Lord Brooks...13 of the 15 states/D of C with the highest poverty rates are 'conservative' states consistently run into the ground by 'conservative' Republicans with tax cuts and underfunded public services drenched in Whites-R-Us-Jesus-R-Us-Guns-R-Us corn syrup.
Mississippi 21%
Louisiana 20%
New Mexico 19%
District of Columbia 19%
Kentucky 18%
West Virginia 18%
Alabama 17%
Arkansas 17%
Arizona 16%
Georgia 16%
Oklahoma 16%
Tennessee 16%
Texas 16%
North Carolina 15%
South Carolina 15%
Now those same Republican lunatics who destroyed civilization in Republistan are ascendant in Washington, briskly swinging their wrecking balls to destroy good government, the common good and American civilization.
https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=17826#Pa45505d91b4741b19175d93...
Some of their 'conservative' ideas are:
1. bankrupting state and national treasuries in order to paint the toenails of the rich in gold
2. eliminating environmental safeguards
3. denying science
4. denying sex education and contraception
5. denying citizens the right to vote
6. tucking a gun under every pillow
7. abandoning national infrastructure
8. abandoning mass transit
9. Maintaining the greatest healthcare rip-off in the world
10. White spite
11. Tax cuts are the answer to every problem
There is no conservative renaissance, David.
There is only moral, intellectual and economic bankruptcy, hypocrisy and the heartfelt conviction that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
945
I wish David Brooks could see that his piece is so vague it can mean anything to anybody. By contrast, Socrates gives us 11 realities on the ground that can be acknowledged as objectively true and worthy of critical discussion. Brooks gives us hopeful-sounding images that apparently are intended to reassure us in a depressing time. I prefer the pragmatism of Socrates as he shows us there really is a there, there.
126
Socrates, reality for the GOP is what they decide it is. Therefore since they don't believe in science unless the facts agree with their predetermined ideas, science isn't part of reality. Only white males are real citizens in their reality. If you aren't a white male (and rich although they will tolerate you if you aren't) you are not a citizen. If you are a female you need the harsh hand and foot of the government digging into your back to keep you where you belong: barefoot, pregnant and cooking the meals for the white male in your life.
They are originalists when it comes to the Constitution. Never mind that a good many of them wouldn't be in office if things hadn't changed. They want to take us back to the late 18th century where they wouldn't survive a minute. 18th century realities were a high probability of death from infections, childbirth, or some other problem we can handle today. There was no Twitter or Fox News. You couldn't vote unless you owned land. Your neighbors were your social safety net. And, unlike today, everyone knew everyone else because they had to. Therefore, also unlike today, people were tolerant of differences. It was necessary to survive. And guns weren't used to massacre people. But don't tell the GOP that. It'd destroy their romantic vision of life in the late 18th century.
62
Dear Socrates,
All of the points in your letter could have been made in a tone and voice that was more suited towards public debate. Brooks and others have written extensively about the way the internet encourages ever more divisive rhetoric to appeal to readers. The NYT takes for granted a reputation for having more discerning readers and commentators than other online news outlets. Liberals can help our society more by making the same impassioned, fact-based arguments in a way that is more directed to bringing people together rather than merely using an argument to demonize. We can do it! In terms of persuading others (if that is the point) it is at least as important as pointing out the problems in contemporary Republican political agendas.
17
“Between 1860 and 1900 alone, America’s population doubled and its wealth grew fivefold.”
Slavery, genocide and “free” land do wonders for a nation’s economic growth.
24
What's wrong with tribalism? It's what makes us hairless upright apes rather than the other kind. Morality is tribalism extended to the human race (all men are brothers, blah, blah, blah). So are "liberalism" and "conservatism."
David. Are you aware of what is happening in America right now. Forget the salon. Open your eyes. Observe. Then write.
10
David Brooks, the rightwing guy who really wants to be a socialist. I don't have any problem with that. I just don't know why Brooks still pretends he's a Republican, when nothing he espouses matches up with how Republicans are today.
5
Renaissance? Seriously, DB? The essential component of a Renaissance is humanism. I'll loan you a lantern so you can go out and look for some humanists in your coterie of "intellectuals."
9
For any talk about rebirth we need a death. The right wing in this country needs to go down in flames before we sift through the ashes to see if we can find anything worthwhile.
10
A renaissance --- if like a crab, you could go backward, all the way to "travaille, famille, patrie."
I think everyone understands why Brooks wishes to carry on about great thinkers like Locke, Rousseau, and Jonah Goldberg. The Right has never had a stronger hold here on the apparatus of the state. But you have to squint pretty hard to see the blaze of triumph in the smoking rubble. Better to look up to the heavens and imagine the glory prevailing up there.
5
Brooks again pretends that the Republican party is in some way associated with some nebulous "liberal project". That the political/economic order that led to 150 years of economic growth prior to 1970 is in any way related to the policies he and the Republican party champion today.
In his own way, Brooks is even worse than Ryan. He is the smooth talking used car salesman talking up the smooth transmission that is full of sawdust.
He is the carny talking up the freak show his party has become.
An everglades guide extolling the swamp his party has created. It is not the D.C. swamp, it is the GOP swamp.
Intellectual creativity on the right?
No. The same tired old lies with better spelling, grammar, and the occasional new metaphor.
8
Well, Mr. Brooks, your quote of "for eons we were semi hairless upright apes" will not find favor with a lot of the right wing "Christians" your Republican party has been courting for the last 40 years. That quote seems to acknowledge that humans (gasp) evolved from apelike creatures. You must have forgotten that the earth is only about 6000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans co-existed.
6
My basic issue with conservatism is how can a "modern" political philosophy cum party whose emphasis and inspiration is the past and whose aspiration is to return to or recreate that past lead anyone, much less a nation, into the future.
The “godfather” of modern conservatism William F. Buckley, Jr., in his mission statement in the first issue of “National Review (1955), clearly stated that his mandate was to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop.”.
Buckley succeeded. Nothing has changed in conservatism since then.
4
Identity politics is tribalism? Nope. Identity politics is what white people like Brooks and Goldberg cry when people ask to be treated equally, to take the place in society that the "Miracle" promised them. It's the rallying cry of the upper class, and their new dogwhistle.
13
How many times have we read this same column by the center-right columnists in these pages? "Yes, we on the right have just gone through a rough patch intellectually, but I'm here to report that we've turned the corner!" First it was supposed to be Ryan, then the reformicons, now we are introduced to a new batch of "young writers." These columns are mixtures of wishful thinking and bothsiderism. I am not holding my breath.
6
There's no "Renaissance on the Right." Brooks wants us to ignore the precipitous fall of the entire Republican Party into the Dark Ages.
From today's Times: "A major donor with close ties to the White House resigned on Friday as deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee after the revelation that he had agreed to pay $1.6 million to a former Playboy model who became pregnant during an affair. The deal was arranged by President Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen."
And: "President Trump phoned his longtime confidant, Michael D. Cohen, to "check in" on Friday as...Federal agents in New York were looking for information about Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who claims she had a nearly yearlong affair with Mr. Trump shortly after the birth of his youngest son in 2006. American Media Inc., which owns the National Enquirer, paid Ms. McDougal $150,000. The chief executive of America Media Inc. is a friend of Mr. Trump’s."
And: "This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values, Mr. Comey writes... his service to Mr. Trump recalled…the days when he investigated the mob in New York. "The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth."
You're reaping what you've sown Brooks. How about some contrition for a change?
5
To say the current Trumpism is caused by the liberals is a hypocritical assertion. Trump dominates the Republican because GOP leadership is no where to be found. Where are Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnel when they are needed most? Let us not try to be an apologist for the Republican Party. They betrayed the American nation.
4
But all the political turmoil is creating a burst of intellectual creativity on the right.
Really? All I read was a lot of sanctimonious clap trap.
5
Liberal individualism???? What the.....? Is this ideology a la carte or some sort of cynical semantical thing? I thought the right was all about individualism, and the right of the individual to play Darwin in the market place.
Now all of a sudden I'm told, no we were just fooling. Paul Ryan is out the door. Now we are talking the talking points of Herbert Marcuse for our own.
This just getting too silly, and way waaaaaaay too abstract.
3
When Jonah Goldberg actually becomes an enlightened "conservative," he will honestly write about WHO created the forces and WHY they did that forced Americans "backwards" into the so-called "identity politics" tribes you are ranting about, Mr. Brooks. Until then, it's all just yada yada yada...
1
I think dismissing seeking social justice as an aspect of tribalism is dismissive of an actual social ill that should be corrected. "Black Lives Matter", after all, is not an exclusive statement.
3
What’s the “Right?” I don’t know anymore. Maybe it’s time to let people to think and express themselves “label-free.” That’s a Renaissance.
2
naive. not a chance. trump has hijacked the party - lock-stock-and barrel, as they say.
there is no room for any other voices. look at his appointments. his white house press conferences. his policies, his rants. his tweets.
it's over until he is out of office and the sooner the better.
I loathe the condescendingly dismissive term, "identity politics," for its predictable laziness in assuming that those wanting to have an equal place at the table are tribalist in nature. When there's equality, there won't be a need for "identity politics." In the meantime, we'll have privileged authors like Brooks and Goldberg tut-tutting about the methodology of those who don't experience equality in their quest to redress that wrong. My God, the epic blindspot this guy walks around with.
7
On a day when the President’s lawyer is in court facing imminent criminal charges, the President himself is tweeting vulgar slander against a former FBI Director and other Justice Department officials, AND launching illegal airstrikes against Syria...
... Professor Brooks delivers a lecture on a Lockean revival in conservative thought and takes a swipe at “identity politics.”
Is this satire or self-parody?
4
To see the falseness of Brook's false equivalence of supposed "identity politics" of the left and right, one need to look no further at the racial and ethnic make-up of the Democratic Party, and then look at the Republican Party. One party actually looks like the population of United States. The other party looks like a white nationalist's fantasy.
4
White supremacy;neo-nazis; bragging about assaulting women; decreasing health care support and education; militarized police; silence on overt corruption -
a "renaissance" like 1932 Germany.
4
Apparently you discovered the term "identity politics" last year when you read the book by Mark Lilla.Nether you nor Lilla realize that the phenomenon is much more prevalent on the right:segregation ,abortion,the flag,all military interventions,the 2nd amendment,anti- immigration,against deficit spending,trickledown economics,the literal interpretation of the bible,climate change denial, etc. etc. You can decide for yourself ,Mr Brooks,whether or not the above positions have a much a more serious impact on our society than a smattering of demonstrations at small ivy league colleges do.Somehow I'm guessing that you threw that silly sentence into your column in order to bait the rest of us.
The Right has had no reawakening. They are still stuck in the 50's.
2
Wow. So "identity politics" on the left - borne of historic and ongoing - racial, gender, socioeconomic, etc. oppression - is equivalent to Trumpian populism? So. Misses. The. Boat.
David forecasts the future of the United States in this column. Progressivism will go out of style and become the next abandoned castle lost in some piney woods occupied only by squirrels.
The true meaning of America will become clearer and clearer as those coming here who are curious about unfiltered news should Google these names and read the info where THEY work, and ditch the next installment of Why We Hate America at the coastal press.
The Democratic party got away from representing the middle class and instead focused on the rights of groups like illegal immigrants, transgender rights in the military, women's rights, etcetera. This happened at the same time that the middle class was disintegrating because of the rise of Reaganism. Democrats may need to get back to the Truman liberalism of representing the whole middle class. Bill Clinton seemed to have the right idea.
I really doubt Mr. Brook's notion that any Republicans in power, or hoping to be soon, are bound by a shared understanding of our history or anything else. Those people left the party long ago, hastened by far right or disaffected poor white voters they did not know existed. Trump Republicans won by reinforcing these voters' worst instincts and lying about making it all go away. Neither Republican nor Democrat leaders focus on these issues with programs on job training, fair housing, economic stimulus in growth areas (like clean energy vs fossil fuel). Mr. Brooks' intellectual friends may bask in their ivory towers, but the current Republican party is almost totally anti-intellectual and out of touch with problem solving. Their lack of courage and principled action will soon sweep them out of office. I hope the Democrats have some plans to address our pressing domestic issues.
If there is a 'conservative renassiance' then it's limited to the halls of academic and more obscure publications... what's evident in practice is anti-intellectual populism, with a bit of autocracy and fasicm thrown in. As Dr. Krugman points out in today's paper, even serious conservative economic thought is relegated to the back pages, never to be allowed to actually inform policy among Republicans.
Perhaps Mr. Brooks should be rallying the troops to create a new party called 'conservative,' and leave the current Republican party to the swamp creatures.
Sorry Mr. Brooks to fracture your delicate and shallow fantasy. But politics is about the possession of power as a bottom line. And power issues strictly from voters (or the suppression of). Fresh conservative ideas will inevitably be constricted by the need to win elections, which will be subordinate to the base ideas that have long sustained the unpopularity of conservative fundamentals, which the majority rejects. Fear- be it war, xenophobia, racism, class warfare through stereotyping of lower classes as criminal- is inevitably the electoral bell cow conservatism.
Frankly, what I find most irritating about Mr. Brooks is his insistence that any selfishness in his own party is a result of liberalism and its excesses filtering over and corrupting the self-restraint of the good ol' fashioned Republican party. For the party of personal responsibility, they sure do like to blame the left-wing for their own failings.
When white slave owners raped enslaved women, Mr. Brooks, they weren't indulging in liberal sexual politics. They were exercising their power. Does it really not occur to the right that the flaws of today's Republicans are driven by the same impulses of unbridled power, which the liberals are constantly fighting to mitigate with the principle of basic human dignity?
2
Before liberals and conservatives can ever hope to reconcile, we must first all agree that Trump must be removed from office. Being a conservative is defensible; being a Trump supporter is not.
1
No, David, "communitarians" will not remove the stain to the United States, common decency and truth that is this Republican Party. Until you call out the right wing monster that has emerged over the last three decades and more, and stop offering any hint of false equivalence between views (as if there really are "sides" any more), you're simply adding a patina of respectability to Trump and all that support him.
David-
So, this intellectual renaissance of yours. The last time you guys on the right had an intellectual renaissance it was inspired by Ayn Rand. Are your "young, fresh writers" any better this time around?
Not that it matters. The idea that today's Republicans care about political philosophy is laughable. Since Trump came on the scene they've dumped the values, like personal morality and fiscal responsibility, that they claimed were fundamental to being Republican.
What's left are two guiding principles that cover everthing.
(1) Make the rich richer.
(2) Get re-elected.
All else is a waste of time better spent on the golf course.
1
I like David Brooks. He seems like a nice, well-intentioned guy. And here he argues from the standpoint of an intellectual sympathetic with Conservatism, his trademark stance. But as an intellectual, I think he misses the point: the thugs, toadies and operatives who populate the Trump administration have as their trademark the ambition to pull down the whole humane legacy of the New Deal, refocusing the role of government on magnifying the profits of their wealthy patrons, ensuring their own jobs, and their reelection.
The objective of those now in power is not doing good for the greatest number of their fellow citizens, nor are they interested in making real the spirit of the Constitution. No, they've won: now they get to scatter the steadfast bureaucrats, bring down the institutions, undo the protections, make the losers lives solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
They've won: everybody get out of the way. You who are not wealthy, you who whine about fairness, representation, humanity, principle, you didn't win, shut up, accept defeat. And the "winners" position themselves to take part in the coming Conservative Rapture. Zero sum: we won, it was never about idealism. or kindness, or love for our fellow man.
Renaissances are rebirths, David. I really don't care who won the election; but I expected humanity. I would welcome it from the left or the from theright. Instead we are attending the funeral of the America we believed in.
2
Jonah Goldberg has been part of the problem with his divisive comments and ideas. His basic attitudes and philosophy fails to recognize the value of helping each other in a community of any kind. He promotes aggressive competition instead.
Mr. Brooks says "The core problem today is not tribalism. It’s excessive individualism..." But which is the party of more individualism? The one that wants more individual gun rights, more individual rights to degrade the environment....I could go on for probably another thousand words here explaining how it is the Republicans who favor more individualism. And which party wants more community - like looking out for those who fall behind in our economic system [which seems to be fixed to help the powerful exploit the poor], a health care system where we are all in it together, healthy and sick, - - -etc., etc., etc., again. So recognizing that excessive individualism is the problem, you will become a Democrat, of course, Mr. Brooks? Or have you so invested your identity in the Republican tribe, nothing will get you to leave it?
Let's hear it for the communitarians! They made--and make-- America great. The selfishness that is so pervasive today is eating away at our true identity. Read Woodard's "American Character" which offers a good explanation of who we are as a people, warts and all.
1
Locke and friends say that we should judge people individually. Tribalists on the right and the left say we should judge people by their group loyalties.
How about "Judge not, lest ye be judged?" What about the Christian, and Kantian, and Millian, idea that everyone matters?
1
A great vocabulary, a large library, and a big dose of elitism allow Mr Brooks to pontificate about the revitalisation of the Republican party. Note that while such a great transformation occurs, the leaders and members of that parts pursue war on 3 continents, racial purging, the relegation of women to the role of womb-provider, and the extraction of whatever wealth exists NOT in the pockets of the Republicans and their very wealthy enablers into the pockets of said Republicans and enablers. I appreciate most of Mr Brooks comments, but this column is below his usual effort and intellect.
1
I view the Right and the Left with a jaundiced eye of an apolitical man. They are but manifestations of Life as a permanent struggle of Good and Evil. Once one gains an upper hand, then the other, with the final result tending to a mean.
1
Mr Brooks didn't disagree with Jonah Goldberg's explanation of the use of identity politics: the left gained traction first, "but now the Trumpian right has decided to fight fire with fire."
That rationalization is not only wrong, but it also promotes "2 wrongs makes a right". Trump's identity politics is a non-stop, national shame. Trump's former strategist actually meets with far-right nationalists in Europe and says “Let Them Call You Racist … Wear it as a Badge of Honor”.
Conservative writers, like Jonah Goldberg, invent liberals-started-war stories to maintain safe spaces for Trump loyalists. Then, at the world's peril, these story-tellers ignore the opportunism that Trump and Bannon inspire in foreign authoritarians by recognizing them and egging them on.
I am hard pressed to embrace the idea that excessive zeal for an ideal--individualism--is our core problem. In fact, the Madisonian vision of competing factionalism presumed that it would work only persons pressed their case in moderation. No, I think what is ripping our country apart is mendacity: unchecked, rampant, and obscene. And, I think, in this regard the originary force of our culture of political mendacity lies with the right. We have no reason to fear nationalism or free-trade, of individualism or communitarianism. Ideas, pressed into service by good persons will work themselves into meaningful balance. No ideas survive in a culture of rampant mendacity. What Trump has demonstrated is that the culture of the lie knows no idea, no ideals. It is the force of unadulterated corruption. That is the lesson of neither Locke nor Rousseau. That is uncut Kant.
1
I don't believe that the left engaged in identity politics. The call for equal rights by left leaning politicians was labelled by opponents as identity politics. It was just the opposite.
If there is a "renaissance on the right" why do they want us to return to feudalism?
1
That really is a different concept of conservatism than many or most self-described conservatives seem to express. For decades, conservatives have praised Ayn Rand and argued that individual wealth and property is fairly earned, and they have accused liberals of leaning towards communism, redistribution of wealth to the group and so forth. I wonder if there are any democratic representatives who actually match Brooks' version of liberal.
1
May we, at long last, have an end to the charge of "identity politics", Mr. Brooks? Societies have always been divided into identifiable groups, whether they be African-Americans here, Russian speakers in Ukraine or Kurds in Northern Iraq.
We could prefer it to be otherwise! But preference won't make it so. And because identities can't be "preferred away", there will always be those who champion the minority segments of any society, because minorities need champions.
The GOP dislikes "identity politics" as a thin veil of dislike for any but a homogenous society over which they exert control. And in that, do not they themselves indulge in identity politics on behalf of the majority?
2
Any renaissance on the Right will not be voluntary. If it happens at all, it will be enforced by crushing electoral defeats and years in the politcal wilderness.
2
I'm a liberal progressive that believes in accountability. Some worship money. Some worship God or blend in with the congregation while pretending to. My currency is liberty and my religion is truth and justice while caring for those that don't have the power or wherewithal to defend themselves. Either I'm missing something or Brooks is.
2
The problem is excessive corporatism and increasing economic inequality, not excessive individualism. Who benefited most from so-called tax reform, the "crowning achievement" of Mr. Brooks' party? Who benefits most from the continuing degradation of the planet? Corporations, one percenters and oligarchs, that's who. And who will pay the bill? Everyone else for generations to come. We're paying it now.
1
American Conservatism is dying because we have outgrown its message.
Goldberg is trying to keep the same individualistic libertarian ideal alive, but it deserves to die.
Brooks is on a better track with his appeal to "communitarianism".
Behavioral economics is demonstrating that all of us "individuals" are really pretty similar and that we'll all tend to perform similarly if provided with similar inputs.
The next debate in our political evolution should be about how to shape and support our physical, economic and cultural environments to ensure that the maximum number of us citizens are exposed to the the most supportive environmental impacts and opportunities.
1
Great to see this covered. The left is often cited as the main group of identity politics when the right is guilty too. One can hope as a new generation comes forth, conservatives can put forth ideas that better represent rather then having our ideas represented like that one week Atlantic writer.
1
Thank you for recognizing that "identity politics" includes straight, white, Christian, males. Too often the term is used as an epithet directed at the political left so that the right can imagine itself as unmarked or unmarred by identity.
2
Perhaps increasing wealth caused the possibility of individualism, allowing win win situations. With static wealth, if I gain someone else looses. Economics may have done more for Locke than Locke did for economics.
I have to ask, Mr. Brooks, which is the party of "excessive individualism" evidenced by their embrace of Ayn Rand, supply side economics, fiscal policies that enhance economic inequality, deification of wealth and privilege, and destruction of institutions that empower groups like unions or the other one which promotes inclusivity, equality, shared sacrifice and caring for the less fortunate and ponder a guess whether the former will change
8
Renaissance on the right: Have a retreat, say "mea culpa," and get back to the business of tax cuts for the wealthy and blaming the left for the deficit. What I mean is: why bother with scholarship? We all know it will come back to supply-side Laffer curves.
6
Excellent talking point David, but not much more than that I believe. What is missing is a deeper examination of the failings of government and the family in their moral responsibilities to the many individuals that do not fit the mean, and who have found in desperation some sense of belonging and empowerment within their tribe. These tribal responses can be good for everyone ie; the civil rights movement or feminism or gay rights. But you're right in that taken to its apparent extremes, it can undo the fundamental agreements that are necessary for democracy to function. Individualism, family and good government can co-exist but we need moral and inclusive leadership. Something currently nonexistent.
1
Brooks writes of 'our common future' & the negative effects of individualism.Views of a 'common future' are based on common shared experiences that build ties and some degree of appreciation, acceptance, and tolerance among people of differing social, cultural, economic, and geographical backgrounds. The conservative establishment-intellectuals, politicians, big donors- proposed and supported policies and actions, often in the name of 'individual choice' which severely weakened or eliminated our binding shared experiences.
1The military draft-an experience at a still formative age that required at least some understanding and trust-you life could depend on it-of others of completely different backgrounds and views
2Public schools-daylong exposure and interaction with a non-selected more or less diverse group. Now neglected/disincentivized vs. private schools in the name of individual choice. US DEPT of ED NCES 2017-073: NY State 1939 private schools, 461,297 pupils.
3.Medicare-once a unitary program (a Buick for all) with broad public support; now sliced and diced in the name of choice offering care from Yugos to Merecedes depending on cost. You take care of yourself and not worry about who has the Yugo.
4.Income taxes-once similar incomes were taxed at the same rate. Now tax ENTITLEMENTS for capital gains income, carried interest income, Caribbean sheltered income.
Mr.Brooks never proposes institutional change except less regulation, only change of heart.
1
Not to state the obvious (as said by others) - but the entire thesis David lays out isn't the "American" story. Historically, it's the White - and Male - American story. The idea that America was pluralistic from its inception writes blacks, Native Americans, and immigrants out of that story. Trumpeting American economic growth between 1800 and 1900 without acknowledging a wage and labor system built on racial oppression is the height of blindness. So, when David talks about our "rationalist constitution" (built on slavery) or our shared national faith / community, it defines that as a "white" story. Blacks weren't allowed to be part of that tale until the 1960s (and are still often excluded).
The entire reason "identity politics" exists is because we have yet to actually reconcile that history - or admit that that history continues to play a dispositive role. It isn't tribalism or "identity politics" to note the radical racial injustices within the criminal justice system, or the biases within workplaces, or the whole host of other ways race (a founding variable of America) plays out in society today. Paradoxically, "identity politics" aims to remedy that by naming that bias - and noting that it is practiced at the group level. By remedying it for the group, you create the conditions where individual merit can shine in the first place.
Put more simply - it's awfully easy to argue for either individual merit or some degree of singular community if you're white.
7
The only manifestations of individualism that are corrosive to our culture and government are the myth of the self-made man and the measure of a man's worth in dollars, not virtue. Republicans since Reagan have had nothing to say but "You're on your own" (except when it comes to businesses who insist they can't profit and grow without deregulation, tax cuts, subsidies and protection from consumer lawsuits and foreign competition.) They may preach about the necessity of marriage and strong families but do nothing to make it easier for two working parents to nurture, instruct and protect their children. Will the young, new "thinkers" on the right examine these conservative dogmas and actions that are, in fact, weakening our social fabric?
3
Brooks States that
"Gratitude is too weak a glue to hold a diverse nation together."
If that si true, let the nation fall apart.
Without comprehending that Gratitude , there is no way to be exist in teh world, And if that glue is too weak, be ready for something other than America.
1
In "value-speak," an emphasis on "rights" can be highly individualistic and create conflict between the one who asserts her "rights" and the rest of us whose duty is to fulfill those rights. Human community declines because asserting a right is an almost accusatory move against someone or some group. When transgender citizens "sue" in court for the right to use the bathroom of their choice, that means I lose my right to have the privacy of my traditional understanding of the proper gender for the bathroom protected. Rights can be incessantly conflictual and in some ways identity politics exacerbates the problem. If one's focus shifts toward the "good" for others and for ourselves, recognizing that your good may be highly individualistic and not embedded in a legal right, the question becomes "how can we achieve your good and eliminate (or minimize) the possibility of conflict. The "good" is not excessively individualistic.Lastly, communities which commit themselves to "love" such as family, seek the highest good for the others no matter what. Our democratic, liberal culture based on your right to be with your own kind, has not encouraged this. We segregate schools, housing, and whatever we can to stay apart. That destroys the community we desperately long to have.
1
As long as the Republican party - or any party - runs its operations with massive, unprecedented, unsustainable levels of red ink - there will be no pain free solution to our political problems. We are Greece in the making. Our quickly mounting problems are fiscal, and in turn tribal. In the end, democracy is still a fight for resources and money. 'The People' are not winning. The 1% crowd rules. So, we're back to Louis the 14th. When does the head of this beast roll on the ground? Not if, when...?
2
Yes, Mr. Brooks, on the right there is a move toward tribalism, if only as a reaction to libertarianism. Everyone who doesn't think like "conservatives" is in the out-group, as are all people who have other religions or whose skin color is not white enough.
The left, on the other hand, while in flux, is more inclusive. We welcome our brethren who look or pray differently from us. We seek dialogue and support among ourselves. Our "tribe" is multicolored, multilingual and multi-creed. We see the strength in the melting pot of America, where most of our ancestors came to be free. Those of us whose ancestors were slaves strive for dignity and the same freedom as the white conservatives have, but with more understanding.
Me, I stand somewhat in the middle, with my white skin, but Jewish background, while my grandsons are dark-skinned due to their mother being East-Indian. Perhaps when our skin colors meld into one, we will understand.
3
I think he's just saying there is gray area, a middle ground where we take the best ideas and benefits of both philosophies for the overall well-being of humanity.
Somebody needs to show me a communitarian on the right. If renewal is to come from communitarians on every side agreeing to improve relationships one needs some common thread that might be pulled together. I just don't see "conservatives" at least as they define themselves these days doing anything like that. Mostly they pose as reflexive antagonists to anything that smells of the "progressive." Both categories are probably fraught. But the progressives I dwell among are willing listeners to anyone who's for preserving things of value to the culture. There may be conservatives who really believe in conservation. But I don't see them. I see science deniers and reactionaries trying to beat back the waves of change that flow no matter what we think or want.
5
"But about 300 years ago something that he calls “the Miracle” happened. It was a shift in attitude. "
No, it was not attitude. Or the philosophy John Locke quoted by the tendentious Jonah Goldberg.
It was the invention of the steam engine which was the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. Slaves, serfs, and share croppers became much less important because there were more efficient ways to create wealth. Hence, there was a gradual lessening of the importance of identity in society. The English Dissenters put their faith in god, science, and industry.
Now we have evolved to a postindustrial society. The means of production has changed, and with it the infrastructure with which to distribute wealth. We see wealth inequality, and not enough good, solid work to satisfy the soul, particularly among men.
Hence, we have seen a reversion to tribalism. People are scared. They desire consumer goods but not the means to obtain all they want. Thus, they blame others who are different.
"When people are naked and alone they revert to tribe. Tribalism is the end product of excessive individualism."
And hoi polloi feel like atomistic individuals when there are no factories or unions, and not enough good jobs in general.
It's the economy, David. And the nature of the economy is the means of production.
4
The sociologist Peter Berger said that a case could be made that the biblical Abraham leaving home and tribe was the beginning of individualism. His definition of modernism was choice, having a choice. The tension between the individual and the group is at least as old as the Abraham story but modernity has put a thumb, maybe a whole hand, on the side of individualism. Even now the tension is still there in the lives of ordinary people.
1
By your logic the youngest freshest voice of all must be our president, since he somehow intuited that the values of the small "l" liberal order were up for grabs even before Mollie Hemingway et al knew it.
1
David Brooks talks about a "renaissance on the right" embodied in the work of certain fresh new writers. But the writing he highlights, by Jonah Goldberg, is simplistic in the extreme. "Eons" of human prehistory are reduced to comic-book characterizations, while all of our subsequent history is said to culminate in a "Miracle" that happened "about 300 years ago." A single miracle-worker, John Locke, is mentioned. From him, somehow, flowed all that is socially good in more recent times, including both democracy and capitalism as well as moral pluralism. Wow! To judge from this sample, Brooks's alleged "burst of intellectual creativity on the right" signals not so much a genuine rebirth of American conservative thought as a forlorn attempt by contemporary Republican apologists to override Trumpism with a pastiche of American progressivism. It surely won't sell, even on "the right."
5
Edmund Burke, Locke, Rosseau, the Enlightenment, Hamilton, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and ... Jonah Goldberg.
Do I need to make a point here or does that sum up the logic of this column?
4
This column is David Brooks at his smug worst, indulging in laughable, almost meaningless abstractions. And in specious, primitive, uninformed, and unsupportable speculations like: “Goldberg points out that for eons human beings were semi-hairless upright apes clumped in tribes and fighting for food.”
And making a stab at an assertion of USA exceptionalism: “And nothing had ever succeeded like America. Between 1860 and 1900 alone, America’s population doubled and its wealth grew fivefold.” Wealth accumulation in the USA in the 18th and 19th centuries and afterward has had its roots in the exotic form of tribalism known as slavery.
8
And John Locke both defended and profited from the slave trade himself. Conservatives always seem to require an imaginary golden age we must return to instead of working with all of us to create a more just and sustainable society.
5
What is this "shared national faith" you refer to?
4
Mr. Brooks has found young, fresh writers who share his faith that the right is about to regroup and spawn an intellectual Renaissance, despite the intransigence of evil left wing identity political warriors whose lust for power got us into this era of dysfunction. Perhaps he even believes that a revitalized Republican Party will then begin offering policies that will cease the systematic transfer of remaining wealth and power to those who already enjoy wealth beyond what most others in the world can imagine.
This wishful thinking is simply delusional. The kleptocracy that controls Congress and the White House must be removed before ideas about recovering a fair and functional government, whether generated by the right or the left, again have a chance to be implemented into law.
9
A burst of intellectual activity on the part of the Right would cause a farmer in despair and desperate straits, to snort in derision while making dairy products to ornate their books parties with organic sheep cheese.
The Left got holding the mess of two inherited wars and a Recession to send some writers of intellect and artists to the garret en permanence.
The last dinner at a restaurant in 2008 was a family affair celebrating the 95th birthday of one of America's first women abstract artists who came from Nice before the Majority was born. It was noted that the Rich would not be purchasing a Botticelli in the near future in view of the Economic Collapse.
The Right has been in a decline ever since in states of fragmentation, and the Left has been as tough as Florence Nightingale in urging it to show some spine. Crippled by Trump, the Right is dragging along on the arm of the Left, but brightened up on hearing of a Renaissance on paper.
Surrounded by industrious Americans here who are beginning to turn Left, because nothing seems inspiring from the Right, and it took a few good Americans to save an historical museum with the sale of Norman Rockwell paintings.
Our Community-Spirit is what keeps us united in the face of misty political weather, and we welcome artists, artisans and writers to join in rebuilding our heritage and future.
2
Science and technology played as big a role in the Miracle as did political philosophy.
2
You are so out of touch with how history and philosophy are taught at universities it is pathetic. How can you, in 2018, push back on calls for social justice for women, African Americans and other groups, which you insultingly call "identity politics"? Take a close look at your conservative bedfellows and what they are really defending when they talk about their "values." More often than not they are justifying a status quo that is deeply unfair, literally deadly to vulnerable populations, and blind to the environmental catastrophes facing all of us.
13
"Between 1860 and 1900 alone America's population doubled and its wealth increased five fold". Immigration and industrialization caused this to happen.
Isn't it too bad that American have forgotten how important Immigration is to our economy. How important innovation is to our economy?
I agree with Mr. Brooks that we "need to improve our relationships on a household, local and national level".
But until we, as a nation, learn to value all who live here despite their cultures, color, gender or economic circumstances it is going to be a long road.
And so long as we let the Politicians get away with their dim views of equality, the tribalism is going to continue.
Our best hope right now are those kids from Parkland.
We should take a page from their book and hold every politician in the country accountable for the deplorable attitudes that they foster.
2
All this dimestore sophistry dressed up to sound fancy amounts to wanting to turn back the clock on civil rights. Plain and simple. It wants to impose morality, and, hmmm, let me guess: christian "morality". Ultimately, like "Trump" and his base, this "rennaissance" wants to harm certain folks.
11
Good grief, Mr. Brooks: would you blame the boys in the band for the sinking of the Titanic because they were playing at the time the ship went down?
4
Republicans have one only one motto — pampering the rich and tormenting the poor. They are the most intellectually dishonest hypocrites. I still remember Alan Greenspan advocating Bush tax cut by stating how harmful $250 billion surplus Clinton had bequeathed.
8
In macroeconomic terms the last few centuries were a “miracle” age, if that’s all one cares about. As usual, there is no mention of the horror of slavery nor the terrible conditions for those building railroads and laboring in sweatshops. This seems like a kinder, gentler version of Trump’s great America.
Similarly, the economic miracle has been sustained by ever greater consumerism. If one’s life revolves around the endless pursuit of more, it can crowd out nobler pursuits including faith and service.
I wonder at my co-religionists Brooks and Goldberg bemoaning the loss of great America. Those of us who try to be Torah observant are somewhat less likely to be sucked into consumerist America because we have to stop work for the Sabbath, we eschew the latest fashions if not suitably modest, and we teach our kids from toddler years onward that no, they can’t have a Happy Meal with a toy because it’s not kosher. You can choose individualism, but it seems hypocritical to then bemoan the consequences when others make the same choice.
3
Not a criticism of Brooks, but rather Goldberg. Him claiming "social justice warriors" started identity politics is just false. That was started a long time ago in the 1800's. Northern Republicans wanted to abolish slavery, southern democrats wanted to keep their slaves. The South believed they were the real Americans...And even before that with John Adams in the 1800's who tried to stop the immigration of the Irish and his party claiming they "don't share out ideals." Don't fool yourself, it's ALWAYS been about race and identity politics.
8
Ah, got it. Only women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Arabs, immigrants, gays, and all the folks fighting for a decent slice of the pie (and a decent grip on the levers of power)--only they practice identity politics.
Straight white men (see the Trump cabinet, the C-Suite of every major corporation, the upper ranks of every media company) don't need to practice identity politics, because they're in charge and it's their pie; and they decide who gets a slice and how big that slice is.
Every kind of American conservatism is dedicated to conserving the wealth & power of straight white men. As it has been since the nation's founding by a group of educated plutocrats who distrusted democracy, and wanted to restrict the vote to white men of property--in other words, men like themselves.
11
Both Brooks and Goldberg botch some of the details and chronology, but Brooks' conclusion is fundamentally sound. The solution to our current problems with NOT come from further individualism. It will take a reinforcing of national community to kill the tribalism the right has seized upon to tear the country apart.
3
You are delusional, Mr. Brooks. It must be nice to completely ignore that the so-called "Miracle" does not apply to most people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community.
"Goldberg writes, 'the Miracle ushered in a philosophy that says each person is to be judged and respected on account of their own merits, not the class or caste of their ancestors.'" When exactly did this miracle occur? During the Transatlantic Slave Trade, during the antebellum South, during Jim Crow, or maybe the miracle is happening now with increasing racist and ethnic attacks in this country?
Liberals did not invent identity politics, racist white people created it when they used their identity to discriminate against others. This lie keeps being repeated by the "transformational" right. And like your party leader, Trump, you are mistaken if you think that a lie oft repeated suddenly becomes true.
Identity politics, used by racist white Republicans and Democrats, have been used to create institutional structures in our country which thwart a miracle of Americans being judged by "their own merits, not the class or caste of their ancestors" from coming to fruition. Have you heard of segregation, heard of redlining, heard of employment discrimination, heard of the wage gap? These are real instances of discrimination that have been built into the structure of this country that can't be wished away or ignored but must be addressed and rectified. Sir, you are too smart to be this ignorant.
7
David, it's time to "close your eyes and tap your heels together three times. And think to yourself, 'There's no place like home'."
5
brooks is living in some alternative world where spineless attacks on humanistic thinking are somehow defined as being a "rennaissance."
5
Mr. Brooks has just penned a verbose, pseudo-intellectual essay that has already been more succinctly stated by our 'stable genius' President in a simple and simply toxic phrase: 'good people on both sides.'
No, there are not 'good people on both sides.' There are rather vile, mean-spirited, self-destructive and even evil people on one side, who live and breathe resentment, and who flex their political and financial muscle to drag the rest of us down into their vortex of fear and hatred of anyone and anything new and different.
And there are the rest of us, the vast majority of us, who simply want our elected government to help us live in a community where all are respected, all can have access to food, health care, education, housing, child care, a decent living wage, transit, clean air and water, public lands for all to enjoy (and not for plunder), an old age without fear of falling helplessly into loneliness and poverty.
What we get from 'conservatives' is an appeal to 'intellect' on par with the intellectual appeal of a prostate exam. An appeal to the childish fear of the bogeyman. Political ads depicting swarms of desperate, violent 'foreigners' racing towards us in the night, threatening to overwhelm us. Muslims, Mexicans, 'elites,' 'globalists,' gays, Jews... picture your own bogeyman, your own creature under the bed. Bullying and scapegoating on a mass scale.
That's your 'conservative renaissance'? You have got to be kidding me. That's Hitler's rise to power.
8
“You liberals are focused too much on identity. You forget the Miracle that happened 300 years ago.”
“Um, have you seen how black/LGBTQ/Asian/Hispanic/et al people got treated in the last 300 years?”
“I know, but just imagine you were a white European man over last 300 years. It’s been AMAZING.”
12
David Brooks has missed the entire point of development in society. The arrival of science and math as a predictive engine for the development of new technologies giving rise to whole new markets like airplanes, rockets, telephones, horseless carriages etc. In contrast, the money and political types are a mere sideshow in a carnival. Basic science and math will far outlast global warming, tribalism, overpopulation and all the rest of the froth commonly mistaken for our history.
3
Before a renaissance can begin, there must be a real desire for one. The Republicans have no desire for a Renaissance. What they want is a new strategy for winning elections and maintaining one-party control. It is unfettered power, all the nation’s wealth, and the control to keep the US under the Republican thumb indefinitely. That’s fascism, not a Renaissance.
Comparing the Republican platform of 2016 and the 14 characteristics of Fascism developed by Dr. Lawrence Britt is instructive. The characteristics are--Repressing human rights, nationalism, scapegoating, supremacy of the military, rigid gender roles, controlling the media, suppressing labor, disdaining the arts and intellectuals, rampant cronyism and corruption, and fraudulent elections. http://www.rense.com/general37/char.htm
This administration has hit every single characteristic with unparalleled enthusiasm. Before any Renaissance can happen, this country has to completely reject the Trump Presidency, the Republicans in Congress who follow and enable the President, and then we must reeducate the population at large what Democracy means.
The Republican Party is not positioning itself for a Renaissance. It’s positioning itself for authoritarian, permanent, one-party rule.
I and many others hope for its complete failure.
204
Thank-you for partially correcting Jonah Goldberg's rather tendentious analysis. This book is based on his former book that asserts that fascism is a heresy of liberalism and the left. In fact, fascism is neither of the left or the right. It trashes both, as we are seeing now.
The Republican party as the party of traditionalists is the logical target of a fascist revolution, as is the persecution of the left wing party. Leftists are destroyed and traditionalists are replaced by fascist operatives in such a regime. Although the fascist revolution in America and the west is only beginning, it must be countered now.
As for his analysis of human history, it is incredibly simplistic. No, tribal societies are not inferior; they are based on natural human collectives. What he calls "tribalism" is, in fact, the old racist philosophy that came to America with Europeans who could not fathom that a civilization could not result from populations that were so different from themselves. Thus, the Aztec and Inca were considered subhuman. Serfdom was based on inequality and conquest (1066) in Britain, and was
a spot on the road to a parliamentary government. Please do not write history if you have never been trained in it.
5
What these wonderful enlightened thinkers missed in their musings is how our great country was built by killing and enslaving millions of Native Americans, and when their numbers dwindled enslaved Africans. This was all done in the name of Capitalism and expansionism.
It is no wonder that we have such disunity in America now. There is a wonderful diversity of cultures and human thought in these times, but until our country faces the uncomfortable truths of our past, we won't be able to light the way into the future.
3
"Modern liberal capitalism is too souless."?????
By that do you mean, as only one example, the Republican tax cuts for millionaires, that favored business owners? How many liberal members of Congress voted for that?
Brooks once again tries to project Republican damage onto "liberals". When it comes to Brooks, projection is a confession.
4
I’m not sure what David’s point is. He talks about a “burst” of conservative intellectual activity, but, instead of laying out any evidence for his claim, focuses on an unpublished book by a partisan provocateur whose best-selling screed about “liberal fascism” totally misidentified the location of the threat: the rise of Donald Trump (and the willingness of ostensibly anti-fascist conservatives to accommodate him) proves that it was the right, not the left, that had been incubating fascist ideology all along. Conservatives, including Mr. Brooks, have so far refused to accept responsibility, and, if Jonah’s book is any indication, continue to push the myth of a liberal origin.
(Need Jonah be reminded that, a few hundred years ago, America also formally institutionalized the non-humanity of Black Americans with the three-fifths compromise? The original sin of identity politics was baked into this country’s foundation, and identity politics have been reinforced by every historical effort to deny Black Americans equal access to the opportunities promised in the Constitution.)
If conservative “intellectuals” want to center their “renaissance” on a debate about identity politics, fine. But at least be honest about it, because I guarantee that a dishonest debate, in which conservatives like Jonah pretend that they didn’t have a hand in creating any of this, will backfire stupendously.
109
Agree with you 100%. If anyone thinks tribalism results from individualism they are seeing it all backwards
5
There may no longer be widespread agreement that family, faith, and village give life meaning—or not at the price to individualism that is involved.
A fine column describing Georgetown dinner party chatter from the late-60’s. The fact on the ground, the hard truth of our daily political calamity, has nothing to do with Locke or Rousseau or even Hamilton. It is the simple fact, inescapable to anyone possessing moral indignity, that this nation has produced a chief executive with, to quote the late great Robert Hughes: “The political views of a Torquemada, the greed of a barracuda, and the vanity of an old drag queen.”
P.S. And that last is not an anti-gay comment—I still worship Divine. Hell, while I’m at it, John Waters for President! At least he’d be hilarious.
2
Let's start with the central flaw in modern American Conservatism, which Ronald Reagan formulated, when he said that "Government is the problem." This four word saying has become the central philosophy of the Republican Party. Our government is the core value that our Founding Fathers handed to through the Constitution. Our living breathing government is what holds us together as Americans. With all of our flaws and shortcomings, it is the formation of our government that has allowed us to thrive as a nation and grow to accept, over time, the realities of equality. Unless Conservatives give up this nihilistic rejection of the great value that our government plays in all of our lives, then the philosophy of the trump tribalism is all they will be left with.
Here is a simple riddle for conservatives to solve. "All Americans should have access to regular health care. And, at the same time, American healthcare should be cost competitive with the other advanced countries around the world. Wasting over a trillion dollars a year on our current system, as we are, is not a sign or symbol of freedom."
Whichever political party, or philosophy, solves this prosaic riddle will inherit the future.
3
I am so sick of this horrid term. Identity politics. It is the politics of inclusion. I am a gay man. I have been historically excluded from the American fabric. I had to fight FOR MY IDENTITY to be included. It is NOT tribal. It is those of us who are not straight or christian or white fighting to be included. The term "Identity Politics" was generated by those who do NOT want me included. It is the protectors of what I was/am being kept from.
168
Well said! It's not about politics; a complex, empowering-disempowering mutidimensional process. Which enabled US, way back THEN, to stop "gathering..." Stop "hunting" to survive, and not for fun. Enabled US to settle down. Seed, harvest, share, and live together. Not just survive, or not, alone. Within, as part of, various systems. Of types, levels and qualities of equity/inequities. Even as just surviving remains a challenge- increasingly so- for many, everywhere."Identity politics" is enabled by satiated-sayers, safe in their homes, offices and other havens, mantrafying semantic surrealism in which descriptions pose as useful and useable explanations. Which misleads! WHO I am, or am not- self as well as imposed IDENTITY does not, can not adequately predict what I do do. Or do; not do. My range of behaviors. By choice or by coercion. Self-defined religionists, of whatever persuasions, those in name only,as well as non-believers, enable daily, toxic, infectious WE-THEN violating of targeted "the other!" As the Creator did at Sodom. It would appear that what is good for G'd, is good for his creations as well.The time has long passed to identify, and delineate, the interacting dimensions of "identity-politics," its range of individual and systemic stakeholders and the conditions which enable its ongoing use to misdirect limited available and accessible energies and other resources needed to create equitable well being for ALL.Whatever one's freely- chosen identity
2
Can't agree more. Mr Brooks seems to think that "family", "community" is some sort of insurance against exclusionary politics and policy. Pretty naive
6
The fight for civil rights for gay people and today's left-wing identity politics come from very different places.
Marriage equality and the mainstream acceptance of gay people has been the greatest civil rights win in my lifetime. It came from gay Americans declaring that their sexual orientation is *irrelevant*, arguing that gay people are the same as straight people. It was a demand that gay people be judged on their character and behavior, *instead of* their identity, and appealed to commonly shared American values of fairness and kindness, and the civic need for tolerance.
Today's left-wing diversity mob is saying the exact opposite: they are declaring that we are our collective identities first and foremost, that we can know some meaningful about an individual based on race, color, gender, etc. This toxic idea is quite literally the precondition for bigotry.
5
The Republican party has sold out the right. It is deeply compromised by Russian funds. Otherwise it remains as corrupt a party of opportunists as ever.
1
Both parties need to can the identity politics and get back to economics, social welfare and advancement, and the US place in the international economy and security sphere. Many middle of the road work a day citizens just don't feel welcome by either.
Read the book of Larry Siedentop:”Inventing the Individual”,The origins of Western Liberalism.Than you will understand “the Miracle”.
“Physician, heal thyself.”
I’m so tired of GOP proclaiming it has a corner on family/family values. Given unwavering GOP support of POTUS behavior, it can no longer credibly play a values card of any kind – other than one that says “my values for me and mine.” Liberals are “soulless” and “destructive… of family, faith and village?” Grab a mirror.
POTUS is the walking definition of soulless capitalism, and GOP continues to prioritize deregulation to remove systems that provide exactly what you claim liberals need help with: producing “virtuous, self-restrained people.”
GOP has an exclusive “me and mine” view of family while the liberals you deride have an inclusive “us and ours.”
GOP doesn’t care about faith (except maybe as a weapon - it preaches but doesn’t practice, hypocritically holding non-GOP to a far higher standard while giving their own a free pass). Many atheists I know are more Christian in their daily life than many “Sunday Christians” I know who show up devoutly each Sunday morning, then flout Christ’s teachings Monday through Saturday.
And how big is the GOP village, actually? Again, it's a narrow “me and mine” (think “atomizing,” to use your misapplied label), while liberals BY DEFINITION have a far broader (more “liberal,” get it?) village – HUMANITY gets included in our village: not just those who look like us, live like us, love like us and worship (or don’t) like us.
Paragraph 3 is one of the most egregious examples of projection I have ever read.
3
Yes, when I think of modern conservative intellectualism, what I think of is meaningful engagement with Enlightenment philosophy and not barely-disguised racism that regularly "accidentally" endorses Hitlerian ideas.
In the words of the President you continue to carry water for, some very fine people indeed.
3
Mr. Brooks, you can try to convince Times readers that there's a cohort of honest, intellectual conservative thinkers ascendant, but it really doesn't matter because the Republican voter rank and file will never read it. That's the great irony of the Kevin Williamson debacle: he surely has more liberal readers than conservatives, and he has zero influence on the GOP. Your colleague Paul Krugman just made the point that the Republican Party doesn't want serious intellectuals, it wants "cranks and charlatans."
While Krugman and other liberal commentators and experts may have some influence on the Democratic Party and typical liberal voters, Stephens, Douthat, et. al. may as well be yelling into the void since the average conservative voter seems to think that Hannity and Carlson are the apotheosis of American ingenuity.
3
Brooks has yet to understand that if people are treated with equal justice and the conditions are cultivated for them to thrive, then identity groups never manifest themselves because they belong as equal members of the entirety. Stop trying to dominate, discriminate and negatively define women, nonwhites, immigrants, LGBQ, etc. and they and everyone else will see their "difference" as merely a human characteristic rather than a flaw of character.
6
Brilliant. This is spot on.
2
Again Brooks misses the point. "burst of intellectual creativity" by writers may be true, yet the same stagnant Republican creatures inhabit the halls of congress .Dream all you want Mr. Brooks, a Democratic wave is coming.
2
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
4
Sorry, I somehow missed what the "cataclysmic transformation" of the Republican Party was about. Transformation from what to what? I guess I haven't been diligent enough in keeping up with this big Renaissance of conservative thinkers. They seem outweighed by the actions of the Republican Party I see surrounding me every day. If this Party is being replaced by something better, then by all means, bring it on. But as Brooks (maybe inadvertantly) illustrates, talk is cheap.
89
David has an ongoing mantra that the left is guilty of "identity politics." He is attempting to spread the blame but his argument is faulty. Does he not see the irony in citing the so-called miracle that "each person is to be judged on account of their own merits, not the class or caste of their answers" when it has for hundreds of years applied to white males. The left is simply attempting to bring everyone else to the table. Sometimes that requires outcaste groups to join forces in that objective.
7
Interesting how the conservative disaster that is our government right now, looks like a renaissance to Mr. Brooks. Also interesting is his logic that somehow liberals and democrats are somehow responsible.
4
Sorry, Mr. Brooks, you new generation of conservatives are just as intellectually bankrupt as their predecessors. It saddens me to see that the conservative mindset still remains closed to facts and ethics.
3
The internet, cable news and social media have all created what Brooks describes as “excessive individualism”. Which is what Marx described as the snake eating its own tail.
"Renewal will come through the communitarians on the right and the left, who seek ways to improve relationships on a household, local and national level."
Add "global" at the end there, and you'd really paint the full picture.
Yet another "conservative" blaming liberals for all their woes. Especially galling is his endorsing the idea that conserviate identity politics is only a backlash to liberal identity politics. Most conservative identity political groups like the Knownothings and the KKK predate modern liberalism, so how can they be a backlash to liberalism that didn't exist yet?
8
Thanks, Mr. Brooks. We'll be looking for those virtuous and self-restrained masses. Do they exist on the right, since 'liberal individualism' can't produce them? Your stable of 'young, fresh writers' are frequently juggling the same, tired theories of the soulless conservatives of old. Different syntax. New faces.
2
" Some conservatives are laying down comprehensive critiques of the way our society is organized. Modern liberal capitalism is too soulless, they say, too atomizing, too destructive of basic institutions like family, faith and village that give life meaning. Liberal individualism doesn’t produce the sort of virtuous, self-restrained people that are required to sustain it."
I hope there is a wave of fresh young writers and thinkers, looking for a new, better way. If this is happening, it's a very positive sign.
I hope the "Trump era" is the end of the destructiveness, economic and social, we see accelerating.
The next 50 years is going to be very challenging worldwide as humans struggle to cope with the changes we've made. Will we use our collective learning and mass communication to overcome the forces of human behavior that lead to catastrophic collapse? I hope so. I have children.
We need a new wave of political thinkers and leaders who can find and implement workable solutions that benefit most of society, not a handful of winners.
<eyeroll>
Listening to conservative "intellectuals" talk amongst themselves about what sustains pluralism is like listening to fire talk with fire about saving the trees.
The central problem with conservatism is that it does not look for new ideas but instead only reshuffles old ones. Conservatives are underrepresented in academia and overrepresented in the clergy because they prefer old books over new ideas. The problem with old books is that they don't contain answers to new problems, and the great risk is that conservative "intellectuals" prefer parable to pragmatic new paradigms.
Among the parables is the equation of identity politics with tribalism. Identity politics is the politics of precision - the ability to recognize that there are some groups of people who have common problems that can be addressed by a common solution in a representative government. From "farmers" (an identity) to "business owners" to "descendants of slaves" and "immigrants", identities are concept classes that locate groups of people with common problems. The great America of 1860-1900 is no model of pluralism and identity-free politics - it was filled with "Irish" and "former-slave/negro" identities whose political needs aligned.
These "tribes/identities" always existed. The problem is not their existence, but their unification by single-issues into a correlated mob, a Republican party hiding national conservatism behind a façade of "states' rights" & regional diversity of federalism.
4
You are perpetuating the great lie I remember from the 1950s and early 60s -- America the great, the inclusive. When, in fact, it was an America when blacks couldn't be full citizens even in the north (read about Trump's record on housing in Brooklyn), restrictive practices against Jews and Catholics (see an early Mad Men episode when asked whether they had any Jews working there and the Jon Hamm character responded "Not on my watch"). In fact, in the 1990s when I was in Oklahoma City a potential client told me and my partner not to drive back to Dallas, that it was still "good ol' boy country". Said without guilt or concern, the un-PC days? This world you write about is fantasy and, in fact, let's be hones -- Trump is merely the unvarnished uncensored version of so many political leaders of that time. We know this from Nixon's tapes, can only imagine what Taft or Eisenhower said and thought behind closed doors. Truman wouldn't let a Jewish journalist interview him in his home in Missouri after he was President because his wife wouldn't let Jews into their home. It's only identity politics when minorities say enough is enough. Brooks, wake up.
8
In November 1953, after he had left the presidency, Harry Truman traveled to New York to be feted at the Jewish Theological Seminary. When his old friend Eddie Jacobson introduced him as “the man who helped create the state of Israel,” Truman responded, “What do you mean 'helped to create'
David Brooks illuminates the cognitive dissonance of the GOP.
1
I read this column with my jaw resting on my chest. Really: we have a president who is--I'm sorry, I'm not a psychiatrist, but I am someone who has reasonable common sense--erratic, bizarre, dangerous, unstable. Virtually all of Mr. Brooks' partisans in the Congress of the United States are ignoring this; in his last couple of weeks, he has pardoned two convicted traitors, and one convicted felon who arrogantly defied a court order. This is after a tax bill that blows up the deficit and the debt to proportions never before seen, despite long hand-wringing about deficits...and then blames, of all things, Social Security and Medicare, some of the most careful stewards of federal funds. And Mr. Brooks finds this current situation PROMISING, and talks about a "renaissance on the right"? Excuse me while I head to the restroom with serious nausea.
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This column is really nonsense. What “uniting faith”? What “national faith”? Mr. Brooks is using a weak rhetorical mode that assumes the consequent. The central question is: what beliefs should we share? Indeed, what is a ‘belief’? I would say that our culture is, in fact, suffering from stress induced by the use of poorly defined, hazy abstractions about which there is precisely no common ground. Invoking some completely vague and ungrounded notion of ‘national faith’ contributes exactly nothing to the solution of our problems.
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The golden egg was conquest, settler colonialism and massive genocide and slavery bringing billions to the small countries of Europe that blossomed in so many outrageous ways and wars that Adam Smith borrowed much of the monetary ideas of the Mongol Empire with it's paper money and created capitalism to stop the destruction of European indulgence caused by the flood of wealth from their rape and pillage. Locke justified grand theft from the nations of the Americas and the rape and death of her countries. Rousseau recreated the idea of childhood from his study of the Iroquois and saved Europe's children from the horrors of child labor and criminal law that classed them as little adults. Meanwhile most white folks couldn't even understand the languages of the people they were raping, pillaging and murdering so they were unclear even about their being human until the US and Andrew Jackson admitted they were human but tried to pay the Cherokees a steel pot, a plug of tobacco and a blunderbuss for land which showed that he knew less about Indians than most police today know about their black citizens. I'm really tired of having to tell my European relatives about my Indian ones. Especially since they don't even know the difference between a noun based language and a verb based one.
They should pay attention because they are about to be pillaged by the verb based languages of Asia who can work together and are capable of discrimination when it comes to enemies.
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While there is plenty of identity politics on both the left and right, and always has been, Brooks identifies the current danger of the new progressive "social justice" movement's type of identity politics:
"Earlier movements wanted America to live up to its ideals. Today’s identitarians doubt the liberal project itself."
In this new world where identity means Everything, the identity of the person expressing an idea means more than the idea itself. Ideas are not measured on their own merits, but can only be seen through the lens of racial and gender (etc.) power struggle. This is antithetical to every concept of liberalism and individual equality. It is racist and sexist to its core. It is exactly what liberalism is supposed to be against.
Alas, even science is now under assault by the "diversity" mob. As per Middlebury protesters:
“Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true ‘fact.’”
This precludes any honest disagreement. All ideas, all debate, all attempts at persuasion, can only be veiled attempts at coercion by one member of one tribe against another.
This is a terrifying but long coming development and it has been brought to us by the leftists who proclaim to be at the vanguard of liberalism, human rights and fairness, not right wingers.
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Let's stop calling it Individualism, Tribalism, Populism.
Let's call it what it really is: Racism.
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The Left’s identity politics: Live and Let Live.
The Right’s identity politics: Stop and Frisk.
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You still are dividing America into Left vs Right....as if nothing's changed since 1968...... a very narrow viewpoint of the modern world. A lot has changed......for the better.....since your 50 yr old world view crystalized. You are out of touch.
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I believe what you re trying to say, Mr. Brooks, is, "It takes a village." Wonder who coined that phrase....?
Little David mentions in intellectual or new. The idea that the institutions of the past made America great, that the towns and villages with their culture and churches held us together is yearning for the past, it is the same myth that the 1950's were universally great for everyone, when it wasn't (Trump nation down south got a lot of jobs, for example, but they paid little and were dangerous, due to no protections for labor, they were the china of the day).
The other idea, that the individual made America great and collectivism was the enemy, is nothing new either, this is the Ayn Rand/Social Darwinist idea that individuals rise and fall on their own merit, which isn't true, and among other things is an apology for the real problem we have today, that the top .5% is basically grabbing the lions share of everything and leaving misery in their path.
A true conservative renaissance would be questioning both of these and finding middle ground. Oppressive religious morality was combined with suppression of the individual, but there is something to the collective "We"; likewise the individual often is the one who challenges norms and creates, but that has to be tempered by compassion and understanding for others. The 1950's golden age of the GOP taxed the well off at high rates and that allowed for programs that helped other people, we need to return to that. The revolution would be in a tribe that recognizes the value of the individual and diversity.
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I agree with your conclusion but would go one step further. We have seen individualism as the opposing pole to tribalism. But the idealism behind the twentieth century dynamic could be seen, rather than in opposition to tribalism, rather to a broadening of the tribe to include not just all the nation, but all of humanity. And in its most enlightened, spiritual form, all of life and finally all of creation.
And by the way, that is not far from the ideal of the early Christian (universalist) church and perhaps of other such groups beyond my knowledge.
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"too soulless ... too atomizing, too destructive of basic institutions like family, faith and village..." This patronizing myth, repeated by you and other conservatives ad nauseam, is conjured out of thin air. We cherish our basic institutions as much as anyone else. We just think they should allow everyone in. If the so-called basic institutions weren't so determined to exclude newcomers (new family configurations, new faiths, new cultural villages), there would be no need for identity politics. By the way, "identity politics" is an increasingly pejorative label meant to smear and silence anyone with a shred of progressive sentiment. I'm tired of that, too.
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You're misunderstanding Brooks' description of "liberal capitalism" has having to do with partisan or left-of-center liberalism or progressivism. He's including all of us in that description, describing the entire liberal order itself, the very founding Enlightenment ideas which we've built our society and nation upon.
I found it impossible to read the article while also thinking that Mr. Brooks is talking about "conservatives" only. On the one hand is Goldberg, who seems to revere John Locke as nearly Christ-like, the philosophical deliverer of The Miracle. On the other hand, there is Mr. Brooks who says that it is in the hyper-reverence of Locke that we find ourselves in our current predicament to begin with that we have to find a way to stitch back together close knit families and communities, so we can find common cause as a nation. Well, exactly what part of Mr. Brooks' point would a liberal disagree with? American liberals have historically claimed that Lockeanism was a philosophy that even though was considered true in principal also was considered to need limitations in order to have a society that did not leave the weak or the minority behind for the sake of the powerful or the majority. Liberals, as I understood it, are for the pursuit of life, liberty and property but also remember that the concept is tempered and preceded by the fact that all people are created equal and never the other way around.
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Ha! Renaissance? More like Mortinaissance.
David Brooks reasoning is sound but truncated. Underlying what he postulates in the current polarizations is the root cause driving this psychic split on Left vs Right, massive Fear.
Fear destroys reason and it is a monster fed by a terribly fragmented means of communication. FB, YouTube, Redditt, 4Chan, Twitter as well as the myriad pundits that inhabit the ether of the god like Internet are drowning put the more carefully reasoned "old fashioned" sources of information about the world we live in.
Far too many of us never learned how to develop and use critical thinking based on multiple sources that must ultimately require us to READ widely and include sources outside our own Country.
So very little is now taught our children about developing this essential skill, critical thinking, and they are taking the easy and erroneous narrow paths from their favorite handheld devices, focusing on the emotionally and manipulative pundits that swarm the Internet.
Rational thought is not valued by the parents of our nascent leaders as this skill has been eroded consistently over the past 40 plus years.And we will pay heavily as a Nation as we have been so easily manipulated by a mainstream of information controlled by monopolies of self serving corporations.
Fear is a major factor in shaping not only public opinion, but also behaviors.The likes of Cambridge Analytical, if not rooted out and stopped, will shape an unrecognizable and manipulated feudal future to our detriment.
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I have to say that aspects of this resonate with and then don't.
My son was a high school debater and I feel like HS debate still teaches critical thinking skills. But I also saw some "drift" in activity in my state where winning was more dependent on smooth delivery, odd affirmative plans, and gimmicks. There was a definite departure from responsible policy solutions.
so another way to say: Style over substance.
and a problem nationally.
We must re-institute listening, policy for the good of the many (not the few), otherwise we will be stuck.
As Mr. Brooks stated, "Excessive individualism has left us distrustful and alone — naked Lockeans. When people are naked and alone they revert to tribe." Rugged individualism has been a mantra led by conservatives since the New Deal. That clarion call has included the concept of rugged individualism. This concept has both alleviated New Deal responsibilities of the capital class and pitted the rest to fight for their ever dwindling share of the American Pie. And we do not blame this capital class for our plights, we blame either ourselves or other readily available groups of so called outsiders. Misleading the masses is a low art form with tremendous returns and little downside risk.
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Identity politics, tribal politics, is being "loyal" to your side, to those who lead it, to those who are part of it, no matter what: loyal to those who are part of your group (religious, political, national, ethnic, familial, or however else you define your group) even when they do what you would regard as wrong if done by someone outside your group.
The only antidote to this kind of corrosive, destructive loyalty, is the rule of law. Though the rule of law itself can be destructive if the laws are unwise, that is to say unequal, or unjust, or unmerciful.
Strive for laws that draw us together 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" equally to us all, and tribal politics will take care of themselves.
We've always known that liberty and equality are both necessary for a harmonious society. We've never truly included all people in their charmed circle. We cannot afford to abandon the effort to do so.
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Pullleeeze. With the possible exception of standing up to Soviet communism in the 50's and 60's (though that was all about preserving capitalism and Christian supremacy, not individual liberty), American conservatism has been on the wrong side of every issue and policy since our nation's founding. America has moved ever to the left on all issues over time, to it's benefit (slowly, grindingly, molasses-like), over the objections, insurrections, and obstructions of conservatives, whose philosophy is, as William F. Buckley Juniorrrrr sneered, "to stand athwart history (meaning inevitable human progress), yelling Stop." It continues today with racist, sexist, multi-bigotry infused reactionary majorities on SCOTUS, in Congress, and most state legislatures, despite (or maybe because of) receiving less actual votes in election after election. "Friends of Abe?" The right's raw incendiary bigotry and hatred has been exposed them as the Party of Trump, the inevitable representative of all they've degenerated into. The tut-tutting of supposedly rational conservative thinkers (there's an oxymoron for you, with the pun in there as well) is laughable considering they've brought their side to this sewer with their irrational partisan invective and hate-mongering over the last 30 years as American society got away from them. Their politics is a failure. Their economics is a failure.
And to extol Jonah---son of Lucienne---Goldberg as some though-leader shows how bereft the right is.
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Nevertheless, the undercover right wing project has painted much of America red. If not stopped, they will soon have a majority in favor of "amending" the constitution to curtail the demos even further. BTW, the Sessions plan to imprison more minorities is not only the provision of cheap labor, it is another stage in disenfranchising the disadvantaged. Stop them this year, or weep in the weeds.
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As a progressive who has tried to learn about conservative "thought" by reading seminal conservative writers of the past, I would welcome the advent of traditional conservatives in our politics. Their avowed values have merit, even if their means suggest other aims.
What passes for conservative today is absolutely nothing like the tradition of Burke's conservatism. It is, in fact, anti-conservative.
It is problematic to try to fit all of what is happening into a one dimensional range, conservative on one end to progressive on the other. The reality or our situation is outside of that dimension.
We are at the point where the financial elite have effectively usurped democracy. And they have done so with the singular value: "free market". Ironically named because what that actually means is freedom to oppress through monopoly power. This is equally true of the republican and democratic party. The singular litmus test of that is which party works to get money out of politics? Hhmmm. Just as I thought. Both parties rely on, and are effectively controlled by, and do the bidding of the financial elite. What do the financial elite use for control? "Donations" to campaigns and ownership of the media.
Discussions of liberal or conservative, democratic or republican are absolutely irrelevant to the true power dynamics in our country.
There is only one group that is working to restore democracy and justice in a meaningful way... Grassroots democrats who refuse big money donations.
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The fact that Jonah Goldberg once began a column by stating: "I'm tempted to start every column from now on by saying 'Saddam Hussein must go'" should automatically disqualify him for life from being taken seriously by serious people.
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Tribalism is the end product of excessive individualism???
Yes, by all means let us have a Renaissance on the Right.
But first let us have a turning away from government by Twitter, chaos, lying. thievery, environmental destruction, trafficking with Russians, the bashing of immigrants and minorities and entanglements with Playmates of the Year.
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David Brooks view of the country is always based on how he, personally, is doing.
The country was founded in order to be of benefit to all of it’s citizens, not just the well to do.
The Robber Barons are in total control, and that does not bode well for the country or the American people.
Let’s get back to the initial goal of the the founding fathers:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. . . “
And let’s remember that it was Ronald Reagan who worked so hard to dismantle this as our goal.
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Is this parody? Citing Jonah Glodberg, who came to the world of punditry as the son of Nixon dirty trickster Lucienne Goldberg who was the person who told Linda Tripp to wire tap her conversations with Monica Lewinsky thus revealing the existence of the infamous blue dress, was a little known right wing TV producer working the AEI?
Why is it that conservatives are always most worried about the loss of the "middle," loss of the mythical "third way," and so concerned with finding common ground and unity ONLY when liberals are on the march?
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True conservative renaissance will start when the current GOP is vanquished at the polls in 2018 and every succeeding election after that at national, state and local levels. And when the Supreme Court and Federal Courts lose their "conservative" majorities. And when their rich donors turn away. Then they can actually start to to bemoan their powerless state, hopefully self-analyze their party's rot and the misery they brought upon millions for generations and the destruction of our institutions, morals and norms they presided over. This renaisance will not be voluntary or quick, it needs many years in purgatory followed by genuine reflection. Arm chair punditry is only a waste of news print.
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New ideas in the conservative world are those old enough to have been forgotten by the mass of right-leaning followers of Fox propaganda. There is nothing new under the conservative Trump sun, only recycled ideas already proven wrong in the crucible of human history.
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Once again, David Brooks misses the essential point, and so, presumably, do Jonah Goldberg and all the other "new voices." The conservative cause has always made its case on the back of racial inequality. It's the horse Republicans rode in on ever since 1964, and, if you count the years before when Democrats were conservatives, the single conservative rallying point all the way back to the founding of the Republic. For Brooks to ignore this is punditical malfeasance, and the reason the Republican party is a rusting hulk.
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Interesting to read your thoughts on how the lack of communal attachments is at the root of our broken politics. So why not use the opportunity to take a well-deserved swipe at Paul Ryan, who through his radical libertarian agenda has been doing all he can to gut particularly any sense that we owe one another anything at all as partners in a national community?
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When Brooks points out identity politics, showing up both on the left and the right, is a result of excessive liberalism, the feedback, most from the left, are:
1) US history started with it!
2) The right does it too, and more
3) We are correcting the existing bad identity politic with good ones. Because we have racism, an type of identity politics, we have to correct it with counter ones to balance it out
or 4) It's too abstract and vague. There are too much injustice now.
I would say one cannot correct wrong with a different kind of wrong, or the same type.
Conservatives, like me, appreciate the foundation of our society and recognize it is general good. It is so complex and multi-factored that right solutions are usually required to be comprehensive and balanced, between justice and compassion, and often take time, not revolutions.
The foundation of which you speak is white male privilege, the rest be damned.
There have always been tribalists and individualists (e.g. shamans, wanderers, thinkers, hermits, ...) mixed together. They are both necessary to sustaining our human ecology. Without the former, there is insufficient inertia. Without the latter, there is insufficient adaptability.
The 'miracle' David speaks of seems to me not to be a sudden emergence of individualism, but rather an event driven by the environment outside our ecology. Our ecology has forever been throwing off detritus in the form of knowledge. As the knowledge sludge grows, tipping points are encountered more frequently-- it's like what happens when water finally begins to boil. Locke's particular innovation was not out of step with other revelations going on at the same time.
The danger is that not all ecologies survive. In an intellect-based human ecology, it is hard for any of us as individuals to see whether a given idea is better vilified and cast out, or treated with respect and absorbed and morphed into the fabric of society. Usually, though, complex systems are less likely to blow up if they are 'damped' -- and in our case damping probably means trying to understand other points of view.
The naked Lockean could also be described as existing in a Hobbesian state of nature.
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Mr. Brooks, intellectuals can write all the books and op-eds they want but as long as Fox News keeps spewing out hate-filled opinion as if it were news there will be no Renaissance on the right.
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Liberals are to blame for conservatives being greedy, vindictive, and hateful.
So the party of personal responsibility, has no responsibility for their own behavior. Fascinating.
Republican/Conservative has become synonymous with hypocrite.
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Apparently Shakespeare, Monteverdi, El Greco, and everyone else born before them, were hairless apes.
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I'm sorry, I lost the train of thought here within a paragraph or two. The "Right" is so broken, so morally, ethically, religiously and legally corrupt at this point that it seems comical for Brooks to even try to resurrect an argument. The product of the conservative cultural "Right" is the dangerous buffoon now in the Oval Office. I can barely read yet another screed against how liberalism created rampant "individualism" that has destroyed American values. Oh, please! All while the American consumer-driven corporate culture has brutally cashed in on every single aspect of that individualism -- in advertising, marketing, politics, retail sales, etc., raking in billions of dollars manipulating our allegedly fractured society. David, go tell the Right to show us some fundamental ACTIONS that show your team is ready to change, to bind our wounds, create community, spread love instead of hate. Right now I have such an existential headache about the future of America that I can barely express my deep disgust at your lame column.
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David, you just can't help yourself. So the "tribal" and identity politics started with the left, and has just now infected the right? Gosh, I never knew that the Klan, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the White Citizens' Councils and America First, were all a bunch of leftists. Thanks for enlightening us to that fact.
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Look. The Republican Party has been deliberately splitting the country since Newt's 1990's Congress; it's been ruthlessly obstructionist against anything whatsoever proposed by Democrats -- even good things; it has prevaricated in a thousand ways about debt, deficits, taxes, and especially health care; it has moved more and more money the the high upper classes, especially with the recent half-baked, rammed-through Republicans-only tax bill; it has supported the profiteering gun industry at the real cost of blood, bone, egregious injury, and human lives, in spite of clear American majorities against easy gun access to highly inappropriate firepower.
And it gave us the sheer madness of Trump!
Nothing from "the right", not even a "renaissance," deserves the time of day from a single America right now, much less a vote. America's awful bipolarity, its sick craving for guns, and especially its income inequality, is owed to the Republican Party as that party has postured itself since 1993.
The Republican party has been worse than awful for nearly 30 years. They are owed nothing for the "American carnage" they have singlehandedly built. To hell with any "Renaissance."
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"Identity politics gained traction on the left, but now the Trumpian right has decided to fight fire with fire." What a basic misreading of history. Identity politics has been the main point of right politics since 1964. Think about the reaction against civil rights and busing; think of the Willie Horton ads and Ronald Reagan's welfare queens.
To suggest that this is a new Trumpian phenomenon is obtuse at best.
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Ha, ha, ha! Thanks for the laughs, Mr. Brooks.
Conservatism is about trying to return to the past, a physical impossibility, to recreate an idyllic past that never existed.
No ideology can deal with all of life's problems. However, the conservative is in a permanent state of denial.
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In the opinion of many of us the problems we face are much deeper than tribalism. At bottom, the West has given up on any moral core, and we now live in a society that Scottish philosopher Alasdair McIntyre termed "After Virtue" in his book of the same title.
Here is Shadi Hamid's take in Foreign Affairs on our sorry moral state:
"To read today’s post-liberals is to find echoes of MacIntyre nearly everywhere: liberalism, once a political tradition, has become an ambitious ideological project with little tolerance for true challengers. Vices are embraced as virtue, religion has become strange, truth relative, and loneliness endemic."
Such a society -- our society -- is running headlong like lemmings toward a suicidal cliff. Politics have become so vicious because the State is too powerful, too centralized, controlling every minute aspect of each person's life, thoughts, beliefs, expression. And the temptation to use such a State to impose your opinions and way of life on others is too powerful to resist.
There is a lot to say about this column, none of it good, but here are two points. First, it's derivative of the now-tired paradigm of hierarchical vs. egalitarian people. It just doesn't hold empirical water to explain much less predict political views. The noise in the data overwhelms any discernible effect from this tired trope from political psychology. Second, perhaps Brooks hasn't been looking at the numbers showing seismic shifts in the upcoming midterm elections. For a political scientist and amateur philosopher, he seems to be blind to the paradigm shift taking place under his nose.
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"Identity politics gained traction on the left...". That's a curious statement, and perhaps the flaw of this piece. To which "identity politics" are we referring? The most visible of the issues of the "left" that might be categorized this way: same-sex marriage, racial equality issues, etc, are, in fact, anti-tribalist; this wishes of groups arbitrarily excluded from the human core to gain access to the rights of the core. If this is what Mr. Brooks intended, then a dangerous false equivalence is drawn with the hatred and exclusion-based policies of the "right". Moreover, if this is the basis, then the well-intended renaissance of conservative thinkers is destined to fall upon deaf ears in what has become of the Republican party.
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I hope these young, fresh writers grapple with the fact that their party exists only to plunder the vast majority for the tiny minority that funds said party. What actual policy have republicans implemented that didn't end up somehow giving more money to the wealthy and less to everyone else? As usual, Mr. Brooks prattles on about concepts like tribalism and individualism, which are symptoms, not causes, of an economic system that is allowing the oligarchs to squeeze the rest of us dry, with the republican party in the role of lackey.
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A hundred years ago conservatives didn’t believe in the phone being used by District Attorney’s to implement arrest.
Some things don’t change
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David, you keep looking for something that isn't there. What is missing is a conservative philosophy that is inclusive and accepting of scientific and technical progress. Today's world will not accept the status quo; change is upon us, and cannot be swept back any more than can the tide (as Knut found). The Republican Party cannot be saved except by anti-democratic means that are clearly unlawful. Stop trying to preserve its mummy and move on to shape a new conservatism that has some actual intellectual underpinning. Decrying progress won't cut it.
Are progressives practicing identity politics when they want leaders to adhere to society's mores as they make change? Are they practicing identity politics when they want to see common sense gun laws applied to individuals for the good of society? The only “ecstatic schadenfreude” being practiced here is the unbridled joy that the nationalist right feels every time one of Obama's laws or regulations has been reversed or every time Trump enrages the left with reckless and abhorrent behavior. The rest of us feel shame and disgust at what our politics have become.
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Frankly, I feel “ecstatic schadenfreude” every time someone connected to Trump is indicted.
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Honestly, it seems like David Brooks keeps on recycling the same op-ed pieces over and over again. This is yet another one of his dense, theoretical, philosophical and again hypocritical conservative hit pieces that blames liberals for doing something that Republicans have been doing for years, namely identity politics. If you are going to say the Democrats appeal to voters based on things, like race, gender and sexual orientation etc., how about calling out the way Republicans have appealed to THEIR target demographic groups of voters, i.e. the rich, religious evangelicals, rabid gun owners, pro-life/anti abortion zealots and let's not forget the biggest group, WHITE people.
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Again, Brooks doesn't understand circumstance and how "identity politics" is just about basic equality. His and other supposed conservative intellectuals are using idealism to cover for keeping the status quo and systemic racism and sexism
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If this is your idea of a "renaissance", Mr. Brooks, I hope I never see the alternative.
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Somehow the term "Renaissance" does not fit the Right"s return to authoritarianism. Think of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco and the last thing that comes to mind is a renaissance of German, Italian or Spanish culture.
Brooks cannot stop thinking of America's remarkable success in the 19th and 20th Century as a miracle of conservative capitalism, when it was a matter of luck. Lucky to have huge country with an abundance of fertile soil and natural resources to feed people and promote an industrial revolution without having to steal from captured colonies. Lucky to be the Arsenal of Democracy during World War II with 3 thousand miles of ocean on either side protecting us from the devastation that Europe and Asia endured.
Brooks rails about excessive individualism. He still does not get the freedom loving Sixties with long hair and bright, comfortable clothing. He prefers suits and hats.
Brooks longs for the National Community in the 20th Century forgetting the racial discrimination that flourished prior to those pesky 60's. The so called Identity Politics he dislikes allows the forgotten citizens to shout "I am here, and I count."
The Right may be rising again but they will not bring a renaissance. If successful, they will bring back the darkness and despair of authoritarianism.
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This article finally helped me understand why I always read the first paragraph of mr. brook's commentary, and then turn to the commentary of his readers who explain to me why, once again, he is using every ounce of his unquestionable intellect in the cause of herding cats.
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Mr. Brooks needs to spend some time in Kansas to find out the truth about his imaginary "Renaissance on the Right".
I would call the same thing a "Brave New World of the Right".
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Who are you trying to reach with your discussion of Locke and Rousseau? Must be all those Trump supporters.
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"They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.."
-Margaret Thatcher
David,
Didn't you always idolize "no society" Thatcher and Reagan, "the rugged individualist", who chopped his wood and pretended to be a Western Cowboy?
You should publish exclusively in The National Review, The Weekly Standard , The American Spectator etc. They are your target, not NYT readers. We already knew the conservative movement was nothing more than greed, power and racism. Or to put it in understandable terms; tax cuts, unending nation building wars and birtherism. The three legs of the Republican/Conservative stool.
1
What alternate universe is Mr. Brooks living in to declare that "the Republican Party is in the midst of a cataclysmic transformation"?
Over 80% of Republicans approve of Donald Trump and his 'policies'. That is not transformation, that is doubling down on enabling dishonesty, racism, misoginy and sheer incompetence.
Republicans are sowing the seeds of their own destruction precisely because they're unwilling or unable to change. They appear intent on sacrificing their own souls in their lust for power.
1
Please. "Intellectual creativity on the right", such as it is, translates for all intents and purposes as "high-minded navel-gazing in support of a transparently corrupt, morally bankrupt, and environmentally disastrous political position". Brooks' hand-wringing about community is somehow less then persuasive given that the conservative movement's most fundamental tenet is "every (white) man for himself".
1
The political right is a toxin making America sick. The sooner we clear corrupt right-wingers out of America's system, the sooner we can return to some kind of normalcy based on returning to ideals of honesty, decency, and basic fairness. Today's and tommorow's right do not know and will never truly understand what honesty and decency and fairness mean to Americans.
Mentioning Locke instead of the enlightenment as a whole is another tribal (anglo saxon tribe) POV. What changed 300y ago blossomed in the encyclopedia and the American/French revolutions. This was a western wide movement that is sorely missed in trump's America.
The title of the piece made me think I was reading The Onion. I’m glad Mr Brooks was able to go to his happy place today.
3
Unfortunately, the current dumpster fire in the conservative camp is turning off so many young people that it will take a generation or more to claw back to mere credibility.
Brooks, an "educated' well-read person, does not want to own up to the perversity of the Republican party. Such denial is at the core of Republican wreckage. David's valid points are lost amid his enabling and excusing Republican's money grab.
2
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Americans, don’t you realize how good you have it?
Your chains are not from without, but from within. There are endless resources and opportunity out there. But complaining and whining stymies curiosity and growth – gets you nowhere.
Empower yourself with abilities, skills and knowledge (A.S.K.). Knowing how to do something leads to questions and knowing how to do more. Soon you have a more comprehensive understanding of the world and your place in it. But you have to ASK … and it helps to have an attitude of gratitude.
1
Perhaps your intellectuals will make the Enlightenment great again, Mr Brooks. Perhaps they will conclude that liberty, tolerance, fraternity and progress are worthy ideals. Throw a little Hume and Montesquieu in for good measure and who knows what they may come up with.
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"Liberal individualism doesn’t produce the sort of virtuous, self-restrained people that are required to sustain it"
Delusion in perfection.
Renaissance? More like the Dark Ages.
2
Wow, just wow.
Tell us Mr. Brooks, has Mr. Goldberg ever bothered to crack open a history textbook. Or you either for that matter.
I suggest reading up on the some 200+ years of history this country has of splitting people up based on nothing more than skin color, or ethnic origin and stripping them of everything they own to give to a white man that didn't work for it.
How dare either of you accuse anyone on the left of "identity politics" when we're merely righting the wrongs that have been perpetuated, and continue to be perpetuated to this day.
America never has been and never was a liberal democracy where all men are created equal. It has always been tribal, because conservatives wanted it that way. It has always been a Darwinian hellscape for anyone who wasn't white & well off.
Conservatives can rail about "identity politics" all they want, but until they stop treating people based on their "identity", then there will always be a need for people to stand up for their human dignity.
This new found conservative approach of forgive & forget and pretend like hundreds of years of discrimination and persecution hasn't damaged the "equality of opportunity" available in the US is absurd on it's face and is nothing more than a continuation of the falsehoods peddled by conservatives. Lies and hypocrisy are all the right stands for.
5
Identity politics in this country began with a white, male Protestant power structure. It did not begin on that vaguest of terms: "the left".
It is science and advances in understanding our world that is destroying faith, not liberal capitalism. When your faith is based on ancient myths attempting to explain the (at the time) unexplainable, that faith is sure to unravel as science provides answers to those ancient mysteries.
1
Oh, please. Anyone hailing from conservative or extreme right can’t see beyond their own unique-ness or America’s border, let alone ponder the lessons of history. And it’s compounded by the enduring notion of state vs. country rights and privileges. America the adolescent.
1
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/25eec92f-07f0-4dbf-b4d6-0165042d8ed1
Substitute "renaissance" for "twister" and that's about what this piece reads like. The usual attack on identity politics , per the GOP forgets the Southern Strategy, the Moral Majority and Willie Horton which were most certainly identity politics. The present attack on elites (apparently anyone with a college education), science, and facts does not seem to indicate any shift for change.
The GOP has be done nothing to indicate any groundswell of change.
1
Feels more like those (few) in power are using tribalism/identity to separate us so that they retain their power. And some of us are pushing back -- unfortunately, against each other and not at the real power.
4
There is one basic reason that people in the US have become 'mean,' and it involves its definition as 'unwilling to give or share things, especially money; not generous.' This results from the deterioration in living standards and the consequent fear of the future the majority of Americans now have to cope with. We are working longer and harder for less, if we can find decent work at all, and this has been a downward spiral for going on 40 years now. And why? Because all the ways we redistributed income after WWII - taxing appropriately to cover deficits (Eisenhower), huge improvements to infrastructure (Eisenhower) and social insurance spending. This resulted in a good quality of life for working classes, and when you take away people's sense of well being they naturally turn against one another. We're 'dog-eat-dog for a reason, and all this column is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. The United States has vast wealth, and until we start taxing it appropriately again, we will be adrift with no hope.
6
David Brooks is almost there, but misses a critical factor in his conclusion. He is right to call for a restoration of community as an antidote to excessive individualism, but the latter did not eviscerate the former. It is the relentless federalism of all things and concentration of power in Washington, D.C. that, more than anything, has eroded community-centered civic activism. When local communities are usurped, there is little reason to engage.
1
So there is a renaissance on the right. Given where 40 years of dominance in our country by the right has led us, those words are not particularly comforting. In particular your concern that prominent thinkers on the right are "missing the bonding sentiments of Edmund Burke" causes me to question your whole premise that such a renaissance would be a good thing if, as you appear to suggest, we need more Burke. A distillation of his conservatism seems to lead to a belief that things just go better if the right people are in charge. And we all know who the right people are and it is not me and I suspect not you. Nowadays we call them Plutocrats. For me, I have had quite enough of the bonding sentiments of Edmund Burke and his little community.
3
Agree, David. Communitarianism is the answer. We’re not just a collection of individuals living on a common landmass. We’re a nation.
1
Dream on, David. Trump is what the Republican party has become. There is no obscure philosophical viewpoint that will make that fact other than a disaster for the Republican party as well as a greater disaster for the rest of the country.
1
BROOKS SAYS “The core problem today is not tribalism. It’s excessive individualism, which has eaten away at our uniting faith and damaged our relationships with one another.”
and remember the right’s reaction to Hilary’s book “It Takes a Village” They called in Socialism!
5
A "shared national faith" is just another tribe, hostile to outsiders. Pew research puts Christianity at only 70% in US demographics. Better hitch the wagon to another horse.
2
David Brooks suffers from selective amnesia. I remember when racial identity selected which school
you could attend, where to live and kind of job one could aspire to hold. Being gay was an anathema.
Strangely or in hindsight not so strange, when the University of Alabama was no longer able to win national titles with an all white team then that identity politic was changed
David has also forgotten about the stunning rise of China. Between 1981 and 2010 China lifted a stunning 680 million people out of poverty and cut its poverty rate from 84% to about 12%.
Perhaps David should take heed of a succinct quote regarding tribalism, religion and identity politics from Chief Dan George.
" First we had the land and they had the bibles,
Now we have the bibles and they have the
land."
5
Got you again Brooks on your false and delusional discripition of Locke’s ideal society.
Let me enlighten you.
“The fact is that Locke was in some respects not even a liberal by the standards of his own times, let alone later ones. For example, the constitution which he wrote for Carolina in 1669 advocated an extreme form of feudalism that had long ago died out in England and which was not found in any other American colony. Serfdom was to be hereditary, according to Locke’s plans. All the descendants of a serf were to be serfs forever, to be bought and sold with the land they worked on, and with no right of appeal to anyone beyond their owners.”
ANTHONY GOTTLIEB
6
Mr. Brooks, are you being intentionally stupid, or are you trolling? Identity politics is the new tribalism? Please. Sell that elsewhere.
Standing up for people who have been held down because of some category they have been is the very struggle for equality!
This column is somewhat clever verbal jiu-jitsu employed by people on the right to convert an ideological strength and turn it in to a weakness. Sorry, Mr. Brooks, but that move is tired and obvious and lacks truth.
A column like this is a subtle act of a bully, trying to invalidate the very hard and thankless work of people working for those who need help because our systems are not fair.
I am white, straight, and Christian, and I can see that we don’t have anything close to a meritocracy in this nation. Why is it so hard for people on the right to see what is blatantly obvious? Unless it is because being a “conservative” in this day and age means you are also averse to facts.
10
Can we lose "the Homeland" moniker for the USofA?
5
Executive summary: David turns in another book report, this time about the maunderings of the ideologue son of Lucianne Goldberg.
3
Oh David,
Conservatism doesn't need more creativity. It needs more honesty. The fight over identity politics is just a way to obscure what the real fight is about - who pays the bills. Washington and Hamilton's experience with the desperate need for funding of the continental army was a driving force behind their conviction that a stronger federal gov't was needed. It turns out that many Americans were reluctant to pay taxes, even to the men who fought and risked their lives for them.
You can spin any number of excuses for why the Republicans opposed the ACA, but the bottom line is that health care costs are increasingly unaffordable for many Americans and unless wealthy and healthy people subsidize sick people and provide coverage, healthcare will be rationed by income class.
The extremely wealthy people who finance the conservative thinkers don't want other people deciding how their money is spent and resent paying taxes. Period.
You should spend more time listening to people like Mike Bloomberg, or Bruce Bartlett who understands the implications of the Republican tax cuts. Instead, you take comfort in and distract yourself with high flying ideas. Thomas Jefferson's ideas were inspiring, but he failed to live up to them and didn't know how to pay the bills.
7
As always I have found today’s offering from Senior Diversity Hire David Brooks to be thoughtful and entertaining. It is a marvel to witness the lengths he will go to avoid addressing the current state of the conservative movement. Like the other diversity hires, Douthat and Stephens, Mr. Brooks either lays the blame squarely on the left or avoids the subject altogether.
Because of this I will do their jobs for them. The modern conservative movement has been reduced to the compost in which fascism has taken root, has been nurtured, and has flowered into the presidency of Donald Trump.
10
Far from there being "A Renaissance on the Right" I see it as a collective plaintive cry on the "Right" about what went wrong. They a looking at all the power they have gained, by hook or by crook, and wondering why isn't there the "Heaven" on earth that was promised by Reagan, Gingrich, Rove, and rest of the crew that claimed we had to overthrow the "liberals" to obtain nirvana. Well, they overthrew the liberals in Congress with jerrymandering, in the Presidency with Trump and the electoral college bias, and the Supreme Court with McConnell's theft of an open seat. Yet the "Right" is still unhappy and searching for another enemy to blame. Far from a renaissance, more like same old, same old.
2
This country was founded on Chistian white male supremacy - isn’t that the original identity politics? Isn’t Trump and MAGA just a return of that oldest American identity politics. Native Americans (the ones who managed to survive the genocide and the ones who had their homes destroyed and land stolen) and non-Christians (including Brooks’ Jewish family) and African-Americans (who were killed by the millions in the slave trade, enslaved and treated as property and not humans, raped, children sold as property, lynched and terrorized well into the 20th century, still killed by police for being black, harassed regularly and systematically, discriminated for jobs and housing and almost every sphere of life, virtual slavery of an unjust justice system and prison industrial-complex) and all non-whites and women (we could never pass even a simple Equalizer Rights Amendment) and LGBTQ (finally some rifhts the last 10 or really 5 years that 40% of the country wants to take back) have been simply trying to get equal rights under the law - to strive for a more perfect union, to finally implement equal protection under the law, 14 Amendment, to actually enforce Voting Rights and Civil Rights Federal Laws - is that the identity politics on the left Brooks is referring to?
Conservatives definitely need better “intellectuals” than Brooks.
3
The write here claims that "identity politics started on the left" - so very interesting!! The identity politics of the Civil War, of Jim Crow, or settlement of Tribal/ Indian territories, the KKK, the identity politics of treating black and brown skinned people as second class citizens, the internment of the Japanese during WW-2, those were all causes of the "Right" in America.
The American Right created the clear distinctions between "Liberals" and Conservatives" as far back as the 1930s and hold on to it to this day. The "Southern identity" aka modern white nationalism started by Barry Goldwater, refined by Richard Nixon, powerfully weaponized by Ronald Reagan and used over and over in electoral politics/ gerrymandering was by the American Right. "Roe v Wade" and anti-abortion campaigns are "identity politics" using Religion - played by the American Right. Even now, the NRA, among the biggest identifier of identity politics overwhelmingly represents the American Right. And I can go on and on ...
If the Conservatives are REALLY trying to get back their soul, then they should take the first step in de-legitimizing all and ANY kind of identity politics on their side BEFORE they ask the other side to make any changes.
2
I nominate Socrates for President! (the NY times commenter ). "The end product of excessive individualism is tribalism". I agree. With the Republicans, the full sequence is: Excessive individualism (read Ayn Rand) leads to Selfishness which leads to Greed/Bias/Hatred which leads to Casteism/Racism/Bigotry which leads to being a Follower of the Orange-Haired One.
2
The most avid tribalists at this moment are those who were admitted neither into Enlightenment-style self-creating groups, nor into the privilege of excessive individualism, which is a distortion of the Enlightenment ideals. Nationalism feeds the tribalists, capitalism feeds the excessive indivdualists, and democracy feeds the self-determined. The first two benefit from illiberalism as zero-sum political and economic competition, and the latter benefits from liberalism in the form of open suffrage and access to education. The first two are winning at this historical moment.
1
For "tribalism" here, read marriage equality, not the carving out of religious exceptions to non-discrimination laws. You really need to read Brooks with with a glossary.
1
Honestly, Brook sounds like the political equivalent of Glinda Good Witch telling Dorothy that all she needs to do is close her eyes and repeat "there's no place like home, there's no place like home," and she will find that she is home. Even the Wizard of Oz, a fairy tale, tried to center itself in reality by placing the fantasy world inside a dream. Repeatedly insisting that "there is a renaissance, there is a renaissance," won't make it true, even assuming these people have worthwhile ideas, until those ideas make it outside the dreamscape of mutual navel gazing so prevalent among the pundit class.
143
Well said. I agree with you entirely.
3
I think of Brooks as Dorothy, who still believes the Wizard is all powerful and not simply a facade. The harshest Republican critics of Trump, who they see as the Wicked Witch of the West is being waged by people who believe that the Republican/Conservative movement have something to offer working Americans, and view Trump's naked greed and rich-man entitlement as an aberration. These are the people still waiting for Republicans to come up with a "real" healthcare reform plan, despite the fact that the ACA was a version of what they claimed they wanted. Despite the fact that everything they've ever suggested would shift costs onto sick people. Despite the fact that they absolutely refuse to raise taxes, but want a strong defense and there's nothing left to cut except benefits.
They reject Trump, but not the plutocrats and worship of markets that begot him.
4
The core problem is indeed tribalism. This is the way of the rest of the world for millenniums and now America is falling into the same trap. The single biggest tribe in America is the tribe of whites. They voted overwhelmingly for McCain and Romney, and now for Trump. They (not just the Republican party officers but all those mostly whites who voted in the primaries) allowed a man who questioned the very validity of a sitting president's citizenship to be their standard-bearer because they felt their tribal identity threatened.
Locke is for university professors and newspaper columnists; tribalism is how ordinary, unachieving individuals justify their existence.
2
Connecting the words, "intellectual" and "creativity" to the right is just wrong!
1
What tribalism is on the left? A party that invites people into the tent regardless of race, sexual preference, etc. hardly seems like a party practicing identity politics and tribalism. Look at those kids ion parkland and tell me there is no sense of community in this country. I like you Mr. brooks but honestly you are blind sometimes (ok most of the time).
4
SMH that readers want to debate Brooks on identity politics or history or the philosophical bases of democratic capitalism when there’s nothing substantive on those subjects in Brooks’s column. It is instead one big deflection: “We conservatives are the club of serious thinkers like Locke and Burke and Hamilton; pay no attention to that buffoon sitting at the head table.”
3
MC
NJ | Pending Approval
This country was founded on Chistian white male supremacy - isn’t that the original identity politics? Isn’t Trump and MAGA just latest version of that oldest American identity politics. Native Americans (the ones who managed to survive the genocide and the ones who had their homes destroyed and land stolen) and non-Christians (including Brooks’ Jewish family) and African-Americans (who were killed by the millions in the slave trade, enslaved and treated as property and not humans, raped, children sold as property, lynched and terrorized well into the 20th century, still killed by police for being black, harassed regularly and systematically, discriminated for jobs and housing and almost every sphere of life, virtual slavery of an unjust justice system and prison industrial-complex) and all non-whites and women (we could never pass even a simple Equalizer Rights Amendment) and LGBTQ (finally some limited rights the last 10 or really 5 years that 40% of the country wants to take back) have been simply trying to get equal rights under the law - to strive for a more perfect union, to finally implement equal protection under the law, 14 Amendment, to actually enforce Voting Rights and Civil Rights Federal Laws - is that the identity politics on the left Brooks is referring to? Conservatives definitely need better “intellectuals” than Brooks
The renaissance of the Democrats has a head start. The GOP is one subway late (surprise, surprise)!
I find Mr. Brooks's well- meaning, hopeful outlook on the latest batch of brainies based on his past enthusiasms for the likes of Craven Coward Ryan and Plutocrat Leaner Ryan charmingly gullible.
And what of Budget Destroyer Ryan? Wasn't he the boy genius for 20 plus years that David admired?
1
Perhaps I am missing something, but what, Mr. Brooks, do you mean by "shared national faith"?
1
Smooth, Mr. Brooks, the way you introduced "identitarians" and immediately segued to how "identity politics" gained "traction" on the left. Nice try.
1
The last time Brooks the lightweight promoted "thinkers" on the right, they all fizzled into oblivion. Keep trying Brooks - the only way to succeed is to keep flailing and failing until dumb luck strikes!
1
one can argue that the tribalism leads to individualism. People get tired of the tribe telling them how to live their lives. They feel suffocated by the tribal rules, so they rebel and become individualists, and the circle continues. There is not much to learn here. Everybody knows the people are complicated and full of contradictions. They will follow the model that, they think, serves their best interests. Whatever model you think is best, you will have to convince people that it is for their own good.
With the exception of Goldberg, even well-read Times subscribers have never heard of most of your litany of conservative writers, which are forming a new tribe.
2
See, this is what happens when people succumb to Ignorance and elevate a lightning bug to lightning status---which is what Brooks is doing here. His comparison is a mockery of the kind the Chief Ignoramous espouses on a daily basis. The golden age of the Renaissance was not about left and right politics---it was about achievements in art, literature, science, and the elevation of the human spirit, exemplified in Leonardo Da Vinci. Decent stage-setting man for the individual that he was, John Locke was a political philosopher. As there needs to be separation between Church and State, Man needs the fresh-air separation between unbound creativity(a "Renaissance" in the truest sense) and gaseous, flower-killing politics. Brooks's blending of the two is not helping in defending the individual against a pandemic engulfment by the later.
2
As the astute nightclub comedian says, one of the benefits of being "in the club" is that no other club member calls you out publicly for ridiculously wrong prognostications you made yesterday. Too bad for you that most of us aren't in the club and remember those columns quite well. We are just surprised that you seem to forget them.
Brooks mentions identity politics quite a lot- typically with a dismissive flick- but does he really not grasp that the 'politics' came as a response to an 'identity' that was defined by someone else?
1
The supposed shift that occurred with Locke didn't prevent Americans from building their great wealth on the backs of slaves, something which occurred long after Locke. If the Lockean "miracle" was meant to unleash the emancipatory effects of capitalism and democracy, I'd hate to see what would have unfolded without it! At least Brooks tries to complicate Goldberg's simplistic narrative, but we're still left with an analysis of a bad argument.
1
Another tirade from Brooks against the individualism of the 1960's. If we'd only preserved the social bonds of the Eisenhower era, everything would be fine. Except that the Golden Age of the 1950's he and other conservatives look back on was golden only for privileged white men like them. Others did not have it quite so good, remember?
The individualism Brooks rails against is actually the insistence that women and people of color should have equal economic and political rights in this country. The paradise he wants is possible only if they do not.
1
Here is what I see and within my own family:
People that say they want a return to an America they say they once knew better and had, by way of foisting things onto my children that they never had to endure or contemplate.
1
David Brooks has lost his relevance. His Conservatism has died and been replaced by Trumpism. Brooks has no place to go so he is reduced to praising hacks, blaming too much individualism and now blaming liberals for globalism. The fact that at least the last 3 Republican presidents and their Republican Party were believers in free trade and globalism seems to have slipped his mind. Tribalism thrives in this country as do endless columns listing all the problems, with no meaningful solutions. Brooks is searching for a role as a meaningful voice, but it is too late for him.
3
what an interesting view. thank you for exploring it. for those of my fellow liberals who complain that identity politics is diffferent than tribalism, they have a point. On the other hand so does brooks. When I was a child , our national identity wasn't black or white, blue or red, urban or rural, it was american, we believed in our nation. And many groups assimilated without the need for identity politics. But some groups ( especially afro americans and women) were never really allowed to assimilate. And because of that there was some need for identity politics. But perhaps we should rethink talking about identity groups quite as much We need a government that reminds us of our common belief . From my point of view, the republican party has used identity politics to camouflage their goal of decreasing taxes. Never the less , i would much rather vote for someone espousing the great merit of american ideals while promising to make us more true to them, than someone who wants to blame some other for our woes.
2
Mr. Brooks deliberately mis-characterizes those who fight for social justice as being "identity politics" warriors and as doubting liberal democracy. He'd like you to believe that they are only interested in serving their own group, instead of pushing our nation to fully embrace ideals of equality. What a shame.
7
"Suddenly fundamental issues, like the values of the liberal democratic order itself, are up for debate."
About time (!) the machinery got started...despite the best efforts of
early-warning voices, whose siren call, lots of it in comments on these pages, sounded loud and clear. That it went unheeded, could only be by choice, the same choice that passed up "fundamental issues" for the complacent, elitist, disdain for the
"clown" and his cohort (not thought to be so many at the start, but, once the clown car doors opened, a shock).
conned we were, done in by our "motivated gullibility"...you can thank colleague krugman for that apt phrase, and skipping burke, locke and rousseau for the moment, bow to lenin for drafting the subversive plan to exploit it.
And so, the "can do" of common purpose, the "unum" has been eroded...we now have the alienation of "ecstatic schadenfreude," divisive conflicts among the "pluribus," that promise chaos.
Identity politics gained traction on the left? Which the MAGAs are only now reacting to? Mr. Brooks, have you forgotten the Obama Years? The rise of the barely-hidden racism of the Tea Party? Birtherism? You must be kidding us. Only now is there a left-wing tribalism, formed out of resistance to Trump and the blind loyalty of his minions. By the way, we will prevail. You can count on it.
5
Group think. The situation where you belong to a group that you identify with and go along to get along. You end up agreeing with the group regardless. To question is to be excluded. Actually it shows in most groups including the Presidents advisors who end up agreeing so you fit in and are not seen as outsiders. You show up at a Yankee game with a Red Sock hat and you are booed, sometimes attacked.
Slowly Mr. Brooks you approach the belief in Marxism. True, you hide behind the classic American terms - tribalism versus individualism, but the following sentence reveals the profound change that the appearance of Trump has created in your worldview: "The core problem today", you write, "is not tribalism. It’s excessive individualism, which has eaten away at our uniting faith and damaged our relationships with one another". Here you admit that you miss a decent measure of social solidarity, proclaiming that for achieving social peace you are willing to give up a considerable share of competitiveness and personal achievement. Beware. I am afraid that in a little while conservatives will call you a leftist. The change in your world view is welcome, but I think that you are wrong: Social solidarity is not a miracle or magic that suddenly appears in our human society because someone preaches to create it. The American social system is fixed on the lack of social solidarity. Would you be willing to admit that competition without measure, wild and cruel, has created a clearly non-solidarity society and a reality that threatens to destroy the basic construction of the "American Dream"?
Michael Karpin, Tel Aviv (author of "Tightrope – Six Centuries of a Jewish Dynasty" published by John Wiley & Sons).
1
So, the Republican Party looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but according to Mr. Brooks is not actually a duck, but an eagle, soaring to new heights of enlightenment thanks to the musings of some “exciting”new thinkers within its ranks.
As far as bird analogies go, ostriches burying their head in the sand might be more appropriate. Locke? Rousseau? Please look at the reality Mr. Brooks. Your guiding philosopher today is Trump.
4
The Enlightment was not a "miracle".
It was the product of human evolution built upon centuries of intellectual thought that began in Greece and Rome with a bit of Christianity thrown into the mix. There was nothing divine about it, especially since the Founding Fathers most responsible for this country's Enlightenment
foundations were deists who believed that any deities that may exist didn't bother with the arc of human affairs.
If any renaissance is to occur on the Right, it must first jettison this desperate need to see the world only in terms of religion, especially white evangelicalism. The Right's big problems began when it expelled Enlightenment Reason and decided it was God and not man who created Enlightenment principles. It furthered its decline when it then tossed science out the window. It cemented its irrelevancy completely when it began enforcing Iron Age mythologically-based moral codes on a society rapidly evolving away from the need for such relics.
The last thing this country needs is a "miracle"-based renaissance on the Right. What we do need is another Enlightenment based on, like the first one, science and reason for life as it actually is in the 21st Century.
6
So it's tribalism that's our problem? And "identify politics" is a form of tribalism? So, then, racism is no longer an American problem? In David Brooks right wing circles, I suspect that anyone who complains about birtherism, homophobia or sexual harassment is just being tribal.
1
This country was founded on Chistian white male supremacy - isn’t that the original identity politics? Isn’t Trump and MAGA just latest version of that oldest American identity politics. Native Americans (the ones who managed to survive the genocide and the ones who had their homes destroyed and land stolen) and non-Christians (including Brooks’ Jewish family) and African-Americans (who were killed by the millions in the slave trade, enslaved and treated as property and not humans, raped, children sold as property, lynched and terrorized well into the 20th century, still killed by police for being black, harassed regularly and systematically, discriminated for jobs and housing and almost every sphere of life, virtual slavery of an unjust justice system and prison industrial-complex) and all non-whites and women (we could never pass even a simple Equalizer Rights Amendment) and LGBTQ (finally some limited rights the last 10 or really 5 years that 40% of the country wants to take back) have been simply trying to get equal rights under the law - to strive for a more perfect union, to finally implement equal protection under the law, 14 Amendment, to actually enforce Voting Rights and Civil Rights Federal Laws, not looking for supremacy (which is what many Christian, white males want to maintain), just equality and basic human rights - is that the identity politics on the left Brooks is referring to? Conservatives definitely need better “intellectuals” than Brooks
4
I think Goldberg is closer here. David's point is that excessive individualism is the problem and commitment to interlocking communities is the solution. I think David's view of human nature that underlies this position is naive and utopian.
The Founders, steeped in a Judeo-Christian view of human nature believed that human nature is irreducibly individualistic, and that this natural self-centeredness was reliably subsumed into something larger only through tribalism (which I would describe as "the collective individualism of the like").
The brilliance of the Founders is not that they promoted community, but that they replaced the old tribalism - based on race, religion, blood, culture or heritage - with a new one based on an idea - the American tribe, which everyone could join if they were committed to the idea. Yes, being human, it took centuries (and a Civil War) to bring the ideal progressively closer to reality. And the results are far from perfect - but they are objectively very, very good. Never in human history has there been a multi-cultural society as just or with as many opportunities for all members. Try to think of one (that actually has existed or does exist and is not merely imaginary).
Goldberg is right. Identity politics, which evinces disdain for the American tribal bonds, is a destructive, pre-modern force. Identity politics progressively tears down the house which is the only structure in history in which their proponents would have a voice.
2
Please. The success of nations has always been a result of the natural resources it controlled. True of the Romans, the Spanish and British Empires, and the United States. The latter succeeded in taming a large, resource-rich new continent using Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" together with a massive dose of slave and near-slave labor. The enlightenment was possible only because wealthy, educated whites had the leisure to learn, think, and write. Leisure they obtained with the lash and the truncheon. Until the new left starts to address income inequality, equal opportunity, good schools for every human being, and workers' fundamental rights, I'll take a pass, thanks.
1
Interesting how Mr. Brooks suggests that the espousal of excessive individualism is the primary problem facing America today. I totally agree with that, but how does the author reconcile this conviction with the party he supports?; the GOP has hardly abandoned its libertarian streak yet.
Another brilliant piece. This time in our country may be bad for the country and bad for us, but David Brooks is doing the best thinking and writing of his career.
3
"Intellectual creativity on the right". Let's see now. Deny well established science. Tax cuts for the wealthy increase government revenues. Foul the water we drink and air we breathe. Enrich insiders by privatizing schools and prisons. Construct barriers to discourage American citizens from voting. Take health care away from Americans who want and need it. Enable a tyrant-wannabe president.
Yes, David. Very creative!
8
As usual, Mr. Brooks uses pseudo-philosophical handwaving about excessive individualism and tribalism (valid enough points in themselves) to elide the ugly truth of the moral defect at the heart of all conservatism: that the core conservative agenda is the preservation of privilege. All else is a means to that end.
2
Brook's comment about today's core problem being "excessive individualism" should be amended to say: individualism has led to reversion to tribalism.
In other words, having reached the extremes of individualism via the American Dream and discovering we remain unfulfilled, we have reverted to race and class expressed through identity politics.
The newly "globalized economy" has damaged the souls of both winners and losers and gutted the middle class. No quick fixes beckon.
We appear to be in a struggle with ourselves over the future of the country. If the future US is to be less white, what will replace it?
There may be a third tension beyond the individual and tribal. In evolutionary theory there is the added dynamic theorized as reciprocal altruism; when differences find value in working together. Social anthropology raises this tension in the form of a question: Can diversity in a democracy build common good without a common enemy? Without a shared external other to be at war with how do diverse tribes find a reason to work together across identities and boundaries? Our collective failure to negotiate this tension plays out vividly on the national stage, where our two-party system now makes a mockery of democracy and the search for common good. The answer may emerge in communities, where relationships across boundaries may form the kinds of bonds needed to form shared values and commitments to build community together.
2
"all the political turmoil is creating a burst of intellectual creativity on the right." Creativity can also be used to create fiction. Creativity also brought us CDOs and other creative financial instruments. Creativity has brought us Alex Jones and NRA TV. These are all "creative" what they are not is factual. So where is the burst of intellectual competence? Or intellectual acceptance of science? Or facts? I would be much more impressed with the right if they would use facts and science, I'm not impressed with "creativity"
1
I think this reversion to tribalism as described by Goldberg is exaggerated. It exists, but not to the extent Brooks is blaming it for the cause of the anger and divisiveness in the west today. Liberals and conservatives have just become too extreme; moderation is the answer, a willingness to give in. I'll be the first - on abortion, my most cherished principle, because it's a procedure that goes to the essence of women's ability to control their own selves. But, uniquely to us, we have the ability to carry another growing life... and I am willing to compromise - somewhere - on this. Fearful as I am of the slippery slope, I will compromise. Who will join me?
2
Post modern conservatism has many poster children such as Paul Ryan now exiting the scene. What was his ideology? A juvenile adoration for a crack pot couch philosopher Ayn Rand. The policies spun out of this ideology fit nicely with the economic elites. The core value of this conservatism is protection of the single bottom line. By protecting the wealth of the wealthy every one wins. Unfortunately it is an utter failure. While many people benefited many loosers were left behind.
Forget the philosophers of the past. When Thomas Pikkety'a book "Capitalism in the Twenty First Century" was published American conservatives could not react fast enough to denounce this seminal work because it demonstrated the roots of inequality. Come to find out redistribution is a good thing for society. Conservatism will not rise like a Phoenix from the ashes until it embraces a kinder gentler from of capitalism. The democrats have been accused of using identity politics but this accusation rings hallow, what they have tried to do is broaden the economic franchise through broadening opportunity for under represented groups.
3
Amen. Although I have thought most of Brooks’ recent opinions have been off the mark, the last few paragraphs of this one hit the bullseye. Excessive Individualism trumps tribalism as the key dilemma of our time. It does seem that the current Republican party is dominantly a mixture of libertarianism with some tribalism, which will continue to dominate in the years ahead. What concerns me most is the reset that returns us to the status quo (1980 forward) prior the recession. This includes tax legislation that is more pernicious for the long-term health of our society than Bush’s two tax cuts; the perhaps excessive buildup of our military in light of the minimization of our diplomatic and foreign assistance capabilities; a retreat in our ability to be protected from the excesses of the finance-insurance-real estate sector of our economy; the much too incautious casting aside of environmental protections; the retreat from adequately addressing the two most important collective needs necessary for effective employment, education and health; and the continued ignoring of truth to the default of ideology, such as retreating from the dangers of climate change and not facing up to living in a globalized world - all of which perhaps facilitates the diminishing of ethical importance, whether within the Trump administration, Congress, or the generally Republican-efforts to suppress voting and gerrymander legislative districts, not to speak of impeaching judges.
3
The ideology of the GOP is that of Paul Ryan and Alan Greenspan, both of whom absorbed it from the ideologue of their youth, Ayn Rand. Her 'novels of ideas,' especially THE FOUNTAINHEAD and ATLAS SHRUGGED, present not only the ideas of fierce individualism and laissez-faire capitalism, but embody those ideas in a powerful narrative of heroic romanticism that is particularly seductive to the adolescent mind. Brooks' notion that the GOP can be infused with any kind of communitarian spirit--the idea that, as essentially social and political animals, humans cannot survive without an ethic of cooperation--goes contrary to the sine qua non of the modern conservative's fundamental premise. It would be salutary were modern conservatives to resurrect Burke's vision of the social contract, or even the Adam Smith of "the theory of moral sentiments," but they would have to reject the libertarian implications of Milton Friedman, the oligarchic inclinations of James Buchanan (the economist), and the dated excesses of Hayek's ROAD TO SERFDOM.
7
The nation should have been following the tenets of Jefferson more perhaps than that of the more famous Hamilton. Freedom and Equality are of equal importance, but are in conflict with each other.
Funny, the final paper is due in a few weeks and the conservative rough drafts leave out science-driven reality. The First Law of Thermodynamics and the spectroscopy of those molecules that absorb in the infrared make it clear that climate will be warming and sea level will be rising. If the AMOC is slowing ahead of schedule and the destabilization of the WAIS is faster than originally imagined, humans, along with natural ecosystems, will have to adapt to a rapidly changing world. What in human experience suggests that the ideology and navel gazing of narcissistic right wingers will show us a path forward?
Who on the right is willing to look nature full in the face and realize that the influence of their fantasies is nothing compared to the impact of inexorably rising temperature. temperatures? Instead of braying about the nature of God and Man, they ought be figuring out how to get on without emitting CO2.
4
Evaluated in context of its aspirational conclusion, it’s hard to disagree with the sentiments expressed in the column. Our nation, inarguably ‘fragmented,’ clearly needs renewal. We do, indeed, need to move past our tribal politics through improved relationships and discourse at all levels of society.
Just when do we start?
3
Mr. Brooks appears to have forgotten the Trump GOP are the “Right” and their corruption, incompetence, racism, and treasonous failure to combat Russian espionage in our elections have ruined their brand with most Americans.
Seriously, Mr. Brooks. Are you living in a bubble?
5
In which universe does the America of 2018 have a shared national faith? What had been fraying for decades collapsed under the 8-year welter of birtherism and paranoia fomented by the right-wing propaganda apparatus.
It wasn't enough for Mr Brooks to put his head the sand all that time -- he now extols the work of a writer notable for soft thinking and intellectual dishonesty and makes the bizarre argument that the future of conservative intellectual though lies in tying liberalism to excessive individualism.
I'll retire to bedlam.
4
"Modern liberal capitalism is too soulless, they say, too atomizing, too destructive of basic institutions like family, faith and village that give life meaning. Liberal individualism doesn’t produce the sort of virtuous, self-restrained people that are required to sustain it."
Of course the same could be said of unrestrained population growth, which the right to life conservatives are all in favor of.
1
"Identity politics warriors claim they are fighting for social justice, but really it’s just the same old thing, Goldberg argues, a mass mobilization to gain power for the tribe."
Brooks's ceaseless attempts characterize the social goals of the conservative right and the liberal left as equally extreme is becoming tiresome. Even though it takes two people to have an argument, it is not a given that both parties to the argument are morally equivalent. A group of people insisting on being treated as equals is not the same as a group of people insisting on their own superiority.
The conservative right fights for unconscionable things like the right to fire a gay employee simply for being gay. By contrast, the LGBTQ "tribe" insists that they are due the same legal protections as their straight counterparts. Similarly, the Nazi, KKK or Confederate sympathizer trying to preserve their "heritage" of racial superiority is not morally equivalent to any group (including Antifa) insisting on equality. A woman who demands control of her own body is not the moral equivalent of any groups claiming jurisdiction over it.
Brooks seems to place the metaphorical conservative elephant on one side of his moral scale and claim it balances somehow with the liberal donkey on the other side. That just means his moral instrument is in need of serious calibration.
7
I was much taken by Barzun's hypothesis in "From Dawn to Decadence" that we live at the end of the Period which began as the Renaissance. Nothing I have seen since has convinced me that he was not right.
Culturally there is a tectonic shift; what the landscape will look like after remains to be seen. Certainly much that we regard as valuable is defunct, for which we may well mourn. Equally vulnerable are sores and inadequacies. Our job as individuals is to identify for ourselves and our posterity whatever fragment of civilization it may be our lot to have charge over.
But take comfort; that is ever the lot of a rational and temporary being.
It is odd that Brooks ignores the remarkable contributions of attachment research that unveils the profound influence of mother, family and community that can optimally foster the growth and maturation of participatory adults collaboratively involved in the life of communities. It is really up to us to assure the viability of maternal relationships in safe communities that support and sustain the competence, stability and loving embrace of our children. Most politicians especially those on the right seem to have no awareness of nor compassion for the needs of children, their mothers, families and communities. They are brutishly focused on male dominance to the grave disadvantage of all. They seem coldly indifferent to those slaughtered in wars that have no rationale other than to serve the grandiosity of their leaders. Today DJT is the most egregiously indifferent to the lives of mothers with their children and their need for stability and support. His own personal malfeasance as husband, father and family man is reflected in his indifference to the needs of children and their parents. It is the responsibility of politicians to serve those most fundamental objectives. Social/governmental theory and advocacy must also serve those objectives.
2
Maybe one day all those conservative intellectuals will have some influence in our society, but right now you've got Hannity, Limbaugh and Trump leading the right. Deal with them first and then come talk to us about healing our differences.
3
Whatever 'nations' & 'nationalism' was or pretended to be, it was an abstraction, a construct that may or may not have had some evolutionary biological adaptive imperative developed during the diaspora eons whan tribes roamed vast unpopulated landscapes hunting beasts to extinction.
But whatever engendered tribalism in that prehistoric age, & however that tribalism may or may not have evolved into the nationalistic impulse, & to whatever extent that impulse evolved into the corporate entity of the nation-state, it has all run its bloody course & become obsolete.
The world is now small, humanity has infested the globe & its prior exploitative imperatives & power-structures can no longer be indulged.
Humanity, & all life on earth is clearly a single, finite, fragile system.
Societies that remain fixated on militaristic economic exploitation & the expired ideal of expanding individual affluence at the expense of everyone & everything else, do so at the extreme peril to the entire system.
What is a given is that we are, in the end, individual minds & bodies, with the self determination & choice to be genuinely virtuous & enlightened.
All this crawling back into tribalistic, clan-based caves & power-structures while pointing spears out at the 'other', is over.
Give tribalism of every stripe its final funeral & be done with it.
3
At risk of oversimplifying, the primary ideology of post WWII conservatism is social Darwinism. The civil rights movement broke through that wall and various "special interest groups" have attempted to rush through the gap, with varying degrees of success. Most people fall into several such groups, e.g., female, lesbian, highly educated, person of color. Tribal analysis sheds little light on these dynamics. It is much more apropos to middle east politics. Political polarization is a matter of alliances strengthening based upon historic commonalities. There are few "pure" conservatives or liberals when you dig below surface appearances.
Sorry...”conservative” has no meaning, nada, zilch. So a rediscovery from a fantasy isn’t that interesting. What would be cool is to revisit science, thoughtful exchange, some rethink the impact of the enlightenment, so we could join hands and inclusively move ahead. Solve real pressing issues like the balance of a healthy economy, people and planet...now there’s conservative values. Current spokes-droids for so called conservatives are mostly fear mongers, so we need a new name that doesn’t divide but honors all humans for their intrinsic value and calls on each to be responsible. Humanists works for me.
1
Mr. Brooks, so now you want to become the new, NEW Compassionate Conservative, only without all those nasty identity labels we liberals have imposed upon you, which you see as the impetus to all that nasty tribalism.
How nice for you.
Next, you will tell us that Conservatives invented the classless society, but we liberals taught you stigmatism and laziness of the other.
You love to speak about the great economic explosion of the late 19th century as if this is some kind of evidence of success of your economic ideas, but said nothing about the spoils of that explosion and the wretched poverty that came in its wake. You look at numbers, but ignore the massive ghettos we created in order to provide that reservoir of cheap labor.
During that time, also came the concept of corporations having individual rights that equal mine, again ignoring the power of accumulation of capital and how it can skew the system in its favor.
So let me tell you what I think Mr. Brooks.
There are no new ideas coming from the right.
It is just a repackaging of the very same ideas, only with an illusion of compassion and a cherry on top.
Donald Trump did not happen in the Democratic Party.
He happened in your party and new ideas mean NEW IDEAS and not a repackaging of the old.
We all need to look inward Mr. Brooks because of Trumpism, but we also need to go beyond the left/right paradigm and I can see that you are not ready to.
You still prefer to blame, while in your mirror is Trump.
6
Donald Trump did not happen in the Democratic Party.
Quite a good point since when he tried to run for president way back when, what he ranted about would have been closer to the Dems than the GOP.
"Donald Trump did not happen in the Democratic Party."
He didn't happen in the Republican Party, either. Trump decided (and rightly so) that he had a better chance in an open Republican field than against Hillary. Trump's only ideology is Trump.
Is #metoo identity politics? Is the civil rights movement identity politics? Both are about dignity for all, recognition that different views have value. Belief that we are “stronger together”, capitalizing upon our individual strengths and insight.
If that is identity politics - well Yeah!
“Lock her up!” - that’s tribalism and mob rule. - Boo on that.
5
As I read this contribution by Mr. Brooks, I kept checking my calendar. No, it is April 13, 2018 and not April 1, 1958.
3
The Black civil rights movement, (except for Nation of Islam), the gay movement, the women’s movement, unions, etc, are not tribal, seeking to set themselves apart, but inclusive, trying to get INTO a tribal club of establishment from which they have always been excluded. To turn around and say they are elitist identity political movements is to use the alt-rights’s own inversion of the truth.
The “miracle” benefitted mainly the white European men, the most tribal, exclusive movement the world has ever seen.
Identity politics are not the issue, anyway. The issue is energy, climate change, lack of potable water, and the sustainability of human life. Oh, and war with Iran and North Korea, now that the identity guy himself, John Bolton is in power.
3
Identity politics was what the Civil War was fought for, and has been one of the most intractable problems in the US ever since. Today's Democratic Party leadership has quite recently and foolishly embraced a newer and more diverse version of identity politics, but their version will never have the impact, power, or success of the GOP's "southern strategy"----still the king of identity politics, and a direct descendent of the "war of Northern Aggression."
4
David, methinks that thou, or those thou praiseth, hath confounded liberal, with libertarian, as the book sayeth, look not for the more in the neighbors eye and ignore the beam in this own.
Perhaps some of these proto-intellectuals might consider who wrote "It Takes a Village" before condemning the left.
1
Jonah Goldberg? Really? He's hardly a paragon of intellectual analysis. This is the guy who tried, contrary to decades of real political historical review, to re-frame fascism as a product of the left side of the political spectrum when everyone knows that the Nazis co-opted the term "socialism" on purpose to deceive the people- a notable early example of "framing."
The hue and cry over "identity" politics is a big example of false equivalence. Appealing to identity on the liberal side toward people who've been made second class citizens or marginalized (such as gays, minorities, etc) to rally them to vote and use their electoral and economic power to gain a fair seat and fair share is NOT the same as the identity politics of the right which primarily sells hate and anger to its constitutuents over "those people" getting something "our people" have to work hard for and pay for.
Goldberg ranks very closely to Dinesh D'Souza as a real analyst of contemporary politics and society, i.e. discredited.
7
"The central tension in his book is between Locke, who emerges as a rational, calm, pipe-smoking economist, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who emerges as a wild-haired, passionately resentful rock star. The liberal order emerges from the individualism of Locke and is threatened by group consciousness and romantic resentments of Rousseau."
Somewhere both you and Goldberg have forgotten the influence of Adam Smith.
1
Oh David. At this point it seems like you're just throwing spaghetti at a wall.
I wish you would come down here to the deepest darkest South and sit down with some of my rural relatives, who are all, with the notable exception of my long-suffering mother, members of President Trump's base. I have struggled to understand them nearly all of my adult life, these people who will invite me, a gay liberal, into their homes, feed me, my partner, and our children dinner, bless my partner's heart at every family gathering, etc., and then spew forth the most hateful vile political rhetoric imaginable on social media or after they've heard even a soundbite of news from the television that's perpetually on in the next room. Fox News, of course, always Fox News. There's a pathological disconnect between the political views of these people and their actual values -- between what they think and how they live. There is no comparable cognitive dissonance among people who self-identify as liberals or leftists, who more or less vote their values and live their politics. So, yeah, I guess I've actually come to the conclusion that conservatives, most of them anyway, suffer from a mental illness. Perhaps you too will find your answer in a psychological treatise, as opposed to a philosophical one.
11
Brooks insists that the promotion of Lockean individualism was “the goose that laid the golden egg” and that, as a result, American “wealth grew fivefold.” It would be refreshing if Brooks gave just the slightest nod to African slavery as also playing a role in the growth of American wealth (and by “American wealth” I mean white American wealth). Or does my suggesting this merely make me, in Brooks’ eyes, another zombie in the thrall of “identity politics”? Mr. Brooks, since you are an inveterate reader (for which I commend you), please read Edward Baptist’s "The Half Has Never Been Told." I would be interested in seeing how your reading of it would influence a rewrite of this piece.
The trouble with all of these fresh-idea right-wingers is that they are ignoring the elephant in the room: the overweening power of the plutocracy. This is what got the American dream into trouble around 1900, and the innovations of the two Roosevelts and other progressives finally got the system on track and producing for the American people in general. Since Reagan, the reemerging growth and power of the plutocracy has become dominant again, producing income stagnation, migration of critical industries to low-wage countries, the weakness of labor unions, and finally the desperate and futile turn to Donald Trump by a large section of the working class. Unless the new-right thinkers can come to grips with the power of the plutocrats, they are wasting their time thinking up new paint jobs on the old conservatism.
6
Start with the oxymoron, "intellectual creativity on the Right" and you are going to go downhill from there, paragraph by paragraph. Take a look at the constant caustic undermining of liberal democracy and you can see that the conservatives have been very good at one thing; making sure that we never see the complete picture. Use their gutting of Obama Care so that the experiment in some sort of modified universal healthcare would be flawed and doomed to mediocrity before it was even signed into law...
The conservatives are only creative as a destructive force and only add to the country's strength in times of war where they can be co-opted into cooperation with the rest of America (even if they didn't start the war to begin with)...
4
"Liberal individualism doesn’t produce the sort of virtuous, self-restrained people that are required to sustain it."
Exactly the point of Patrick J. Deneen's "Why Liberalism Failed."
If your social model (1) reduces all of history to a tribalist/non-tribalist binary, and (2) picks an arbitrary, Eurocentric line of demarcation situated some 300 years ago, your social model is egregiously oversimplified and should be thrown away.
If this is what "debate-shifting" modern conservative thought looks like, I have to question the debate itself.
1
Mr. Brooks, I always read your column although I hardly ever agree with your views. Your talent as a writer and extensive literary and philosophical knowledge seems to energize some of the best comment writers.
I read your column and then read many comments. This helps me understand your scholarly references and helps me to clarify my discomfort with your conservative views.
I also feel encouraged by thoughtful debate, an important facit of a healthy democracy.
2
Brooks once again offers platitudes about community while failing to recognize the technological revolution that has untethered community from geography. In the good old days, yes, one's community - those with whom one shared both plight and the bulk of communication - was a geographic construct. We talked in church or the club, suffered drought and celebrated events with those who lived nearby. Today, beyond the subsistence lifestyle, local threats no longer dominate for most, and the internet has completely changed the nature and reach of our communication.
The technology-enabled identity groups he faults *are* the new communities. Their communications and shared plight are governed by socioeconomic, race, gender, religious and sexuality 'nearness' that transcends geography. Yes, that creates real challenges for understanding the plight of others not in our circles. That is not a new problem. Citizens of the city and the farmland often had little understanding of the other. Racial homogeneity in many parts of the country remains a critical barrier to unity. Nostalgia for father-knows-best geographic community will not be a path to solving our many problems, and is in fact partially a cause of them.
4
The truth is, though there ARE Democrats who can be named "conservative"......
There are NO Republicans who could be called "progressive".
3
As Mr. Brooks pointed out in a recent column, Trump enjoys the support of a full 89% of Republican voters. And this despite his obvious unfitness for office, corruption, and rejection of so much conservative orthodoxy of the last four decades.
And I to believe that the remaining 11% are having a serious discussion of conservative reformation that will soon persuade the 89%?
2
He's got the right mix in there, but the basics to which he calls us to return are badly frayed, and the enlightenment, like the rest of Western culture, was male: individual, solitary, self owning, fragmented, grasping. IMHO we will just run on as we are until the resources are exhausted, when we will be driven back to each other, survival as community. Short of that, it'll be me first all the way. Sadly, women, who called us back to our selves as innocents and then as all for one and one for all in families and then as our safety at the end as caretakers when we die, have sold out that a core of community stature, choosing to be men instead. Once the basic balance at the level of male and female is lost, the rest is down the drain. Call it reactionary, but when the resources are exhausted and they will be, as L. Cohen says everybody knows, then the rubber will hit the road and the actually sustainable will emerge. Toward the seventh generation....
I state the obvious as a reminder.
Whenever I read political news and its associated comments, I have to remind myself that this is the thinking of possibly 22% of the population. Most of our citizenry is occupied with many other activities.
If you insist on growing the human population beyond Utopian levels and don't want to be led by the 1%, it is essential to communicate more effectively. Political types need to bridge the political landscapes by carefully raising comprehension of our citizens. Discussing the latest scandals does not count. Hiding behind slogans to net greater participation is dangerous. I understand that might be asking for much, since politicians love to be loved. Good luck.
2
Brooks writes of "National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who later this month comes out with his epic and debate-shifting book, 'Suicide of the West.'" Here is a paragraph from the blurb for that epic and debate-shifting book:
"Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history—in 18th century England when we accidentally discovered the miracle of liberal democratic capitalism."
That is indeed an epic summing up of human history. Had it not been for that single Miracle we would all be stumbling around in darkness; had we just heeded the miraculous message, we'd be endlessly basking in sunlit prosperity. But we didn't listen and now, "we are increasingly taught to view our traditions as a system of oppression, exploitation and 'white privilege,' the principles of liberty and the rule of law are under attack from left and right."
I. e, we've got Donald Trump.
This is the same Jonah Goldberg who, in the early days of the Iraq War, offered mid-east scholar Juan Cole a wager of $1,000 "that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years’ time, agree that the war was worth it."
Brooks and Goldberg, like Trump, inhabit a world far removed from suffering humanity.
3
“Tribalism is the end product of excessive individualism.” This is patently false. Tribalism existed long before the “excessive” individualism of the last few decades, and tribal conflict is more severe in less individualist parts of the world.
Bonds of community enhance tribalism—a recent study showed that Nazi party support increased faster in parts of Germany with strong civic associations, for example: http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/nico.v/Research/Bowling_for_Fascism.... Of course, communal bonds are a good thing that make people happier, but only people who are already have fundamentally individualist moral values can be trusted to enjoy communal bonds in a positive way without leading to discrimination and hatred of outsiders.
2
Mr. Brooks has no Idea what liberalism is about. It is not unrestrained individualism. Liberalism is about the dignity of the individual and justice. The American democratic experiment is essentially an experiment in government through liberal values. The "American Faith" as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is liberal. American political conservatism has been a restraining and moderating force on the
historically liberal direction our system has taken us. Maybe this moderation has been important in keeping stability to a system that is actually not natural to a human nature which is in large measure is "tribal", hierarchical, authoritarian, ego bound and selfish.
The American Liberal Experiment has always relied on a belief in human reason, and by extension scientific understanding. The intellectual conservative movement that you Mr Brooks were a member of was maybe a rational recognition of the non-liberal side of human nature. Intellectual conservatism stressed the value of individual responsibility. This is an important value not unknown to liberals though the deeper rational understanding is that the individual behavior is a result of many more factors.
What has gone wrong with conservatism is that what was once a rational recognition of darker tribal values is now promotion of tribal values. The value of individual responsibility has become an excuse for injustice.
4
It's been over 50 years since I have taken an I.Q. test, but your one statement zipped it to my forebrain in an instant when I read:
"...human equality, pluralism, democracy and capitalism...."
The question was: Which one of these does not belong?
"Capitalism".
Why "capitalism"?
It's not in our Constitution. No, I don't see matters like "interstate trade regulations" as bearing specifically only on capitalism.
Such regulation could also apply to democratic socialism..... and does, for instance "Social Security".
Or all of our alphabet soup of programs designed for the poor.
Yes, it's true that every Republican wants those programs gone or so loaded with requirements (such as Trump's directive this week that any program that assists any person in this country - who is poor, that is - must work for that assistance. Which is utterly what Paul Ryan had been working for for the last 20 years and now that he has what he wanted, he can quit) but those programs are not gone. The reason is simple: We are NOT specifically a "Capitalist form of government".
So, please, do not add in an "economic system" to your list of Ideals.
Our "Founders" never heard of "Free Trade".
7
"The question was: Which one of these does not belong?
""Capitalism". Why "capitalism"? It's not in our Constitution.
Nor are the words "democracy", "human equality", or "pluralism" in our Constitution. Look it up.
"Or all of our alphabet soup of programs designed for the poor."
The federal government was never intended to morph into a welfare state. The Founders wisely left that (and a great many other things) to the states.
A Renaissance on the Right? Oh, were it true! The Republican party lost its soul long ago with "the Southern Strategy," Willy Horton and "god, guns and gays."
You can't get enough working class people to vote against their own economic self-interest unless you play to their racism, sexism and homophobia- unless you convince them that they're part of a dying tribe and must do everything to defend it.
A real renaissance on the right would being with a powerful, focused denunciation of the oppressive forces that seek to divide us. Then make your argument for Locke.
The problem is you'll lose the base. But what if the new Republican party saw their mission as educating the base and powerfully fighting against racism, sexism and other forms of oppression while at the same time espousing the virtues of capitalism.
There you go. Sign me up!
3
"The core problem today is not tribalism. It’s excessive individualism."
Is "excessive individualism" code for "rapacious inequality"?
2
Mr Brooks
You may want to rewind the clock but the American Right has mutated. Populism and tribalism are tools Trump and the Republicans coop to manipulate the masses.
They are no Edmund Burke or John Locke. Just as the holier-than-thou evangelicals and the bastardized prosperity preachers are not Jonathan Edward.
The marriage of the social reactionaries and plutocratic libertarians have completed. So big deal if the so-called conservative think tanks pay the young guns doing intellectual gymnastics. More like mental getting off!
When the conservatives, both social and fiscal, risk a chance to pump themselves with anabolic steroid, they danger their own DNAs. There is no path forward and the past is just that. Reversing their DNA damage requires more than a few young guns invoking the ghosts of long forgotten heritage, especially when nutty ideas like creationism and divine right like "God wants the Trump to rule" garage become legitimate Republicanism
Once upon a time, you hailed - maybe you still believe it - that the outgoing Speaker, Paul Ryan, as the wonky guy, Mr Brooks. See what he got us into. Sure, America may be riding high now - thanks to President Obama's eight years of efforts in the face of a shameful Republican obstructionism - but the loan will come due. The Tea Party tried to invoke American heritage too, too bad it was in names only
4
Once more we have our elderly father changing the subject about the uncomfortable reality we live in by his stern insistence on the values of times gone bye when men stood tall in their three piece suits in front of a reverential family. Respect in the saving graces of a well knotted bowtie.
2
“Young, fresh writers are bursting on the scene: Sohrab Ahmari, Helen Andrews, Charles Cooke, Mollie Hemingway, Jason Willick, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Gracy Olmstead, James Poulos, Oren Cass, Matthew Schmitz and many others.”
So, how many Republicans are reading these authors? Have you been watching Trump and his rallies? Their may be conservatives reading these authors but they are kidding themselves if they think they have influence in today’s GOP. These conservatives would be better off to form their own party.
1
It's not surprising that this appeal to community rehabilitation is implicitly directed at the white, Christian tribe that has been moved to the front of the line of oppressed victims of the liberal experiment. Just as it's not surprising that the Trump era has pushed the systemic racism and effects of 350 years of American white tribalism into the background. It's no wonder authors such as Ta-Nahesi Coates rail with frustration. To witness this level of concern and political/philosophical analysis of what's wrong with America, while the subject of black disenfranchisement gets pushed aside, must drive him insane.
Trumps' signature achievement has been to roll aside the rock under which he and his racist ilk have cowered for years. Trump gave his tribe permission to tell it like it is and confirmed that "like it is" means fear of white displacement. The response of his supporters to this permission is what has driven a wedge between Americans.
It is insulting and offensive for Mr Brooks to continually lay the problems that Trump and HIS tribe have created at the feet of those of us who continue to try to restore some sanity to our country, blaming us for being too individualistic, not having adequate faith, refusing to embrace our MAGA brothers. I vigorously object to the notion that our problem is that too many white people didn't get theirs when the economy rebounded.
Get rid of Trump, roll the rock back, elect progressive thinkers, heal America. It's that simple.
2
How is the political party who calls itself conservative, or Replublican, not a form of identity politics? How is the political party who calls itself liberal, or Democratic, also not a form of identity politics? The identity politics between liberal and conservative are not a problem if (a) one group dominates the other, or if (b) they are not too far apart. Throughout most of American history, one group, the establishment, dominated politics. But the large wave of immigrants in the 1880s eventually challenged the establishment in the 1960s. During that time, there was a re-alignment of political parties. The conservative Southern Democrats joined the Republican party, and Progressive Republicans joined the Democratic party. So now we have an increasingly polarized society. This situation was not caused by excessive individualism.
David Brooks is shameless in his attacks on liberals. He never misses an opportunity to tie the word "liberal" to whatever it is that he thinks is failing - including "capitalism." "Liberal capitalism"? Really? I thought we were "comanists." I look forward to witnessing this Renaissance; it's WAY OVERDUE. That conservatives are moving out of the High Middle Ages and discovering the Renaissance is a good thing. That they are reading philosophers like Kant and Rousseau is a good thing. I can't wait until they get to the Enlightenment. Then they'll understand the foundations of our "liberal democracy." I'm a proud "liberal" because it gave birth to this country. Just read the Constitution. There's no greater example of liberal idealism than that! You're catching up with us so keep it up and bring it on!
1
"Modern liberal capitalism is too soulless"
Why the "liberal" modifier, as if that what makes modern capitalism soulless?
Without speculating who made it that way, capitalism is intentionally soulless. It's guiding principle, sustain and enhance investment value, does not have any social or political content.
When you you remove all the abstractions and references to historical icons, the differences between liberals and conservative can be very well revealed in lists of specific objectives for each side. In this context "identity politics" is not a pejorative, but identifies what slice of the community a specific objective is targeted to help, e.g. the sick, the malnourished, the homeless, those subjected to subjected to discrimination because race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.
Here are what, in my view, are major liberal objectives:
Universal health care that is free from devastating financial hazards
A chicken (or something that tastes like chicken) in every pot
Intense efforts to reduce the threat of global warming, and planning to cope with the the problems that arise when threats materialize
Affordable adequate housing for those unable to afford market rates
An education system that serves well the individual and the community
Not an all inclusive list, but it would be interesting if Mr Brooks could provide a comparable list of major conservative objectives.
1
What Brooks calls the liberal democratic order is made up of a majority of well educated Americans. Studies have shown that the majority of people who marry are well educated Americans. Insofar as family and faith are concerned, Brooks is presumptuous in thinking that everyone should follow his rules and have a faith or any faith. Foisting his views upon others isn't much different than what ISIS does, only he does it with words instead of bombs.
Insofar as soulless capitalism is concerned, shouldn't Brooks be looking at his Republican Party that want to get rid of safety regulations and environmental regulations in order to increase profit.
Brooks rhetoric is as divisive as that of the far left and the far right.
Maybe Brooks should have asked his parents why the symbolic reason they were burning the $5 bill before grabbing it.
1
I would love to see a rise in true Conservative intellectualism and philosophy...but Jonah Goldberg, so responsible himself for the rise of political tribalism in America, is not the guy to look to for that. I feel kind of sorry for David Brooks because I think he'd also like some serious soul searching and elevation in thinking from his end of the political spectrum. Seems to still be a good ways off though.
1
A combination of bad history and bad philosophy leaves us with a column worthy of Trumpian America. Maybe this is good material to add to the spitball fight we are now witnessing between Comey and the President. It's Animal House, not honored halls of academe or of government that we have before us. Yuch!
4
When the Republican Party’s leader is the dumpster fire in office, obviously conservatives will chatter about rebranding. But the conservative base in this country at best settled for and at worst identified with none other than Donald Trump. American Conservatism needs more than just cute chit chat and mild discourse, it needs to go into therapy.
2
Brooks wanders in fantasyland again. No matter what the issue, excessive individualism is always the source for every modern problem. Why can't we just return to the warm safe 50's when women could not get credit in there own name and the only African-Americans seen were in B movies singing spirituals? Individualism is a conservative issue, not a liberal issue. Horatio Alger was always the story of bringing yourself up by your bootstraps without anyone's help and anyone who could not do that was lazy, immoral, etc. and probably brown, ignoring the issue that some people do not have boots.
Even if we were to go with Brooks' argument, just how would that happen? There is never an answer for this, just hand wringing. Looked at closely Brooks is talking about is a white male community that existed on the backs of women and people of color. There is no way to return to that, no matter how hard 45 tries.
2
Hard for me to see how a rehash of a Locke-caricature doing battle with a rehash of a Burke-caricature (with a Rousseau-caricature thrown in for a little zip) amounts to an intellectual renaissance.
I love reading 18th-century political philosophy (and discussions of it by scholars who actually know what they're talking about). But come on.
We need some new ideas that describe what is unique to politics in our own very bizarre times. Not a battle of Enlightenment sock-puppets.
2
Given the content of this thoughtful essay--and in particular the middle-ground hope the last paragraph gives air to--it would be more correct to title it, "A Renaissance in the Middle." Seems to me, claiming middle movement as an inspiration of the Right, contributes to the notion of Right-versus-Left tribal fabric. Given our woes, who cares today about the pedigree. We are all ingredients in the solution. It is the gel of our political pudding that matters at the end of the day .
"The core problem today is not tribalism. It’s excessive individualism, which has eaten away at our uniting faith and damaged our relationships with one another."
I"m sorry, but it was Reagan and the generation of politicians that surrounded him during the presidency that started the damage and the excessive individualism. It was around that time that, with the purpose of dismantling the safety net through lowering taxes on the rich and increasing deficits astronomically, that politicians started to talk about the "taxpayer" instead of the "citizen".
It's a subtle distinction, but the "taxpayer" is a "customer", that has to maximize the return for him/herself on the money dedicated to a project. "Citizen" is just a part of of a bigger entity that benefits the whole, without being relevant how much each individual gets back on each transaction. Because in the fullness of time, all will receive a benefit.
So yes, the left is becoming combative. You've never stopped an enraged animal just with nice words. But the advantage of the left, with their "identity mixing" is that it's trying to go to the basic "E pluribus unum".
1
Ben may be correct about identity politics having a long pedigree tarnishing all parties, but clearly the current Democratic Party is a coalition of identity groups. There is no broad base to the Democratic Party any more. Hillary lost because she couldn't hold the Obama identity coalition together while Trump was able to bring together a new coalition that cut across several new demographics. But that isn't why I decided to write today. Brooks quibbles with the Goldberg thesis by suggesting that we have arrived at a point where the balance between individualism and communitarianism has shifted too far toward the former. Based on what? It seems to me that 'statism', an uneuphemistic synonym for communitarianism, is rampant.
The only hope for "conservatism" is for "decent" Republicans to abandon the GOP, and form a third party.
This split will doubtless lead to Democratic party dominance for a number of years -- but the Dems will inevitably over-reach, and "the center" will go looking for alternatives. It would be good for the country if there was a party of "decent" conservatives who people could vote for, rather than having the only choice a party defined by racism, resentment, and grievance.
In David's previous "Speaking as a White Male ..." column, he wrote: "If it’s just group against group, deliberation is a sham, beliefs are just masks ..."
To which I penned the following on tribalism. It got nary a notice then; maybe it was in the wrong column. Here, again:
Tribalism seems "hard wired" in our species by human evolution, and looks to be a deep and darned near immutable feature of human social organization. It provided a clear adaptive advantage when human society was organized as small, competing bands of hunter/gatherers in the ancient, prehistory beginnings of our species, tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago.
In modern society that ancient social wiring is no longer evolutionarily beneficial, and has turned increasingly and profoundly destructive on balance. Once you become sensitized to it, you see it everywhere, doing great harm to group interactions on all scales, and also to our epistemological structures.
I've concluded that transcending that innate human feature is the fundamental challenge of our species. Because tribalism is deeply coded into our core makeup, perhaps at a genetic level, transcending it involves in many respects a conscious effort to work against our very nature. Perhaps accomplishing that would be the crowning achievement of enlightenment.
I don't think Identity Politics is the villain here. Rather, it is the attitude that social/economic progress for one segment of society can only come at the expense of another. In the past, Marxian Economics may have promoted such a view, but today you see it more on the Right. Our current President's view seems to be that our country (or our tribe) can be winning only if someone else is losing.
Identity issues are compatible with the opposite attitude---- certain policies can lift us all up.
2
To keep it simple: the problem is we all want to be different, but treated the same.
FDR used the power of the federal government to improve lives in the household. Federal power should be used to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and redistribute that wealth in a color-blind, gender neutral manner. Social security is accepted because it works to protect the interests of all Americans, regardless of tribal identity.
2
The GOP will fail unless it picks up on a new vision of Federalism. Unfortunately, this would involve a long sustained process of reestablishing the correct sovereignty both the Federal and State governments. Let the Blue states be like Denmark if they want and pay for it, and let Idaho be--well Idaho, but don't expect goodies from D.C. unless it is for a good national purpose. Issues such as SocSec and Healthcare need to be restructured in the way they are financed, but still perform an important civic function. Liberals need to learn that strong individual rights lead to strong group rights, and Conservatives have to realize that freedom and liberty are abstractions if one doesn't have the opportunity to receive a solid education and a full stomach. The later to be best accomplished by the states.
I wonder if the argument Brooks is putting forward isn't a false equivalency. Identity politics from the left has largely been a reaction to oppression rooted in our founding documents. The intersectionality of gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, language, age, class and many more forms of oppression are manifestly different from the identity politics of, say, white nationalism and an aggrieved and distorted Americanism. The intellectual fault lines between conservatism and liberalism continue to work their way outward. Identity politics is just some convenient labeling exercise we like to engage in. The reality is much more significant.
The dream of the left - collectivism, atheism, and absolute ideological conformity. Their idea of progress was tried already in the 20th century with 100 million souls lost trying to make the perfect society. When this is brought up now, their only response is a weak version of the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy. Individuals, imbued with natural rights, engaged in voluntary interaction have done far more to advance civilization that any other form of social organization in history.
1
How is it that the Republican "right" always seems to promote a good story line? It has been a remarkably destructive force in our society, and now, amazingly, we're back in Nixonian lands. How the Republicans recovered from that era is a bit of a miracle, to borrow your notion of miracles. But this is hardly the time to rejoice in Republican rightism, with its efforts to squelch free expression, further enhance the wealth of such a small percentage of Americans, expand prisons and turn many of them over to private enterprises that do a horrific job, crushing the spirit of many young people who, as DACA reciepients, now live in fear of their fate, promoting guns both in and outside the U.S., exporting huge numbers of those weapons and creating havoc throughout Mexico and Central American states, further promoting a new wave of nuclear weapons and a completely unnecessary expansion of the military, creating havoc in education, promoting destruction of our environment, and so much more. The Republican Party lost whatever soul it had long ago, and now its a zombie party, trying to come back to life. Please stop trying to put it on life support.
1
The American national story is about rural pioneers, rugged individualists who tamed the wilderness. That story no longer fits the reality; in fact, it's the rural Trump supporters who identify most with that story and are trying to defend it. And it's the city-dwelling modernists who are trying to minimize it or consign it to the past.
The world has moved on. There is no more frontier. While I remain aware that we came from that reality, we are not there anymore.
Meanwhile, I'll pick a minor nit with the author, who says:
"His conservatism is missing the bonding sentiments of Edmund Burke, and the idea that the little platoon of the family is nestled in the emotional platoon of the neighborhood and the emotional platoon of the nation. "
A platoon is a small unit. Perhaps a company of the neighborhood, a battalion of the city, a corps of the state would be more accurate.
1
As others have eloquently pointed out, the "identity politics" of the left has a more inclusive goal: to have everyone's voice be listened to, especially those who have been suppressed in the past. But there are still a hopeless few of us whose aspiration is to be "citizens of the world." A world where the place/tribe/community/nation of one's birth is understood to be arbitrary, a circumstance of pure luck, and should not override our simple humanity. I view with grim sadness the obvious trend across the globe of humans' devolving, as Brooks suggests, back into small tribes who all hate one another. It is especially painful to see that some of the worst firestorms are occurring in the very places where human civilization first arose, in spite of its neat symmetry. But perhaps humanity itself has outrun this great experiment, that human nature is at bottom selfish and violent, in spite of individual exceptions. After all, we've only been at it a few thousand years - an eyeblink in the history of our planet, which we are racing to destroy as fast as we can anyway.
1
This argument is absurd. What Brooks dismisses as "identity politics" on the left, is the response to the failure of the romanticized national community to evolve. The false equivalence - equating identity politics on the left and right - is either willful ignorance or moral blindness.
The "identity politics" of the left is the banding together of marginalized people and their allies, who seek a sliver of power and comfort against the economic and political might of the right. The "identity politics" of the right is the calculated effort to maintain white privilege, to limit the power of women and to secure the advantages that were embedded in the nation's founding.
4
How interesting that it has been the Right which has given us the pandemonic anarchist, Trump.
He may be America's first ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) President. Impulsivity is
a prime symptom of ADHD. It is horrifying in a relative and more so in a President.
1
If only Americans could all believe in the value of the common good - that we are all enriched when opportunity is extended to everyone, that we all share in contributing to the well-being of all citizens - instead of whining about taxes. But the "American dream" has largely been one of attaining wealth, not forming a community. Those who have the most wealth and power now have their feet on the necks of those who don't. And the struggle of so many people to assert themselves in the face of this juggernaut turns into a battleground of grievances and whose-wounds-are-the-worst on both the left and the right, while the big boys just return to their money and laugh.
1
David writes as if Locke and Rousseau were solely reponsible for our nation's history. He leaves out the little matter of the scientific/industrial revolution, which powered that amazing growth and at the same time atomized society. You no longer need a community to raise your barn; it's done by machine- assisted labor while your neighbors go about their own business. I won't go on into all the social ramifications, but surely including philosophy while leaving out science and the machines is only half the story, or less.
3
Intellectual creativity is defined by dismissing science? By supporting criminals for national office? By reverting to greed and huge national debt for future generations to deal with? I don't think Goldberg is going to solve anything with so many simple and unthinking people in office.
2
Another false equivalency exercise by Mr. Brook. Identity politics on the left formed to gain equal rights for oppressed people. On the right they are formed to maintain oppression aka traditional values.
4
Transformation? The Republican party has just launched an entire website to discredit James Comey. This isn't just Trump saying Comey is a slime ball....its the official Republic Party so entrenched behind Trump that it will go this far to discredit Comey.....Turmoil is not a strong enough word....and transformation is so far beyond the horizon as to not even be visible.
2
Let US not forget that the African slave trade paid Europe's bills while Locke and Rousseau were thinking about various form of liberty. Let US not forget the horrible condition of the white working class in Europe and in the United States, anti-female laws in the name of protecting women, and discrimination against certain European immigrants coming to the United States. Let US not forget the pervasive deception of white supremacist ideology that was the thinking behind slavery, the Trail of Years and the wars against Native Americans, the Civil War, anti-black pogroms, lynchings, the terrorism of the KKK, voter suppression, and today's blue on black killings.
White-washed history will always lead to wrong analyses.
3
Thanks David for straight-white-man-splaining to us what's wrong with society. Jonah Goldberg too.
2
No!!
You are wrong Mr. Brooks! We will not surrender to your lies. Conservatism is dead. It was always a con. It was always trickle down and swiftboating and nonexistent WMDs.
The conservative project is over. Paul Ryan left the field of battle and admitted defeat. He left us with huge debt. Because he was a liar and never cared about the truth. Magic asterisk my a&&.
There is no such thing as conservatism. There is only a few lying shills left who are paid by the super rich to lower taxes.
We shall go on to the end. We will defend the New Deal.
We shall fight in the court rooms, we shall fight for the unions and rule of law, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the government, we shall defend our rights, whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on the airwaves, we shall fight on the internet, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
We will not forget your complicity with the destruction of our democracy.
We will find your spouse, and fire her from her job.
We will find your children in school and make sure they fail every class.
We are the working class. You call us when your toilet leaks....we will make sure it leaks into your bedroom.
We will find your parents in nursing homes and slowly role them into small windowless rooms.
You will never be safe, and we will never forget.
1
David Brooks, you've left me lost in a swirl of arguments here. Reminds me of Shakespeare's lines, "This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
3
A GOP "burst of intellectual creativity"? "Identity politics has gained traction on the left"?
Other than the GOP lawyers, who are thinking up new and creative ways for "covfefe" to dodge legal consequences for myriad crimes, this is obviously a troll (and worse) article.
1
In America today we have “the right,” embodied by Donald Trump and Fox News, busily tearing at the foundations of Western democracy.
With his eminent place on the NY Times opinion page, David Brooks doesn’t write about that. Instead, he finds an intellectual renaissance on the right! Who knew?
And one of the principal architects of that renaissance is none other Jonah Goldberg, who several years ago wrote a book claiming that liberals are actually fascists because of something Woodrow Wilson did or said.
Yes, David, you’re got a real renaissance going on over there.
1
Finally! The real, intellectually grounded conservatism free of white identity politics and a brain dead reliance on small government, anti-tax fantasies that we have all been waiting for. This time for sure.
Don't fall for it.
1
Where were you, David, when Hillary Clinton made your very same points in her book “It Takes a Village”? For some reason that phrase made conservatives howl.
This column is so breathtakingly incoherent it’s hard to know where to start. But, as always, David starts with progressives as the cause of all our woes. Poor conservatives had no choice but to fight fire with fire. But he’s forgetting that the core “identity politics,” the core ideal of meritocracy, was the Civil Rights movement of the ‘60s — which instigated the hideous core of all things “conservative” today.
Basically, hidden in all Brooks’ columns is a rejection of Civil Rights and apologetics for racism. He cleverly hides behind his own brew of “higher morality.” He’s hiding in plain sight.
2
>> “ecstatic schadenfreude” — the exaltation people feel when tribal foes are brought down.
Exultation, not exaltation.
1
Could one possibly get more mealy-mouthed?
3
Tribalism on the left leads to Social Security, universal healthcare and public education. On the right, it leads to white supremacy, cowboy capitalism and autocracy. Not much "renaissance" going on here. Mostly, it's just rot.
5
Reading Brooks columns since the decline of the Shrub and the advent of Trump is like being captured inside Ground Hog Day. In column after column he continually tells us its the elite's fault, id politics fault, liberal's fault, the East coast's fault, the media's fault, etc., etc., that the GOP and America are in disarray and approaching cataclysmic decline.
Brooks and his ideologue ilk owe us an apology. Until then he is just tiresome in his endless casting of blame elsewhere and not on his ideology. Citing Locke doesn't help the bankrupt GOP or this country. It evades a necessary GOP reckoning.
4
Fragmentation seems to have taken a perverseness.
Our pluralism
Conservative intellectual is an oxymoron.
2
If anything good comes out of this Trumpian travesty, it will be the utterly complete destruction of the Republican party. No group of crooks and liars deserves it more. Ryan, Trump, Pence, Nunez McConnel...their names will be written in history books for generations and the GOP will never recover.
3
David your essay is sadly confused. Just one marker: you admire a book whose premise you reject— ie the book blames tribalism, you blame individualism. Next you make the freshman mistake of calling Burke a liberal. He wasn’t, he was a classic English conservative. He wasn’t even an economic liberal (ie a Buckley-esque grotesque like mr gradegrind), not least because the term wasnt in vogue then. As is all too often the case with you and “conservative thinkers” in your camp (think the bumptious Stephens), your faulty premises undermine the rest of your arguments.
It’s all sometimes amusing, except when you and Stephens not only claim the right to speak somewhere other than bob jones university, and insist on having Charles Murray along too. Then it’s just too silly a waste of parental tuition money.
1
“It’s the poverty, stupid”.
The French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Nazi Germany and others were all fed on the anger of extreme, extended poverty. All else is secondary.
See straw.
Grasp same.
Seriously?
3
Give it up. Conservativism is a cult belief system based on propaganda and outright lies whose immoral underpinnings share much commonality with fascism.
2
“The core problem today is not tribalism. It’s excessive individualism. . .”
I would argue they are both core problems of approximately equal magnitude. And that they are both at the core of the Republican appeal to its base. . .and to its financial backers and propagandists.
"Identity politics gained traction on the left, but now the Trumpian right has decided to fight fire with fire. Populism is a form of identity politics because it’s based on in-group/out-group distinctions."
Nonsense. The Right loved group identity so long as it was useful in subjugating others. The Right (and the center) constantly and viciously enforced divisions of race, ethnicity, and gender. Only when civil rights activists began using identity as a lever to gain ameliorative treatment did the Right become skeptical of group identity. That is, only when universality became a means to avoid providing oppressed groups the goods necessary to make them equal did the Right decide there was something untoward about group identity. Brooks dresses up his ideology in Locke and Mill, but its really nothing more than Burke with heavy doses of Friedman's nonsense.
3
It seems that every new column I read from Mr. Brooks takes him further and further away from reality. One would think that as intelligent as he appears to be there would be a glimmer of common sense. Instead we get this republican wish list of nonsense. Republicans as a whole have no compassion, no ethics, no morals, except when it comes to the wealthy and large corporations as they continue to destroy our country. A renaissance on the right? Good luck trying to sell that one Mr. Brooks, your beginning to sound more and more like Mr. reality star huckster Trump.
Those Locke, Burke, Rousseau, Douglass guys are doing a really great job.
1
While this is fascinating, conservative New Yorkers always seem to miss a few essential parts to their theories -- if they spent more time in California I think they would come to see the world differently. Inherent in conservative thinking is that it is a misfortune that ought to be "corrected" to be a single parent and a worker -- if they only worked harder or made better "choices," they wouldn't be stuck in their situation. In CA, we reverse this. There is no shame in having a job (plumber, day laborer) -- it is dignified and respected. There is no shaming of single parents--many do it by choice and it's society's job to support parents, not judge them (or their kids). Similarly, being LGBT or a person of color isn't an "unfortunate row to hoe" that people subtly look down on. I think every conservative should come spend a month on the west coast -- they will see that their pretzeling game of Twister is just that -- a bending of logic to suit a very strong bias.
2
The Republican Party is in the midst of cataclysm not transformation. The transformation hasn't begun that I can see. It is still in free fall, and the party is dropping like flies in winter. I certainly hope there are young voices that can scrape together some "core values" but the legacy of white supremacy, old man politics is going to be hard to get rid of Mr. Brooks. You are a rosy lensed Republican, not very proud of your party at the moment, I get that--but take the classes off.
Once again, I will point out that intellectualism depends on a broad education and experience. The Republican philosophy does not reflect that. You need a complete over haul, from the bottom up. Your point of view will no longer fly in this country.
Another superficial analysis by Mr. Brooks, bloated with empty buzz words. For example, Mr. Brooks claims that liberal democracy has created "excessive individualism," ignoring the fact that the divorce rate is higher in the red states that iconize traditional religious values than in the blue states where liberal democracy still thrives. Empty nonsense, Mr. Brooks. You also claim that "[l]iberal individualism doesn’t produce the sort of virtuous, self-restrained people that are required to sustain it." But the white lower and middle-class voters who installed Mr. Trump, and who still endorse his serial dishonesties and cruelties, are not products of liberal individualism, but rather of a cultural and racial sense of entitlement that is inconsistent with the liberal values of diversity and inclusion. Again, more nonsense and empty rhetoric, Mr. Brooks. Trump's ascension is not a result of the failure of liberal democracy, but rather of the traditional conservativism on which you were weaned. That's why the vast majority of congresional Republicans have subordinated integrity and conscience to political expediency. There are Republican voices still worht listening to -- John McCain, Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake -- but you are not one of them, Mr. Brooks.
2
"Our predecessors did not believe in the end of history—or that it bends, inevitably , toward justice. That is up to us. That requires our persistent, painstaking effort."
Remarks by John McCain in Munich, 2017.
...That is up to US. ....OUR persistent, painstaking effort.
Words to remember and live by.
2
Another blind Brooke eye piece totally missing the real time economics of Republican driven income inequality by its focus on cultural speculation. Modern "modern liberal capitalism" was not to soulless until the Republicans smashed it by increasing CEO pay to many hundreds of times of employees pay. After Roosevelt the nation experience a boom of both capitalism and income equality.
As for a the right getting a new message , the only right message that matters now
is people like Fox news, which does not sustain detailed examinations, except for some clever new propaganda techniques.
Mr Brookes needs a better macroeconomics focus/
We have to hope beyond hope that these young individuals are their own person and that they are not lured by they easy path to politics ala Trump. Our country needs decent human beings from all sides of political spectrum.
Was this column a response to Krugman's column about Republican Unicorns? If so, you left out a very important piece of information. Do any of these people have any influence , at all, with the Republican Party?
2
Leave it to a conservative to blame the left, yet again, for a mess of their own making. Blame is play number one in the conservative game plan. Observe, wrong doing conservatives detect in others is often the behavior they themselves are actively engaged in. They're the experts in false accusation, always against persons blocking the path of their self interest, and their most skilled practitioner is The Donald.
2
Brooks is trying to whip up a "renaissance on the right". He hopes for a "cataclysmic transformation" leading to a burst of "intellectual creativity".
Good luck, Brooks, you're a voice crying in the wilderness!
There's no sight of Republican politicians, or voters in flyover states and the fringes of coastal states, who know the meaning of those fancy concepts.
A renaissance in the party of Hoover, Nixon, Bush, and Trump beggars the imagination. Hope for intellectual creativity from the Congressional leaders, Ryan and McConnell, and the drooping senilities of the Congressional majority, is a bridge too far.
America is a one-party nation, the Republicans vs. the rest of us. Forget trying to transform the Republican Party! Just join the hopeful and thinking Americans who don't need or want a political party!
2
The Liberal democracy gives the opportunity to its citizens to create the best sociology tool that can organize an efficient and happy society - it is always be dynamic process. The current turmoils in our democracy is the sign that old system need change and we are yet to find a new formula. Society changes in two directions - new physical tools creates economic prosperity, economic prosperity changes the external quality of life, new quality life creates new mental state and that drives changes in social system. This dynamics continues and there is no static state of nationalism, tribalism, liberalism or humanism. Definitely old liberal and conservative thinking is obsolete now, today many emotional experiences and contradictions are unexplained by rational thoughts. God and Spirit are coming to rescue us, but this God is not the almighty sitting above the sky, it is the Divinity inside all human and Nature. These thoughts are new challenges - secular political parties and Church, Mosque and Temples are trying to adjust to these new forces. All of them in transition and there are violent forces on every area to stop these change. Ultimately new conservatism and liberalism will be defined and it will take human society to a newer heights. Let us encourage this debate and creativity.
I sincerely hope that Mr. Brooks will take some time tonight after he and Shields get off the air to read the NYT and Reader's picks from the comments to this piece. It's way past time Mr. Brooks for you to come to grips with the moral and philosophical bankruptcy of modern conservatism and the damage that has been wrought when politicians in its thrall have come to power ... and perhaps even to say something about it. You may be the very man to lead the Grand Expiation that your movement needs before it can be taken seriously ever again. Maybe not.
1
David, I enjoy your thoughtful writing. It would be nice to have a nation devoid of identity politics, but when certain groups (ethnic minorities, LGBT, religious minorities) feel they are not fully accepted members of a society that is predominantly white, heterosexual, and Christian, it’s the natural result.
Right leaning politicians have cynically exploited fear of
others (and diminishing power of the WHC community) for as long as I can remember. That’s how we got to where we are.
1
It's a blatant false equivalence to claim there is identity politics on both the right and the left. No, there is not. Identity politics has infested our universities, where study after study shows the rising generation does not believe in basic American values like freedom or speech or equal protection under the law. Guess who is running our universities? The left. You can't blame both sides here, David.
Paul Krugman's op-ed today asserts that Trump was boosted by the media's "orgy of false equivalence." Brooks ignores the lurid reality of AMI, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the President. I felt he's trying to assure us that the Thinkers will bail us out, by explaining tribalism. I don't have confidence. Still, I'm bookmarking this article for its list of conservative writers.
How I wish the world reflected the ideal Mr. Brooks has constructed. The reality is that the GOP doesn’t care about ideas unless they are of the Ayn Rand type that can be used to justify further enriching the wealthy and punishing those Jesus referred to as the “least among us.” Republicans care only about money and power and are driven by what Buddha identified as the root causes of suffering: greed, hatred, and delusion.
2
Enough. The thin veiling of the ideal Christian European culture that has brought great things to the world over the last 300 (really more like 500) years is balderdash. That economic engine was based on superior fire power and the willingness to commit genocide on 5 continents of the earth (North America, South America, Africa, Australia, and Asia). "The White Man's Burden" a phrase depicting the necessity to extinguish every other culture in pursuit of the resources, markets and land of people whose only real offense is that they had not invented guns.
Every author mentioned is scrambling to find another was to elevate white, male Christian supremacy.
Families are important, but family is not only the standard white couple with 2.5 children. Families have gay parents, single parents, black and Latino parents, Muslim. Hindu and Buddhist parents, agnostic and atheist parents, poor parents. They have family members that are healthy and smart, but they also have members with mental illness, physical disability, functional illiteracy, conviction for a crime, debilitating illness that prevents them from working.
The right demands the birth of every conception, but turns its back on the child as is slides from the birth canal.
Try going back and reading the words of Jesus without Paul and the Roman cabal that stole them for ulterior reasons.
1
Individualism is the ideal of Ayn Rand, a republican heroine. Paul Ryan made his staff worship at her altar.
Holding up Goldberg as your intellectual hero is really sad. This is the guy who used to lead the right wing Christmas fights about putting up christmas trees and saying Merry Christmas.
1
If David Brooks can suggest that identity politics and the eclipse of individual liberty was invented by the left, then perhaps the declaration of a wonderful intellectual renaissance on the right is . . . premature?
1
For years I have read David Brooks to force myself out of my liberal shell. I give him credit for being more eloquent than Fox News and much more stealth in his false equivalence. But, I am exhausted by his pieces during the Trump era. His piece today is about "a renaissance on the right" and yet more criticism of the Democrats' supposed use of "identity politics." This particular Republican party talking point is ironic from a party that coined the dog whistle phrase "welfare queens" and whose recent nominee proposed a "Wall" and a "Muslim Ban. Crickets from Brooks about the Republican National Committee's (not a superpac!) web site eviscerating long-term Republican James Comey in service to the most corrupt, incompetent and possibly criminal POTUS we have ever had. And we're supposed to read about a "renaissance" on the right. Spare me.
3
I agree with some other comments that identity politics began with the right - from the very founding - and that what gets called "identity politics" today is when groups of people, who have been referred to outside the exclusive identity packs, point out that very fact. I think Brooks' and Goldberg's willful ignorance of this fact is 'very very' (to quote fearless leader) telling.
One could certainly substitute selfishness for individualism. This is what happens with tribalism I suppose. Seems to be happening worldwide, not just the US. And corruption is always at the core too.
Good as far as it goes, but the argument might be better characterized as being between Voltaire and Rousseau.
Are you really praising Jonah Goldberg, who published a tome called *Liberal Fascism* in 2009, surely one of the most inane, historically and philosophically inept books of the last 50 years? It's telling that in the account you mention, capitalism just *rose* up. Nowhere do you, or Mr. Goldberg for that matter, mention colonialism, slavery, imperialism, etc. Nor do you mention that "identity politics" are not something *new* or confined to the Left, but have been a feature of the Right--including the "identity politics" that underline the US's liberal project of citizenship (remember the 3/5ths compromise and chattel slavery--yep, that again--the slaughter dispossession and forced removal of Indigenous Americans, Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, etc.?) and liberal subjecthood and democracy. I'll start taking you and Jonah Goldberg seriously when you finally take our REAL US history, and not some whitewashed version, seriously. And to think they pay you twice a week to churn this stuff out. Amazing.
3
However we choose to organize and define ourselves, by tribe or as a series of individuals, we still have not figured out how to consistently care for those who cannot contribute fully to the American dream due to disability or age. This is the main flaw of libertarianism, and a growing problem for a society that no longer values local community or religious congregations. We have an aging population, we have mentally ill in prisons and on the street, and no way to ensure, as a people, that they are kept from destitution and despair. I'm not sure either Locke or Rousseau had the answer for that, and the FDRs, Trumans and LBJs are long since gone. What we need is a moral center.
After seeing what is presently happening to this country, it is increasigly difficult to believe that a Renaissance of any kind is possible on the right.
Especially when it comes to identity politics and tribalism, which has been their mainstay since time immemorial. So to position it as some kind of liberal construct is not only delusional, it's wrong.
And this also applies to the concept of nationalism, inasmuch as it's hard to define what it is as a whole when a significant part of the population remains marginalized to the point of non-existence.
And until that changes, it will be hard to imrpove relationships in a nation as diverse as this one is...on any level.
1
Mr. Brooks, respectfully, what are you thinking? The primary event of 300 years ago was not a shift in attitude! More important than simply the Enlightenment you cite, 300 years ago was a culmination of what had already been hundreds of years of small incremental technological advances, to the tipping point of steam power, mechanical engines, trains... The Industrial Revolution!
To ignore the societal impact of technological revolution is true historical blindness, and calls into question the foundations of this column. What is the epicenter of our current ugly tribalism? Economically depressed areas that have lost jobs to automation, versus economically content areas that are benefiting from technological change. That holds true domestically as well as globally. In other words, the industrial revolution continuing.
Writers can have their mini-renaissance on the left and right, sure that matters a bit - but not as much as the real world of food, shelter, and material goods in which all of us live.
Finally, is it possible to end a Brooks column with something other than a call to "improve relationships on a household, local and national level" without any data or specific policy proposals.
1
It amazes me that people are congratulated and vaunted for selling old wine in new bottles. I suppose it might be called a fundamental tenet of political philosophy that the "liberal" state is based on the idea that the goals and aspirations of the individual are what drive political institutions rather than the other way around.
How one defines what is best for the greatest number is the question then and there is a tension between the "libertarian" view that the greatest good is achieved by the least interference by the state in human affairs (think gun control) and the "communitarian" view that the state is necessary to restrain the darker forces of human nature that threaten individual rights (think segregation).
One can see, I think, that there tends to be a pretty close correlation between the extremes and the views of the two political parties in this country. In that sense then Goldberg is just working the old right wing argument of less state, more individual freedom and the "payoff" is what? Less tribalism?
So Brooks is right -the answer is a return to a more left wing communitarian attitude ("if you do well we all do better so we're here to help you do well). but wrong that Goldberg, as represented in this essay, has said anything worth saying since it has already been said.
1
While I certainly believe that books and ideas can have momentous consequences in history, I think that David Brooks persists in believing that American conservatism is a "movement of ideas," rather than an effort to perpetuate and worsen inequality by lowering taxes on the wealthy, deregulating corporations, and eroding the social welfare system. Brooks's belief that a few conservative scribes who write for small-circulation magazines and think tanks will devise a means to re-weave the American social fabric is laughable.
5
David refers to "identity politics, which is reactionary reversion to the pre-modern world."
According to this trope the civil rights movement was not seeking equality for people catagorized as racial minorities or women.
It was a collection of individuals who for some strange reason couldn't vote, get a decent job, live or travel where they pleased.
Women didn't get paid less becasue they were women. It was becasue they could get pregnant and interupt their career.
300 years ago we discovered the value of the individual. Some individuals were better suited for work in the cotton fields than others. Some individuals really enjoyed work in a garment mill while others decided to go to school.
And some individuals, that these "identity politics" people falsely catagorized as women discovered that they were better suited for housework than other individuals.
What an amazing discovery! Truely a modern miracle. So we can't undermine the very foundation of modernity with policies to compensate women or racial minorities.
We don't even know what that means! There are no races, no genders, no categories at all, only people.
There are people who work hard and prosper and people who don't. But that descibes individual effort, not meaningless physical traits.
Mary doesn't get paid as much as Peter becasue she's a woman. She just doesn't work as hard as Peter. And for that matter, she's not as valuable as all the Peters! What a modern idea! Truly a conservative renaissance.
3
One the one hand I see facts, rational thought, and informed judgment. On the other I see ignorance and knee-jerk emotion.
1
David Brookes believes that gratitude is not the right glue. He may have a point. More striking, to me, is that denial of the value of gratitude, specifically, is what separated "cold" progressive atheism 200 years ago from the focus on gratitude as the most basic of virtues, espoused by theists, among whom were to be found some of our founding fathers. The view of the pro-gratitude camp was profoundly conservative: we start from our own smallest circle of experience, love for and gratitude for our beloved parents, and only from that love and gratitude to we learn to love the world. This was one of the distinguishing features separating "dissident" Christians, such as the Unitarians (including the Romantic poet Coleridge) and theists from the atheist firebrands, such as Thomas Paine.
2
Re geese that lay golden eggs: let's not forget how foundational to American capitalism slavery was. In Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson explains that in 1860, slaves were the single biggest financial asset in the United States. Slavery also fuelded British and North American industrialism -- the "lords of the loom" and the "lords of the lash", despite their eventual confrontation, worked in symbiosis for the better part of the 18th century. Other examples abound. Point: the exploitation of stigmatized groups played at least as important a role in the creation of western wealth as did the protestant ethic and liberal individualism. Mr. Brooks should know better.
1
"Identity politics warriors claim they are fighting for social justice, but really it’s just the same old thing, Goldberg argues, a mass mobilization to gain power for the tribe."
This is one of those right wing tropes which drives me right up the wall. Unless you are a white male ( the "default" identity), your "tribe" is how you are classified. Black? Your individual merit means bupkiss if you are stopped by the police, trying to purchase a home in a mostly white neighborhood or a high achieving individual who is automatically assumed to have gotten where you are by 'affirmative action'. Female? Sorry, certain professions are closed to you, your merit has nothing to do with your salary, and your body is not your own. But heaven forfend that you should point this reality out, because then you are guilty of invoking "identity politics". Get a clue David (and Jonah): this is the card the people who hold power play to attempt to stop the people who don't from gaining any. The Lockean ideals were never actually universal - but those of us to whom the were never meant to apply aren't going to stop pushing until they do.
3
Trump is sitting there front and center and Brooks dances on the head of a pin. Ostrich.
2
So, the Republic of Gilead?
1
If the debate about healthcare is any indication, communitarians are again losing and tribal die-in-the-ditcherians are winning.
Gated communitarians don't count.
"Liberal individualism" !??? OMG, not again. Lookee here, David-- it is the right wing and capitalism that stresses individualism-- not the social responsibility and society that is the hall mark of the left and socialism.
Good piece David. Would I be correct in saying you believe in Jonathan Haidt's idea of multi-level selection?
Oooh goody! The newest "my gosh there really are some new and daring super-intellectual conservative thinkers out there". The GOP will be saved!
Phooey. Just because the modern society of the left does not resemble some John Birch fantasy of church and village does not mean that there is less community or spirituality. Go to a potluck at your local yoga shallah and see for yourself.
1
The always overhyped Republican "intellectuals' gave us Paul Ryan who Brokks was enthusiatic on TV, radio and in print.
Ryan says he accomplished eveything he came to ggovernment for: such as stealing from the poor, working and middle classes to give to the rich, as in his tax "reform."
Ah, dont ya luv those Repub thinkers?
1
Brooks fancies the idea that conservatives are enjoying a period of intellectual renewal, and some interesting conversations might be transpiring in a few cloistered settings among men and woman who have absolutely no power over national conservative politics.
Has Brooks ever listened to the rigid and ideationally vacant nonsense of Fox News? Doesn't he know that 89 percent of Republicans like Donald Trump who probably thinks John Locke invented a new kind of combination lock.
I think Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had it right: Conservatives have no real ideology to benefit society; they are only interested in maximizing their fiendish control of as much money as possible.
Consider one of my ideas: Conservative thinkers pat themselves on the back for rejecting the crass materialism of Marx (The belief that material matters govern human relations) and for allegedly believing in more civilized things such as ideals (Religion, patriotism, etc.)
However something happens to conservatives when they go from Yale to Wall and Broad: The old guys take the graduates aside and tell them that all that talk about ideals and its superiority to material matters was a lot of bunk designed to make conservatism look good to lady-like academics. The old guys on Wall and Broad and in Washington don't give a damn about ideas or idealism (The belief in the supremacy of ideas). They believe in one thing and one thing only: The maximization of their own personal wealth.
1
This is satire, no?
3
Congrats on a howler of a headline. Cannot read such clear film flam tho.
1
What a heap of incoherent claptrap!
- The Right hasn't had any meaningful socio-political insight or strategy for the past two decades; and now there's a sudden burst of "creative thinking?" Most of the writers mentioned merely parrot the same tired old talking points that Fox and Breitbart have been spewing for years. Just because the spewers are young and wear hip clothes doesn't make them intellectually cogent nor insightful.
- And what is this "modern liberal capitalism" you're decrying? It's an oxymoron! Capitalism (which conservatives extol) becomes an anathema just because you mash it up with the dreaded L-word?
- And Brooks, like so many on the right, is utterly clueless about what "identity politics" really means! If you equate it with "tribalism," you're just displaying your ignorance. Yet they bandy it about it like a cudgel; they spit it out with the same derision as the word "liberal." If you would simply ask us and then listen to us as we explain how we use our own words (rather than imposing your own incorrect conclusions), maybe you would realize that the Left has actually been arguing for inclusivity all along, and that the current divisiveness and tribalism has been cynically promulgated by the Right purely as a political weapon.
We on the Left are more than willing to engage in meaningful discussion with you on the Right, no matter how close-minded and uninformed you are, if only you would accept us as equal partners in an actual conversation.
2
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Just saying.
Hi David, You may not remember me. I'm the one who wrote in response to your "The New Power Structure" column the following:
You think your column is bipolar? Not at all. Rather it appears to be the column of one who has recently realized he has been so wrong for so long and thinks that he can crawfish from his past.
Nope....into the boiling pot goes the crawfish.
Dare I say food for thought?
Perhaps I was hasty. Why? Well, this "Renaissance" column is certainly bi-polar. Well done, David.
1
Renaissance? That bunch of list-3 hacks led by the ineffable Jonah Goldberg and his dime-store philosophizing?
I know hope dies hard, but are they really the best Brooks has to offer?
3
The meritocratic past Mr Brooks envisions never has existed. The benefits of the first 100 years of our country went to land-owning men, and most other growth can be attributed to a wealth of natural resources unexploited by colonial overlords. And recent conservatism has sought to reverse what meager egalitarianism our country has managed in the past 40 years (thanks to progressives) by stripping the social safety net and de-funding education. The only renaissance on the right is one of retirement - and good riddance!
2
“Scooter, was convicted of four felonies in 2007 for perjury before a grand jury, lying to F.B.I. investigators and obstruction of justice during an investigation into the disclosure of the work of Valerie Plame Wilson, a C.I.A. officer.” Will the Renaissance men weigh in on Scooter or stick with the trope that only liberals are capable of crime?
"he little platoon of the family is nestled in the emotional platoon of the neighborhood " ohh righht - you live in, what, Westchester? Connecticut? anyhoo.. is 'the Miracle' meant to be the Enlightenment? It worked out okay until it didn't . We had a Civil War once and we could again but I don't think it'll come to that, because the laws on our books now have improved since that time. I do not want to hug a Trumpster..and they don't wanna hug me.
Brooks' party has become the party of collective narcissism, fueled by white men mostly, who are obsessed with being the richest man in the world and controlling/ diverting the peoples' government to suit themselves.
Stop this nonsense about identity politics beginning w liberals. Such utter nonsense. Remember Christian conservativism, sexist gender roles, homophobia, racism and southern strategy, racism and domestic policies, mockery of poor and needy, and need I go on? Own your political garbage. Because conservatives are destined to— no, you ARE repeating it, and it’s as nasty as ever.
social justice seeks equality. white guys feel this is a threat to their tribe. hence the name calling.
So, an article about all the wonderful new blood writers in the conservative realm turns into just another give-and-take with Jonah Goldberg .... switch and bait.
Does David Brooks mean white, Christian, genocidal plunderers of European descent, when he refers to our “common faith”. America’s Euro-American “common faith” has always been to subordinate other humans who don’t look and talk like them.
Re David Brooks’s "The core problem today is … excessive individualism, which has eaten away at our uniting faith and damaged our relationships with one another":
I disagree.
Contrast these 2 groups of values…
(1)
Otherizing: I’m better than you. If you’re not for me, you’re against me. Get off my turf. Go back to your own kind.
Badmouthing: You’re poor because you’re lazy. You can’t get ahead because you’re stupid. You don’t deserve my tax dollars. You’re what’s wrong with America.
Lying: You just want to kill babies. Your marriage defiles mine. You’re a thief, rapist, and murderer. This is all your fault.
Extremism: If you challenge me, I’ll shout you down. If you don’t support me, I’ll punish you. If you frustrate me, I’ll hit you. If you’re too different, I’ll kill you.
(2)
Equality: Who are any of us to try to control each other’s equal lives?
Respect: Your personal boundaries, beliefs, decisions, and moral code are your own, and rightfully so — as are mine.
Understanding: Asking others about themselves makes more sense than telling others about themselves. So tell me about yourself — your history, beliefs, goals, what you’re good at, what you need help with.
Coexistence: We share the same country and many of the same needs. Let’s focus on those, and find win-win solutions. Where we disagree, let’s respect each other’s boundaries.
… I offer this contrast of values as a lens to see how many issues boil down to Americans’ Sacred Right to Subordinate Americans.
Every other month, David Brooks writes something that is humane and wonderful. But just about the time I'm going to get suckered into to believing that he is a voice of reason, he starts his yapping and blaming the "libruls" for the decline of society. Then I remember that he is just another shill for the good old days (which weren't so good in my opinion).
1
That's what you see, David? Must be nice. I see a movement dangerously flirting with fascism.
I see an immoral, mendacious conman in the White House, I see his enablers in the legislative branch attacking Mueller for fear of being exposed as complicit in treason. I see the party of 'fiscal conservatism run a 2 trillion dollar tax scam to benefit a handful of Billionaires and corporations. I see industry hacks destroying the EPA, the DOE, the CFPB. I see the right wing media attacking the victims of a school shooting, and calling Mueller and the FBI criminals. I see people marching with Nazi flags. I see a party that has, frankly, gone off the deep end, a movement you helped nurture- but what do I know- just the view from the cheap seats.
1
Mollie Hemingway? Of the Federalist? That has a black crime hashtag?
Really? This passes for a “renaissance” of the Republican Party?
Who funds the Federalist, David?
Good luck on your “tour” of America.
David, my phone listed your column after Paul Krugman's. Check it out. I guess this proves you don't get a chance to see each other's columns before publication.
Mr. Brooks is wary of "individualism," whatever that is, but the
best governance derives from starting with the individual as the
basic political unit. There may be plenty of social units --
couple, family, village, etc. But when constructing a government,
you need to start with the individual. This, it seems to me, is
the great insight of the Enlightenment. And it dovetails nicely
with the concept of evolution by natural selection, an idea that
came along much later.
Successful societies adapt to changing circumstances. Adaptation
depends on invention -- whether its hardware, like a gadget, or
software, like a set of regulations. Invention comes from
individual minds. Therefore, the successful society will place a
high degree of importance on nurturing individual minds.
1
Mr. Brooks, why does it matter if someone is coming from the left or right? Perhaps someone should change out all the bindings of your library so you have no idea what you're reading and can just think. The theses you mention criticizing capitalism are as old as Christian socialism, if you've ever heard of it. Huh? Christian socialists? What? Almost like your trite pop social science of left and right is meaningless. Yup!
Fox News. Explain.
Mr. Brooks is flailing desperately trying to rehabilitate a broken, soulless ideology by attributing actual meaning to pseudo-intellectual babble.
1
Hmmmmm, why is it always the fault of progressives with you Dave?
Conservatives bear no responsibility?
Hmmmmm, why is it that progressives think everything is the fault of conservatives? Progressives bear no responsibility?
"says each person is to be judged and respected on account of their own merits"
That is the Christian doctrine, preceding John Locke by 1500 years
What a load of pedantic nonsense! If the right were in the midst of a Renaissance you would not be pointing to fringe academics for proof of it. You would see it in your own leaders. Instead, you find there a literal black hole of vision, morality and anything resembling progressive thinking. Yours is nothing more than a wishful, ivory tower fantasy, Mr Brooks.
The meme that Americans interacted with each other as equal citizens until the left imposed identity politics is both false and pernicious.
If the New York Times consistently paid all employees whose last name began with a "B" 50% less in salary, gave them tiny offices in run down building, and let only a handful of "B" employees into editorial positions, David Brooks would object––repeatedly.
His objection would not be "identity politics." It would be equity politics.
1
Philosophical hairsplitting and straw man arguments (identity politics?) to dodge the fact that the Republican President is a corrupt racist lying demagogue and the Republican base doesn't know or care about Rousseau or Locke. Their philosophers are Ann Coulter, David Duke, and Benito Mussolini.
The idea that the American political right believes in anything other than white supremacy, raw power, money, cronyism, authoritarianism, and serfdom is a fig leaf held up by a few self-deluding right wing pundits inflicted on us by media companies attempting to bring "balance" to news coverage already deeply tainted by right-wing illusions.
1
Thanks for warning me about Goldberg's pseudo history book. Would hate to have wasted precious minutes flipping through it in a bookstore.
1
More a case of vampires rising from the crypt with a new twist on the twisted the Renaissance is devoid of anything other than another veil on fascism and racism and misogyny. Conservatives have nothing and are a footnote in history: what can happen when greed and hubris entitle a vicious minority to seize the reins of power through subversion and distraction.
2
I will believe that they have "evolved" when they join the board of a Marijuana grower, like John Boehner. Until then, this is all talk.
How quaint. I'm sure that the victims of the native American genocide, slavery, Jim Crow and lynchings were happy to learn that there is a new thing called identity politics and that it's the fault of the left.
Talk about blaming the victim.
1
When your conservative ideals have settled into an incompetent puddle of racist overtures, constitution-busting and unbridled self-dealing masquerading as “ reform”, always retreat to the view from geostationary orbit. Thanks for the lofty thoughts, Mr. Brooks.
DB, what planet are you living on? Who is president of the United States? How did he get there? Who supported him? Who, even now, continue to support him? And you want your readers to believe "the Republican Party is in the midst of a cataclysmic transformation," and our "political turmoil is creating a burst of intellectual creativity on the right." Seriously? By whom? Trump? Ryan? McCarthy/Scalise? McConnell? Cornyn? Sure. I'll give you a thumbs up on that one.
As an Independent who has voted for candidates in both parties, I deplore the false equivalencies stated in this piece. "Identitarians" on the left are rooted in social justice movements for civil rights righting to force the country to live up to its consecrated ideals of equality and opportunity for all. The tribe on the right uses terrorist memes such as the klan, the confederate battle flag, Nazi slogans and such to express reactionary resentment against those movements, even as social justice for all regardless of creed or color remains more a goal than an reality. It constantly blows my mind to see apologists like Brook (and I will assume Goldberg and National Review et al.) coddle white supremacists angry about what they see as gross injustices against them when all along, for over two and a half centuries, all they and we have known is white justice in one form or another.
1
I find it difficult to see the world of individualism and isolation that Mr. Brooks portrays. I see people with strong family ties, links to their community and a strong belief in their nation. That those qualities can gravitate toward tribalism is a valid point, but to attribute the ills of society to an over-emphasis on Lockean values seems to me to be a reach. The erosion of the American ideal has more to do with self definition of what it means to be an American, whether one (consciously or unconsciously) defines Americanism as culture or as values. What is the primary 'definer": color, religion and tribe or the values associated with rule of law, civil rights, and safeguarding institutions?
Call us when you land, we'll pick you up at the airport. Wow.
The headline was so enticing, the column so disappointing. It is a lousy review of Jonah Goldberg's book, and a shallow hand-wave over those he claims are "young, fresh writers...."
Please, I want to know, what are those writers expounding? A return to monarchy (or a good authoritarian strongman, at the very least, if his progeny are inept), or rule by elite white men? That seems to be the position held by the GOP today. After all, their policies appear designed to create a class of serfs and a class of ignorants to serve corporations and the hyper-wealthy.
Let's try that out in the 2018 elections. The bumper stickers write themselves, don't they: "Vote for a Return to the Monarchy," "Simplify your Life, Let White Men Decide Everything" "Vote to end Democracy, Vote GOP"
One last thing - "liberal individualism" is the hero of the Republican dream - Ayn Randism taken as a guide to life. Democrats believe in community and social responsibility - as evidenced by the greater health of the states where it is pre-eminent. When are you going to give up your illusions, David, and become a Democrat?
2
"The core problem today is not tribalism. It’s excessive individualism."
Wrong again.
The core problem today is what is has been since at least 1619. The obsession with isolating, stigmatizing, demonizing, and subjugating black people. In a word, racism.
Brooks's pious, faux-idealistic claptrap about a new generation of intellectuals ignores that, at bottom, they sing from the same old dismal hymnal, and will inevitably wind up with the same disastrous results, as did their ideological forbears.
We never learn.
During decades of oil painting and love of The Renaissance, it never occurred to me that DaVinci and Rafael and Titian and Michelangelo were "semi-hairless upright apes clumped in tribes and fighting for food." I have to run out and get a copy of "Suicide of the West" so I can be informed, I guess. I do see the shift, though: now the right, spurred on by people like Mr. Brooks, have decided it's time for the intellectualization of xenophobia, intolerance, and racism.
1
Nice Title, no substance to support it.
Oh, so three hundred years ago a ‘miracle’ happened. What! And the baby Jesus could talk and he enlightenment apparently was missed.
And what’s this liberal capitalism and liberal this and liberal that when it’s economic conservatives who have destroyed the ideal you think is being revived with the same bull. Less taxes, less social stability. When a conservative says the word reform, hang on to your wallets.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. National faith??? Hello?
And no, excessive individualism is not the core problem. We have a problem with nationalistic brainwashing by Fox and others, destroying individualism, solidifying tribalism and destroying critical thinking skills.
2
"Liberal individualism"? What in the world are you talking about?
Renaissance on the Right? Surely you jest. And just as surely, it's a pretty sick joke.
1
Drifting along on the waters of philosophical thought, ignoring the sewage and bloat along the shore, our hero Brooks averts his gaze...not realizing his raft is sinking.
1
As always, Brooks writes a report on the last book he read. And as always he finds something that suits his false equivalence narrative. Times readers deserve a lot better.
1
I assume the term "liberal" in your third paragraph refers to classical liberalism, not to "liberalism" in the modern political sense, which is what 99% of your readership is going to assume. Either that or you are deeply confused.
David, you kept disappointing me! Previously, you said Homo sapiens were out of tribalism for thousands of years. You tried to downplay the significance of evolutionary force and selfish genes. Now, you put out a new number of 300 years. Either way, your assessment is too simplistic. I just don't see any hope moving forward. Everything you said was true if the white race was the only race in consideration. The "liberal democracy" was developed for white people only. White people could talk about equality but they really meant equality inside the white race.
I gradually realized the "melting pot narrative" was really a wishful thinking. Liberal democracy cannot function well in a diverse society. Three hundred years is nothing in evolution. Not to mention slavery and colonialism were big part of the three hundred years. In fact, Asians were only allowed to come merely fifty years ago!
When can you finally be honest with yourself and with us? Diversity is against human nature. Homo sapiens were not evolved in isolation. The entire human history is a record of "crimes against humanity". Neanderthals were wiped out by Homo sapiens. Survival of the fittest. It is the rule of nature and there is no point to sugar coating it. Only when you finally face our genetic predisposition, we can find solutions and move forward. Sad!
Seriously, your harangue on all things identity eclipses complexity to rather flatten and whip the imagined specter/s that both scare and critically overwhelm the right's imagination.
I'm sorry, I just can't make sense of David's articles. I have tried and tried but I just can't get there.
Mr. Brooks you always seem to look at the history of America through rose colored glasses. Americans have always been tribal. When immigrants came to America they usually moved to where their tribe was. Just look at the history of lower Manhattan. Jews in one place, the Irish in another, the Italians in another. Even today there remains Chinatown, little Italy. Just look at the history of the Catholic Church in America. I lived for awhile in a small 'city' in Rhode Island, Central Falls, that is exactly 1 Square mile. However there were many Catholic Churches, one for the French-Canadians, one for the Portuguese etc. Identity was based on where they immigrated from. I remember a line from Frank McCourt's memoir 'Tis. For those not familiar with his story he was born in America, his family moved back to Ireland and he returned to NYC as a young man. I remember him writing "why can't I just be an American and not an Irish-American?" But his jobs, his lodging came from his Irish connections. My Swedish grandparents did not settle in an area where there were many Scandinavians; they wanted to be Americans. On my mother's side the ancestors go back before the revolution (English). As for me I have no identity beyond being an American and I certainly feel like an outlier. The melting pot took a long time to melt, but far too many Americans are pushed aside where they don't even have the chance to melt because they are still outside the pot.
How about student loans? Owning a home, forming a family, going on vacation, even buying a later model car, are far-distant dreams for young people graduating college and, if they are lucky, going into a job (or should I say "gig") without medical benefits or pension coverage.
We don't need to look for fancy explanations of what is wrong. Young people are stuck paying tribute to the well-off for the foreseeable future.
Fulminate all you want about identity politics. It is fundamentally beside the point to those in permanent thrall to the creditor class.
History teaches us that this often doesn't end well.
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I think we that it may be we had this sort of right wing intellectual burst before. During the 1920’s and ‘30’s. I’m not so sure it went all that well.
1
This is a lovely column, in two Acts. The first Act is a description of flowering conservative thought. The second is a thoughtful and earnest (so earnest!) grappling with main themes of that thought.
The column would be lovely if it were not built on an enormous fallacy -- or perhaps "fantasy" is a better description of the first Act.
There is no flowering of conservative thought in America today. Rather, the authors cited by Brooks are the smallest of small minorities, ants shouting in the forest. Unfortunately, all the energy, and all the volume, among so-called conservatives is elsewhere.
3
A Republican Renaissance?
The Republican thinkers believe that corporations are people.
The Republican thinkers believe that their religious beliefs and practices should be enforced on other Americans who do not share their beliefs.
The Republican thinkers believe that the 2nd Amendment gives them the right to arm themselves and carry weapons designed to kill with military efficiency and have the right of power of life and death over their fellow citizens.
The Republican thinkers believe that by sending "thoughts and prayers" they have discharged their responsibility to protect people.
The Republican thinkers believe that great wealth is commensurate with great virtue and that poverty is a punishment for moral failings and sin.
The Republican thinkers believe that laws should only be applied to others.
The Republican thinkers believe that taxes are theft and not the shared responsibility for an educated and civil society.
The Republican thinkers believe that "regulations" infringe on their freedom to make more profit.
The Republican thinkers believe that by saying "I'm not a scientist" they can absolve themselves from listening to scientists who all agree that man-made Climate Change now underway is a threat to our palnet's life supporting ecosystems.
The Republican thinkers believe that "benefits" are "entitlements."
The Republican thinkers believe that "lies" are more useful than "truth."
The Republican thinkers believe that healthcare is not a right.
Renaissance? No!
8
Thanks for this piece, Mr. Brooks. IMO, the loss of smaller communities is worse for the US than DJT, though they are tied to the same tribalism dynamic.
One might think that the recent advances of IT would have brought about a renaissance of rural communities. In fact, the opposite has happened. Instead of telecommuting from the family farm in Iowa, people telecommute from coffee shops in Brooklyn and the more affordable areas (San Jose?) around Silicon Valley.
I don't have the space here to go into the structural reasons for that, but the red/blue political divide, as well as much of the wealth disparity in the US, is outlined more clearly by rural/urban lines than by state or regional boundaries.
In China, we can see the implications of this: rural land grabs by nouveau riche communists, the loss of economic viability of farming, the smoldering start of a rural revolution.
It would be wise for the US to invest infrastructure funds in rural projects - higher speed internet capacity subsidies for low pop density regions, tax breaks for tech start ups in rural locations, for example - but I doubt these are coming any time soon.
I understand that much of the NYT's readership will pooh pooh your piece ("Another crazy conservative going off on identity politics") and my comment ("Invest in rural areas? Why? How about affordable housing in NY, Bos, SF, Wash first"), but I fear that tribalism, and reactions to it, will cycle to more extremes while small communities suffer.
Not mentioned is how this tension between individualism and tribalism has been exploited by the political class; particularly on the right. We keep looking for a Jack Kemp to emerge from the GOP and instead we continually get Nixon. This is a leadership problem.
Jonathan
1
Which liberal? Right wing shareholder value maximizing neo-liberal? Yeah, that is soul destroying.
The liberal Christian churches that formed around anti-slavery and still have causes? No, there is lots of soul there.
Which side of the Democrats is Brooks' liberal? He mushes it together.
One thing certain is that the Republican Party is soul destroying, by design. It crushes souls like grapes or olives are crushed and squeezed, and the product isn't shared.
Identity politics? The US has two realities. One has only one big white group in which everyone is expected to join the melting pot. The other has factions cynically promised things that will never be delivered -- the point is the endless promise to get votes, not actually doing any of that. LBJ was the last one who actually delivered on any of those promises.
This column is empty talk that mushes together any important ideas to avoid the real issues of economic or social justice, or even of a real soul.
2
A good look at a major problem with America. People have created so many categories (LGBTQ...XYZ) for ourselves that it has literally made it impossible to find anyone that is similar enough to relate to. Look at those kids marching after the school shooting. It looked like the only thing that brought them together was death. And perhaps put down your devices once in a while.
But where do the “People” fit with these new thinkers? The vast majority of Americans are now, especially, a-political and a-historical. I’m 74 years old, and remember how my parents and farmer neighbors were mostly knowledgeably engaged in political discussions of current events and political party platforms in the 1950s.
No longer. Specialization, the rigid 24 hour news cycle, eductional failures, increased wealth and garage filling distractions, cynicism with Washington—who knows the reasons?
Basically, then, what will attract the attention of this audience of “The People”, given their lack of a foundation ability to judge these new theories, and that we are supposed to have a government “of the people, for the people, and by the people?”
Oh yeah, the good old days, "Between 1860 and 1900 alone [when] America’s population doubled and its wealth grew fivefold."
Those would be the days when 4 million black people were enslaved to produce cotton and other crops for the benefit and wealth of their owners. And then after the Civil War, when they were "free," and many were desperately trying to survive by sharecropping, but also maybe being lynched, tortured, cheated, and beaten for trying to vote or maybe addressing a white woman to her face.
Yup, those were sure the good old days, David. What a wealthy country we were.
1
In your lists of presidents you conspicuously left out Obama,.. who was confronted and resisted at every turn by individualists/tribalists/republicans as he tried to bring the country together after one of the most divisive periods in our history.
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Mr. Brooks, please save us the lectures and write honestly and intimately about your own personal struggles. That is what will make the difference.
2
Individualism is a strength. Tribalism is a disease. “Stronger together” is a truth.
2
Why is a call to stop discrimination, and build an inclusive society dismissed as "identity politics"?
Seems like the opposite to me.
2
What a mish-mash this piece is. The recent upheaval in conservatism has left you lost and troubled. You're trying to make sense out of it. I see that. You're not there yet.
3
I urge everyone to read Danielle Allen's wonderful book,,OUR DECLARATION.
Her analysis of just the second sentence of that document is brilliant and optimistic....and free from the cant of left and right.
The future and the human race are too varied to be wrapped up in any one solution. No philosopher knows all of humanity. Locke did not invent the steam engine, any more than he invented agriculture. I think Genesis had a warning: agriculture would consume the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Remember the parable: Cain, the farmer, killed Abel, the herdsman! Subsequent inventions grew the population even faster, spurred climate change, and drought, and. Results: forced migrations, local wars, and in Europe and America, widespread disruption and unease.
Liberal Democracy spread over little of the world. When agriculture began to spread, 10K years ago, we may have numbered 10 million. Now, we approach 10 billion. The population of America more than doubled since WWII. Our room to expand is reduced by desertification. And those who were smart enough to inherit masses of money pay half-baked “philosophers” to tell us there is no such thing as society. To them, “freedom” means “devil take the hindmost.” That’s important because they aim to convert America by stealth to the Pinochet model of Chile. Longing for the 13-state USA is childish. Asteroid, earthquake, war: these may be solutions to the problems we’ve created in our murderous grubbing for wealth.
1
What in the world do all these big words do for the average working family? Jonah Goldberg a brilliant thinker? He just throws red meat to his fans with hald truths and distortion of reality.
1
Didn't identity politics begin when the first European looked at a Native American and said, "Sorry, buddy. This is going to be a white man's land"? Didn't it solidify a short time later when Europeans decided that all Africans would be identified as subhuman and eligible for enslavement? Haven't conservatives perpetuated these and other prejudices to maintain their identity as the ruling race? Just wondering.
The Republican Party sold its soul for votes beginning with the Goldwater revolution in 1964 and the rejection of civil rights laws. While Goldwater was an honorable man, his stance attracted many of the worst among us - the racists Democrats had spent several decades marginalizing then finally rejecting and ejecting in the sixties.
The Democrats didn't choose "identity politics" - a phrase the GOP uses to tie them to minorities. The GOP did. They chose white, angry, racists who were losing their position of prominence by color of skin. They chose angry Christians who saw their power diminished. Democrats chose those who saw equal opportunity as a greater good, no matter their race or creed.
The GOP also chose rapacious capitalists under the guise of "free markets" - a phrase which is code for a diminished federal government that restricts the rights of employees, holds businesses harmless for violations of public trust and asks nothing for the common good save a large standing army to do their bidding.
"Identity politics" is a polite way of calling Democrats "N..... Lovers". Tribalism is similarly a way to deflect the desire of those within the tribe to control all by dint of race or religion, culture or cash.
Mr. Brooks wanders through philosophical weeds and ignores the reality of a racist, anti-democratic party predicated on allowing the wealthy to amass all the power and call all the shots.
3
Where can i get a "Neo-Cons 4-ever" helmut-headed bobble head doll for the dashboard of my St. Reagan lovin' F150? Anyways.
Mr. Brooks quoting Goldberg, “the Miracle ushered in a philosophy that says each person is to be judged and respected on account of their own merits, not the class or caste of their ancestors.” Mr. Brooks then cites Locke (or the caricature of Locke) for this idea. To me, it sounds more like Muhammad and his idea of the ummah... the community. It is one of the great ideas in human history. It is too bad so many people have forgotten it.
"an emotional community, rooted in our land, inspired by our history, warmed by the hope of our common future" -- Brooks. "The land was ours before we were the land's" -- Robert Frost. Let's not ever forget how the land became ours, and what we did with it when it was. It's not a simple story.
David,
You talk as if identity politics was a new phenomena...this has come about because of our history....slavery, segregation, and nativism were the early primitive forms of what has morphed into identity politics on both sides...the power structure of the white male was there all the time....with economic adversity we needed some one to blame...who else but the immigrant and the people on public assistance?
Tribalism is a manifestation of economic displacement and those who are willing to take advantage of it...the two I think of are Hannity and Sharpton (although Sharpton has toned down his act a bit).
The last point is that this attack on political correctness disguises the hate, the racism and the amorality that Trump is symbolic of...many Republicans say the world is not a perfect place...so we will accept Trump's warts to get what we want...funny, the were howling about morality when Obama and Clinton were in office.
True the world is an imperfect place...that is not a rationalization for what Trump stands for and for what he is doing.
Hold on, the elevator has not arrived at the basement yet.
2
"Between 1860 and 1900 alone, America’s population doubled and its wealth grew fivefold."
Not to be a wet blanket, but I am sure the total conquest of a new continent, and the subjugation of its native population, had something to do with this history.
America was a one off. Only once in the history of the planet was a new continent "discovered" and then made a boon for the conquering civilization.
To think there was some lesson that could be repeated from that, is to be not only historically naive, but geographically just flat out moronic.
This is why we can't have nice things.
1
What's amazing about this column, with its grandiose ideas and sweeping claims about the American experiment, is that it manages to do so without noting the teensy weensy issues of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow. How can we really have an honest conversation about Locke and Rousseau without mentioning the American elephant in the room?
1
Why Mr. Brooks you are sounding more liberal-minded by the day, and this reader sees no contradiction when you write without gavel 'Modern liberal capitalism is too soulless, they say, too atomizing, too destructive of basic institutions like family, faith and village that give life meaning. Liberal individualism doesn’t produce the sort of virtuous, self-restrained people that are required to sustain it', bringing to mind the religious neighbors who believe in 'absolute honesty', proceeding to tell you that they use your garden as a dumping ground for their rubble.
It takes a man on site and sight, regardless of his non political views and no fear for his soul, to remove the waste. This is because it is a Man's World.
The neighbors enjoy stating their political views by announcing with the help of steel plates their choice for the most conservative Elder in town. There is no reason to believe they are not virtuous, and when a man shows up, regardless of his beliefs, the neighbor sends his gracious wife to ask forgiveness with tears in her eyes to tell me how much I am loved, cherished and treasured.
Singular, because liberal-minded friends are the first to understand the importance of their family community, some of the finest are of Muslim faith, and they are always the first to ask whether you are well and in good spirits.
As for Individual personal Independence, Orwell comes to mind. It appears to have served him right. And it also helps to flourish with pennies.
There is nothing wrong with “Identity Politics” for people whose very identities were recently, literally illegal (LGBTQ). Or those who were historically treated as property, then given equality under the law and had that equality withdrawn (Jim Crowe) and terrorized into submission (4300 lynchings).
Only the Conservative movement has sought to stigmatize those who have legitimate problems with David Brooke’s Lockian fantasy about a perfect American Meritocracy.
Jonah Goldberg, et. al. can wish away the current identity-based inequities all they like vis a vis Black Lives Matter, and Me Too. They can point to the particular perversion known as White Identity Politics and Trumpism as a an inevitable consequence of those movements rather than the vicious backlash that it is.
Meritocratic Democracy relies on equality of outcomes. When the conservative Renaissance about which Brooks is so excited for gets serious about fixing identity based discrimination in our country—rather than complaining about “tribalism” and wishing we were all more firmly grounded in our Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke—we might begin to take them seriously.
David Brooks would do himself and his ideas a favor if he stopped slapping the label "liberal" in front of every concept, belief and behavior he doesn't like. It's not only incorrect, it's quite irritating.
1
Philosophies rarely lead.... rather they follow. So arguments like these need to play out before we can analyze them.
What is left out here is power and corruption. Without a moral order and a moral basis, there is slaughter on the horizon.
1
National faith? What would that be, Christianity? What kind? I thought we had a National First Amendment.
Typically, Brooks cherry picks from a slate of latest folks with a book out who, it always seems, appear to be looking in from high intellectual heights. It seems to me that Brooks is always looking for some high-brow chum to justify his own milquetoast philosophies. There will be a renaissance on the right when or if any positive, constructive ideas emerge ever manifest in real, coherent governing policy. I'd like to see Brooks tell a black mother in suburban Atlanta that her work is not about social justice. Tell the teachers there that they are "Lockeian individualists." Go into the neigborhoods and try to explain to the immigrants about their "ecstatic shadenfruede." Millions of people are fighting for their lives every day and Brooks is standing around with his pals and their shiny new critiques of the world order. He'd do well to get out of his study and do what he said he was going to do--go be among the people.
You have a few months left to hallucinate about the resurrection of your party, Mr. Brooks. You are still in denial. But eventually please be honest enough about what you know needs to happen next to help this country, which to send home every Republican politician in Congress. All your incomprehensible verbal menadring and hand wringing only occurs because of the exposure of the moral and intellectual bankrupsy of the GOP. Accept it, vote Democrat for once and then help rebuild a new political landscape.
Good article by Mr. BROOKS, but we should also recall that title of Jonah Goldberg's work is derivative from a book published more than a decade ago by Pat Buchanan, "Suicide of a Super Power!"
"A Renaissance on the Right" Ha, ha, ha...right!
Mr. Brooks, when did you turn to writing satire?
In the roar of Hurricane Trump, among the foul winds of Republican Party anarchy, noise and chaos, you found a few "young, fresh writers?"
What is the likelihood that Mr. and Mrs. Republican, who live in red-America where any and all taxes are anathema, where building a useless wall is worth giving up healthcare, who believe government is our enemy, who believe Fox and Fools is a source of truth, who wear red, "Make America Great Again" baseball caps while waving the flag of the Confederacy, who foam at the mouth chanting "Lock her up!" who believe Hillary runs child-prostitution rings out of pizza shops; what Mr. Brooks, I ask, is the likelihood that a few possibly rational voices can gain traction in Trumpville?
The Republican brand is polluting our air and rivers. It is poisoning America and harming global stability. Like climate change, the Republican Party is destructive to our culture and civil society, and threatening our future.
The storm on the right can have no renaissance. The storm must be fought. It will take generations to repair the damage it has done and is doing.
Mr. Brooks, stop looking for a philosophic silver lining in the catastrophe of the right. Choose to join the Age of Enlightenment and fight for an America that is the promise of a better future for all.
Keep clinging to your patriarchal faith, GOP. If God said it, it must be right. And of course only the males in charge get to decide just what God said.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is moving on. Leading perhaps more morally righteous life, and leaving "God," whatever that is, completely out of it. Need I mention, we "nones" are the group that's really growing.
If the past few years have taught us anything it is the irrelevance of conservative intellectuals. Brooks thinks Goldberg's book will be "debate shifting." Perhaps. But among whom? I confess I largely stopped reading Brooks years ago because I find his thinking generally muddled, and this column lays out many of the most basic problems in his reasoning. He apparently cannot see the contradictions between the worldviews of his two heroes: Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman. History seems to be a pure abstraction for Brooks, who cannot see that Friedman-style capitalism guaranteed doom for the Burkean values he holds so dear.
I do admire Mr. Brooks' optimism, 'tho he does remind me of the little boy frantically shoveling the "pile" next to the Christmas tree while saying, "I know there's a pony in there."
Open your eyes Mr Brooks and please stop engaging in such odious "wistful" thinking. Trump is ripping apart what is left of the Republican party and threatening the country with a Constitutional crisis. Meanwhile the GOP is split between those who enthusiastically enable Trump's authoritarianism and those who meekly turn a blind eye to his lawlessness while they head for the exits. And in the midst of this you are writing about a country club Republican renaissance!? Please get over it and realize that your bourgeoisie young Republican fantasy is headed the way of the Weimar Republic (face palm).
1
There you go again David: "the Miracle ushered in a philosophy that says each person is to be judged and respected on account of their own merits, not the class or caste of their ancestors.” More rubbish about that meritocracy that produced the likes of George "Wubbya" Bush and "Stormy" Trump. Really? Actually, Bush and Trump are products of modern white based affirmative action, at Harvard and Wharton, that overrides Merit in favor of Money (I would say family like it was at Harvard for more than a hundred years but it is really money now). In fact, in America merit counts in the lower class where those who really work hard can make foreman on the work crew. But, the owner is the son of the daughter of the Grandfather who started the business using slaves and a whip. Some merit. But, keep telling yourself Republican lies David. We will keep telling you they are lies.
1
In Statecraft as Soulcraft, George Will descibed decades ago the conflict between Lockean liberalism (championed by what Will called "soi-disant conservatives") and Burkean conservatism, which includes the communitarian conservatism advocated by Brooks. Both this essay and (it seems) Goldberg's forthcoming book add to this discussion in a useful way.
"Identity politics" is not at all the destructive force Brooks and Goldberg portray it to be. Often it is the best way to address system injustice. Black Americans band together to address racism and police brutality; women stand together to confront sexism and sexual violence; LGBTQ Americans unite to battle homophobia and transphobia. The impetus behind them is not to divide but to integrate these groups into the category of citizens that enjoy equal protection under the laws and customs of the United States.
The communitarian impulse Mr. Brooks longs to find in conservatism has been extinguished from GOP theorizing about governance since Reagan. It was barely a whisper voiced by BOMFOG moderate Republicans prior to that and going as far back as Herbert Hoover and later, vicious Republican opposition to the New Deal. GOP thinking has always been based on a kind of Calvinist moralizing about the inherent value of individual success and industry. The poor and the sick don't deserve our help, because God would have already benefitted these unfortunates had they been truly worthy. The meek are the "takers" and they are in our way, seeking faintly red solutions to problems of their own making. Brooks never deals with, or even addresses, this cynical and fundamentally cruel streak in modern GOP and conservative thinking. Before he can build a credible case for a communitarian conservative Renaissance, he has to address the elephant in the room.
I read this article several times in the hopes that I could figure out what it meant. No such luck. By the way, what does "Identity politics gained traction on the left" mean? Is standing up for GLBTQ rights "identity politics"? Is standing up for black kids not getting shot by cops "identity politics"? So you are saying these are morally equivalent to standing up for white people?
Is the right finally putting it’s bloody-minded, civilization-threatening opposition to climate change action up for debate ?
Because that would be wonderful.
I love how casually Brooks writes “Identity politics gained traction on the left...” as if the left just invented the concept in a vacuum. The left’s identity politics is a direct response to the ultimate ugly expression of identity politics—slavery and Jim Crow, of course embraced by reactionaries and the South for decades and decades. Identity politics in America began when white men decided that black men were property. Everything that followed was a reaction to that.
1
So we're going to fight tribalism by remembering that we have a "shared national faith?" Would that be Christianity? The Christianity that many members of the Republican party use to justify the most inhumane and unChristian of actions?
I share no faith with those folks.
Republicans intellectuals- there’s an oxymoron for you. Last time I checked the overwhelming majority of Republicans don’t believe in evolution and good percentage think dinosaurs and humans lived together.
Nice try Mr. Brooks.
1
"The core problem today is not tribalism. It’s excessive individualism, which has eaten away at our uniting faith and damaged our relationships with one another. Excessive individualism has left us distrustful and alone — naked Lockeans." That "excessive individualism" is at least in part a response to repeated and systemic institutional / group failures on a large scale. Can you trust the government? Watergate, Iran Contra, corruption, government funded settlements for harassment/affairs. Can you trust businesses? Enron, Subprime Mortgage, Wells Fargo's fraudulent accounts. Can you trust religious groups? Clergy abuse and a massive global cover-up/enabling.
The problem with the GOP (center, right, ultra-right) is that they don't read fiction - they prefer to live it.
A coming together of communitarians on the right and the left? What on earth does that mean: Karl Marx meets Friedrich Hayek?? Brooks' argument does not fly. The American right is inherently NOT communitarian, other than via tribalism. The fusion of right-leaning religiosity, advanced corporate capitalism, and now nationalism, produces the very conditions Mr. Brooks decries.
So it all starts with Locke. I wonder if Messrs. Brooks and Goldberg know that Locke not only defended slavery in his Second Treatise, he actually authored a pro-slavery constitution for the Carolina colony.
Locke's liberalism was predicated on slavery and kind of tribalism of his own.
1
Another nothing burger column from Mr Brooks.
Locke and Rousseau.... come on.
What about your party's obsession with Ayn Rand.
Mr Brooks, you are a part of the root cause of the problems now facing America. You went along with and promoted the GOP cause as it became more extreme but maintained a fig leaf for modesty. Trump tore off the fig leaf and showed everyone what was behind it and for a while you feigned offence, but eventually you went along with it.
There is no renaissance on the right. The right is doubling down on its vindictive winner takes all politics.
And by the way, "winner takes all" is another way of saying survival of the fittest..... DARWIN .....EVOLUTION. Square that with GOP faith based politics.
Mr Brooks, You lost me at "a burst of intellectual creativity on the right". I think what you mean is the new justifications for greed. All the American right has ever cared about is facilitating the transfer of wealth to the rich from everybody else.