare queen driving a Cadillac around town to pick up her welfare checks. The old fool would read any script put in front of him, he thought he was on a television show selling 20 Mule Team Borax.
Reagan worked so well for them they've continued to choose small men with small minds to office. Their voters keep falling for the same old lies, ignorance really is bliss.
The Republican coalition shrank so now it includes neo-nazis, sex offenders, money launderers, and a host of bigots. They scooped up the worst among us. Trump is the perfect chief for this tribe.
We'll get it back and just like the Civil Rights Movement we'll have to shove it down their throats.
4
“Under the influence of this mentality, liberalism goes from a creed that
Are values individual rights and deliberatn to one that values group separatism and intellectual intolerance.”
“Better together”, diversity, “...it takes a village”, “black lives matter” are the Democrat cri de coures of the last few elections. The only people who experience these values as group separatism and intellectual intolerance are the disaffected white people who’ve been suckered into feeling threatened when they might have to examine their own personal behavior and speech-or worse—the Presidents behavior and speech.
I get that David Brooks is essentially a centrist, but cynically positioning yourself as such is lazy. Charlottesville, the racist video re-tweets, the Muslim -ban have no equivalent actions that keep the see-saw in Brooks’ smug horizontal perfect balance. Claiming that a few misguided college kids afraid of “micro-aggressions”, and a bunch of mostly women in pink hats who are reviled by the Billy Bush tapes and gleefully display their disgust by peacefully taking to the streets represent some threat to our polity is just silly.
This isn’t Berlin in the late 1920’s . We aren’t seeing gangs of Nazis battling Communists in street fights. We did see Nazis in Charlottesville, though, and we did hear them called “good people” by our President.
3
Mr. Brooks, you missed what your comrades are showing you. Conservatism is dead. It is buried under un-declared wars in 3 countries and $2.3 trillion dollars of new government debt, but you can still smell it's rotting corpse, which reeks of racism, mysogyny, and xenophobia.
6
"They will realize it’s time to start something new." or will all just be exhausted from the carnage that the clan warriors will ignite. Afraid the mob goes grossly stupid and malignant before its wisened up.
2
No actual conservative reads the "conservative" columnist at the Times and he has no actual influence on conservative thought. He just tilts at the wind from his perch in the Big Blue echo chamber which is NYC.
1
Bravo David. Once a virus gets out of the bag, the only way to kill it is to kill good viruses also. We will NEVER see politics the same way as yesterday. Maybe Donald Trump will turn out to be a blessing in disguise. The old way of politics was really a “old white man’s club”. We now need to find a better way of living and philosophy to replace it. It’s probably going to take some time and the political pendulum will have to sway back and forth at least a few times, but I’m certain that in the end, we’ll be a much better system.
2
Some day, you will write a column that tells the truth about the logical death of the capitalism that you revere and will not segue from a mild rap on the fingers of the fascists to a full-throated statement based upon your worshipped False Equivalence.
Well, probably not.
6
The duplicitous Brooks continues his false redemptive narrative! Look at me, gentle warrior of the misunderstood conservatives!
Brooks has spent the last 30 years cheering for the degenerate traitors that (currently) rule this country. He has advocated for destroying government programs and promoting the interests of the moneyed his entire career, spouting fake folksy platitudes and vainly quoting scripture.
He laughed at those who warned against enriching a few. He mocked those who tried to bring decency to the fore. This is a cheerleader for Bush and Cheney, from Gingrich to Ryan and the rest of those who smirked their way into power while Brooks and his arrogant clique cheered.
And now he wants to be part of the winning team. The real Americans who have been fighting the corruption he helped create and now “laments” with this dishonest pseudo-contrition. The guy who switches teams when his team loses the pennant race. What a clown, a quisling who used to nip at our ankles and now wants to be picked up and scratched behind his deaf ears.
7
How dare you compare the Democrats with the Republicans!!!! You lie and make false equivalents that are not remotely right. Just one example, when did a Democrat not take a vote on a President's choice for the Supreme Court, when David =, when? Democrats have not changed but God Almighty the Republicans have gone over the cliff.
7
When the right continually attempts to pulverize the left, the left feels the need to either stand up for itself or be destroyed.
Being defensive is a totally appropriate response to being put under siege by the likes of McConnell, Ryan, Devin Nunes, the Freedumb Caucus, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Koch Brothers, Americans for the Prosperity of the Koch Brothers, hypocritical evangelical scolds, and the plethora of other deplorables too numerous to mention that now drive the republi-con party.
We will not go quietly like the jews did in 1930's Germany.
Your party did this, don't try and make it seem as though it was equal parts right and left.
Trump is driving this country to the type of autocracy and militarism that allowed Japan and Germany to follow their leaders into a worldwide holocaust. The stakes are actually much higher this time because of the proliferation of WMD's.
Oh and you have a lot of crust Brooks to appropriate Martin Luther King's words and claim them as a "pillar" of conservatism. If only it had been, but it never was and never will be.
5
It's ok! All's well!
Living in a robin's egg blue state life is just honky dory!
We bluebirds just have to stop worrying about the folks outside our walls and their problems with abortion and civil rights and jobs and education and discrimination and immigration yadadadada;they will just have to make their own political changes or move in with us - the door is always open.
BUT -if you're happy where you are -the way things are - then -don't worry - be happy - as long as you can?
1
Mr. Brooks,
How can you equate the Republicans with the Democrats and keep a straight face? The Republicans really are playing a zero sum game, and doing it quite well I might add. They have no qualms in achieving their ends. Even as some Democrats might try to play hardball, they are essentially pansies. Total war versus running away with your tail between your legs after shutting down the government for three days is not equivalent. Fear and rage are basal emotions. How does one appeal to one's better angels when faced with such a freakout?
Speak for yourself, Maurie Beck. We are not all "pansies"; we elected a decent man to the WH twice; he faced a gerrymandered corrupt GOP Congress and still managed to craft some kind of health care for all, currently being destroyed by unfettered insurance carrier greed for higher premiums, unaffordable without subsidies which are no longer funded. We stood in long lines to vote; our jobs were put at risk by polling hours meant to open late and close early in gerrymandered voting districts. We focused too much on national elections, ignoring our State legislatures and Governors where voting power is decided. We won't make that mistake again, starting with Virginia. We outnumber Republicans in registration; we need to ramp up that factor; we need to get our voters to the polls. We will do that. If we don't, the current plutocracy in power now will go on; if that happens, we will see another Hoover era. The denizens of gated communities will have no place to flee; perhaps India?
Yes we are. The Republicans have an eschatological worldview. They are true believers willing to blow everything up, including themselves. In fact, they seem to ache for a final conflagration and martyrdom.
Democrats are all over the place and are not true believers. Compared to true believers, we're pansies. In a sense, that's a good thing, but it creates a big disadvantage when dealing with immoral true believers with god on their side.
look at the accompanying pic.
all white....
GOP has become the white party. so, you see david, there is a change going on in at least one of the parties.
1
The GOP defined zero-sum, us-against-them, winner-take-all politics. Yet Brooks also finds the Democrats defined in that way?
When Nixon made the Faustian bargain and adopted the Southern Strategy, that led (but not inexorably) to Reagan's "welfare queens" and "strapping young bucks", to Bush the Elder's Willie Horton, and finally to the "very good Nazis" as Charlotte.
I don't see that as happening to the Democrats.
7
David, all in all a decent piece, but unless you can point to one Republican administration that lowered the debt or at least balanced the budget - I can point to two, Johnson and Clinton - can you PLEASE stop parroting the falsehood that fiscal discipline is a "pillar of conservatism"? Did you just discover that Republicans had abandoned it? Were you asleep during the Reagan or both Bush administration?
Puh-LEEZE!
3
If you could get over your knee-jerk false equivalence, you might have something useful to say. But no. You have to act like there's ANYTHING resembling Trump on the Left. There isn't. The most you can gin up is some campus intolerance of intolerance, as if that balanced the scales with racism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc. etc. etc. on the Right. Try being honest for once.
4
Things having become more demented than the worst of all predictions, why not revert to kingship, let King Trump bring pestilence upon us and start The Revolution all over again; for it is evident America has failed the class of democracy and must repeat it...
2
Who are these “clan warriors” hobbling liberal dreams? They are creatures of David Brooks’s imagination. In reality, we have one party that is clearly insane and another party that represents more or less everybody else. That the latter includes black nurses, Latino electricians, gay real estate agents and white librarians does not make any of us clan warriors. The only identity we claim is sanity.
8
Another thing Trump has exposed is that the Christian Right is not really Christian but just right wing bigotry hiding in a church.
6
Yep, there has been definitely third party lately, brought to this country by Trump: Putin America First!
2
I've said it before and I'll say it again, you need counseling for your depression. The GOP of yore you long for never was, and you don't have the courage to change parties, even after the greatest presidential impostor ever was installed in our White House, where he is day after day destroying our Democratic institutions by fiat or by innuendo. Please, get help.
4
The Harvard JFK School of Government teaches a set of principals that is copied directly from the General Motors School of Business Management. Let that deliberate parallel sink in .......
GM goes bankrupt darn near every year. Why? Because, according to JM Keynes....."deficits dont matter".
And that is precisely why neither the DNC,Inc nor the RNC,Inc cares about how upset you, the taxpayer, get over Deficits.
They simply are trained to NOT care about deficts.
In WashDC....."deficits dont matter"
.....
But here's the problem in the Modern Era, one that would blow dear ole JM Keynes mind..............deficits do matter.
John Maynard never saw "the Internet"......he did not theorize on Global Trade....which is based a lot on the older model of Colonial Merchantilism......take from the weaker, vasal state, add value to it, sell it back to the vasal state, and KEEP the vasal state in Debt to the colonial masters.
Harvard and all the other business schools trained LEGIONS of MBAs to go forth and manage the American Global Empire.....but sadly, unlike their earlier British Colonial counterparts....the American MBA saw the USA as a much more lucrative vasal state to plunder....and simply refused to go overseas....the pickins were simply too good too ignore.
We even elected a power mad MBA to be our president.....Miss me yet? Dubya.
......
The Two Party System....actually a Duopoly....is designed to enforce and maintain Keynsian Econ ...
If we Americans are in “scarcity mentality” it is because we are feeling true scarcity. Our medical insurance premiums and drug costs have skyrocketed, the price of an apartment in NY is in the millions, our children’s student debt seems insurmountable. Perhaps it is the Darwinian monkey in us, but when we feel personal scarcity we feel less generous, more tribal out of a sense of fear. Especially as we see the accumulation of vast wealth at the very top, and we witnessed an economic collapse and the Justice Department failing to take anyone involved to prison. And, now we see a tax break benefitting the wealthy donors of both parties.
Remember your history, Hitler rose to power when the Germans were feeling scarcity after WW1. Perhaps you purchased your house/apartment before the steep price increase, perhaps your employer provides generous medical insurance, perhaps your children will not have crushing student debts. I’m happy for you, but perhaps that has insulated you from the pain the rest of Americans are feeling, and allows for a bit of out of touch preaching.
3
"...the rise of authoritarian populism, the retreat of liberal democracy, the elevation of a warrior ethos that reduces politics to friend/enemy, zero-sum conflicts."
But, but David, aren't you the one who writes about either-or, black-white choices in your morality plays? And isn't it the party for which you shill the party of forced choices, not compromise? Really.
2
This is great, but tune in next week when David Brooks writes a column excusing conservative pussilanimity in collaboration with Trumpism and musing about the horrors of leftist identity politics to the exclusion of everything else.
2
In this country any kind of multiparty government will lead to the rule of Trump/Fox nuts. Their 30% cult following will become the majority.
2
Never has the GOP fallen to such despicable immorality in such a short time !
3
Indeed, a paradigm is necessary,to enhance our education in civics so to understand the momentous crisis we are going through. The harming results of Trump's awful self-centered unscrupulousness is his governing style of provoking a constant war-room of fear, hate and division, to keep a loyal base to lend support to all the lies, innuendos, insults and exaggerations he feeds them...to the point of 'converting' them to the dogma truth (not subject to discussion). This has provoked the worst disaster we can think of, the loss of trust in our democratic institutions. And chaos personified in our 'ugly American' in chief (arrogant, ignorant, discriminator, xenophobe and sexual predator, and stupid to boot). Short of expelling this demagogue, and charlatan, from the White House, I see no remedy.
2
The remedy is with the mid-terms, if enough Democrats are elected to push back against the current one-Party government we now have: Republican President, GOP controlled Congress, a right wing ideologue now tipping the Supreme Court to the right, in favor of corporations and corporate power. The recent tax heist which gave permanent tax cuts to corporations and the rich, and temporary small tax cuts to others which sunset in 2027. We know how Rome fell due to corruption of the Senate; Rome was a powerful empire ruling the known world. We saw the collapse of the British Empire due to corruption at home. We have not yet produced either an FDR to stand up for the working class, or a Churchill to defend the free world as we know it. In fact, it is now legitimate to ask how free we are with suppressed voting rights, gerrymandered voting districts, and a demagogue in the WH who gives a corrupt Congress power to steal from the rest of us. How are we an "entrepeneurial" culture when bank loans are impossible to get, main streets are now disappearing with their jobs, student loans are now in hock to big bank interests keeping the poor and many others from achieving the degrees necessary to survive in the new global economy; forget about funding trade schools for those with the aptitude, because unions feel threatened and are no longer open to non family related newcomers. We continue to believe we are "exceptional".
Your constant attempt at maintaining a "balance" toward liberals and conservatives is tiresome in the extreme. The nightmare of Trump began long ago in the slave holding South. Conservatives, or whatever you choose to call them, have tapped into that hatred ever since the civil war and they continue to do so today. Conservative's "thinking" has never been anything but an excuse for flag-waving, gun fetish, racism and ignorance all hiding behind their disgusting Christian piety.
2
What two-party system, David? The GOP is not a party. It is a collection of venal lackeys doing the bidding of a cabal of wacko wealthy weirdos who buy its re-election with Fox & Friends, disinformation, and incitement.
4
Liberal clan warriors, David? The blame falls squarely on the GOP, the clan of which has shown itself to be unworthy representatives of our truly great nation. Is this your idea of a fair and balanced opinion? Why, you are scarcely different from Fox.
2
There are still two parties. There's the Democrats and the party of Trump. The Trump party still bears the "R" so people are happy they're not voting for the "D". It's unlikely that the party of Dole/Reagan will ever be back, so, real conservatives are left with choices. Hold your nose and lie to yourself that a Trump vote is still better than a D vote. Vote for the Democrat and hope the stink on your party goes away or, don't vote. Tis pity, tis true; tis pity, tis, tis true.
The comments here prove the point that Mr. Brooks is making.
We have the radical left emulating the idiocy on the right: "I am moral and those that oppose me are immoral!"
1
Jesting Pilate mocked Jesus the same way.
The real problem, David, is that the 'thoughful conservatives" you like to talk about, the William F Buckley's and the like, tacitly or outright supported the tribalism they claimed to fight against. Buckley and Goldwater despised the 'loony right', the John Birch Society, the religious fundamentalists, racists, Nazis and so forth, but then when the GOP not only actively courted these types to join the GOP, but also allowed them to de facto run the party, they basically did or said nothing. Buckley when the whole religious right came into fruition, instead of attacking it for what it was, wrote long essays about how this was a natural progression.....it is why the idea that conservatives wanted to judge a person by the nature of their character, not their skin color, rings hollow, when the GOP actively used Southern white hatred of the civil rights laws, when conservatives preached the gospel that the civil right laws and courts had no right to 'settle the matter'. While many of the 'thoughtful conservatives" may not be racist themselves, they supported the courting of them.
2
Trump and his minions are a malignant tumor upon the civilization you describe. The spineless coward Congressional Republicans had the same cancer within them for years. Trump brought it to the surface and made it uber toxic.
The cyber knife to irradiate this cancer upon the US is the voting booth. Some of the tumor is slowly being removed in ones and twos by local elections which are getting flipped to the Democrats.
The big treatment session will be this coming November.
But beware: the cancer will never be irradiated from these Republicans soles, or their supporters. It will just become dormant again.
2
Mr. Brooks, you really should recognize the responsibility that the Republican Party has for this disaster: Trump was popular because he said racist stuff out loud. The Republican Party since the Southern Strategy convinced white voters to vote against their own economic interests by dog whistle appeals to racism. That's disgusting, and it's what got us here.
2
White nationalism has taken over the conservative movement, from Bannon to Brooks. Even here, when trying to take a stand against racism and the scarcity mindset, Brooks smiles upon a xenophobic restrictionist immigration policy.
1
Republicanism at it's finest: ignoring all the horrendous acts of your own party until you really cannot anymore, and then claiming that both sides do it.
4
Unfortunately, the something new may just be a Putinesque American Oligarchy with a pretend democracy, pretend rule of law, and above all, pretend media independence.
We are at war with Russia. They are the cause of our unbalanced dysfunction...America was always a country of warring minorities, but now it is the home of racist, oligarchic leaders who are in thrall to the 1%. Just like
Russia.
Hugh Massengill, Eugene Oregon
You write this for the perspective of a false equivalency. It is not the democrats who ate constantly engaging in obstructionism and illegal tactics like holding a supreme court nomination hostage or Gerrymandering to the point of open refusal of law like we have just witnessed in Pennsylvania. The Republicans have a president befitting their own soul: mean, fake, uniformed and corrupt. They will soon become the Third Reich
If a Trump core sticks with him through hell or high water, a multiparty system is probably necessary. The issue is what a third party should focus on, what should be its tag and byline, to differentiate from what currently exists? My suggestion is to focus on Work, Family, and Community, with the tagline perhaps being Honesty and Common Decency.
For Work, as an example, we can expand and develop the earned income tax credit and consider funding health care and social security through a tax on federal adjusted gross income rather than payroll earnings. For family, consider expanding dependent credits to members of extended family or allowing these deductions to cover children in their early teens, provide child savings accounts, and consider funding families for community college education. For Community, provide incentives for community centers that provide resources to localized neighbors or tax credits for voluntary community service at places of worship and other community facilities. Perhaps it also involved righting some wrongs, from this perspective, of the recently enacted tax act by strengthening estate tax provisions or increasing taxes on dividend income or short-term capital gains. We have had nearly 40 years of increased returns to capital and little if any increased return for common work. With a new and different focus we can creatively think of new and effective things to do to honor work, family, and community and build a sense of common decency.
USA is becoming a failed state due to a conservative movement gone berserk.
4
Sure, Democrats can get mad, and some of them can't keep their sense of humor when they're mad. Angry Democrats can bore you to death talking about politics. But one thing the great majority of Democrats don't do well at all: seething with resentment forever.
You describe well the party whose resentment boils up within them whenever they are reminded that somebody, somewhere, is getting free stuff. Condiments, maybe. Who knows?
A monster stalks their dim horizon, made from equal parts Limbaugh rage and not knowing any of these "others" themselves. All Black women are suspect of the crime of Gold Cadillacking; a Mexican man crossing the border--"he's gonna get everything for free." I know, I've lived and worked around these people my whole life. Decent to another white guy in person, but no fun to party with.
My late Dad used to say "if there was a busy street, with all Republicans on one side and all Democrats on the other, you'd be able to tell immediately which one's which. Republicans have this resentful, unhappy look--like they'd all just had their wallets stolen. But the Democrats would be shuffling along, laughing and having a good time. You really feel sorry for Republicans, life isn't that grim."
Democrats don't need a new party. We haven't been angry so long that we lost our souls. Besides, we don't even belong to an organized party--we're Democrats.
2
The greed of the Oligarchs, and work of their complient minions, have reshuffled the two party system. Winners and losers. Comrade 45 is the culmination of Reaganism in government philosophy, enabled by the Nixonian Southern Strategy.
4
The middle class hasn't just got up and vanished, it has been eliminated trough policy changes to make the country a "global" participant at the expense of the middle class. Eliminating and or trying to eliminate through bad policy has a really bad ending in history. All the knuckleheads in Washington may want to review what happens when you attack your own people. The answer isn't pretty. American citizens are fed up with being global citizens at their own expense. Wake up Washington.
Sorry Mr. Brooks, but National Review magazine has a racist history all its own, long before Fox News came on the scene. Yes, even the Pontifex Maximus of Republican Conservatism himself, Bill Buckley, authored some racist doozies. Just look in the N R archives.
1
Progress in America is a lot like mating elephants.......
It cannot be accomplished without a lot of noise and crashing around.
I am proud of my American Heritage that so completely baffles the rest of the world.
They all are angry and upset because Americans always do things completely the wrong way...but always seem to win, prosper, and wind up at the top.....its just not "fair"!
The sainted Reagan's first, post-nomination speech was a paean to states'rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the city whose claim to fame was murdering civil rights workers in the sixties. The Republican party has been a cesspool of racism and hypocrisy for half a century. Its economic "platform" has never been more than an easily discarded sideshow to its real identity as a corrupt offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan.
Its demise as an institution is far overdue.
Warrior style? These guys are punks, not warriors. All of them are smarmy little worms that used to get beat up in high-school. Trump was assuridly a bottom boy in his military school, where his father enrolled him to "make a man out of him." I'd like to see any one of these lightweights hold down a real job, like mining coal or teaching school (no, not 1 lecture a month at an Ivy League school but a ghetto high school) or working a double shift in a hospital that is so underfunded that there are never enough people to do the work. Ordinary Americans struggle on heroically while these strutting peacocks pretend to be tough while getting their nails done. Get them out of government and back in the ooze where they belong. Quickly before the rot sets in.
The Republicans were not always the vicious, vile liars and hypocrites they are today. To suggest that the parties are equally to blame for the deep rifts in our country is patently false. The Republicans have been going off the cliff for years and than they elected a deeply-ill man who is hate incarnate.
They use gerrymandering and voter suppression to stay in power against the will of the people. They are no longer a political party. They are simply thugs, plain and simple.
1
There are some false equivalents in your argument... other than a little shrillness, I see scant evidence that liberalism is undergoing a devolution towards group separatism and intellectual intolerance that is anywhere near to conservatives. There are factions, to be sure, but that seems like normal democracy at work.
To my knowledge nobody's had to take a Grover Norquist-like pledge in liberal camps. When the right is in decline, it trends to fascism, with a pseudo-moral revival and purging of "others." We've now got everything in place but the brown shirts, boots, and Kristallnacht. Evangelicals clap their hands. Fascism in the ascendant is the real problem here.
Perhaps the most depressing observation in the entire column is that The Wall Street Journal has been replaced with Fox News, the worm-tongued propaganda machine for the worst of these elements.
3
Item 1: As a life-long Republican David Brooks is much better off today than he was yesterday. Item 2: David Brooks helped enable the Republican Party to become what it is today. Item 3: David Brooks is trying (disconcertingly) to make us all believe he had nothing to do with it.
1
I like David Brooks, but this article is nonsense.
" . . . the civil war in the Balkans was the most important event of that period." No, it was not. Any of the concurrent events that you mentioned was more important.
" . . . there's been an utter transformation in the unconscious mind-set within which people hold their beliefs." No, millions of people's minds formed as the result of millions of years of evolution have not utterly transformed in twenty-five years. Mr. Brooks, this sentence might have sounded good to you when you wrote it, but can't you see how ridiculous it is?
I could go on - every paragraph contains some dreck - but that would be as tedious as this "think" piece. The dangers to democracy are very real, but this pseudo analysis of the problem is more hurtful than helpful.
I sympathize, David. Born into the right I'd pretend that Gerald Ford was us,too. Modest, smart, diligent, unsullied by contact with black or poor people or any of our failures. Earnest, innocent, you know, decent.
But I wasn't so I can't give you a pass there.
In the six decades I've followed public affairs decency has never been more than a fig leaf to the GOP. To forestall MacArthur and McCarthy, Eisenhower reached into the GOP midden and plucked up the steaming stool Richard Nixon. Nixon had displayed all he was in his first Senate race against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, who he leered was "pink down to her underwear." Nixon elevated Agnew and embraced the racist 'silent majority' and the White Citizens Councils. The vapid 'Saint Ronnie' pitched poisonous soap with the same bright, empty smile as "morning in America." He was the glove, the vile Rumsfeld and Cheney were the devil's fingers.Ideal? What Ideas? Push drug lords into the arms of virulent Mullahs to foment violence in the most unstable places on the globe? Well, yeah, I guess I agree, that's what passes for ideas on the right. Arrogant. Ignorant. Violent. Racist and Misogynist.
America trembles on the brink at this moment because of the American Right and the party you champion.
...Trying to understand why Brooks continues to make a case for conservative ideology when true conservatism, as espoused by the Wall Street Journal, is a white man's fantasy of the good life that belongs to, and functions for, the few.
1
This is an excellent account of what has/is happening, however, the analysis, and therefore the conclusion is wrong.
45 is not leading the Republican party, except nominally.
45 is, essentially, an insurgent https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21716026-donald-trump-rages-again...
The allusion to Dennett’s anarchistic cosmology is valid and sound. The world has become more godless, organized religions are assailed constantly, capitalism is villainized, social and cultural strictures are denigrated as being riddled with biases, even implicit ones; and to distract, smoldering identity based bias is fanned to conflagration again and again. We see the rise of Democratic Socialists ( SEE dsausa) as well as National Socialists(SEE: splcenter.org national-socialist-movement). We see the rise of domestic terrorists, invariably hyphenated anarchists in their philosophy (SEE: everycrsreport.com, Domestic Terrorism: An Overview).
Rethink 45, isn’t this the M.O. of an anarchist? Not a Republican. 45 SAID he was going to D.C. as an insurgent, why is anyone surprised? No one believed him?
The resurgence of conservatism is directly related to 45s insurgency.
No, this is not the end of a two-party system, but its nadir. It is all up from here. Register to vote and bring along someone to register with you too.
Then vote.
Brooks is harking back to mythical good times when Republicans were reasonable. But that was never the case. The only difference now is that their self-interest has become even more naked. Brooks is living a lie. Republicans will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into a better future.
1
Nope David, it's not a scarcity mindset. It's the fact that the Republican Party is no longer a functioning political party that shares any sort of common assumptions or concerns for country, fellow citizens, allies, the planet or anything else of value. It's a corrupt evil group of people driven by old white racist corrupt donors like the Mercer's the Kochs Adelson that want to line their own pockets, that of Congress and this beyond corrupt administration. When McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat from a sitting president, republicans gave up any pretense of being a functioning political party. Until we vote every republican out, nothing but fear, hatred, racism, rob the poor to give to the rich will happen. Shame on EVERY SINGLE person that didn't vote for HRC. Thanks to you we are in this horrible time of crisis.
3
Maybe David Brooks was in Europe when it happened, but Martin Luther King was not a Republican.
2
To Ms Gail Collins: Please debate as in the past with
David Brooks, and educate this person
and inquire of him, 'do you really believe
what you say?'
With all that's gone on since 11/8/16
1
Gibbon said that the fall of the Roman Empire was due to "the triumph of barbarism and religion". The United states seems to be following the same course.
3
The methodical destruction of our democracy by the GOP has happened as the Democratic Party has been marginalized to impotency, despite its fiercest whimpering.
If some organ donor would kindly provide the Democratic Party with a spine, November 6, 2018 could become an important date.
In the early stages of the United States of America.....the enlightened wealthy men of the times theorized that there would be no need for Political Factions. That we could cultivate rational men who participated in governing by the will of the people, for the people....and of the people. That somehow, we would all behave as enlightened individuals, resisting the draw of Mob Rule and emotion...to respect laws we created and engage in intelligent debate to decide our best courses of action.
....
OK.....that was obviously a pipedream.
.....
Here we are a meer 200 years later.....but we go thru a chaotic period about every 70 years....so this Two Party System has stabilized and worked effectively for about 70 years(1930s up till now)....time to trash it.
...
It was becoming increasingly obvious that the Two Party System had morphed into a Duopoly, with very little difference between the CorpHQ of DNC,Inc and CorpHQ of RNC,Inc.......Coke or Pepsi? Ford or GM? Corn Flakes or Post Toasties? absolutely no intrinsic difference, huh kids?
The DNC and RNC only quibble over how best to run the out-of-control Bureaucracy that once worked so effectively.
To say as Brooks does that the Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans is a travesty. He keeps implying this possibly in some deluded idea he is being fair. In no way are the Democrats as radical in their views as the Republicans are today and have been in the past, especially in their bigotry and underhanded hypocrisy. Mr Brooks, rethink your own views and ethics, and start saying it as it truly is, not some pseudo intellectual drivel. Krugman gets it right every time, saying it as it is. He sees through the hypocrisy and lies and calls it as it is. Try it.
2
David, every time I think you're making sense, you cut the branch you are standing on with a jabberwocky of "me-tooism". At least you made it to the third from last paragraph in this one. I salute your accomplishment.
It's true that our current voting schemes lock in an oppositional 2 party system. But other schemes are possible within our constitutional system that would allow for more parties.
One example, for House races in a state, everyone would vote for a candidate to represent their district, as we do now. But determining the representative for that district would be done differently. First, a vote total for each party would be generated for the state. The share of representatives for the different parties would be proportional to the statewide totals. (Some "rounding" scheme is needed. Several are possible.)
As a concrete example, suppose the party wins 40% of the statewide vote, and that's more than the other parties. E.g., if there are 10 districts, and there were four districts where the party received 65%, 60%, 55%, 50%, and in all the other districts the party won a smaller percentage, then the party's candidate would be the Rep for those 4 districts. The districts for the party with the next highest statewide vote total are assigned in a similar way, and so one for other parties.
It can be shown that this scheme nullifies gerrymandering. It also more clearly reinforces the notion to voters that they are voting for both a party and a representative. It also allows for minor parties to have Reps. In the example, a party with at least 10% of the statewide vote will get at least 1 Rep.
1
as usual, Brooks gets it entirely wrong. You can't discuss our poisonous partisan atmosphere without discussing Fox News and the right wing propaganda machine. They created it. As for the left-wing "clan" - when your civil rights are relentlessly attacked, whether you are a woman, an immigrant, a person of color or all of the above, what choice do you have but to circle the wagons?
1
Poor Mr. Brooks, still stuck claiming Reagan was the good Republican and well Trump isn't. "Abundance mind-set"? I guess Mr. Brooks drank the Kool-Aid made from "capitalist narratives about dynamic entrepreneurs and America’s heroic missions" and never recovered. Economies go up, and economies go down. That's why we had the New Deal. That's why we have economic safety nets. That's why Reagan's "economics" were voodoo - not of this world.
At least Nixon understood what was coming. He created the EPA. He understood the greater world beyond the fantasy libertarian voodoo that was rising in the form of the John Birch Society. He was a crook, but at least he wasn't stupid. Now the Republican Party has been subsumed by the John Birch Society. And people like Trump, Ryan, and McConnell are playing out their ignorance on the big stage and it shows.
3
Warrior mentality? I spent 30 years living and working with Native Americans. One thing I learned is that a warrior is someone who will stand up and protect women, children, elders, and others who are vulnerable. To call those so-and-sos that are running the Republican clown show "warriors" is to insult all persons who will stand up to defend the targets of their hatred.
6
Did he just say (with a straight face) that Republican politicians have had to say goodbye to most of the pillars of conservatism: ... the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. ????
Now the republican party can claim the legacy of MLK as their own? Really?
3
Of course, David would have us believe that somehow the left is equally guilty. Kind of like Charlottesville. There are some good and bad people on both sides...if you don't bother with counting. So, if one side had 95% bad and 5% good, while the other side is 95% good and 5% bad...both sides have good and bad!!!
Yeah, the far left would be just as bad as Trump IS NOW, if they had any power...and were allowed to exercise that power over the last 38 years with the advent of RR. But they haven't and couldn't, so they aren't nearly that bad. I will admit, the far left wants Trump and the far right to torch this country because they believe they can rebuild from the ashes. That rebuilding anything this large will be very painful and take a long time doesn't seem to discourage the true believers on the left.
As for the true believers on the right...Brooks nails them. They are just like the Germans of the 1930's. Blame the "other's" for our problems. Concentration camps for immigrants? Already started. Final solutions? The base is onboard. Self destruction...they will take the United States down with them rather than give up power.
3
The Republicans don't worry about deficits, they don't worry about anything at all, they discovered the ultimate 'get out of jail free card', when something goes wrong just blame it on the democrats...works every time.
2
True and valid, but what if scarcity thinking is not only a psychological mind set, but based on actual scarcity? What if the U. S. and Europe have had the luxury of abundance up to a point, but now the scarcity of the world is catching up with them? Is this our future?
3
David Brooks today takes a page out of Trump’s playbook. Trump is the master of misdirection and distraction. When he or his team lie, cheat and steal, Trump blames someone else for doing worse, or he simply does something even more outrageous to call our attention away from the incriminating evidence. David is right that scarcity now drives our politics, but it is a classic misdirection to suggest this is caused by Trumpism, is a betrayal of Reagan-era Republicanism, and that liberals are also guilty of degrading our politics. Scarcity is real for the poor and vast numbers of the middle class because of the redistribution of wealth to the top 1% that began with Reagan. Trump is merely Reagan without the smile. As for the liberals bearing the blame for this as well, that’s a classic Trump maneuver—spit on the Constitution, praise Nazis and wife beaters, undermine the rule of law, and then blame the hotheads on college campuses for the degradation of American politics.
1
This is just nonsense. Trump is the culmination of 40 years of pounding of a pseudo-libertarian ideology into the public ethos by a vast propaganda system of talk radio networks, Fox, think tanks,. and lobbyists.
Nothing new here. The Plantation owners have been misdirecting the anger of the sharecroppers onto the freed slaves for a long, long time.
Everything that's been going on is consistent with the moral certainty of the Republican Donor Class: mine, mine, all mine!
Don't blame the Me First movement on Donald Trump.
It's what's been driving the Party since 1964, including Saint Ronald.
#MeFirst #MAGA
2
And, all this "realizing" that will happen -- you think Trump's voters are mindful enough to engage in it? Think again. The end of Republican decency predates Trump by a lot. Karl Rove's "win at any cost, even if you lie about everything" mentality was the turning point. The election of largely ignorant posers to public office as part of the so-called "Tea Party" was the next step. Do you think abortion is really the defining issue for the Trump family? The Trumps were pro-choice Democrats until about a year and a half ago. Please. Wedge issue ranting and blatant racism is the Trump formula and Republicans have embraced it. What a sad state they are in.
1
To say that liberals are as much to blame for the state we're in as conservatives is an offensive lie. The existential threat that conservatives seem to obsess over about liberals is that some 19 year old college student will "force" them to be politically correct. That's not even in the same universe of threat stepping on all our throats because of Trump and his paranoid white nationalists.
2
The end of the Two Party System? Thank goodness!
1
Not a pretty picture of the "Conservative" mindset. But it didn't start with Trump and it represents a minority point of view. "Nativists" of the 19th Century, Christian religion justification of slavery, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Southern secession, the KKK, Jim Crow, the pre-union "sweatshops," the decisions to bar immigration of Jews fleeing Europe during the Nazi era, separate cemeteries and Country Clubs, discrimination based on race, religion, and ethnicity.
The rise of the ultra-rich right wing billionaires who have purchased the air waves to spread hate with AM talk radio , Fox "faux news." Rupert Murdoch purchased the Wall Street Journal in 2007. The founding and funding of front organizations in so called "think tanks" like the Federalist Society, Heritage Society, American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institute, Cato Institute,
Freedomworks, Claremont Institute and others to spread their right wing ideology.
Their money has fueled the debasement of American political discourse and behavior and led to the Supreme Court decisions in Bush vs. Gore, Citizens United, D.C. vs Heller, gutting of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby Co. vs Holder, Hobby Lobby, and the idea that a twice democratically elected President of the United States could not select a Supreme Court Justice if Republicans controlled the Senate. ALEC, gerrymandering, state laws restricting voting rights, collusion with hostile foreign powers to gain advantage.
"Multiparties" are not the answer. Vote!
3
How is the left pulverizing the right?
What is the left trying to destroy of the people of the right?
By wanting transgendered people to be able to use whatever bathroom suits their needs?
By wanting LGBT people to have equal access to goods publicly offered in the market?
By wanting black people to not suffer disproportionate prosecution or death by through law enforcement?
By wanting women to have the same opportunity to a lunchtime meeting with their elected officials like the Vice President?
By a woman wanting control over her own body instead of men whose religion they don’t share?
By wanting everyone’s right to vote to be respected and not taken away through voter suppression laws and gerrymandering? Or by not suffering through sexual harassment or be beat up by their husbands?
By wanting kids who have known no other country but the USA, to have the opportunity to become adults in this country instead of grotesquely deported to a country they have?
By wanting healthcare for all?
By wanting an education system that teaches science not religion?
By wanting an environment that supports human in the future instead of short term profits that destroy these public commons?
Mr Brooks needs to stop lying about the left. They have a wider America in mind, it just doesn’t stop at white rich and male the way Mr Brooks wants.
5
If this is "the end" of the "Two-Party System", be proud of the fact that you and your fellow conservative facilitators were the root cause of it's failure, not the shocked, saddened and innocent bystanders you now so unconvincingly purport to be.
The problem with ideological "conservatism" is that it's always been a paper thin veneer used as a cover for the ugliness underneath that was always required to keep it alive.
And you now pretend to be an after the fact play by play announcer of a game that you willingly participated in.
What you are seeing now wouldn't be horrifying to Reagan, it was the inevitable result of his election.
2
Another tough news day for a Republican Mr. Brooks? Like the Mississippi River in Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Fin" and Robert Redford's "A River Runs Through", Brooks invents a GoP "Scarcity Mindset" in the sixth paragraph. He then forces it to wend through the thoroughly despicable GoP swamp of policies and execrable morals hoping it will wash clean the ugly philosophical mud banks in false equivalencies. Only at the end do we arrive at a 'delta' suggesting that for Republicans and Conservatives of good faith Trumpism is not sustainable.
Brooks loves to invent new terms or endow old ones with 'special meaning' in hopes of saying something useful. He is no Mark Twain who brooked no nonsense in taking craven politicians to task. And "scarcity mindset" is a false equivalency for "craven mindset" which is the only way an honest writer could characterize the evil done by Trump, McConnell, Ryan and their cabal.
You can try to dress up a SH in satins and sequins but the stench will always win out. The real question is whether those like Mr. Brooks are merely sequins or a source of the putridness wafting over 'sea to shining sea'.
'Scarcity mindset' indeed. What is scarce is an honest addressing of good and evil.
You lost me in the last paragraph making reference to Liberals.
Are you claiming the Dems also have a warrior clan mentality? If not, who are the Liberals in the Repub Party?
That oddity hasn't existed since the 1960s.
1
Brooks, enamored with his self-image of sage punditry, gets wrapped up in his maze of Hegelian logic, spinning a tale of two mind-sets gone awry but eventually transformed into their better selves. We need less psychobabble about scarcity mind-sets and more fact-based measurement of the damage of extreme nationalism. No David, the world will not necessarily resolve its antitheses into a grand new synthesis of failed ideals. Perhaps you have gazed too long into the self-reflection of your wondrous being.
1
The End of the Two-Party System. Ain't gonna happen. Not in the USA.
The breakdown really started with the GOPs treatment of our first black president with endless disrespect ("You lie!") and antagonism ("One and done") that I don't think they would have showed if he had instead been a standard-issue white male. Of course some people were overtly racist, but many others just unconsciously were unable to see Obama as a figure whose authority deserved respect. Disgraceful behaviors, like McConnell's refusal to deal with Obama's Supreme Court pick, would not have been considered acceptable under Reagan, Clinton or Bush administrations. I think Hillary as a woman would also have had the same problem.
2
Republicans have always talked out of the sides of their mouths, and it is a complete lack of a moral center and a foundation of greed that has for far too long been their actual mindset. Whatever mainstream ideals they have espoused their actual behavior clearly demonstrates what they really care about is the moneyed class and whomever will pay them to run their campaigns. So let's not pretend Republicans have been tainted by DT, as it was the Republicans who enabled such an amoral, self-serving, racist and sexist criminal to become president.
1
A real, centered third party, working for the good of all is needed now. Where are the leaders who are courageous and willing to form such a party?
It would be neither typically "conservative, " nor the current version of "liberal."
It would be practical, smart, tolerant of differences - always working toward common goals, and ignoring unimportant differences.
It would value privacy, humility and competency.
Who lead us? We need them now.
David, you say that the Republic Party traded away its fiscal principles for a win on immigration. I missed this - who exactly was on the other side of that trade? I don't recall the budget being a big win for Democrats.
1
Mr. Brooks' piece inadvertently highlights the problem: capitalism IS a scarcity-based economic system. That's the whole point of industrial/post-industrial government, to allow public institutions to mitigate the inherent shortcomings of such a scarcity-based economic system.
Unfortunately, a problem that can't (or won't) be properly diagnosed cannot be solved. It should surprise no one that our politics (and our society) over the past 30-40 year's has mirrored our scarcity-based economic system. What IS surprising is how few pundits, like Mr. Brooks', are able to see the obvious. Too many, in fact, are desperate NOT to see the obvious. Why? The truth hurts sometimes.
3
Ah, yes, the false equivalence. Republican Evangelicals are a siege-mentalisty interest group and liberals are into "group separatism" (no mention here of the racism that fuels the GOP) and "intellectual intolerance" (no mention here of the Republican hatred of real facts). What about the Republicans who voted for Trump, not out of their hope that he would push their Evangelical agenda, but out of a white tribalism? There is a wonderful way in which you take abused women and African Americans who spent 8 years hearing nothing but racist invective from the Birthers and their ilk, and blame them for "separatism."
No, my friend, it doesn't work that way. And Brooks's claims to moderation are nothing of the sort. They are veiled apologies for what they appear to disdain.
1
Excellent column, Mr. Brooks. It is encouraging, but we're now hearing amplified cries for Democrats to fight fire with fire and use the GOP's dirty tactics against them. This would amount to the clan warfare you discourage here. There are few options for civilized negotiation when consistently confronted with lies and false equivalencies from the top and there is no reasoning with djt's rabid supporters on the bottom.
Perhaps things will shift in November. But is even an incremental sliver of light enough to scatter the cockroaches?
Your column reminded me of a line from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address: each side in the conflict looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.
The zero sum clan warrior mentality is incompatible with pluralism, democracy, and peace and prosperity. We build road networks, school systems, electric grids, and water and sewer systems for everyone.
Slavery and other kinds of white supremacy were great wrongs requiring equal protection of the law for all and, today, naturally following the lead of others according to their talents and understanding.
Democracy requires the consent of the governed but when the Rs withhold consent unreasonably, refusing to accept the legitimacy of elections (birtherism, filibuster abuse, Garland nomination), they destroy the basis of democracy.
D politicians do not resolutely defend, in ways the public can understand, food stamps, Obamacare, and deficit spending during recessions as desirable parts of well-regulated capitalism. Much of the D base seems animated by a loathsome misandry.
Time to realign. Preserve our democratic and prosperous ways with a decent respect for the opinions of humankind.
Oh, good. Another article that tries to tie together both the right and left using the same extremist twine. No, David. There are not two extremist parties in the United States. There is only one: the Republican Party. And it has been extreme for a while now so put aside your feigned surprise and write so that the extremists are taken to task. In other words, name people who are extremist; name people who use their leadership positions (McConnell and Ryan) to advance extremist positions; name people who peddle in racism and homophobia. Use your words, David. You still have a platform that can reach a lot of people. But, equating left and right "warriors" is intellectually lazy and simply not true.
4
The transformation of values that David attributes to a switch of mindset from “abundance” to “scarcity” is more easily understood as a switch in the GOP from its earlier values to those of a few billionaire backers that now call the shots. They tell the GOP Congress what to do to fund a media campaign of disinformation, distraction, and incitement of bigotry and racism. And the GOP says: “Fine; works for us!”
5
Nice, but no prize. I like your writing but if you aim at the wrong target and hit the bulls eye in the wrong game, you get nothing.
Politics and Economics are two different systems. Better to aim at the offending system, Utilitarianism and the Capital Market and its assumptions about value. Then you would have a foundation to build on. Modern economics and capitalism require scarcity. The statement, that an economics virus got to both parties and was not a founding tenet of the modern Republican Party, is just wrong: Economics as politics - is - Republican thinking.
You might choose to read the old NYTimes Critic Walter Kerr and his 1960s book "The Decline of Pleasure," where he maps out the whole sorry situation we now found ourselves in. Look backwards to some real tradition, not this faux Heritage Foundation, Samuel Lipman/William Buckley variety.
Remember, Sam could play the Bach Concerto that Buckley tried and failed at in Arizona. However, Sam did no better with the political science and economics than Buckley. Both turned out to be Proto- Trumpy Wannabes. REH: NYCity Performing Arts Administrator.
1
Brooks begins on the right track:
"In retrospect, the civil war in the Balkans was the most important event of that period. It prefigured what has come since: the return of ethnic separatism, . . .'
Very true. For example, in West Germany, all through the 50s, 60s and 70s, there never was a party of the left or right. As recently as 1998, the social democrats got 41% of the vote.
But the influx of one million Muslims two years ago totally destabilized German politics. Now the right wing party is polling 15% of the vote and the social democrats are down to barely more than 16%, and the Christian Democrats are polling in the high 20%s. The communists are up to 11%. The center is collapsing!!!
After getting off the right track, Brooks goes way off the rails, and he blames all our problems on the emergence of a “scarcity mindset,” which he says has replaced an “abundance mindset.” But Germany’s economy is booming and is seeing a budget surplus. In America, polls show a majority of Americans being optimistic about the economy. Where is the “scarcity mindset”?
Brooks should have stuck to his guns. But he doesn’t want to admit that man is, by operation of immutable human nature, TRIBAL. It is sad, but true, that good fences make good neighbors. Take those fences down, and you will get Donald Trump and the emergence of the German AFD.
3
All of the talking heads, political pundits, scholars, academics, and the rest miss the overriding problem in the US. We're trying to govern a 21st Century nation with an 18th Century piece of paper that is currently impossible to change. Adapt or die folks.
4
Donald Trump presents a clear and present danger to 90 per cent of life on the planet. It is time for American political and security institutions to take the necessary preventative actions.
1
I must stop for a simple contradiction in your article. You claimed that a Conservative tenet was "the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin." This is ludicrous. Conservatives in the USA were the ones against ending slavery, were pro-segregation, were against the civil rights movement, despise the idea that Black Lives Matter, and have continued their massive bigotry with the election of the obvious racist, Donald Trump. Do not ascribe positive values on a group that has been consistently opposed to anything that's not pure lily-white. Let's face facts: the biggest reason we still have racial problems in America is the prolonged and desperate struggle of the right wing to keep people of color down.
"[T]he idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin" is a liberal belief that has never, ever been espoused by the right.
3
Mr Brookes,
I do not recognize the fantasy world that you describe as the 80s. I am your contemporary and we share an alma mater, but this view of Regeanism as a positive, expansive era is ridiculous. Even while it was going on it was obvious that the Republican ideology was was racist, exclusionary and destructive. You may not have heard the dog whistles, calling the bigots to unite, but a lot of other people did. Reagan normalized the idea that government cannot function as a legitimate perspective. He made it OK to believe that we are better off fighting it out as individuals rather than working collaboratively towards collective solutions. The seeds of our present political dysfunction were planted long ago but it was Ronald Reagan who fertilized them and watered them, allowing them to flourish into the jungle we now inhabit.
3
Colin Turnbull wrote The Mountain People - about an African tribe relocated and subject to harsh scarcity. Their society collapsed into brutal survivalism- babies were left to die, food was snatched from the elderly.
Scarcity is worse than acid eroding civilized human relations: it breed ruthlessness, cruelty, might over right, Mad Max world...without heroes or heroines.
The emotional degradation brings terrifying destruction of our quality of life - the sense of community is decimated. Weaponized individualism becomes the ruling regime.
The horror.
1
These nativist, bigoted and misogynistic views have been a part of the culture of this country (and the world) for a long time. But let me be very clear. I am a gen-xer, it was obvious to me in my youth that only one of the modern parties in this country has chosen to embrace racism and resentment. It began with Goldwater and Nixon, was continued by Reagan with his dog whistles, and has reached its crescendo with Trump. The Democratic party used to have a racist, segregationist wing, it is gon,e subsumed into the modern Republican party. Until people of good faith simply stop voting for republicans, and truly punish them at the ballot boxes the very real problems this country and the world has will not be solved. If one wants to put an end to the racists, the tribalists, the xenophobes, they have to resisted at every level, no matter how much you agree with their ideas on taxes and government regulation. Mr Brooks there is a solution. Vote for Democrats until the republicans stop catering to the bigots, or a new center right party is created. This isn't that complicated.
5
"In theory, the G.O.P. restrictionist position on immigration is perfectly legitimate. But Trump has fatally entwined it with his constant race baiting."
This is key. As general principles, few ideas GOP ideas are truly objectionable. Border security, a strong military, law and order, fiscal responsibility...
That leads some people to ask, "well, why are you always down on Trump then?" It's simple: I have ample reason to believe Trump is malicious. I wouldn't trust his discretion in fairly enforcing traffic laws, much less protecting the supreme law of the land. If an officer is forced to use lethal force, trust in their discretion is all we may have. But if that officer publicizes biases to the entire community, every instance involving that officer's discretion becomes inherently suspect. And so it is with Trump. A person that declares their desire to ban Muslims is naturally going to have a hard time convincing the country that their hastily enacted travel ban is unrelated. A person who declares Mexican immigrants (even IF undocumented) thieves, murderers and rapists will have a hard time asserting that their dubious "wall" does not reflect their bigoted views. The list is too long to detail here.
The point is that even if we say all of Trump's remarks are mere coincidence and not what's "in his heart," the mere appearance of such outrageous bias guarantees that Trump's policies (and thus the U.S. government) will always be suspect.
3
M.Brooks.... What republican party are you writing about? The one which decided 50 years ago that the path to power was in championing the racial grievances of Southern bigots? The one in which Reagan gave a "state's right" speech in the city that hosted the murders of three civil rights activists a decade earlier? The party that spent 8 years trying to undo the election of Bill Clinton, even though it could be said he was the most successful republican president of the 20th Century? The party that spent 2 terms trying to make Barack Obama a 1 term president? The party that shunned its Constitutional duty to allow the hearing of Obama's Supreme Courty nominee?
t rump didn't just appear out of thin air to lead the republican party; t rump is the only logical conclusion to a half century of "clan warrior" dogma from your party.
Furthermore; I would really like to know who these extreme "clan warriors" from the left are. Bernie Sanders has been labeled a socialist by republicans, and some democrats, but he is no more nor less than an FDR democrat firmly committed to the common good.
4
Mr. Brooks,
Just because we have a common enemy in #45, it does not mean that we agree on who has been destroying America. Your beloved Greed Over People party has been either getting us into never-ending wars or obstructing--now destroying--the machines of government.
The sooner you admit this to yourself, the sooner you can abandon the Russian-Trump oligarchy with enough force to promote anyone that is not Republican. Their collective sycophantic efforts of undermining the Constitution would make any Republican furious if they believed their own rhetoric.
3
"Restricting immigration has become the core Republican issue."
Wrong.
Republicans have as their core issue restricting taxes and regulations. The immigration issue (which is really a race issue) is an easy piece of bait for their base, who can't seem to get the picture that they are being manipulated by politicians locked into slavish dependence on people like Rupert Murdoch and the Kochs.
2
David, your conservative brand has been in the tank for decades. Long before Trump they were anti environment, pro big oil, pro private prisons, pro harsh drug laws, anti choice, anti welfare. pro war etc. They have been morally bankrupt much longer than you may want to admit.
3
David: the Russians are wining because they are exploiting the narrative of the Republicans who convinced their tribe that liberals are the enemy. Congratulations on your 45 year campaign beginning with William Buckley. Your party has managed to convince people that we don't need taxes because roads will repair themselves.
2
More "both sides" nonsense. Who exactly are the "clan warriors" in the Democratic Party? The Republican House and Senate are filled with extremists. And the National Review? It has pretty much given up its "Never Trump" stance.
4
Let's remember that while there is a strong, sociopathic right wing currently running the country, the "utopian communism" of which you speak is nowhere in evidence. The so-called left wing in The US is basically a centrist party. Healthcare for all, reduced military spending, and affordable, high quality public education are not unachievable, utopian, or communistic ideals; they are realities in developed countries throughout the world. Why not here too? Personally, I blame the Republicans along with Fox and their millions of brainwashed adherents. Please, let's avoid the false equivalence between conservatives and "leftists" in our country. There is no Left to speak of, and no real conservatism, either.
To top it off, White Nationalism predominates in the White House. I still have trouble understanding how this happened. Clearly I have been deluded throughout my life in thinking that the USA was better than to allow this. The bad guys are winning, and we are closer to the end of our once powerful democracy than most people think. If the Democrats don't win big in November, I believe all will be lost.
6
If trump becomes our dictator (like his role model Putin), will there even be any more meaningful elections in the future?
1
The dynamic Brooks described was very much at play in the 2016 election, but the results there don't brood too well for his vision of a moderating multi-party system. Traditional conservatives had a number of options in the primary - Kasich probably the most sensible of all of them, but also to a greater or lesser extent Fiorina, Gilmore, Pataki and Bush. But these folks garnered anemic support at the ballot box, and when the general election came around the overwhelming majority of traditional conservatives held their nose and voted for party over country and conscience. Doing away with the primary system would be a step in the right direction, but its hard to see that happening. With the amount of money in politics these days, the parties serve as crucial funding sources, and the parties want the primaries so they can control the candidate (see Democrats in 2016).
We are not a single, unified nation. "We" never will be. Get over it and admit a democratic-republic is an oxymoron. Time to break it up peacefully where, for example, Trump voters will never agree with me and vice-versa ~ while the "Nation" falls apart from within. "Nero fiddles while Rome burns" is in play here.
Boy. I sure hope you're right, Mr. Brooks. But I'll be 60 this year - little chance I'll live to see it, I'm afraid.
1
David Brooks never fails to write in a way that stimulates thought and debate. That's a great journalist. While I question many of his conservative underpinnings, I feel certain that if the majority of Republicans were as informed and thoughtful as Mr. Brooks, we would not be in this mess.
And he's right about scarcity. The human population on Earth is the source of scarcity and that will drive conflict. You can't help worrying about the future if you watch a nature show or observe progressive crowding in your city.
If a multi-party system can help mankind deal effectively with survival issues, great. But more likely are electoral reforms such as PG mentions. Those are long overdue and should be attainable with rational leaders in state and national offices. And they won't happen without our demanding it.
3
Trump did not create the current Republican party but rather the opposite - The long held ideology of the Republican created a Trump victory.
It reminds me of the Golem of Jewish lore. Loosely interpreted, the Golem was created in the Rabbi's image to protect them from attacks all around them. The Trump Golem is exactly what the Republicans have been for many, many years. He just gave them permission to come out of the shadows.
3
There is no scarcity. GDP and corporate profits are higher than ever, reflected by the stock market that Trumpsky loves to trumpet. Corporate titans spend their leisure time diving into huge bins of money like Scrooge McDuck. What we need to do to erase the perception of scarcity is to role back three decades of Republican/Conservative redistribution from out of the pockets of ordinary people, into the coffers of Republican donors. Let's consign Reaganism to the dustbin of history.
3
"Eventually, conservatives will realize: If we want to preserve conservatism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors. Liberals will realize: If we want to preserve liberalism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors."
Just who are the "clan warriors" of the left? Workers who lose their jobs fighting for the labor unions that helped create the middle class? Women who risk their personal safety supporting reproductive rights against evangelicals who care about fetuses only until they are born? African-Americans who resist random police stops or take a knee during the national anthem? Immigrants who face permanent separation from their families when they care for our children and elderly, construct our homes, and pick our fruits and vegetables? Reporters who speak truth to power while their jobs are vanishing? Native Americans on tribal lands with guns pointed at them protesting oil pipelines? These are the "clan warriors" the left must abandon to preserve liberalism?
You have it all wrong. The only way to address the most critical issues we face -- global warming and nuclear war -- is by being a clan warrior. The wealth and power of the "clan warriors" on the right will never surrender. They must be, in your words, "pulverize[d]." That will come, hopefully peaceably via the electoral process, but quite possibly (if not more likely) via the chaos generated by the "underlying conditions of scarcity."
2
As always, Brooks seems well intentioned and sounds reasonable, but then falls into mischaracterizations in an effort to show equivalencies between “liberals” and “conservatives.” Contrary to Brooks’s telling, I recall Reagan’s ascendancy being all about a zero sum concept—the idea that in bad economic times resources were being taken away from hardworking whites and given to nonworking blacks on welfare and food stamps. And regarding as liberalism being about separatism and shutdown of debate, we see friction and competing claims among various groups on the left, sometimes to the point of absurdity, but this reflects a diversity made possible by inclusion. If we see less of this on the right, it’s because the right is so much more demographically homogeneous.
1
I had to laugh at this statement by Brooks: "...the pillars of conservatism: rule of law, fiscal discipline, global engagement, moral decency, the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin."
Let me just comment on a couple of aspects of that list. The administration of President Eisenhower is the last administration that judged people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Same for moral decency.
Nixon? Nope - the southern strategy. Lying about Watergate
Reagan? Nope - the welfare queen, his words in Philadelphia, MS. Iran/Contra.
Bush 1? Vetoed civil rights acts. Devastated Panama. Clarence Thomas.
Bush 2? Katrina. Lied about Iraq in order to start a war.
So since 1960, and especially after President Johnson passed the civil rights and voting acts, conservatives have always been against the ideas that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, and that moral decency is a good thing.
2
So exactly which model is the democrat party operating on? Abundance of chaos that's what, just like this abundance of finger pojnting. Abundantly clear is that democrats are abundantly untrustworthy when it cones to participating in political ddebate and competition. Starting within the jurisdiction of their own primary and moving into this realm of sycophants at the NYT.
"Republican politicians have had to say goodbye to most of the pillars of conservatism: rule of law, fiscal discipline, global engagement, moral decency, the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin."
These are not conservative ideas. These are common sense ideas that sprang from the concept of respecting the value of other human beings and nations. To constantly elevate and identify these ideas as 'conservative' is the fuel that Republicans like Brooks have been throwing on the fire of division, racism, resentment for decades. Brooks has led a privileged life, being enabled to remain in his 'conservative values are inherently better than liberal values because they are conservative' bubble for the entirety of his career and made a good living at it, but the rest of us live in the real world, not the liberal or conservative world, where we depend on people of integrity doing their jobs everyday--growing our food, harvesting our food, transporting it to stores and all that that entails, from the farmers, the harvesters, the drivers, the manufacturers, the regulations and rules put in place to ensure its safety. It all depends on individuals doing their jobs without regard to whether or not they are conservative or liberal. Yes, we have a scarcity of integrity mentality at the highest levels of our government, but within the ranks, we have honorable men and women doing their jobs in the best way they know how.
1
Thanks once again for a thoughtful piece, David, however I do not share your optimism that there is a solution. Regardless of politically correct pundits, bot sides are most certainly NOT to blame. The blame lies entirely with a group of people who essentially despise true American values and see them as weakness. This is the group in the recent election in Alabama who openly said that they would rather have a child molester than ANY democrat... even the governor of that great state said that, in those words. No, David, things are going to get MUCH worse before it gets even a tiny bit better. We are in grave danger of losing our country....
2
.
DB tends to speak in political terms, but upstream of politics is culture and it is here the effort needs to be made. A new and expanded definition of human identity – body and soul, mind and heart, self and others – offers a more complete understanding of the human experience.
Body – celebrate sport and movement
Soul – celebrate spiritual strength, faith and equanimity
Mind – celebrate academic achievement and mental acumen
Heart – celebrate music, art, emotive performance
Self – celebrate, confidence, carriage, self-esteem
Others – celebrate social skills, impulse control, humor, empathy
This is a philosophy of the individual - balanced and whole. It is beyond politics. Yet any party can embrace this foundational philosophy and build policy from it. Any individual can find their strengths and weaknesses within it.
3
Mr. Brooks is almost home. He has finally seen that conservatism can but lead to bigotry and tyranny. The conservative polices of today, and the man who embodies them are a straight-line result of the politics of Ronald Reagan.
Conservatism rests of the premise of "the other." It rests on the premise of protecting what you and your tribe have, but it starts a battle that can never be won.
1
I found this to an optimistic vision
Both parties have failed. I suspect Trump could win again, and finally the will to break away will metastasis. New parties, new visions and a parliamentary system. It could happen.
1
David Brooks has perhaps provided the best example of false equivalency yet.
Moreover the allure of a third party has provided a refuge for those who shun the difficulties of working for progress within one of the two existing parties. It is a cop out.
Just more of the same, " both sides are doing it." The Democratic Party is strong, and rising. We just need to attend to our base better and tackle Republican falseness head-on. We are not the party of intolerance. Hillary's motto was "Stronger together," but at that time the nation didn't want to hear it. Maybe in 2018!
1
Underlying the scarcity mentality is the very real economic fact that income and wealth inequality is the greatest it has ever been since before the Great Depression. Many who voted for Trump did so because he promised to look out for the working class whose real wages have barely risen in two decades. The GOP conveniently blames immigrants, ignoring fiscal policy and government failure to mitigate the impact of technology and global trade on workers.
As a result, 90% of Americans are completely justified in their scarcity mindset. We have experienced the failure of trickle down economics, globalization, and unbridled Wall Street capitalism. We understand - following the SCOTUS’s disastrous 2010 Citizens United decision - that our government and our economy are now effectively in the hands of billionaires, hiding behind 401(c)4 non-profits. We are governed by oligarchs, much like Russia, only less overtly. There is still some shame among a few of our politicians. This explains why Fox (run by oligarch Murdoch) can’t bring itself to admit to Russian interference in our elections. This is why the Mercers (hedge fund oligarchs) underwrite Breitbart - to keep up the drumbeat of anti-immigrant, anti-minority fervor that keeps the white American underclass in line. Democrats are trying to talk sense; bending over backwards to compromise. Yes they are vilifying Trump, Nunes, and the circus that passes for a West Wing administration. Thank God for their sanity!
1
I like this article. I would love to have a multiparty system, but due to our track record with Independents and Green Party candidates, I don't know how feasible it is.
As a balance, I’d like to remind folks that the scarcity mentality has deep and wide roots in the US. My family in South Dakota loved Hoover. He got it: there wasn’t enough and the Depression was going to purge the nation of the unworthy poor and immigrants. The cities were going to get what they deserved: disease, starvation and death. For them, FDR pitched the lie that there was enough for everyone. That attitude has been galvanized into the force we see now, but it’s always been there. This is just the beginning.
What a bad memory Mr. Brooks has. Does he not remember WACO Texas? Does he not remember the Oklahoma bombing inspired by the events of WACO Texas. Does he not believe that the events of the early 1990's were just a prelude to the issues we face now? People were feeling disconnected back in the 1990's, we just didn't have social media to depict how bad things were getting. We saw the rich getting richer, but the middle class just starting to be under attack from technology and outsourcing business to other countries. I would say that Mr. Brooks really got his premise wrong. The issues that we face today were surfacing back in the early 1990s with the middle class being squeezed; we just didn't see the extent of the problem because of the bigger news: stock bubble, housing bubble, 9/11, etc.
1
I agree with Brook's point about the scarcity mentality, but not with the idea that there really is scarcity. In fact we live in a world of abundance and waste. There are plenty of examples, but energy is a good place to start. Remember that old light bulb that heated a wire until it glowed. Now our LED bulbs use a tenth of the energy. Poorly insulated housing and gas guzzling cars are other examples. Worldwide famines predicted 50 years ago are no longer on the horizon, and food scarcity is mostly a political and economic problem, not a scientific and agrarian one. What if Americans ate half as much meat and sent the surplus grain around the world (and didn't use it for ethanol)?
1
Republican Party Saint Ronald Wilson Reagan prophesized that America can cut taxes and increase spending on national security defense and entitlements forever because neither deficits nor debts matter because America is an exceptional nation. Reagan trolled color aka race by praising state's rights in Mississippi, condemning a Cadillac-driving Chicago welfare queen and a strapping young buck standing in line at the grocery store with food stamps while waiting to buy T-Bone Steak. There is scarcely any doubt that Donald John Trump is the reincarnation of Reagan without any of the governing, political and acting talent or experience. Particularly the Reagan gift for soft, smiling and shrugging color aka race and xenophobic bigoted rhetorical euphemism.
3
"Restricting immigration has become the core Republican issue." Tax cuts for the rich is the core Republican issue. Immigration, fiscal responsibility, protection of the unborn, strong military; these are all just means to the "tax cuts for the rich" ends.
1
This is a terrific piece but David Brooks is missing the new GOPs four philosophical principles: First, they no longer believe in democracy as a way to organize American society and want a .0001 percent plutocracy. Two, they do not want to share power with people who are non white. Three, facts and science are irrelevant unless they reinforce the first two goals. Four, they are willing to turn America into a totalitarian state to achieve the first two goals. This is so sad for America and the world.
3
Yes. The intrinsic problem of our political system is the same as that of our legal system: It is intrinsically adversarial, but it needs to also be what French philosopher Alain Badiou calls a "truth procedure." The fact that ours is a two-party system rather than a multi-party one surely contributes to that, as does the essentially personal and ad hominem character that political discourse in this country all too easily winds up having. We normally vote for politicians whom we think will do things we like, but they, and often the more partisan among us, want more than anything to win, perhaps at any cost.
Trump's presidency marks the triumph of a politics that is merely about governing over one that is about anything substantive. His entire rhetoric is not just authoritarian but performative, and so largely removed from any substantive discourse. This should indicate to left-liberals the need for imaginative proposals and not just angry opposition. Failure at this will consolidate the defeat of real democracy that is the meaning of Trump's triumph.
What Brooks calls abundance versus scarcity and thinks of as mentalities might also be thought of as the need for any politics worth its salt to make clear not only what it is against but also what it is for. Any meaningful politics will have a keen sense of both. But when opposition triumphs over vision, anger and cynicism join hands.
1
Thanks, David Brooks, for attempting to understand and explain what is happening in America today. My greatest fear is ignorance and the worm-like way it can undermine and destroy a democratic society. The warning signs abound. While public schools in a democracy offer equal educational opportunity to a broad swath of citizens, public support of charter schools, private schools, etc. means there are fewer dollars for public schools and more division by social class. Dark money now plays such a prominent role in elections that those with wealth, not we the people, determine the outcome. Technological advances, AI, and the cyberworld present more moral dilemmas, and we are not yet prepared to solve them.
The Republican principles, under which I was raised, encouraged education for everyone, treating everyone equally, sharing with those less fortunate, and adhering to high moral standards. Today's Republicans support a man who defies all the principles I admired and still admire. So I am fearful that our fragile democracy will be swept away before citizens, in ignorance, even realize what is happening.
1
The republicans created the “scarcity mindset” – it’s called fear mongering. They use it and will continue to use to keep in power. Power is their only goal and to meet that goal the fear monger and collect money from billionaires to enact polices that will destabilize if not eventually destroy this country. And when were republicans every fiscally disciplined? During Eisenhower’s presidency? Certainly not during Reagans’, Reagan increased he deficit (2.5% of GDP to 5%). That was over 30 years ago. And moral decency? Really? I’m so very tired of republicans trotting out how family oriented and morally superior they are when their policies prove the exact opposite. And I’d tired of anyone who is not republican or conservative being told they are morally deficient.
I think the question should be when will the republicans choose the country and democracy and our society over party, the lining their own pockets and unlimited unchecked power
1
What I believe this piece ignores is that the scarcity mindset is propaganda for the many as they must get used to scarcity while the 1 % take away their economic basis.
1
Our government today does not reflect what Americans stand for.
The electoral college and gerrymandering are incompatible with liberal democracy. The southern strategy required that intolerance and bigotry be thrown into the mix. Without the electoral college, Trump would not have been elected and Mr. Brooks would not have written this article.
1
"the scarcity mentality and the perpetual warrior style it demands"
It's borderline panic. Years of stagnant income levels. Children worse off than their parents. Infrastructure crumbling. Environmental degradation. Pretty easy to understand the drivers of the "scarcity mentality". When people panic all rational thought processes and cooperation cease. Everyone looking out for themselves. Maybe this is what Brooks means by "warrior style".
This seems to be more about human nature than politics really.
One of Brooks' best columns.
Insightful piece and, unfortunately, realistic. I wonder if it's possible to reverse, or at least shorten the life of, the "scarcity mind-set" through non-relenting and credible (if not inspirational) leadership espousing the "abundance mind-set"? Is there room for such leadership, or would such a seemingly pervasive international trend only die out of natural causes from the weight of its own dysfunction and failures in the cyclical churn of any dominant political philosophy?
1
Imagine this- campaign finance reform.
Limited rational amounts of money from the taxpayer for each candidate that wins a minimum percentage of the vote in the primary election.
Then the congressmen won't be bought by their donors and will actually represent the voters!
Look at the systems in Europe and Canada for guidance.
There are not "underlying conditions of scarcity [that] are only going to get worse." The scarcity mentality of those who believe that the amount of pie that they can get depends on them deporting people and cutting immigration so that there are fewer people in this country to eat pie may sadly persist, until the point at which the elderly white population actually starts to demand expanded immigration of service workers without which there will be no one to care for them and no one to pay the social security, Medicare and income taxes to keep money flowing to benefits for elderly white citizens.
I'm deeply troubled by the way Mr. Brooks defines his notion of "a scarcity mind-set." For him, the notion that "resources are limited" is "an acid that destroys every belief system it touches."
But surely in a warming world with a swelling human population of 7.6 billion, we would do well to remember that the resources of our one and only planet are indeed not limitless.
Mr. Brooks seems intent on characterizing the desire for humans to live sustainably as a dangerous "anti-philosophy." He argues that it inevitably leads to an "us versus them" mentality.
Perhaps it might instead lead to the wisdom that we are all in this together.
1
David Brooks is conflating ideas that don’t belong together, such as ethnic separatism, the resurgence of authoritarianism ( Europe of the 1930’s), the warrior ethos and a mentality of scarcity. My grandparents who grew up in the early 1900’s, grew up in an economy of scarcity, but this did not condemn them to a sour attitude or cause them to lose faith in the future. It was only after WWII that we entered the period of abundance, or more correctly, an era of wasteful consumption where we truly lost sight of the limitations on the earth’s capacity to disgorge natural resources, and absorb industrial and human waste. Looking at the policies of the Trump administration there is no hint of scarcity. Their wasteful spending on an unnecessary military build up, shows no sense of limits, or proportion. In Trump’s review of our national monuments, he said such monuments, ‘create barriers to achieving energy independence’ and ‘otherwise curtail economic growth.’ The idea is to claw as much out as quickly as possible to line the pockets of the oil and gas oligarchs under the pretext of creating more jobs. There is no sense of conservation or of holding any of our resources in reserve. Burn it now – burn it fast - appears to be the motto. In the past whenever capitalism has been in crisis, as it is now, we have repeatedly seen the symptoms manifested in ethnic separatism, social division, authoritarianism and the warrior ethos. Mr. Brooks is looking for the problem in the wrong place.
Here is solution then brings back sanity to our system.
Constitutional changes that:
1. Bans all contributions to the political system except by citizens. No unions, no corporations, no special interest groups, no lobbying groups, etc etc
2. Each citizen is allowed to contribute a maximum of $1,000 per year. That covers both State and Federal.
3. Term limits of 3 terms in House and 2 terms in the senate.
When all that happens, politics is no longer a career or a business. Can you imagine that?
Barrington Murray
1
Money is speech and corporations are people, remember? Another disgraceful GOP distortion of the levers of democracy.
The scarcity is entirely a matter of distribution: the US economy, real-dollar per capita, has roughly doubled in 40 years (you could look it up)--there is no scarcity, we've built a whole 'nother America. But where is that 2nd America? Hardly a penny of it is in the hands of 80-90% of us, circulating through the real economy. The bulk of it is in the pockets (including secret overseas pockets) of a mere 10,000 families. There's your scarcity: a scarcity of secure, happy families, not of total wealth.
That could be fixed overnight by simply applying the current payroll tax to all income, earned and unearned, and using the new revenue to extend Medicare to all, boost retirement benefits to a livable level, and subsidize education, especially job training.
Meanwhile, the 2-party system has nothing to do with it. Multi-party politics has crippled the UK for decades, keeping hopelessly obsolete Conservatives in power by splitting their opposition. It's also created perverse politics in Israel (and many other countries), where every ruling coalition has to kowtow to splinter extremists.
Meanwhile in one of the planet's (yes, this planet's) most vibrant jurisdictions, California has succeeded by shrinking our Republican Party to an irrelevant club of extremists, while our Democratic Party has expanded into a big tent of visionary moderation.
I'm aware everything I just said sounds like science-fiction to a lot of people, but in fact it's all true: somewhere it's a new millennium.
The U.S. now "reveres a pagan immoralist." A bit of an exaggeration, but not too much.
We are returning to the U.S. culture well-rendered by Mr. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain).
Some 70 years of horror elevated communitarianism, 1920-1990. But now, without an external threat, U.S. citizens are returning to an unmitigated culture of individualism. There are fragmented communities, but even the old white-Christian-antiEuropism is nothing compared to wealth and individualism.
The divinity attributed to Washington, Lincoln, &c., and the super-humanity acclaimed of U.S. citizens, always seemed a bit much.
If the house majority were to terminate the “Hastert Rule” the body could begin to function as a more centrist and effective legislature. Ending Hastert would encourage issue oriented cross-party coalitions and reduce the division that is pulling congress into its current dysfunctional state. Small step, large benefits. Courage Mr. Speaker
As jobs disappear thanks to robots and AI, our political crisis is only going to get worse. I'm not a afraid of waking up to a multiparty system so much as a banana republic.
Brooks devotes exactly two sentences to liberals, and mentions Democrats not once. The scarcity mentality, if that's what it is, is a Republican mentality. The end of the two-party system, if that's what it is, is the demise of the Republican Party.
More Democrats than ever before are backing universal healthcare. For the first time, 30 senators have cosponsored a bill extending Medicare to all. Is that the product of a scarcity mindset, or a plan to harness the bounty of capitalism to promote the general welfare?
The political migration is and has been underway for over two decades. As the oligarchs consolidated power and a radical base in the electorate to maintain it, traditional, economic, mercantile conservatives moved into the vacuum left by the McGovern candidacy plus the Civil Rights legislation in the Democratic Party. The evidence of this shift is clearly seen in the beliefs and actions of the Clintons and the Obama campaigns and governance.
In 2007 I suggested that if the Republican party wanted a historically accurate conservative to run for president, they should have drafted Barack Obama.
What we see today are the majority of the Republican tribe unable to give up their label, even as it has morphed into non-conservative extremism, while a good part of the offspring of the tribe have set in place a corporatist version of the Democratic party.
I agree with much that you write here, Mr. Brooks, except that I don't see the clan warriors on the liberal side. If only you understood liberals better! Liberals, like me, have been baffled for the past 25 years at how so-called "Christians", a religion that is supposed to be inclusive, became such narrow-minded bigots and how they came to believe that Republicans were God's favorite. Liberals, like me, have been mystified at how the so-called "family values" party is willing to give any Republican politician a mulligan -- no matter how egregious the offense -- as long as he fights to make sure no woman has access to an abortion. And yet, your former family values party doesn't want to have anything to do with the children that are subsequently born to these women.
The "me, me, me" and "It's mine and you can't have any" scarcity mentality has been propagated by Republicans, including St. Ronnie, for all of my adult lifetime. Donald Trump is just the fester at the top of the boil. Liberals have their faults...in spades...but the mean-spirited selfishness and the shocking Hatfield & McCoy clannishness of today's politics must be laid squarely at the feet of Republicans.
David Brooks is right – we must begin a new era in the American democracy experiment. Its structure, however, should be a much more radical break than he envisions. We must leave behind the anachronisms of enlightenment ideology and embrace a new world of scientific reasoning combined with common sense and humanity. Rigid ideology has depleted our capacity for logical problem solving and thinking. One can almost hear the ghosts whispering to Brooks as he writes, “ you can’t go that far in radical thinking – after all you’re the conservative commentator”
Cooperative, collaborative, compromise is essential to creative social thinking but is in stark conflict with partisanship. I believe that the vast majority of Americans instinctively understand this but are at loss for a practical path forward. Creative leadership is the key to the future – Macron in France has shown some of the qualities needed. Let’s hope that the American tradition of leadership rising in times of crisis brings us through this mandatory transition.
I like David Brooks, but he is looking in the wrong place. This is not some political aberration, people not realizing when they are wrong. It's the logical result of the most unfettered capitalism the world has ever seen. At the time of the "abundance mentality" he is remembering, the top income tax rates were in the range of 80-90%. Simply put, no one could get super rich, because the government would take away most income after a given level. That reverberates throughout the economy -- if people only have so much money, then prices can only go so high. Money stays invested in companies because there's no way for executives to grab it. Now, a few people can earn $500 million or more in one year, and the resulting price mechanism is ripping society apart. It's no wonder people don't perceive abundance -- in many coastal cities even a two-parent family earning $300k lives paycheck to paycheck and can't buy a house. Meanwhile "all-cash buyers" scoop up their route to upward mobility and then offer to rent it to them.
The irony, of course, is that the conservative tax revolution IS ITSELF the mechanism that destroyed the abundance mentality. If Brooks thinks that conservatives will decide to soften the free capitalist logic in favor of more shared prosperity, he certainly doesn't explain how that will happen.
3
We are entering an era of comparative scarcity on the planet, whatever illusions we self-medicate with in the richer countries. The biophysical constraints of the planet and the laws of thermodynamics will not permit a renewal of (short-sighted) abundance. A renewed sense of common purpose and mutual trust might come from an agenda that recognized the realities and faced the need for substantial shifts in distributive policies, from nonproductive tax cuts for the few to general improvements for the public. Instead Trump's budget summons the ghosts of the Gilded Age, and ignores the last few decades' experience with uncritical privatization. No doubt he would regard privatized water systems and radically increased rates as an infrastructure 'deal' for those rural areas where unhealthy drinking water episodes are concentrated. Brooks is understandably silent on the new mentality that is necessary, because it would not only depart from tribalist hostilities, but would return to the more egalitarian priorities of the Founders, who understood how centrally important it was to moderate inequality, if an authentic republic was the goal. Trump's personal war against all is not a reasoned strategy but a rhetorical one, whatever one thinks of the overall scarcity/abundance issue. How long will it take the faithful base to accept they have been thoroughly deceived?
6
I support an updated version of the Popular Front Against Fascism, that is, a united effort to defend liberal democracy including everyone who opposes the extreme right wing attack. To the extent a third political party would serve that purpose, I support it. But I have yet to hear how late-stage capitalism can provide a decent standard of living for everyone willing to work a 40-hour week. I yearn to hear it because I fear that the internal dynamics of the capitalist system push it in the opposite direction. Which then means we will need to enter the brave new world of how to harness "markets" to qualitatively stronger constraints on private power.
4
This is one of Brooks' less comprehensible columns. But I think the answer to what he is trying to say include:
1. Scarcity is an outcome of too many people worldwide, chasing too few resources. This will become even more evident with events like the water being turned off in Cape Town. Serious birth control availability and use is well overdue, but we need to start sooner rather than later.
2. This is exacerbated by the fact that too many of these excess people are not of our clan or color.
3. A multiparty system will never work with our current government system. For that to work requires a parliamentary system, and/or ranked voting. Until then, additional parties will just be a means to splitting votes and the least desired people and parties gaining power.
2
You just might be right about a realignment of the political system, Mr. Brooks. It's been a long while since I've heard many of my salt-of-the-earth friends and neighbors in Ohio say that "we need more than just two parties to choose from."
The last time was during the Vietnam War.
2
I'd argue that we need to change our mindset at a higher level to overcome the perceptions of limited resources. We need to see the ability to live in our world, literally the earth, its sea and its atmosphere, as a challenge, not a limitation. As long as we view our welfare in terms of using up resources, we will be caught in this zero-sum mindset. When we can think of welfare in terms of "fairing well", of enjoying one another's interests, abilities, and ways of living, then we'll begin to focus on health, education, and meaningful work. So much of the U.S. is still in a Costco mindset, of "how much can I take home", as opposed to what can I enjoy from the people and things around me. We need to redefine the importance of culture and the people around us.
3
There are so many structural impediments to a multi-party system in our Constitution, in order to "end up with a European-style multiparty system" we would need a new Constitution.
Is that really what Brooks is calling for?
1
Brooks's hypocrisy would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. He has been an apologist for the Republican racist and oligarchic agenda from the beginning. Now that he sees the neo-nazis taking over he gets on his high horse? Should democracy ever re-assert itself in this country, his collaboration will be rewarded with a shaved head.
19
“Now, Donald Trump leads the Republican Party, the personification of the scarcity mind-set. “
I’m not sure if you recall, Mr. Brooks, but it’s not as if resentment was in scarce supply while Obama was at the helm. The only difference then was that the resentment was directed inwardly, at the 1-percenters (income, obviously).
How quickly one forgets...
6
Obama did speak quite eloquently about the dangers of inequality. Strangely, most Republicans have a masochistic stance on this issue, which could be stated as "No thanks. Give it to that rich guy instead." Oxfam reports that 82% of global wealth generated last year went to the top 1% and yet most Republicans, to their own detriment, have been brainwashed to think this is OK.
1
The two party system has not effectively existed in most states for decades. Look at California - a primary system that eliminates opposition parties from even participating in the general election. You seem late to the party Mr. Brooks.
2
Don't forget Texas. Same story, different beneficiaries.
Mr. Brooks you are beginning to understand the true direness of our democratic crisis. Politics as usual won’t solve it. It doesn’t matter which party gets the upper hand next time. The victories will be narrow. One party control will not guarantee success. Gridlock and trench warfare will continue. Allow me to extend the metaphor. Churchill had a brilliant plan to end WWI trench warfare by thinking totally outside the box by sweeping behind the enemy to create a pincher attack. It sadly failed not because it was a flawed plan but the British warlords who executed it were bunglers. A third party is desperately needed and perhaps too a parliamentary system (bet that would make Mr. Brooks go all wobbly and many Americans alas). The essential ingredient is a visionary and bold leadership. If Churchill had Eisenhower by his side in WWI it all may have turned out differently.
2
Our electoral system has been corrupted by a cult celebrity consciousness such as Donald Trump. A personality rather that a person who represents an emotional attachment that cannot be severed under any circumstances other than the death of the personality. A mythological social super hero who represents feelings such as, anger and frustration yet has no substance based in reality. The only party that matters is the party of belonging to the cult.
3
Most first world democracies are multi-party.
Typically several far left alternatives, a primary center left alternative, a center right alternative and perhaps several parties on the far right as well.
Vote splitting can lead to results that might be confusing to American's used to a mostly two-party system.
In Canada, Stephen Harper's Conservatives formed a majority government with 39.6% of the popular vote while Justin Trudeau's Liberal's formed a majority government with 39.5% of the popular vote.
Other democracies like France have elimination elections to give better clarity.
But the USA looks desperate for something more than two parties, if nothing else to blow off some steam and generate some clear alternatives for people to vent their diverse opinions.
2
One interesting thing to point out is that Canada has three national parties plus a Quebec regional party despite the fact that its election system is first-past-the-post (plurality wins). The Canadian House of Commons is elected in basically a non-gerrymandered version of the way we elect the House of Representatives.
There are two center-left parties, the Liberals and the NDP, which run candidates against each other and the Conservatives, often splitting the vote in ways that benefit the Conservatives. I'm not sure why they continue to do this rather than collaborate strategically, but somehow it's a stable setup. In the past there had also been two conservative parties, which merged into one in 2003.
I'm not totally clear on why our House practically never ends up with third-party or independent members, while Canada's Commons does, when they are elected in virtually identical ways. It may have something to do with our presidential system forcing people into a two-party straightjacket that then translates into two-party votes downballot as well.
1
"Under the influence of this mentality, evangelicalism turns from a faith into a siege-mentality interest group that reveres a pagan immoralist. Under the influence of this mentality, liberalism goes from a creed that values individual rights and deliberation to one that values group separatism and intellectual intolerance," says Brooks.
Translation: There are good people on both sides.
4
Most of this editorial is entirely correct, but not the next to last paragraph. In the current environment the two-party system is far more likely to be replaced by a one-party system than by a multiparty system.
2
What I’m most concerned about is the possibility that many conservatives and liberals will end up agreeing on one thing - that democracy doesn’t work any more. Anti-democratic forces will argue that we long ago lost sight of the principle of one person, one vote anyway, so we would not be losing anything by moving forward with a new system that actually gets things accomplished with efficiency and rapidity, without the pointless, dishonest facade of elections.
2
"Whose side are you on?"
"Side? I am on nobody's side, because nobody is on my side."
-Treebeard (Loosely paraphrased from Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers)
I remember literally pausing after reading this as a child. How can something as noble as a shepherd of the forest NOT want to fight against the greatest evil ever to confront Middle Earth!? How is this right, or at least not wrong?
That pause led me to look over at the orcs, and even at Sauruman. Were they really evil? Was Middle Earth condemned to perpetual war, or could there eventually be a truce, perhaps even lasting peace? Could the Elves and the Orcs figure out some way to co-exist?
It's all fantasy, of course, and not even remotely analogous to the real world.
But the conundrum of the Ents inspired me to try, just try, to see the good in, and the reasoning of, those I disagreed with, for the sake of peace.
So whose side am I on? Why does there have to be sides?
I agree with this opinion piece. The 2-party system needs to die, replaced with a more fluid multi-party system. We must strive - and perhaps struggle - to coexist as an incredibly diverse nation, and that cannot happen with the battle lines being constantly drawn by two super-parties ruled by warrior chieftains.
6
In what universe is "the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin" a "pillar of conservatism"? Certainly not the one I inhabit.
14
Didn't Harry Truman say things worked better when there were liberals and conservatives in both parties? We still have conservative Democrats, but when was the last liberal Republican? Nobody even remembers.
11
The two party system has been broken for quite a while, but its better than what seems to be going on now: two "parties" in two completely different but just-as-serious types of chaos.
I was always against 2 party because it makes choices one of two extremes. And nothing is ever in between, where the truth and answers always lay
3
What you gloss over at the beginning is the importance of the end of the cold war. The forces that tore Yugoslavia and our modern world apart predate the cold war and were not ended by its demise. The threat of tribalism was contained by the threat of nuclear annihilation. Absent that threat, human history has resumed its prewar course. And that should fill us all with disquiet.
7
Can I politely suggest conservatives as identified in the op-ed form their new "extra" party first? The electoral result would be out-standing!
3
"Now, Donald Trump leads the Republican Party,....."
BUT, considering that the Republican Congress has supported every one of his appointees and virtually all of his spending proposals, he isn't leading them anyplace that they don't want to go.
15
Yes it does seem as if something fundamental, and as of yet, unconscious has changed, and perhaps "scarcity mentality" is a fitting description. But where is the root of this change? The cold war mentality of fear was precipitated by the witnessing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The unconscious seems prone to shocks which expose the psyche to existential fear coupled with helplessness. Whereas fear of individual death produces fight or flight, fear of mass death may produce desperation and anomie. It may well be that the knowledge of sapiens-generated biosphere destruction is the newest atomic bomb to the unconscious. The absurdity and sadness of the situation lies in the reactionary desperation that is the conscious display of the unconscious wound.
3
Warriors embrace authority--it is the hierarchy they know. When the civilian "Commander-in-Chief" is Trump, authoritarianism rules. Interesting how Mr. Bone Spurs is now perceived as a tough guy.
3
Republican core values for decades have been: lowering taxes for corporations and the rich, and the deregulation of environmental and other rules that hurt the corporations bottom line. It was these two "values" they pushed - and were able to pass when they couldn't do anything else. I think immigration is a far third on their agenda.
4
It is used as a tool, that's all. Except for the true believers, you know, the bad guys. Brooks ignores in his approving remark about conservative immigration policy that it is against our American ideals NOT to take refugees and the poor. Also that is is in our economic interest NOT to restrict immigration numbers at a time when we need to grow the work force. And, that low-skilled workers ARE needed to do jobs that people with more skills reject.
David,
Could have written your article several years ago. I'm one of many just waiting for the "right" candidate to emerge--be it Rep. or Dem. Surely there's one person in our country who has the wisdom to see what is needed, based on what we're losing--as a country, a society, a Democracy. Yes, I'm still positive on our future. I may not live to see it but I remain hopeful. Just difficult wading through our country's swamp right now. How long do we have to wait and how bad does it have to get? We'll see...
1
Many of the problems that we are having here are happening all over the world. Destruction of the ecological system. Displaced people that are not wanted anywhere. All the problems global warming is bringing.
I believe the elephant in the room and still a religious and political third rail issue, is over population. Human being are large animals that require a lot of the earths resources. Ecological systems need to be balanced. Too many Humans degrades these natural systems. We need to start thinking about how many of us can live comfortably on this beautiful planet.
3
The genius of the Founding fathers was the use of tripartite checks and balances. Three branches of government and essentially three basis of governing power in the Presidency, Senate and House. The fatal flaw in the system is the evolvement of a two party system, which maintains its control through the use of the filibuster and Hastert rule. Those rules developed due to the lack of any checks of majority abuse, again because of the presence of only two political parties. There must be a third party to allow for compromise and the capacity to shift policy of government in a more effective fashion. We are stuck now and unless those in power are willing to break from their tribalism, the end result will be a real breakdown. We are not immune from revolution, riot, societal chaos.
132
The actual 3 branches of our government are: the Executive (the President), Legislative (House & Senate=Congress), and Judicial (the courts including the Supreme Court). The court system has been politicized too—which is not how it was designed to check the other two.
8
Imagine being a member of a party that uses a rule named after a convicted sexual predator and liar and thief.
One would think they would change the name of the rule at minimum, but hey, this is the modern GOP of liars, thieves, wife beaters, money launderers and colluders with Russia...
7
The 2 party system is failing not because we need more parties, but the degrading of our election system by gerrymandering and the use of the obsolete electoral college. Time to stop the lip service of "one person, one vote." Time to make it an actuality
6
Brook’s premise that scarcity will only become worse is premised on one issue: the increasing impacts from climate change. Republicans, (especially Trumpians) appear content to deny its existence or, in the case of Brooks accept its inevitability. Climate change can be mitigated, but at this point it will take a Herculean effort led by the abundance mind-set that new technologies can supplant the economic losses incurred by old technologies that are the root cause of ever increasing scarcity.
Instead what we are seeing is petal to the metal exploitation of fossil fuels and a near total abdonment of adaptation in favor of short-term profit for elites. To return to Brooks Yugoslavia analogy, the zero sum game drawn up by Milosevic and his minions led to genocidal war. The myth of Yugoslavia is that this was facilitated by long-held hatreds. The reality is that much of the country was inter-married and ethnicity, or tribe was not an issues until politicians made it in their political interest to stoke fear.
One can look back to Trump’s comments (when in thinking he would lose) he invoked the NRA and implied violence would be the correct response. I fear a civil war in America. As unthinkable as that is (just as it was for many Bosnians—before it wasn’t) look at the post-war political dystopia that now defines the Former-Yugoslavia. Those Americans who have supported Trump have already led us well down that road. The question remains is this our pre or post-war new reality?
1
While I appreciate Mr. Brooks trying to be a voice of reason in a chaotic and frightening world at the moment, I must respectfully disagree with Mr. Brooks's assertion that the death of the two party system would be a bad thing. I would argue that it would actually heal the divide if there was a multi-party republic. Your side would be less bitter in an electoral defeat if the guy closest to yours had a seat at the table.
Yugoslavia broke under the crushing austerity policies demanded by the international financial community, imposed to extract the maximum possible debt repayment. The West is now breaking under similar policies, imposed to make creditors whole after the financial crisis. Austerity is the culprit.
1
I'm a Liberal. I once was a Republican. So let's compare issue positions of Liberals like me to Republicans and where those positions fare relative to history. My Liberal position is to protect public lands and parks as national treasures to the ages, just like Teddy Roosevelt. I support a strong EPA to prevent corporations from using our resources as their personal toilet, just like Richard Nixon. I support Planned Parenthood, just like George H W Bush. I support a ban on assault weapons, just like Ronald Reagan. I support public unions, a strong social safety net and a deep cynicism for the military industrial complex, just like Eisenhower. I support compassionate and intelligent immigration, just like George W Bush.
Now let's draw some historical comparisons to Republican positions. The only ones I can think of is the John Birch Society espoused by the Koch family and those of David Duke and George Wallace.
David, did I mention I used to be a Republican?
9
That "eventually" of Mr. Brooks' may be centuries away. Three powerful modalities have set together and interlocked: race, scarcity and the two party system. He is spot on that the more primitive parts of our psyches have been triggered. Ten years of 3% growth that does not all go to the 1% may help delay the bloodshed.
For me the two party system cannot end soon enough. Parliamentary government makes the parties cooperate for the government to work. The two party system when filled with those who think government is there only for their own personal benefit or some ideological bent, lead to the squalor we have today.
In a government of several parties, the likes of Steve King, Mark Meadows, and Jim Jordon, outspoken leaders of the GOP Freedom Caucus, would have their own little corner in a party comprised of those with similar beliefs. Those beliefs would no longer be allowed to take hostages as is the current practice in the two party system.
142
It's sheer nonsense to argue that parliamentary democracy makes "parties cooperate for the government to work." That certainly is not the case in Britain, whose system of party government places much more power in the hands of the Prime Minister and the majority party than our tri-partite division-of-powers system ever has. The minority can complain during Question Time about the behavior of the Government, but they have little real influence over British public policy.
"Parliamentary government makes the parties cooperate for the government to work."
Our Constitution will not allow a classical parliamentary system. Such a system requires the ability to have a vote of "no confidence" in the government that triggers either a new government or new elections. The fixed terms mandated by the Constitution does not permit either of these.
There is nothing inherent in a parliamentary system that "makes the parties cooperate for the government to work." Parties align enough to be able to select a national leader but those sorts of arrangements are not permanent. Some parliamentary systems have relative stability and others are in frequent change. In those with a "President" the position has quite limited powers and actual governing resides in a person chosen by the parliament (usually the "lower house") by the majority party or the majority coalition. WE# would need to amend the Constitution to allow for this. It is quite likely that the Freedom Caucus would join in coalition with the members of the Traditional GOP ending up much where we are now.
The idea that multiple parties could work is a complete fallacy. Even in nations where there are several parties, united coalitions are formed for opposition and support, basically becoming two monolithic parties.
America is destined for a two-party system, because America is based on a completely oppositonal set of ideas -- that America will value the rights of the individual against tyrannical government, while at the same time, attempting to create a just society offering protection to the vulnerable against the historical forces of exploitation. These two ideas will always be in conflict with each other, and will need to be constantly negotiated. forming more parties will change nothing about this.
Brooks is one of the most thoughtful journalists of our time. His comments on tribalism are spot on.
That said, two diverging thoughts:
I don't think that the Trump base thinks this way. There is a lot of pent up redneck thinking cloaked with a veneer of Fox media-wonking that probably fits his description of the zero sum mindset, but that has always been there, for decades and probably all the way back to the 1800s. I'm not at all sure it's a new trend. On the left, the identity politics are a function of demographics, as the white European majority becomes a minority. That fact is not mentioned, and it's clearly part of this picture. Identity politics on the left has caused an equal and opposite reaction on the right, and Trump was savvy enough to capitalize on it.
As to a multi-party system, good luck on that. The institutional barriers are immense. I remember advancing that thesis as a freshman poli sci student, and my prof chastised me with the simple question: How? What structural change in election laws, the electoral college, districting, etc would possibly make that happen? The Founders did not foresee the two party system, but it's here to stay. I won't hold my breath on that one, sadly, because right now the Sensible Center (today's Silent Majority) is unrepresented by the wing-nut politics of the two parties. If somebody could explain to me how a centrist party can arise and sustain from this mess, I'm all ears but doubtful.
Can we finally ask the question: which party has the moral high ground? Conservatives who remain moot are shamed. Democrats who rail again indecency, lying, the destruction of government, inequality policies that benefit the rich, or a corporatist takeover of our democracy are branded unrelenting warriors and demonized with a false equivalency of "behavior". Are the democrats equal in their extremism? Third party? Mind-set of scarcity in both parties? I beg to differ. As a writer on ethics and morality, would you ask yourself please if you have not succumbed to the normalization of the acceptance of lying, of the loss of ethics, the loss of decency by the leaders in the party in power. Look at what Democrats are trying to do, unsuccessfully, in their minority role. Dreamers, immigration, higher minimum wage, protection of environment, affordable college and improved public education - for the least financial able - and the forgotten mission - end big money in politics. End Citizens United. Moral high ground? Scarcity mentality? I don't see it. This reads like an excuse machine for the extreme views of the right. Sorry to say.
3
Nothing profound in this column. Just the usual even handed chatter. The heart of the problem was seen by Tocqueville nearly two centuries ago. He wrote:
I think that the type of oppression by which democratic peoples are threatened will resemble nothing of what preceded it in the world ... I want to imagine under what new features despotism could present itself to the world; I see an innumerable crowd of similar and equal men who spin around restlessly, in order to gain small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.
It would resemble paternal power if, like it, it had as a goal to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary it seeks only to fix them irrevocably in childhood ... After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd ...
it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
"The idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin" is a 'pillar[] of conservatism'? Since when? Richard Nixon developed and rode the so-called 'Southern strategy', a toxic brew of race-baiting and appeals to white bigotry, all the way to the White House, and it has been a 'pillar of conservatism' ever since. Donald Trump is only the latest and crassest iteration of this fundamental fact. Face it, Mr. Brooks: racism is and has been the core 'pillar of conservatism' on which Republican electoral success has depended for the last 45 years.
2
I agree with much of Mr. Brooks' analysis, but he concludes with a somewhat sterile claim that "Decent liberals and conservatives will eventually decide they need to break from it structurally. They will realize it’s time to start something new.".
That breakup and the resulting "something new" seems to call for a multiparty system of some sort ("European-style"?). But it remains to be explained how such a system can work effectively under the current electoral-college system in which any and all third parties serve only as spoilers. New is not synonymous with Good.
I don't know what Brooks' "something new" looks like. But I'm convinced it can't be Trumpism, which is, in fact, "something new"; but this "something new" is something very bad.
Details aside (such as reconfiguring our Constitutional system), let's agree that any step in a radical new direction must involve resurrection of an old value, namely, Truth, a virtue that subverts the continual and blatant public lying currently in vogue, especially in the Republican domain. Multiple new and competing propaganda parties won't cut it.
1
"the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin"
The Republican party has never believed this. They were just better at hiding it.
4
Brilliant column. The heart of the problem is evolutionary psychology. And the only solution will be people recognizing, and then resisting, our primitive urges, derived from our human nature. Humans always favor their "tribe," and so the key is to view the "tribe" broadly.
In sum, a viable democracy requires people (and their political parties) to value and protect the larger society (the nation, or even all humanity), and to do this, we must view the larger society (not special interests) as the "tribe."
4
There is no scarcity. There is a distribution problem. The problem is income inequality.
To get to a viable third party means that someone such as Trump wins because of the division of his opposition.
People who want to see the end of the Trump/GOP horror show have got to come together to defeat them and the Russians at the ballot box in November.
1
It has bothered me for some time that the most common verb in the pitch of politicians of all stripes is "fight" which I suppose derives from the scarcity mentality. "I will fight for jobs, immigrants, border control, tax cuts, veterans, civiil rights, etc., and I will fight for you."
Instead of all the fighting, I prefer listening, thinking, understanding, creating, working, and finishing. Instead of "winning" which demands that someone is loosing, I prefer sharing, collaborating, agreeing. If one must fight, fight for the Constitution. If one must win, may the win be for the country first rather than the politician or political party. Simplistic? Yes, but vocabulary choice in one of the steps required to move out of scarcity mentality.
2
Brooks is seriously misjudging the Democratic Party. Yes we have our disagreements, but that's the nature of this diverse coalition. Trump and the GOP in Congress are uniting us as never before. Some pundits will be shocked the morning after the midterm elections when the House and Senate both flip to the Democrats. Then the target will be to replace Trump in 2020. Most of us realize the peril of allowing the GOP and Trump to remain in power.
1
'Stuck fighting his wars with him, Republican politicians have had to say goodbye to most of the pillars of conservatism: rule of law, fiscal discipline, global engagement, moral decency, the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.'
Well, you're correct about there being little fiscal discipline from Reps, but both 'sides' lost that long ago.
The rest of that sentence is laughable at best, delusional at worst.
Belief in rule of law stands strong. Global engagement remains though the US is rightly stepping back and letting other countries control their own destiny.There's nothing fading about Reps standing on moral decency. Plus, Reps aren't the racists you would like them to be.
If that sentence truly describes how you see things... I weep for you.
To read this one would think that the transition Brooks describes was a bolt out of the blue that came with Trump's election.
It wasn't, and it wasn't nearly the transition he imagines. Fo News has been around for a lot longer than Trump. Brooks' party, and it is his, has been espousing bad ideas for decades, including when he was a GOP enthusiast. As for the "abundance mind-set," it was based on phony theories about self-financing tax cuts as much as anything.
I'll accept the "respectable Republican" anti-Trumpers when one of them accepts just the tiniest smidge of responsibility for the mess the GOP - not just Trump - has created.
1
Puzzled by Brooks and his accusation of GOP race baiting on immigration. I too think that the president would be viewed more favorably if he stopped tweeting, but the immigration policies that he has suggested, and his ideas about who should come into the country and who should not, have far more to do with what will be helpful to the United States and what will elevate the income of lower-class Americans, than it does with the skin color of the intended immigrant. Meanwhile, as a person reads the comments here, there is far less Democratic support for open borders and legalization of the illegal then Pelosi and Schumer might believe. In this time of the Twitter Stasi, many people on the left don't tell the truth under their own names about how they feel on this subject because they fear repercussions from friends, family, and employers. The fear is justified.
1
The fundamental problem lies with straight, white men. There are simply too many of them in our country right now, and they are ruining the course of our country's progress. We desperately need fewer of them -- we need, by contrast, more women, more non-whites and more non-straight people in the country in order to move past this obstacle that obstinate straight white men are putting in the path of progress. They simply do not want to give up their privilege -- it's that simple. We will simply, therefore, have to outnumber them by becoming more female, less white, and less straight as a society overall -- this is really the only way forward.
Real scarcity of resources will come from sudden global warming. If we're fighting that while fighting ourselves we're in deep trouble.
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And the "something new" Mr. Brooks may very well be a rethinking of the compromised democracy that may have worked for the founders in the 18th Century but has failed in the 21st.
Parliamentary democracies that allow for power sharing though coalition governments contrast sharply with our winner take all system. Furthermore, bowing to the faux sovereignty of the States has made the idea of "one person, one equal vote" a bad joke in the United States, though it remains fundamental to the very concept of democracy. How else could we be governed by an unqualified President who received 3 million less votes than his opponent, and a Congress whose Republican legislators received far less than a majority of votes in the nation but hold a majority of the seats and all the power?
The Electoral College must be eliminated and the Congress must be representative of the will of the all the people, not the interests of individual States. The status quo could result in the slow and painful death of the Union.
2
excellent and disturbing article, but i think you're wrong about liberalism valuing group separatism. group separatism is the risk associated with embracing differences, it is not the goal. the goal is inclusion. unfortunately that goal has not been achieved.
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Mr. Brooks seems to think that there are identical "clan" factions that are similar in both parties.....therein lies the problem. To sugar coat discrimination in the phrase "intellectual intolerance" demonstrates how blind Mr. Brook's is to the real discriminatory experiences of racial minorities, people who identify as LGBT, and religious minorities, all of whom are Americans. You cannot compare discrimination of these groups to the plight of a "siege-mentality interest group" that "reveres a pagan immoralist."
2
Mr. Brooks, the real scarcity we are experiencing is not merely about material resources, but empathy. Our country has changed, as exemplified by Trump's campaign pitch to people of color: "What have you got to lose?"
We're watching and doing nothing about ICE police dragging fathers away from their families, Dreamers threatened with deportation, frequent mass shootings, millions of Americans without access to basic healthcare, failing schools and expensive higher education, millions of homeless, and yet, we don't see any national movement toward addressing these problems.
We can solve these problems. The excuses are many, mostly about money, but it is primarily the absence of empathy for others that holds us back, and that utter lack of empathy starts at the top. The coming GOP attack on so-called 'entitlements' over their cost will make that very clear.
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The choice between the scarcity and abundance mentalities translates on an individual level to the choice of fear or love. With which attitude do we view those outside our immediate spheres? David says the scarcity mentality operates on a more fundamental level of the psyche. I agree and we should also remember that the abundance mentality can, too, as demonstrated by the best rhetoric of Obama. Democrats and progressive leaders need to frame their messages to operate at this basic level, to appeal to the better angels of our natures.
4
From my point of view, Reagan was a Goldwater disciple and Goldwater was the modern originator of the divisive policies that brought us to this point. Greed is good does not make much of an abundance philosophy. The conservative portion of our culture has always tended toward the Ostrich mentality, refusing to see the stentorian poison marching beside it. I'm still waiting patiently for the party that will center its platform around the dismantling of the United States Military. Much like politics, all service is local. Just imagine how we could be spending one trillion dollars every year. Plenty of education, health care and infrastructure to be had for that amount of money.
2
Actually, this all started in California in the late 70's with Gov. Moonbeam. After Prop 13 passed, Jerry declared that we had entered the very era that Mr Brooks describes. Conservation, limitation were passive-aggressive response of the Prop 13 and punishment to those who supported and still support it. Gone was the Pat Brown view of looking forward and up . The result of all this is the failed state of CA - major industry gone, Silly Valley oligarchs rule the state and what is left of the middle class along with most retires fleeing the state. I have witnessed first hand the destruction of three major areas - Western NY in the 60's, Detroit in the 70's, and CA. The current administration is just the latest example of History repeating itself at a national level.
another Brooks column that bends to reflexive equivalency. No the Dems and GOP are not equivalent. Only one party has jettisoned its principles and plays to people's resentments. And that's the GOP.
5
This piece is misnamed. Even if "real" conservatives & liberals were to attempt to "start something new," as David suggests, they would inevitably produce a two-party system. There are strong incentives, both for voters and representatives, to form coalitions of this kind, and their is an institutional and historical path dependence at work here. If you want to end the two-party system you'll need a constitutional amendment. If you want to do that, you have to start by reforming the parties.
Constitutional amendment to end the two-party system?
The 2016 presidential election was lost by the Democrats because of internal division, and the rift is only getting wider. Internal division does not have the same destructive power in the Republican party. The Republican intellectual elite has always been more or less for show, an ineffectual and insincere cherry on top of the party’s populist sundae.
1
Instead of listening to David Brook's fear mongering about the collapse of democracy, concerned citizens get their voice heard. But, wait that's being part of democracy which apparently won't exist soon.
Look back at most points in American History and you'll find there were often more than two ideologies at play, from George Wallace's presidential bid to the Copperheads, yet there have only been two major parties at any one time because we aren't in a parliamentary system.
If you actually believe that we shouldn't have a two party system, then we need to reform our voting institutions. Support organizations like Fair vote that are working to implement ranked choice voting which would allow the creation of viable third parties. Don't be David Brooks and just sit around and be afraid. Do something!
1
immigration bashing did not start with Trump. I arrived to the country in '92 (Bush I), after the recession, and we were surprised by the raids to pick up illegal immigrants. That subsided in the Clinton years.
The one that went to unnecessary wars that were not paid by taxes, but by deficits was Bush II, so Trump would not be an original, all in all.
And only now, about 40 Years after Reagan liberals are becoming warriors. They tried to be democratic Democrats all along. But you can't be only that today, or you will be run over.
Final note: most of the scarcity comes from the top 1% owning more than the bottom 90%. Fix that, and it will be abundant again.
3
Brooks' article only reinforces what I have seen time and again: The Republicans value loyalty to the Tribe irrespective of Truth. Liberals value Truth and Reason. This is an age old battle that will never end.
Loyalty to a tribe gives safety to the members, allows escape from scrutiny, as only a superficial quality such as skin color or a vanilla flavor of hate provides admission to it.
Thank goodness we have Democrats who uphold Truth, battle against these misguided tribalists, speak out against their fallacies, and call them out on their trickery.
The battle never ends...
1
David Brooks opinions are always brilliant c
Unfortunately, President Trump and his supporters personify mediocracy, which Brooks elegantly calls “scarcity”.
Hoping that a few Republicans who still hold the values of the old party, condemn the current moral decline of the nation.
Is there a scarcity of “gentlemen” ?
One could argue that the legitimate claim of scarcity, namely economic, is a result of conservative policy over the last 40 years. Conservatism has, in many ways, only been a guise to fool the lower class into shifting more wealth to the ruling class. The destruction of two parties is the end result of trickle-down economics.
3
This is a good column, an impassioned cri du coeur, but it does not buy conservatives any way out if they believe that "the underlying conditions of scarcity are only going to get worse."
David has brought it to the starving life-boat problem -- who eats who in what order?" Is that what "conservatism" is now reduced to?
The failure here is that conservatives demand an impossibility: that resources be boundless, unlimited. Clearly that's nonsense. But if they are forced to confront that nonsense then they go bonkers and insist that it's now time for cruelty and cannibalism -- they see no way to actually live in peace in a finite world, no way to share, no way to actually CONSERVE.
4
What starts out as merely a totally unrealistic comparison between the toxic conservative movement of today and a thoroughly sanitized dream of conservatism past becomes yet another utterly false equivalence by Brooks in which the liberal side, whose mainstream and fringes have hardly shifted in tone or content over recent decades, is painted as a counterpart to the right-wing warrior clan, with a present need for "decent liberals and conservatives" to break away from their stifling mind-sets. But the only examples of toxicity he presents are on the right: Trump, Fox "News," abandonment of rule of law and moral decency, racism, etc. The liberal side may have its excesses but there are simply no equivalents in the leadership of the mainstream left. Brooks may not like Pelosi or Clinton or Obama, or Maddow, but they are not applauding Duterte, pining for more immigrants from Norway, trashing the FBI as well as the constitution, and spewing verifiable falsehoods hourly. Even the "scarcity mentality" Brooks discusses is something uniquely right of center. Remember the criticism of "tax-and-spend" liberals? That hasn't changed in 50 years. It identifies a consistent liberal attitude, right or wrong, that we can in fact provide for most everyone, we can have enough, and government can play a positive role in it. Yes we can!
3
Am praying the Mid Term elections will claim majority rule for the Democrats in the House and the Senate - to FREEZE - Trump / Pence and all alt right Republican legislators who worship Trump - hence - creating an environment where Democrats and Moderate Republicans ( If there are any moderate Rs left) - will be able to --- finally -- work together for and by the American people...All Americans - not just Trump's few.
Then - the Democrats win the Presidency in 2020 - with a balancing of electing moderate Republicans because the alt right Republicans are either voted out or retire - leaving, the House & Senate still be in Democrat majority - making sure the Agenda of The American People - is the priority over the top 1% & Mega Corporations.
Am praying the millennials - women - people of all colors - vote in the mid terms for Democrats - Congress on down to School Board.
2
Retail politics in the US has defaulted to superficiality and hate mongering. Politicians cannot rise within their parties unless they show a talent for using the centrally concocted talking points. This sad state of affairs doesn't reflect anything about "conservatism" or "liberalism;" it is merely the logical adaptation of our 2 party system to a poorly informed population with short attention span.
Interesting ideas but I can’t buy most of it. You talk about scarcity driving a warrior mentality. Scarcity for whom? The Kochs? Surviving is not the issue for them, it is greed and hegemony, pure and simple. And they have managed to rig the game through Citizens United.
Ever since the”greed is good” mentality of the Reagan era commenced, we have seen a “ means justify the ends” governing philosophy of the Republican Party grow and succeed, to the point where their plutocrats now are effectively a minority tyranny. This concentration of wealth is unprecedented in world experience. Serious economists such as Piketty question if a society can hold together with this degree of economic polarization. It is no surprise that they have coopted the media through Fox News to promulgate their propaganda, and the political power they wield is immense.
This warrior mentality is all about bigotry and greed. Period.
3
It is and always has been the nativist element in the population against the ‘Other’. The difference here versus the situation in Europe is that here the ‘Other’ constitutes over 40% of the population whereas the nativists, essentially semi educated Anglo Saxons, constitute about 35% or less of the population. Those figures explain why the nativists have become so desperate and so nasty as the try to hold on to a vanishing power.
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1
"...we could end up with a European-style multiparty system."
Yes, please.
2
"the pillars of conservatism: rule of law, fiscal discipline, global engagement, moral decency, the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin."
If those are "the pillars of conservatism", I have clearly missed them. What I saw in Reagan was militancy, racism, profligacy, and divisiveness. For the life of me, I cannot understand why a huge country, the USA, invaded the tiny island of Granada. That was taking an elephant gun to a Chihuahua. Deficits? Thy name is Reagan. As Cheney famously said, "Reagan taught us that deficits don't matter." Well, at least not when a Republican is in the WH. Reagan's attack on welfare was racist to the core. He wasn't describing a woman with long blond hair and ivory skin when he talked about the Welfare Queen. I also thank Reagan for the AIDS epidemic. If he had put money into finding the cause instead of pretending it didn't exist, it might never have become an epidemic in the first place. Which did he hate more, Haitians or Gays? Hardly matters, does it.
Now, he did labor under a terrible burden when working hard to turn Americans against each other, the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting. He eliminated it. Had he not done that, there would be no Fox News. Pity.
Finally, his tax cuts set us on the path to inequality. Let's not even talk about his attack on unions, the underpinning of middle-class prosperity. Reagan's beaming smile hid his mean, nasty, destructive intentions.
2
"Today, after the financial crisis, the shrinking of the middle class, the partisan warfare, a scarcity mind-set is dominant: Resources are limited. The world is dangerous. Group conflict is inevitable. It’s us versus them. If they win, we’re ruined, therefore, let’s stick with our tribe. The ends justify the means."
all part of the republican plan for permanent political power for the wealthy. too bad you couldn't see past your ideology in those earlier years. you cannot lay a single one of these problems at the democrat's door..... especially after the scandalous (treasonous?) way the republican congress treated obama. they have gleefully pushed this country to the very edge in their quest to not allow anything good to happen during a democratic presidency. now the bill is due and we will all pay dearly.
2
IMHO this is unustified demagoguery:
"Republican politicians have had to say goodbye to most of the pillars of conservatism: rule of law, fiscal discipline, global engagement, moral decency, the idea that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin."
How can anyone make those claims? No proof? No examples?
Here's another:
"In theory, the G.O.P. restrictionist position on immigration is perfectly legitimate. But Trump has fatally entwined it with his constant race baiting. Republican politicians could have denounced the race baiting but remained silent. They allowed themselves to become fellow travelers to bigotry, and spoiled their own cause."
No proof of "race baiting". No examples. Certainly it cannot be referring to "racial bigotry".
I offer those quotes as examples of prejudice and bigotry (intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself), against President Trump, conservatives and Republicans in general.
Should anyone actually believe such divisive demagoguery it may well divide people into two "parties".
Brooks never connects the dots between the Republican's actual concrete policies and the scarcity that middle America perceives. Brooks also promulgates the false equivalence between fighting for equal rights and cozying up to the Klan. He doesn't realize it, but he is part of the problem, not a detached observer.
2
David is absolutely correct, there is no longer a two party system. There is radical conservatism & radical Liberals, and stragglers that have lost their party.
From the Stragglers will arise the Centrist Party, who are fiscal conservatists & Social Liberals.There will also be splinter parties of Black Lives matter, & White Supremacists.The Radical Liberals will vote with Black Lives Matter & Radical Conservatism will vote with White Supremacists, and the Centrists will be like independents & determine the winners.What do you know, we are back where we started, with a chaotic political system.
1