I can't believe even David Brooks can really be as obtuse as he seems in this article. Does he have no familiarity with Marxism? With dialectical materialism? Does he know nothing about the 1960s counterculture, which is the root of all of these movements? The professors who grew up in that time have now taken over and enshrined that ideology in higher education. Class has been replaced by race and identity, and the neo-Marxist dogma marches on.
As for the students, they get to feel like they're a part of something that gives their lives meaning, not to mention potential spoils if they can claim membership in a protected group.
16
I tolerate your jeremiads most of the time, but this one makes me really angry. You conveniently ignore the adult tea party disruptions in 2010, and blame kids in 2018 who have to shout above the money poured into political coffers to be heard. And sometimes it takes a few kids to be gunned down for politicians to listen. If there are any stairs out of your ivory tower, I suggest you take them if you want to remain relevant.
39
Imagine being raised to believe that everyone is equal yet being forced to deal with those who practice exclusion based on race, gender, religion, or sexual identity. These young people recognize the hypocrisy of our supposed values versus our actual actions and they're pushing back. Please remove your rose colored glasses and recognize that life has always been easier for those who are white and much harder for those who are in the minority. Quit dismissing them and actually listen to what they are saying. You might be surprised to discover that we've used debate on a multitude of ideas to justify every disgusting, racist, sexist thing that Trump stands for. Our young people are simply saying enough.
30
Dear Mr. Brooks,
While I commend your attempt at perspective taking, it is not fully realized. If you wish to continue this endeavor, I would suggest literature over social science. I have always found that to be the most helpful for me. It’s how I’ve learned to hear those unlike me.
For instance, you may wish to start with “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros, to see if a women of color shares your view on the prevailing idealism of the 1980s.
Given your last paragraph, I think you’d be fascinated by the much more recent “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich. You would find you had so much in common with the passion for the law that the Native American father has. If you really let yourself into the story, you may also understand and yes, empathize with, the “irrational” actions of the son.
Finally, I would also recommend “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas. (There are “mobs”, so I think this would be helpful). Read it as if you were listening to your own child.
Finally, if you do not have the time to read these, I would suggest simply listening. Listen to the kids. Not listen as you do in one of those reasoned debates, jotting down your rebuttals as they talk. Listen the way you do to someone you love, who’s telling you they’re hurting.
I always read you because I admire your reason. But right now, I don’t think reason will get us to the whole answer. I don’t think we can reason our way out if this. Maybe, though, we could listen our way through it.
36
I'm glad you're trying to sort this out, Mr. Brooks. Ultimately it's a sad chapter in our collective history. But I think you're too kind to those who used their power early on — from the 1940s through the 1970s and beyond — to systematically (i.e., structurally) exclude African Americans from the American banquet, doing this through government-enacted regulations that deliberately separated whites from blacks in sundry federal and state housing projects. Blacks were explicitly targeted as the unwanted. This is brought forth in a new work, "The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America." ¶ I'm old enough to be the grandfather of these "mobbists" (and I don't like their immense intolerance of anyone who doesn't conform to their ideals). But they have a point. The structure over all these years has not changed. Perhaps it's necessary to use the sledgehammer after all. ¶ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/22/when-government-drew-the-colo...
18
The Republic is threatened like at no time since the Civil War, yet another conservative pundit is obsessed with a few handfuls of college kids who are too dumb to understand the basics of free speech. Our house is on fire and Mr. Brooks is complaining that the delivery boy is throwing his morning paper in the flower bed.
9
Concerning his own preference, what he calls mistake theory, Brooks writes:
"But Obama’s election also revealed the limits of that ideal. Now the crucial barriers to racial justice are seen not just as individual, but as structural economic structures, the incarceration crisis, the breakdown of family structure."
Now the crucial barriers to racial justice ARE, indeed, seen as, not just individual, but structural. That's good; it's accurate. In other words, America is, indeed, growing up.
That many of our nation's young people are impatient -- freaking out, even -- is entirely understandable. I'm thinking we aint seen nothing yet, frankly. Wait till there really is not enough water in CA to grow our food, and see the mob does then.
Leadership in America is practically an oxymoron because we think of the future as forever just about 3 months out, and forget what happened just about 3 months back. Nobody can lead if his or her time horizon is that in-close.
12
How many decades do we have to listen to the David Brooks of the world, those "reasonable" people who spend every waking moment admonishing anybody who raises his voice, or marches in protest, or argues that the status quo protects only those who have status.
Eugene Debs was a socialist provocateur, and Martin Luther King was a Communist rabble-rouser, and Malcolm X was a violent black separatist, and Abby Hoffman was a dangerous clown, and Daniel Ellsberg was a pointy-headed traitor, and Malala Yousafzai was a spoiled girl who didn't understand religion.
According to "mistake theory," the Iraq war wasn't an act of insane hubris by a white colonial power, and neither was the Vietnam war. No, they were just decent men making a muddle. Apartheid, too. And maybe Treblinka, Just well-meaning reasonable people slipping up.
Brooks is very quick--like most "reasonable" people--to invoke the French, Russian & Chinese Revolutions. All that violence, all that blood. Somehow, he neglects to mention the American Revolution. as violent & bloody as his examples.
"Mistake theory" is a con, peddled by those with power to those without it, to make sure things stay that way.
30
Seriously, David, if you think the danger in the country is coming from the LEFT, and from the young, you need to think again.
I know it's hard to be conservative now, and to look at Trump and recoil, while secretly wondering, "Is he actually the logical extension of these conservative principles I've been pushing?"
I know it's hard. But for thoughtful conservatives, it's a time for humility and contemplation. If you just keep falling back on blaming the left and blaming young people, you've entirely missed the opportunity to learn from this costly time.
20
For someone who thinks social problems are complex, Brooks is a very simplistic thinker. His column always seems based on an oversimplified contrast class, in this case one between mistake theorists and conflict theorists. Isn't it possible that there are more than two kinds of "theorists"? That this is a false dichotomy? Yes, public problems are caused by error and complexity, but they are also caused by malevolence and evil. These things aren't mutually exclusive.
17
Yes, Mr. Brooks, conservatives should also revisit the revolutions you mentioned. They may have been bloody, but they sure got results. Conservatives are once again fueling a fire that will burn out of control. Why don't you write about that?
6
As someone who has some firsthand experience with college "mobbists", I think one thing that is happening is that people are losing sight of what works. It is the breakdown of the commitment to functionality that plagues us right along the political spectrum. Human evolution and the history of animal domestication tie into the race/ racism debate, the evolutionary game theory of sexual reproduction favors male pushiness and female choosiness in humans as it does in all Eutherian mammals, Transgender people, while perfectly valid in their own right, sever the continuum of viable gamete, sexual game theory, secondary sex characteristics, behavioral sex characteristics that get babies made, and so on and so on. Things are the way they are for reasons that are not arbitrary, and confronting stubborn problems (that act only to our detriment) requires both compromise and an understanding that you can only scratch the surface and change the superficial, or else you cause far more damage than benefit if you try to change the fundamentals. Address sexual harassment by making any and all reference to sex taboo in the workplace. Address inequality by first agreeing that modernity is very predominately Eurasian in heritage, and then show how treating, say, blacks and native Americans better will only strengthen the modern (Eurasian) world. In the immortal words of Richard Dawkins, "science works". Its high time we reapply that mentality to other things and do what works.
4
When Senator McClellan decreed, not only that President Obama must be denied his lawful right to submit his nominee for a vacancy in the Supreme Court occurring in Obama's term as President, but also that the qualifications of his nominee could not even be discussed or debated on the Senate floor, was that action based on Senator McClellan's allegiance to "Conflict Theory" rather than "Mistake Theory"?
Or was Senator McClellan simply acting from a long-standing Republican tendency toward Oligarchy, siding with the greed and money of the 1% who compose his class of rulers, whose demands negate the workings of democracy?
It seems Mr. Brooks has yet to come to terms with the fact that the crude demagogue Donald Trump has seized upon the ugliest and most vicious of sentiments belonging to the Republican Party. The clothes of Brooks' various theories will never cover their imperious deeds.
19
No, David.
I too am a child born into the late 1960s, who grew up in the awful mess of the 1970s, who came of age in the 1980s.
The same crushing structures that make angry young men and women were there. This disaffection is caused by trying to offer people simple when they vitally need skills to recover from the chaotic. It was caused by a growing voice in the land that asked why lay our lives on the line? And who the hey are you to ask me that anyway?
Our culture has taught kids that power is imposing your will on others. Or by handing rejection out like candy.
The difference now is we have the sharing economy. People now happily tell you to your face that you are so full of it.
What we lack is grace.
We talk about parenthood in terms of control and milestones. We stress over all the missed and refused gates.
We talk about error when life is about emerging from the noise.
Life is about transitions.
If you don't get this, you dropped the ball.
2
"Today’s young people were raised within an educational ideology that taught them that individual reason and emotion were less important than perspectivism — what perspective you bring as a white man, a black woman, a transgender Mexican, or whatever."
Ugh, no. Brooks is misrepresenting someone's position, yet again! (Ps. You can't just stick "ism" onto a word and pretend you're communicating something valid.)
No one has ever said that individual reason is less important than what group you belong to. What the argument is is that your perspective will always be influenced by what group you belong to, and that you cannot see the world from every group's perspective. Further, because people in different groups have very different experiences, someone in group A cannot speak to the experience of someone in group B. Someone in group A is limited in understanding what someone in group B's experience is like when they apply their individual reasoning alone. They must listen to the experience of a person in group B to understand it.
So, it's not that your individual reason is unimportant or less important in every case, it's a recognition of and honoring of people's different perspectives.
10
The problem with your argument Mr. Brooks is that tribalism is what got us where we are and that that may be the only response that will be understood. This era will go down as the blue collar white man's last stand. It's not about this theory or that theory. The Koch funded cranks spew hate so they shouldn't be shocked to be treated roughly.
4
The younger generation is so horrified at what we elders have done to this nation, as an old codger responsible for this catastrophe, I hope and pray someday to see the fruits of their efforts turn this nation around, and return to some sense of decency, integrity, and a nation that cares about how all of US are doing and not just those fortunate to have accumulated a vast amount of wealth and power to exercise over the majority of US. I have a dream. For the dreamers of today, may you grow and prosper. We American need you now more than ever.
DD
Manhattan
10
HIs best column.
4
Say what you want re their perspectives, these mobbists are no different from Mao's Red Guards from the 1960s in China, as noted by another elsewhere: " "Life and Death in Shanghai" by Nien Cheng should be required reading for every SJW and campus radical. These people are just like Mao's mobs of radicalized students during the Cultural Revolution - They take over the language, intimidate and drive out their enemies and even resort to violence in pursuit of their non-sensical and dogmatic socialist vision." And who unleashed them? Not the right, but manifestly the left, whose duty it is now to leash them, explain to them what freedom of speech and the others means, how it came about and how many died to protect it, in other words, behave like a conservative. Possible? Dimly. Likely? Ha, ha, ha. Not until the mobbists physically attack the NYT building and its occupants.
3
Liberals are tired of being suckers... They have seen what happens when one side plays by the rules (Democrats) and one side cheats (Rebublicans)... see Bush vs. Gore and the denial of Merrick Garland's nomination.
So the descent into illiberalism proceeds.
14
I have a Puerto Rican friend, a lifelong Independentista. She has traveled to the US on several occasions. I asked if she had ever visited any Latin American countries. "No," she said, "I won't go there, Las Republicas are not safe."
Why is she an Independitista?... because she likes them socially. They carry a defiant attitude that she finds appealing, at some level.
My guess is that the current rash of youth activism has the same sort of intellectual vacuity. They are having a good time dressing up and scuffling in the streets. It stirs up a bit of adrenaline. That is all there is to it.
2
To phrase what Brooks says another way, many in the younger generation do not consider themselves primarily Americans. Though we are all hyphenated Americans of one sort or another, their primary identity is on the adjective preceding the hyphen, not on the collective noun, American.
This cuts across the political spectrum increasing the tribalization and consequent polarization of our people. Whether it's Black, 2nd Amendment, gay, anti-abortion, women, Christian, or whatever else describes our sub-group of Americans, unless we acknowledge that our primary identity is as Americans, we will not only fail as a viable, progressive nation but, more to the point, be incapable of dealing with the legitimate concerns of our secondary identities.
4
Too bad ‘mobster’ was already taken.
Or you know, it's because they're children.
So DB would like us to have a civilized, respectful debate on whether racism is bad? Genocide? Nazism? Flat earth?
" If reason and deliberation are central to democracy, how on earth did Donald Trump get elected?"
By allowing equal, respectful time to the above.
8
"....manage to combine snowflake fragility and lynch mob irrationalism into one perfectly poisonous cocktail."
Actually, that sounds like Trump and his cronies.
11
Personally, I'm on the side of ANY speech that doesn't directly incite to riot. My objection to yelling down Nazis and the like--and yes, Spenser is a Nazi--is that it's kind of lazy, and it plays into the hands of the shabby likes of Sean Hannity.
Yelling down James Watson is easier to deal with: cut it out. Stop it. Learn enough science to explain why he's a dunderhead (let's start with his never havng dne any of the work to back up his claims about race), and explain why he's a dunderhead.
But at the same time, I notice nobody's mentioning how hard clowns like Jay Sekulow are working to suppress speech, to shut down research, to get profs fired, and so on. Doesn't that count, if we're gonna be all het up about the zfirst Amendment?
Oh, and a question: why're all these Republican and right-wing student orgs demanding to have people like Ann Coulter speak? It can't be because their ideas are fresh and new, or because they tell hard truths, or even because they're particularly good speechifiers. Mostly, they lie, they slander, and they scream, and I've already heard Rushbo's act, not to mention already read, "Mein Kampf."
So I'm expected to take their guff seriously, intellectually speaking? Come on. Wouldn't be that these clowns are invited for reasons that have zero to do with promoting the Enlightenment, would it?
9
Not sure how you can attack students for "snowflake fragility" while you simultaneously ask us to be sympathetic to Trump voters because "liberal elites" and Hillary Clinton hurt their precious feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelings by saying Trump is a bigot and some of them are bigots too. And that they are SO SAD by changing cultural dynamics. And that they are SO SAD that "west coast elites" allegedly "look down on them." Boo hoo.
11
It is amazing to me that it took Mr. Brooks 56 years to find out that there are evil people in the world. He was born after World War II but certainly, somebody should have told him about Hitler and the Holocaust. I guess they forgot.
These kids evidently have had a better education they know a deadly fascist when they see one. They’re not about to let them take over the United States. The kids are correct. Fascist our bad. Surely Mr. Brooks can understand that.
It’s okay to write interesting intellectual explanations about differences in interpretation of epistemology and social theory. But occasionally we ought to have a clear understanding of what evil is all about.
7
We all know that revolutions eat their young, David. This is NOT a revolution but a revulsion. A revulsion against those who preach hatred and racial prejudice. A revulsion against someone who thinks that white separatists have "some good people". It's a revulsion against a political system that is stuck in the 18th Century and enables a minority party (no matter which) to control a nation. It's a revulsion against an economic system that rewards mostly those at the top. Free speech isn't free - far from it - but it doesn't include rabble rousing, burning torches, and Nazi swastikas without any pushback.
4
Student mobbists are a throwback to nationalist Europe of the 19th century where one's identity became central and all others had to be destroyed or removed leading to 2 world wars. They are a negation of the American melting pot. They deny the obvious and irrefutable fact that Obama is not African-American but of mixed race which can be easily proved by looking up his parents. They deny that common Americans are not racists which again can be easily proven by the fact that just as Obama is a child of a mixed race marriage so there are a raising number of mixed race marriages all across the country.
Racists on the left and the right will deny that Obama is white & black. They will deny the Trevor Noah is white & black. They will deny the results of the genetic tests that prove this to be true for many other Americans as well. They will deny the fact that America is a melting pot.
Do you ever feel like we're all at a museum exhibit called "Self-Styled Rational Conservative, Circa-Late-20th Century?" He doesn't see us here, just on the other side of his wood-paneled bubble. He puffs forlornly on his pipe and regards his reflection.
4
Brooks reasons, the young people he considers know the forms of rational discourse but not the utility in getting what they want. They let their passions guide them and they only think of what they want not how to get it except by demanding that others see that their causes are just and must join with them. They will change once they understand that they will have to make it happen.
The presumptions of mistake theorists are more realistic than the theories based upon struggles between good and evil, the light and the dark. A lot more harm is done because of ignorance, indifference, and a lack of consideration than maliciousness or predatory behaviors. It takes a lot more effort to address these sources of trouble than those produced intentionally.
The fear of an overarching evil establishment is mistaken and thinking that it exists could destroy our liberal democracy. Trust is essential to it’s existence.
2
This article doesn’t really explain anything. Before it is assumed that there is a generational divide in social and political philosophy, Brooks should probably first justify that there is actually one. “Today’s young people were raised within an educational ideology that taught them that individual reason and emotion were less important than perspectivism” - but who raised them in that very ideology? Brooks’ generation did! So Brooks’ generation believed in one thing and preached to their children another? I don’t think so. If anything, this article is actually self-defeating. Generational divides don’t just appear by magic, if we can’t figure out why it occurred in the first place, any discussion that comes afterwards is just tautology.
1
I came of age in the 1990s, where we were promised that free trade, increased tolerance, etc would generate prosperity and lift all boats.
But the powerful few at the top - especially in the Republican Party, have broken they promise. They have cynically manipulated powers to enrich themselves at the expense of others. They have supported Trump and others like him because it wields them power. They have manipulated the electoral process trough gerrymandering. They have rigged the courts. The concept that we’re supposed to calmly, rationally figure things out through consensus and conversation went out the door with bush v gore. The consensus driven neoliberal new world order was destroyed by greedy republicans And their moderate sympathizers. Folks like David brooks who didn’t want to rock the boat.
7
"There was also an assumption that while we might disagree on the means, we all wanted basically the same things. For example, though America was plagued by economic divides we all wanted a society in which social mobility and equal opportunity were the rule. Though America is plagued by racism, we all wanted more integration and less bigotry, a place where talent and character mattered more than skin color and prejudice."
Mr. Brooks, I came of age in a middle-class environment in the 1980s, too. But I'm guessing that your coming of age included unicorns and good witches? I knew that not everyone wanted more integration and that talent and character meant not a lot if your skin was darker than your classmates'.
Yours is a lovely theory, but it's just wrong. I grew up hearing dog whistles where you apparently heard logic. And now when certain Americans have given up dog whistles for bullhorns, you blame those who have been the victims of those dog whistles.
6
Good column, but there was one egregious formulation -- "structural economic structures" -- that in years past would never have made it past a Times editor. (Perhaps they're all too busy working on retroactive obituaries for the long since deceased...How did this qualify as news? Really it just reeks of institutional vanity and virtue signaling).
There's an interesting reading of Trump's "America First" ideology as responding to a new awareness of ecological crisis and likely shortages in the short to near term future: despite repressing (and exacerbating) the issue of climate change, the Trump administration is thus interpreted as reacting to this increasingly threatening sense of scarcity by racing to grab as much of the pie as possible in a world where mutual cooperation is ever more likely to break down as winner-take-all scenarios proliferate.
3
Funny, David, that you mention the 'closing of the college students mind" as if this is a new phenomenon, the right has been accusing the left of taking over colleges with "liberal orthodoxy" and shutting out voices going back to the post war period when people started going to college en masse, so this isn't new.
And it is interesting that David talks about the mob mentality, of kids on college campuses who are all of one mind, who have grown up with tribal parents, etc..and aims it all at the left.
David, have you ever seen the speakers at conservative schools, the various religious and non religious schools? If not, I suggest you look at their pattern of who speaks there, and it is interesting, unless it is some liberal turned neo con, you won't see anyone to the left of Barry Goldwater (in his prime). I think too that these incidents are well publicized by Fox News and Breitbart, but don't talk about the many thousands of times controversial speakers do speak (sorry, but being protested doesn't deny their free speech, kids on college campuses have the right to say what they think of White supremacists and the like)....but that wouldn't be convenient, you use extreme examples like Milo what's his face, and jordan Peterson, and Laura Ingraham, and don't mention the many people who do speak *shrug*.
It also raises a question about opening minds, would you be upset if students protested a black panther or a nation of Islam speaker, and got their invite rejected?
Dearest David, you make me feel like a kid again. I'm a few years ahead of you, coming of age in the 60's and 70's, and our "mobbism" was in reaction to events like draft lotteries, or May 4, 1970 (Kent State--ringing a few more bells than we would have hoped, forty-eight years later.)
You can get our perspective much better from Gail Collins than from me; but I would encourage you instead to actually listen to the students themselves, rather than ism-ing them. I've been a high school and college teacher for a very long time: there are too many theories, and not enough listening. They are the ones who will act, and whatever we might theorize about them is indeed dust in the wind. There seems to be a possibility of actual action on gun control, sexual consent, race and other social and political issues led by teens and millennials--just as we did, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and many others did. As Max Plank observed, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Listen; the times are changing.
3
Perhaps "Mistake Theory" may have had some relevance in the past. I'm quite sure that the arc of human destiny being described today is very deliberate indeed. The mistake, if there is one, is that people like Mr. Brooks and his ilk were given the power to influence this arc to the detriment of the other 99%.
2
Revolutions work. If a large group of young people are coming the believe that conflict is the only way to obtain justice in this country, they are probably right. Corruption in this country has become endemic.
5
"Today’s young people were raised within an educational ideology that taught them that individual reason and emotion were less important than perspectivism — what perspective you bring as a white man, a black woman, a transgender Mexican, or whatever." This is not true. Young people are simply aware of how race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation INFORM their individual reason and emotion. Mr. Brooks, you make a (common?) mistake by assuming that these "tribes" are monolithic. Take the time to listen to young people and you will find at least as much in-group individuation as with other generations.
1
As a student in college right now, I think you're making this far too complicated than it needs to be. Generally, students will reject speakers like Christina Hoff Sommers and Jordan Peterson not out of some sort of Marxist ideological paradigm but because the fans of these people, the ones who invited them to speak on campus, are usually annoying/high-minded loudmouths who know that the presence of a controversial speaker will ignite a flame war on social media. We're kids. We like attention, and we love to yell at each other. Yeah, we're probably going to regret it later, but at least we'll have learned something.
4
When Buckley and Gore Vidal’s were going at it head to head which kind of theorists were they? I’d say conflict has been around quite awhile, the millennials certainly didn’t invent it or refine it.
1
College kids are low hanging fruit and one that every conservative and Fox News absolutely delight in decrying. They will grow up and the next generation will give us all something to complain about. I don’t like this behavior either, but the only thing that will change it is peer pressure, not a bunch of lectures from conservatives.
1
Mistake theory WAS the best way to look at the country's problems until the Republican party went crazy and simply stopped believing in reason. Now, global warming is a conspiracy, women's emancipation destroyed the family, more guns equals fewer deaths, and other fantasies of the deluded right hold sway. It wasn't the left that gave up on reason in favor of pure power, it was the right (see Neil Gorsuch as the finest example of a pure power play) and the left has been forced to adopt these tactics to survive. Grow up and stop acting as if our problems rests equally on both sides. This view is itself an abdication of reason.
6
We are all totally depraved, but we are told to prioritize “mistake theory” when judging others. And we all judge. It’s right to judge behavior, but usually wrong to judge motivation.
It is not a mere matter of philosophic perspective, though; it is a matter of experience...
Mr. Brooks,
My nearly 18-year-old son would be a great kid to help you with those imaginings and to, likely, correct your assumptions. He has a great deal to say, as do his peers. You might want to read Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and meditate on the section in which Emerson describes the power of youth, just so you know what to expect.
All those kids (4.059 million) born in 2000 will be voters in the mid-term elections this year. What will happen if their votes aren't heeded? It might be a good idea to transition from imagining to learning.
Kindest Regards,
Beanie
1
No need to talk to students. Wisdom cannot be given, it has to be earned. Students need to talk themselves into the right answers. So far, they replaced wisdom with cheap ideological shortcuts. The irony is that it is happening in the universities, where wisdom should prevail.
1
I came of age in eighties too. That’s when I learned about structural racism. I must of slept through the class on Mistake Theory.
5
'Reason' doesn't seem to win elections.
Republicans rule the country not by appealing to reason, but by mobilizing the 'mobbists' in their core voter base.
I also came of age in the 1980s when this mob-rule of red-state voters was organized into an election-winning machine.
It was clearly not 'reason' that put Reagan in the white house. It was an organized war on liberalism in which the religious right (hardly an ideology based in reason) was mobilized, or co-opted, by the capitalist right, the free-market extremists for whom greed & self-interest & social-Darwinist wealth accumulation was their 'ersatz religion'.
Added to this was the mob-mentality of Reagan's anti-Soviet 'Evil Empire' rhetoric (hardly non-tribal) & the 'welfare queen' mythos intended to appeal entirely to a racialist 'conflict theory', etc.
But Reaganism, which built the base for Trumpism was all about radicalizing the base & it worked.
We won't be able to reverse the destructive red-state rigged voting machine by being reasonable, Obama tried that only to be blocked by radical, & infuriatingly racial obstructionists,
I think you do need to radicalize the base to win elections in the USA, not through bloody revolution, but by a more impassioned, 'populist' mood than progressives believe.
The student 'mobists' have the right idea if the wrong target (if only because it terrifies conservatives as we see in this piece). That's how elections are won to civilly realign policy.
You have to fight to win.
5
...though America was plagued by economic divides we all wanted a society in which social mobility and equal opportunity were the rule. Though America is plagued by racism, we all wanted more integration and less bigotry..
What can possibly lead to the conclusions given above? The Civil War never really ended in this nation. The Republican Party developed the Southern Strategy under Nixon when they promised to block all civil rights legislation turning the South solid Red. Reagan worked overtime destroying the unions that were the last bastions of blue collar job security and fair work rules.
We all wanted ..what ? Mr. Brooks? Really.
4
I think the article is onto something. I’m a 20 year old college student, and I’m most certainly a conflict theorist. I also don’t like the trend of speech suppression. Unless someone is advocating violence, they have a right to speak. They also have a right to be mocked and ignored. When we rise to Ann Coulter or Milo, they win. When we label Ben Shapiro and his ilk as Ann Coulter, they win. We have to be smarter.
Mr. Brooks, have you -- at any time -- actually sat down with such students and directly asked them what they think and why they do what they do?
Or is all your "understanding" gathered at a distance? Or from a speculative height?
I don't approve of mobbism on either the left or the right. But I also disapprove of so-called grownups theorizing about youth without actually investigating.
I didn't like it when I was a student in the counter-cultural 1960s and '70s, and as a matter of principle I still object to it today.
5
Well David is onto something here, though not quite on track: “The solutions to injustice and suffering are simple and obvious: Defeat the powerful. Passion is more important than reason because the oppressed masses have to mobilize to storm the barricades.”
Things haven’t quite got to the “storm the Bastille” “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” stage yet, which led to beheadings and purges, but the “let them eat sand” indifference of the GOP Congress and the lying through their teeth of McConnell/Ryan are heading us in that direction. The Dems aren’t able to put up a united opposition either, which worsens the plight of the vanishing middle class, and makes reasoned response look ineffective.
4
Mr. Brooks, you write a lot about civility while Rome burns -- and I'm not talking about college campuses. Socially idealistic young people, who may have just reached voting age, did not elect Trump. Trump is the person who is destroying the country. Young people are working out identities and ideas, they have energy, and they want the world to be a humane place. Please put your energy towards the actual crisis we are in -- a wholesale misdirecting of attention away from the robber barons in high places in our government.
3
You mention a number of revolutions which these young should study and note that all wound up waist deep in blood, true as far as it went. Was not ours a revolution also? And it didn't wind up waist deep in blood (unless maybe you consider the Civil War an extension of the revolution, a big, big stretch). But the others mentioned, yesirree, blood everywhere, including, usually, the revolutionists; revolutions (except ours) devour their own.
Um. We call ours a "revolutionary war" but maybe it was really a war for independence, which is not the same at all?
Brooks says "the law is...living proof that we can rise above tribalism and force". But the law can be waylaid by tribalism, and it has been by the Republicans' refusal to consider Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, their foot dragging on appointments to other federal courts during the Obama administration, Trump's appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and stuffing of the lower courts with ultraconservative judges, and the ideological jurisprudence of Thomas and Alito.
4
As a lawyer, I would encourage most conservatives to take a course on constitutional law. Just because they think the Constitution says or ought to say something doesn't mean that it does.
2
Napoleon said it well:
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by
incompetence."
However, it's much more entertaining to believe in conspiracy theories and dark web adventurism than human fallibility.
"Mistake theory" implies an open and good faith debate. After a century of advertising, public relations, and spin, as well as faux mental health theories, it is difficult to trust one's own factual or theoretical bases for reasoning, let alone others. We have done it to ourselves. Since few people have a grounding in mathematical or physical science reasoning, these disciplines themselves are seen as something to "believe" in. In short, it is easy to conclude that it is futile to set forth a reasoned position if one can expect only more public relations blather to dismiss it. A retreat to cultural Marxism in which the louder party wins (while people with money control the megaphones) has resulted; shutting down the people using the megaphones is no longer experienced as a loss of the other side's perspective.
Has anyone noticed that as the media has become more and more hyper- partisan that conflict theory is rising.
These kids grew up watching Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity screaming thru the TV. They do not remember a time when civility was the norm.
We want be able to fix this until we understand that incivility is toxic for our society.
1
In this era of oligarchy and ruthless pursuit of profit at the expense of those not in the 99 percent of the population, it is hard to see how conflict theory is not at least as accurate a perspective as mistake theory. It is easy to see Trump as incompetent, but it is equally easy to see him as full of malice and evil intent. Just look at his history of building wealth at the expense and destruction of anyone standing in his way. It seems that so many of the young protestors are "right on" in understanding the world they now inhabit and it would be in our own interest to follow suit.
2
Brooks observation that one's perspective is contingent on when one comes of age is very relevant, and his indirect plea to again teach our kids civics and history is vital. That is why my hope is with the current high school students, not their immediate elders. As with the Viet Nam War and Civil Rights in the 60s and 70s, it will take a generation of young people to Just Say No! They are the ones with the energy, focus, and creativity to develop their own media, organize boycotts, take to the streets, engage in civil disobedience, and whatever else they deem necessary. After all, they not us older folks commenting here, are the ones who will live with the consequences of what they choose to do or not do.
I look to the high school generation, not 20-somethings, because a college generation concerned with "micro-aggressions" and "safe spaces" would not survive a Kent State. The most positive thing for positive change I have heard about recently is the call by high school students for a national day to walk out of school to demonstrate that unless things change, there will be no business as usual. If they do this, if they continue on the road to determining the nation they and their children will live in, they will be criticized, bribed, threatened, and worse, but that's the way life is. Remember Kent State. There is no free lunch.
I am sorry to see Brooks' resigned sadness. Our disagreements notwithstanding, he deserves better. David, there is hope past your disillusion.
1
Brooks observation that one's perspective is contingent on when one comes of age is very relevant, and his indirect plea to again teach our kids civics and history is vital. That is why my hope is with the current high school students, not their immediate elders. As with the Viet Nam War and Civil Rights in the 60s and 70s, it will take a generation of young people to Just Say No! They are the ones with the energy, focus, and creativity to develop their own media, organize boycotts, take to the streets, engage in civil disobedience, and whatever else they deem necessary. After all, they not us older folks commenting here, are the ones who will live with the consequences of what they choose to do or not do.
I look to the high school generation, not 20-somethings, because a college generation concerned with "micro-aggressions" and "safe spaces" would not survive a Kent State. The most positive thing for positive change I have heard about recently is the call by high school students for a national day to walk out of school to demonstrate that unless things change, there will be no business as usual. If they do this, if they continue on the road to determining the nation they and their children will live in, they will be criticized, bribed, threatened, and worse, but that's the way life is. Remember Kent State. There is no free lunch.
I am sorry to see Brooks' resigned sadness. Our disagreements notwithstanding, he deserves better. David, there is hope past your disillusion.
1
We live in a time where reality is considered subjective. Something is offensive if someone feels offended.
We also live in an era in which progressives have convinced us that we simply cannot understand each other. If I express an opinion about a "women's issue", my opinion is dismissed because, as a man, I cannot understand a woman's perspective. So, why bother trying?
Progressive values have striven to denigrate objective thought, and to drive wedges between us, while pandering to those who would wallow in their own dissatisfaction rather than constructively solve problems.
In our attempt to be understanding an inclusive, we have weakened civil society.
Re-read Brooks’ paragraph on conflict theory, and instead of thinking about students think about the Republican Party and the Trump administration. It’s not the students we need to convert to a better theory.
5
I also lived through the 80s (and the 60s and 70s as well), and you make a point about generational differences. But there is another viewpoint you appear not to have considered: maybe there are people and movements that are not "mistakes", but but really are simply and fundamentally bad, and absolutely convinced they are not "mistaken". You admit they will not be convinced otherwise, so why should they be tolerated?
1
I respect Mr. Brooks and his contributions to the public discourse, but this essay is problematic. I, too, came of age in the 80's, and while the sociopolitical situation had not deteriorated to the extent it has today, Mr. Brooks' remembrance of that time seems biased. The 80's began in the shadow of the Greensboro Massacre; they were the era of the Iran-Contra hearings; they saw Morton Downey, Jr.'s rise to fame; they witnessed the proto-Antifa Tompkins Square Riots; and they were punctuated by the racism of Senator Helms' campaign against Harvey Gantt, with the awful "hands" ad. To say this time was characterized by a widespread commitment to reason, compassion and compromise is just not true. Given the racial tensions exposed by the Shreveport and Miami riots in '88 and '89, not to mention the Crown Heights and LA riots that soon followed, it's hard to believe "...we all wanted more integration and less bigotry." Indeed, according to Branko Marcetic in Jacobin, Klan membership grew dramatically between the mid-70's and 1981--and, of course, the militia and survivalist groups of the 90's didn't arise ex nihilo. It's debatable whether we ever universally revered inclusion, compassion and reason. But if the public discourse today is even more degraded, and our differences more divisive, the one event that draws a clear, bright line between then and now is the rise of the internet, social media and smartphones. Our indulgences may prove decisive in our undoing.
2
Very apt, profound and timely. I'll save this.
To compare the students of today exercising their constitutional right to protest, or even speak out, under the watchful eye of their parents and teachers, to the revolutions of the past ending in bloodbaths is a stretch. The content of their argument is anti-firearms and assault rifles in particular, essentially the absence of weapons that kill. These youths are experiencing an authentic problem, and doing their best to make changes, something their dithering representatives are failing to do. Maybe they have been given a platform to be loud, and unreasonable- but who can reason with a 2nd amendment warrior who needs to "hunt" with an assault rifle. We often hear of kids "surviving" high school but it might take on new meaning now. The recent Florida gun legislation allows, perhaps encourages, teachers to carry firearms in school… an extremely bad omen.
2
I'm not sure during which period in the US history does Mr. Brooks think that the most of the societal problems were attributable to Mistake theory. I would assume that Mr. Brooks doesn't attribute slavery, segregation and women's rights issues, to name a few, to the Mistake theory. These, and other similar issues, were born out of tribalism, and the only way to resolve them was to uproot the structures that created and perpetuated these societal ills.
Maybe these students are seeing some of today's societal ills along similar lines, as being born out of tribalism, and needing a Conflict theory approach to resolve them.
2
Thank you and thank goodness for David Brooks reasoned and thoughtful writings. Mr Brooks we take refuge in your thought leadership and positive communications. We are certainly indebted and enriched by your efforts.
How incredibly naive. "We all wanted a world with social mobility for all." That has NEVER been true.
2
I came of age in the sixties. Remember how the protestors were much reviled and the threat to overthrow the government was real. Except it wasn't.
I did a bit of protesting the war and thought the world was on my side and we could change the course of world events. We were the generation of peace and love. Except we weren't.
More 18 year olds voted for Richard Nixon in 1972 than George McGovern, the first time young Baby Boomers could vote.
For all the images of Haight Ashbury and "flowers in your hair" the peaceniks were not the dominate force in the long run.
It was the conservative, way right of center which is still playing out today.
The Baby Boomers majority were conservative, sticks in the mud. They won. We lost.
Settle down David. History repeats itself.
3
First of all, I would say you're probably talking about, maybe, 25% of the students. The ones who don't shout and demonstrate we don't know about. Secondly, I grew up in the sixties and this is not so different. A student of history will tell you that "the powerful few keep everyone else down" is not a particularly new idea. It might even have had something to do with the French Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution. And then there's the very simple notion that students are young people and they're just rebelling, as young people are often wont to do. Finally, how would Trump's crowds react if, say, Nancy Pelosi went up on the podium to talk to them? And Trump's crowds are not young people.
4
We're starting to sound like old fogeys. Historically, riots take place in the Spring. Et, oui, Monsieur Brooks, and Revolutionary History that you mentioned in understanding fledgling Mobbists should be taught as a matter of course.
Our young are feeling their oats in different ways these days. No more pitchforks are being used. An elderly aunt told me earlier there are different kinds of revolutions and they occur in cycles.
What were those of us who have reached the age of maturity doing during The Kent Student tragedy. It is a chapter in American history that I don't even want to understand.
The student riots in Paris in 1968 have not been forgotten and were quite violent. True, I was reading English novels and wandering about a large empty school park outside the City at the time, without a phone, radio, newspaper or T.V. The witnessing of an Adult tragedy was waiting outside the gates of this haven and took place after Easter the following year.
There is a theory here in Steinbeck Land that lawyers will bleed you dry. Regardless of politics, we all agree on the above.
Credit to be given for Mr. Brooks for trying to pack so much meaning of life in these contemporary times into a short column.
A great majority of humanity tends to complicate matters. It is becoming an uphill battle these days to keep in time with the News and maintain one's equilibrium.
Thinking of a young student. Anthony Borges is his name and he saves lives.
PAX.
3
Inside I am not old of course. I feel the same as I always have. But sometimes what comes out of my mouth sounds like an old fogey. If I don't notice, my son or daughter point it out.
During the Kent State tragedy, I was in elementary school. From a house across the street I watched the tanks and tear gas roll through the trees and buildings.
Tens of thousands of young men were drafted and sent to their deaths in a war that the Pentagon knew could not be won. Withdrawal however would have made reelection less likely.
We have a family connection to a country that underwent a revolution. And then promptly scheduled one or two more. Our visit decades ago brought out the secret police. We met up with relatives who had been tortured.
I don't agree with much of what David says here, though there is something to the "mistake theory." All the same, do we at least all agree that advocating for revolution indicates ignorance and recklessness?
1
Rule of reason, or 'mistake-ism,' is an ideal to be desired, but tribalism has been the norm for at least as long as I've been on the planet. It may have been invisible to white suburbia before the 1990s, but it's inescapable now. Tribalism existed, but the dominant tribe has been insulated from its impact.
Thus the scale by which we made our 'reasoned' judgments has been heavily biased by the institutions the current generation is, according to Mr. Brooks, seeking to overturn. But I don't see the current generation as quite so radically different from ours as Mr. Brooks describes. I have not seen them reject the rule of law so much as reject those laws that preserve inequality.
I do, however, see reasoned discourse under constant attack by so-called conservative media--media that seems driven more by a desire to attack liberals than to confront liberal ideas or present alternative viewpoints.
Of course the true motivation of conservative media is to generate viewership and to promote political change that favors the ruling class. But if they explained that philosophy honestly it would be strongly rejected.
8
I am a millennial born in the late 80s, but I don't particularly identify with my generation if they do actually act in the way they are portrayed. I say "if" because I don't personally know any other millennials that act like some of the more radical and outspoken ones you see reported about. We are generally calm and low key, just trying to get by. Low salaries are a big hitch in our lives, but we don't really take it out on others. It's just life.
However, I would like to take the advice of Mr Brooks and learn something more about the various revolutions that he mentioned.
I just wanted to ask if anyone has any references to podcasts, YouTube courses, websites/articles, or even (affordable) books that do a good job of accurately conveying what happened during those times, French, Chinese, Russian...
I have a very basic understanding of these events, but would love to understand them on a deeper level in order to see the parallels to our current situation.
I worry that we may be headed that way, and so understanding the detailed past of bygone revolutions could help safeguard the future. Hopefully we won't end up there.
Any suggestions or advice is greatly welcomed. Thanks.
4
I hope these books aren't too expensive. They're all lively and well-written, yet scholarly. In some cases, there might be video versions/documentaries based on them.
Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution.
Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924.
Frank Dikotter, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957.
2
"Any suggestions or advice is greatly welcomed."
Go to a library, and use Google.
This covers a lot of revolutions:
* "Revolution : 500 years of struggle for change" by Mark Almond.
The literature on the French Revolution is huge. Here are a few suggestions:
* "Danton", Wajda's 1983 movie about the French Revolution. Be sure to watch the extras on the Criterion DVD.
* "A concise history of the French Revolution" by Sylvia Neely. Short, gives coverage of the role of women.
* "The French Revolution : voices from a momentous epoch, 1789-1795" ed. by Cobb & Jones. Source material -- letters, diaries, journals, etc.
* "Robespierre : a revolutionary life" by Peter McPhee. Recent bio. of one of the leaders of the French Revolution.
For books:
Doyle's Oxford History of the French Revolution, and Simon Sciama's Citizens, are arguably the best for France.
For Russia, Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy, and Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution are certainly among the best, although biased. The are a bunch of new books that are worth a look as well. It's 100 years, after all.
For China, John King Fairbanks, The Great Chinese Revolution, and Frank Dikotter, The Tragedy of Liberation. John Reed's Red Star over China is the classic, by someone who was there at the beginning.
There are lots of others, but these can get you started.
1
To phrase what Brooks says another way, many in the younger generation do not consider themselves primarily Americans. Though we are all hyphenated Americans of one sort or another, their primary identity is on the adjective preceding the hyphen, not on the collective noun, American.
This cuts across the political spectrum increasing the tribalization and consequent polarization of our people. Whether it's Black, 2nd Amendment, gay, anti-abortion, women, Christian, or whatever else describes our sub-group of Americans, unless we acknowledge that our primary identity is as Americans, we will not only fail as a viable, progressive nation but, more to the point, be incapable of dealing with the legitimate concerns of our secondary identities.
12
You're forgetting that these "hyphenated Americans" are *created* by those intent (aka the GOP) on denying them their constitutional rights and protections as Americans. The younger generation are simply calling attention to our failure at ensuring equal rights for all citizens — they are well aware we are all Americans.
2
I came of age 20 years before you, David, in the 1960's. When I was a college student, we were "mobs" against the Vietnam War and for civil rights. We saw the problems we encountered, racism, an unjust and unnecessary war, inequality, environmental degradation, etc., as caused by malice and oppression, not errors or complexity. College wasn't just for becoming trained for a job; it was also about an education in government, politics, social issues, the arts, history, etc. We went to college without huge debt, and make a good living when we graduated.
Progress was not always constant, but it seemed that the country was moving in the right direction. We saw gains in civil rights, worker protections, higher minimum wage, environmental protections, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Even the GOP supported some of the gains. Then we had the "Reagan revolution" in the '80's, and government became "the problem," not the solution. The GOP was taken over gradually by the extreme right-wing. "Free enterprise" would solve all the problems. Tax cuts for the wealthy became the main goal of the GOP. The right-wingers took over the GOP. They had their propaganda machine. They appointed right-wing Justices, and we got money as speech, corporations as people with religious rights, etc. The GOP rules by malice and oppression. They use propaganda, voter suppression, even Russian assistance to attack our Democracy and stay in power. Students are not always right, but they may be our only hope.
25
Younger generations have a different understanding of what’s wrong with society and really screw things up.
2
I remember marching in and sitting down during protests during the Vietnam Wanna-be-War. There were the Hawks and the Doves.
I remember the Chicago 7 (once there were 8). I remember the Iron Curtain with Commies on the other side and America's Greatest Generation on this side. I remember The Black Panthers, the SLA, Communions, and Religious Retreats oh so popular with 'certain people'.
Most of all, I remember in 1966 a family of 4 of darker skin people moving into our neighborhood. He was the first dark skinned person to work in the little local hospital where I worked. A very nice man who was a caring doctor. There wasn't a weekend that went by for 2 years where his car wasn't egged and his house wasn't TP'd.
I do believe, Mr. Brooks, you either jest or don't realize that even social evolution takes 3-5 generations. I assume it is a jest.
Of course young people frighten us old people. Their music is aggressive and they have the same amount of energy as a toddler but with the hormones we once had when we were their age. They are testing the bars of their cage. Every generation, if successful, bends a few kinks in the bars. Those that are not successful destroy the cages. Right now, there is a man sitting in the White House who is destroying the cage and you are worried about a a generation who has no power but in 2-6 years will have babies that change everything. Why aren't you concerned about the old man in the White House? He's the biggest danger we have at present.
25
I thought this was an excellent column -- it clarified for me (a kid of the 70s) the confusing way that theories of govt and economy and race have changed over the years. I also was raised in an era of "mistake theory", and that was my worldview into my 20s. But then I started worked at a think tank where people rejected many ideas I took for granted, and it was very jarring and almost painful for a while to have my assumptions scoffed at. But years later, I really appreciate this different way of looking at the world, and I feel it has opened my eyes.
However, I think synthesizing these two views is by far the most accurate way to approach the world -- in many situations the system itself must be dismantled because it is causing the problems, and yet this does not explain everything in life -- we need the nuance of mistake theory. Individuals and their decisions still matter too.
4
I'll take a stab at "Mistake Theory". David Brooks: you're making a mistake. Reason has nothing to do with this. No one is going to reason successfully with the racist scum who peddle white supremacy in the guise of phony white nationalism, any more than anyone is going to reason with the Kochs to convince them to act against their own narrow, short-term financial interests by supporting or at least not opposing politicians who recognize the threat of climate catastrophe.
No, my friend, reason doesn't come into this, at least not at all levels. What counts is what kind of a world we want to live in. I'm with the kids you unfairly deride as "student mobbists", not with the neo-nazis and climate change deniers. Just which side are YOU on exactly?
30
Ironic that you use the open and reasonable 'comment' section to engage with those you disagree with - while championing the 'mobbists' who would shut down all discourse.
1
"Mistake theorists believe that the world is complicated and most of our troubles are caused by error and incompetence, not by malice or evil intent."
Nobody asserts that the world is simple. But does Mr. Brooks genuinely believe that today's societal problems could be solved without a rebalancing of power dynamics, simply by holding hands in a circle chanting kumbaya until the other side sees an error in it's logic?
15
I have long wondered if those making bad political and economic decisions were mistaken or venal. Apparently, the choice between mistake theory and conflict theory is a free choice (which could be like the half-full and half-empty glass choice). But whether the actual political and economic actors in the world are acting in good faith in a too complicated world or are acting in bad faith to promote their own fortunes at the expense of others is a fact about those actors. When I observe (as I have increasingly in the last 35 years) intelligent political and economic actors supporting illogical and irrational policies (that have, over time, been exposed as such), it is not my theory of the world that matters, but the reality of those fighting venally for their own benefit. Those who believe in (or hope for a world safe for) mistake theory need to battle the conflictors who are robbing us.
4
Free speech is only for us, not them.
7
Interesting piece. Like Brooks I came of age in the 80s, but I've never been what he describes as a "mistake theorist". I've always thought that lynch mobs would again proliferate if people believed they could get away with it.
Some people are happy participants in the social contract, giving away a measure of their liberty in exchange for a well-ordered society. Other sign on grudgingly as it's the socially-acceptable way to live. Another group never signs on, and seeks only to not get caught. (Shockingly, politicians are well represented in the latter group).
Nothing that's happening today surprises me in the least -- and shouldn't surprise any old-school Democrat. Unions weren't formed because people are basically nice folks who mean well, and only need persuading. We had a union movement because many understood that things were the way they were (unjust, cruel) because powerful people meant for them to be that way, and stay that way. Only resistance and activism changes this. And yes, David, many of those who have the courage and commitment->fanaticism->arrogance to stand on the ramparts and fight are not nice -- or even particularly rational -- people. The nice people are home equivocating.
10
"...the law is beautiful, living proof that we can rise above tribalism and force — proof that the edifice of civilizations is a great gift, which our ancestors gave their lives for."
Hear, hear.
But our Constitution--with its disproportionate representation of southern and other lightly-populated states--has brought us what could become a permanent tyranny of the minority. And so, as far as fulfilling the requirements of that flawed document may be concerned, we rely almost entirely on the tender mercies of the least-qualified and most corrupt Congress I can remember.
At the head of this whole disaster, Donald Trump, with his almost titanic disregard of "the edifice of civilizations," has become a huge fish bone in the windpipe of our legal system. The central paradox here is the more awful the President is, the harder it will be to dislodge him, without critical damage to the surrounding tissue.
4
Brooks is just becoming irrelevant. What he doesn't get is that students no longer will tolerate those who sow lies and deception. If a person lectures to dismiss climate change but refuses to present any peer reviewed evidence for his position, he should be shouted down.
16
Climate change may be real, but the political hype around it is totally bogus and is merely a convenient vehicle to enact collectivist "remedies". Obama was wrong to commit us in the Paris Agreement, and Trump was right to withdraw from it.
Precisely why is shouting him down better than simply refuting him? Who determines what counts as a lie and so must be shouted down? Won't the ultimate result be that everyone is shouted down and the no one can be heard? I understand that shouting people down might make you feel good, at least for a while. But I can't see what real good it does.
Dunno about individualism being downstream from a group. Nor is tolerance a norm. I remember many very intolerant positions taken by incumbents, notably the Silent Majority of Nixon, and the Deep Rednecks of decades. Students are growing up, and waking up, in a polarized environment in which even being polite is some sort of elitism, or weakness, depending on which end of the Popsicle stick you're on. A mob can handle this backward, regressive/aggressive environment.
Mistake theory is like a conspiracy theory. If you have a mistake, you don't need a theory; you have everything you need to work with, The theory of lack of malice, however, doesn't stand up for a second. The constant malevolent attacks on the poor, for example, aren't based on ideologies. They're the product of minds which really are malicious, doing unnecessary damage to a huge part of the society. Why wouldn't people become aggressive, in the face of it?
"Debate" is now based on outright lies, and some sort of hideous inner logic which tells these liars that lying is OK, even to yourself. Social problems cannot be solved by lies. Nor can anything else. Younger generations have to adapt to the world as it is, without the benefit of memories of better times.
The mobs may be noisy, irritating, and drowning out people, but let's face it, this generation has no voice at all, anywhere on Earth. I don't like mobs, but I do like kids. Let's see if these kids can mob their way out of this mess.
11
“I thought it might be a good discipline to try to see things from the students’ perspective” - except that Brooks doesn’t want to see their perspective; he just wants to promote his own. So, like a broken record, Brooks takes yet another column to trot out some intellectual paradigm that fits neatly into his world view. Today it’s “mistake theory.”
As Brooks talks, it becomes clear that he is concerned more about his view than that of the students he is trying to understand. Of the 856 words in the column, at least 518 are clearly devoted to Brooks describing his perspective. Brooks even manages to infiltrate the little space that he has allotted to the students’ perspective with an overall condescending tone, and with pejoratives like “mobbists” and “perspectvism.”
Brooks notes that things have happened since his “worldview was formed.” Apparently his worldview was formed in stone. He is continually amazed when others see the world differently. His interpretation of history is always definitive, expressed in clipped tones. “This remains my basic understanding of how citizenship is supposed to work.” The statement drips with arrogance. These are not the words of “reason, compassion and compromise” he finds so important to complex social issues. Neither are the words offered in the spirit of debate that he deems so essential. The tone of the words communicates an absolute, with a priori content derived from natural law, indeed (probably) from a divine source.
10
Ah yes, what a wonderfully coherent mansplaination of the ire of the younger generations toward the capitalist beast that urges them ever closer to the precipice. I would imagine many of today's youth are more interested in the American Revolution than the French...tar and feathering is such more deserved form of punishment than the guillotine (too quick and not as scary). Simply put, if SOMEONE does not put up a fight against facism then we are done for. I don't even understand how a reasonable person could see it any other way...unless of course they have simply become to comfortable in life to see the horrific potential the future holds if we do nothing.
10
I'd call it "oldsplanation."
1
These students need something real to get radical about.
Their energies & organisational efforts would be better spent on causes that matter, not so much this textbook safe-space-seeking snowflakery & campus-radicals-without-a-cause syndrome.
There really are things that matter, of grave consequence: Looming nuclear weapons still hanging like a guillotine over the neck of humanity, firearm fanaticism, regulatory roll-backs desperately needing legislative action to correct, the vast extinction of species underway caused by reckless industrial abuse.
If someone shows up on campus with a bunch of hokum for an ideology, seems more effective to use it as a debate exercize, ask them the tough questions, or not. Bring in speakers with the opposing point of view, etc.
But really kids, we have serious issues threatening survival. Back in the day, kids would chain themselves to old-growth trees to defend the last of them from being logged. People sat in those trees to stop the destruction. Or take a cue from Paul Watson, spend a summer sailing after whalers & defending the endangered. Learn conservation biology & rescue the last of species, or get into politics, we need better people to vote for, be that person.
You could fight for the right to education, make some progress on Bernie's campaign to free students from the loan/debt racket, whatever.
But if someone wants to speak. let them speak, these speakers are not nazis imposing their tyranny on anyone by force of arms.
3
Always remember that David Brooks is a man who referred to Iraq war opponents as "cowards", who in 2011 extolled the virtues of Rick Santorum as a presidential candidate, who referred to people who opposed the re-election of Joe Lieberman as the "Taliban Wing" of the Democratic Party, who thought it was perfectly proper for Reagan to campaign in Philadelphiia, Mississippi and talk about states rights. etc etc etc
The man is a neo-liberal hack who has been wrong so often that on the rare occasions he's right he practically personifies the old line about even a broken clock being right twice a day.
15
'... Brooks is a man who referred to Iraq war opponents as "cowards", ...'
Where did Brooks say that? Give an exact citation.
So David Brooks, one the the architects of the modern day runaway train of the Republican party that now courts white supremacists, destroys our environment, our public education system, our healthcare system, our tax system and has a leader who courts despots and dictators wants the kids to shut up. Really? Because these kids cannot, like you and I did, 40 years ago, afford to go to college, find a job with a living wage or even move out of their parents home. They are the rock throwing Palestinians the Republican party has created. Enjoy the fruits of your labor. They are going to change the world you created and sanctioned.
11
Oh David. You’re so cute when you try to keep things interesting with your silly controversy. I too came of age in the 80’s and look back on it as a materialistic coma devoid of depth, empathy and meaning. A time of privilege when I didn’t have to question my status or reflect on the condition of the world at large. As for the kids- the are speaking the language of their times. Fighting fire with Fire. The right has been silencing the left for - well I’m going to say since 911. Remember how Rachel Maddow used to be an earnest Rhodes scholar carefully defending her thesis about the war? How her minority view was brutally shouted down. Then there was the gerrymandering and now we have republicans controlling all 3 branches of government and blithely moving ahead with their agenda despite 70, 80, 90% of Americans wishing the contrary. Anyway when you’ve got Nazis and nepotism in the Oval Office - it’s time to get up on your hind legs. Lord knows the right is not afraid to break some eggs. On the other hand. The students are responding exactly as the Nazis want them to and David is soft pedaling that narrative for them.
14
For obvious reasons, Brooks doesn't mention Bernie Sanders or Trump, both of whom were born long before David. You could say that Sanders was channeling the energy of his young followers, but he's been spouting the same conflict theories his entire career.
Yelling at and about other people has NEVER accomplished anything positive. At it's most basic root, conflict theory is childish and immature. The younger folks spouting it right now can be excused on that rationale, but leaders like Trump and Sanders have no excuse.
2
Trump and Sanders have nothing whatsoever in common besides age. To suggest Sanders in any way mirrors Trump's mendacity, ignorance or stupidity is absurd and reveals an utter incapacity for simple observation and, more importantly, rational thought.
And to think: Sanders advocates for you, too, and against the forces which and are working against your interests.
"For example, though America was plagued by economic divides we all wanted a society in which social mobility and equal opportunity were the rule."
I challenge the assertion that the usual cast of characters currently forming policy in this country ACTUALLY believe this. It is not clear to me, in the year 2018 (acknowledging Brooks' point about whatever circumstances existed as he was coming of age) that we all agree about our collective strategic and moral goals, but disagree about how to best achieve them.
Quick example... Does anyone genuinely argue that the heated debates about LGBT rights is a matter where everyone agrees the LGBT community deserves to be treated 100% equally to everyone else, but we are debating how best to ensure that equality? Of course not. In fact, the present administration recently took it upon itself to argue against its own department that gay employees may be discriminated against simply for being gay. Do we all agree transgender people deserve respect, but debating how to show it? The same administration tried to dismiss transgender people in uniform via TWEET, citing the financial "burden" they represent to a 3/4 trillion dollar defense budget.
Look, conservatives and liberals alike no PRECISELY where the tone of our national discourse is being set. The nation gambled that tone and rhetoric would not be relevant to the state of our union. But it IS deadly serious. We are being "led" to a very dangerous place.
1
I am sorry to see Brook' resigned sadness. Our disagreements notwithstanding, he deserves better. David, there is hope past your disillusion.
Brooks observation regarding perspectives contingent on when one comes of age is trenchant, and his indirect plea to again teach our kids civics and history is vital. That is why my hope is with the current high school students, not their immediate elders. As with the Viet Nam War and Civil Rights in the 60s and 70s, it will take a generation of young people to Just Say No! They are the ones with the energy, focus, and creativity to develop their own media, organize boycotts, take to the streets, engage in civil disobedience, and whatever else they deem necessary. After all, they not us older folks commenting here, are the ones who will live with the consequences of what they choose to do or not do.
I look to the high school generation, not 20-somethings, because a college generation concerned with "micro-aggressions" and "safe spaces" would not survive a Kent State. The most positive thing for positive change I have heard about recently is the call by high school students for a national day to walk out of school to demonstrate that unless things change, there will be no business as usual. If they do this, if they continue on the road to determining the nation they and their children will live in, they will be criticized, bribed, threatened, and worse, but that's the way life is. Remember Kent State. There is no free lunch.
2
The most cogent thing I remember about Kent State is the Regular Army general's sour assessment of the situation: "What did you expect when you had a bunch of draft-dodgers facing a bunch of draft-dodgers?" (Those in uniform were, of course, national guardsmen.)
1
"There was also an assumption that while we might disagree on the means, we all wanted basically the same things."
About this assumption, did we all want basically the same things in terms of personal comfort and security, or did we basically want a community where comfort and security were ideally ubiquitous? In bumper sticker terms the former could be "If you have yours, don't worry about them.", and the latter, "Share the wealth."
Hard to see how the wealth and income inequality we have today resulted from a series innocent "mistakes" in a complicated world. In this regard, the Trump tax cut is a great example of where a surfeit of debate was irrelevant to the outcome, a taxpayer funded 1.5 trillion stipend for the rich and powerful.
2
It's my impression that in previous generations, people had opposing views, but all were rational and worthy of at least a certain amount of respect. Our battles were between traditional liberals and traditional conservatives, while the youth of today seem to be confronting white supremacists and other political extremists. I view our conflicts in the 70s and 80s as between mainstream Democrats and Republicans, while today it's more like the battle between good and evil. I fervently believe in free speech rights, while at the same time having no problem with the idea of vehemently protesting extremists like Ann Coulter, Dana Loesch, or Richard Spencer. Their right to speak does not trump other people's right to choose not to listen.
1
We are not where we are today because of mistake theory. If you were paying attention beginning in 1980 with the election of Reagan, you would understand how we arrived here today. The Reagan revolution began the attack on institutional government. With his "government is not the solution, it's the problem"; to his Cadillac queens; and finally his attacks on unions by destroying the FAA union, It is totally predictable to find ourselves here. Take Reaganism along with Buchanism and the reactionary right attacks on social issues and restriction of voting rights you naturally get Trumpism. It was a long 36 year arc, but here we are.
I'm in my 7th decade of life and have always thought that there could be a better America if the Republicans were a sane or just reasonably balanced mentally. Their policy of giving more and more to the richest is proving to be a disaster for America. They are the manufacturers of inequality. Just how much more do the wealthy have to have? Th Republican solution to every problem is to give tax cuts to rich people. If those cuts were used to improve the quality of life and America's infrastructure we would be in a better place. The elderly, poor and disenfranchised would have health care, a sound pension system and more unified America. But the republicans won't stop until they have all the wealth of this country. We deserve to have the revolution we need. Well America will get the revolution it deserves. What kind?
5
Conflict theorists are created by the continued "error and incompetence" of mistake theorists who continue to provide discredited remedies for the "complex condition" of a dying patient.
1
I will be 62 this month. Ever since I can remember - certainly since the time I was an undergrad - I always had a suspicion that the USA had built its foundation not on democracy, as we like to tell ourselves, but rather on an extreme version of capitalism mixed with individualism. Greed. That's right, greed. The notion of the common good has been snuffed out and strangled. Neither of the two establishment political parties represent the human person. Bernie Sanders was mocked and rejected by both those established parties because, in my opinion, he struck a chord with what people know to be true. He's a humanist and this country has chosen the course of greed and individualism.
4
Greed is good, or hadn't you heard? They made a movie about it. It has a great speech.
David Brooks talks about social "theorists" almost as though they deserve deep respect. Where I come from – the "hard" sciences – theories must have strong connections to empirical facts. The "theories" Brooks describes are ideologies, not genuine, intellectually respectable, theories.
In antiquity (the late 1950s and early 1960s), social scientists like Samuel Beer tried to emulate hard sciences (as nearly as was reasonable) by comparing social theories to empirical fact, including facts derived from the historical record . No more, judging from Brooks's description.
And where students were encouraged to be thoughtful and weigh evidence, many are simply being indoctrinated, not educated. It almost makes me fantasize about razing universities to the ground, leaving behind only STEM and related departments –they, at least, connect with reality.
Brooks claims that "the 2016 election ... validate[d]" the "conflict theory" ideology, He overlooks complexities – of Trump Democrats, for one thing. Moreover, he shows no awareness that "conflict theory" is a warmed-over mash-up of Marx's and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s ("The Age of Jackson") social theories.
There's so much in Brooks's provocative article that cries out for non-ideological, empirically based, critiques. My comments, above are merely a sample.
2
We've come quite a ways since the revolutions you cited. I think it'll be deeper, metaphorically speaking, than waist-deep this time around.
Actually, I don't think we've come very far at all, at least since Mao's Red Guards in the mid-1960s. But I agree that if blood begins to be spilled, it will be deep. And, like the Spanish Civil War, it will be the left to blame, and it will suffer a similar outcome. And doubly despised by such as me for having trashed our noble experiment.
Brooks talks about the “law” as a beautiful thing but I wonder just how beautiful it really is. The Romans had a comprehensive legal system and look at the moral decay that existed there.
Why is the accompanying photo on this op-ed of students objecting to a white supremacist, while the op-ed itself chooses far less controversial or offensive victims of "mobbism"? It may not be smart tactically to feel the trolls of the alt-right, but surely the thoughts of Richard Spencer and his ilk are not worthy of discussion in the academy. As for mistake-theory versus conflict theory, are partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, a tax bill that penalizes student loan debtors but rewards private school tuition payers -- are these things born of mistakes? Nah.
2
Brooks came of age in the 1980s. That explains a lot. Movement conservatism was only beginning at that time.
The movement that was conceived under Goldwater, grew to adolescence during Nixon and reached full stride under Reagan and beyond, was not interested in liking and understanding their opponent. They called their opponents enemies of America and wanted to drown them in a bath tub. Their primary tactic was to personally vilify their opponent and what we are seeing on campuses today is the other side saying "Enough!"
And conservatives best be careful. I watched a 6 part series on CNN about the 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping. They may be snowflakes at Berkeley today but back then they were domestic terrorists adept at bomb making, weapons procurement and use and bloody murder.
So let me get this straight: the students constitute a mob BUT the pure poison of Rush Limbaugh and the birthers and the constant denigration of all those "sub-human/violent" others is not part of what led to this place?
Our children are attacked with assault weapons in their schools. But we are unable to do anything about it.
You bet there is a real conflict going on in our country.
8
When it is the stated position of the American Right that no other party/person has a legitimate right to participate in the governance of the Country, and proceed to put this "dogma" into effect (eg. RedMap Project, perverse gerrymandering, denial of Pres. Obama's right to appoint a Supreme Court Justice and denial of Pres. Obama's legitimacy in general using "birth place" as a not-so-veiled euphemism for, oh no, he's a Black Man) then you've got bigger troubles to deal with, Mr. Brooks, than a handful of college protestors. These "protestors" and all American "kids" grew up watching the Right do this. And these "kids" know that denial of climate change is a dangerous and cruel farce, that the destruction of separation of church and state is dangerous, and that reverting to "biological differences" as an excuse for not addressing reality is more than they can stomach.
5
"Now the crucial barriers to racial justice are seen not just as individual, but as structural economic structures, the incarceration crisis, the breakdown of family structure."
Um, it's only "now" for white folks like Brooks (and most white people, to be honest). The idea that racism is structural and institutional is not new to people of color. They've been talking and writing about it since the late 1800s. Of course, we whites almost never listen to them, so it isn't surprising this is new to us.
The reason "mistake theory" (and of course, Brooks finds terms and definitions that neatly fit his worldview and rejects everything else - so much for reason) seems more accurate to Brooks is because it allows people like him to avoid any and all accountability for the truly destructive ideologies they have supported.
I personally don't think there's anything to be gained by shutting down speakers at a college campus. But I often wonder why "free speech" is only achieved by inviting racists and rape apologists to campuses...why not anarchists, or socialists, or anyone from the peace community? Is it interesting to anyone else that this debate about freedom of speech and expression only comes up when it is conservative/right-wing people being criticized? Or am I being unreasonable?
8
Spot on!
1
Not sure why there needs to be an endless parade of op-eds pointing out this inherent contradiction to modern society. Read Locke. Tolerant societies have to be intolerant of intolerance. What is the point of alluding to this contradiction again and again?
Perhaps a more helpful article: look into the speakers these "student mobbists" are denouncing and make a critical argument that these students are wrong in pegging them as intolerant. Consider the recent events in Charlottesville. For the most part, (excluding DJT) deemed the KKK presence their intolerable and did not put up with it. Why not do the same for these campus speakers? Are their more mainstream thinkers and groups that should be treated similarly? Simply harkening back to the glory days, where "students believed in free speech" is hackneyed. Maybe our society was more intolerant in such days, and thus there wasn't such a need to restrict intolerance?
Mr. Brooks is so wrong about how doctors work. We do not stand around a complex patient and have an open argumentative debate with each other with the most emotional or compelling oratory winning the treatment plan. We do not need to consider all kinds of wild unsupported ideas to come up with the best plan. We use evidence from science and testing to determine what is the most likely cause/diagnosis and what is the most likely effective treatment, then we discuss with the patient and family our findings, the risks and benefits of proceeding, and make the decision together. Our political environment could learn some lessons from this approach. It must have been nice to be a mistake theorist, but one needs to follow the evidence, not just stick with comforting assertions.
5
Yes, and no. One would have to be as blind as a bat and without an analytical bone in body to not see the corporate hegemony over American life that has developed since 1980. The tipped scale of it. The corruption of a body politic that, after Citizens United, simply gave itself over to the well-heeled and tax-breaked corporates and their kleptocratic dogs of war. We also see the huge scale of severe issues around the world driven by these same organizations, now interconnected across formerly distinct business interests and socially joined at the hip, where they gather together, on the playgrounds of wealth, all around the globe, in the finest locales, insulated from the rest of us rabble, save for the servers that are at their beckon or call. There are, though, developments outside of any controlling mechanism, whether it be political or economic - unhappy circumstances, out of control. Again, however, it serves to point out to the Brooks and Noonans of the world, that your political party and you rhetorically, in so many instances of the past, put this ship to sea, and without a rudder, so happy to sail in sunny weather, with the wind taking us all where it might, were you all. It is only now, now that the left side of things has had enough, now that you've all just gone too far down the rabbit hole, now that demonstrations may be simple but they take on the elephants in rooms, now that the left is as loud and dismissive as the right... now do you guys see a problem. SMH
2
"If I could talk to the students I’d try to persuade them..."
Mr. Brooks, you can talk to the students. Get out there and be prepared to listen and modify your theories in the process.
You would likely find it would be a very uncomfortable discussion, but I think it would nonetheless be worthwhile and educative, perhaps life changing. Part of being young is wanting to be very right against established ways of doing and thinking so mental and verbal barriers are thrown up at every turn, making discussion difficult.
From my rather limited contact with current college students, I would say the biggest potential barrier to dialog is the underlying belief, by many, that dialog is not possible, that the people they encounter outside of their isolated academic world, and some inside, are evil. This is a mighty barrier to leap over, in many cases impossible.
In projecting a bit, it seems that those who mob to shutdown those exposing radical racial and cultural arguments are trying to say this: certain ideas have no place in a decent society and represent roadblocks to a better way of life. There is a point to this. Very few campuses would invited a Nazi to give a speech nor would they accommodate someone who believes in the inherent superiority of certain races. Speech is free, but we don't encourage destructive ideologies, do we?
Meanwhile, Mr. Brooks, venture forth and get back to us with the details of your experiment in listening. Should be interesting.
4
I grew up in the sixties, and though the current spin on that era is the achievement of racial equality and the end of endless war through peaceful civil disobedience and respect for "democracy" & the First Amendment. Well, ok, and if you believe that... So as the Koch's and their ilk send provocateurs fanning out to the campuses of the nation spouting grievance and victimhood, I applaud the efforts of the "mobbists". The "free speech" they are smothering isn't actually free.
2
This is a complicated, nuanced subject. Oddly, I wrote a Facebook post expressing the same sentiment just a couple of days ago. But I'm not sure it's that simple.
First of all, "mobists?" Could you possibly have a more inflammatory headline?
I have a lot of conflicting thoughts on this subject. I protested the Vietnam war in the early 70's, and I'm pretty sure it would not have come to an end due to reasoned debate. Like another writer, I only wish I would've been more active. I've marched for the environment, and I'm pretty sure the polluters would like to have kept those conversations in nice, civilized rooms where their lawyers could control the discussion. The rooms they're moving back to now.
I'm a believer in reason's power to improve society, but I also know that reason can be a weapon, and that those with power and money can buy the biggest, meanest arsenals.
On the other hand, passion can easily lead to eating your young. What prompted me to post on Facebook was another Times article, "We're All Fascists Now." And frankly, maybe it's because I'm getting to be an old man, "microaggression" sounds like an excuse to be wildly self-indulgent. Navel staring with a gun.
But... but... in broad strokes, they're right. As Mr. Kranky said, the hippies have always been right. And in my experience, when we reply to extremism with moderation and reason, we get run over. Ask the Jews in the 30's. An over-the-top comparison? The Right has been radicalized for decades.
5
You have two sorts of enemies. Let's call the mistake enemies luxury enemies. They are a luxury since they will spend time simply saying bad things about you.
Real enemies stick a knife in you. Mistaken or otherwise, they are out to assassinate you.
You can talk about, to, or with luxury enemies.
It is civilization. Real enemies confine themselves to making you lose money, or never get any. Most of us are wage slaves now. We cannot afford our lives. We can march & collect money & hire lawyers. Treasury Power is ours but our enemies take our money for themselves.
In the first place the "mobbists" are more like the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks won. However what they won was famine & dictatorship and an above ground economy and a secret economy.
Such is the nature of man, and the human condition.
Democracy is the best form of longterm government. When it cares more for weapons spending than education spending, it fails.
Two kinds of education: indoctrination or I want to say simply Ed U CA Tion.
peer to peer education is the most effective.
Your "reason, compassion, and compromise" have been nothing but hollow words used to placate the oppressed and conceal the violence inherent in power.
2
David Brooks says, "So I thought it might be a good discipline to try to see things from the students’ perspective —"
Ah, says I. David is going to get together with some college students and ask them why they do they things they do. He's going to ask them what's bothering them so much, and what it is they seek.
Foolish me! Of course David does no such thing. He IMAGINES what students MIGHT think. He IMAGINES what he might say to them, if he deigned to lower himself to the level of actually meeting with and speaking to these students he types about. David has no use for actually speaking TO the subjects he types about, he merely speaks AT his subjects.......again...and again...and again.
5
I'll try to be a mistake theorist. Mr. Brooks, you are mistaken that the NY Times needs yet another opinion piece on how the younger generation is intolerant. You are mistaken that an ideology based on denying anyone their humanity is something to be debated instead of eradicated. It would be a mistake to think this is a more pressing free speech concern than the laws Republicans are trying to pass making it legal to drive into protesters.
It's funny how these "Let's hear the other side out" pieces only address being nicer to racists and never to someone talking about a universal basic income or harm reduction.
4
Repeal the 17th amendment.
I fear that "mistake theory", on which Mr. Brooks hangs his hat, is a mistake. How can anyone examine the history of the last century and conclude that we all want the same things, and that bad outcomes are the result of mistakes? Was Hitler a mistake? What was the mistake? How about Stalin? I could go on, but what's the point? God bless the students who have the courage and conviction to condemn evil when they see it.
4
As an exercise in empathy, this article is too smug to count. The kids you're talking about probably wouldn't read this and feel understood, which is the whole entire point of empathy. I think you're trying for an "I'm right, you're wrong, if you would just get it" kind of empathy, which has a much more accurate descriptor - lecturing.
4
If you find yourself saying, "I believe in free speech, but...", then you don't believe in free speech. You likely don't even grasp the basic concepts of it. The pastel haired totalitarian mobs are filled with people who are woefully misguided at best and quite dangerous in the worst examples.
3
You're right that it shouldn't be shocking that many born after 1990 would be more oriented toward conflict theory than mistake theory. After all, their reality has been more influenced by evidence of the former, Including people who slaughter their friends and teachers with weapons of war. Including a president who thinks neo-nazis are some of the "good people" protesting. Real evil and real malice is out there.
But c'mon, that does not mean they have abandoned reason and aren't capable of seeing some failures as resulting from mistakes rather than conflict. I give them a lot more credit than that, and you should too.
4
Wrong. There are examples of current students overreacting to perceived PC slights but this isn’t one of them. The voices these students don’t want to hear aren’t those of thoughtful political scientists with good faith views that challenge conventional progressive dogma. These people aren’t William F Buckley. Heck they’re barely John Birch. When a college campus provides a forum to Ann Coulter it is endorsing the very fact-free, narcissistic, hate mongering ramblings that have saddled us with Donald Trump. There is no argument there, no thought process. There is only the desire to get 15 minutes by shouting ever louder that liberal views, consistently vindicated through history as moral and just, are nothing short of a conspiracy designed to rob real Americans of their birthright.
You don’t legitimize these people any more than you “debate” whether the holocaust happened or whether human beings evolved from apes. To do so is to a disgrace to everything that education stands for.
17
David Brooks' entire career on this page has been spent selling perspectivism as reason, with catastrophic outcomes. He has demonstrated 100% incapacity to revisit his own work and account for his role in the disasters he helped to sell. One cannot conclude otherwise than that The Times, as a policy, will not examine the record under its own name that would show how tragically wrong Brooks has been for years.
2
Mr. Brooks why do you spend so much time writing about the other side? Shouldn't you be writing more about your side since thats the side you know best and thats the side you work with? Why don't you show the GOP how to clean up their mess instead of commenting on how the other side should handle themselves. Your expertise will be better suited in working with what you know best and where you have the most influence. What you're doing is kind of like being the Monday morning quarterback.
13
Once again Brooks has smugly and condescendingly condemned what he sees as the smug condescension of the Left. His claim to being a model of empathy, understanding and reason is laughable.
4
Our "sacred" laws are the reflected will of the folks who own Congress. As an aside, when did you last see a rich white guy go to jail?
Are these neo-Nazi speakers being paid to speak at universities. If so, is the money coming from student fees?
I met Loudon Wainwright II during a campaign event years ago. While writing for LIFE he actually had the thought to go out and talk with students and not just pontificate from on high. Give it a try David.
Finally our own revolution which seems to continue, has been steeped in blood also.
1
Thank you for your insight into Mr. Brooks and his conservatism. I find I like him but his perch at the top of moralistic opinions is troubling, indeed not a welcome contribution to the difficulties we face when our culture is rabidly unequal and reason produced no solution to the growth of that tragedy endemic to our so-called middle-class society. Look around, David, and notice how little high-minded morality plays into the actual functioning. You are right to take a moral perspective; you are wrong to conclude that the "haves" are in fact correct in their smug complacency and at the expense of those of us unable to send our children to schools that would teach them to mind their demeanor regardless of circumstance.
First, I don't see what's wrong with protesting against a white supremacist. Or a Klan member, or a Nazi, or an other bigot. If all they're doing is picketting, holding a rally outside, running their own forum, isn't that what one SHOULD do?
Second, never keep your mind so open that your brain falls out. If you're inviting James Watson to speak and holding a discussion of whether there are such things as scientific bases for racial differences, all well and good: from what I've read of Watson's views, he sounds like an idiot, but free discussion is what a university is for. But if you want to host some ignorant fool's rantery, largely because you think it'll tick off the libs, or you're too dumb to know the diff between Watson and some self-appointed guardian of whitery, that isn't what a university is for. Go get a soapbox and rant outside the front gate.
Third: a lot of what's going on isn't about any denial of speech rights. It's a far-right demand that their nuttery gets to be taken as just as serious as a real discussion, real research, real knowledge. It's a demand from hurted white boys, who somehow have the time to flit hither and yon, deliver these crackpot screeds, and then appear on Hannity as a champion of the First Amendment.
Fourth: OF COURSE everybody has the right to speak. If no like, change channel. But judging by the success of FOX, d'Souza, Savage et al...and the loot they're making...are they really being picked on all that bad?
4
Brooks sounds like King George lll after the Boston Tea Party.
2
Mr Brooks you never cease to amaze me. You and your conservative theories have harped for years about the failings of those terrible liberals. As I read your columns and listen to your interviews, i get a mental picture of a very prim and proper professor type who tut tuts at anyone who is not as enlightened as he is. Sorry, all hell has broken loose and you did little to oppose it. Mobbists, snowflakes and lynch mobs? Really? Your rhetoric seems extreme. Your labels overwrought and pointless. You would have disapproved of the student protestors in the 1960s and the women’s movement. Tut tut away, but students have found their voices and they aren’t afraid to speak up. It may be messy, but we have been nothing but messy since Trump entered the picture. It’s good to see some pushback against these two Neanderthals.
3
I also came of age in the 1908s, and I think it is willfully ignorant to compare the situation we have now with what we knew then. Mistake theory is not possible now unless you have been living under a rock. In an era of big data and decades and decades of global experience and examples, we do indeed know how to solve social problems. There are now many brilliant people who have looked at complex issues and can offer up with good solutions, because we have data. It is a false choice to say it is either mistake or conflict. You have to give a damn about society as a whole and have the will to change things. As long as we have a 1% who cares nothing about any group other than themselves, and is terribly good at hoodwinking people, we no not get ahead. But I think it is always darkest before the dawn, and I can only hope the vehemence of the 1% is because they know they will eventually lose. The natural order is toward progress and liberalism (with a small "l"), and not toward conservatism (with a small "c"). Just look at history. We'd still be in caves if conservatism was the way. The future belongs to our youth and I for one am betting on them! These young folk are awesome!!
1
An excellent column. No doubt the vast majority of the NYT readers will 'harrumph' mightily about your conclusions.
Why? Because you are telling them something that deep, deep down makes them very uneasy, which is: the left/liberal consensus they helped foster is mutating into something altogether illiberal.
When I was growing up, the liberal left was a bulwark in defense of free speech, free expression, reason, individual rights, tolerance, and science.
Now, shockingly, the shoe is on the other foot, with the left leading a systematic attack on all of the above for the very reasons you outlined in your piece.*
Most liberals and Democrats find this hard to believe, so conditioned are they in the righteousness of their beliefs. Take off your blinders, folks. What's going on is not righteous. See it for the rather considerable danger that it is.
*(Anyone who doubts this, take some time to study the rickety and highly dubious intellectual underpinnings of today's left groupthink, much of which is mimed and passed on uncritically by this very newspaper and the readers in this thread: post modernism, structuralism, intersectionality, etc. Most of these ideas were borrowed from post-war French intellectuals who later admitted (Foucault being one) that, well, a lot of it was actually BS and made up to garner attention.)
4
Crazy thought here, but why didn't Mr. Brooks ask the kids? You know: Interview them. Maybe cite a statistic or two, which just might show that speakers aren't being shut down with special frequency, but those who are shut down garner a lot of coverage.
1
Mistake theory is attractive when you are a member of an elite group that gets paid to ponder policy. Brooks has never understood, or never expressed, any understanding of systematic oppression and the way in which corporate elites and first world nations have exploited and oppressed the rest of the world and also developed the ideologies to rationalize the oppression. Brooks breathes the air of that ideology and uncritically massages, re-forms, and exhales it on a regular basis.
1
A good way to begin what could be a quality discussion. First, as I commented on a similar piece by the Editorial Page editor, there are times when the academic process still works. Last week, there was a civil discussion at a Ramapo College forum between a Koch Brothers-funded speaker on climate change, and us sustainability professors and students. No one turned their backs on the speaker or rocked his car. He, in turn, was polite and the libertarian moderator gave the mic to those he had to know would have objections. I suspect there was learning on both sides. So it is possible!
Regarding the two theories, mistake and conflict, while useful perspectives, the challenge is to take the best from both and try to reach a convergence. Reason needs to be a part of it, but as David has shown in his social science-oriented columns, sometimes we can fool ourselves about how rational we really are. It can take great effort to actually practice and overcome various cognitive biases, particularly confirmation bias. So as emotion can not wished away, the unrecognized challenge is to work out rules for the road for it; that is, which aspects of it work and when, versus when it becomes unproductive.
Finally, big change, or transformation, is increasingly likely to be necessary, on issues of speech, democracy, climate change, international trade (which I see is a topic of the day in the NYT today), etc. There's a lot we're going to have to figure out, and we'll need open, learning minds.
1
I got a chuckle over these two course suggestions at the end:
Shouting down crazy alt-right speakers is somehow applicable to the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. Yes, they are surely going to end in a bloodbath on campuses. Calling people snowflakes is surely a winning strategy by the way.
Constitutionalism. Our courts are now partisan battlefields. What would you suggest as recourse to a Congress that refuses to consider Obama's Supreme Court nomination? Where's your sacred constitutionalism now?
5
You came of age in the 1980s and youths optimism had recently been flushed down by the Reagan administration. These kids are acting like its the late sixties again. You might not understand it, BUT the kids are alright.
4
I'm tempted to read it again. Mr. Brooks so regularly casts clarity on many social and political issues. Here, I have a problem getting through the fuzz.
The very same society that elected Barak Obama had a nearly equal number of people who opposed so much of what Obama represented.
Mr. Brooks writes, ..."though America was plagued by economic divides we all wanted a society in which social mobility and equal opportunity were the rule."
I, too, came of age in the 1980's. I don't remember his America.
As a college professor with a PhD in American History, I have some extra-curricular reading and study suggestions for David Brooks that I think will broaden his thinking and allow for much needed revisions to this editorial. Brooks writes "Obama’s election also revealed....the crucial barriers to racial justice are seen not just as individual, but as structural economic structures, the incarceration crisis, the breakdown of family structure." It is odd, and ahistorical, on the anniversary of the 1968 President's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—the Kerner Commission--to claim new awareness of structural racism and socio-economic disadvantages. Moreover 1968, and the years before and after it, roiled with student protest (largely dismissed by those in power with vocabulary reminiscent of Brooks' "mob" comments). And never mind that historians have already established the devastating structural disadvantages wrought by mass incarceration and the 1980's war on drugs- look no farther than Michelle Alexander's excellent The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). Perhaps Brooks could enroll in a Postwar America history course, and encourage protesting college students to join him. It would benefit both parties.
6
Not to let facts get in the way of theory, but when I was in college and graduate school in the 1980s the practice of shouting down speakers was in full swing. Reaganite apologists, Nicaraguan Contras, CIA recruiters were routinely met with howls of protest at my university. It is hard to tell the story that Mr. Brook's desires to tell when the facts get in the way.
1
"... in the 1980s the practice of shouting down speakers was in full swing."
How did university administrators respond to those incidents?
1
Generalizing is unfailingly hazardous.
Excellent - as usual! So how to get people to see the theories then apply them to the world beyond them as well as in themselves. Also, how to reduce conflict theorists in number and effect to put something else in place?
Speakers, writers, and politicians who say, write and politicize offensive rhetoric and behavior deserve to be called out for what they are. End of story.
1
That's an essentially authoritarian philosophy. North Korea has already done this. People who offend can't be called out if they are simply suppressed. And offensive to whom?
Not sure why there needs to be an endless parade of op-eds pointing out this inherent contradiction to modern society. Read Locke. Tolerant societies have to be intolerant of intolerance. What is the point of alluding to this contradiction again and again?
Perhaps a more helpful article: look into the speakers these "student mobbists" are denouncing and make a critical argument that these students are wrong in pegging them as intolerant. Consider the recent events in Charlottesville. For the most part, people (excluding DJT) deemed the KKK presence there intolerable and did not put up with it. Why not do the same for these campus speakers? Are there more mainstream thinkers and groups that should be treated similarly? Simply harkening back to the glory days, where "students believed in free speech" is hackneyed. Maybe our society was more intolerant in such days, and thus there wasn't such a need to restrict intolerance?
1
Mr. Brooks,
At the end of the day, when the next active shooter walks into a school
and kills again, who is more morally guilty, these student activists who may smash structures or free speech, OR the politicians who continue to take buckets of NRA money to keep assault weapons in the hands of their constituents.
You are generally careful to balance your message but not in this piece.
You are basically stating the excesses of the young and the Left are
worse (especially if they interrupt your dialogue,) than the death and destruction that the party in power the Right permits almost weekly.
This is a tone deaf article: it leaves out what these kids are protesting about and focuses on their noise and interruption.
Do you remember the Marches on Washington that literally stopped the Vietnam War? Those marches took courage, commitment and, yes, ...
interruption and some property destruction.
I am seventy, a Vietnam era veteran, and a psychologist. I will choose these kids until blood actually rolls, over the Right who are complicit in exchanging NRA money for children's lives.
7
As a college student, I realize that my generation as grown up believing things could be better, yet they are not: some men still think it is acceptable to harass women, racism is still prevalent, even in small doses, and income inequality continues to rise.
Given this state of affairs, I understand (but don't agree with) the people who see things as black and white. Despite all the progress we have made, our government refuses to take any action in the face of modern issues, let alone acknowledge that they manufactured them in the first place. After millennia of persecution, women are tired of being treated like objects; anyone who is not white has to deal with stereotypes that negatively classify them; jobs are scarce while PhD students are not. I will enter the workforce once I complete grad school in the next decade: I'm supposed to be happy with the current state of affairs?
Mr. Brooks' article is, like many of his preceding ones, out of touch with the problems on the ground. While I do not always agree with students' methods, I understand their anger. The revolutions he praises were bloody, yet they eventually gave rise to a new order. The notion that we need to take courses instead of protesting injustices is patronizing to the highest degree. While free speech on college campuses has a new (read: problematic) definition, to say that we need to curb our passion is absurd given that no one else seems to have enough of their own to want to change the status quo.
1
"The revolutions he praises were bloody, yet they eventually gave rise to a new order."
Brooks does NOT "praise" those revolutions. Indeed, he cites them as examples of the violence that happens when "the passion of the mob" is "unleashed" "in an effort to overthrow oppression".
As for your "new order", the French Revolution was followed by the dictatorship of Napoleon, who "unleashed" a huge war. Are you going to justify wars, because "they eventually [give] rise to a new order"? You can only do that in hind-sight, unless you claim to be clairvoyant.
1
Mr. Brooks once again presents two groupings (mistakists and confilctists). Although those do exist and are distinct as viewpoints or approaches, they are not applicable en masse to any age group. Not to baby boomers, millennials, current students, nor even steel workers. There have always been "conflictist mobbists" on campuses as well as the much larger "mistakist" majority - think back to the Vietnam War protest days. As always, the truth (and there is truth) depends on the particulars of any specific disagreement and the protagonists, not on a gross grouping of people based on general attributes like age, race, sex, class, what have you.
As a law prof, I'd like to endorse the notion that "the law is beautiful." But as "studied" by some, for instance at Lewis & Clark's law school, in the news recently, law study is far from beautiful, fair, balanced, thoughtful, sensitive, beautiful. The study of law in our law schools has too often become a study in virtual violence. This violence is barely contained, real, and too-often fascistic and vengeful. David Brooks, come to visit.
Law schools have been harbingers of change, for instance in the excellent change away from segregation (see the Sweatt v. Painter case and plenty more). But if the law schools remain harbingers, too much of what we see is raw hatred that no law can contain. I am worried, and I see it every day.
1
"The study of law in our law schools has too often become a study in virtual violence. This violence is barely contained, real, and too-often fascistic and vengeful."
That is incoherent. If the study is "virtual", it cannot also be "real".
Once again, David Brooks underestimates the roles of globalization, mass immigration, race conscious social policies (like affirmative action) and the shift in elite wisdom. Young people and elites have no use for the nation state, national community and sneer at the idea of E Pluribus Unum. Elites incessantly urge us to "celebrate diversity" and "difference"--and this is how young people were raised.
1
Mr. Brooks has launched repeated attacks on the so-called intolerant left, particularly against college students. Today's column is his effort at empathy. Really. I suggest examination of the decisions made on campuses by those who are inviting some of the more vile provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter who want nothing more than to offend. I feel I could use some guidance, some support in my own efforts to understand what possibly could be motivating these young college students to use their presumably limited speaker slots on such individuals. Alternatively, Mr. Brooks could spend a few moments explaining his own writing choices, given that there are many other subjects he could choose to write about, yet he returns over and over to this particular subject.
Oh, I don't think that revolutions that end in blood are particularly a bad thing, David. If it is the blood of the elite that is flowing then meaningful cultural and economic change can occur and benefit all of the people. It does not hurt for the ruling class to understand where the limits to the acceptance of their greed and avarice are. It is only when the gutters are running red with the blood of the peasants that things tend to deteriorate because the elite simply dig in and continue to snatch and grab everything in sight. Maybe we are at the point where the worlds rich and poor need to sort out where we are going to as a society for the next hundred years or so.
1
Mr. Brooks misses several points and makes certain assumptions. As much as he values the law, and believes in the constitution, his party and the sitting president have made a mockery of the very document they claim to be sacred. The president has ignored every constitutional check and balance and the mobbist congress has allowed him unchecked power. What good will learning about the law and constitution will do when the GOP is dismantling the judiciary brick by brick? How do you convince the so called 'Student Mobbists' that this is still a 'mistake' when they see the arrogance with which power and money are handed to the very few who are closest to the president? The kids have it right. You cannot reason with dictators or wannabe dictators, and sometimes revolutions need passion.
If one considers the protest movements of the last century, most of them attracted a lot of attention but accomplished very few of their shouted demands. It's because they think of themselves as the avant garde of revolution who are going to unleash a popular uprising by virtue of the truth and morality of their various causes. But in reality they are lucky to get popular support for anything that they demand. Mostly it's just good for advertising revenues for the mass media.
This is a liberal democracy which means those who participate have the say in what the government does. Just complaining about anything is not participating, it's a plea for participants to act upon their behalf. The Tea Party got representatives in Congress, Occupy... did not. It seems to be that the stronger the emotional demonstration the less effort to act to change anything about which is protested is accomplished.
To give an illustrative example, Black Lives Matter. This movement was a reaction to 400 years of bigotry and oppression that still does harm today. But without the willingness to overcome the resentments produced by all that injustice, the movement has no chance to deal with the problems due to racism beyond complaining with great righteous indignation. The movement vents but it presumes that that will be enough to make it all better.
The big failure is the loss of institutions to correct the wrongs. We once thought that the courts would correct the breaking of the laws. We now see the courts as another tribal area filled with believers in one side or the other. The Supreme Court is as dysfunctional as the congress.
W see theFBI people not behaving in a professional manner. We se the congress ignoring all our basic beliefs in democracy and fairness. WE see the Presidency becoming a reality TV show. We see special interests (NRA, Oil, Defense) using our political system for their gains. We have lost all belief in the system working.
While I might adhere to the mistake theory of civil discourse, young people are more correct to use the conflict theory where the underlying governmental or cultural process and structure is entrenched and immune from democratic change.
The best example for this is gun control. 90% of americans want some form of gun control. Yet we cannot change any laws, because entrenched government actors have become immune to the democratic process. The only way to force this change is to tear down the structure. It is the most rational response to the existing data.
The social sciences tend to indulge in generating hypothetical explanations and sharing them as great new plausible explanations for all kinds of things while neglecting to use the tools of science to prove those hypotheses.
Reasonable explanations for how people behave must predict how people will behave under well defined circumstances. It tends to see mistakes as actions due to unexpected circumstances. A theory which can predict mistakes would address the way people decide to do things given certain circumstances. Merely observing that the world is complicated and involves too many uncertainties to avoid mistakes really does not explain very much and provides no predictions of any value. There is a discipline which does and that is the psychology of decision making.
In the "Public and its Problems" John Dewey, who was still being read in the 1980's, said that the major conflicts in society are a matter of different interests. When individuals and groups pursue their interests, conflicts necessarily emerge. He did not postulate evil intent, nor did the more contemporary Jurgen Habermas who, I guess, in Brooks' mind, was a "conflict theorist." To postulate ill-will in another person or group is not a generational phenomenon. It is human, and needs to be checked continually in the interest of communication.
1
I'm 60 and I'm completely with the students on this. They've likely done more work than Mr. Brooks has, getting to know who someone like Jordan Peterson is and other delights of the alt right, either via investigative reading or by listening to Youtube rants, and want to make no bones in expressing what they think about folks like that. In other words, the students know ahead of time, don't need to hear out another lecture about the speaker's ideas about this or that. They have already made their position known. So it's not a matter of mob thinking, but collective critique of what is being presented. These kids really do know how to think for themselves - at least as many of them as there ever was, which may never have been wholly substantial. While I admire many of Mr. Brooks' positions, though I may disagree in terms of ideology, I think he's way off base in his account of college students. I'd say they are better than we were back in the '70s - '80s.
6
What is going on with any member of a group, students or anyone else, is revealed through talking to them. Theory does not help. You need individual exploration, i.e., the Socratic method. Anything else is a stab in the dark.
Notice here in Brook's essay, not one example of any kind of inquiry and conversation, not even of a student leader talking to a researcher or reporter. "With such and inquiry, we are likely to find what we suspect but do not know, the roots of present day student anger. What I suspect (but do not know) is that student anger on both the left and right is fueled by inaction on their concerns by authorities. I'll leave it at that.
2
It may be true that "student anger on both the left and right is fueled by inaction on their concerns by authorities".
If so, it ties their vehemence more specifically to the transitory perspective of being young. They are not so far away from expecting that if you raise a concern with Mom and Dad, you will receive immediate attention and steps taken to relieve your pain. If this is not forthcoming, it produces "outrage" expressed in a tantrum.
Only with maturity do we come to accept that frustrations are part of existence and we sometimes have to live with them.
No, ERP, the concerns and anger being expressed by students as evidenced by interviews when available show a lot of informed consideration. The Florida high school students showed that, college students, even more so. Still, the conversation needs to go deeper than mere theory will allow.
1
From my admittedly subjective understanding of history, I can't help but conclude that most people of a certain age tend to demonstrate a preference for passionate expressions of outrage over nuanced, calm and reasonable debate. The phenomenon Mr. Brooks highlights here is, in my opinion, more likely attributable to the age of the people involved rather than to a systemic paradigm shift. Perhaps the difference is in his perspective.
8
Since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president and labeled Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists I have not seen much reason for hope. Recently, I and I think millions of Americans have been energized and inspired by the intelligent, well-spoken and brave young people from Parkland who have become engaged and involved in causes they believe in. I'm so proud of them. I find it interesting you would write such a dismal, negative and condescending article about our young people at the same time.
7
I'm all for the mobbists. If more people had spoken out in past years, we wouldn't be in this mess. I, for one, am very glad people have woken up. And, if anything, people should be even less considerate of "other points of views" and other tribes when those views and those tribes are all about hate and fear.
6
We cannot, and must not, tolerate another iteration of Hitlerism.
Being polite to dictators accomplishes nothing.
Action is needed. There has been plenty of discussion and plenty of fake news.
Time now for voting and replacing.
Make America accessible to all, not just the 1%.
I am sorry to see David Brook' resigned sadness. Our disagreements notwithstanding, he deserves better.
Brooks observation regarding perspectives contingent on when one comes of age is trenchant, and his indirect plea to again teach our kids civics and history is spot on. That is why my hope is with the current high school students. Now, as with the Viet Nam War and Civil Rights in the Sixties and Seventies, it will take a generation of young people to Just Say No! They are the ones with the energy, focus, and creativity to develop their own media, organize boycotts, take to the streets, engage in civil disobedience, and whatever else they deem necessary. After all, they not most of us older folks commenting here, are the ones who will live with the consequences of what they choose to do or not do.
I look to the high school generation, not 20-somethings, because a college generation concerned with "micro-aggressions" and "safe spaces" would not survive a Kent State. The most positive thing for positive change I have heard about recently is the call by high school students for a national day to walk out of school to demonstrate that unless things change, there will be no business as usual. If they do this, if they continue on the road to determining the nation they and their children will live in, they will be criticized, bribed, threatened, and worse, but that's the way life is. Remember Kent State. There is no free lunch.
And David, there is hope past your disillusion.
3
It is interesting that Mr. Brooks suggests that students take a course in constitutionalism to learn that mistake theory is superior to conflict theory. Given that slavery was permitted by the US constitution and that it took a civil war to end it, suggests quite the opposite.
1
"Mistake theorists believe that the world is complicated and most of our troubles are caused by error and incompetence, not by malice or evil intent. This remains my basic understanding of how citizenship is supposed to work."
He sums up his entire mistake within the first few paragraphs, yet the article just keeps going?
Before long, he's using phrases like:
"structural economic structures"
"If I could talk to the students" - alas, the bubble he lives in makes it so difficult to communicate with the outside world
Mistake or Conflict: my guess is that people exploit the situation in favor of their advantage. Self denial-ism has a role in radicalism.
If Brooks had written "Christina Hoff Sommers to Jordan Peterson, I confess that I find their behavior awful," we might have some ground for a meeting of the minds. Too bad about that period.
1
Ugh; you're so wrong about many fundamental ideas in here.
"But empathy is the essential character trait for our moment. So I thought it might be a good discipline to try to see things from the students’ perspective — to not just condemn or psychoanalyze them but to try to understand where they are coming from. So here goes."
- It's so nice of you to put your absolutist condescencion on hold for the moment. Maybe Conservatives are only momentarily empathetic; conversely, because Liberals are dreaded "perspectivists," they are by definition understanding and empathetic of other viewpoints.
"But Obama’s election also revealed the limits of that ideal. Now the crucial barriers to racial justice are seen not just as individual, but as structural economic structures, the incarceration crisis, the breakdown of family structure."
- Um, you omitted one tiny factor: The overtly racist reaction of the entire Republican/Conservative cabal, as evidenced by Birtherism, congressional refusal to work with Obama, hatred fomented by FoxNews, etc.
"Debate is counterproductive because it dilutes passion and sows confusion. Discordant ideas are not there to inform; they are there to provide cover for oppression."
- Whoa! You've made a huge leap to a totally illogical conclusion. MLK and the civil rights movement succeeded precisely because they combined debate with public passion.
Rather, it's absolutist thinkers like YOU who refuse to give credence to other people's perspectives!
5
Your last paragraph reminds me of Judge Langlois from the movie BECOMING JANE, who tells Jane Austen's boyfriend that the whole purpose of the law is to defend private property from the mob.
1
Mr. Brooks' column reads like another Baby Boomer's whining lament about the millenials. It's their world now, and we have left them a terrible mess, made worse by the results of recent elections. Perhaps it is time we got off the stage and let them work on their own solutions.
11
I tend to favor the students in your argument, Mr. Brooks. While the problems you identify are complex, the simple fact is that our definition of what is dialogue has been corrupted for a long time. A pervasive example: A cable news organization will have someone on to, say, talk about the horrors of the Holocaust. That same news organization will then have someone else on as counterpoint -- "Just to be fair and offer an opposing view, we've invited...." -- to argue that the Holocaust never happened. Substitute Holocaust with climate change, Obama's citizenship, evolution, the Rohingya, you get the picture. This is dialogue, technically yes, but with an extremist idiot and it's broadcast into our living rooms and streamed onto our homepages. Why must the media put these people in front of a microphone? They can have their views, absolutely, but we shouldn't feel compelled to give them a distinguished university platform or Nielsen rating and enrich them and their Speakers' Bureau or book publishers in the process. We need better stewards of the media to foster better, more honest dialogue.
3
Go Students! You must take over the country like we did back in the 1960's and 1970's! M O D Mobilize, Occupy, Destroy! Your place is not in school; it is in the streets; in the buildings of corporate and conglomerate America. You must upset, disrupt, occupy and destroy the norm and the status quo. America must be razed and burnt to the ground. Even the toxic ashes must be swept away and deeply disposed of.
1
I think that Mr. Brooks underestimates both sides in the issue. These "snowflakes" are fighting back against a poisonous ideology with the same tactics used by the promoters of that ideology. Does debate work with Nazis, their sympathizers and supporters? Is there possibly one side of the story that does not deserve the space to debate? If only we could go back in time and ask Eisenhower this question. Or maybe Crazy Horse.
My question is: Why should someone, whose point of view is to deny the legitimacy of someone else's right to exist, not be treated in the same fashion? In the past, were Nazis and KKK members allowed to speak their minds, and possibly win converts on college campuses and other publicly funded venues? Is someone a "snowflake" for standing up to, and fighting back against, those who would destroy all that Mr. Brooks proposes to believe in? To me, willing to take action for the ideals that we have built our society upon, is a sure sign of strength (of vision, character and morals), not a sign of delicate "snowflake" weakness.
4
Pragmatically, it feeds into their strategies and propagates their ideas....
So David what brilliant ideas should the students take away from listening about white nationalism? I'm sure many students have listened to these ideas and they don't like what they hear which is why they are protesting.
What good comes out of listening to Richard Spencer talking about creating a white ethnostate? If only we just debated with Nazis, things could have turned out so much different. I don't think so.
6
Help me out. I've read your opinion piece three times. Where is the part where you actually talk to the young people you are "trying to understand?" Really this is just an article about how your way of thinking is correct and their way of thinking is wrong. I guess that's one opinion.
P.S. your descriptors give away your intent.
2
Good points, if you ignore slavery, genocide of natives, Jim Crow, and the massacres in Oakland, LSU and Kent state.
3
Brooks, have you ever really met and talked with someone who didn't exist in your ivory tower? I didn't think so.
2
For a conservative to engage in hand wringing over the prospect of MOB rule is laughable. You invented it, you perfected it, so now live with it.
2
How many students does it take to shutdown a right winger speaking? Perhaps the problem is the right are such snowflakes. It would be great if a few students would let even those they see as evil speak recognizing they do not speak for G-d any more than does the right.
I just re-read Brook's column of utter nonsense where he demonstrates all that he doesn't know.
I know I will now pass by any of his further writings.
2
“Or whatever”?
What do you do when the “civilized” government never confronts illegality by alt-right fascists?
1
Maybe if Mr. Brooks wants to promote civility in discourse he could begin by canning the Alt Right slur "Snowflake".
6
Being at least 10 years older than you, David Brooks, I thought I was out of touch. Compared to you I'm fully informed about the young. So you came of age in the eighties, I don't remember any social movements by your generation except the part about greed being good.
Please stop making a fool of yourself in public.
7
Others have done a better job of deconstructing this nonsense than I could, but this is as trollish an article as I've seen Brooks offer. After lacerating activist students as an irrational and perfectly poisonous lynch mob of fragile snowflakes, David Brooks pivots to his utterly unhelpful impersonation of empathy, before (rightly) concluding that he "probably wouldn't persuade" activist students anyway. All the while failing to realize that the "reason" whose loss he laments has not been lost at all, but only refined through better understanding of one another - one which he has not grasped. If Brooks is interested in gaining that that better understanding he should stop calling names. I'd pay to sit in on one of his classes next week. Angry, defensive, superior, outdated: David Brooks.
2
Utter nonsense. Just look to Florida students and see accomplishments unmatched by anyone in Brooks' elite world.
6
Are students shouting down a speaker a mob violating free speech or a participatory democracy defending America? Students make mistakes—Christina Hoff Sommers is a conservative who can be debated with, but Richard Spencer is a fascist hell-bent on establishing a white authoritarian ethnostate who should be shouted down. Freedom of speech is a political weapon. The Republican Party uses it to give corporations the right to purchase elections and to break up unions by allowing workers to refuse to pay dues while the Democratic Party fiddles. Hitler's ideas seemed so crazy the German liberals didn't take him seriously, and the conservatives put him in power thinking they could control him. Mob democracy needs to learn to distinguish between opponents and enemies, and get organized, to become a wall against fascism.
2
The mistake theory requires that the goal of each individual is the same: find a solution to save the patient who suffers from a complex medical condition. In tHis context, each opinion is considered with regard to the best interest of the patient and compromise is perceived as the best way to move forward, considering all of the different possibilities, weighing the possible courses of action and so on. This mutual understanding was reflected in the Fairness Doctrine, the understanding that opinions and ideas from both sides needed to be considered equally. The Fairness Doctrine disappeared in 1987 and Rush Limbaugh launched conservative radio in 1988. Coincidence? I think not. Since that time, in an effort to garner ratings and ensure a loyal fan base, the boogeyman was created: liberals and the government. Pumped through rural America where there are no opposing views represented, this format was able to grow into Fox News. This form of media had no interest in informing but rather to achieve two things: ratings (read profits) and power to increase those profits. The reason the dialog no longer works is that the left is still trying to save the patient while the right is interested in, well, money and power, facts be damned.
It is sad that false equivalencies continue to be used by conservatives to pretend that both sides shoulder the blame. The patient is still sick, only one side thinks they should cure themselves, alone, by pulling them up by their bootstraps.
2
Remember when college campuses were shut down by radicals in the 1960s? Next thing you know we have Ronald Reagan and 30 plus years of conservative economic dogma running our country. We have another Vietnam or two. We still don't have legal marijuana except in a few states, and that only recently. Black people still have trouble voting. Whoda thunk it.
So what if this is going on on college campuses today? What will it mean? Based on my life experience, not much.
I grew up in the ‘60s and was a newly-minted adult in the ‘70s. I’m way ahead of Mr. Brooks. And now his constructed views make sense to me. He just hasn’t seen as much as I have.
The ‘60s and the first half of the ‘70s were all about what Brooks calls “conflict theory.” It is not a new position. At all. Back then it was always us versus the bad guys. This “theory” obvious now? — it never went away. The American cultural revolution was “bloody.” We vilifyed the war machine and those who enabled it. This stance was as righteous as was our role in WWII, and we knew it. But unfortunately, we didn’t use the guillotine. Our nemises lived on.
When I returned to San Francisco in the ‘80s I was disgusted at how the righteousness of the cultural revolution had curdled into smugness. Yes, I used that word back then. I decided to abscond to Southern California, where smugness held no sway. It also, blissfully, was the largest donor pool to progressive causes. I was very comfortable there. Until smugness spread across the land.
Yes, smugness is a huge problem, but so is naked opportunism, which the other side feels no shame in their hearts for. Progressives have believed that their moral high-ground would have vanquished their opponents. Hasn’t happened. The unabashed self-serving side of the U.S. simply got more virulent — but what the progressives have left is something they don’t believe in: censorship.
We’re all in deep trouble.
5
Wilson shouting "You lie" at President Obama before Congress and then not being summarily removed from his job for this lack of civility erases any so-called harm you attribute to young people's form of expression. Wilson and McConnell paved the way for this type of in-your-face confrontation. Let them publicly admit they were wrong, agree to confront the current president over his ridiculous behavior, and then I'll re-consider your opinion piece.
5
Brooks says a lot of things in this piece and this is one of them, "Though America is plagued by racism, we all wanted more integration and less bigotry, a place where talent and character mattered more than skin color and prejudice." The actions of many do not make the "...we all wanted more integration ..." this true. See Charlottesville alt right protest. There are quite a few with that mindset who don't think as deeply as Brooks. They see the other (origin, color, religion, etc) not as equal to the supreme white class.
I don't see much from that side moving to Brooks view and given we are taught by our leaders that Power is all that matters. Get it any way you can.
So we have Trump and the GOP line up with him because of power. They need his pen so they bend to almost any twisted view he espouses.
Lets get real Brooks. The lust for power is what is doing this. Nothing else.
1
Well said David. This covers the situation well.
This article has very little to do with "understanding" students and a lot of judgement and assumptions about their upbringing.
3
"The concession of politeness is always a political concession," said French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Brooks's Hobbesian rejection of "conflict theory" entails denying one side of republican social and political life, affirming a depoliticized politics that is sanitized against conflict or expressions of it that threaten to become unruly. It is to affirm a notion of politics as essentially consensual and so permitting expression of conflict only as polite disagreement. Yet, republican social life always involves social conflicts; democracy is contestation.
What is most wrong with so many of the college student radicals is not the embrace of conflict nor the wrong idea of its (properly polite, patient, and parliamentary) pursuit, but the wrong understanding of who the parties are and what the stakes. They should be opposing the neoliberal state with its apparatuses of policing, and management through psychology.
Identity politics and social justice warriors are part of a liberal (not left-wing) paradigm, with roots in Affirmative Action, that over-valorizes demographically defined social differences within the framework of meritocratic and neoliberal policies that express the material interests of the ruling class of professionals, "leaders," and managers. The complaints these students make are only about inclusion and complaints directed at protection by authorities enforcing a morality.
We have enough "beautiful" law enforcement and need a new politics.
I love the two subject area suggestions, but feel this is all much ado about nothing.
We’re dealing here with a pretty small minority of obnoxious progressive agitators. True, they’re young. True, they’re egged on by people who should know better in academia and the media.
And while these people have always been with us, what’s new is social media. These people are leaving a loud and obvious record of their irrational hysteria. Sure, some are competing on the activist front for gigs in the “lucrative” non-profit and activist and media and academic sectors - lol, enjoy that 20 year stint as an adjunct or a lifetime of poverty wages. So this makes sense.
But the majority of the minority are broadcasting loud and clear to HR departments across the land that they’re really not worth hiring. No one wants drama. No one wants to hire a basket case who cries at the word “Trump.” And so these kids are a self-correcting problem. They’ll make a ruckus in school, but upon graduation the majority of them are going to be quietly serving us coffee, and wondering why the job market is so tough.
But again, these head cases are not at all the problem that Mr. Brooks makes them out to be. Their bark is far worse than their bite, and their numbers are pretty small.
1
Interesting theories Mr. Brooks. Here's a question: When Mitch McConnell said his only goal as senate majority leader was to make Obama a "one-term president," was that mistake theory or conflict theory? What about when he refused to act on Obama's supreme nominee?
Perhaps conflict theory is not something today's students invented, but something they learned at the hands of some prominent national politicians.
3
The Republican Party operates on conflict theory, and particularly the deep pockets that fund it these days. For conflict types, debate is ideology and ideas are weapons; whether global warming or guns are threats or not depends on how you make your money and attract your votes. Debate with such people is a waste of time because they are not intellectually honest. They have crafted their messages to be persuasive rather than true, and the only research that interests them is market research.
Mistake theory is undoubtedly true, but will not work until conflict types have been somehow sidelined. Mistake theory is defenseless against conflict theory, and this is its problem. Any system is enormously complex and keeps running only by constant application of mistake theory. But mistake theory will only mitigate malice and oppression, and may instead make them more powerful.
I would substitute two other courses: advertising and propaganda and how to fight it, and a study of our law and race. The former will show how to deal with the ideology that supports the conflict and hides its malice and oppression. The latter will show how constitutionalism gets coopted by tribalism and force, frees itself, and gets coopted again.
Perhaps the study of successful revolutions should be added: ours, the British, Solidarity.
If we're talking about irrationality, then the values you claim for your generation take the cake.
You "all" agreed that although America was plagued by economic divides and racism, you "all" wanted more equality and less bigotry? How could both be true?
Maybe the reason you don't understand young people is because young people don't seem to want to maintain the contradictory positions that your generation tolerated. Instead of wanting and doing nothing, they are wanting and doing something.
In a society that is apparently plagued by racism but no one sees themselves as racist, mistake theory is kind of useless. Everyone is absolved because racism is a little thing that's hidden in individual souls, and all you have to do is deny it's present in your own.
Conflict theory at least acknowledges that racism rots our institutions like cancer. How else to explain the different outcomes in criminal justice? The differences in accumulated wealth? The differences in educational outcomes? Are these really the problems and faults of individuals?
If young people demand change where your generation was ambivalent, so much the better.
1
David, interesting but I think you are overthinking. I think it's more simple than that. These kids watch the conservatives, through eight years of Obama, lose all semblance of integrity and decency. From yelling "liar" at the President addressing Congress, to setting the main goal of the GOP as making Obama a one term president, to Republican stealing of the Supreme Court seat. They saw the conservatives throw out all the rules and norms that make true democracy work. They watch conservatives make "compromise" a dirty word, when the whole concept of our government is build on recognition of different opinions and a system of mechanisms for compromise. They saw rudeness and lies from conservative radio and TV and learned that if irrationalism was working for the right, maybe it'll work for them too.
4
Mr. Brooks, your default mode these days seems to be indulging in telling fairy tale narratives of times past and hyping over-simplified views of what ails our current system. Let's get real: power always seeks to sustain itself at the expense of those without it. Efforts to make society more just and equitable will always come up against entrenched interests that want to resist change. If you have any doubts about that, I refer you to Citizens United , the forces that brought it about, and the toxic influence on our political system it continues to wield. See also, Republican "establishment" figures like Ryan and McConnell who sold themselves to Trump to retain power. Students have a keen nose for hypocrisy and cant, and this current administration and GOP stink to high heaven.
2
I, too, subscribed to the mistake theory until, after I gave a talk about the Investor-State Dispute Section of the TPP, a member of the audience told me: "these corporatists don't care about Americans or any other workers. Why should you people be better off than third world residents? You can just be serfs!" That's where they are taking us, and now I am probably a mobbist, too.
1
The thing is, "mobbism" almost as a rule does NOT address these questions of oligarchy and freedom. Instead, its particular approach to identity does serve to pit Americans against each other--which makes it harder to mount common cause against illiberal corporatocracy and new fascism.
Mr. Brooks, a lost in the wilderness republican is trying to ingratiate himself with the Trumpublican party by attacking college "mobbists". Shameful. If he were to address the true threat to our democracy he would be forced to indict whose he seeks redemption from.
1
Weren't our ancestors that gave their lives, in their time, conflict theorists?
Ugh; you're so wrong about many fundamental ideas in this column.
"But empathy is the essential character trait for our moment. So I thought it might be a good discipline to try to see things from the students’ perspective — to not just condemn or psychoanalyze them but to try to understand where they are coming from. So here goes."
- It's so nice of you to put your absolutist condescencion on hold for the moment. Maybe Conservatives are only momentarily empathetic; conversely, because Liberals are dreaded "perspectivists," they are by definition understanding and empathetic of other viewpoints.
"But Obama’s election also revealed the limits of that ideal. Now the crucial barriers to racial justice are seen not just as individual, but as structural economic structures, the incarceration crisis, the breakdown of family structure."
- Um, you omitted one tiny factor: The overtly racist reaction of the entire Republican/Conservative cabal, as evidenced by Birtherism, congressional refusal to work with Obama, hatred fomented by FoxNews, etc.
"Debate is counterproductive because it dilutes passion and sows confusion. Discordant ideas are not there to inform; they are there to provide cover for oppression."
- Whoa! You've made a huge leap to a totally illogical conclusion. MLK and the civil rights movement succeeded precisely because they combined debate with public passion.
Rather, it's absolutist thinkers like YOU who refuse to give credence to other people's perspectives!
2
I remember Joe Walsh saying "You lie!" in Congress to Obama. The vitriol against W, the malevolent hate of Obama, and now Trump is being called a serial liar everyday on all networks except FOX. He is one, so it needs to be said. But as hard as it is, without compromise, democracy is deadlocked, no wise governing. Let your "enemies" speak!
These kids are aping behavior practiced by infantile adults for decades. What happened to taking seriously the models for adulthood involving kindness, manners, civility, honesty, bravery, respect for law, honor, good character, etc. If adults won't practice what they preach to their children, how can they expect the kids to respect the cooperation a decent society must have.
The ascension of tribalism, never compromising, is an infantile approach to life. We see the results of this approach, yet it continues. Crips & Bloods.
"The definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over again and expecting different results". This, 1st seen in a 1981 NA text, is false. insanity is a legal term. But it is just plain stupid to keep making the same mistakes or repeating the same lie, like trickle down economics, and expect different results. Little kids are ruled by emotion, not reason. They bully, lie, form cliques, and one hopes, mature later.
Childishness now extends into old age, especially with Trumpism, a negative, poor me, horrible "them", immature emotional approach to life, bereft of reason and respect for knowledge.
1
Is it not your beautiful law that allows the students to assemble and protest - as loudly as they want to?
The fascists come to campuses to create havoc; they are not there for reasoned debate and probably expect none in return.
When the fascists then complain about the trampling of their freedom of speech, they are very conveniently forgetting that the protesters also enjoy that same freedom.
Hey Brooks. Do us a favor. Stop reducing every discussion to a choice between two extremes. Yes, there are lots of mistaken people out there causing problems. Meanwhile, there are loads of others advancing a morally corrupt agenda, because with enough red-faced people shouting in the bleachers, you just might take over, say, the Oval Office. Even if your candidate has the acumen of a doorknob and the integrity of a toad.
I will stop reading your columns unless you start talking to me as an adult, rather than a child who needs to have everything oversimplified. Please--describe to us the complexity of the world as surely you must know it. Raise the bar. We've got a democracy at stake.
16
Brooks has his own history of trying to shut down debate, which he conveniently fails to mention here. During the debate over the Iraq War, which he supported, his party tried to silence war protesters by calling them unpatriotic. He tried to silence them by saying that opposition to the war was the equivalent of support for the Saddam regime. That isn't an argument, it's a way of saying that no argument the other side can make can be legitimate. In other words, it's an attempt to silence your opponents. People who live in glass houses should not throw stones, David.
4
I don't think all of them are students. There are antifas and anarchists, adding the Putin trolls and you have a potential mix by themselves. This is not to exempt students if they are part of it. Indeed, how are you going to defeat intolerance with intolerance.
One cannot do a simple thought experiment. Mrs Clinton started out to be a Goldwater girl. Had she experienced any shut down from the liberals in a major way, she might not have become HRC by the sheer tendency of human psychology. And that may very well be a hidden design in Putin's disinformation campaign. Sadly, both the right and the left have been more than eager to oblige
Something that is different from when you were young, Mr. Brooks, is the information landscape. It was hard for someone's ethnostate manifesto to gain traction because the costs of scale for spreading information were much greater than they are now. The racist viewpoints people my age take so much issue in don't require reason to gain traction. Combine that with the social impacts of modern technology and economic stagnation, especially in rural areas, which cause high rates of depression and loneliness, and you've got a perfect recipe of a larger platform abhorrent ideas and a larger audience yearning for some sense of belonging. Letting speakers speak without challenging them, because they won't give you an opportunity, allows their opinions to avoid the marketplace of ideas that is so important. These "mobs" are far from those of the French Revolution. The defense of free speech shouldn't be telling students we can't exercise it.
Unlike college students and opinion columnists, the vast majority of the population must work in some kind of job. This requires a "Mistake Theorist" perspective (more terminology. Are we going to get a Brooks dictionary soon?).
We are not all physicians, but we all must decide the best course of action to take in our jobs. The idea that Americans or indeed any society is less rational and logical than they were 30, 50, or 100 years ago is simply wrong
It’s easy to join in with protesting that appeals, just let your feelings be your guide. Reacting against something people want changed is usually motivated by strong feelings. Strong feelings will go away. But if people feel committed to change and work through the problems that must be solved to achieve desired ends, the initial feelings can produce a well informed and appropriate result. But if the strong feelings shared drive people to act, it usually becomes a mob, and mobs are mindless and without conscience.
Mr. Brooks' columns seem to to drift more and more towards abstraction and a "soft" sort of denial as the country faces real "on the ground problems". His notion of Mistake Theory being a kind of standard for "sophisticated people" before this generation is risible. Has he forgotten the labor movement? The fight for women's suffrage? The civil rights movement? These were not "reasoned debates" between two factions with the same basic goals in mind. The progress (in my opinion) made by these movements were not the result of dialog but precisely "about smashing structures that others defend".
Mr. Brooks, in my opinion, has been retreating more and more into some fantasy about a past where those in power were quite willing to discuss reasonably ceding that power to those those without. It is a nice idea, but was never the case. And never will be.
Lastly, on this notion of "perspectivism". The understanding that there are other perspectives (i.e., black man, white woman, etc.) does not eliminate the importance of individual reason. But, it is completely naive to think individual reason is not affected by ones cultural perspective. I am not advocating Cultural Relativism, but color blindness, like any other blindness is simply that -- blind.
"Debate is essential. You bring different perspectives and expertise to the table." -- Sure, but debate does not continue forever. If the question in dispute is empirical, we bring facts to bear on it until reasonable people reach a consensus. But this debate is not about facts; it is about values: who we are as a people, and whether we can be one--'e pluribus unum.' We do not discover values by observation and research; we choose them by examining our hearts and spirits and our sense of well developed human nature. We do not choose by adopting conflict theory or mistake theory; we recognize the problems built into human nature and we seek to transcend them.
Here's the problem as the young see it: on issues of race, we've already seen and we've already chosen. I was almost an adult when this nation passed its 1964 Civil Rights Act, and it has been half a century of push-back and evasion on issues of race and gender (sexual orientation, religion, disability, age, etc. also). Try understanding impatience! (And by the way, I don't see many youth advocating bloody revolution, only change.)
What "conversation" requires that our college campuses be hospitable to white supremacists? Why pretend that such a debate still exists and each side should be heard? Let's discuss how to actualize the choices we've already made. A community of scholars preserves what has value, discards the dead hand of the past, and practices civility in the canons of reason. Moving on then. . . .
3
The great irony for me is that the various campuses where these protests are taking place to successfully shut down speakers who have other than "liberal" world views, is that they (Middlebury, University of Chicago, Michigan State) are all within a stone's throw of communities with some of the most intractable social problems our country faces: small rural communities gutted by lack of hope and opioids, chronically crime-ridden urban ghettos, and extreme poverty. I believe it is the university leads and faculties who are failing these students, these students who are being schooled in identity rather than social interdependence and solidarity. Any one of these off-campus areas, when studied, would provide an education into the political complexity and landscape of conflicting political ideas that is not serving these communities of Americans well. Every student's education should include exposure to this real lived world and its struggles and guidance about how his or her future life may or may not contribute to solutions.
I long for the days when Mistake Theory could explain the problems of the world, but in a United States of America where someone dies by gun violence every 15 minutes (including suicide) and yet lawmakers will not pass the most basic laws to get weapons of war, assault rifles, off of our streets, the only explanation is Conflict Theory. It's not a mistake if it happens over and over again and you still do nothing. I love our country; I grew up believing that my country was one ruled by the consent of the governed and that I had a say via the ballot box about its leaders and its direction and the laws that it should pass. As I've grown older, this has become less and less true. Corporate lobbyists abound, and now thanks to a truly awful and illogical ruling by the Supreme Court, corporations are now "people" too. Newt Gingrich got into bed with Jerry Falwell in 1994, ceding logic to "faith" and a sense of moral superiority that allowed one "tribe" to consider themselves superior to all others and to inject that view into our political discourse. As to Brooks' reference to the cost of revolution, I would remind him that the America I grew up in was bought at the cost of revolution and blood. This cognitive dissonance created by the right, this idea of superiority of one group of Americans over others, is anathema to the ideals of our Constitution, and people like Brooks need only look at his own "tribe" of Republicans to explain these students' unrest.
1
When the rule of law and truth is spat upon daily by our GOP leaders who exactly should these kids be looking up to? When nothing matters anymore it's difficult to lecture young people on how they should behave.
1
The present addiction to identity politics is the reductio ad absurdum state of our Affirmative Action policy from the 1970s. After that original sin, it was inevitable that subclasses would arise and demand their preferences too.
The Supreme Court is being presented with increasingly stark cases of government-supported race- and gender discrimination arising from Affirmative Action policies, particularly in higher education.
This chaos will continue until the Supreme Court ends it.
1
In the present context, the present comment is beyond silly. At all but a few of the leading American universities, white applicants are the recipients of the largest (by the numbers) affirmative action program we have ever had. All other things the same, that is, for students that are identical other than race, white students have a likelihood of admission to leading universities that is between two and six times higher than for Asian-American students. This paper reported on the Princeton University study that determined this.
William Casey doesn't know or care to know the facts. He is implying that affirmative action (for brown people) is behind these student protests. His argument is racist at its core. It is therefore altogether typical of the president and his supporters. Yet nobody would scream louder than the rich white supporters of Mr. Trump, were he to stop this kind of affirmative action.
William Casey wrote:
"The present addiction to identity politics is the reductio ad absurdum state of our Affirmative Action policy from the 1970s. After that original sin, it was inevitable that subclasses would arise and demand their preferences too.
The Supreme Court is being presented with increasingly stark cases of government-supported race- and gender discrimination arising from Affirmative Action policies, particularly in higher education.
This chaos will continue until the Supreme Court ends it."
3
Is it too obvious to point out that instead of stating "if I could talk to students..." your should try to talk to students before writing a column like this? This is lazy, and not reflective of the day to day life or thinking of students, who generally go about their business as students always have. Do we need to call them "snowflakes" because they don't care to entertain odious provocateurs?
People born after 1990 have seen a lot of trends that inform their worldview - not just that "reason, apparently, ceased to matter." They have lived their entire lives with growing income inequality and in a time when the socioeconomic status of your parents is the greatest predictor of your status, not in a world of equal opportunity. People born after 1990 have also only seen not one, but two Republican Presidents elected while losing the popular vote, thereby enacting policies that are not reflective of the majority. They have also watched one party completely ignore societal problems like climate change and get away with doing nothing to address it because we let them play the "debate" game all too long.
There ARE malicious and self-serving actors behind those trends. Of course they think we need to attack the people in power and the structures that keep them there. Let's just hope they vote next time.
3
It should be quite clear to everyone that mistake theory is nothing but a coverup to the prevailing conflict reality. The entire system we have now serves mostly those at the top leaving only crumbs to the rest. Those benefiting the most from the current system have no intention or desire to wllingly give anything to those occupying the lower rungs of the ladder. It is time for a real revolution to correct the system, equalize opportunity and secure fairness. Student Mobsters are the only way. They should be cheered, not criticized. They represent the welcome wave of the future.
The piece opens with a seemingly earnest desire to find empathy for the "mobs" and closes with a reading list that might help these mobs correct their apparently incorrect world-view and more align it with the authors own.
This is a classic example of invoking the word "empathy" to suggest a measured and thoughtful mindset and then discarding all its meaning because, actually, your own opinion is the true one.
It is a remarkable thing that young people in the most open and successful multicultural experiment in history, the United States of America, have decided the right target for disruption is doctorate-holding speakers at their universities. and not the embassies of China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. They will grow up to be doctors and nurses who rush to treat flesh wounds but let their patients die of cancer.
1
You don't have to read far into Brook's piece to encounter "snowflake" used as pejorative to know that this is not a genuine attempt at understanding or reconciliation but simply a disingenuous premise for forgone conclusions.
I believe in free speech. But I also believe in the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Many of those being protested aren't arguing about tax rates or the existence of intelligent life in the universe. They are speaking about the rights of others to exist or to exist in a state lesser than themselves.
So when someone gets up and advocates for my demise as a person or a life that is not simply another philosophical point of view but an assault on my right to exist. I believe anyone has a right to protest loudly against those who would advocate for terminating their existence or subjugating them to an existence of 2nd or 3rd class citizen or a non-human being. And make no mistake some of these speakers are not speaking in metaphors when they call for the elimination or subjugation of groups of people by whatever means or selective methods they feel entitled to.
3
David, go talk to the students you call mobbists. Your theory seems to make sense to me. I grew up in the 50's and 60's, but I wonder what the people you write about think.
1
Not only did the French, Russian, Chinese and other revolutions end up waist deep in blood, they also were true revolutions in the sense that they started with some type of oppressive rule, overthrew it, attempted to form a new rule with new principles and finally ended up with yet another oppressive rule. Meanwhile it seems clear to me that many people in this country now prefer some version of a dictatorship to democracy. I hope we are not heading for such a revolution, but I fear that we are.
1
I like the two courses suggestion. Students are no longer graduating with this kind of knowledge--but the managerial class that runs the universities is occupied with a different cultural agenda and a more marketable curriculum.
I understand the limits of a column, but these oversimplified categories of mistake theorists and conflict theorists probably distort more than they help. Most people probably think in both ways--and with many more passing theories depending on the troubles being examined. And we need as many frames as possible--fewer does not help. Simplified solutions are part of the problem.
I do appreciate the effort at empathy. I have found that individual students in reasonably small classrooms where we can have guided discussions that are open and respectful are often capable of looking at all sides to issues and examining them with care and as much understanding as possible. I am hoping that we can also get to the place where we can disagree without treating each other as enemies. We seem to have mostly lost that.
2
It's also complexity vs. simplicity. American leaders could explain complex problems to the general public, create effective policies, implement and manage them. Now our leaders sole focus is presenting a simplistic tribal view of the world which pretty much guarantees political contributions and reelection and not much else.
3
How about the explanation for our situation being a combination of mistake and conflict theories? Most of us can probably agree on certain goals. But some of us are certainly out only for themselves.
3
While the closing statement is romantic - constitutionalism as a savior - keep in mind that it has been subverted by the GOP who has very tribal instincts. There is an inherent advantage given to rural - GOP - voters, where the tribalistic instinct is greatest. There are plenty of examples, but simply look at the most recent Supreme Court nominee to be seated. This was a crisis where the constitution was sidestepped to appease tribal goals.
2
1. Unless you explicitly incite violence, you have a right to speak. Period, end of story, full stop.
2. Colleges and universities are there to protect, develop and extend knowledge. Of all kinds. Even if you don't like it. Stop shouting; it's lazy.
3. Nobody has to pretend that a Coulter or other right-wing loon who gets very, very well paid to shriek is a competent intellectual. They also don't have to pretend that talk-show hosts are scientists, or that Klansmen and fascists and Bible-thumping bigots aren't what they are.
4. A lot of this "mobbing," nonsense comes from: a) white men's hurted feelings, b) working people's class-based sense of oppression, c) the fact that it's a good tactic.
5. Free speech rests on the idea that you take the right seriously, which means stuff like, read a real book now and then, think about your dopey ideas, listen to the other guy. Want to be taken seriously at a college? Learn how.
6. Should a NYT columnist really be complaining about snobbery?
5
David Brooks: Let them eat sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro”
6
I got to "snowflake fragility" and stopped. David Brooks has confirmed to be what I always suspected him to be.
4
“If you could talk to them....” from your article. Why don’t you actually interview them or have a focus group and actually speak to them and understand them.
Otherwise, this whole article is worthless.
5
If I were to post a comment here saying about the Times opinion editors and columnists what professional right-wing trolls like Hoff Summer and Peterson are saying about women, people of colour, queer and trans people, leftists, and student activists it would never be posted. If I were to send David Brooks an email saying what these people demand the right to say right to students' faces, I'd be getting myself into trouble. Yet somehow, it's the students and their allies that are accused by the editors and columnists of being "snowflakes" shutting down free speech, and the columnists and editors applauding each other for their open mindedness and bravery.
3
What a rambling mess. I was born in 1974 and have no idea what you are talking about.
2
There was plenty of partisan ranting in the 80s, too (I came of age, like Mr. Brooks, in the 80s); it's just gotten a lot worse since then.
I blame the end of the "equal time" doctrine for a lot of it. (That was in 1983.)
These students are totally brainwashed. I have zero sympathy for them. We live in a golden age of science & technology. These kids have been given an incredible opportunity to study at the best colleges & make our world a better place. Yet they are resentful, cynical & defiantly ungrateful. How did this happen? Schools are supposed to teach kids HOW to think for themselves, not WHAT to think. If the "smartest" students are against freedom of speech then our educational system is intellectually bankrupt...end of story. What is going on inside our schools is a disgrace. It needs blowing wide open. Our education system has produced a generation of self centered brats whose only commitment is an absence of commitment to a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, obedient, pliable, without any real obligations or devotions. These students are a desperate herd looking for a master. Ready to be taken over by anyone, anyone who will tell them what to do without the burden of thinking. This is a mentality ready for a Fuehrer. Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of public policy experts have combined to produce a generation of nihilists. They're the culmination of a progressive education that has forgotten nearly everything good about American history, & as a result, have achieved near-perfect indifference to their own culture. Revolting on every level.
3
And I forgot: "Revolting on every level."
So in the third sentence of an editorial supposedly about "understanding" students, you use the term "snowflake." How tiresome.
5
First explain NRA mobbists to us, Mr. Brooks, and how and why your party is in thrall to them.
Then you get to tell us about how shameful student mobbists are.
All I hear from you is the pot calling the kettle black.
3
Oh great. David Brooks is going to fix today's kids with his recommended course list. Right.
2
What’s good about reading David Brooks’ columns is it gives me insight into White male privilege self-delusional perspective and reminds me that we need to keep up the fight.
8
Brooks is an apologist for Trump and GOP. It's nonsense to suggest there is a trend toward mobbing on college campuses when a few arcane fake news spouting speakers get heckled. In this internet age no-one's free speech is trampled. Everyone has a free forum with access to millions to spout whatever point of view they espouse. Do you forget the Trump rallies where a few tried to speak up and were hit and threatened in the worst Nazi fascistic tradition.
You are a sham sir.
And the students you're talking about are angry as well as more than half the country. We're angry; at the hypocritical GOP, The irrational NRA, the fake Christians who only care about unborn life, the science deniers destroying the ecosystem, the continuing social injustice, the buy in and deification of American style capitalism without any regard to social, care, compassion and convention. Trump is the manifestation of the GOP's and America's worst impulses. The blood you speak of will be on all the supporters of this corrupt winner takes all system.
The gall you have to suggest the left is not listening to dialog from the other side when Trump and GOP and shut out any other ideas except their own warped twisted self serving ideology.
You have some nerve buddy...
4
The simpler explanation, David, is that 19 year olds tend to be self-righteous idiots. They were in my generation (60s), with you as a possible exception they were in your generation, and the snowflakes mobs are doing their own variation on it now.
4
Brooks, keep it simple. These kids are dirtbags and need to be thrown in jail.
Geez David, your columns would be worth more of a read if you didn’t spend time twisting yourself into a pretzel in order to cast people fighting oppression as the real oppressors. Par for the course with you, though.
3
David, you were not yet at the University of Chicago when Bruno Bettelheim was psychoanalyzing the Vietnam war protesters and blaming their toilet training. But you're carrying on the tradition.
2
I too came of age in the 80s and shared this "mistake theorist" perspective for a long time. As a woman, and one who fell into the post-second wave of Feminism when women saw it was easier to join 'em than beat 'em (see suits, shoulder pads, Thatcher, etc.), this made sense. But with this next wave of Feminism upon us, I now too am realizing the need to upend old power structures-- not through individual debate and reckoning, but in systemic ways. Maybe as an older white man, its harder to understand this urgency.
2
The students of the sixties, of which I was one, realized that the structures of American power directly threatened their lives -- Vietnam, southeast Asia -- and therefore they had to confront those structures. The students of the Parkland generation are realizing the same truth today, this time focused domestically -- NRA, compliant and cowardly Congress (again) -- and so must similarly confront the structures of power that are directly threatening their lives. I am pleased for David Brooks that he never had to face such immediate threats, but there is something about them that focuses the mind on structural realities rather than polite dialogue about good guys and bad apples. So quaint to think that way. I think a fellow named Karl Marx taught us all this 150+ years ago, no?
2
Mr. Brooks seems to feel that historical change comes about by people of good will meeting together to find common ground and sensible solutions to the worlds problem. That's a nice thought thought, but has nothing to do with human history, which is violent, contentious, and driven by the loudest voices with the most power. I'm all in with the shouting Student Mobbists on this one.
2
Mr. Brooks'columns continue to be baffling. While he is obviously thoughtful and articulate, he approaches a societal problem in a rational way and does an excellent job describing its elements before coming to wholly unsupportable conclusions. Whether one came of age in the 80s or 40s or even the 20s the lessons reasonable principled people would have learned would not favor the mistake theory. Those who shined a light and brought about change in labour practices, civil rights or the manner in which foreign policy was conducted resorted to loud public displays of dissent when quieter more polite forms failed. Ken Burns' recent documentary about the Vietnam War revealed how disingenuous our leaders can be behind closed doors. The many sins of industrialists, segregationists and politicians at all levels are too numerous to mention here. The strength of the American system is that the ability to protest loudly and at times uncivilly does not land its citizens in jail, and but holds those in power to account and strengthens the fabric of society. For those feeling dis-empowered the justice delivered by courts can seem abstract. And surely there is some middle ground between quietly filing a lawsuit and bloody Mao-style revolution and Robespierre. If we survived the Weather Underground surely we can stomach some angry undergraduates.
1
I, too, am older than Mr. Brooks. I am a student of Art, Art History, and History itself. Since the advent of Rome, and the "sublimative religions" that replaced 30-60,000 years of faiths loosely based on "brain-eating", we saw Rome meld into the British Empire with Christianity as its faith.
The vicious nature of The Crusades, created forever enmities between Islam and Christianity, lasting until, and recounted even today in news broadcasts, and the need from the European populace for Chivalry to keep the war-spoiled knights from returning to levy horror on the home front; Chivalry was introduced by the Church at Rome. Thus; Civility ensued.
Today we drift from religion but expect civility; White Supremacism is not Civil. When will we realize the overall absence of Morality present in modern America?
1
I would also suggest that they read, and digest, the book by Jacques Ellul, 'Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes'
What David Brooks describes has already been identified and analyzed by Ellul, back in 1962. We live in a propaganda state and today's student mobs are playing right along with the program, which coincides with the new communication medium of Twitter, etc. and mobile phones.
From Wikipedia:
"Ellul agreed with Jules Monnerot who stated that "All individual passion leads to the suppression of all critical judgment with regard to the object of that passion".[59]
“ The individual who burns with desire for action but does not know what to do is a common type in our society. He wants to act for the sake of justice, peace, progress, but does not know how. If propaganda can show him this 'how' then it has won the game; action will surely follow" "
2
I adore the way you inveighed, then cited Wikipedia rather than Ellul's book itself.
2
Reality, as it often does, lies somewhere in the middle. Most people in power think they are doing good to the citizenry. Some people clearly want to oppress and keep down those they feel are less worthy. But many of the first group want to oppress but have convinced themselves otherwise. They are not conscious to their nature. They have convinced themselves they know better than the people the serve. You hear it in the white politicians who lecture black people on how they just need to behave differently and that will solve every racial problem.
So these people are technically in the "mistake theorist" paradigm, but are functionally under the "conflict theorist" paradigm. Overall, I still agree that the mistake theory needs to rule the day, but don't be so blind to unconscious bias either. Noble actors can still be subconsciously power hungry.
2
Our form of government should be taught at every level, beginning in first grade. This is the single most important thing to be done.
2
David, it sounds as if you'd have sided with the Tories in
1775, because they thought they could afford to talk and
"compromise." They had a King on their side. Or with Davis in 1863 for the same reasons. Or Gen.Less. After all, Lincoln was a liberal and intellectual activist. Tell us how one can reason with or talk with, nevermind compromise with
a Trump-type who hasn't the language or intelligence for
discussion and no interest in compromise that would make
him seem weak. Or a Congress that refuses to subpoena any witness that might threaten the KIng? These kids are no snowflakes. They understand, where you stay in Conservative,
wimpy fog. What is it you'd conserve? Whose future?
3
One is forced to wade through 2/3 of this column until finding the root cause of the problem, a so-called "educational ideology." David Brooks should spend a great deal of time dissecting this pernicious creed and much less of our time comparing his fatuous theories.
I graduated from college in 1981 myself, Mr. Brooks. I think your recall of the Reagan era is mistaken. One of my first political acts was joining the protests against the horrific violence his Administration unleashed upon South America.
"Though America is plagued by racism, we all wanted more integration and less bigotry..."
Have you forgotten "dog whistle politics" and Lee Atwater? Reagan's “states’ rights” speech outside Philadelphia, Mississippi?
Rather than lecture today's kids about reason and mobbism, why don't you read Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail. He wrote about you!
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/060.html
~
5
When I was in college the 'left' supported the free speech movement. I am ashamed the only supporters of free speech now come from the 'right'. What happened to the ideal of "I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it"?
2
When there is zero correlation between what people want -- such as universal background checks before buying guns -- and what Congress does, what are the options for improving society? David Brooks, as gentle and thoughtful as he appears sometimes to be is a classic conservative who shudders at students "smashing structures" of NRA corruption, say, and being unwilling to listen to the lies of Republicans on behalf of the gun manufacturers for the millionth time. Sometimes, it takes students mobbists to grab conservatives by the lapels and shake some reason into them. And almost always, mobs are the only societal influence that outweighs the overwhelming voice and power in Congress of NRA campaign contributions.
And here's a reading list for David Brooks: “In the Thick of the Fight” by Carolyn Collette.
3
Brooks concludes that the solution is “Constitutionalism”. This is the point Brooks and other conservatives insist on misunderstanding. The Constitution says the government shall not infringe on free speech, neither the speech of Brooks supposedly cancelled speakers NOR the speech of the students who oppose them. For a better understanding of this point, and the whole campus speech situation, I recommend Brooks read:
https://theoutline.com/post/3399/the-bari-weiss-problem?zd=1&zi=aigv...
1
"Mobbist" is an interesting term to use when the columnist is claiming to take an emphatic viewpoint! I doubt Mr. Brooks described the Tea Partiers as "mobbists" either, but then he's also completely ignoring how it has been the right wing that has attempted to demonize the center and left-of-center since the advent of Limbaugh and Gingrich in the '90s. What a shock when students engage in a little tit-for-tat, however misguided.
Lastly, Brooks' contention that "we all wanted more integration and less bigotry" is just not true. The enemies of civil rights merely changed their talking points and dog whistles to allow a compliant media to give them cover.
1
Mr. Brooks is too generous in his interpretation. Whenever we stoop to the same tactics as the oppressors we oppose (violence; force; absolute disregard for civil behavior and rational argument), we become no better than them and do great harm to the ideals that we cherish. I would also tell these collegiate mobbists - you can (mis)behave in the safe confines of the university but be careful about setting those as the rules of the game - your opposition has a lot more guns than you do ....Violence begats violence
Those troublesome students.... just like that political mob that blocked a certain supreme court nominee back in 2016
6
Mr. Brooks makes some interesting observations but I find his solutions to the problem of student-based fascism perhaps, a little naïve.
Tell them about the beauty of constitutionalism and the rule of law?
Lewis and Clark is a law school!
Does Mr. Brooks not realize that the protests against Christina Hoff Sommers were organized by law societies like the National Lawyer’s Guild of Portland, the Minority Law Students Association, the Black Law Students Association, the Women’s Law Caucus, the Jewish Law Society and the Latino Law Society?
Even worse, there are law firms like Nexus Caridades Attorneys Inc., who have a national bailout fund for any protesters arrested during demonstrations against "White Supremacy" like this.
And then we wonder why these protests often devolve into violence and anarchy?
Our own precious snowflake-in-chief praised the very fine people at the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville. The new lynch mobs wear khakis and carry tiki torches.
The rightwing attacks on universities and their students are more of the same from the Fox Trump Republican conspiracy-theory mill. David now believes "neo-Nazis are free-speech advocates?"
David attacks these university students but makes no mention of Mr. Trump's white nationalist cult which has become the most dangerous mob in America. This mob has enabled a dangerously unhinged and untethered president.
My family has been around universities for most of our lives. As a child I watched tanks and tear gas roll through the trees and buildings of one university campus.
The students were right, however. For decades, thousands of young men had been drafted and sent to their deaths in a war the Pentagon knew it had already lost.
Our snowflake-in-chief who casually tosses off threats of nuclear war was a four-time draft-dodger. That makes one snowflake lie for each student who was shot on that campus.
David, I implore you to not lose track of the bigger picture. The present student protests are insignificant. There is no reasoning with the president or his cult. They are impervious to decency, reason, facts, and reality.
2
Another bunch of way oversimplified generalizations that reveal a basic ignorance about what is happening.
I guess you do not get that reason with our determination to run the systems with it fails.
What drove all of the "revolutions" that you mention plus the one that you don't, (and that is to say nothing of the civil war and the 2 world wars with out which we wold all be slaves of the Fascists) was reason with determination to see justice done. Your use of the term passion is just ignorant. You fail to understand the unquenchable striving that has drives the evolution of Freedom.
1
Well, David, if we're really going there (back in time), I'd like to believe that that Archie Bunker and all his legion buddies would have joined his "Meathead" son-in-law and their ilk in any 'mob' protesting alt-right, AR-bearing, neo-nazis.
1
I experienced this after the election at Albuquerque's Women's Rally. A group of older veterans (I'm 68) volunteered to provide security on the stage during the rally. It was real eye-opener. The young women, like the one in the image here, were very energized, and I thought that a good thing. I had to keep them off the stage for security reasons. I asked about a dozen of them, between the ages of 18 and 25ish, if they voted. Not one had ever voted, some were aggravated that I asked, and a few said it doesn't make a difference. When I pointed out that it certainly would have last November, some walked away, and another called me an "old man" who really didn't understand the world as it is. I guess I don't understand their world view, but it does explain some of what Brooks is getting at here.
1
Mr. Brooks, you have a rosy recollection of the way conservative Republicans dealt with race back in the 1980s. Most reasonable people back then were appalled by, what Reagan's campaign manager referred to as Reagan's "coded messages" on race and by his pilgrimage to Philadelphia, Mississippi. Your generation also experienced a lot of irrational mob action (remember that mob of auto workers murdering a Chinese guy because they were angry about Japanese imports?). How about Jesse Helms' campaign ad that claimed that white working class men were losing their jobs to minorities and women (when the Boss Man was actually offshoring them overseas to make larger profits). I don't like these student shutdowns of rightists visiting their campuses, but you won't convince anyone about anything if you continue to reinvent yourself as some sort of liberal back in the 1980s. Your Revolution of 1980 began the decline of reason (no, when you reduce revenues they do not increase) and human decency.
23
David's rosy recollection of the way conservative Republicans dealt with race in the 1980's also includes conservatives using Willie Horton in race baited ads for GH Bush in his run for President in 1988. I agree with you, the 1980's were the beginning of the end.
1
"If I could talk to the students..."
What is stopping you from talking to articulate students who don't share your world view? Talk about tribalism.
Apparently you are only comfortable talking to conservative students from elite enclaves, or more likely talking to them when you give an invited lecture. Get out of your tribal bubble.
5
In the case of Christina H. Sommers, the mob consisted of law students. If snowflake fragility and lynch mob irrationalism can infect even this segment of the academe, I fear for our future jurists.
1
If you were born after 1990, all you saw was war. Endless wars. Your fellow students were sent on rotations, one after another, till they lost their mind, their body parts and returned hollow. If you were born after 1990 you saw with your own eyes your parents being laid off, the Y2K scare, the runaway internet boom and bust, the unfair way the system was rigged against you, that while Wall Street made money, Main street shops shut down, while banks were bailed out again and again for foolishness, ordinary Americans were punished for their hard work, their pensions gone, their safety net gone...the Republicans stripped them off everything, and if you were a colored person, you saw your dignity being stripped off.
Just like you David (I am your age, and Obama's), I have kids born after 1990 and I am able to see things through their eyes. You have no idea what they see, in front of their eyes George W Bush started 2 unfunded wars, single handedly destroyed middle east ancient civilizations, and yet, he and his team are still running scot free, not being held responsible. The saddest lesson our kids have learned: you can do evil and get away with it, if you are rich, powerful, white and Christian. Truth be told. These kids are multiracial, biracial, they have friends from all nations, they have studied foreign languages, they have traveled, do not for one moment think they are foolish. They are holding a mirror up for you to see what you have failed to acknowledge.
24
Mr. Brooks identifies as conservative. Although he is no supported of Donald Trump, the article ignores reality.
Make no mistake, our President routinely appeals to racists. Apparently, the conservative establishment is more than happy follow his lead. Conservative money fed think tanks demand that racist views couched as academic research be heard on college campuses. If they are allowed to speak as invitees of a prestigious educational institution, the racist views are given a legitimacy they do not deserve. Thus the end goal, normalization of the President's appeal to racism is achieved.
If the school administration will not stand up to wealthy conservative donors, students will. Standing up against prejudice is not mob action. Our constitution gives the American Nazi Party the right to speak and march. This right does not guarantee that Nazis must be invited to speak at Harvard or anywhere else.
Which side are on, Mr. Brooks?
107
What you state is equally delusional: just look at UConn's hosting of Farrakhan-sympathizer Linda Sarsour vs Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro who is called a Nazi by progressives because he is skeptical of identity politics. Sarsour supports Sharia law and backs someone who is racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and very likely Malcolm X's killer. UConn's suppression of free speech and debate conditions students not to choose but to accept what is fed to them even if they can't taste the poison. This is not a unique case in academia.
2
Great article.
1
Mr. Brooks, Mr. Brooks. Had you noticed that all of the speakers you mention are far-right, nationalists, or anti-feminists? Do you think that retrograde, racist, anti-female, and far-right thought needs a hearing on the campus of a public university?
5
Sure it does. Why not? You don't have to pretend it makes any sense or rests on reality, but if a "public university," means anything, it's that it belongs to the public.
Pretty much all the public too, not just the bits of which you approve.
2
The speakers he mentioned are Christina Hoff Sommers and Jordan Peterson. Neither can be credibly described as far-right or nationalist. As for anti-feminist, the first considers herself to be a feminist. Both are critics of feminism, but neither are hatemongers. If you think they should be banned from speaking at a university then you are making his point -- you wish for the university to no longer be a forum for the free exchange of ideas but an indoctrination mill.
2
I'm sure there were quite a few people in Germany in the early 1930s who felt that the less-than-hardcore NAZIs needed to be listened to, understood, and reasoned with. After all, to use a current axiom, there were some fine people there, right?
How did that work out?
The problem with this point of view, as with Stephen Pinker's, whom Brooks recently extolled, is that it is not at all grounded in reality, but rather in ideas totally divorced from the real impact of those ideas. We do need to have a vigorous social discourse, but not on the basis of "all ideas deserve to be heard." Fascism is well understood, and nobody needs to listen to it, much less attempt to reason with it.
As Dylan wrote some 50 years ago:
"While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole that he's in"
I care not to go down into the hole that Mr. Brooks is digging with his conciliation.
3
Come back and talk to us when the "student mobbists" are shooting AR 15s, Mr. Brooks.
6
The reality is that racial differences in average performance are only becoming more obvious as the decades go by -- e.g., nobody except a black has started at one of the 64 cornerback positions in the NFL since 2003. But we aren't allowed to discuss in public any possible explanations except Systemic White Racism. This means that racism witch-sniffers are not allowed to lose arguments, so that just encourages them to spread more hate against whites.
Not surprisingly, more and more whites are getting tired of and a little concerned about the growing respectability of anti-white hate rhetoric.
The solution is free speech. Let James D. Watson, Larry Summers, James Damore, Jason Richwine and the like tell the scientific truth about human differences.
1
Speaking of scientific truth, Watson shot his mouth off without doing any research first, Summers is an economist, Damore's a programmer, and Richwine's a talk-show host with a degree in public policy, not science.
As for your "black cornerback," routine, it's a typical (and laughable) example of how very little the "poor us white guys," crowd knows about genetics.
Are there predispositions laid down at a genetic level? Sure. Are some of these likelier in roughly-definable, "racial," groups? Sure.
And if you knew jack about the subject, you'd know that a) it's pretty much impossible to isolate pure "racial," strains in American populations, b) little things like the ways poverty interacts with sports systems matter a very great deal.
By the way, how come white American males seem genetically predisposed to suicide and mass murder?
1
The breakdown of the family structure is caused by racism? So the black father abandons his family because of racism? That’s an example of a loss of reason.
Also a loss of reason is the failure to use the words racism and bigotry to describe people outside of the US. If Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East are not bigots, nobody is a bigot. The word “sectarian” needs to be retired. No more euphemisms.
2
There is a superordinating construct that undergirds both mistake and conflict theory. Self-interest motivates members of both camps.
"If I could talk to the students"...Too bad Brooks is just a New York Times columnist and has no way of doing that! His only option is to float a dubious opposition between conflict and mistake theory. If only there was some way of finding out what student activists really think...
4
This is the most ludicrous thing I have read in Times for many years. David Brooks continues to astound and entertain, if not inform or enlighten.
3
I think this is probably one of the silliest and incoherent things that Brooks has ever written, and that is saying a lot. Mistake theory? Mobbism? What is he talking about? It looks to me that he wrote the sentence "these student mobbists manage to combine snowflake fragility and lynch mob irrationalism into one perfectly poisonous cocktail" first and then came up with an analysis afterwards. I also oppose efforts to censor speech that folks might disagree with. But to reduce the question of how to fight against the growing racism and fascism among the far right to one of "mistake theory" or "mobbism" is just piffle.
4
As a faculty member and also someone who knows many protesters from both Anti-fa and other antifascist student organizations, one thing you seem to really be failing to acknowledge loudly enough here is that the people against whom these protesters are raising their voices are people who openly say it is OK to kill Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, etc. They regard Swedes and Norwegians and Germans as a master race and say things like "Heil Hitler" when they are marching. I think the best way to show our repulsion to facsists and dangerously violent ideas in society is to show up en masse and shut them down. One makes it clear that we do not want to hear the ideas of facist genocide as "rational ideas to be debated." I have heard Richard Spencer. I have read his articles on race, as I am sure you have. I have listened in on conversations among people from Der Sturmer saying they will restart the genocides we have seen in the twentieth century. These people come to their demonstrations armed when they can be. If we want Anti-fa to seem less extreme, let's make sure we are standing there along with them, demanding in huge numbers that these 2018 brown shirts know they are outnumbered. The reality is that Americans have more in common with these protesters than we do with Richard Spencer. It should not be hard to be there with them. I am, in body and spirit.
157
Thank you, Jane-Marie. When Brooks or the NYT, I'm not sure who is responsible, posts a picture of students protesting white nationalists as an example of leftie intolerance, I shudder. Racism is the one issue I won't discuss. Sorry if it makes me an old woman with a closed mind, but that's the way it is. My mind is open on all other topics--economic theory, affirmative action, safety net, you name it--but I won't discuss white supremacy because to do so is to legitimize it.
We are all human beings. I thought we decided this long, long, ago. No one 'race' (aren't we all of the human race?) is to be elevated above another. If mankind cannot agree on this one, simple fact, then I despair for humanity.
When the white nationalists came to Boston, 40,000 of us showed up to make it clear they weren't welcome. We showed up even though the hard core nationalists had decided to drop out when they heard we were all coming. I felt sorry for the remaining 'free speech enthusiasts' who are actually decent people, but hey, they should have thought about the sort of people they would have been standing with.
2
Students did not put 2.3 million Americans in prison. That is 25 percent of the world total with 5 percent of humanity. And while only 13 percent of Americans are black 40 percent of the prisoners are black due to color aka race persecution.
Students did not conspire, collaborate and cooperate with Russian interference in American politics and elections.
Students are not profiting from the House of Trump occupation of the White House.
Students were not marching with torches and terror in Charlottesville.
Black students played a central role in black liberation from the campus to the courts to the streets and suites.
10
I know this is David Brooks writing, but I am still struck by his ability to describe the polarization of American politics without ever using the term “the Republican Party.” So Obama’s election signaled a shift from individualist to structural attitudes about racism? And how exactly, pray tell, did that shift come about? Did you have your head buried in tomes of rationalist “mistake theory,” and miss the enormous wave of individual and collective racism directed at the President? Did you miss when the elected leadership of the Republican Party publicly announced their scorched-earth opposition to Obama? Have you never heard of Merrick Garland? Have you never watched an NRA video and seen and heard how they describe the Americans who disagree with them? Hint: it’s not in terms of mistake theory. Have you never heard of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”? Have you never heard of Lee Atwater?
It’s not just that Brooks is able to repeat this massive elision ad infinitum. It’s that he chooses to do so, and thus continues to serve as a public relations agent for the right-wing’s assault on constitutional order and civil society. They’re not doing that by mistake. It’s very much on purpose. Your shock at similarly aggressive responses from the groups they are attacking means either that you’re not paying attention or that you’re a stooge.
10
A handful of people own half the world's wealth. Half of the US thinks the earth is 10,000 years old. Half the voting public thinks it's okay to arm themselves for Armageddon. Yet Brooks, like most conservatives, is obsessed about a few noisy college kids. This is the gigantic problem that keeps a NY Times columnist up at night ?
9
Sit down, Mr Brooks; the children are talking.
9
David, would you also speak in a similar condescending manner about student activists who may have tried to stop the fascist precursors of the 3rd Reich? Fortunately some of our ancestors put their lives on the line to assure that a free society could be passed on to the next generation.
3
"My gut reaction is that these student mobbists manage to combine snowflake fragility and lynch mob irrationalism into one perfectly poisonous cocktail."
That is not a gut reaction, those are the facts on the ground.
2
For heaven's sake. The students have a right to protest when idiots come to their campuses to speak. I'm all for trying to walk in the other guy's shoes but sometimes you have to call it what it is. The kids are alright!
6
The argument here, albeit framed with elegant new labels to be hashtagged, is not new. As one who came of age in 60s, I saw "student mobbists" caught up in the Civil Rights Movement, prevent Neo-Nazis, like George Lincoln Rockwell, from speaking on campuses. I thought at the time, like you, that we should allow purveyors of hate, distrust and divisiveness to speak, if only to expose them for what they really are. Trust in the system, I thought. Better to talk than to revolt. I was wrong then as you are now. Hate speak never deserves a civil platform. The Germans are wrong to ban all Aryan promotion, but we are wrong to believe the 1st Amendment allows the promotion of hate speak. It allows its existence, but there are limits, as SCOTUS has repeatedly found, when such speech incites "lawlessness." You end your case by citing bloody revolutions in the cause of freedom, and trust in constitutional law. By that standard, I assume you condemn our Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Without them, you would condone tyranny and enslavement.
2
As usual another thoughtful piece by David Brooks. However, despite the (probably apocryfal) Churchill comeback on ending a sentence with a preposition as "being something up with which I will not put", the column would be stronger and more grammatical if it ended "...for which our ancestors gave their lives"
You make some good points...but why do you always have to sticks condescending jab into your columns (“The second thing that happened was that reason, apparently, ceased to matter”) negating the credibility that you’re actually trying to see someone else’s point of view?
2
Hmmm. So, they’re still “wrong”. What a surprise. Well, this might sound harsh, but explain the mistake theory/American Idea to the people of Ferguson, Baltimore, the South Side of Chicago, or Benton Harbor, or those in Kentucky trying to live on $7.25-hour minimum wage. Or Mexican immigrants brought in to do cheap work so we can have cheap goods and then turfed out/vilified. Or the rise of separate-tax-base white municipalities after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Tell them about Goldman Sachs. Or why affordable health care is a bad thing. Or why guns are good. Or why the black President almost completely boycotted by the white Senate. Or explain it to the young person in Miami standing up to their knees in seawater during a sunny day storm surge.
And, seriously, the best you can do to dissuade someone from wanting more change than mistake theory seems to be capable of delivering is to warn them about the French, Chinese, and Russian revolutions?!? And to ask them to trust lawyers? My God.
4
As a writer who built a career on sycophant adherence to power and money, it is no surprise that you have you whole career avoided recognizing and calling out the corruption of the giants of our economy and their determination to control our political world. The cut throat struggle between corporations to gain market dominance is a model far more threatening than the current child mob. Though I am a great admirer of Miss Manners, and her struggle to reset the world in terms of personal behavior, her rules of behavior cannot be employed to effectively counter the corruption of our society. The idea of corporate, and political, and social crime as a mistake is just hog wash. There is little evidence that the ills of our present society are a result of mistakes. I believe you believe that the invasion of and the war in Iraq that you supported was a well intentioned mistake. You still will not credit the hawks who drove us to it with intentional corruption and deceit which is their due. Perhaps you excuse your gullibility as mistake. I call it blindness inspired by your misdirected loyalty and the unwillingness to see obvious evil intent in others of your tribe.
6
Brooks says "the incarceration crisis." Has he an opinion on Prohibition? (The war on drug users)
Prohibition is largely responsible for the "crisis."
Have I missed his column in which he discusses what right the Government has to police personal behavior, including the other "victimless crimes" such as gambling and prostitution?
Think for yourself?
1
The issue is that law, reason, etc. *are* all downstream from identity -- straight, white, male identity, which created them in its own image to reflect its own priorities and, inevitably, to accentuate its own advantage if for no other reason than the fact that these ideas stem from a worldview which arises from that identity. This is why it is specious to appeal to reason and law and the like -- these are disguises for appeals to straight, white male identity and power, and nothing else. If these things are to be preserved, they must be thoroughly cleansed of their straight-ness, white-ness and male-ness -- if it is even possible, or desirable, to retain them at all.
Frankly what we need from straight white males is not law or reason or endless columns in newspapers. What we need are two things.
The first is shutting up. Straight white men have had the floor for millennia -- it's time to shut up now, really just shut up. Your perspectives are obvious and problematic. It's time for the perspectives of others. The best way you can contribute at this point in history is with your ears -- shut up and listen, and when you are tempted to say something, listen harder and keep shutting up.
The second thing we need is for you to get out of the way. Give up your privilege by giving up your places and giving them to women, people of color, and sexual minorities. Without editorializing to make yourselves look better than you actually are (see "shutting up", above).
3
The next time you find yourself wondering how the Alt-Right and White Nationalist movements have become so powerful in this country, perhaps it would best to just re-read your comment.
These young people already know what Carlson, Ingram and colter are going to say. I ask again why don’t those people book themselves into oral Roberts, BYU or liberty. They want book sales, ratings and publicity.
50
For both "sides" I suggest the following: if you don't want to hear what is going to be said, don't go!
Yes, Mr. Brooks, go spend some time with those students. While you lecture them about civility, and respecting their elders, look for that quiet angry kid in the back of the room. Every school has a couple of them. And wonder, does he have an AR-15 stashed in a locker? Will today be the day he snaps? Then watch as the politicians tell you there is nothing they can do about it.
4
Mobbism? Maybe a moment of outrage, but most kids just want a family.
2
Listening is the first step to understanding.
It's use is missing from this piece.
2
When is David Brooks going to retire?
Here he laments the rise of tribalism, as a mysterious development of the 1990s. Mr. Brooks, for the umpteenth time, it is your Republican Party, in which you were an active participant, that gave rise to the tribalism that infects us today. Your Republican Party imagined, developed, and fully implemented the Southern Strategy in which white Americans would be made first to resent and then to fear and hate the modern state. It is your political hero, Ronald Reagan, who symbolically began his run for President in Philadelphia, Mississippi, famous only for the murder of civil rights workers. It is the right wing media, in which you personally were a participant, that has so poisoned public discourse, pitting whites against blacks, Christians against Muslims, men against women.
Now, when blacks and women and Muslims are attacked for two decades as “the other” by your political allies, youare you shocked that they would respond in kind. You treat their response as the irrational result of a poor upbringing. It’s not. It’s the logical outcome of the us-versus-them politics your Republican Party has been practicing since Richard Nixon.
Every column Mr. Brooks writes suffers the same fault: a failure to reckon with his own past.
2
Once Mr. Brooks (in his opening paragraph paragraph, no less) blithely trots out right wing rhetorical devices like "snowflake," he loses any intellectual credibility, and becomes part of the problematic schoolyard discourse to which we, as a nation, have descended.
4
You don't know what you are talking about. I have an 18 year old daughter and I know very well how she was educated here in very liberal Madison WI, and in no way was she taught that identity comes before reason. Stirring up fear of "identity politics" is just old conservative propaganda that you have not moved past. What young people may understand today that we didn't in the past is that people in our society are natural (and often intentionally) segregated into groups and that some groups are more favored than others. And that the struggle is create a society where everyone is on equal footing. Women, gay, black, etc.... To understand that is reason not passion. And when the very few shout down speakers they do it because they think they know what the speakers will say. And most of the time they do because the speakers are not there to communicate but to participate in political theater. Richard Spencer is the perfect example. He is there to provoke, to stake a claim. I think it would be better to ignore him and his kind, but there is no reason to listen to him at all. What he says is stupid and is not even the point. This whole terror over the activities of a very small minority of college students is so ridiculous that it can only be, like the fear of "identity politics," the result of propaganda. Conservatives want their base to be frightened. Frightened of college students, gays, immigrants, voter fraud, black people, you name it. I am surprised you're falling for it.
181
As a non-white, lesbian professor, I can tell you that a small but significant because very loud minority of students are so ideology-driven that when they read literary texts their primary concern is to label and judge fictional characters and label and judge the text according to their ideology. If the text eludes, as great literature does, such labelling, they are dissatisfied. The situation has become so untenable that I am now afraid to teach a book like Coetzee's Disgrace in a gender and sexuality or in a literature class.
6
I think the points made in both of these posts are valid. I'd add that mindless labeling is a problem that extends well beyond the classroom. My recent experience in a comments section was typical. Someone responded to my comment by saying I'm a "liberal" and that I couldn't understand an op-ed piece because it was written by a "libertarian." That was the extent of the response; no argument, no thought, just labels. You see that all the time.
Over and over we see anecdote conflated to data as though a trendy narrative is factual data. Older people with an ideological ax to grind are blinkered by the golden age myth. Clutching their pearls the graying elite bemoan the young. We have these stories from Babylon this generation is not as pious as our generation in the good old days. Brooks doesn't bother with studies offering qualitative data to prove his narrative of campuses rife with students who don't live up to his generations purity. Why? Maybe because it is easier for him to simply wag his finger at the imagined problem than to offer actual proof of a whole generation of kids he lampoons based on his hunch. Brooks offers a silly denouement in the form of stilted advice for students to "study" conflict which results in "waist deep in blood". Geez, David was self parody your goal?
2
This attempt by Mr. Brooks to explain why students protest Nazi and white supremacist visits to their campuses is unbelievably condescending. The student protests need no explanation. It is not irrational. Calling them "student mobs" instead of protesters or demonstrators carries a negative connotation. It's the corollary to Trump's Charlottesville view that there are good people on both sides, i.e. there are unreasonable people on both sides, the student mob being one side. Brooks' theorizing shows how completely out of touch he is, and how his need to rationalize GOP talking points persists. Sad.
179
This is so utterly disingenuous:
"...we all wanted basically the same things... we all wanted a society in which social mobility and equal opportunity were the rule... we all wanted more integration and less bigotry, a place where talent and character mattered more than skin color and prejudice." Who is this "we"? The modern Republican Party, of whom David Brooks is one of the most prominent members, has never wanted anything of the sort.
"The idea for decades was that racial justice would come when we reduced individual bigotry — the goal was colorblind individualism... [T]hat ideal reached its apogee with the election of Barack Obama." Yes, Barack Obama, who was relentlessly vilified by Brooks's political party.
Which is the more active ingredient in this nonsense: cluelessness or contempt?
5
Not convincing. I read this as a statement that, in order to understand contemporary students who are smitten with mob psychology we have to realize they are “perspectivists.” And the only way to understand “perspectivists” is to be a “perspectivist.” That’s not a good example of empathy, nor even sympathy. Yes, we always need to understand things in context, but we cannot reduce anything to simply it’s context. Postmodernism unhinged is just that—unhinged.
1
I might go along with this if I did not happen to know people who are blatantly racist and who share their irrational hatred as widely as they can through email networks and social media. This is not a matter of well-intentioned people disagreeing about how best to solve complex problems. So while I might not agree with how so-called mobbists pursue their agenda, at least I think I know why.
1
Or perhaps a course in basic civility?
This article is surreal. Brooks says he wants to understand these folks he labels as mobbists. His desire too understand then proceeds as a soliloquy about himself and then a series of foot-notable comments about his label. He suggests that if he could talk to them so he could tell them how to behave differently they probably wouldn't listen to him. This is not reporting - the article space is wasted. If he truly wanted to report on this labeled group he should sacrifice a lunch period and go looking for a few representatives. Then he would have a basis for reporting. Instead he has objectified them from his office chair - not sufficiently interested to cultivate a relationship - but needing to generate a few easy column inches.
2
In the words of our President, "There's good people on both sides."
Conflict theory might be better described as conflict of interest theory. One group wants to keep the status quo; one group wants to change it. One group is highly interested in keeping finance, housing, compensation rates, incarceration rates where they are because they like the kick-back and control; the other group wants to change it because, quite frankly, they are getting kicked and have little control. I'd argue that it's highly rational to gather in a "mob", or a group, to gain power in an effort to change the status quo. Sitting downstream with your individual reason leaves one in student debt, unfairly paid, or even unfairly jailed. Better to gather in a mob and hold status quo to task, tell truth to power. Albeit clumsy, and maybe even bloody -- if power is that stupid, stubborn and greedy.
3
Fight or flight. Get enough food to eat to live to procreate. All the rest assumes mythical actors not in evidence.
David, why are you always black and white?! In reality, the bybrid of mistake theory and conflict theory makes more sense. Of course I am for constitutionalism but I don't buy into the arguments of "originalist". In fact, US Constitution has "design flaws". To be fair, things made sense before may not make any sense today. For example, "all men are created equal" is clearly a wrong statement for two reasons. (1) The accurate statement should be all white men are created equal. Slavery was a common practice back then. (2) How can men are all created equal? We all have our differences and that is the true beauty of life. Because we are not created equal, we must offer equal opportunities to everyone and we must offer social safety net to the unfortunates.
Unless we have the courage and wisdom to face the uglies, revolution is inevitable. For the same reason, the election of Trump was inevitable. Again, I blame the coastal elites for the problems in this country. The elite-industrial complex including NYT and elite schools are so insulated from the realities. A few million readership should not be celebrated. It is actually very SAD! When popular cultures are shallow and when learning becomes un-cool, that is the real sign of decline. The echo chamber of NYT is very unhealthy to our democracy. Speaking of elite schools, come on, if they truly want diversity, stop the legacy program. Otherwise, they just merely "redistribute" the limited entries by taking less Asia Americans.
1
Mistake theory? We've had well over hundred years of discussion, asking for a marginal reduction of abuse and torture from people steadfast in their domination and power. After Sandy Hook, grieving parents asked for regulation on the most lethal weapons from their representatives. They and the children of Parkland, FL in an obsequious plea ask for minor changes without so much as an offer for open conversation from the other side.
Might I remind you of reconstruction lynchings, prison enslavement, killing and abuse of peaceful protesters, the sanctioned killing of Black youth from a police force meant to protect. No offers to change the system. just a vilification of Black people as rash and violent.
The silent culture of rape, abuse, work place intimidation and the pleas for open conversation from women with their legislature, ignored.
Wake up, David. Enough is enough.
3
I see fantasyland more on the republican side to be honest. These students demonstrate against hate preachers. You may question
how they do it.
3
I didn't realize the Tea Party was comprised of this country's youth.
2
When I was in college in the 80's, we never had neo-Nazis coming to speak on campus. The most conservative speakers were mildly pro-Reagan. Now what passes as "conservative" is really race hatred. Thank goodness our students are standing up to it and calling it out, not tolerating it in a cloud of intellectual obfuscation about "understanding and liking each other."
4
And what would be your required reading for each course?
From WWI, 1914, through WWII, the Fate of the world was at stake. With the advent of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, the Existence of the world was at stake. This hair-trigger balance was ended by the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Relatively speaking, the problems faced by those who came of age in the 1990s are secondary: the millennials live in a much more humane and secure world than did the several generations before them.
What makes for the dramatics? Not just for the "student mobbists", but for both Establishments, many of whom relish a "New Cold War". Boredom with a calmer world?
People are indeed dying, and that is ghastly. Killing even one person is infinitely hideous. But, determining how to end the murder requires a finite accounting: which horrors are numerically worse than others?
Those born after 1970 should understand that during the sixty years 1914-1970, almost two hundred million (200,000,000) people were killed by political violence and the related wars.
Before deciding how to fight today to end injustice, the very first decision must be never, ever, under any circumstances, shall we indulge in the behavior that brought the unprecedented 20th century blood feast.
The main cause of the disaster was the acceptance of mob behavior: Stalinism's fascistic murder of tens of millions; the original Nazis---the lethal Brown Shirt mobs; the darlings of the New Left---the Red Guard lynchers.
The mobbists' new idea is old: the worst idea of all history.
I don't much like Brooks. His often tortured logic usually misses the obvious. And it doesn't help to have his column on the same page as Paul Krugman's, the latter always making sense and brilliant. The contrast couldn't be more striking.
2
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
2
Unlike David, I came of age in the sixties, which to anyone who knows the history of the times occurred from about 1964-1974 and I don't really see much difference in generational character traits between then and now. As Neil Diamond said: "except for the names and a few of the changes, the story's the same one." The young have always excelled at reacting to what bothers them at the time and if it is free speech to allow white nationalists to thump their chests, isn't it as well free speech to allow students to express their objections. In my day of youth, whether in keeping with the definition of mistake theory or conflict theory, those of college age sought to disrupt the Democratic Convention in Chicago and that city's best armed, if certainly not finest, did all they could to define the limits of free speech at that time in that place. Who were then the fragile and who then behaved with the irrationality of a lynch mob- Mayor Daley's Shutzstaffel or Abbie Hoffman's Yippies? And today is it the resurgent Nazi Party or the Gen Z college kids who are fragile and irrational? Free speech in support of extremism is rarely met with the opposition respondents humming Kumbaya. Let the outrageous attempt speech with their forked tongues and let their opposition attempt to roar with disapproval. As long as there is no rioting, no violence, how does this bring poison to the cocktail? Isn't this basically what the First Amendment is all about?
2
“If I could talk to the students I’d try to persuade them that mistake theory is a more accurate and effective way to change the world than conflict theory...”
Here’s an idea, David: why not actually talk to students, interview a wide range of students activists and, you know, engage in reasoned, democratic debate —and, well... journalism.
3
With the country's most prominent birther elected President, and with that President's comments about some very nice people being part of the Neo-Nazi movement, it's hard to see racism in this country as an individual 'mistake,' but Brooks, God bless his heart, takes a stab at it.
Sorry, but treating the alt-right as just another 'viewpoint' is part of the problem, not the solution.
2
But you do not want to refer this younger generation back to the lessons our own domestic wars? Our Revolutionary War ended up with the birth of a great, free nation. And our Civil War resulted in the beginning of freedom for African Americans and a vastly better society. Sadly, blood being spilled is oftentimes the price we must pay for good to prevail over evil. I am with this younger generation. Why be abused by the rise of Neo-Nazi, fascist voices in America today? Why should anyone have to listen to the words of pure evil and hatred spewed just to prove we have a First Amendment in this country? These folks are welcome to stand in front of their own mirrors and recite whatever hateful ideology they wish to espouse there. It is far better to stand up and protest against this evil as it begins to reascend, yell, scream, light a few fires and throw a few punches rather than sit back, do nothing and allow a platform for these insects to infest this country at will. Perhaps this younger generation has a better grasp of history than you, Mr. Brooks.
3
Yes, these all-powerful lefty college students have the right-wing on the run. Talk-radio, Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, Alex Jones -- they've all terrified of that kid's dyed hair, black jacket and emphatic sunglasses!
If only David Brooks expended half his outrage on state-sponsored censorship.
For example, peaceful protesters who face years in jail. as do the Trump J20 protesters. Or peaceful environmental activists, charged under terrorism statutes...
Or U.S. government attempts to make support of a boycott of certain Israeli goods illegal?
{https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/rights-protesters/new-israel-anti-...
You say callow college kids are a much more appealing target?
2
Come now, Mr. Brooks. “...we all wanted more integration and less bigotry...”? Do you really believe this? You must have lived in a very insulated environment. When you were coming of age, did you ever travels outside of upperclass, segregated neighborhoods and elite universities?
3
"Today’s young people were raised within an educational ideology that taught them that individual reason and emotion were less important than perspectivism — what perspective you bring as a white man, a black woman, a transgender Mexican, or whatever."
And there, folks, you have the the perfect distillation of the quintessential conservative middle-brow Elderly White Male pundit perspective.
2
It was and should be considered an honor to lecture in a college auditorium. Colleges are supposed to foster the search for truth. However, there are lies and there are liars. While everyone in public life shades the truth to some extent, there are others who completely disregard the truth to gain partisan advantage. Should colleges legitimize partisan extremist liars by allowing them the honor of lecturing in a college auditorium?
In addition, there are those whose words and deeds are so reprehensible that they do not belong on a college campus Would we want Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi lecturing on college campuses?
There are honorable conservatives and liberals who should be welcomed to present their views on college campuses. There are also dishonorable conservatives and dishonorable liberals who, in my opinion, should not be welcomed on college campuses.
Mr. Brooks - you have made no attempt to differentiate between students who rightly protest dishonorable people and so-called snowflakes who are protest otherwise honorable people that they merely disagree with. I don't always agree with actions of student protesters, but I understood that some speakers did not deserve the honor of speaking within the confines of a university.
Believe it or not, there are some evil people. You should be intellectually ashamed of yourself for failing to take that fact into account.
2
I'm all in, for reasoned discussion of ideas I don't like, that make me unhappy, that express a different view of the world. And I'm medium disgusted by the shouty people from the leftish side of the spectrum, who really ought to know what free speech is all about.
However.
I really get tired of the notion that every college campus in America is picking on everybody who isn't a member of Antifa or whatever. That's just nonsense; more than that, it's a genteel version of, "Collitches is run by commies and lesbeens who Hate America," which we've been hearing since what, the 1950s?
And while it's sweet that Liberty U invited Bernie Sanders that one time, could somebody show me where they consistently represent, say, agnosticism? Or encourage dissent on, say, fundamentalist Christianity and far-roght economics?
Then there's another little issue. Since when was Ann Coulter an intellectual? And while she's a step up from some plain old nazi, since when were we spozed to provide a platform for people who, quite literally, goosestep their way onto it?
The Right's spent decades suppressing free speech. Their latest trick is to argue how picked-on they are.
168
Can you provide any examples of the right suppressing free speech in the last decades? Any at all?
Well done!
The NY Times needs to vet David Brooks' articles for logic. It seems like every paragraph and every argument is undermined by the next paragraph and nex argument. Having read lots of his articles, I'd just say that the best approach to reading his stuff is to remember that some people accuse others of what they are most guilty of.
3
Most of the commenters here at the NYT seem to favor the conflict theory over the mistake theory, which makes Mr. Brooks a hapless tool of the powerful, worthy only of their contempt. The passion that accompanies that theory seems to make it hard to read, but easy to write, as long as it is from the set script.
3
I’d like to suggest that Mr. Brooks take a History course on American Lynchings. That way he might not so easily draw a bizarre (some might suggest racist) comparison between student protesters and actual murderers. While Mr. Brooks might not have intended to be offensive and bigoted (although one has to wonder after his dig at Mexican transsexuals) that fact that it apparently never occurred to him that referring to “lynch mobs” is a deeply flawed analogy speaks volumes. But then again, he came of age in the decadent 80s so forgive him for not caring enough to learn his nation’s history.
Had he looked he might have learned that the US Congress was unable to pass anti-lynching legislation during WWI while Americans of all backgrounds (but specifically including African-Americans) were fighting and dying on the battlefieldsof France. Had he looked he might have learned that the civil rights movement in America reached its apex nearly a full generation AFTER we had witnessed the murderous insanity of the Nazis.
It’s important that we not allow things like lynchings and holocausts to be trivialized by inappropriate comparisons. I would hope that Mr. Brooks would consider deleting the word lynch (especially because he was trying to be empathetic and see things from someone else’s perspective) since it would actually make his argument more effective but somehow I doubt he will.
2
It's frustrating to read Brooks now cause I remember how good he used to be before he opted out of hard political commentary and started writing like a freshman liberal arts student.
Oh, dear. Donald Trump got elected, in very large part, because the then financially struggling media, supposedly so simpatico to Hillary, found that their ratings soared when it gave a platform to the shock jock Presidential candidate, that was never supposed to win.... so his shady deals, bankruptcies, bimbo eruptions, bizarre impersonations of himself, Howard Stern confessionals, sexual assault allegations, tax frauds, indifferent behavior towards his children, money laundering, friendship with mafia types, explosive temper, erratic personality, poor understanding and judgement, all got swept under the rug in service of higher ratings... and newsprint sales....
My understanding of how citizenship is supposed to work is that the press does vital due diligence in reporting the truth about a candidate for the presidency. Especially when the candidate is blackmail chum. The kids, at least, have the enthusiasm and ignorance of youth to explain their close mindedness. The press just followed the ratings cash.
4
Brooks’ crocodile tears are a sham. He talks of a need for racial justice. But he demands an honorable platform for the racism of the odious Charles Murray. I must assume it’s his white privilege that blinds him to the inconsistency and incompatibility of the two. When people like him and other institutions repeatedly insist on both lines, this is what we know to be true: racial justice takes a back seat to white supremacy posturing. To object to the posturing is no more inappropriate than Jesus driving the money changers from the temple.
3
I grew up in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s and learned about evil early. There was the evil of Hitler and the concentration camps and of Japanese POW camps in the immediate past. There was the evil of lynchings and cross burnings by the Klan. There was the evil of the murders of civil rights workers, including Dr. King. These things weren’t “mistakes,” they were evil. Sometime in the 70’s that changed, and the concepts of evil and sin disappeared. Karl Menninger wrote an book about it, “Whatever Happened to Sin,” which “educated people” discussed and dismissed. When evil concepts and actions become mistakes to discuss and solve, that doesn’t mean they go away; they become bad decisions, illnesses and other individual problems instead of things society needs to handle.
How lucky we are that today’s young people are seeing that shooting up schools and churches, racist and anti Semitic marches, and law enforcement deciding that it’s okay to beat and kill people without arrests, let alone convictions are not mistakes or bad decisions that can be rationalized away. Somehow, those of us who have been adults for a while have come to believe that lying, cheating, stealing, adultery, etc. are okay as long as the people doing these things are on our side politically. So some “perfectly nice people” can be neo Nazis racists, and Presidents like Nixon, Clinton and Trump can lie and have it excused. I think these kids have rediscovered something really important, a sense of community.
2
Ah, Brooks. Your party decided a long time ago that their real aim, using government to promote the transfer of wealth to the wealthy, didn’t have much appeal, so it switched to something like the following.
Don’t vote for him, he likes homosexuals. If you vote for him, you like homosexuals too. If you hate homosexuals, vote for me.
All they have to do is change the bogeyman to another to make the appeal usable universally, such as Mexicans, African Americans, Muslims, take your pick. And note the republicans did not say they hated homosexuals, they ask if YOU hated them. So people gathering around something than reason and thoughtful debate is a natural consequence of such crass behavior, and because their base is shrinking, the republicans are doomed, and the political retribution that follows their dumping will be breathtaking.
3
So eloquent.
Brooks correctly understands that when hate, brute cruelty & rage causes others to suffer, retaliation in kind seems necessary. Antifa mobs felt they learned the lesson of past fascist dominations- folks were too optimisti, passive, trusting. Old Testament rules should have been used- fight fire with fire.
The absence of crucial principled thinking, alternative ways to push back, resist, stand strong, is evidence that paranoid nativist racism & anti- federal government stirs equally primitive thinking & rationality is degraded.Fighting is invigorating as is righteous indignation. Hating bigots is not seen as hypocrisy.
1
Oh David Brooks. I came of age in the 1980s too. You left out the part about "the southern strategy." You left out the part where President Reagan used the term "welfare queens" against American citizens in order to encourage working class whites to vote against their own interests—as they have been doing ever since. Your particular view of the world was in ascendancy back then, but to many of us it did not feel overloaded with "reason, compassion and compromise." In fact, this country has been in a downward spiral of bigotry, greed, and needless cruelty ever since. I for one am glad to see young people speaking out—against racism, against the NRA, against everything that is supposed to frighten and silence them. Look at the photo accompanying your piece. I'm sorry you're offended by pink hair or by kids who pull their hoodies up because they're out protesting in cold weather. Maybe they scare you. Maybe you're just jealous of the energy. I must tell you—there is nothing more depressing than an aging man attacking younger people for being politically engaged. I'm sorry you feel your power slipping away, but that's the way it goes.
3
The problem is that too many well-intentioned people are afraid to call them out and counter their views for fear of appearing racist. As a result their dangerous idiocy thrives. Society normally has an immune systems that fights these type of 'viruses,' but political correctness has weakened our immune system. I imagine this is how many societies descend into madness, when rational people refuse to speak out against dangerous ideas out of fear of being on the wrong side of an issue or being insensitive to oppressed people.
"Now the crucial barriers to racial justice are seen not just as individual, but as structural economic structures, the incarceration crisis, the breakdown of family structure." How convenient for Mr. Brooks to ignore the core of the problem. Integration, tolerance and the elimination of individual bigotry were fine so long as the core assumption of a benign white supremacy was still accepted. With the election of Obama, this assumption could no long hold; and as it fell so did Mr. Brooks' world. Brooks is not representative of the bad guys, because he actually believed in and worked to achieve integration and tolerance. But for others, they merely tolerated tolerance so long as their superior position in society was not challenged. When the superiority of being white was lost, the racial conversation changed. Today's students understand the nature of the conflict, my generation including Brooks does not - and does not want to..
Look inwards, Mr. Brooks.
50 years ago The Republican Party created the Southern Strategy, the conscious effort to appeal to the segregationist Strom Thurmond and George Wallace Democratic voters.
In the 1980’s the Republican Party gave us the culture wars and Reagan and the dog whistle politics of welfare queens and States Rights and created the Reagan Democrats.
In the 1990’s we got the Newt Gingrich House of Representatives take no prisoners confrontation, the Clinton impeachment, Whitewater, and Vince Foster murder conspiracy.
With Obama, they created the Tea Party and gave us the birthers, death panels, and support of the Confederate flag.
And all these years, the Republican politicians have been using the Reaganomics talking points of small government and tax cuts for the “job creators" coming from the right-wing think tanks.
3
Is there such a thing as true evil? That's not an idle question.
Around 1972 while elected to of the Associated Students at Northern Arizona University, I was called by David Duke, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, who wanted us to have him as a speaker. I refused. We had the usual argument about free speech access. I told him that while I agree he had a right to speak, I would never lift a finger to help him.
The atrocities of Nazi's in World War II, Stalin's purges, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's "reforms", Turs elimination of Kurds, and the Rohingya in Myanmar today all reveal philosophies of hate that resulted in mass murder.
Political discussion requires the challenge of ideas. But philosophies of hate threaten the existence of humankind. The attitude of a great many that we should just ignore these philosophies/people and leave them alone is exactly what makes their eventual atrocities a certainty.
Ignoring evil encourages evil.
While the aroused passions of young people challenging speakers at universities does fly against our democratic ideal of free exchange of thought, we should not forget that social media allows unbridled ability to proselytize the entire world, and is in fact happening.
I will not condemn non-violent protest that interferes with the ability of dangerous hate groups to spread their message.
3
Wow! Theory and tribal past meet current practice devoid of trust in our democratic institutions, and the widely available demagogues trying to convince us of their goodies...if we only listen to their false promises and acted on them (thus, vulgar brutus Trump got elected). We remain tribal, independent of economic forces isolating each other, where loyalty to an ideology disregards competence and reason. We are emotional beings, and respond as such, where we use reason mostly to justify what we said and did (or didn't) after the fact. A mob mentality, out of charlatan's convincing us that reality is what we want it to be, irregardless of the facts and empiric evidence. The values we ought to appreciate today, making our lives so much better, and based on real sacrifices of out ancestors, seem lost to today's youth (just look at the disregard Unions suffer at present), 'student' cynicism and distrust now our currency. Could it be that the digital marvel and technological prowess are feeding us with so much information that we are confused as to what to believe in, with scant understanding of the world we are living in? This chaos is killing us, perhaps with an inadequate education, the lack of scruples in politics, and Machiavellian malevolence (the end justifying the means, however unjust and deprived of compassion they may be). Shall we demand prudence (doing what's right, however difficult and hazardous), to ease our distress of being lost in our own laberynth?
The student organizations that recruit inflammatory speakers like Coulter, Yianapolous, etc. do so in order to garner attention. Then, when this inevitably occurs, they shout "intolerance!!!!" Pundits such as Brooks play into this narrative. Of course, students and others who disagree should not incite violence--virtually no one thinks they should. But often it seems as though they are egged on, and then take the bait. I agree that they should stop taking the bait, but it is hard. I say this as a college professor who has seen this conflict firsthand.
115
Corporate money pollutes and skews the playing field, degrades our democracy — diminishes our voices. Why on earth should kids be silent about it? Change begins from the ground up, Mr. Brooks. You've been living in a privileged bubble far too long. The "group identity" you decry is imbedded in our founding documents, that all are created equal and deserving of equal rights and protection under law — until we truly fulfill those promises, expect to see citizens exercising their First Amendment rights by protesting injustice, greed, racism and bigotry. Your GOP is doing its best to take us back to the dark ages, these kids give me hope by becoming politically active and opposing them.
1
The last 30 years have been a disaster for the country. The shift in wealth percentage has been insane. What do the youth have to look forward to? I assume you would advocate more of the same. They have a right to their voice just as An Coulter has hers. Who are you to say they don't?
98
He didn’t say they shouldn’t have a voice, he said they can’t silence people in a public forum.
Let's go back to the 1980's. Ronald Reagan was the greatest purveyor of race dog whistle politics. His and his wife's famous War on Drugs started, perhaps, the greatest wave of racial incarceration in American history. The Republican Party had already begun the great racial divide campaign with Nixon's Southern Strategy. The Willy Horton campaign against a nation of mad murdering, rapist, black men, would soon follow. I don't think Nixon, or Reagan, or Republicans in general created racism in America, but they have played upon and fanned the flames of racial divisions, cynically, for half a century and bear some measure of blame for where we find ourselves now.
If conservatives had worked as Mr. Brooks suggests, for a world of thoughtful, rational discourse, instead of racial divisions, we might be in a very different place today.
As a, long ago Eisenhower Republican, I can only wish it had been so.
3
I encourage Mr. Brooks to read today's piece in the Times about black church goers leaving predominantly white Evangelical churches since the election. The piece ends with a white family presenting a conflicted African American woman with a pamphlet discussing how Trump was chosen by God, and that Obama should never have been president since he wasn't born in this country. Yes, we're still plagued by tribalism in America. But the largely white, largely Christian, largely Republican, largely Fox-newsified Tribe is the biggest arbiter of misinformation and impotent rage that prevents our country from solving solutions together. So it's easy to see why student mobbists (what a terrible term) are trying to shout over the din.
289
That doesn't sound Christlike. Perhaps Christian should be in quotes.
1
All or Presidents have been ordained by God, according to Romans 13. That doesn’t mean He likes them, or that they’re good Presidents or good people.
What- pray-tell would Mr. Brooks (now) call students during the 1960's Lunch Counter protests throughout South or the early work of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee)?
4
“This remains my basic understanding of how citizenship is supposed to work.” So says a man who drank the Kool-aide of his generation and consumed all its myth.
Liberal democracy did not transcend tribalism; it was an attempt to control tribalism for the benefit of the wealthy. The “constitutionalism” Brooks worships is the codification of an oligarchical strategy that sought to keep the wealthy in control. The wealthy Founding Fathers put the enticing words “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence – words that were not legally binding. But in the “beautiful law” of the Constitution those words suddenly became “life, liberty or property.” And the property belonged to the wealthy. The Constitution “on paper” gave rights to everyone, but then put those rights under the supervision of rich government officials. The foxes ran the hen house.
Reality is hard for Brooks; he prefers the comforting myth that says liberalism put “reason, compassion and compromise atop violence and brute force.” But the oligarchs used the “brute force” of the law to protect their interests. Just check out the 2018 tax breaks.
David, surely you’ve read Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” The U.S. never ran on “mistake theory”, but on an emotional Darwinian drama of survival – in Zinn’s words: “a history of …fierce conflicts of interest between…masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, the dominators and the dominated.” And so it goes.
2
It may be true that some “student mobbists manage to combine snowflake fragility and lynch mob irrationalism into one perfectly poisonous cocktail.” If so, it’s also true that conflicting interests become effective to the extent that they are mobilized, emotionally, morally and symbolically, relative to the mobilization of opposing interests.
See Florida high school students vs the NRA.
3
even madmen have a right to free speech. all they are doing is getting him more publicity then he otherwise would have gotten
I am 69 years old and actively participated in the Vietnam War protests. I can tell you that this old "Snowflake" is not as fragile as conservatives like to believe that we are, nether are these students. We gave the right every chance to help form a more perfect union, Obama certainly extended the olive branch. What did we get in return, obstructionism not dialogue and then the ultimate insult, Trumpism.
So now we have taken off our "snowflake" gloves and are hitting back hard and landing punches. I can understand how uncomfortable it must make white conservatives feel. Now you understand how we lefties feel about the persistent attacks by those on the right trying to be "more conservative" than the next guy. Just look at how trump treated and spoke to Hillary Clinton during and even after the campaign. Where was your moderate voice back then. Moderate conservatives such as yourself are scarce as hens teeth these days and seem to be hiding in the bushes like Scott Spicer. Your Republican party as you described it yourself has become cheesy. Thank you for speaking out and expressing your thoughts, this lefty appreciates it but like these students I am tired of providing hate mongers, racists, misogynists and homophobes a platform. We can be so much better than that.
4
For my own part, I can see it from both perspectives. On one hand, I defend the right of the Richard Spencer's of the world to speak despite his speech being completely reprehensible. On the other hand, I see the student's, anti-fa perspective: where is the line between preservation of the right to expression and complicity in an intolerant and potentially murderous movement.
In my opinion, the students should peacefully protest these events. Sunlight makes the best disinfectant. But I see why they are worried. With the election of Donald Trump we now have a president who equivocates on Nazism. The students are thinking "If I don't violently resist this now, where with this lead? What is my culpability in a potentially genocidal nightmare? How will history see us if we don't make a stand now?" I feel this viewpoint, at this time, is reactionary but I understand it.
I'd say "nice try, Mr. Brooks," but, actually, as a piece of attempted empathizing, this falls down hard.
"Here's what inspired me. Here's what I think inspired them."
This isn't empathy; it's diagnostics. Let's see you actually reflect on their feelings-- what they feel, and not just life lessons with which you will instantly disagree.
You might even find something to their condition other than merely a flaw to be fixed, a disease to be cured.
2
I think you've left out part of the equation on "perspcetivism"... and its an element the students themselves don't give enough weight to in their discourse though it's key to their claims and aims: unconscious biases. If you factor in what we know about unconscious bias, you realize that justice can never be achieved if our cultural wiring is inherently routed away from it... Thus, changing individual minds is via reason while necessary is unlikely to be sufficient. The acknowledgment of unconscious bias then requires attacking problems (racism, sexism, inequality) at the structural level. It also seems to lead to extreme though-policing on the part of the "Student Mobbists" in an attempt to make Everyone Else aware of our own biases in an attempt to rewire us all.
The effect, too often, is a discourse that places too much emphasis not on group identity, but on elevating and making equal each unique individual perspective and experience, no matter how thinly sliced, or outside the norm. They're offended by the very idea of the existence of any kind of norm, lest the term dare exclude a single individual experience. This however DOES exclude the majority which, for countless reasons, likes to (needs to?) clump experiences into buckets in order to understand them. It also leads to an uncompromising self-righteousness which alienates the majority and thus defeats the purpose of the entire enterprise.
David: you have a platform that revolves around civility, even toward politicians that are devious and lack civility. They avoid discussion and avoid efforts to change. They use their positions to never change to the status quo. They also turn their backs on immoral behavior. You need to show your principles and demand accountability of your colleagues and our politicians to whom you have access, which the young and myself do not. Make them answer: act like the journalists in the UK: be direct and unrelenting until they show their real selves and them continue to remind them of their positions. Additionally, the issues of wealth disparity and unequal treatment before the law are real and cannot be disputed. Accept it; it is not tribalism that have caused this; rather it is an unwillingness to live up to our constitution. We all have the rights per our constitution to have our government "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty" to everyone.
2
Mistake theory sounds wonderful, but the first premise of that theory listed here is patently and obviously overoptimistic. We have not regressed from some utopic, post-tribal 1980s. We never got to post-racial, and we never got to equal opportunity.
While mistake theory is right to start with the benefit of the doubt, and assume the best of all comers to the definitely essential debate on any given issue, we can't act as though we've outgrown malice. While many people may want less racism and more focus on talent and character, not everyone does. Moreover, not everyone maintains that view when they perceive the "other" as having something to do with their own misfortune, whether accurately or not.
These student mobbists are not correct to bar unpopular or controversial views from their campuses. Civil society must safe for civil discourse, even if this means abiding difficult, offensive, or even vacuously provocative speakers. But we also need to recognize that what we see today is the direct result of decades of trying to convince ourselves that we'd achieved what we hadn't: equality of race, sex, and social station.
1
Grew up with bad default assumptions about minorities, women, gender fluids, others. A little life experience changed that, now i am a real inclusive. But in that same time, those being more included seem to be coming for me. I don’t think I am alone in this feeling. Did not vote for either Hillary or DJT, but would bet many feeling like me did. It’s why we have what we have.
I think the root of the problem is the changing nature of American neighborhoods, which over the past 75 years have become steadily more segregated into "haves" and "have-nots," people with advanced education and people without, "white" Americans and Americans "of color." This was fueled significantly not just by personal preferences, but by government policy, from the federal level on down, which enforced these divisions, especially along racial lines. For several generations now, the vast majority of American kids have grown up in cultural, and increasingly political, segregation from one another. They literally don't know, because they've never experienced it, how "the other half lives." Many Americans may have saluted the idea of a "society in which social and equal opportunity were the rule," as Mr. Brooks writes. But in practice, when it came to choosing where to live, the white majority of Americans have resisted it. Whereas during the first half of the last century, many of us grew up in neighborhoods of mixed economic, social and national backgrounds, most kids going to college these days (or not) don't even know who the "other half" is. When is the last time anyone called America a "melting pot?"
If I have one regret about my time as a student in the sixties it is that I was not more politically involved. In those days the call from the powers that be was that mistakes were made. That the system needed changing as the students proclaimed was not really taken seriously and that is what your article seems to do.
So belatedly I say Go for it students. Proclaim the need for reform with activism. Some would call it mobbism, but I say it is your sense of social justice and that needs yelling from the roof tops always.
105
Two key differences need to be added as root causes.The first is that when Brooks came of age the culture was shaped by a rising economic tide lifting all boats.Today's students live in an era when the nonsense they were told growing up (you can be anything you want to be, find something you are passionate about, work hard and you will get it ) is patently no longer true unless one pursues currently relevant education or skills, leading to anger, resentment and loss of faith in their elders.The second is that today's students are much less mature and much more entitled, having been mollycoddled, treated as customers by faculty and protected from "micro aggressions" in so called "safe places". Blame, rejection of expertise (my opinion is as valid as yours) and lack of accountability are all childish traits.
1
To understand the kids look to the parents who raised them. How can you blame an 18-year-old for traits you don't like?
2
Although I do believe in freedom of speech and I don't think it should be shut down, I'd like point out that some of these ultra-Conservative speakers are provocateurs. They specifically want the reaction they're getting, to prove something. Yesterday I just read some comment about "triggering" the left through demonstrations.
2
It is truly embarrassing how many column inches the NYT Op-Ed page devotes to "free speech" on college campuses. Of course these speakers have a right to spread their views, but they have no right to a cordial reception at every venue. The crowd is equally entitled to shout them down.
As a recent college grad, I find it strange when these passionate reactions are attributed to "snowflake fragility" rather than principled stances against characters like Sommers or Peterson or Charles Murray who flirt with the alt-right. These cut-rate intellectuals get promoted beyond their station by conservatives worried about view-point diversity; they get shouted down not because their ideas are challenging, but because their ideas run a gamut from inane to offensive. The reactions that they elicit are not signs of a lack of engagement, but of engagement and rejection.
In my opinion, the op-ed columnist pearl-clutching over 'student mobs' seems more fragile than the students: always worried that he will be the next victim of the crowd at his panel on 'rebuilding social fabric' or whatever inane topic he chooses, because that is the apotheosis of material or psychological hardship that he can imagine.
Meanwhile, there's a real world where people face real hardship. If Brooks wants to talk revolution, perhaps focus less on bloody consequences than troubling causes: inequality, exploitation, alienation. Certainly not students yelling at Christina Hoffman Sommers. Write about what matters.
3
Perhaps this argument would resonate more with me if there were any serious conservative voices left. As far as I can tell, most of the so-called conservative speakers being rejected are unserious people who operate as simple provocateurs (some even openly claim the title). Let the serious, rational speakers of the right come forth and then I will be glad to hear them out.
2
I find the column very thought provoking but upon reflection I am not sure that we previously were a more "mistake" theory society. I think of the McCarthy era and the Vietnam protest era that included Watergate, riots, anti-war demonstrations. You are doing like many Republicans/conservatives have been criticized for years..... waxing for the good ole days..... days that only really existed in your mind and selective memory. The responses by young people in the Vietnam era are little different than those of today. Have we really changed that much? Will today's youth maintain their current ideals or will they morph into the curmudgeons it seems many of the Vietnam era youth have morphed into.
2
I am not a mobbist, but I disagree that all of our societal ills are best understood through Mistake Theory. To me, even the term Mistake Theory is problematic, because it implies that no one ever does bad things on purpose.
However, I do empathize with the idea that society is complex and there aren't many simple solutions to our problems. But I also allow for complexity in the causes of our problems. Some people are tribal; some people are incompetent. Some people are greedy and selfish; some people are error prone. And yes, some people are willing to harm others just to advantage themselves.
I believe that people are less innocent than Mr. Brooks implies, but still I'm no mobbist, and it bothers me when speakers are shouted down too.
They should add Hegel to their reading list. They might get the idea that the necessary and logical historical antithesis to their identity politics tribalism thesis, is a rising identity politics of white men. The evidence is clear it's already happening, of course. If they think they are going to win that one, I strongly suspect they have a sorry lesson to learn. In the viciousness of the backlash, they will really find out what "woke" means. Progressives? I don't think so.
1
There's a difference between assumption and pretense. There have always been people who very much did not want more integration. It's sometimes been easy to pretend otherwise, but never to really believe it.
I was born in 1975, smack in the middle of GenX, so maybe I can bridge this gap between the Boomers like Brooks and the millennial mob.
Maybe, like the silly old Nature/Nurture question, society's ills are not best solved by approaching them as either/or dilemmas between Mistake Theory and Conflict Theory. Maybe they are best understood as an inevitable mix of both!
Opposition to stem cell research itself stems from a mistake, in the form of scientific ignorance, but manifests itself as a conflict when ignorant lawmakers have the power to prevent progress: mistake and conflict, hand in hand.
We must eschew both premodern ignorance and postmodern dogmatism (and vice versa) and stay true to the middle, modern way of rational liberalism.
1
Hmmm. Conflict theory’s worldview is just about the single best descriptor of the obvious effects of "trickle-down, supply-side, voodoo Reaganomics" I’ve ever seen!
“In the conflict theorist worldview, most public problems are caused not by errors or complexity, but by malice and oppression. The powerful few keep everyone else down. The solutions to injustice and suffering are simple and obvious: Defeat the powerful. Passion is more important than reason because the oppressed masses have to mobilize to storm the barricades. Debate is counterproductive because it dilutes passion and sows confusion. Discordant ideas are not there to inform; they are there to provide cover for oppression.”
1
I think the key word in this piece is "assumption". Throughout his adulthood, Mr. Brooks made and continues to make an assumption that he, no matter his privilege in upbringing, education, and skin color, he had the same opportunity for a political voice, and social mobility, and respect as many others in the US. He then can use that lens of privilege to view others who find that they lack a single voice and move to find a collective voice through protest in "mobs". The fact is that Mr. Brooks never really had to pursue an avenue of protest. He is a white, highly educated male with long-held esteemed writing and speaking roles in some of the most esteemed papers and broadcasting services in the country.
Like Mr. Brooks, I'm a white male in my 50's who has prospered thanks to a great education and upbringing. Unlike Mr. Brooks, I remember watching the riots of the 80's and view those in context to recent protests of today. I note that in spite of the fact that America has elected a black president, we are still a deeply divided nation where many are not heard.
1
One unfortunate reason for the "all or nothing" approach from the liberal side is that on several major issues the conflict is not between alternative approaches to a problem - between alternative solutions - but between addressing a problem and a dogmatic denial that the problem exists. Climate change is the most obvious example. There is also economic inequality, the cost of higher education, and, to some extent, gender bias and health care costs. You can't make a plan, taking the best ideas from all sides, when one side refuses to offer any ideas.
As a professor of History, what stands out to me is that both courses Mr. Brooks recommends would be provided by the traditional liberal arts curriculum, particularly the disciplines of history and humanities. The very same liberal arts curriculum that is mocked by our culture as useless and being gutted from most universities in the United States. The very same universities whose students are engaging in such detrimental actions.
When we turn the focus of higher education from developing informed, critically thinking, civic minded citizens into developing hire-able workers we shouldn't be surprised when those very students fail to understand and think through the implications of their mobbist behavior.
It would seem that a re-calibration in focus across all levels of education is an important element in resolving current social challenges we are facing as a nation.
6
The speakers that are being protested on college campuses are fully engaged in the Conflict Theory (Ann Coulter, Richard Spencer, etc.) The campus protesters recognize this and oppose it, not only their constitutional right, but an academic imperative as well. As students, they have been encouraged to respect others, value data based reasoning, refrain from overvaluing one's own opinion, etc.
It would be inconsistent at best to let these speakers, who represent none of these qualities, to speak without opposition.
7
And therein lies the problem. All the accusations you make are opinions. So rather than let people speak so that everyone can form their own opinions, you and those students have decided that you are the arbiters of truth.
Let 'em speak. Picket outside, ask them questions that they can't answer, hold a meeting of your own, but let them speak.
You know what's worst about just getting up and shouting? It isn't that the Coulters of the world batten and fatten on that.
It's how lazy it is. And how self-righteous.
In the first place, nobody could possibly be unsure of what a Coulter or a Spenser thinks. They make their tidy livings blasting the good news as loudly as they possibly can.
In the second, and while you may find it presumptuous, the fact of the matter is that Coulter lies a lot, and Spenser is a racist loon whose "ideas," are laughably stupid, or would be if those ideas hadn't gotten so many people killed.
And in the third. They have a right to speak, of course. You know...the right that they clearly want to take away from everybody else.
2
I am all for empathy, as well as dialogue. However, violence and intimidation have no place in civilized discourse, whether on college campuses, in public parks or elsewhere.
Mobbists prevent the exercise of free speech and the presentation of ideas with which they disagree by using violence, intimidation and sabotage (e.g., damaging sound systems).
This is mob rule, and is certainly not the American way. Where is law enforcement when this thuggery occurs? Told to stand down by those who overtly or covertly support the mobbists.
It is particularly saddening to see the colleges and universities caving in to the mobbists; after all, isn't one of the aims of higher education to challenge students to consider--and to accept or reject--divergent opinions?
3
So I'm not necessarily saying I disagree with you, but I have some counterpoints that might be worthy of consideration?
1) Violence, intimidation, and sabotage are all rightfully condemned, but it is my impression that even among the most ardent of leftist students, those are minority actions. (Please correct me if I'm wrong). However, the broader no-platforming movement involves aggressively lobbying to prevent right-wing speakers from speaking and jeering them off the stage if they do speak. Effectively, silencing them, but I would argue that this cannot be a violation of free speech as long as the State is not involved in silencing the speakers. Your free speech protection is only against being legally silenced by the government; it does not guarantee you a passive or politely listening audience.
2) I think the students would argue that (by way of example) Richard Spencer's divergent opinions - ethnonationalism, 'peaceful ethnic cleansing', ethnic morality, women as childbearers for the Volk - have already been considered and rejected. Especially in diverse campuses, the Alt-Right's message explicitly dehumanises and targets members of the students' communities, labelling friends and loved ones as lesser, subhuman, undesirable, unnatural. I would imagine that, in the students' minds, the benefit of affirming those people's belonging in the community by no-platforming their accusers far outweighs the dialectic value of debating someone who marches with swastikas.
2
"...snowflake fragility..."
Using this term to describe the younger generation is beginning to grate on me.
Listen, no one had it easier than white baby boomers, especially those who were born in the '40's. The world was theirs to take. College was affordable for everyone, buying a new car every few years - no problem, getting into your first home...yeah, sure.
These kids are going to have to struggle to attain anything close to what their parents had. College debt, outrageous housing costs, child care, and....who can afford to drive a car?
Oh, and should we bring up the national financial mess the baby boomers left their offspring? Here's a a better definition of a snowflake: a generation that takes tax cuts galore and has no problem adding to the debt (put it on the credit card), rather than sucking it up and doing the right thing.
The generations who lived through the depression wanted to leave things better for their children. Legislation reflected that. Can anyone say that now?
I'm a baby boomer that has increasingly become annoyed at my generation's snobbery. I know there was some good things that came out of our time, but caring for those who will follow is not one of them.
22
I don't think you know many of your fellow boomers. Or if you do they're all upper middle class.
Talk to the folks who suffered through 14% mortgage rates in the 80s. Yeah, sure, it was "easy" to buy a home then. Or talk to the ones who are living in New England and can't sell their houses and get out because the property tax bill on a simple raised ranch is hitting $8,000 to $12,000 a year in many Connecticut towns. The ones whose major investment - their homes - have never recovered their value and continue to drop in price. Talk to the ones who got caught in between caring for teenagers and aging parents at the same time - the ones who didn't inherit a house or anything at all because it was all used up. Talk to the ones who lost their jobs in 2009 and have been plugging along with jobs where they earn half of what they did in 2007.
Talk to the ones who fought tooth and nail for social justice when they were younger - the ones who completely changed society's perception and demanded fair treatment for gay people. Or the ones who went against their parents and genuinely embraced people of other ethnicities as friends and family of choice.
8
"...snowflake fragility..."
And I recall that just four or five years ago "snowflakes" were frozen fertilized embryos that the Christianists were trying to get "good folk" to adopt so they wouldn't be flushed down the drain.
Then, suddenly, one day, the fertilized embryos were never mentioned again and there were new "snowflakes" - only these "new" snowflakes were now fully-grown adults of leftist tendencies whose egos were soooo "fragile" that any confrontations would cause them to melt! Oh, my!
What's interesting is that the users of "snowflakes" were exactly the same folk in each case: right-wing sneerers. How they made that leap from embryos to adults was sheer poetry in motion!
2
Who is worthy of being taken seriously-- as a speaker, as an intellectual, as a constructor or distributor of knowledge?
Universities don't give a podium and a microphone to just anyone.
So the question is, who deserves a podium and a microphone?
I think the students are saying that leaders of hate groups don't deserve to be taken seriously. They don't deserve more attention, more press, more audience. These people aren't serious people who have dedicated their lives to reflection, study, contribution-- they are basically angry, bigoted people -- a product of divided and difficult times.
It's completely rational to object to the idea that white nationalists aren't worthy of more attention; they are not intellectuals and they don't create thoughtful, rational, or scientific arguments.
I think these students are defending discernment. They are objecting to the idea that anyone who is sort of famous in our weird culture represents something serious and worthy of a platform.
11
Dear Mr. Brooks, you had me until your last paragraph. With the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch, filling the vacancy held open for a year by Senator McConell, will it not force conflict theory upon our constitutional system and therefore, break down the constitutionalism approach which you are celebrating?
8
Mr. Brooks' theories seem to be ungrounded in everyday life. The students who are repelled by racism and by carelessness are not engaged in mob behavior, not that I have witnessed. Yes, passion mobilizes, but except for the annoying presence of racists pretending to be patriots, I see no violence on campuses, only the wretched efforts of petty bigots to halt the progress of human affairs. Mr. Brooks, you of all people, for you are a talented man, need to come down to earth and realize that what these young people are protesting needs changing -- and it needs changing now. Discordant ideas, my foot. These are offensive ideas, and they need to be marginalized again. Sometimes I just scratch my head as I try to understand why you try to rationalize oppression.
6
How ironic! I was just wondering what courses Trump supporters should take to become better citizens too! I suggest statistics, media studies, and an American history course that emphasizes how and why Reconstruction failed.
7
Why are we surprised about this? Students that use Conflict Theory were raised during the 1990s Newt Gingrich era that started the petty, mean spirited, and all or nothing philosophy of running our government. This has widened to other groups and aspects of our lives and it has continued to become worse over the past 20 years. Today nearly every organization including the NRA, Republicans, businesses, universities, and even Democrats are using this philosophy. People will always disagree but maybe a leader could step up to teach our country and culture how to disagree without being disagreable.
5
Unfortunately we are only hearing from one side of the student political spectrum. The leftist students are silencing the conservative speakers and will not allow them to have a voice. This has happened at Berkeley where students smashed buildings and caused massive destruction due to their opposition to a conservative speaker appearing on campus. They do not want dialogue only their progressive viewpoints expressed and will stop at nothing to prevent the other side to speak.
The conservatives must stand up to this bullying behavior and insist their opinions be heard. We are a democracy and one side should not rule over another. It is up to college administrations to enforce all opposing views be represented but that may not happen since they lean leftward themselves.
Students must not remain silent and not lose this battle. They must demand action and their side of the issues. They should not be sidelined by these ceminals who shout them down.
One last point. These students in the photo are covering up their faces. They do not want to be identified because they are cowards.
2
"Equality of opportunity" is nonsense, Republican rhetoric at it's worst. Coupled with "social mobility" which has also shown to barely exist, it's all repression all the time.
5
At least Brooks admits the mob has a point. There are racial, economic, political, and many other boundaries embedded structurally in our institutions. The individual can transcend various animosities but the system is slow to change. "Too slow," says the mob. Just like there is never a time to address gun violence. There never seems enough time to address any other social injustice either. The issues sit there stewing in the minds of public consciousness.
Allow me to provide an example. There are currently six, count them, six ballot initiatives working their towards November in my state. They are not the result of some unreasoned mob mentality. Citizens tried appealing their concerns through legislative process and rule of law. Individuals respected the formal mechanisms of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy disrespected them. There was no reasoned debate within the legislature. Every issue was shelved or denied on a strictly partisan basis.
I have studied the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. They all exhibited horrifying consequences. However, I also studied the American revolution. Our nation's formation also exhibited horrifying consequences. Starting with slavery and genocide, the list only gets longer from there. These atrocities were not mistakes. Our crimes were deliberate actions of collective policy that are still echoing through our politics today.
Before you go condemning the mob, consider perhaps the mob is right.
4
"Today's young people were raised within an educational ideology that taught them that individual reason and emotion were less important than perspectivism -- what perspective you bring as a white man, a black woman, a transgender Mexican, or whatever."
Mr. Brooks states this with no supporting evidence as if it were an obvious fact. In my experience (1) as an educator and (2) as the father of two children, born 1990 and 1992, Brooks's claim is dead FALSE.
3
Perhaps the 1980s, presented as a nostalgic era, is an anomaly. Hilaire Belloc touched on the same fraught themes as we see today in essays written during the period between the first and second world wars. He wrote of the evils of capitalism and its displacement of ' Faith' and circumscribing of person freedom (the 'Servile State'), how the media abandons truth for the sake of advocacy (with both sides claiming that some sort of truth will result from the frisson), the materialism of the (then novel) professional politicians ...
2
I, too, would rather maintain a "mistake theory" world view and for decades, I held to that. But I have come to realize that it not an effective theory, as "speech" has become concentrated in the hands of an oligarchy and and given to corporations as though they are people.
Racism, sexism, genderism, classism, are institutionalized and have been forever and are only getting worse as the affluent few who want to maintain their power push to keep it so and convince a disillusioned segment of society that they, too, will benefit from the status quo. So while we were making personal and local progress over the last decades, the majority of the instututional structure remains tilted against justice, perhaps increasingly so.
Information and data, now not hidden but at out fingertips, lets us see whant in the past could be concealed. People are angry at what they now know. Can you blame them?
While we may feel that free speech is more important than anything, these students feel that continuing to give these proponents of injustice even more advantage than already held is no longer a tenable situation. I can sympathize with, though not support, their methods. I would urge not blocking their right to speak but instead strongly but peacefully mocking them. No one like to be belittled and laughed at, not even racists.
Or lif that fails, revolution, I am also up for that.
Once again, Brooks zeros in on intolerance on the Left, seemingly forgetting that decades of intolerance on the Right has triggered these reactions.
Remember Willy Horton, "2nd Amendment remedies," "real America," "anchor babies," the "food stamp president," birtherism, and the long filibusters of Mitch McConnell and the year-long refusal to consider Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, et al?
For Right wing thought leaders, history seems to begin now, when it's convenient.
All the rest of our problems were born of liberals, or the Clintons or Carter and all that is good and right in the world was born of Reagan.
Please... the entire modus operandi of the Right is to simply trigger the Left. And they have succeeded. These protests are born of a frustration with Democratic leaders often choosing to bring knives to gun fights. The courts' rulings on fighting words notwithstanding, I believe the Right has been employing fighting words for years and now the Left seems more willing to put up their fists. Our nation's politics have historically been a rough and tumble place. So be it.
5
"So I’d just ask them to take two courses. The first would be in revolutions — the French, Russian, Chinese and all the other ones that unleashed the passion of the mob in an effort to overthrow oppression — and the way they ALL wound up waist deep in blood."
Or, the American Revolution. When inhabitants of a bunch of states came together to create a democratic republic and liberate themselves from a ruling king who received taxation without representation. Pretty much what we have now.........taxes paid (not in proportion to earnings mind you) in states and the federal government which has gerrymandered our "representation" to ensure they keep a majority.....even in states where the votes for Democratic candidates far exceed those of the GOP, yet can't get proper representation.
And the law? You mean the ultimate court of law, the US Supreme Court, which for years has had it's justices appointed by Presidents, yet the last President couldn't get his excellent candidate in?
Young people: read your American history. What party has provided social safety nets for citizens to keep them from bankruptcy or real life hardship? And what party wants to take that away? And while Trump says "most people don't know Lincoln was a Republican", remember that the parties are flipped now because LBJ, a Democrat, twisted arms to get civil rights passed, which he knew would lose the southern vote "for a generation". More like 3 generations and counting.
3
I agree with most of this piece, but I disagree with the observation that today's campus protesters are trying to "Defeat the powerful". To me, it seems that they are also trying to attack and defeat anyone who is white and/or male. How else to explain 'no whites allowed' days on campus and sexual assault rules that effectively assume guilty until proven innocent? Like many good intentions, the campus movement has been hijacked by ultra-radicals and doesn't really represent typical young people. It reminds me of anti-Vietnam protests that turned violent, anti-abortion protests that spawned people who felt it was OK to kill abortion doctors, and so on. These types of radicalized movements eventually flame out, and I hope this one will as well. In the meantime, keep the dialogue going.
1
Empathy is an essential character trait for any time. As is often the case, Mr. Brooks places the tell or rhetorical clue right at the beginning.
1
Yeesh. I can repeat my comment to Brooks from 2 columns ago...
"David, I'm with you in the repeated undercurrent to your columns that identitarian politics can be deeply flawed. Identity informs perspective but is not itself a monopoly on perspective, and plenty of educated people can speak truth to power despite the terrible affliction of majority status.
But, come on man: Leftists (or for today's column, student activists) are not tribalists just because the Democrats big tent includes more tribes.
Primitive tribalism is trying to deport or ban the brown-skinned. It is curtailing programs and agendas that disproportionately benefit women, poor people, and minorities (be it consumer protections or defense of civil rights, etc.) because your base is hostile to diversity and expansion of opportunity.
Insistence on recognizing people's basic humanity as a barrier to entry in public discussion is hardly the tragic career-ending (or for today's column, conversation-stopping) boundary shift you make it out to be; it's what should have been happening all along. All progressives are telegraphing is: Go ahead and be against gay marriage and cater to the like-minded should you choose, just don't expect others to view you as a tolerant person when you do."
...Frankly, the kids' "perspectivism" is a wish that reason would return in the form of a public discourse that doesn't push the abhorrent as equally valid and worthy of our time in service of some misguided notion of balance.
2
In today's NYT there is in the Canada section a column about Montreal. It talks about tribalism and Anglophones and Francophones. It is about the writer returning to Montreal after a thirty year absent.
I too returned to Montreal after a thirty year absent over ten years ago and found that it was a city of young people and over two thirds of the city were neither of British nor Quebecois heritage.Almost 40% are visible minorities and when there is no common heritage avoiding the old tribal ethnocentricity becomes a justifiable method of maintaining social order.
It is time to start using the term middle-class as defined in the dictionary. It is time to acknowledge that 83% of the population lives in cities and 87% of our economy is urban based and that economy is generated by the middle-class in the major cities throughout the world. It is time to realize it is the middle class 10-15% of the population that understands and is capable of bringing peace, order and good governance to this world. It is time to realize that the old hierarchies and conservative values that created today's world have not evolved to understanding that the future belongs to young middle class people in NYC, Berlin, Shanghai, Toronto and London who share a common set of values but none of the tribalism of the Westphalien State.
John Ralston Saul says the USA is the most European of the world's nation states and he is correct and so the USA remains the world's greatest danger.
1
How about analyzing the speakers they shut down for the provocateurs that they are. The "mobbists" are no worse than their adversaries (whom Our Mr. Brooks gives a free pass). The speakers' goal is precisely to be shutdown, in order to use the student passions to prove just how hypocritical and illiberal that liberals are. Sadly, these students are suckers for this ploy, and what they lack is the perspective to see they are being used. They also lack a contemporary example like Dr.Martin Luther King, who saved the civil rights movement from a similar fate of marginalization by forthrightly championing non-violent protest (which takes more courage). I disagree that the mobbism Mr. Brooks cites is a rampant as he makes it out to be for the sake of lecture, but it is real, and the real problem is that it takes attention away from the passivity and failure of adults in the face of institutionalized hate, prejudice and yes, privilege, that the students sense most clearly, but unfortunately without understanding that their actions reinforce all three.
David likes to put the vocal right and vocal left into categories as extremists, with the hope that some soft-spoken, sensible, pro-business, socially-liberal centrist will someday rise and unite our country. The thing is, this mythical centrist figure is completely irrelevant today. Since there are such radical forces it power right now, the moment demands a vocal and forceful response. Antifa and the campus mob are right to speak out, but you don't have to be with Antifa to strongly oppose Trump's policies. Why aren't there more vocal centrists shouting from the rooftops about the bigotry and corruption of the Trump party? See Mitt Romney's Never Trump speech from 2 years ago, and see Mitt Romney today. Why can't we have a strong and forceful center, rather than a soft and compliant one?
1
An interesting piece. I find myself shaking my head or rolling my eyes at all the stories of student mobbists (if that's the phrase we're using), but I remain hopeful for them. I say this in full realization that - at that age - my views were every bit as half-informed and void of nuance as theirs, but there are few things in public discourse as shrill, pointless and cringe-inducing as 18-year-old activists demanding society and all structures around them be rebuilt to accommodate their current preferences. College is a brief, wonderful time, and I feel like telling them to spend those four or so years enjoying life instead of pretending they understand the world. But again, I remain hopeful. They'll grow up, they'll learn. And one day they'll roll their eyes and shake their heads at the next generation.
1
"Progress is less about understanding and liking each other and more about smashing structures that others defend."
An apt description of the Civil War.
1
I don't think it's fair to blame the kids. The adults have created the problems, intended or not. It has always been the young who see our hypocrisies and point out our mistakes. It's hard to take, but it's important to listen to their complaints and respond to the message they are sending, not just the behavior they exhibit.
And the adults need to take responsibility for their own failures and continue to work to pursue justice for all.
1
Are the shouting and obstruction of the "student mobbists" more "awful" than Richard Spencer's call to forcibly deport anyone who isn't white? I know which one appalls me more. Of course, we would like everyone to be civil and courteous and engage in thoughtful discourse. But some of us (and I'm older than you, David) watch the complete breakdown of established civic systems, the mass murder of children, the Blood and Soil tiki marches, the wholesale rescinding of government regulations in favor of private corporations, sexual predators running for (and winning) government office, and elected officials who ignore their own constituents' expressed desires so as not to endanger their corporate income... no wonder we're furious, frustrated, and see no recourse but to march, shout, throw fists, block the road and get arrested. Nothing else seems to be having any effect.
2
Perhaps, your Grand Old Party who has engaged in nihilistic politics should read our constitution again and again till they understand it.
I have a hard time imagining how mistake theory would have helped the civil rights movement, or the union movements at the turn of the 20th century.
Wrestling power from the powerful requires conflict and confrontation.
2
The kids are right, it is institutional and tribal oppression; however, the institutional and tribal oppression is not happening at the national level, but the state and local level. What is disturbing about the election of Donald Trump is the attempted coup of institutional and tribal oppression from the state level to the national level. This is why there is a war on women and poor people. These same tribal/institutional forces demonize poor people and women so they can be oppressed. The kids are right and the irrational rise of "gun rights" is designed to do nothing more than oppress women and people of color that have the highest poverty rates. That's right, women are being institutionally oppressed to remain in poverty by denying them the right to birth control.
I appreciate Mr. Brooks attempt to empathize with student protesters. This, however, is a very confusing and tone-deaf piece. He attempts to see things from the point of view of young people today only after after making a profoundly arrogant assertion that reason doesn't matter to us. If your position is that "individual reason" doesn't matter to us, why even bother with this exercise?
If the NYT Opinion section were truly interested in fostering understanding of the positions of student protesters, they would publish the opinions of students protesters. Instead, we get essay after essay from middle-aged columnists who claim to have some insight into the student psyche. At best, these columnists offer misguided attempts at empathy. At worst, they offer red meat to the anti-academic right. Neither provides "understanding".
I think Brooks is being far to generous to the current students. Their simplistic view of the world as victims and oppressors is a road that leads nowhere. It is basically a new named for failed marxist ideas. It becomes a game show titled " who's the most oppressed". And of course it has lead to the nationalistic backlash which got us president Trump.
3
Two thoughts. Mr. Brooks seems to have forgotten the American Revolution in his attack on the revolutionary spirit. One can only imagine the David Brooks of 1776 tut-tutting George Washington and the other 'mobbists' who chose to fight oppression and injustice in hope for a better world. He probably would not have approved of Jesus Christ either, since Christ was also too conflict orientated. It's hard to imagine the founder of Christianity sitting passively while Richard Spencer and Ann Coulter (with the Kochs, Mercers and Bannons greasing the wheels) justify wickedness. It's true that opportunism and courting power was a successful strategy for kids in Brooks' day. But today's students face the insane world Brooks and his crew bequeathed them. It is certainly perverse and without question critical for someone who paved the way for the right wing Trump Rvolution (but who now ducks accountability as a Never-Trumper) to be lecturing kids to do as I say, not as I did.
1
Young people are angry because they see the unfathomable greed, hypocrisy and selfishness that the Republicans and their compromised President have brought to this country.
Brooks, as usual, is an apologist for this crowd. But his intellectual blather doesn't hide the fact that the party he supports is brutalizing the country so many of us love.
2
When I was young (born in 1948) "conflict/complex theory" was juxtaposed against "structural functionalism" and the explanation of deliberate oppression was "Classical Republicanism".
"Classical Republicanism" took a new look at the Ancient World.
It pointed out that there were two different ways for a society to be organized. It could either be ladderistic, everyone on their proper rung, a la Plato's "Republic", or there could be increasing inclusion, a la Cleisthene's "democracy".
That was the tension: Would the world become a "republic" with everyone in their place, from Priest-King down to slave, or would the world become "equal", with women and slaves included?
Well, we know how that one turned out, don't we?
In the Republic of the USA the top rungs of that Republican ladder threw out the Equal Rights Amendment for the majority of the citizenry. Women would NOT be included in the Constitution.
Now, that ERA was an "obvious, perfect solution".
But the "malice and oppression" of the "powerful" Religious-right, Republican Party, demanded that women be oppressed. It was NECESSARY that they be legally inferior so that abortions could remain the mainstay of the R Party.... because that was where the R's got the vast majority of their votes.
Only if women were oppressed could their reproduction be messed with.
If they were "equal" to men then.... oh, that wouldn't be legal!
Simple solutions?
I've seen a few in my 70 years.
And found there are men who refuse them.
2
Brooks is correct in asking that students take more coursework in history.
However, history is not as simple as attending a Hamilton, Hip Hop play.
And no, history was not a lie…if you listen carefully.
1
But nothing explains their lack of tolerance. Clearly they are not receiving an education. They are wasting their money on college and should focus on how to become the best food server or janitor possible.
From the article: Passion is more important than reason because the oppressed masses have to mobilize to storm the barricades
So what happens after you "win"? You don't really know how to run things. So they collapse - and this is how Venezuela becomes what it is.
1
Where was Brooks when Mario Salvio made his "throw yourself into the gears" speech, or when upper middle class kids were robbing banks or setting off bombs, circa late 1960s. The "mobbists" is a small minority now as it was then but it is important because it is a symptom of a dysfunctional political system. And the disfunction starts and end with the republican party. Rather than condescendingly empathize with the student "mobbist" he should try reform the republican party and the"conservative movement" which starts with throwing the corrupt bums out every last one of them.
1
Mr. Brooks, I believe you have fallen for the Fox News "fair and balanced" approach here. Not all ideas are worthy of a voice in the public square--white nationalism chief among those, but any who advocate for terrorism or violence in general. How are the students in the wrong here?
1
You write: "In the conflict theorist worldview, most public problems are caused not by errors or complexity, but by malice and oppression. The powerful few keep everyone else down."
Ok, well, I was born a year before you David, and I disagree with this whole column. In its entirety. The powerful few have always kept everyone down. The vocal minority. White men with money. Men who came to power because of who they knew and not what they knew. Our world is in a state of perpetual conflict. The elite DO dictate terms. And my feeling is that you like this and do not want to see it changed.
I wish you would stop demonizing my daughter's generation. They are thoughtful and concerned. They are engaging. And engaged. You cannot stifle them.
I would prefer to see one of them have a regular column in the NY Times. They need a voice too. They are screaming as loud as they can, but you prefer to plug your ears because you like the current power paradigm. Well, David, hang on, because your world is shifting. Thank goodness.
13
Way to go Janice!!
Kids today grew up under Bill Nye the Science Guy logic. Science connects their dots while information technology saves the day. They are connected by science-based ideologies using social media based logic.
Mr. Brooks, you say, "Students across the country continue to attack and shut down speakers at a steady pace, from Christina Hoff Sommers to Jordan Peterson."
What you don't say is that these students are protesting hate and white supremacist speech. I salute them.
What you don't bother to talk about is the attack on Separation of Church and State, as guaranteed to every American citizen, by the radical religious right who have tried to convince people there is a war on "christmas". The war is on the infringement on OUR rights to worship as we please - or not - without interference by any religion.
What you don't bother to mention is that elitists who want an authoritarian regime so they can rob us blind and reduce OUR United States of America to a third-world country put The Con Don into OUR white house to further dismantle every social good and safety net since FDR.
There is much more you choose to ignore.
Are you an American, Mr. Brooks? Or are you still stuck in the 5th/15th centuries?
Think about it.
WE THE PEOPLE - the majority of average Americans and people around the world - will move on with or without you. WE will not go back to your tiny little male-religion-dominated world.
3
I came of age in the 60's when civil rights was a big struggle in the city where I lived. It seemed progress could be made by addressing things like housing/mortgage loan restrictions, voting rights protections, fair trial/defense lawyer improvement, etc. As Vietnam protests heated up we joined in in the beginning when they were peaceful. Our last protest was against the Pentagon when some decided to scale the fences and take on the armed guards in a way the seemed to us to be quite unnecessarily provocative. Did not see how that helped the cause.
Tax-resisters, peaceful protests, ballot box, actions like the Berrigans pouring blood on military installations, etc worked along with those few in government plus the honest reporting on actual conduct of war all contributed to bring it to an end.
We in the 60's were under not illusions about civil rights,poverty, violence. Michael Harriington, Jane Jacobs, Martin Luther King,Jr, the Catholic Worker, H. Caudill, and many others invited serious rethinking of how we thought things were, and of how to move toward the way they "ought" to be. Gov-ernment had a part to play in that same process.
But we did have hope that our efforts could make a difference.
1
The students recognize that some of these guest speakers are not there to debate, or engage in discourse, but to provoke for provocation sake and to insult others under the cover of “challenging people with unpopular ideas” and then cry oppression when the audience objects.
They come looking for a fight, then act surprised when they get one.
8
If the 1980's were all about "mistake theory" and the view that racism would be overcome through individuals climbing the ladder of progress (with the helping hands of noblesse oblige Republicans), why did the saintly Ronald Reagan kick off his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, bastion of white supremacy and "states rights?" Why did Reagan proceed to invent tales about "welfare queens" and "young bucks?" And why did the moderate Bush, the elder, rely on Willie Horton to stoke racial fear and prejudice during the 1988 campaign? What a fabulous decade it was. All Enlightenment and kumbaya over at the Heritage Foundation and the RNC. Thanks for the false nostalgia.
2
They are not Mobbists they are Maoists. Maoist arise when a sociery fails to produce what the intelectual elite in a society say will happen when the populce follows the dogma that all knowing advertised.
As a society becomes less equal and reality moves further from its prevailing myths, the Maoist arise demanding religious adherance to their academic beliefs.
Was there a summit of opinion writers recently where they all decided that shrill college students were a dire threat? Everywhere I turn, I read yet another piece decrying the shocking, awful behavior of these students.
Guess what? We’ve been here before. A generation ago we heard the same panic about out-of-control PC culture when Gen X was in university. Same hand-wringing, same pearl clutching about encroaching illiberalism and even Marxism.
And those very same students are now in mid-career - at Raytheon, Goldman, Lockheed etc. Those fearsome students of yesterday are now running our global capitalist system and military industrial complex. Same as it ever was.
In the end, these are kids being kids. Figuring it out. Enough with the fainting couches.
3
As always, Brooks misses the point while pretending to be open minded. Calling it "mobbism" is prejudicial from the start. The real mobbism we see is not on the campuses of elite universities (Brooks is always happiest at Princeton and Yale) but on the Right. His preferred solution--constitutionalism--would be a good answer if the law were not shown to be a corrupt monopoly of entrenched interests. Can we trust the DoJ right now? Can we trust our circuit courts? Can we trust our state courts? And, let us remember, that the law is expensive.
Just as important, "free speech" piety makes sense if everyone is playing by the same rules, if all sides accept the canons of evidence and proof. But that isn't the way it works right now, is it? Look at the present "debate" about gun control. It is not a debate. The side with the money is not interested in the facts. And because the NRA has made it difficult, if not impossible, for the government to compile data on gun violence, the facts are very hard to get.
Brooks is a bad sociologist and a sanctimonious fool. His measured tones are not the sign of reason, but the mark of his condescension. It is not that he grew up in a different world or that anything has changed. It is merely that our children have woken up to the reality of contemporary Machtpolitik. They are not wrong. And they are right to be angry.
3
I was a college student in 1970, the year of the Kent State massacre. Students shut down colleges all over the country. Campuses today look pretty quiet by comparison.
2
Lumping together the French, Chinese, and Russian revolutions is incredibly superficial. (Didn't they ask you to read Hannah Arendt, "On Revolution," at the University of Chicago?) To go just one level deeper, the Russian and Chinese revolutions led to brutal (in the name of communism) dictatorships. The French Revolution (unlike the American) led to the establishment of universal economic and social rights. Yes, it was exceedingly bloody. But that is what it took.
3
"Students across the country continue to attack and shut down speakers" says Mr. Brooks.
He's right, but he's limited. Students are not the only people shutting down speakers.
Milo Yiannopoulos was disinvited to Berkley in September 2017. But he was also disinvited to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2017. Why is Mr. Brooks up in arms about the first cancellation and indifferent to the second one?
3
I grew up during the Civil Rights Movement, when it seemed the virtues of American democracy were always front and center. In school they were exalted: the right to be heard, even if it was the KKK speaking, went without saying. I remember my teachers describing these rights to us many times. Even on TV, there was a reverence of individual rights. Everyone understood, it seemed to me, the ground rules. The underlying belief that sunshine was the best medicine was near universal. We—those who disagreed with the KKK or George Wallace et al.—had to wait our turn to speak. And we did. MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, seemed to my young mind to silence a generation of haters. Since then we’ve lost the ability to hear each other out. There’s a cacophony of views now that does not wait for the morning paper or nightly news. The old media landscape in some ways helped to promote rational exchange. Now millions espouse opinions simultaneously and often without regard for the facts. That irreverence for facts, a Conservative invention, combined with the enormous megaphone of social media, is downright scary—especially when it becomes state sponsored. No rational voice can out shout a billion bots. Social media must be regulated in a way that acknowledges the primacy of facts and individual rights or democracy is lost.
1
I disagree with you, Mr Brooks. Your pals, the republicans, started and nourished the war of tribe vs tribe.
Defeat the Powerful. Passion is more important than Reason. You consider these "ideologies" as counterproductive. How about this: the Powerful, those in power, will not listen to Reason, unless you consider the NRA as "reasonable".
So I am going to defend Passion. And I am going to set aside my atheism and get on my knees and pray my heart out that the Passion of millions (I hope) of young people-kids in school-are going to use their passion to unseat the powerful and marginalize the NRA.
That's our only hope, imo, because your pals have totally and completely and utterly failed us.
#NeverAgain
5
Read up on the turbulent 60's and early 70's, Mr. Brooks. What goes around comes around.
1
"The second [course] would be in constitutionalism...the law is beautiful, living proof that we can rise above tribalism and force — proof that the edifice of civilizations is a great gift, which our ancestors gave their lives for."
Then why, Mr. Brooks, do the minority of 63-millions not believe in "constitutionalism?" They rejected "reason and deliberation" for tribalism. Student "mobbism"--your phrase--is the passionate reaction against tribalism.
Give it up, Mr. Brooks. America is the modern Stone Age.
2
Mr Brooks has a real problem with young people. When I came of age, in the late 1960’s, the adult establishment had a problem with us. We were told “love it or leave it”, do your duty and shut up. I was on the University of Minnesota campus when riot police charged through the campus gassing and beating students, attempting to silence dissent. Adults had patriotic advice for us and were horrified by our selfishness. They were disgusted by those rioting in America’s ghettoes. They were horrified by young women demanding some rights over their bodies and lives. By the time Mr Brooks came of age, it was a quieter time, it was a good time to develop a world view. They only needed to get into a good college, get a job and raise a family. For some people growing up in times of peace, having a strong, unyielding position is hard to understand. Calling today’s protesters “snowflakes” is adult-splain to silly children. They need to toughen up, no trigger warnings of coming harsh content that might harm their gentle psyches, like the kind TV viewers get every night on the news, that there may be some pictures or words that will offend viewers. Mr. Brooks proves the notion of confirmation bias, acceptance of views that support your own views. Anyone can trot out philosophies that support the correctness of their established ideas. Why not try to understand someone else’s views for a change?
3
These kids are sick-and-tiredof listening to the verbal garbage and ignorance. Yes, they are rude and should just not attend, but from the president on down to the attorney general and Laura Ingram and Hannity, it's really garbage and lies and all the "deplorable" words. They have had it up-to-here with an almost dysfunctional society and government. Your description is not so much wrong as it is too nuanced and verbal.
2
Here's something you failed to recognize. Those born in the late 60s and early 70s, a time when a generation had no choice but to challenge the established power structure with direct action because the powerful refused to allow for change, upward mobility (the US now has one of the worst records of upward mobility of any industrialized nation), and demanded obedience to a government that believed in never-ending war, are the parents of those children born in the 90s. They wanted their children to benefit from peace and relative prosperity. They wanted their children to have real opportunities no matter where or to whom they were born. Instead those children find themselves on the brink of adulthood with obvious and blatant institutionalized racism and misogyny. The 80s war on drugs enshrined those issues. The 80s also brought about the end of most rational regulations on capital and ushered in an era of runaway income and wealth inequality.
So these children see inequality as their parents struggle to make a living in a country that rewards capital and punishes labor. They see their schools decline in the midst of budget cuts to appease the 1%. They see more poverty, homelessness, hunger and a return to never-ending war and fear. Who can blame them for again wanting to tear down an establishment that has failed them so miserably?
2
I'd suggest an additional course of study, which would address the era of the Vietnam War, complete with the governments' lies, the military cover-up, and the "student mobbists" who protested the entire situation for over five years.
3
“Now the crucial barriers to racial justice are seen not just as individual, but as structural economic structures, the incarceration crisis, the breakdown of family structure.”
Jim Crow wasn’t structural? Segregation, as stated by George Wallace, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” that wasn’t structural? These injustices weren’t focused on the individual, but on an entire group of Americans.
Speaking of injustice. What about the US government’s lie for going to war in Vietnam to fight communism, and continuing that war killing over 50,000 American soldiers because the government did not have the stomach to admit it made an incredibly huge mistake. That wasn’t structural?
Guess you did grow up in the 1980’s David.
3
"Jim Crow wasn’t structural? ..."
Read Brooks more carefully. Brooks is contrasting two "worldviews":
"But two things have happened since my worldview was formed."
What I think this article misses is that some of these speakers are sponsored by right wing moneyed benefactors whose interest is not to have the speaker speak, but to provoke a confrontation so that they can say: look at those illiberal hypocrites....so they themselves can later justify similar conduct by their own persons.
These are not speakers who students ask to speak...these are speakers whose expenses are paid by other to appear on campus.
In today's electronic age, you can see speakers on an iPhone. I would submit that part of the speaker series is to provoke the reaction that Mr. Brooks correctly condemns.
So, let's have disclosure or investigation on who is paying for what, how many students actually attend the events to listen to it, and even look at whether provocateurs may be planted by those who support the speaker.
And, don't forget, speech includes the right to demonstrate and assemble.
1
The assumptions in this this article are just plain wrong. For instance, “we all want the same things.” No, we don’t. Gun rights advocates want a society where everyone is packing heat, and when you have a problem, you shoot it out. While Fragile Snowflakes are poisonously and Irrationally asking not to be shot in school.
These are very different things.
2
Constitutionalism? This is another assumption that an abstraction can be acceptable to a large enough number to have actual consequences. Imagine "original intent." That allows us to carry muskets; but the NRA dictates that no firearm is off- limits. Imagine slavery, and Justice Thomas defending it! While America was sparsely populated, whites could get on with life: the pie was big enough. It didn't matter that blacks or savages had to be exploited or extirpated in the process--it's estimated that 20 million "Indians" died in war, disease, poverty etc. Now, there is the impression of crowding, and newcomers are once more among the whipping boys. The notion that racism ever went away is wrong, wrong, wrong. The notion that "personal freedom" and states' rights were ever primarily about anything other than white supremacy is an insult to history.
2
I recommend reading an article in the Spring edition of The American Scholar by Robert Boyers in which he discusses the same theme, but in the context of the spread of “Entitlement” arguments advanced on college campuses these days. Well written and thoughtful.
Children are dying. Is the NRA agenda to allow unfettered access to guns a mistake? Is caring that parents are losing their children to this easy access to guns snowflake fragility? Is the bloodbath that continues with over 1,000,000 gun deaths since 1968 an indication that a constitutional amendment that is part of a vision “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” working out?
1
Recall the Administration of George W. With the war of choice and the relentless bottom top redistribution there was a good deal to be furious about. Yet we did not see this defensiveness on American campuses. The difference is that for all his many flaws no one seriously thought Bush was an open, explicit, aggressive racist. Trump Is. Trump makes it clear every hour of every day that he hates the majority of Americans. On New Years before he took office he tweeted an ironic Happy New Years to all the haters and losers. Mr. Brooks you know what has happened since then. Just this week Steve Bannon celebrated the rise to power of the lethal League in Italy as it calls for the mass expulsion of non-whites. At the same time CPAC invites anti-Semite La Pen to give a speech on these shores. Why are these "mobs" so scattershot aggressive? Because we live in a country rued by an authoritarian that was put into place by a minority of voters and wants to destroy us. You know all this but you remain in the Party where 80% celebrate his brutality. I have a tough time understanding these students, I have a tougher time understanding you.
1
If the speaker is a white nationalist, then there is no debate. There is no debate when someone puts their race above others. Liberals advocate tolerance, but should that include being tolerant of intolerance? I say no. Tolerance is like a peace treaty, but when the speaker is a white nationalist, they have broken the treaty, and there is no moral obligation to sit quietly and politely listen. In fact, we should do the opposite.
3
If you are trying to see things from another's point of view, I have to say that you aren't trying very hard.
2
"Mistake theorists believe that the world is complicated and most of our troubles are caused by error and incompetence, not by malice or evil intent."
At this point, if you can't see the malice and evil intent behind the actions of the WH, McConnell, and Ryan, you do not want to see them. You have decided not to see them. There's a word for that: complicit.
3
Is it lost on Mr. Brooks that in an article suggesting that students are irrational and misguided he STARTED by making fun of them with name calling? The fact that he as a supposedly wise adult would behave so immaturely undermines whatever it was he was trying to say. He essentially uses the very sorts of illegitimate debate tactics he is accusing others of.
Is it lost on Mr. Brooks that while he suggests students are only concerned with raw political power, the reality seems to be that in America it is actually Mr. Brooks’ OWN political movement that has devolved into an unprincipled, anti democratic “tribe” interested only in raw power?
Mr. Brooks even goes so far as to suggest students are somehow to blame for Donald Trump. Supposedly mature, thoughtful, responsible ADULTS like Mr. Brooks need to look in the mirror instead of preposterously trying to blame our children for our problems.
3
You can find no better locale for idiotic, crackpot and dangerous ideas than Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, London. It is also home of the most skillful heckling in the world. Daft ideas are exposed as daft ideas when loudly questioned. Young people ought to listen, then disembowel the offerings of the crackpots, not demand "safe spaces." The greatest weapon is the lampoon.
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Calling them "mobbists" disqualifies every syllable of the remaining analysis.
Whom have they lynched?
And "snowflake fragility?" They have more courage and resilience than an armchair pundit who spends little time risking anything other than unfavorable comments.
The reason for their passion, Mr. Brooks, is that your 1980's version of social justice was a convenient way to avoid social justice. You mention race and that your generation thought "curing" individual bigotry would solve the problem. Well, how did that work out? Denying the systemic sustenance of white privilege that emanated from slavery is intellectually and historically dishonest. By claiming that racism is "individual bigotry," one can say "I'm not a bigot" and wash his hands of the collective shame we should feel.
Likewise, the 1980's view justified the other end of the continuum. The wealthy were wealthy because of "individual merit." No reason to examine the rigged system if it's all a question of individual merit. It allows the privileged to believe their success and wealth are a virtue and - darn it all - if those "others" would be more virtuous they too could enjoy the fruits of their intelligent work.
Both of these intellectually dishonest legacies of the 1980's are precisely why today's young people are taking to the streets. Disadvantage is the result of systemic and systematic oppression. Advantage is the result of unexamined privilege, which Brooks has in abundance.
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Me. Brooks is wrong about essentially everything here. He is nostalgically referring back to a world that hasn't existed for some time, maybe never existed.
Today's students are not sheltered. They have grown up in the shadow of 9/11 and school shootings. Their families have suffered from the Great Recession, the loss of jobs, uncertain healthcare and multiple generation complexities.
Students are targets now. Their educational opportunities are hard won. Republicans attack work study programs, Pell grants, federal loan programs. Those most at risk of sexual assault are this age group. Racism and hate groups are on the rise. Bias against LGBT is endemic in red states.
Far right groups target campuses. They attempt to turn them into backdrops for their hate speech just like Charlottesville. Campus security costs skyrocket with these events which have zero to do with education. Some rightwing groups train their out of state protesters in how to attack students on campuses.
Students commit suicide, suffer stress, have financial hardships, and through it all pursue their educational goals. It is despicable that they are being used as the next target by the same bigots who claim religious rights to discriminate against others.
The absolute ignorance on display by the right wing including pundits show they have not stepped foot on a campus for years and neither know nor care about actual students or education.
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The student activists on the left have only adopted the strategies that Newt and his ilk used against Clinton and were institutionalized by the Tea Party. Sure they go overboard, they're kids. But, what's the excuse for McConnell, Ryan, Rush, and Fox?
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Though I respect the sum of your moderating words, I'm not sure that this strand of perspective is appropriate in the current context of events. Remember that these young adults are faced with an illegitimate Supreme Court that will cause a festering pain for decades. The word 'Tribalism' has become your 'politically correct' hot button word. David, please try to find a more endearing word, and conceptual framework, that reflects this legitimate generational and existential struggle.
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If I wanted to understand someone, I think I would talk with them directly. Ask questions, have a conversation.
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What I see is masses of people who inhabit a Foucauldian sense of “truth” as merely being a tool used by powerful people for retaining power, as described in the article. The irony, though, is that they have zero suspicion of the truths they subscribe to, and they’re unwilling to listen to arguments. They’re arrogant in this way. They strongly critique everyone else’s versions of truth, but never theirs. Everyone else has a “truth,” but they have Truth. Their emotional grandiosity inhibits their ability to think more clearly.
If rationality is undermined, I imagine we’ll be stuck with this kind of emotive/instinctive drama.
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How can anyone alive today believe that political conflict in America stems from "mistake theory"?!
The Republican Party enacted laws to deny the franchise to minority voters with, in the words of one judge, "surgical precision." Those laws almost certainly swung the last presidential election. Oops! Surely an unexpected side effect of COMPLETELY HONEST CONCERNS about voting fraud!
The Republican Party refused to appoint any justice nominated by a Democrat to the Supreme Court. I'm sure that was just a misunderstanding. It COULDN'T have been a naked and corrupt power grab that has already paid incredible dividends for them and is about to result in public sector unions losing most of their members and influence.
Republican statehouses gerrymandered voting districts so extraordinarily that states with near 50-50 splits in the total congressional vote somehow elect three times as man Republican congressmen as Democratic. When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw this travesty of democracy out, the Republican state leadership threatened to impeach the judges who decided against them. Plainly this conflict between pseudo-representation and the principle of "one man, one vote" is very complex and can only be resolved through "reduc[ing] passion and increase[ing] learning."
Tribal warfare is not inevitable. The Republican Party makes it happen. And why not, it gave them control of all three branches of government!
But whatever, blame students with no power whatsoever.
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This, and other writings on contemporary student protests, ignore a basic rule of college-age behavior. As always, they are brimming with self-righteousness, and are convinced that, because they are righteous, and their intentions noble, their shouting down of different views is actually noble.
Whether on the right or on the left, like all true believers they swallow dogma in one gulp, and devote themselves not only to defeating their enemies, but to rooting out heretics who might deviate from the true path of righteousness.
Eventually, most of them grow up.
I am an old white man who no longer has political representation. I stand in awe in these times and ask. Where did these people come from, then I realize they are just my grandchildren ...
Thank you Brooks for bringing the most profound comments to light I have read in a long time.
Thank you for reminding me why I love the NYTimes.
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"... snowflake fragility ..."
This is trump.
"... empathy is the essential character trait ..."
This is NOT trump, nor the republican party.
"... Progress is less about understanding and liking each other and more about smashing structures that others defend. ..."
This IS trump, and the republican party stands by and enables it.
"... If reason and deliberation are central to democracy, how on earth did Donald Trump get elected? ..."
Again, this IS trump, and the republican party stands by and enables it.
The students in this article did not vote.
"... outbreak of an ersatz religion ..."
Evangelicalism is the outbreak of a consequential ersatz religion starting with Reagan, and culminating in the outrage that is the current WH and congress.
Students don't have the time to waste on lectures by folks who have sold their souls to the AEI.
Mr Brooks, you have been for decades soft pedaling, an apologist, and defender of what has evolved into today's radical, nihilistic, and reactionary republican party.
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I googled Christina Hoff Sommers.
She belongs to AEI.
She did videos for Prager University.
Prager: believes as fact there existed a magical garden with a talking snake that conned a woman into eating a forbidden fruit thus gifting all babies forevermore with original sin, requiring believing that a human sacrifice in a remote part of the Roman empire is a ticket to another magical place heaven.
I don't know if Christina subscribes to such nonsense, but she is guilty by association. This is NOT the signature of some towering intellect. I, nor any student should waste their time with this, and universities should waste money for speaking fees for this either.
"So I’d just ask them to take two courses [on revolutions and constitutionalism]."
That's a great suggestion, but the syllabuses wouldn't be as simple as Brooks suggests.
"... they [revolutions] ALL wound up waist deep in blood."
Revolutionaries love blood. Marat, Trotsky, and Mao all use "blood" in their rhetoric.
"... the law is beautiful, living proof that we can rise above tribalism and force ..."
The law codifies tribes, such as the "United States". And capital punishment, the ultimate imposition of force, has often been condoned by the law. Indeed, treason, which is the betrayal of a tribe by a member of that tribe, has long been punishable by death.
It's a lot easier to be a mistake theorist when all of your base level Maslowian needs--for food, shelter, health care, etc.--are being met.
When they are not, when you can't see a reasonable livable economic for yourself because it seems that control of resources is concentrated in a tiny number of hands, conflict theory seems to make loads of sense.
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Isn’t this what the late Richard Rorty (my former professor, of impeccable leftist credentials) described years ago in Achieving Our Country - a tendency of some on the left “to give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice”? I wonder if Rorty would be booed now.
I read with amusement/horror some of the responses on Twitter yesterday to Bari Weiss’ piece (We’re All Fascists Now) – people who, with no apparent sense of irony, proved the point of her article with their vitriol and demands that she be fired.
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For decades, the GOP cast liberalism as a disease at best, as treason at worst. We have seen three decades of using Congress to take down Democrats. Think of the seven inquiries into "Benghazi" meant only to destroy Hillary Clinton rather than get to what actually occurred. Consider the Devin Nunes "Memo" and politicization of Russian hacking. Now add the GOP's denial of science - from evolution to climate change - attacks on abortion choice, pollution control, banking regulation, and funding for education, poverty programs and healthcare.
As to the law, the GOP is the party that took unto themselves the "Impeach Earl Warren!" crowd with their Southern Strategy, Cliven Bundy's armed resistance to the federal government, and has spread the availability of ever-more-lethal weaponry.
Shutting down speakers is a nasty thing to do.
But at what point does the Republican party have to take some responsibility for poisoning polite discussion?
Where was the concern for Ann Coulter's book, "Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism"? The hatred spewed daily by the talk radio crowd?
How long would you expect courtesy to be offered by "students" when they get none in return...and live with "lock down" drills as the GOP sits idly by?
Courtesy is only possible as a two way street. There is, candidly, no traffic from the GOP and hasn't been for a decade.
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The idea that an individual's "reasoning" is separate from his "perspective" does not make much sense.
Nicely reasoned, helpful article. Thanks.
Based solely on this and Bari Weiss' op-ed, you'd think there were mobs of Maoist death squads terrorizing the nation's universities. This is just false. I'm a professor, and while I've seen a few overzealous (sophomoric, even) 19-year-olds make silly claims, I've seen nothing close to "mobs." Brooks offers no proof than his usual gut problems, which he really ought to see his doctor about at this point.
Reason hasn't ceased to matter, either. I still deduct points from my students' papers for logical errors, and I have yet to go through my first self-criticism session. Nor have "individual reason and emotion" given way to "perspectivism," but we do acknowledge that individuals don't exist in a vacuum but are determined in part by race, class, and gender.
What did change from Brooks' Reaganite halcyon days is that many (not just) young people have come since 2008, Ferguson, and Trump to see that "structural economic structures" matter, and that effecting change is about changing those structures, not just "liking each other."
As for alleged "mobs," Brooks makes the same slander against students as Breitbart, couched in a feigned "empathy" that lets him claim a Burkean superiority to the undergrad sans-culottes. In fact, it's the right that targets campuses: see death threats against Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the "Campus Watch," and the murder of Heather Heyer. No mention of this far more troubling show of "tribalism and force" here. Are these easier on Brooks' gut?
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These kids are slowly coming to realization that life isn't as Rosie as they thought it was going to be and that will lead lives, probably, less fulfilling and successful than their parents......... and they are not happy about it.
I find it interesting that you say "if I could talk to students...". What's stopping you? It sounds like you want to talk "at" them to tell them what they should do. Maybe you should come down out if your ivory tower and actually go listen to what the students have to say. If you actually listen you might learn something and so might they.
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Student mobs shutting down speakers on campuses? The shutting down of speakers of right or left wherever they appear which is not on own turf?
The problem is rather obvious to me: The problem is that any number of people not of some establishment, bought in, coopted, safe, institution situation, which is to say not with any likelihood of having a fair, WRITTEN, in public vehicle pronouncement, are instead forced to make do with trying to speak somewhere, and when some do manage, they are cynically spoken of as just likely to incite violence, and then are prevented from even being able to speak before the public. Their final resort is I suppose to stand on a box on a street corner and exist only as cranks.
For decades it has been obvious that newspapers such as the Wash. Post and NYTimes are rigged operations with often absurdly easy to critique pieces, that the people who are allowed to write before the public are of some institution, some official political or economic or military or CIA or what have you operation, that nobody can get a word in who is not somehow bought off or coopted or committee sanctioned, leaving everybody else not to mention brave intelligent independent thinkers having to try to slide by somehow or stand up and shout or try to speak in public.
I would describe my fate as that of Hemingway's old man in Old Man and Sea. Every big fish (idea) I land never redounds to my credit/pocketbook but is coopted, leaving me with only fish skeleton for fate.
David, if universities are responsible for the tiny fraction of students who cross the line from free assembly and protest to the obstruction you choose to sensationalize, then are they not also responsible for the other 98% who do not? You claim to be a social-science informed op-ed writer, but partake of selection bias--unwittingly or not--entirely oblivious of doing so.
You would think from this overheated "stab" at understanding a position he clearly detests and does not respect that college students arrived on campus tabla rasa and were entirely unaffected by any other source of information during their four (or equally likely, six) years of coursework besides the one to two truly radical professors they are likely to engage with. No acknowledgement that K-12 education is largely nationalist indoctrination (as it is in all countries).
This dumbing down of social theory to "mistake" vs "conflict" theorists, and then creating a caricature of the latter would seem to be beneath an intellectually rigorous polemicist like Mr. Brooks--apparently not.
But, perhaps saddest of all is Brooks' utter misunderstanding of the society we live in. That in the 80's and 90's you adhered to the myths of the preceding generation is not the fault of anyone but you. "We all wanted a society in which social mobility and equal opportunity were the rule." False. All "wanted more integration and less bigotry." False. Untrue then, untrue now. Perhaps your false assumptions are the problem.
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True: ""We all wanted a society in which social mobility and equal opportunity were the rule." False." And yet we stand to confuse just ends with just means...
Ironically the illiberal approach to shutting people down is paired with a rather sparse view of social mobility and equality--whether in terms of goals or strategy to get there.
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Yes! And how about instead of taking a stab at understanding other people's point of view in a complete vaccuum, why not get out there and speak to them and ASK them (novel concept, that) what they think and why. Seriously, this column makes me want to say "if the music's too loud, you're too old." And I'm sure I'm closer to Brooks' age than that of milllenials.
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Strongly agree with MYPOV! Their last paragraph says it best, and an editor (or teacher) would have moved it to the top. I've sharpened the front end:
"Brooks misunderstands society, then and now. He claims "We all wanted a society in which social mobility and equal opportunity were the rule." False. He adds that. "all wanted more integration and less bigotry." False. Untrue then, untrue now. Perhaps your false assumptions are the problem."
David, you may have been a nice boy and thought those nice things. Strom Thurmond left the Democratic party in 1964 and became a Republican, because he opposed Civil Rights Act of 1964. Because he wanted *less* social mobility, *less* opportunity, *less* integration. People malign Richard Nixon for the "Southern Strategy", but he was dust in the bigot's wind. Ronald Reagan's dogwhistle about "state's rights" in Philadelphia, Miss. was not the nice thoughts of a nice man, nor were his "welfare queen" fables, nor G.H.W. Bush's "Willie Horton" ad.
A young person hoping to wish away the bad things of the past is an optimist or a fool. A grown adult who paints over the past he lived through is harder to excuse.
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You can pretend to consider other "perspectives" all you want, but no one is fooled, Mr. Brooks. Yes, you came of age when Reaganism was ascendant and the structures upon which equality of opportunity for those most in need were crushed beneath the arrogant weight of "trickle down" as the cynical manipulation of the commonweal in the form of voter suppression and gerrymandering became a religion to the right. Here's a perspective for you, Mr. Brooks: maybe the "conflict theorists" understand all of that was no mistake; maybe they believe in something other than the triumph of privilege and are simply out of patience. A reckoning is coming, Mr. Brooks, and you'd best be ready with something other than "theory."
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How curious that David Brooks only focuses on the student demonstrations, and ignores the fact that the speakers being protested are blatant racists advocating for racism, and are being financed by Republican Party organizations.
Apparently to Mr Brooks, racism and bigotry and the advocacy of racist positions on college campuses is perfectly acceptable. What's important is that these blatant racists be given as many platforms to spew their hatred as is humanly possible.
I stand with the students. Hate speech is unacceptable. And far from being "fragile snowflakes," as David Brooks characterizes them, these students are, in fact, courageous defenders of decency and American ideals.
I urge those students to fight on.
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Congratulations to Mr. Brooks for coining the term "structural economic structures." We always knew there had to be underlying causes to America's persistent racism - might "non-structral economic structures" be part of the solution? But stylistic inanities aside, this piece ignores historical realities in a manner consistent with the "what-me-worry?" groupthink that characterised the 1980's. Yes, that period was an anomaly well summed up in the title of Haynes Johnson's excellent book on the Reagan years, "Sleepwalking Through History." When Mr. Brooks came of age the Great Communicator had proclaimed "Morning in America" as he promised to "Make America Great Again." Now we have a sociopathic huckster making the same promise in the wreckage left by the delusional, antisocial economic ideology peddled in the 1980's. Perhaps American students have simply woken up to the brutal realities of the historical legacy left them. And, yes, Mr. Brooks, writing from a Europe in which extreme right-wing, racial nationalism gains more traction each day, there is evil, and there is malicious intent in political projects. The genocidal fascist movements of the 20th century (both brown and red) were both intentional and highly "structurally structured."
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I could tell that we were in for some more of Brooks' sermonizing about how life would be ideal if he could only instruct the youth who "combine snowflake fragility and lynch mob irrationalism." Certainly life was easier for his class when his group depended on the services of the Black maid and the Hispanic gardener and the rest of us knew our places in white suburbia.
As to Brooks' contention as that all revolutions end up awash in blood, he ignores the fact that the violence of the those revolutions only followed years of the rich and privileged asserting their rights to rule and that the masses should be happy with the crumbs tossed to them. There may be no peaceful resolution in a country unless the elected lackeys of the Koch Brothers and their ilk start to recognize the need to share some of the the wealth they gained to those upon whose backs their fortune rests.
By the way, I’m 71 years old and support the ideas of the snowflakes and mobsters like the ones who march for freedom against "the very good people" who deny them the rights to peaceful protests. I can’t march too well with my walker but I can and shall do what I can to advance these causes by working to help the masses add to their protests by registering and voting in 2018 and 2020.
1
A very solid presentation of the different ways people understand our problems.
One piece that is missing for me is who these students are. I taught for 30 years at a state university where most students were first generation college students. They were mature and serious of purpose.
I have been retired for 10 years so maybe they have changed in that time, but I can't see my students in the ones David Brooks is describing.
It doesn't take many people to drown out a speaker. What percentage of student bodies at various campuses think and feel the way David Brooks is describing? 1% or 75%?
It makes a huge difference. Because a mentally unbalanced teen kills several children does not mean that we need to change our understanding of teens in general. And if a small percent of college students are thinking and acting in the way we have seen this does not mean we need to change our understanding of college students.
I tend to think that if I went back to my teaching job I would find the students there to be the same as they were for the 30 years I taught.
Maybe we are making more of this than is called for.
1
It’s nice of Mr. Brooks to share his recommended reading list with “student mobbists”, who represent a small, powerless segment of the electorate. But I would be more interested in Brooks’ recommended readings for the so-called Freedom Caucus that now dominates Congress, dictates who gets appointed to the federal courts, colludes with white-supremacists, denies global warming, and seeks to deprive poor women of family planning.
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I would like to see the Resident take a class on constitutionalism. He clearly hasn’t a clue.
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Yes, please Mr. Brooks...what would you have McConnell and Ryan read to bring about the changes in our country that you desire? ( I won't ask about our President; he apparently does not read anything.)
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David Brooks writes, "If I could talk to the students..."
What, exactly, prevents him from talking to the students?
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As George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
It’s MItch McConnell who buried “constitutionalism” for instance by denying hearings on Merrick Garland and whose tribalist bigotry - along with the hypocritcal greed of Paul Ryan and the enormous, ignorant ego of Trump- has encouraged mobs like those in Charlottesville to amp up the polarizing displays of illogic and demonstrations of brute force. Students, including high schoolers who don’t have the vote, are responding best they can.
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Thanks, Mitch, for invoking the “Biden Rule”
and McConnell who buried the axe in bipartisanship when he made the Republican Party vow not to pass any Obama legislation.
No offense, but you can find on you tube tapes of Chuck Schumer adopting the EXACT same position regarding holding off on supreme court nominees at the end of the Bush the Younger and Dumber presidency. Exactly. the. same, almost word for word. What say you?
Like many other readers who have commented here, I grew up earlier than David Brooks, and am old enough to have taken part in the civil rights movement. Anyone who went through that was quickly disabused of the idea that if only individual minds were changed, that would be the end of the problems. Then, as now, you were forced to understand that the problems were indeed structural. It's not a matter of whether you were a "mistake" or a "conflict" theorist, or whether you were steeped in tribalism. All you needed was to keep your mind, and eyes, open to the reality around you.
David, sometimes the reality you confront is what shapes your views, not the preconceived notions you bring to that reality. It may well be that the reality of the 50s-60s was more pronounced in this regard (civil rights, Vietnam), but in any event your neat categories simply do not apply across the board, and across time, as you seem to believe.
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Great piece, and it’s funny to see all the comments that declare Mr. Brooks “right” or “wrong.” Yes, the argument simplifies reality. Any argument must do that to be readable and understandable. Still, the argument succeeds because it provokes thought and critical thinking about the issue it addresses.
For what it’s worth, I agree with Mr. Brooks’ motivation for writing the article — trying to understand violent protests against ugly speech, and broadly with the analysis — mistake versus malice, favoring mistake. My guess is that the powerful rich who seem to favor extracting more wealth and power at the expense of the rest of society reflect human norms evident throughout human history and probably before. If it’s a malicious conspiracy, it’s a conspiracy of genetic predisposition through natural selection. It’s a “conspiracy” that the American Revolution and modern European socialism show we can correct. They also show that there is no one way. If nothing else, this OpEd reminds us there are different ways to view a problem, and that diversity of perspective can be the source of solution. Rigid dogma and unwavering subjective faith never are.
2
First, we haven't been building liberal democracy for 3,000 years; it is a recent innovation, with roots in 15th century Switzerland and 17th century England. And we are not re-tribalizing, at least not here in America; here in America we're tribalizing for the first time.
It was precisely the lack of tribes, the relative equality of all men (sorry double xers) that made America different, and that made the myth of the melting pot so attractive.
But we never really were a true melting pot, and as our diversity increased to the point minority voices could no longer be ignored, tribes began to emerge. Now they are well on their way to becoming the most important factor in our politics.
So how do we prevent them from dominating our civic life? Well for one thing we could quit condemning old white men and the culture we associate ONLY with them, though its creation had nothing to do with their race.
The founding fathers wanted life, liberty and happiness for all. It's true they didn't think of their African slaves as actual humans, but we can correct that mistake while still celebrating the best of our predecessors' thinking: the "industry and frugality" Franklin prized so much, the equality under the law Lincoln died to establish, the four freedoms of FDR, and on and on. It is not 'acting white' to believe in those things. They constitute a culture available to us all.
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Mr. Brooks suggestion is a recipe for yet another group of white men jawing on about the problems with brown people and women and doing Absolutely Nothing.
We've seen this movie before. It wasn't worth the price of admission.
No popcorn, no progress.
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What a fantastic column. I’ve never made these two distinctions, but they’re so clear. And a frightening warning. However, it’s not just students who are confict theorists. The Trumpists with their wrecking ball are also tearing down institutions, but with different goals in mind.
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It was the so-called "mobbists" of the 60s who ended the Vietnam War. It was the so-called "mobbists" of the early 20th century who got labor laws passed and wrested some of the benefits from the gilded plutocrats.
Seems like no social change for the better comes about without some conservative decrying the change. Like David Brooks.
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This is a well-composed insightful opinion piece about Mobbists (who are not always students).
Hopefully, there will be a follow-up piece about what to do - once the effort to persuade Mobbists to transform themselves into better-behaved, more rational beings doesn't succeed. What then?
"Mistake theory" sounds reasonable on the face of it -- that is, moving away from simplistic "principles" that in reality are not only not simple, but conflict with each other -- "right to life," "equality before the law," "liberty," "justice," "rectifying historical discrimination," etc., and instead dealing with problems (but how do we determine what is a problem and what priority criteria we should use when confronting them).
Revolutions -- sure they were bloody and wasteful. But why did they come about? -- let's begin with those in power, those with the largest share of wealth not being willing to compromise and share a bit -- like today's tax cut for the rich -- certainly not a way to show how peaceful "normal" government can work for all.
Constitutionalism -- "equality [before the law] I sang this word as if a wedding vow; but I was so much older then I'm younger than that now."
2
Another course-- or better yet, major-- they should take is a rigorous, maybe STEM-based one where the right answer is not a matter of opinion.
I think the thing Mr. Brooks leaves out of the equation is the following. To at least some degree, the students have a different mindset in another way, as well. That is that they are a part of a community, say their University, and view a speaker being invited to speak at their University as some sort of de facto community endorsement of the views expressed by those speakers. When viewed this way, the students just don't want to be seen as endorsing these views and feel that this is being forced on them. Not necessarily a valid perspective, but I think a real one.
The analogy I see in the US government would be those who refuse to allow tax dollars to be used for, say, abortion, because they are anti-choice. These people seem to be happy to spend peoples' money who are adamantly anti-war for wars of choice, but will not abide THEIR tax dollars being spent on things they disagree with.
2
Would Brooks have call those who managed to free us from Britain "Revolutionary Mobbists"? The term as used by Brooks is perjorative and unfair, and does not take into account the rightful rage induced by a capitalist pay-for-play government that lays siege against its own constituents, putting them into hopeless economic stress through no fault of their own. Ps- I am older that Brooks. This is NOT a generational issue- it is an economic-equality issue which transcends all other issues in the end.
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That doesn't explain why some students want to suppress the speech of anyone with whom the disagree, regardless of the topic.
Have you read the Federalist Papers?
Agreed, JG. 64 year old white guy here.
The dynamics present here have existed for a long time. The movements in the 50s and 60s, for example, against racism in law, in personal behavior and hearts, and against a war that most Americans saw as unjust laid bare the fact that even then there were rampantly selfish capitalist and racist elements of power that were NOT to be reasoned with, that only understood movement-based expressions of resistance. And so today, when similar forces are at work, both of those in power who wish to stay there and in those who are confronting those elements of racism and economic power.
You are a wonderful writer with many wonderful observations. Many of those observations are, I believe, clouded by what you wish was true now or what you hoped might have been true in the past. You often times miss the darker side of America, the side that abuses its power and abuses some segments of American society, most often the vulnerable and voiceless.
Here's to unleashing their power and voices and making sure their place in our society is elevated.
1
It is too bad Brooks isn't old enough to remember the campus ferment during the Vietnam war. Then, too, students protested - sometimes violently - the presence of speakers whose (pro-war) views they found offensive. And the cooler and wiser heads of the establishment argued then that only a free exchange of ideas could lead to resolution of the issues at hand. Student "mobbism" clearly helped end our involvement in Vietnam, and it is to hoped that it can have an effect on the current resurgent racism and xenophobia. There is no such thing as "civilized debate" with a white nationalist zealot, on campus or off.
2