American politicals has acquired the trappings of a new religion modelled on past hirearchical Church. The three branches of legislative, judicial and executive office represent a government trinity that sees the president as a god-like figurehead who conflates with Congress and his appointees to the judicial branches into a monolithic super-power.
The princes of the this new secular church are represented by the key figures within each branch - Chief Justice, Senate Majority/Minority leaders and Speaker of the House. The priests in the HR operate the missions and congregations across the 435 dioceses while the Senators form the college of Arch-Bishops - two per state.
The Chosen parishioners are engaged in rapture. Their faith in America and "In God We Trust" is transferred to the conflation of the legislative, judicial and executive leadership. Their words are taken as infallible. Lies become truth. And the truth subject to artificial intelligence spun by superficial acolytes that read from the entrails of social media polls to construct answers posed by Sermons from the Oval Office - 'we are not our brother's keepers', and 'winners are preferred over losers'.
Beyond the din of division and voices in the desert that confuse the Base with Fake News lies Technocratic Elites, Wailing Wall Street money changers and Tax Reform whisperers: collectively, "The Bilderburg Citizens".
The new motto for this secular nation should be reconsidered: "And May God Help Us".
15
I understand fully why Mr. Brooks wrote today’s commentary, “When Politics Becomes Your Idol.” Someone had to say these things. As always, Mr. Brooks whips an insightful, spirited pen. I can’t quibble with his analysis on the surface. I also appreciate that he applauds diversity and reason, values that Mr. Trump’s camp abhors. I roil beneath the surface of Mr. Brooks swell words. I hope he might forgive me—especially in light of his clarion call for civility in the piece, “How to Engage a Fanatic,” (October 23, 2017)—as I scratch the following, alternative itch.
I resent that Mr. Brooks, and we as a collective and thoughtful national community, must for the larger public good psychoanalyze 30 million fellow citizens who practice group political turpitude; slip with apparent ease into the miasma of collective spiritual discombobulation; and gang up to indulge in unilateral cultural nihilism. In a decent world, we may expect that they would first reach out rationally, even if in compelling fashion; engage in firm-minded civil debate about their grievances; formulate concerns in common idioms of decorum, form, and substance; use fact-based reasoned argument; eschew propaganda; and belly up to an ethos of communal ownership for causes, consequences, and cures.
12
“What you see is good people desperately trying to connect in an America where bonds are attenuated - without stable families, tight communities, stable careers, ethnic roots or an enveloping moral culture…or to even have a spiritual narrative that gives meaning to life.”
Get a grip, man. Your search to understand the roots of the monstrous Trump phenomenon contains a tragic flaw: you believe in belief. It is a style of thinking - a stencil that you place over cultural change that yields unsound conclusions. You assume that religious beliefs (your “spiritual narrative”) are the optimal way in which to teach virtuous behaviors such as tolerance, compassion, and fairness in any society. In promoting the aspirational aspects of religious belief, you fail to acknowledge that belief has intellectual requirements that tend to obviate the need for evidence, logic, and independent thinking.
The Enlightenment shaped our culture and led to our Constitution - not the tenets of the Abrahamic religions of the Bronze Age.
As Richard Dawkins observes: “There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning ….” I’m about to text my children and my brothers to ask them what they think of your op-ed. We all talk almost daily because, unlike in the imagined bucolic past that you long for, our bonds are not attenuated - thanks to modernity and the scientific innovations that shape it.
15
That void, Mr Brooks, cast from withered community has succumbed the family and, soul by soul, every faith. Now, those fancy trinkets and the merriment that occupies all hours can no longer sustain them.
Without normal human connections, the basest of sentient traits becomes - an insatiable appetite - for 'greater purpose'. And so, they latch upon partisan politics as it were their idol. Into that pit, consumed.
A macabre vision, Mr Brooks, for All Hallows' Day. In the Good Morrow, shall we return to the real reason for protest and marches? It's as simple as being constantly lied to and recognizing that this feverish 'selling' of healthcare and tax reform is NOT "better and cheaper" NOR "for the middle class". Protestors are rejecting falsehoods, so let's not conjure deficiencies onto the citizens.
9
Dear David,
By your own measure, American consumer capitalism itself is an idol that makes categorical demands and fails to deliver on its promises. If the very foundation of our society is built on the quicksand of a failed idol, how can we expect to rebuild anything of lasting value on it. Maybe that's why drug addiction is such a problem. Maybe that's why anger controls the national conversation.
11
“All idols begin by offering great things for a very small price. All idols then fail, more and more consistently, to deliver on their original promises, while ratcheting up their demands. ... In the end they fail completely, even as they make categorical demands. In the memorable phrase of the psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover, idols ask for more and more, while giving less and less, until eventually they demand everything and give nothing.”
Sounds like an accurate description of DT, and how he treats all who sign up to support him. Let's hope they eventually come to understand this, and do not continue to be taken advantage of, while the nation as a whole suffers serious damage.
8
This past year I've found myself drawn to the historical perspective and reasoning by such journalists as David Brooks. That is not to say I'm becoming a conservative- it's more an intense concern about understanding our current circumstances and hearing different perspectives. It is so easy to hear what we want to hear, we need to find and promote the voices that bring meaning to the madness. Thank you, David.
I have to admit I spend a lot of time following the news and fretting about the future of our country. Mr. Brooks often ignites my thinking about his salient topics, and prods me to dig deeper. One common theme that I keep coming back to is education. Although it is not that simple, it strikes me that poorly educated people serve the Republican party interests very well. When education is not valued and is underfunded, especially in some red states, we all suffer. It is shocking to hear some of the Trump supporters parrot falsehoods and propaganda from Fox news and Alex Jones. You can sense the desperation, hopelessness, fear and rage that drives their thinking There are vast majorities of the country where all one can hear on the car radio is Limbaugh or Hannity. This is brainwashing. Amp up their fears, feed them nonsense on an endless cycle, keep them under educated, create a criminal class than cannot vote, promote desperation, and we become witness to a hardcore idolatry ruled by the lizard brain where facts don't matter, only tribal instinct.
24
The so-called "elites" may have implied the myth that Mr. Brooks describes, but both sides explicitly pushed ideas that they knew to be false, banking on the average voter not having the specific knowledge needed to recognize the lie: Republicans said we could cut government spending without losses to average citizens, and running a negative balance for years on end while making only the minimum payments on our debts wouldn't lead to financial catastrophe. Democrats said that globalization would bring increased business opportunities, but conveniently ignored the fact that globalization would also increase the competition for jobs. Both parties are equally guilty of fantastical thinking.
That said, Republicans are guilty of something the Democrats are not: they knowingly nominated and provided cover for someone that they knew to be unfit for office for both intellectual and temperamental reasons, all so that could get the White House to rubber-stamp their most regressive ideas without ever having to compromise. That it hasn't worked out the they anticipated isn't surprising; they can still salvage something if the choose to start exercising their oversight authority.
Absent Congress choosing to act as legislators instead of political hacks, they will force the people to put an end to the madness on less-favorable terms next year.
9
Mr. Brooks has a talent of doing with social issues what a miniaturist does with doll house displays, finely crafting tiny recognizable everyday things of life, based on resources from others or his own, and arranging them into an appealing, almost familiar, and certainly recognizable setting that invites imaginative entry and engagement.
But the attenuated bonds that he highlights are as elusive to nail down as they are to address. This editorial does a really good job (for me) in giving them shape and stand out with some clarity. Using partisan identity "to fill the void left when their other attachments wither away — religious, ethnic, communal and familial" seems to strike nearer to the truth than not. It may be gleaned from simple observation (the search for genuine connection in an over-connected world), from top-rated movies (ideals, battles, conflicts fueled with religious fervor and solved through fantast powers or capacities), and from popular social media (top news stories, sports heroes, fallible movie stars, and topics or videos that go viral).
I never thought that politics was a cure for spiritual and social loneliness. Politics is too big to know and too hollow to pursue. There are much better parables, fables, myths and legends that challenge and shape attention in genuine significant ways, ways that lead towards community and connection, not away from them.
If we could only find ways of moving from living in a dollhouse to living in our own house.
2
Many interesting ideas have been raised since Mr. Trump's election, in David's columns and elsewhere. Here for instance we read that party has replaced families, roots, communities, careers, and moral culture. A few days ago in this paper we read that Trump supporters want so much to believe that Trump is good that they fail to see him for who he is, and want so much to believe the opposite of his critics that they demonize them.
There has also been much good research that to some degree confirms or rejects these ideas. Trump's voters were on average well off. His average primary voter had an annual income of $72,000. Compare that to Clinton and Sanders primary voters for whom the annual average income was the same: $61,000. The hardships that David mentions, which he claims drives people to the Republican party, are well correlated with income. That is, the lower one's income the more likely they are to experience changing stepparents, changing homes, financial stress, chronic drinking, etc. So it is not very likely that Trump's voters were more motivated than another demographics to, for the reasons that David suggests, to have embraced the Republican party in the totalistic manner that they have. The notion that Trump's supports are deluding themselves, as described above, is perhaps a better story. As is the story that has underlined so much of what Trump and his voters have said and done: racial resentment.
6
Arguing about politics is and was my family's favorite pastime. Like my , father, I and my adult children yell at TV news. An older cousin confirmed my hunch that our paternal grandfather yelled at the radio before he had a television. We imagine there were ancestors who yelled at the town crier.
As the only members of our immediate families who made choices that brought us into the lower level of the global meritocracy, my husband and I don't look down on anyone. But we're running out of patience with those who don't believe facts, whether it's climate change or the fact that very few middle income people are likely to have assets that will be subject to the estate tax. And frankly, some of the rhetoric from the right smacks of the latest iteration of Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion.
Bonds can be formed if one wishes to form them. Of course, that requires putting down the smartphone and actually coming together with real (not virtual) neighbors. I thought you folks across the aisle were big fans of personal responsibility and initiative, David.
8
Teach the people to love themselves, to love the beauty and strength of the community, the principles of society.
3
Idols sound here to me a lot like an addiction.....
I think Dave is on to something powerful. The only problem is that increased mobility, family breakdown, and unrelenting technology make "myth-making" almost impossible to facilitate.
3
In his list of "more important dependencies" - "family, friendship, neighborhood, etc. - Brooks leaves out the most important dependency of all, humanity. This glaring omission turns his sober sounding philosophy, the "better philosophy (of) the Reagan era" into semi-religious - and wholly divisive - drivel.
4
C'mon America--Indictment an now Terrorist--How Likely? Yelling in Arabic and not shot dead? Doesn't add up -- Horrific Distraction.....
1
All Mr.Brooks does these days is don a sheep's clothing.
3
A good essay ... George Orwell noticed this some time ago explaining the desire for people to love "Big Brother." But after 12 Presidential elections I am beginning to think that all politicians are "clueless idiots full of drivel" -- beyond the electioneering phase of their duties. What cure is there?
1
50% of all the people you meet are below average intelligence.
2
Why is it that Brooks is unable to understand reality? In his never ending effort to appear even handed, he equates people, both Republican and Democrat ( though sadly too few Republicans) who recognize that Trump is the greatest threat to our polity, with Trump supporters who have a quasi religious faith, which like all fundamentalist faiths, is unable to see reality. There are now, and there always have been, grounds for reasonable people to disagree about political and economic issues. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a good reason to support an ignorant and immoral demagogue as President. It is only those who do who should be damned for idolatry. And Brooks ought to grow up and acknowledge that truth.
8
To be a "moderate" in today's politics, to the the "man in the middle", Brooks' brand, is to abdicate responsibility for our system that depends on engaged citizenship.
Being a firebrand in defense of our political system based on equality of opportunity, access to the vote and following the law is to be an engaged citizen and we need them desperately. When your political party, the Republicans, before Trump, denied a hearing for a Supreme Court nominee, it was not behaving moderately and at that point an engaged citizen of either party should realize that something needed to be done. Unfortunately, that party now has ill-gotten gains and a president with an ill-gotten presidency.
These are not times for moderate citizens if we want to keep our republic. But it makes it easy to sit back and pontificate about idolatry in the name of moderation.
19
“Partisanship for many Americans today takes the form of a visceral, even subconscious, attachment to a party group. Our party becomes a part of our self-concept in deep and meaningful ways.”
I would say it's entirely an issue with education, learning to be rational rather than to follow the herd. Personally, I would argue that despite best intentions the visceral component is nearly impossible to entirely subdue (probably part of this thinking fast and slow business).
It's also a self-invigorating cycle. The visceral and group-think component has always been there for politicians to exploit because political affiliation is a key part of the game, that is, you subscribe to a group and win or lose with them, and the ideas come in second, as they cannot be implemented if you lose. It is no surprise that "hypocrite", "politician", "turncoat", "unprincipled", etc should often be used in the same sentence.
Why did Obama have so many problems appealing to a broad base during his presidency and often upset those on either side of the aisle? I think it is precisely because he was principled and so stepped on little feet with each decision he made with best and most reasonable intentions in mind, rather than aiming for broadest political appeal.
10
He also championed globalization, which stomps on working class Americans. Why is that "reasonable"?
The problem with America today, with America for the past several years in fact, is that politics has ceased being a means toward governance. Politics has become sport.
It started with 24 hour horse race coverage of campaigns and elections. Rooting for candidates, in an increasingly polarized electorate, devolved into rooting for teams, red or blue, regardless of merit.
As with sports, people want "their" team to win. The aim is to rack up points. And if your team can't score, the aim is to prevent the other team from doing so. Keeping the trophy away is of utmost importance. The goal is not governance. The goal is humiliating the other side.
In this environment, the desire to best the opposing team excuses everything. To boosters bad acts, whether collusion with an enemy, or deflategate, are unimportant distractions. True sport and true governance are immaterial.
Winning is the only thing.
7
I lead a moderate, indeed a conservative life. One wife (for more than a quarter a century now). Two children. A dog. Home in the suburbs. Little alcohol. No tobacco or drugs. Pay my taxes. Exercise. Eat well. Work hard. But when it comes to politics, I am fact-based, socially liberal and fiscally progressive (tax me more, please!). Provide free healthcare, free education through professional school, and safe, affordable public transportation -- just like the rest of the developed world. I'm not angry. I'm not loud. I'm rationale.
35
You should donate to those charities that act on those social areas that concern you but the government needs to keep its hands out of our pockets. Forced charity in the form of taxes simply tales from unflavored groups in order to redistribute it to favored groups. It ignores the reality of free markets. It uses the threat of force to carry out its objectives. It permits the 47% who pay no federal income taxes to vote for candidates who promise free stuff to those 47% paid for by the 1%, ignoring the fact that the top 1% pays an obscene 40% of federal income taxes.
2
Yeah, politics is my idol & I care too much about it. Why? Because it’s about food safety & health care & reproductive rights & the environment & education funding & the arts. I find this article condescending & preachy. I’ll continue to care too much about politics. It’s connected to everything.
13
Better myths? We need better neurology:
'We’re always in search of the leader that we can rely on to be our partner so that we can just kind of sign off on that person and go back to worrying about other things,” said Elizabeth Saunders, a George Washington University political scientist who studies American foreign policy.'
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/world/asia/aung-san-suu-kyi-myanmar.h...®ion=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article
3
I don't think this is a 'both sides' issue because liberals really get fired up over policy, like single payer healthcare or Wall Street corruption.
5
And some conservatives don’t get fired up over Second Amendment rights, or limiting abortion?
6
David, another brilliant article! And yes, I admit that I idolize Democratic values, i.e., justice, equality, generosity (helping the "least of these" as Jesus asked). These values are the values preached by a Jewish carpenter.
Republicans, have along history of not supporting any social program that will help vulnerable and needy Americans. I believe the GOP is about to reap what it has sown.
By the way, the photo accompanying this op-ed speaks volumes! Donald's supporters idolize the flag, our military and him, still claim to be "Christian"! If Donald has done anything it has been to unmasked whom those so-called Christians really are!
18
A religious argument counters your supposed Christian views. If God made Mark Zuckerberg the world's richest man while making millions of others homeless, isn't against His will to try and change that. Look into Calvinism and the Prosperity Gospel.
The fundamental problem with these nice pieces by David is that the people who would benefit the most from reading them don't and won't!
18
An educated populace sounds like what's required for a functioning democracy, but studies show that this is a myth.
The individual voter is an emotional consumer and votes his tribal background. This is understandable because, in fact, the individual vote does not matter at all. One vote out of all votes cast is nothing. And so we vote emotionally, to make a statement - like sticking it to them.
Further, we only get one shot at democratic participation every four years and then are entirely forgotten about.
Additionally, the two parties are not so different. The Democrats love Big Money as much as the Republicans. The difference is that the Democrats throw a bone back to the masses to keep them quiet whereas the Republicans leave nothing on the table.
Democracy has been perverted by those in power, primarily by the Republicans, but also by Democrats who look the other way and go along for the ride. Until the Clintonistas get radicalized and join the Progressives we will continue our descent into fascism.
A possible non-violent voter solution to this problem of perverted power is replacing business as usual with dedicated Progressives - all other votes continue the income inequality trend. Toxic Capitalism must be replaced with democratic Socialism, or we die.
A more likely and more satisfying solution to massive income inequality is the French Revolution solution. Just need the Trumpsters to break through their programming and see how they've been used.
5
David,
Go see The Florida Project. It is a remarkable work of art, and especially relevant to your essay.
3
I think you’ve been writing a lot of good columns lately but this may be your best.
Near the end you write of believing “that we become free as we multiply and balance our attachments.”
Apparently there are religious traditions that hold we should free ourselves of our attachments. I’m willing to accept that may be true (though I doubt I understand exactly what they’re saying). But at least for now it seems likely that the best I’ll be able to actually do is balance my attachments, more or less and hopefully harmoniously, while trying to step back occasionally and keep them in perspective.
4
I know some people who are solidly, fiercely on either the right or left. They each have their implacable set of beliefs and their idols. Yet so many others I know are either moderates, or simply people who have a set of beliefs that is not implacable. Or at least, they recognize that not everyone shares all of their views. We do need better myths. I feel as if America has lost its connection to its values and principles because of polarization. It has become worse than that: tribalism and hatred.
1
David, yes, my affiliation with and adherence to the principles of the Democratic Party is a form of idolatry. Just as soon as my party can drive the Republicans out of power and return America to being a welcoming, generous and economically prudential country, I will cease idolizing the party and become , like you, a moderate.
10
“Idolatry is what happens when people give ultimate allegiance to something that should be serving only an intermediate purpose.” Brooks’ statement drips with arrogance – the arrogance of religion which assumes itself to be the only truth, the only path to social harmony. But from another perspective, religion is the idol, one that has already served its intermediate purpose and has now outlived its usefulness. Religion employs “reification” the process whereby something abstract is deemed material or concrete. Reification is particularly pernicious in this day of socially divisive alternative realities because it allows you to make a specious claim about anything. Invoke reification and A is B becomes A is C through Z too. So we need to be real here and recognize that other human beings are all we have. The skies will not roll with thunder and lightning to reveal a supernatural force that will smite our enemies. Cling to religion’s illusion of social cohesion if you want David, but it can’t deliver that in any universal way. Relying on the supernatural to solve or explain our circumstances is just an excuse to do too little or nothing at all. Religion relieves humans of responsibility because it claims that ultimately we are not in control. The real false god, the real idol here, is looking for easy answers that relieve us of the responsibility for our fate. You dwell in the Land of OZ David. Pull back the curtain to see that the Wizard is really just a guy from Kansas.
7
I read this piece as saying that politics has become a form of idolatry for many of us and that political attachments should be put in perspective and seen as less important than “family, friendship, neighborhood, community, faith or basic life creed.”
I didn’t read anything that suggested to me that Brooks wants us to simply swap out religion for politics in our attachments. But it’s true enough that he wrote of “intermediate purposes” such as “money, technology, alcohol, success or politics” while leaving religion off of that particular list.
4
All well and good, except one when party, which will go unnamed, flirts with and embraces racists and religious crackpots, among others, to sustain myths for which it will always be the champion, since those myths are challenged by nothing less than modernity. How do you appeal to the myths of a Creationist; to a climate change denyer who is told by a U.S. Senator--James Inhofe-- that "God is up there?" ; to a person so steeped in racial bigotry that he protests the removal of a Confereate monument on the base of which is inscribed language dedicated to the subjugatiion of the descendents of slaves? All of this a certain unnamed party has done for the past 50 years, stooping to appeals to the worst demons of our lesser nature, to win elections and hold onto power, power that rewards and coddles the wealthiest and most irresponsibly avaricious among us. We have science and the scientific method, which took us from the Dark Ages to modern times. We have the Enllightenment, which taught religious tolerance and was the basis for the creation of the U.S.A. and the adoption of our Constitution. We have the civil rights laws and post-Civil War Constitutional amendments, where our nation made a commitment to equal protetion of the law for all. And we have an unamed party which panders to all who would would retreat from those ideals and commitments, from KKKers to End Times crackpots. Some myths have to be marginalized. Period. It takes responsible leadership. Period.
12
Brooks is trying to harken back to a better time...was it a time when America was great?
1
This column could have been written by Barack Obama. Boy, do I miss him!
3
Worshipping Obama is as naive as worshipping Trump.
"If politics is going to get better we need better myths
If politics is going to get better, we need political writers to address the importance of reality based facts. Call out the lies as much and many times they are used to do the same.
5
Perhaps if Mr. Brooks were to use more prosaic terms it would make thing more clear for all concerned.
It isn't reinforcing myths that has caused the current problem, it is instead the pandering to prejudice.
Ronald Reagan speaking about 'welfare queens', and 'strapping bucks' did not bring the country together, nor did his incessant denigration of government.
What they did do was reinforce the racial and educational prejudices of a segment of society, and thus lay the foundation for the next twenty years of divide and conquer.
Take this kind of pandering, mix well with false 'libertarianism' blend in a large helping of misogyny, a huge dollop of anti-intellectualism, and a complete refutation of truth and voila Trump.
9
Best thing written yet about why we're at war with our neighbors. Well done.
Doesn’t Mr. Brooks realize that it’s not partisanship, but rather war?
On one side is bigotry, racism, and misogyny. On the other side is the fight against those issues. The former has the power right now, but the latter has the numbers and the Press.
The question is who will win?
6
You've hit a nerve, Brooks.
Idolatry is the root of all evil, and you can expect such insight to invite virulent opposition. I commend you for tactfully shedding light on the principles of truth in the face of a hostile and fallen world. There is One who takes notice of all and it is his opinion that matters.
Keep up the good work.
1
Two thoughts:
Mr. Brooks could widen out his comments beyond politics to business (CEOs as idols) and beyond. The lack of recognition that all the people in a group (company, political party, other) contribute to the success of the group has been forgotten.
I think I am more cynical than Mr. Brooks. I think a lot of people heard or read rumors and bought into them without any critical thought or further reading. Also, given 40% of the public doesn't vote is another measure of the apathy of the public.
4
Everybody needs a belief system and politics is one. But the new major idolatry in America and the West is political correctness.
PC in today's self centered me-me world has made great inroads in replacing age old Judeo Christianity that has been the underpinning of morality, ethics, personal stability, family life, communities, and so much more, for 3 thousand years - of course, with its own imperfections and misuses. The Second Commandment (of the 10) is against idolatry, the very idolatry that has arisen today as PC - and politics - and has taken so many forms over the ages, including communism, fascism, and now feminism, racism... - all part of PC.
The problem with idolatry is its pursuit of false gods with rules made up by the opinion makers, the powerful, the rich and well connected of the day, who possess no higher wisdom or principles or formulas for behavior or for ethics or for morality and on and on. Whereas Judaism and Christianity brought us out of paganism, PC is taking us back into it, with its damage perpetuated through legislation which also attacks the Judeo Christianity which were essential for the birth and success of America. Ironically, all of this is understood by the refugees coming to us from South America, and from traditional black Americans, who may be the best hope for our crumbling society along with the remnants of traditional religious Americans.
1
Remember Jesus's second commandment — love your neighbor as yourself. Treat your fellow human with the human dignity you claim for yourself.
A pretty PC thought, don’t you think?
2
Maybe you should tell Congressman Steve King.
1
We only win when we play for each other.
5
Well, we know it's bad when celebrating a lack of passion is seen as the answer to all our problems. It has never been the moderate standing against the winds that did anything great for our country. It was the two sides standing against each other, but willing to compromise in the middle that did so. Only one party thinks compromise is a dirty word. Only one party began the demonizing practices that define our politics today. It's hard to imagine what any republican would consider a moderate today, so far off the rails of political moderation have they fallen. Clinton was the best republican president since Eisenhower for all matter and result and Obama about as moderate as one could hope for, it being somewhat challenging to even come up with something radical he did do, outside of the White House veggie garden, that hippie, and Michelle really did that anyway. I think Brooks should stick to fixing the republicans and not the whole system, besides, the democrats are never fixed really, unless they're focused on fixing stuff, and they aren't terrible at that, if republicans don't get in the way, and of course they always do. Fix the republicans and we would at least have two sane parties to deal with, but good luck, because every problem they have was featured in this article. Politics only for the sake of winning and getting paid, idolatry of the WASP and worst among us.
8
Thanks for an insightful column.
1
It's funny, but the group that considers itself to be the most religious (at least in an ostentatious way) are the ones that cling hardest to party as tribal identity. I hear so-called "Christians" claim that Trump was chosen by God (and thus can do no wrong), that policies that are manifestly unChristian as proclaimed by Jesus himself ("as you do unto the least of these, so also do you do to me") like building walls of both stone and law to keep out immigrants, stripping food and shelter and medical care from the poor, treating people in prison as irredeemable, etc; as perfectly acceptable "Christian" doctrine. People who think of themselves as oppressed if they are not allowed to force the rest of the country to abide by their interpretation of the Bible, and that the Republican party will help them do this even though our Constitution and founders explicitly said that church and state are to be separate things.
That kind of blows your theory that people are making an idol out of politics *because* they lack spiritual moorings out of the water. They refuse to be swayed by logic and reason *precisely* because their religion and their politics both give them leave to do so. In spite of your ferocious attempt to pretend that the members of both parties behave in the same way, they do not. Religion has no place in politics, and the time has come to strip them all of their tax exemptions.
11
Brooks blathers mindlessly on about “a spiritual narrative that gives meaning to life,” how a biblical ethic will bring us together in blissful kumbaya. But religion already has stranglehold on our government and society, yet, we still have huge divisions. Why? A big part of the answer lies in the rapacious hypocrisy of Christianity, a reality Brooks won’t touch with a ten foot pole. There are endless examples of biblical injunctions that Christians love to ignore. The bedrock of Christianity “Love they neighbor as thyself” (Mark 12:31) is tripped up by racism, and anything that falls outside of our tribal affiliation.
The key to this paradox is to realize the true nature of religion. Yes, yes I know religion provides a sense of community for some, but “community” often means a toxic “tribal.” And it also allows connection with the transcendent for those who believe in it. But underneath it all religion is about power. Its doctrines and rituals serve as a façade to disguise its real energy. Historically, the great religions have always been defined by hierarchical power structures. Religion is 1) about controlling people and 2) an excuse for a lot of bad behavior. So David, that’s why religion doesn’t work as social glue; it’s not really about what it says it is. The real god is power, and the human need to worship power outweighs any devotion to community or transcendence. Just ask a priest; ask the Pope. Ask an orthodox Rabbi or the Imam. Ask your Congressman.
9
"Today, partisanship for many people is not about which party has the better policies ..."
And those people are all Republicans. Own it, Brooks.
7
Mr. Brooks:
When are you going to acknowledge that the ship of state is sinking and stop writing about where it should be headed. The answer is obvious: we are going down.
6
This is a good column. I agree with Brooks that the disappearance and/or diminishment of social connectors (secure long-term employment, extended families, social clubs, churches) and the stresses of new technology and multi-cultural considerations have created a sense of socio-economic alienation among a great number of people. They hunger for allegiance, acceptance, and identity through political affiliation. Those seeking that in tRump idolatry are likely suffering more than those whom they seem to disdain
2
Why is "our" in quotes in the sign exactly? Does anyone know?
4
I'm not joking I really want insight
Betsy DeVos knows, I bet.
As a psych nurse, I always wanted to understand my patients' crazy talk but the sane mind is just too logical. Just accept that she "knows."
The most eloquent rationalization of stupidity I've read all week. And there is much competition.
And of course it wouldn't be a Brooks column without at least one false equivalency: "It should be said that people on the left and on the right who try to use politics to find their moral meaning are turning politics into an idol..." Ha! Tolerance and intolerance aren't two equally moral choices.
7
Seems to be a remarkably weak column offering a solution to nothing. In other words, a column offering nothing to no one. Maybe he should have skipped the book.
3
The Republican party is for people who don't have a life; right Brooks?
2
The Republican Party has systematically undermined democracy through voter suppression, gerrymandering, wedge politics, and propagation of outright lies through partisan media outlets for decades. The Republican Party has for decades engaged in a deceptive, bait-and-switch campaign to persuade working and middle class voters that it represents their interests while pushing economic policies that benefit the elite of the elite, the mega-donors that dictate the party's legislative program.
This is a calculated, long-term effort by a group of self-interested economic barons who exploit the insecurity, prejudices, and willful ignorance of the Republican Party base. So don't give us this psychosocial babble about Trump tapping into "myths" that arise from the anomie of the heartland (because you saw a movie)!
16
David writes another insightful column. I agree that many are using much of their life's energy to prove the other side wrong and their own side right - a form of idolatry. And politics can't heal this, but community can. Here in Houston, everyone came together after Harvey hit. Political differences were literally washed away, and everyone forgot their idolatry. It was all about helping each other. It was wonderful. We need more of that sense of common purpose.
3
Great column.
1
Really? How so?
3
I think that Mr. Brooks' description of partisanship as total is apt, but I am not convinced that a feeling of belonging is the source of the energy poured into political identity.
This year, Richard Thaler won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his groundbreaking work on understanding why we place whatever value we place on individual items. Thaler discovered that we value that which we have MORE than similar items which we do not yet own.
In our current political environment and modernizing world, conservatives desperately try to hold onto their own cherished memories of how America used to work for them. This is all that matters - mostly white men remember fondly how they were respected and treated in society, how well they were compensated at work, and how well their families functioned. True or not, works for everyone or not, it matters not.
Times change and things are no longer so facile and they grip tight to their past and they identify with the Republican team. To hold fast to what is dear, they always back their team.
Progressives are still striving. Some Democrats reach farther now, others less, but as a group, Democrats are less able to dismiss misbehavior or poor policy recommendations than Republicans because Democrats are reaching with less gusto than Republicans are holding onto their past.
These two groups are not equivalent, but the totality of the politics does change the dynamics and makes one either pick a team and commit, or stay out and tune out.
Circumstances are dire here in America, and Brooks makes some very good points about politics and society. We--many of us anyway--can't be bothered to delve deeply into issues; rather, we turn to various forms of instant information that squares with our own political/social viewpoints. The fact that the other side does this as well leads to more engagement/hysteria. I call it the train-wreck syndrome: can't look away, no matter how hard we try. Sadly, this isn't happening to someone else, it's happening to all of us, and we all are doomed unless something happens to change it.
1
That is a very eloquent way of saying: "You have lost your mind!"
Our dear Mr. Brooks: Sorry, once again a false choice. How about a politics bent on raising up the standard of living for everyone, with justice for all. That need not, and perhaps cannot, be achieved by family, religion, community, or whatever false idol you propose. As for me, I'm still waiting for my "Lonesome" Trump moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez5cTYL4paA
2
How can we create a new myth of social equality, when inequality not only keeps growing, but has become institutionalized?
I mean, I get the point that people need something beyond everyday reality to feel connected to, some sense of larger community, but the really of modern globalized capitalism is that its reshaping (and commodifying) practically all human relations, just as Marx said it would. And the conditions its created make ANY claim to social equality in ANY nation seem pretty specious.
It seems like those of us who are surviving in this new global world are like Hamsters running on a treadmill all day long, while those who are failing behind feel deeply alienated and devalued.
How does one create any myth to bring these two types of people together?
2
Mostly, Mr. Brooks, Trump gets his myths wrong too. Most of the educated morally enlightened citizens working to solve social problems don't look down on the people who are struggling. They don't want to deprive anyone of medical care, social justice, a level playing field, economic security. They don't want tax breaks. If you're talking about the brainiacs and billionaires on the Left (like Krugman, Soros, Buffet), they stand for things that benefit 'regular people'. They're mostly virtuous, wise, and tough. Not smug. Not greedy. They're honest. They're Not Trump. Thanks.
6
When David Brooks declares that “...we need to put politics in place,” he needs to be more explicit, and he needs to name names. Who is the “we” he is speaking of that has put politics in the inappropriate place? Are Democrats and Republicans equally guilty?
Isn’t it the Religious Right that deserves special credit for this state of affairs? And if that’s the case, why is Mr. Brooks hesitant to say so?
2
Politics is the new tribalism. Perhaps we Americans are most familiar with this via the Hatfields and the McCoys. But casdting the net further, we come on the Guelphs and the Chibelines of Renaissance Florence, and the blues/greens of early Christian Constantinople. In both instances, while the violend gang organizations began in relation to political issues, they embedded themselves in their cultures as ongoing mass mayhem.
1
Speaking as one of the "extremists on the left," when it comes to supporting the EPA ands such environmental activists as the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club, I do not hear anybody over here talking about Mother Earth. Our hair is on fire about increasingly low sperm counts, high cancer rates and brain damage from the very chemicals and practices that the current EPA is refusing to regulate or ban. We are not snobs when we say that low-information people are enabling the degradation of our planet and our bodies. That's why that man loves the low information voters.
But I do believe Curt is on to a good idea- to meet people where they are, empathize with their values and, somehow, educate them about what can be done to protect the good stuff.
2
Mr. Brooks writes, “Today, partisanship for many people is not about which party has the better policies.”
That’s a false equivalency. Only one party wants to curtail health care’s reach, to reduce taxes for the top 1% of income earners, to roll back regulations on environmental toxins, to scale back the US’s commitment to clean energy, to remove the people’s collective ability to take action against financial industry abuse, to even allow bump stocks on automatic rifles. And, with a few exceptions, that party’s leaders are now subjugated to an indecent, small-minded and unfit man.
So yes, Mr. Brooks, today’s political discourse is often heated to the point of further divisiveness. But no, you cannot credibly claim that Democratic Party supporters are blind to which party has the better policies. That’s not even a contest at the moment.
4
Brooks is talking general tide dynamics as a tsunami is heading our way. They're saying "The presidents authority will not be questioned." Light your hair on fire, David.
1
John Lennon imagined a world with no religion.
I imagine one without Fox News.
"Politics as Idol" is just more of the same, nonsensical "false equivalence pablum" that puts the blame on "both sides".
This isn't a "both sides" problem, it's a GOP problem, and it runs deep.
"Politics" isn't the enemy, and it isn't an "Idol". It simply doesn't work when one side is morally broken.
5
Brooks brings up two themes I want to underline. Politics is supposed to take policy disputes to the "court of reason". In the court of reason it is supposed to be governed by the notion "may the best argument win" Rationality is supposed to prevail in taking the best argument to prevail over partisanship, ethnicity, personal identity, etc. Brooks describes the various forces at work today that prevent the Congress from functioning according to this principle of reason. The worship of false idols he mentions fits with the Trump campaign, portraying himself as the all powerful father who would come riding to the rescue and fix everything for everybody, "only I can fix it". It fits too with the pathetic, alienated members of out society who feel so powerless and ineffectual and infantile that they want a false god, a mere man, come in and make it all better for them. This was the fake image of himself that Trump peddled to his notorious base. They don't need to worry their little heads about anything big daddy Donald will handle it for them and make everything hunky dory. This is sad and pathetic to say the least. Contrary to Mr. Books however, this is not due to an "excessive dependence" on politics but only a debased version of such reduced to seeking salvation from a false god who is going to make it all better for the weak helpless children . Politics whose essence is the court of reason has been replaced by the exploitation of lost souls.
2
No, no, the problem is not that the false idol demands so much of you, but that it demands so little, and gives so little. Community institutions like churches, clubs and unions demanded dues or tithes or volunteer work, as opposed to occasional voting and Facebook likes, but they supported you, too--if the boss messed with you, or you were out of a job, your union or congregation did more than give you a smiley face. For many political identifiers, they are given a lonely and solitary identity that requires nothing but outrage.
4
The political climate is worse because one party has abandoned the idea, "at the end of the day, we are all Americans." Now voters are given idols to worship and fellow citizens as enemies to hate by those same idols.
2
David, I feel your pain but Trumpism has far more to do with racism than any sort of cultural disenfranchisement.
3
The conservative right has been selling its myths, falsehoods and idols since at least the rise of Fox News, the first big foreign hijack of American media and thus American thought. Saying "both sides do it" was invented by the lying right as a justification for their propaganda. Foolish writers (I won't mention any names) now parrot that fabrication as if it were truth.
Elsewhere in the editorial section today, a Republican apologist, who probably considers himself an "intellectual conservative" like Mr Brooks, bemoans, like Mr Brooks, the ruination of their heretofore saintly Republican party. Yet their party has been telling the same lies Trump tells since Nixon. Brainwashed by right wing untruths, Trump's supporters are convinced Democrats are worse, in spite of the reality that over the last 50 years the only party who has ever produced any legislation benefiting "working America" has been the Democrats. But because Dems want to wish everyone a joyous holiday season they are anti-American and to be hated by Republicans.
"Trump is our savior" says the Trump idolater's sign in the heading photo. Did we ever see that sign for Obama? Highly doubtful. Too many Trump idolaters are Christ idolaters. Thinking Christ wants them to support Trump exposes their deep ignorance of both men.
5
Note that the sign says "our" savior. By putting the "our" in quotes, this believer in Trump may be indicating a secular savior for the Trumpsters and not the "Son in the Sky" Savior.
Without the quotes, she would be publicly pledging allegiance to the Anti-Christ and be dammed for all Eternity to the Fires of Hell.
Of course, her vote for Trump has already dammed her.
You may reasonably believe that the Anti-Christ or the Apocalypse is a myth, but the end times are nigh. Witness Trump playing with the Nuclear button.
"The man of sin will come with the power of Satan. He will use every kind of power, including miraculous and wonderful signs. But they will be lies." 2 Thessalonians 2:9
Let us pray, this Halloween, that Trump is not the Anti-Christ, but know ye that Christ is most certainly the Anti-Trump.
3
Political parties are, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, granfalloons. A granfalloon is a proud and meaningless collection of human beings, or in Vonnegut's words, a false karass.
2
Sorry David but I look at the woman pictured with the placard and I don't see virtue, wisdom or toughness. What I see is pathetic.
3
There is something not quite accurate about this opinion. Among my own friends and neighbors, political loyalties have far less to do with the personalities that represent our positions, and everything to do with the fact that we support those politicians who champion the policies we champion. This support is not about celebrity, but aspiration.
"The heroes of this myth were educated, morally enlightened global citizens who went to competitive colleges".
For example: George W. Bush was rejected from the University of Texas at Austin because he graduated at the bottom of his HS class, and, his SAT scores indicated he may be special needs intelligence levels.
However, he was then admitted to Yale as a "Legacy" (white male affirmative action)...candidate.
At Yale he rarely attended class and graduated with a C average - the grade granted to those at Yale who never attend class and flunk all exams.
Then, with that outstanding performance behind him he then failed at a few companies then was admitted to Harvard because his Dad was rich and famous.....the other white male affirmative action program.
After Harvard he went on to destroy the entire Middle East based on lies as the "President everyone wants to have a beer with".
And there you have it. "Competitive meritocracy".
LOL. I mean really loud.
5
Having never voted or really cared who is elected, I have to agree with this article. I get along with people who voted for Trump and I get along just the same with those who think he is the next Hitler. I think it would do the country well if more people didn't get so obsessed with politics. Although, I admit I like watching politics for the entertainment value
HEINUS! false equivalence. Still buried, buried in tribal allegiance Mr. Brooks. You truly think that the democratic left is immune to all reason and decency and is frighteningly criminal and fascistic just like the current crop of republicans, r e a l l y... Get the sequoia out of your eye man - you are willful blindness incorporated.
3
IDOL WORSHIP Wasn't Kosher when the Children of Israel built and worshipped the golden calf while Moses was up on Mount Sinai receiving the Law of the Torah. In fact, it wasn't kosher when Abram's father, Terach, made a living by selling idols to worship. So Abraham followed the commandment to leave his father's home to leave the idols. What will it take for the GOPpers to wake up and realize that they have been following a false messiah who will lead the US to its own destruction? If they truly believe in the authority of the Scriptures, they will have to leave their idol worship and seek a new leader who follows the Law.
2
There you go again, Dave.
2
Clear insight from Mr. Brooks, as usual.
I'm antipolitical: I am against all the evil that Republicans do.
2
This pseudo-scientific screed about "idolatry" is David Brooks at his worst.
A card-carrying member of the Republican elite, a multi-millionaire from his best-selling books, owner of a magnificent mansion in Washington DC's tony Cleveland Park, Brooks imagines that political parties provide "identity" and "meaning" to Americans just as the Republican party has provided identity, not to mention Croesus-like wealth, to him.
Brooks has become the quintessential self-absorbed, thumb-sucking navel-gazer of Republican elites.
What the American people loathe are multi-millionaire Washingtonians like David Brooks who assume that their pseudo-scientfic "deep analysis" can make rational sense of the unease and rage now sweeping across the prairies and abandoned factory sites of the American heartland.
Donald Trump was hired to break the furniture in Washington DC.
Yes, it is the Brooksian elites -- Republicans and Democratics, media and academics alike -- that the heartland loathes.
Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, is the only politician in Washington DC who is willing to speak the truth: the American rich are eating the American poor for lunch.
6
How someone Jewish can spin this kind of apologia for the Republicans, when they don't consider him one of them, is beyond me and a shonda to boot
2
This article has been written by someone who has never been laid off with no prospect of getting an other one.
Social research shows manual workers who work have DIFFERENT job expectations than college educated people doing paper work.
To manula workers job security is more important than high salary, exciting tasks or opportunities for advancement.
The fundamental change in the US has been that job security for manual workers has disappeared. When you get laid off, chances that you will find an other , comparable job are slim.
It is the deep, very deep, economic insecurity of those exposed to outsourcing and in-immigration that underlies the Trump phenomenon.
Add to this a disdain of the educated class that keeps telling manual workers that they "vote against their best interest" or even more haughtily declare that outsourcing seen more intelligently is a positive development as it lifts people in China out of poverty ( see Krugman In Praise of Cheap Labor) and you have a combustible mix. This kind of argument pours oil on a fire.
Unless the educated elite understands above, the chasm will continue.
But I fear, that until all the NY Times writers are laid off, and their jobs are outsourced to Bangalore, after having trained their replacements for one year, that shall not be the case
6
Right on.
Politics teaches that life is initially unfair, and religion teaches that the world is ultimately just. What happens in between makes all the difference.
When we get to a certain tipping point the extremist control the agenda. This is where we have ended up. Perhaps Brooks makes the time worn mistake of assuming that everyone is to blame. In this case it might not be true. We elected an extremist after 8 years of an extreme moderate. Maybe that points out that there is some kind of inherent weakness in moderation. But perhaps that is a misunderstanding and can be overcome. It does not necessarily take strength to have a big mouth and try to push people around. But the moderates have to have strength to overcome the extremist. This can be tricky. Who are our greatest moderates? Lincoln and FDR. Who's ready to be publicly great? It can't be a squish. That was tried and led to trump.
"It’s to believe that our politics probably can’t be fixed by political means. It needs repair of the deeper communal bonds that politics rest on, and which political conflict cannot heal."
Right. Let's all go back to church, or find our "spiritual narrative." Then our politics will be just swell. Like they were 1860-1865, when far more people attended church (as a percentage) than do today. When the American Revolution was still within living memory. That's why the Civil War never happened, right?
As others have pointed out, it's the lack of thinking, of putting party over common-sense, which is the real problem here. And it's been known as a problem since our country was founded. As Thomas Jefferson so ably put it over 200 years ago,
"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all."
Pretty much says it all. Now, if a citizen can't understand the point Jefferson was making, maybe he/she shouldn't be able to vote.
4
A plea to the Times: no more squishy moralistic arguments that somehow America has lost its way because of "communal bonds" or "cultural references". Trump is about economics. People have been left behind by an economy that feeds the rich and starves the poor. Populist revolts are never mounted on a full stomach. We might not be in soup lines like our forbearers of the 1930's, but we know when the economy is stacked against us and our children. We need to stop searching on the back of the pew to find some moral failing that explains our current situation. Look instead at the number of people that are either poverty stricken or one step from it despite years of work and frugal living.
5
Trump is about racism and hatred of others.
1
Racism and nativism typically rear their ugly head when time are bad.
1
Call me partisan but Democrats are all about policy. This substitution describes Republicans, particularly those who have voted against their interests since Reagan.
2
The idolization of Trump has all the characteristics of a cult. If there is a way to defuse this situation, it might lie in using the methods that have been developed for rescuing people from cults. David Brooks could do a great service by looking into and reporting on this area of social science research and practice.
5
It’s not even about which party has the better philosophy, as it was in the Reagan era.
I slogged through the rest of the mush, but it just got mushier.
For people who can see Reagan initiated the current cycle of the destruction of Equality and Freedom and Happiness..
Reagan's first Inaugural, a piece of amazing sophistry which links one lie or half truth after another, launched the attack when he said "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people."
Hardly anyone heard the note of Ayn Rand in this.
His second inaugural carried the attack further..."I will shortly submit a budget to the Congress aimed at freezing government program spending for the next year. Beyond that, we must take further steps to permanently control Government's power to tax and spend. We must act now to protect future generations from Government's desire to spend its citizens' money and tax them into servitude when the bills come due. Let us make it unconstitutional for the Federal Government to spend more than the Federal Government takes in."
It was during the next 35 years that the greatest transfer of wealth in history from the people into the hands of a group
of a few hundred took place. talk about a con job!
5
Politics is America has evolved into dogma. Perhaps it always was. Dogma gives people the excuse not to think, thereby removing all rational thought from their lives. "I'll support Trump no matter what," is dogma born from a cult or pure ignorance.
We live in a time of education, education, education, and yet all that extra rote learning only proves that education is no guarantee of intelligence. In some parts of the country it provides but a breeding ground for more dogma.
"The people get what they deserve," is a sad but appropriate phrase for the present.
Excellent analysis - thanks. A tale as old as time "beware of false idols".
When there is a flashy Demi-God spewing attractive falsehoods to a group of disheartened, disillusioned and disaffected people, it is easy to see how one gets hooked into the dreamlike illusional fog that the Demi-God preaches. A formerly drug addicted friend of mine once told me of his first hit of crack - how he had never had a high like it, was hooked immediately and then fell from grace very quickly taking 13 years to finally quit the drug following much pain and sorrow. It feels the same with Trump. His addictive allure and abusive power-plays hook us, trap us; then it is hard to give up his toxic brew even when it causes pain and suffering.
Falling for the false idol is as old as time and rising up from the turmoil will require a Herculean feat.
For a lot of Americans their idol is guns. They are more important than anything else including family, religion, country, or health.
My idol is the truth. That is why I don’t like to identify as liberal or conservative, Christian or Muslim, etc. Right now the Republican Party acts as the enemy of the truth and therefore I fight against it.
4
The greatest myth you have missed is that we all subscribe to the founding basis of this nation. Our difficulty with diversity would disappear if we believed in the level of equality described there. Our problems with religion specific law pushed by Christians, Jews, Mormons, Muslims and others would also diminish if they met the founding basis of our nation rather than their own selfish approach. And we should also examine our personal myths such as the Reagan comment you inserted.
Both sides do it. SO SAD!
There are people who want equality for all.
They want women not to be harassed and assaulted. That they are treated equally with in the workplace for the jobs they do equality in pay for performance, and in avenues to advance. They want women to decide their own medical care, not their employer and not someone else's religion.
They also want LGBT people to have an equal right to a government contract called marriage and equal access to the goods for sale in the public market.
They want equal access for all in accommodations and a place to live. Regardless of race, sex, gender, or LGBT status. They want everyone to have the opportunity to freely use public restrooms.
They want healthcare for all. Because getting sick generally isn't a choice. They believe that this should be affordable because unlimited profit here is an abuse of people i need with no options except to die from lack of treatment,
They believe that all races have a right to equality, and that a 400 year history of racism that includes today, in blatantly obvious ways if one look at demographics.
I'll give you a hint of who these American people are- They're not The Republican Party. Amazingly, even you are free to join them.
5
It is not politics when you believe in a mythology of things as they never were,
When you believe in Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan you believe in the insight of men who were drunk, crazy or stupid. How sad, to be devoted to a political and social philosophy that in 1965 when middle income America was at its strongest in terms of wealth, power and equality declared war on the almost 200 years of evolution that came closest to realizing "with liberty and justice for all."
Thomas Chandler Haliburton said, "When a man is wrong and won't admit it, he always gets angry." Donald Trump is the result of all that anger. It is time to let go of the myth it is time to embrace the future. American conservatism has lead us to a dead end, it is time to let go the anger and acknowledge the mistakes of the last 70 years. There is no future in the economic and social visions of America's right wing. It is time to educate, and provide for the general welfare of all Americans and only a strong government of the people, by the people and for the people can do that.
In 1992 the conservative philosopher Fukuyama wrote "The End of History" and now realizes how wrong the conservative vision was. Mr Brooks it is time for you and your cohort to give it up before you completely destroy the only planet that can give us life and hope. The Democratic Party is conservative enough, America needs a second political party that believes in the future.
4
Typical David Brooks - all problems in society are caused by what he sees as cultural and spiritual decline, and no recognition of the role that agressive right-wing propoganda has played. Conservatives have been fed a steady diet of misinformation - from welfare moms to death panels to Hannity, Glenn Back, Bill O'Reilly. They have also worked hard to smear and vilify the opposition, and blame problems on "others" like immigrants and welfare recipients. Small wonder conservatives are frightened and angry and distrustful of institutions. And small wonder that liberals are fed up with responding to this nonsense.
5
No David, only on the Trump base right is it visceral “Party” only. Most of us are independent and both policy and philosophy guide our opinions, our interactions, and our votes. You have mixed up the thinking, thoughtful majority with the screaming, bitter, angry Trump crowd who, as you say, care nothing about policy or philosophy. Some of them seem to feed on pure resentment and vilification of “the Other”. Your party lead this ugly parade, sir.
1
I find it ironic when David Brooks talks about roots, morality and community while praising the globalist elites who have undermined those roots, morality and community, not just on a spiritual level but economically as well. International treaties have undermined local control over economic matters breaking the backbone of successful and striving communities. Many of these treaties undermine the courts and the say of counties and states. Economics and trade became and end in itself without regard to local affairs and the impact on concrete people trying to stay in control of their lives. The global elites have their own power projects and have nothing but despise for traditional morality, religion and local affairs. It is the idolatry of globalism that has the upper hand and has given up on any mediated development where the common people, not just those with an MBA, matter.
1
Interesting premise. Would Brooks call Soviet dissidents people who are obsessed with politics to the point of idolatry?
1
I have been critical of David at times. This one he nails. Crushes. David, if you are listening, try and locate an essay by Christopher Lasch from the late 1980s titled: "What's Wrong with the Right". I think you will get it.
Brooks drives a point untapped when talking about American politics in todays society. Politics is becoming far greater of an anchor to ones own identity in this country. This is not new and could be explained through the concept of homogenization of people. We're not becoming 'one thing', yet our cultures are becoming closer and closer to one and the same, so much to the point we see our society in halves. These halves r not farther away, they are closer to eachother than we've ever imagined.
When we lose touch with the old institutions that we've identified with such as the church, we've adopted new ones: Your local sports team, your alma Marta etc... why do you think many Americans despite born in America express themselves as a different ethnicity? To show a difference in identity, to stand out from our homogenized American selves. Facebook is enough to show that we all want to be 'unique' . Yet it begs us all to realized how and who we identify ourselves with, and in what reality.
Attaching political parties to ones identity is detrimental to their being. Ideologies from both parties don't properly address everything in reality, nor has any philosophy or ideology properly done that; which makes sense in the most diverse country on earth. Thinking progressively does not make you a an crazy liberal, and voting for D.T does not make you god awful human, and neither makes you unfit to live here.
1
"we need better myths, unifying ones that are built on social equality." So, Mr. Brooks, just exactly was wrong with Barack Obama's presidency?
David French has a companion essay on these pages entitled, appropriately, "Mueller’s Investigation Won’t Shake Trump’s Base." Fittingly, there are three glowing women in the forefront of the photograph. Are these women aware that Donald Trump, their "idol," if you will, admitted to felonious serial sexual predation? The philosophic creed of Trump Nation lies in this statement: "It’s an unfortunate truth that the Republican base not only accepts but also often angrily defends conduct from Mr. Trump that they would never, ever accept in a Democratic president."
So, Mr. Brooks, what is behind this hypocrisy? Racism? Classism? Sexism? Why do those Americans with the most to gain from its fruits stubbornly hold to the thing that will ultimately destroy it: the GOP, the true golden idol?
The Republican Party cultivated those idols, waking the sleeping monsters as the civil rights movement gained momentum and forced uncounted millions of Americans to engage or to ignore the historic divisions in our country. Instead of mending the tear, Republicans have, for the past 60 years, taken to ripping the fabric, the very flag which they call their own, simply because it no longer answered to their own narrow viewpoints.
The GOP has taken America down a steep, dark and narrow way, where there is no light and no air, the place that breeds idols.
1
The polarising and idolatry are happening on both sides. I have never voted Republican but less and less do I want to vote Democrat. The Republicans are simply shills for the wealthy, true. The Democrats on the other hand are the party of grievance and outrage. They are the party of the perpetually offended and holy victimhood. Both are parties of division they just have different ideas of how to divide us. I have little use for either of them. Unfortunately voting really doesn't help. It's a sham, a game of the lesser of two evils.
2
"[H]ow virtue, wisdom and toughness is found in the regular people whom those folks look down upon."
Lord, deliver us from the tyranny of "regular people", or "Real Americans" as that 21st century oracle Sarah Palin called them! These are the same folks who think that if another person has a an education from a recognized college or university, and a successful professional career, that such things do not represent a life dedicated to "virtue, wisdom and toughness" - and most of all a lot of hard work. Instead, they connote foolishness, laziness, moral corruption, and a theft of what they see as a lifestyle entitled to them by virtue of being born as the "right" people.
This culture sees a half-black kid abandoned by his father and raised by his white grandmother, who with little more than smarts and determination worked his way through Columbia, Harvard, and into the highest office in the land, not as the ultimate fulfillment of the American Dream, but as an untalented, elitist insider and usurper. They also see a man who mostly inherited his wealth, who's declared bankruptcy multiple times and kept his personal fortune while those who worked at his casinos lost what little they had, who dwells in a fantasy world of 24 karat gold plated everything, as a protector and champion of the common man.
Rejection of the day is night, up is down, backwards is forwards nonsense that is one party's politics today is not Idolatry. It is a sign of sense and good character.
5
For so long as politics is attached to the health and well being of our shared human life, I’m going to give it a lot of attention. There is in this column a siren song for equvilecies”The Left is just as flawed as our current Right. “ I think of John Prine’s lyric from Dear Abby “Quit wishing on bad luck and hoping for good.” IMO the Trump supporters are so afraid of this big complicated world they want to wish it away. GOP uses this cynically to get power. So now we have a dangerous leader that people have to fawn over and handle with kid gloves. Or he might blow up this flawed but shared planet. The moral failings are not in the immoral avarage person but in the welll edcucated monsters in offfice. Our leaders must lead and not just exploit. GOO sets the worst possible example they are tragically flawed blind with greed and hubris.
3
Mr. Brooks, you are so close to realizing that the United States is dead! There is no communal bond that is going to bring everyone back together; there are two groups with different communal bonds that are mutually exclusive. Unless you want those two groups to start killing each other, stand up and say the obvious: America should be broken up into new countries!
#calexit
3
Idolatry, whether religion, politics, fraternity, and so on, allows one to join a tribe, gives permission to hate others. I am not sure that religion or any other tribe is a better way to go than any other. Blindly joining a group, be it Republican or Democrat, is lazy and the easy way out.
1
David Brooks has a hit and miss record as a social philosopher, but this one is a hit of the first order, and - First Commandment.
David is pretty off target here thinking polarization is caused by politics and outdated myths. Polarization is caused by a venal Congress of lackeys ignoring the public weal and welfare to serve a bunch of bonkers billionaires. The public knows they aren’t listened to and anarchy results.
2
Visualize the crowds around the flaming barrels in the ‘Max Headroom’ series, an awesome metaphor for Mr Brooks’ article...
Thanks, Mr. Brooks, for an excellent column. Alas, I'm afraid in writing for the NYT, you're preaching to the choir. How about posting your column on Twitter?
1
Americans need to realize that a large segment of our population is dangerously mentally ill, but are walking around, as if they are just hunky dory. This is what happens when we don't have nearly adequate healthy care for all.
1
Notice that the only institution mentioned by name is the Clinton Global Initiative. Talk about Freudian slips maybe. Does Mr Brooks see his own contribution to our current status?
3
It is the state that is the idol, politics are the commandments. The state requires militarizing professional sports, and flag worship. We are the nation, we need to revere each other as persons striving for our ultimate concerns -- concerns which we cannot ultimately control -- with humility, sincerity and courage.
Sufi mystics distinguished idols from icons. Idols demand worship and full obedience. Icons open up a world that is beautiful, and in the end non-conflictual realizing none of us has the whole of truth, demanding listening, empathy, and care. We are out of control, and just need to realize it so we can find a way to genuine reverence and respect for each other and our nation and stop worshiping the state.
2
For the right the only creed accepted is Christianity. Muslims and atheists, etc., need not apply. Ironic given how unlike Christ the right chooses to act.
2
I'm a liberal who also reads David Brooks (and George Will), so I guess I'm off the hook on idolatry.
Another meander around the real issue. Fox News has rotted the brain matter of roughly a third of the electorate. The reputable press needs to begin covering the Fox evening line-up from 8-11 p.m., annotating the transcripts of the primetime line-up, pointing out the lies and omissions every single day. Hannity in particular is a menace to reason and probity, a fifth column inside the U.S.
6
Let us not forget the excellent conditioning of the Republican voter’s mind that began in the Reagen era. The myth is that the low wage Republican voter will some day obtain wealth. It is as if by voting for an extremely wealthy Republican that politicians’s good fortune will trickle down to you. This is a lie yet it is swallowed by these broke, brainwashed voters each election cycle. More Koolaide, anyone?
4
Didn't Vico prove that literature in barbaric times has a raw pungency? Values get reestablished in valueless times through invective and raunchiness- through emotionally vivid experiences which have no gravity or weight
"The first sip of that martini tastes great."
hold on there..... if properly made? so does the last one. but if you think trump voters are drinking martinis? you need to get out more.
The swill they are drinking tastes mighty fine to them.
1
Does the woman pictured realize that her "savior" and most of his party are looking to take away her safety nets of healthcare, Medicare and Medicaid as well as raise her taxes in order to enrich himself, his family and others of his ilk.
Does she understand that her "savior" has gone bankrupt several times, allowing himself not to pay men and women who were in more need than he was, who has sexually assaulted several women, and who has installed in many cabinet positions those who are the very people to undo the purposes of the office.
He is not our savior. He is a loser and a grifter who will ruin us all if we let him.
3
This is good as far as it goes. But the real idol, the Moloch (h/t A. Ginsberg "Howl" Part 2) behind the scenes, is much older, much more powerful, and much more pervasive than the idol of politics. It is called the "free market" but it is really the endless, insane, and in the end utterly futile pursuit of ever larger bank balances (which are merely ones and zeroes in a computer memory) as the measure of all worth, material, personal, and spiritual. If one has more money than any person can possibly spend in a lifetime (e.g. Manafort paying over 600 K to a landscaper) what is the point of scrambling,scheming, even cheating to get still more? It is a mug's game that one can't win, as DJT demonstrates every day; the satisfaction, like the first martini, wears off quickly, and one must desperately have another, and another.
As Thorstein Veblen said, displaying one's wealth is part of the human primate status game. Isn't the whole thing a game in which the point is to best ones rivals (just ask Roy Cohn, trump's mentor); the money is just a way to keep score? However, this is not a game restricted to the hard drives of gamers. The pawns are real people who are often not even aware that they are such and they are the ones whose lives are damaged or destroyed.
That is the idol which has destroyed the bonds that Brooks laments; like all gods it is a human creation, a fantasy that has become hideous reality through our own actions.
1
And where did this idolization of political identity start? Where is equivalent in power and relevance of the so called tea party/freedom caucus on the left? When has the extreme left ever had the influence the extreme right/fascist/nationalist now have on the republican party and on the national dialogue in general?
Could it be that the last 30 years of republican manipulation of hot button/morality issues such as abortion, gay and female rights, gun confiscation, racism, foreign policy that shouted WMDs and imminent attack by ........fill in the blank, could have had some effect on the vast population of middle America? That area that gets news from a propaganda network.
The areas of the Nation that gave the election to t rump have all been under the thumb of republican rule for the last half century. The southern strategy through Reagan's speech in Philadelphia, MS has insured the republican party of a base that, as we see today, has no interest in American ideals or democracy. They just want to get even with modernity for letting "those people" achieve some degree of citizenship.
1
Middle America - the undereducated, underinformed, incurious, brainwashed center. For 50 years they've sen parades of Republicans back to office and yet they still blame Democrats for their deteriorating health, bank accounts, and intellect.
1
Nice bit of Brooksian both-sides-do-it. But it sure seems to describe Trump voters more than Democrats. This is why RW media is a big thing. Other than MSNBC part time, not so much LW media. There used to be a lot of people talking about Dems regarding Obama as “the Messiah”. Used to see that constantly from GOPs, never saw any Dem say anything like that.
1
Whether "by chance or design" as Orson said before the Martians came, whether by intention or "unwittily" as Dwight Macdonald said before the Russians didn't, Mr. Brooks often titles his columns after famous essays by humanists of the old social-democratic, anti-Stalinist left, e.g., his April installment, "This Age of Wonkery", after "This Age of Conformity" from 1954 by the critic Irving Howe. So when you essay today to excavate the grad-school version of "When Politics Becomes Your Idol", see "The Idolatry of Politics", the 1986 Jefferson Lecture by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, who taught at Chicago, as it happens, during Mr. Brooks's years there soaking at the campus pump, reprinted in Modernity on Endless Trial in 1990 and available where all NEH documents are souled:
https://neh.dspacedirect.org/handle/11215/3767
Preach. Can I be a guest columnist? Here’s my revision to your headline: “When Politics Politics Are Your Headline”. I agree with you, but you also need to take responsibility for this, too. You and your colleagues at the NYTimes — and most other news sources — segment their readership into one dimension: politics. We are either conservatives, liberals, or moderates. All our news is filtered based on this segmentation scheme. No other factor matters. Do a content analysis of your essays. Do one for the opinion section of the NY Times. The NY Times is not alone, but I’m calling you and your employer out because you’re blaming the victim, while simultaneously dividing America further. And your audience is tired of it. And tired of the complete failure of the media to take responsibility for its role in dividing America. Controversy sells headlines. I get it. But don’t be a hypocrite. Do a little soul searching before you preach.
1
Excellent column. Putting so much of ourselves into the endless hyper-partisan political battles of the day, takes away from our ability to do the more important work of building our communities through care, compassion and outreach to those around us and in the wider world.
Half my family (from Kansas, of course) consider my liberal, bi-racial, activist family to be "liars and devils". They are convinced we have nothing in common and that we have been transformed from dear cousins to "paid protestors" who would undermine everything they hold dear and rip America apart. A black box that they watch every day, all day, tells them so. Their pastors might repeat it. Their neighbors repeat it. Donald Trump is their idol because he is trying to save them. No analysis of where we are as a country can be complete without discussing the role of propaganda, because from the White House press podium to Sean Hannity to the local church, the rhetoric of constant attack and victimhood rages without interruption; "Anyone not with Trump is coming for you".
3
I think Mr Brooks would have been better off writing a column titled "When Ideology Becomes Your Idol." Especially now in the Trump era, there is a fundamental difference between the left and the right--the right now trumpets ideology over evidence. Thus climate change is a hoax, tax cuts will pay for themselves, and legitimate news sources are all "fake news." What too many conservative-leaning writers avoid saying, even the never-Trumpers like Mr Brooks here, is that the right has become so extremely reactionary that even the most evident facts are deemed heretical if they contradict their ideology.
4
I track these issues and problems back to Ronald Reagan's divisive question "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" It wasn't "Are we as a nation better off?" The promotion of ethnic politics and economic advancement of some versus the opportunities for most, follow in this wake.
The plots to privatize Social Security rather than educate the population on the support system it needs is done with only the invisible hand of Wall Street looking to loot private plan hopes, and the recent rumors of capping the 401k savings only reinforce this looting of the middle class to enrich the moneyed plutocrats who are never satisfied with the idea of perpetual riches for their class.
Lincoln told the story about the farmer who said he wasn't greedy, he just wanted the land next to his. That is the principle which is eroding and corroding the underpinnings of people's hopes for integrity in government. Trump simply personifies all this and has lived it. Some hope that they can become rich also, as he promised, but we don't even teach civics anymore to have people learn about the aspirations of our best past leaders. That most people learn their news from Facebook rather than a variety of detailed news reports from news organizations is an indictment of current standards.
1
What I appreciate in this column is the mention of fragile attachments. I think that provides a deep insight that Mr. Brooks just falls short of mentioning. The deep unconscious crisis that he hints at is that we are in crisis with our parents. That Trump and the GOP has become a parental figure that we have deposited our projections. These projections can framed in the positive as in the picture 'Trump is our Saviour' a protective figure or they can be traumatic and neurotic projections Trump is the abusive father. Either way, I disagree that politics should be absolved of this position of importance. First, if we could control the unconscious we would. So the first thing to recognize are these projections are just that - a detachment of the real conflict - that you should be having with those figures in your life. I'm not saying this is easy, having the conflict but the projection onto politics is a form of avoidance that will likely remain unresolved and cause increasing distaste. The empowering recommendation is that we turn inward and identify - who is that Trump like figure we are idolizing? Or demonizing in our lives? Maybe it's time to have an actual conversation with that person and at least address the fragile attachments that are illuded to in this piece. Overall, my concern is not about the crisis of consciousness, its happening. But how we decide to have it and move forward will mean everything for our Democracy.
1
...says the political commentator.
Look, I like and respect David Brooks. I read his book. I went to hear him speak at a university event. But now is not the time to talk about myths and politics. The indictments of Manafort, Gates, and Papadopoulos are not politics, they are centered on real criminal investigations. If Russia interfered in our election, that is not a myth, it is a threat to our democracy.
4
Politics equals idolatry is a bit of a stretch even as it may be so with some. Still, the penultimate paragraph in the article says it all in my view and contains the elements for any self healing.
Reading through the comments here, I get the strong feeling that intellectual ideas are but a semblance of the truth that we need to restore and maintain our humanity, to keep us from devolving into beasts with big brains. To heal ourselves and our relationship with others, we need a deeper truth than intellect presents: the truth that comes from revelation. That can only be prepared for by opening the heart to whatever we need to hear and acknowledge. Our healing as a society and a nation must begin within the humble, open individual soul, and not by projecting error onto others, which is all too apparent as it is everywhere.
1
I give Republicans credit for being effective.
Since Reagan trickle down economics and government is the problem, Republicans have been cutting taxes for the rich and social programs for the rest.
The Republicans have been hurting the poor.
And the Democrats are the ones who want to help education, protect against the predatory for profit schools, give people healthcare, reduce poverty, protect their air and drinking water (Flint), etc.
But Republicans gave the poor the culture wars, dog whistle welfare queen politics, anti-abortion, anti-same sex, patriotism, the flag, and in general, liberals are not like them and bad.
I still think of the Republican primaries when none would admit in public they believed in evolution.
And it works for some people. Not everyone, but enough to win elections and then gerrymander and voter suppression.
All to make the rich even richer.
They are ruining our country.
1
Politics has become sports, where myths float far beyond facts and allegiance is blind and enthusiastic to the extreme. How do you convert the other party's loyal base? The same way that you convince a Yankee fan that allegiance to Boston is a better deal, more rational, more gratifying, better for the country? Good luck. Go Boston! Go Bernie!
Just wave religion’s magic wand over America and perfect social harmony will descend from the heavens. But let’s look at the facts. Our government is already firmly in the hands of the religious. 99 percent of Republicans in the House and Senate are Christian - a bigger majority than the American public. Prayer and Bible study groups proliferate on Capitol Hill. The controlling party, GOP, is in the hands of the evangelical right.
Furthermore, studies have clearly shown that he more religious a person is, the more conservative he is. Fundamentalist religion and political conservatism are altogether compatible, locked in a common value of tradition, a respect for customs and institutions.
Look at the two most obvious manifestation of conservative religion, Christianity and Islam, and their political expressions. They have much in common: both are patriarchies; abhor homosexuals, and abortion rights; profess certitude on the existence of God; deny evolution, and are rooted in tradition, in a belief of absolute morals, and in an obstinate resistance to change.
Contrary to Mr. Brooks’ claim, religion is not social glue, but a wedge. Religion drives tribalism and divisiveness. In spite of shared similarities, Christian conservatives increasingly view Muslims not as fellow believers, but enemies. And, in spite of their huge majority, Christians complain that they are marginalized and discriminated against.
And I haven’t even gotten to the rapacious hypocrisy of Christianity.
2
I can go along with you on hypocrisy of people who say they are following Christianity. Jesus's teaching of parables, sermon on the mount, lady caught in adultery are not hypocritical. Jesus's anger toward the pharisees hypocrisy might more be what you might be referring too when you say " And I haven’t even gotten to the rapacious hypocrisy of Christianity " I see the current White Evangelical Church in America in the same light that I believe Jesus was seeing the pharisees of his day. ( Self righteous, judgmental, merciless, hateful, compassionless, self indulgent , social club )
I do enjoy Brooks' insights. He represents a conservatism that liberalism could find compromise with and America could be more successful. Brooks points out smartly that which keeps dialogue from truly happening when it most needs to happen. Unfortunately, because he is correct, Brooks gets lambasted by the right for being a "fake conservative." How unfortunate that such a sensitive, intelligent, and articulate commentator should be ignored.
What I wonder is who has the courage to actually stand up for America and be the role model we need so badly?
1
I totally agree: I ignore the sensational and over the top emails I get from the Democratic leadership who basically are just begging for money to be get more begging and so forth. I believe that to reach the other side is not to look at them as the other side but with empathy and understanding and see where I can help them. No Trump supporter will leave Trump because you call him a liar, con man and/or whatever. But if you can point out that health care promoted by Trump will mean less, that tax cuts will mean less, that endless wars will mean less then you may not have won the day, but you have laid a foundation for their own enlightenment and hopefully return of empathy and united belief in a different story.
" Trump is our savior" ------ this poster is enough to explain the mindset of Trump supporters. In Red states , the Republican Party is the only political party. Democratic party politicians can not expect to win state house, governor, senator , Congress member or any position for decades (since LBJ signed the Civil Rights law). But in Blue States like NY, NJ, PA, Con, MASSACHUSETTS etc. the Republican Politicians become mayor, governor, senator etc. Unfortunately, the people of Blue States are better off financially, socially and in education than the people in Red States. It is due to lack of education, influence of greedy religious leaders, listening to talk radio and watching FOX news only and also identity crisis.
1
Oh, pulleeeze, Mr. Brooks! Tribalism has displaced the cautious, healthy skepticism that once characterized American voters of both parties.
When a candidate claims that fixing something as complex as affordable healthcare would be "easy", we have been warned.
When a candidate claims that lowering corporate taxes will motivate those companies to hire more workers and raise wages, we have been warned.
When a candidate says only he can bring back the last-century manufacturing jobs lost to low-wage countries, we have been warned.
When a candidate has to tell us how smart he is, and what a great dealmaker he is, we have been warned.
Ignoring obvious red flags like these in favor of blind allegiance to a blustering, compulsive liar, we have abandoned our responsibilities as thinking citizens of a participatory democracy.
2
I found much in this column to agree with. I have always felt that we would do much better selecting leaders in this country if we looked at elections for what they really are - job interviews. Campaigns are the candidates' attempt to convince "the Boss" (us) that they deserve the job and that's exactly how we should treat them. But instead, we've somehow crafted this cult of personality, particularly around those running for President, that focuses much more on personal charisma (or lack thereof) than any actual fitness or aptitude for the position. Most of us would never hire workers that way, so why on earth do we treat candidates for the most important jobs in the land differently?
I wish David Brooks would stop tarring Democrats with the Republican brush. Democrats have their own problems but it certainly isn't a religious thrall for their party and its ideas. Most Democrats have always held their noses when voting for their leaders (including President Obama in 2008, mostly because he seemed inexperienced. Our youngsters encouraged us to take the leap). We also have comedy and "Hollywood," which help us mock our political leaders and keep them in their place and help us maintain our equilibrium (think about Darrel Hammond's lacerating impersonation of Bill Clinton, who was actually a successful president). Now, who in the Republican party has the best impersonation of Donald Trump? The fact of the matter is that it is conservative Republicans and conservative Republicans alone who treat their ideology like a religion and hail their leaders as demigods. Their curia is the conservative media that has transformed the party into a half-crazy monster (John Boehner has some interesting thoughts in this regard). If David Brooks now wants to start marketing himself as a "moderate" rather than a "conservative," he needs to take a much clearer look at the cult from which he is disentangling himself.
Brooks says "partisanship...is not about which party has the better policies....People often use partisan identity to fill the void left when their other attachments wither away—religious, ethnic, communal and familial.
But, partisanship is exactly about which party has better policies, even more now than in Brooks' imagined bygone years. Now we must fight to win back rights that we believed secure in those days.
Brooks says people use party affiliation to fill "the void." But politics is the very warp and weft of all other "attachments". Politics is the glue that binds people who are NOT of the same religious, ethnic, communal or familial groups. It overrides all of them.
And oh, dear, wouldn't you love to believe that the GOP, especially the current strain occupying Congress, had any political philosophy, values or even myths?
The GOP has only its Norquist pledge and nothing else, except whatever the lobbyists who bought them off wants them to do.
Trump's deluded base dictates how the rest of us will live. That fact alone transcends any "attachments". I don't believe "the other side" has any values or tradition that I want to be part of. Quite the contrary, they have made me ashamed of my country that it could have elected such a repulsive caricature of an ignorant, corrupt politician.
2
Mr. Brooks once again laments this country's political polarization and seeks to explain it. But maybe he should just look at the picture accompanying his article. It shows, as one reader put it, a "ludicrous woman" holding a sign saying "Trump is our savior". What better way to whip up anger and foster polarization in left-leaning, anti-Trump Dems like me?
But sadly, maybe that's what NYT readers want. As of about 10:15am, I tallied the number of "recommends" to every comment recommended by 20 people or more. 40% recommended polarized comments, all left-leaning. A mere 8% recommended comments advocating discussion between sides, seeking the truth, or not casting the opposition with a broad brush. As someone we all know would say, "so sad".
I pray to God (everyone's god, actually - I'm desperate) that the usual silence of the moderates accounts for these stats. If not, we're doomed.
Please don't insult your readers. Trump does not get "his facts wrong." He LIES, consciously and intentionally. He always has and always will.
2
A thoughtful column, Mr. Brooks, poignant and on point, thank you.
A particular passage caught my eye, perhaps because I think it’s a little off target.
“If politics is going to get better we need better myths, unifying ones that are built on social equality.”
If politics is going to get better in this country we need to build a framework that promotes equal opportunity for all. From equal opportunity “social equality” will flourish. And, if we are ever to attain true equal opportunity for all, we need to adjust our social priorities. We need to put educating every child in this country, regardless of social status, as being fundamental to our strength and longevity as a democratic society. And, yes, that means a disproportionate distribution of resources that promotes equal education opportunities for all children. In the long run it is our best and least expensive means for creating unifying myths and social equality.
2
.....does David Brooks seriously think that the message about how "virtue, wisdom, and toughness is found in the regular people" is a new one?
He can't possibly think that. I don't for a second believe he's so ignorant. So... why's he pretend he does?
1
Reagan was the worst president America ever had. It is not that important to me whether he was a good or bad man Reagan turned a forward looking country whose success was built on evolution into what it is today. Back in 1980 to be American all you needed to say is let's make America great. That was America for almost 200 years until Barry Goldwater who declared war on The Civil Rights Act and evolution. It was however Reagan and the revisionists like yourself who stuck the dagger into America's heart.
In 1980 we in Quebec were escaping the ultra conservatism of of an order that had existed from before the French Revolution and it was only our proximity to the greatest nation on Earth that we knew we had a lot of catching up to do.
We are evolving rapidly and like all evolution there are bumps along the way. Marriage is a religious institution and when 80+% don't believe in the god of the Abrahamic religions marriage is either mutual consent or civil contract and those who take their religion seriously they are free to do otherwise.
We are an evolving society really and truly free to do as we may with the protections in place to protect the vulnerable.
Because of men like yourself your society has devolved and Margaret Atwood becomes a prophet. All your Texases alas are becoming dystopias and Dallas is becoming the worst city in the land of plenty in which to grow up.
3
Once again the reader comments about "false equivalence" which have nothing to do with what's written. Is this some kind of NYT readership knee-jerk response?
If someone writes, "Many people eat too much, whether it's 5 lbs of bacon or a bale of lettuce." then the key concept is TOO MUCH. Writing that there's a false equivalence between bacon and lettuce is just trying to hijack the discussion in illogical ways. No kidding that bacon and lettuce are different, any fool knows that! But let's not lose the point that too much of even a good thing will give you a tummy ache (or an unbalanced life, to Brooks' point).
Try eating a bushel of lettuce and see for yourself.
when George Bush was president most of his presidency with my hair on fire. the Patriot Act Valerie Plame Dick Cheney all to be
I switched out "Idolatry" for "Ideology".
It works either way. Try it.
1
Thank you, Mr. Brooks. It strikes me that the description of "politics as idol" given by you here is very much like a description of addiction: bigger and bigger demands and diminishing returns.
There are a few flaws in this analysis (of the classically "small c" conservative" kind). First, identity partisanship is NOT a phenomenon across the political spectrum, but is rooted overwhelmingly in one party and ethnic group -- anxious, White and culturally "Christian" (if not necessarily observant) folks in the GOP. No other political party in modern US history has been anywhere near as solely reliant on one part of one ethnic group for its political fortunes, and the inability of any meaningful GOP resistance to Trump to form is eloquent testimony to how Trumpism has moved from a cynical electoral strategy to the only viable power base in the Party. Thus, the rejection of the American Creed and even modernity as such lives in very particular places in the US: there is no "middle" difference for a pundit to split.
Second, there is nothing especially "new" in blood-and-soil identity politics (with tinges of apocalyptic imaginings) in US political culture. The 1920s, under the baleful influence of the rebirth of the KKK, showed a very similar identity discourse. I presume this would be in Brooks' "before-time" of intact families and uncontested institutions (although no social historian of the US would concur with this watershed model). Indeed, there have in fact only been relatively brief windows in conservative politics in the US where this strain was truly marginalized. Its loving cultivation by one party, though, has now hollowed out the entire political culture.
1
David Brooks describes my high school age infatuation with the Goldwater conservative movement. It was not until later that I learned the source citations in None Dare Call it Treason did not support the arguments in the text.
Intelligence can be defined as the ability to reconcile what may initially appear to be incompatible concepts which should cast doubt about extreme ideological perspectives in both parties. Politics doesn't function as a debate about competing policy proposals. It has morphed into which candidate can project him or herself as a sugar daddy who will address each and every one of our needs with minimal discomfort to the electorate. Politicians can no longer be human with positive and negative outcomes in addition to human frailties. (imagine Kennedy trying to run in today's environment). The social disconnect that your refer to is not the cause but merely the manifestation of public crede that looks for simplistic explanations and panaceas in lieu of the need for shared sacrifice to ensure remedies to foreign and domestic issues. In short we get the politicians we deserve.
lets not forget that no one tells the truth anymore, and no one is willing to stake out a position that is not informed by polls. And the lack of leadership within the house and senate. When will they be willing to step up and say exactly how they want to do things and be honest about the impact. when will there be an honest debate about the issues instead of slogans and scare mongering. The political parties have left little to grasp onto except for party loyalty. there is often merit to proposals from both parties the work is to come up with a solution acceptable to all, today compromise is a dirty word and actively discouraged. the parties demand loyalty to a point where it is difficult to elect a single person because of their policies as they will be forced to vote the party line.
"We need to put politics in its place". When it doesn't affect you no matter how heinous the tax bill proposed, or your ability to afford health insurance, then politics is background noise in your life. For those of us affected by political decisions, politics isn't an idol, it governs our very lives, even our ability to afford basic needs.
Trump is indeed a false idol who lacks moral character, and is ill-suited for the position of the most powerful man in the world, yet one those who voted for him and in his own Party will not condemn.
Are we supposed to just shrug our shoulders and be unconcerned about how Trump's presidency is affecting our ability to have clean drinking water, clean air to breathe, to have a modicum of health care insurance, and to have the assurance of having and keeping social safety nets? These things are not just trivial interests which have little affect on our daily lives. So exactly how do we push back against a man who is unfit to be president without some kind of allegiance to a particular political party? What "unifying myth" would you suggest for us to rally around?
Politics does unfortunately "transform life" if you need that ACA or the social safety nets just to exist. To the well off, those things are of little political concern.
Mr Brooks: Truly an exceptional column. The phenomenon is more similar to religion than to tribalism.
That Trump gets his facts wrong and the myth right seems to be a double condemnation of his politics. Advocating for equal protection, due process, and freedom of consciousness is not idol worship - it's holding the Constitution up where it is supposed to be: The Supreme law of the land. Advocating for a return to religious principles is fine provided we acknowledge that those principles have to be ethical and moral (they so often are not) and subordinate to the Constitution. We look to the Constitution for guidance on gay marriage and prayer in school. There is no other source for guidance. We find it here or nowhere at all.
1
Much as I love critical analysis, it's time to stop fretting about our understanding of Donald or his loyal supporters. He's a danger to the country.
The pertinent analysis is Trump is a self-dealing crook and his supporters are blind to his faults. We can psychoanalyze them all after he's out of office.
1
sad and insightful if not tragic
Turning politics into a religion is always a very bad idea because it causes extremism and fanaticism. We have had both the good and the bad. Now we have the ugly.
David Brooks spins like a top trying desperately to find a way for it to be about something other than what it is. It's political tribalism, no it's collapse of religious values. How about we face facts? No matter how pathetic some Trump supporters seem, look at the bigger picture: as a whole the Trump movement from top to bottom is contaminated with a visceral hatred of Obama and the age-old racism of the conservative tribe. On the other side, not liberal tribalism, but liberal rejection of the kind of tribalism that focuses resentment on groups who have suffered exploitation going back centuries. For that commitment to fairness, liberals are in turn subjected to hatred for being race-traitors. Sick.
2
Wait, Donald J. Trump is their 'Golden Calf'? Wow, we have downsized.
Mr. Brooks, I wish you would write a column about the deregulation of our air,water, food, drugs, chemical use, blowing up mountain tops, raping and pillage of our lands and seas.
These are all regulations that republican party has been trying for years to un-regulate for their donors, the greedy oligarchs who would rape and pillage other countries but are now on our shores.
Globalization has made the world smaller and the oligarchs who support you Mr. Brooks are going after it all.
Your party and DNC turned this into a dog fight for their donors.
I am sorry to tell you, Mister Brooks, but as a lifelong follower of all things political back when you were in knickers, with this idiotic demagogue in office, there is simply no way I cannot let a day go by without finding out what this buffoon has done. And now, as we see the first of many indictments coming from the Special Counsel, I feel it is my duty as an activist citizen since campaigning for JFK now more than ever is the time not to take one's eye off the ball.
If but one-tenth of the alleged crimes committed by Trump and Fam are true, then this makes Watergate seem like small potatoes. And it is. As much as I despised Richard Nixon since he first entered Congress, I never doubted for one minute his intelligence and his uncanny savvy political gut. Nixon was far more clever at covering up his crimes then the constantly boastful blowhard Trump. Nixon never telegraphed his punches like Trump does. Not until Nixon proclaimed, "I am not a crook" did I think something truly devious was happening behind our backs. With Trump, there was never a time I thought he was telling the truth. It was just a matter of degree what Trump was lying about.
And so Mister Brooks this dude cannot abide by your suggestion however wise. I will tell you this: being a political junkie for so long I have never taken politics serious enough to lose sleep over. After what I've witnessed, I know that anyone who does is a fool. Only a neophyte would do so. Case closed.
DD
Manhattan
2
"Donald Trump tells the opposite myth — about how those meritocrats are actually clueless idiots and full of drivel, and how virtue, wisdom and toughness is found in the regular people whom those folks look down upon." Stop it, David. You know better. Trump routinely reminds us all that he went to an Ivy League school and is mega-rich. You indulge yourself here in none-too-subtle elites-bashing, when the truth about Trump's self-made myth is far more nuanced and complicated. He's a rich celebrity surrounded by a rich men's cabinet. That hasnt hurt him with his supporters.
1
Trump's myth is a heck of a lot simpler than anything that includes the pseudo-word "meritocrat." For anyone who has been living in a cave the last 18 months, here it is:
Everyone who isn't exactly like you, is to blame for everything wrong in your lives. Give me power, and I will punish them.
This is the oldest myth in politics. Clearly it is also still among the most powerful.
1
If you want a real creepy, how-did-this-25-year-old-movie-get-so relevant experience, re-watch "Bob Roberts." Right down to the SNL appearance.
Love the very young Jack Black, with "BOB" tattooed on his forehead.
2
"It needs repair of the deeper communal bonds that politics rest on, and which political conflict cannot heal." But those "communal bonds" are exactly what right-wing politics is trying to destroy. Reagan's philosophy was the government is THE problem. He preached that government must get out of the way and all our problems would disappear.
Alas the problems didn't disappear no matter how many tax cuts for the wealthy were instituted. How can the Republicans seek to repair the communal bonds that politics rests on if they don't believe in Democracy? If Republicans continue to suppress voting, enshrine jerrymandering and seek to buy their political victories with billionaire's ill-gotten gains what kind of communal bonds are they building?
1
Typical Brooks pablum. One party is in the thrall of its most radical elements and is systematically dismantling constitutional norms, all in the service of protecting a dangerously unfit leader. (Hint: It's not the Democrats.) And all Brooks offers as a response is a warmed-over paean to moderation! That's pretty thin gruel.
There is still a part of the conflict between right and left that puzzles me. There is no question that the right excessively demonizes the left and the left excessively demonizes the right, but I don't believe the level of hatred and anger expressed by the right towards the left is met with an equal measure of hatred and anger of the right by the left. Try going on Breitbart and reading the comments section-often the comments escalate to the point where people are proposing to do things to Democrats that don't sound too different from the sorts of things the Nazi's did to the Jews. Given that Republicans control the white house, both houses of congress, and most governorships (not to mention the fact that we've had a Republican president 3 out of the past 5 elections, despite the fact that Republicans won the popular vote only one of those times) my question is this: Why are Trump supporters so bitter and filled with hatred towards Democrats? Can someone explain that to me?
if i put something on Facebook positive about obamacare my right wing "friends" go nuts, if i say the trump/russia is going nowhere my left wing "friends" go nuts. You have to be one way or the other. I am out
1
I'm not the biggest fan of Brooks' political philosophy but I think this is a good way to look at what is happening. I did not take from this column that there was a focus on religion; rather he is focusing on family and community. By the end of the column, I found myself considering how I can improve my own relations and hopefully, come to some sort of consensus with those with whom I disagree.
I do disagree with the notion that democrats have no policy or platform and are a party of outrage. In fact, there are a number of issues democrats champion. They also have solutions to those problems they identify. And these issues are tied together by unifying themes and principles. At this point, I can't say the same for republicans (with the exception of the ultimate goal of lowering corporate wealthy individual taxes).
7
Mr. Brooks puts into words a belief I have held for some time: the dysfunction in our politics are a symptom, not the illness. But where do we go from here? How do we repair deeper communal bonds? Where do the better myths, unifying ones come from?
6
And we need to shine at least as big a spotlight on backyard solutions that can be implemented on a broader scale, the private sector. The equation starts in opportunity, and neighbors showing neighborliness. It doesn't only have to be during a hurricane. We can share responsibility at home, and it does not have to get political or complicated, or illegal.
2
Unlike some other commentators I think this column has real insight. I recall studying politics in America during the late 19th century, a time of great economic and social upheaval and disruption. There was a great deal of similarity to conditions today what may have been different then from now is that the partisan tribalism then extended to both political parties, at least in the north and Midwest where today I think it’s mostly in the Republican Party.
3
Good, Austin...but hard to locate. Mike
David there is one thing you continually get wrong and that is religious attachment which is very strong in this country, particularly in the South. I am a New Englander who moved to NC and was gobsmacked when I saw an ad for a car dealership with a banner running across the bottom saying "open Sundays right after church". This is Trump country as well as the Bible belt; it was once Dixiecrat land and suddenly by the late 60's was all in for Republicans no matter how awful. Hmmm I wonder why the change in allegiance; it couldn't have anything to do with civil rights legislation could it? In the South there is stability and community by wrapping yourself in God and the flag (both the American flag and the Confederate flag unfortunately), but it is a difficult place to live if you're not particularly religious and not affiliated with either party, although I doubt I will ever vote for a Southern Republican.
4
It has taken me many decades---- far too many!---- to realize that here in the South our religion is intermeshed with the last century of Jim Crow. To be a good, white Christian in my childhood Baptist church was to be an AngloSaxon Protestant Supremacist.
My Road to Damascus moment came three years ago. After researching the monthly newsletters and flyers of the Southern White Knights, the John Birch Society, and the White Citizens Council ( The Rich Man's Klan according to poor whites in my neighborhood) , I was horrified to realize that the sermons and scripture teachings I heard as a young child were taken almost word-for-word from 1950s-70s White Supremacist propaganda publications.
I am still devastated.
To the list of dependencies offered towards the end of this fine column, i would add Nature, the mother of them all.
2
Many of the losses you speak of have been at the behest of the liberal left. In the name of equality in all things we now have nothing on which to anchor our identities to. We wait for the next scandal's result to determine who is up and who is down.
You may decry Pres. Trump but his campaign and initial administration's actions recognize these losses.
He drives everyone crazy with what he says but what he does isn't anywhere near as bad as what I feared.
I didn't vote for either nominee; my first ever write-in ballot.
If tax reform actually allows the domestic US economy to finally find its legs then much of what currently troubles us will be mitigated; opiods are example one.
Income won't solve everything but first things first.
Pres. Trump isn't the answer to all things but as you indicate, politics isn't the answer to everything.
8
What Trump is doing is the bidding of rightwing ideologues by filling courts with young rightwing judges. What the right can't accomplish through candid, rational, honest argument, they'll seize through the judiciary.
5
If you did not vote for Clinton you are responsible for Trump. Trump is the answer to nothing. Republican tax plan is based on proven fallacies and will only help the richest get richer. Look how tax cuts let Kansas "find its legs." Open your eyes and start living in the real world, not conservative fantasyland.
5
Trump quite clearly isn't the answer to anything. Trump is just a symptom of the real problem. The real problem is the people who believed Trump and voted for him, people that could watch the debates and somehow come away with the idea that Hillary Clinton was an abomination who was by some insane rationalization even worse than Trump. The problem is the people who could believe Trump when he told them them the coal mines would come back, that high paying manufacturing jobs would come back, that the Chinese and Mexicans and Islam were the reason for our problems, that the best healthcare could be provided for less and for everyone if we would just repeal Obamacare, that they could ignore his coarseness, that they could ignore his compulsive lying because Hillary was so much worse. To believe all of that is at best the height of willful ignorance, and at the worst just plain hateful mindless stupidity. Our election system is flawed no doubt, but in the end almost 50% of voters voted for Trump. Whatever is in the hearts and minds of those people is the root cause of what is clearly an indication that America is very sick. It can't be fixed by politics although it is fed and nurtured by the GOP (who know exactly what it is they're feeding). It seems to me that it probably can't be fixed without some kind of disaster or crisis that makes people wake up to reality. Trump is perhaps the idiot light that just went on in the car that we're driving toward that disaster.
4
That women holding the sign declaring donald to be her savior says it all. Millions suffering the same anxiety induced by fear and frustration that derails rational search for truth, instead looked to a carnival barker to give them relief from their daily frustration in dealing with evolving truths. And so they gathered in tribal fashion offering their cheering obedience to a myth maker, one who was able to dredge up their fears, hates and bigotry as normal, in no need of analysis.
Unfortunately Mr. Brooks, todays politics does serve as an illusionary cure for those suffering spiritual and social loneliness. The fact that their spiritual beliefs are under attack, failure to adjust to the evolving economic trends by clinging to a past economy gives them little hope. And so the carnival barker holds them in hypnotic idolatry with promises to MAGA.
6
I'm not sure this checks out. The age of Trump was foisted upon us by people with overwhelming ties to their ethnic roots (see: Charlottesville, VA) and enveloping moral* cultures (see: Evangelicals).
The reality is that the politics of resentment were aflame well before Trump, and they were fanned by Republicans playing on white fears that brown people would get their taxes and that single mothers and gay people would usher in some sort of locust-omened apocalypse. Trump, I'm afraid, is the GOP's whirlwind, sown and reaped.
10
Trump may be wrong about a lot of things but the thing he gets right is that the “system” has not been working for all those working stiffs. The irony, however, is that these groups vote again and again for the Republican party that feeds them regressive policies that are intended, and do, cater to the monied in our society, who don’t live in small towns and don’t necessarily abide by the 19th century social mores of these voters.
The consequence is that their economic situation is about to get vastly worse along with the health and social situation for their women and families. All this as their families gets squeezed in order to pay off with big tax cuts the rich guys (and corporations) that support(ed) the election of Republicans. Even the internet and the availability and access to a broad spectrum of ideas cannot open the mind of those blinded by religious righteousness, general ignorance of history and politics and an inability to reason without emotions coloring everything.
If this is what Brooks means then he is right: Salvation does come from the individual. But it also comes from communal efforts to make things better for as many people as possible. THIS is something that neither they nor the Republican Party seem to believe in and resentment is a fatal base on which to build anything.
5
I'll be honest. I am tired of endless drama in our political world today. I regard all of government as the way we get to hire and fire people who are supposed to be working for us......Right now, I would like to churn out pink slips and watch them go to the unemployment office. And stand in line all day.
The work for the American people has ceased to happen.....Watching Congress in "action" is like watching snack time at nursery school..The fighting over who got more granola or juice seems to dominate. Meanwhile, bridges fall down, floods happen, people go hungry while they argue over fruit juice.
I do not invest in philosophy as much as my investment in solutions.. And, until we start demanding those solutions the endless bickering and finger pointing will continue. DEMAND MORE work and less talk.
Never invest your soul in strangers. Pretty simple and yet we keep forgetting that idolatry of false "gods" never works out well for them...or for us.
2
"We have nothing to fear, but fear itself."- FDR
I feel that we don't need to be given better myths or narratives. We have become a society that is beholden to the commerce and media that stokes our fears through false myths and narratives. The work of our time's snake-oil salesmen is not malevolent. It is human.
What I fear (?!) is that as individuals we have fewer and fewer moments to search deeper into ourselves to find a less tainted story. Rather than watch Netflix, Sports or FaceBook for the 1 hour of free time in a day, I need to leap into the darkness of my own mind with no safety net. Observing myself and the world with no narrative or myths to hold me back. No delusions to hold me captive. I have faith that what will be found is an acceptance of myself and others and recognition of idolatry. It can be scary. But we need to be comfortable being uncomfortable.
Happy Halloweeeeen! [but for the rest of the year, lets try not to scare eachother so much]
3
It has been impossible for conservatives to see that their mantra “Freedom of Choice,” applied indiscriminately, as a way of positioning against liberal thinking has finally led to nothing but bad choices. It’s also impossible to see that it’s not just conservatives who have been left with bad choices.
Even when choosing meant creating a choice when none was required, conservatives mandated there be a choice; one that often resulted in a worse choice—attempting to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is a case in point.
As Brooks—an authentic conservative—implies; now the only excuse that conservatives have for continuing to make bad choices is that ‘Democrats are worse.’
Now it’s time for Democrats (re: “Liberals”) to say “PROVE it.”
3
It is ironic in the extreme that the nation whose motto is "In God We Trust" finds itself in desperate need of true, not false, religious precepts (as contained in virtually all major religions) to right its ship. Ideals of selflessness, humbleness, charity, concern for others - especially the poor and downtrodden, forgiveness, willingness to turn the other cheek, and true courage in the face of adversity - these are the ideals that can save us, mostly from ourselves. And literally nothing else can.
2
What a wise and true bit of writing. Mr. Brook's point is the exact definition of addiction. To an alcoholic or a drug addict, one is too many, and six drinks or twelve are not enough.
I have vowed not to let Trump cost me family, friends or associates, but my brother and sister may already be poisoned beyond hope. How does one even approach the subject? Before the election, I confided to my sister that if anyone in the family was voting for Trump, I did not want to know. Total silence. At our gatherings this year, we all got along wonderfully, due to our mutual love and unbreakable bonds. Trump was not even mentioned. A great pity. .
1
Oh, poor David, again wishing for a return to Eden.....our lost Eden. Eden of moderation, Eden of religion and Eden of family ties.
That Eden has never ever ever existed. And yet David mourns its loss and yearns for its return. He creates the very idols he disparages, just different ones from those he satirizes (?) in 'first Martinis'.
And he gains applause and smug satisfaction in the process.
We are forging ahead, and currently falling backwards, and this is the nature of humankind. Look ahead and practice empathy and kindness and forget the memes of a lost Eden (suspiciously like our rosy view of the 50's, by the way, with repression of difference, wild productivity in post-war America, with the United States leading in every way: but don't look behind the scenes at the soul crushing anti-Communism of McCarthy, or the straight jacketing of women and those who need/dare to be 'different', or the terror of the nuclear arms race),
Alas, David is yearning and hoping for what never was. He must envision, if he can, something new and different.
4
Brooks's "idolatry" of politics strikes me as similar to an addiction to soap operas. Or, maybe, fantasy football. Or video games. Increasingly, our national politics is like a dramatic TV crime series, e.g. NCIS, with weekly, sometimes daily, ups and downs, the outcome near, then far, all to keep us glued to the screen. The media, especially the big guns like CNN, Fox, the Times, the Washington Post, supply the soap. Look at today's paper with all the "news stories" about how dire Mueller's indictments are, what Trump is likely or not likely to do about them, their effects on this or that piece of legislation, all implicitly or explicitly asking the overriding question: will the president be brought down? it's a game we play at our peril, because it keeps us from attending to ongoing social problems, not to mention our closest personal relationships. Political idolatry? No, just another sitcom, cranked up a notch.
Brooks blames our situation on political partisanship that he says is caused by the breakdown in family, community, and faith. He misses the fact that the breakdown in family, community, and faith have been caused by runaway capitalism--and that politics is the primary tool for people who want to push back against runaway capitalism and its partisanship-causing effects.
1
I find it hard to disagree with Mr. Brooks, here:
"Idolatry is what happens when people give ultimate allegiance to something that should be serving only an intermediate purpose, whether it is money, technology, alcohol, success or politics."
But the idea that Democrats do not share a venerable set of core beliefs regarding increased freedoms for our citizens, is where he keeps tripping up on his argument.
Both parties have faults in their word and action, but we are a long way from the day when Mr. Brooks can play the role of Mercurtio and call for "a plague o' both your houses." I have consistently moved from a moderate republican to democrat over the past 30 years, as I've seen that the most compelling Republican ideals (limited government where this increases freedoms of people in their communities, fiscal responsibility, a commitment to global trade as a way to avoid international conflict and influence allies and enemies . . . policies that embrace Regan's never-lived-up-to: "Trust and Verify") are only words.
Republican voters have turned away from these better ideas, and others, for identity politics.
When the Republican Party returns to actions that support the musings of their better angels, the idolatry may subside. However, until that time, they are stuck with the deplorables and baseless idolatry, fear, and greed at the helm of their great ship pushing their toxic wake all over our government and citizens.
73
I feel exactly the same but in the opposite direction. I'm independent, and voted for Bill Clinton twice and not another Dem since. Their actions do not come close to matching their rhetoric, and today they've been reduced to calling anyone who disagrees with them a racist...or one of many -ists and -phobics. I believe this largely explains Trump's win as well as the Dem loss of over 1,000 offices the last few years. But they're not alone. Both parties seem determined to commit suicide. We need a new one badly.
The Democrats are starting to succumb to the temptation that the Tea Party Republicans fell for 10 years ago I'm seeing in too many of these comments a contempt for not only the views but the humanity of the "other".
1
We need a new, human-centered myth: everyone is born to serve their needs and the government is there to help him/her to do so. Humans created the system of governing, (our Founding Fathers) chose a democratic republic as our political system as the best means to build a livable, egalitarian, and free society. These days we see the ineffectiveness, incompetence, and malpractice going on in the government in real time, 24/7. Politics is discussed like a football game and dividing the citizenry into opposing teams, players, cheerleaders, and fans. No subtlety, no nuance, no balance, and no thoughtfulness! I believe our society needs a solid, life-long education system emphasizing building quality citizenry with character, modesty, self-reflection, empathy, and self-realization through serving the community and greater good of the world, not just one's own family or geographical community. Also, economic security implemented by a basic living wage for all citizens of the country from birth till death. Citizenship granted to only those born to the US citizens. Americans need a sense of protection and self-esteem guaranteed by the government and unique to being American. Also, people need to be free to make the ultimate choice of when and how to exit the life and talk about it freely with family and PCP's. We can live a more purpose-driven, productive life and reduce the uncertainty and anxiety of living and the humiliation and suffering the extremely old age can bring.
1
Living in Trump country it's easy to see that his rise is much more about emotion. They thought he was throwing them a lifeline; many are desperate to hold onto that.
This article really resonated with me because voters' feelings about the GOP defy all logic and sense. They get voters revved up about gay/black/brown people and then make it impossible for them to get healthcare, just to give an example.
But the "branding" of the GOP as the party of Jesus has given this culture the aura of idolatry. Most people in my state think Christian and Republican are synonyms.
As a result, those who disagree, or just don't want to hear it, leave the church; they feel driven out. or may be literally driven out, as was an elderly woman I knew who revealed she was a Democrat and was harassed as a "baby killer." Even the deacon of the church joined in sending vicious emails to this lady who'd attended this rural church for decades. (question: why do some conservatives, especially religious ones, think that meanness will make others want to be with them? A mystery to me. )
1
I love my Trump-voting friends and family enough to fight for their right to have healthcare, for their right to a modern, enlightened public education and for their right to clean water and low-cost electricity.
Government is how Americans express our values, solve our problems and plan for the future. Control over government means control over the future, how our problems are solved (or ignored) and what values we show to the world. There is nothing more important in America than who is in charge of the government. The political process is how we Americans make this critical choice about what kind of people we will become. There is nothing more important than politics.
1
I disagree with the very premise of this piece. Politics is not an idol, on the right or the left. The idols in this country are money and celebrity. And look where they have gotten us.
1
in this staggering meander, perhaps the signature pot hole is, "If politics is going to get better we need better myths..."
first, it ain't better myths what will unite us but better roads, universal health care, equal opportunity, in sum, "the general Welfare" promised in the preamble, that will calm our fears and make us confident enough to sit around the fire and tell stories of mythic creatures and deeds, (although you do allow that trump has, in effect, better myths already "he gets his facts wrong, but he gets his myths right" a puzzling contradiction to your later suggestion that "better myths" will serve our politics).
the same for idols and idolatry, conflating the sum, the CONVENIENCE we idolize, with its components, smart phones, etc, which come and go but only add layers to our complacency, rendering us (here you are right on target!) rather controlled than controlling.
although the "more important dependencies" you yearn for are good and true, they are by comparison to an active commitment to civil society, abstract, or at least, consequent.
idolatry and ideology are both bars to social evolution, aka progressive critical and practical development of that old "general Welfare."
so let conservatives proclaim ideology and moderates go to war with idolatry, progressives will show you the "deeper communal bonds" you crave as cadres of men and women are brought together, employed for wages, in WPA and CCC type projects dedicated to tangible renewal.
Perhaps I spend too much time on Politics and on the NY Times, but..... Ultimately what other choice do we have. If you seek to make your country a better place, the way you do it is through politics and civic engagement. What other choice is there, of course we can all spend our time doing charitable works, but when it comes down to it, only government action is able to "establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility" It took government action to end slavery, advance civil rights and protect the environment, among other things. I will also add that I chose my side in these debates, because since the mid point of the past century, only one party has actually, stood on the side of justice and decency, it has its flaws, but the vision of the Democratic Party is inclusive, empathetic and seeks to provide justice and prosperity to all Americans, not just old, white men.
The "Trump Effect" has had an impact on America. There is no doubt. What it has done has been to lay bare our inability to put anything in its proper place. Walker Percy in his tongue-in-cheek, deeply profound "Lost in the Cosmos," points out that people who lack a sense of self often identify with totems, like sports teams ("I'm an LSU Tiger! Grrrr!") or a political party ("Make America, yada, yada, yada! Lock 'er up!") or some ideology ("I'm an economic conservative but a social liberal...").
The Byzantines literally burned their city and murdered their emperor because of a chariot race between rival political parties identified by colors --- green, blue, etc.
There is a deep sense in this country that our lives are unhinged, untethered, unmoored, adrift, random, contingent, immoral, unethical, lawless, and not really very satisfying. And our politics probably exemplifies this more than any other aspect of our lives. It's a "step beyond" our madness to think that the likes of Trump or Hillary can solve our problems.
55
Actually, it started out as the colors used in the chariot races and gradually became the identifier of political parties and ending up with nobody being able to remember what the colors stood for.
1
Well said. Let's also be clear that the media is responsible for painting a picture (false I believe) that divides us and pits us against each other in so many ways.
David - like your party, and your party's man, you get the facts wrong. The meritocratic establishment on the Democratic Party side did not create a myth. To be sure, the GOP establishment (meritocratic is not a word I associate with most of the GOP) was peddling, and continues desperately to peddle, a myth. But here's where your penchant for false equivalence between your party and the real public servants falls apart -- again. Many Dems, whether or not they attended competitive colleges, and whether or not they were invited to CGI events, do, indeed, have the brainpower to run a society that is focused on all individuals, not just on those who won the genetic lottery (e.g., the Kochs, and the Waltons, and the Trumps, and the Kushners, and the Mnuchins, and the Bushes and all of their ilk). And they are more than just a little better than almost every GOP "representative" who has held office during the last three to four decades. The problem is that the GOP's single minded goal has been not to serve the public, not to improve the lives of the many versus the few, but to thwart everything that the Dems proposed doing to help the many. And the idolotry of parties and politicians is again, an affliction of the GOP, not of most Dems. You are projecting, again. Just like your president. Your persistent false equivalencies undermine your credibility, David. Are you able to compose a piece that lays responsibility for the mess we're in at the feet of the real culprits - your party?
2
As David French (National Review) indicated in another Op-ED, people will rarely admit they are wrong. Another way of looking at it, if it FEELS true it MUST BE true. That is why so many Americans believe the Sun revolves around the Earth - and perhaps that the Earth is flat. If the seas rise, therefore, they will just flow over the edge. Why worry about global warming? (Sixty or seventy years ago it would have been dismissed as as Communist Plot.) Americans really do not change. Their laziness, ignorance and malice just finds new modes of expression.
2
You know what, Mr. Brooks? I just want to live out my remaining years in a stable country. I want my husband to be able to retire in a few years without worry that we won't have Social Security and medical care that he paid for during his 50 years of labor. I want to be able to eat food, drink water, breathe air and consume medications that I know are free from toxins because a government that serves her citizens makes sure it is so. I want my children and grandchildren to live in a rational, free society, to not have to worry about nuclear holocaust caused by some deranged leader. I want them free to practice a religion of their choice or no religion at all. I want them to be well educated so they can compete in a global economy. I want them free from severe want and worry. I want my adult daughters and young granddaughters to be free to choose their own reproductive destiny, not some theocratic oligarch. I want them free from worrying about the ongoing climate crisis because their corporate owned government leaders malign the science, referring to it as some "Chinese Hoax" meant to enrich the alternative energy faction while selling our country, health and environment to the fossil fuel industry. I want them to live in a country where it's acceptable to be different, whether by ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual preference. A government that upholds ALL our constitutional laws, not just those that suit its agenda. So which party, Mr. Brooks? I think you know the answer.
2
My parents are devout Catholics who are active in their church and in Knights of Columbus. They are also tribalist Republicans who devour Fox News and nothing else. They voted for Trump while still somehow claiming the moral high ground. Brooks ignores the huge role religion has played in the polarization of America.
2
Amen Sir. Society is about making friends, not enemies.
Actually, far more than church is any more, politics in today's America is a matter of good versus evil. On one side are bullying, lies, greed, pandering, bigotry, planetary despoliation and treason. The other side, for all its faults, is our sole hope of stemming them. In the words of Saint Paul, "What fellowship hath light with darkness?"
Politics is a game in which the winner is supposed tobestow some benefit to his/her team and to a certain extent the game, read his/her party, partisans and country. When the party in power fails to provide, another party and /or leader is chosen.
"For years, the meritocratic establishments in both parties told an implicit myth. The heroes of this myth were educated, morally enlightened global citizens who went to competitive colleges,etc etc" This myth failed as all eventually do. The meritocratic establishments invaribly enrich themselves and leave behind the volk/folks. The meritocratic established loved Gobalization and they did well, not so much much the volk. The meritocratic established figured out how to avoid another depression in 2008, save The banks and wall street, foreclose on the homes of the volk/folks. Eventually the Volk gets it an turns on the the meritocratic establishment. However ;another Establishmnet is waiting in the wings. Often the new Establishment is the old in a new suit and hairstyle. Look at the old communist countrys of Russia and eastern Europe, the establissment is now called Oligachs instead of Commi Czars. The new powers behind the American President are not much different than the old. New masks same guys and girls. Enjoy all Halloween, wear a new mask.
This is something your GOP has been great at for the last 35 years, Mr. Brooks.
Nice to see you acknowledge what most of us have long known of those bankrupt political philosophies that guide the lost generation of GOP fanatics.
Get rid of the GOP.
1
This column is prophetic. Should make us all uncomfortable no matter where we are coming from ideologically.
Is Politics a vessel worthy of our deepest passions? Are we merely defined by our political and tribal allegiances and sympathies? Do we judge and see the world only through how we perceive ourselves within a Borg-like mass of like-minded souls? Why do we invest so much in something that is such a cruel mistress? Have we elevated politics to something like a ersatz national religion?
The fanaticism of right wing politics mirrors the religion of many in that group. It requires no thought only obedience and the unlimited capacity to hate as directed.
The idol of politics in the U.S.?
Impossible to escape it. And it pays its groveling pundits and other operatives well. The idol of Civility, National Interest, Morality, The System, and worst, American Culture. This idol by overt and covert means to point of horror story depends for its existence on all but institutionalized cowardice, depends on all powerful art, science, literature, philosophy subordinate if existing at all.
You can always tell the culture of politics in the U.S. because nothing of great writers, thinkers, scientists is mentioned, just the usual Constitution, this or that cheap moralizing, safe and mediocre psychologizing,--surface writing, thinking, acting. To expect a life of family, friendship, neighborhood, community or even faith not to mention a worthwhile life creed underneath such a thing is to wrestle with mental sickness one's whole life.
I can think of nothing over past seventy years more vulgar than Ronald Reagan. And these days the left is obsessed with somehow, anyhow, elevating this or that minority or woman or gay over any white man. It's just a madness of cowardice, crude generalities on all sides. But it does pay a lot. Power. The entire opposite of sports: A game entirely rigged as to who gets to play. Who gets to think. Who gets to write. Who gets to act. Who gets to have influence.
Now if you want a truly worthwhile idol, the idol which is truly stern, which is likely to take all and give nothing back, try to become a genius.
Anything a person can like and do can be pursued and performed to the degree that it shuts out other concerns that lead to healthy human development. Horizons narrow, character development slows, arrested development occurs and finally addiction replaces life. His up bringing and self acclimation, now supported by mob adoration, has made a narcissist of Trump, a toxic narcissist. He can never be seriously viewed as anything but a psychotic needing constant monitoring and control, lest he do further harm to himself, family, friends and nation. He has infected enough people to the degree that they can now hold a republican congress in thrall. They need each other in order to maintain the insane, infernal machine they have made of the Federal Government which has become a dysfunctional sanitarium. It is apparent that an intervention in Trump's addiction must take place; however, it is becoming more apparent daily that a cowardly republican senate and house is greedily fearful of doing so. It is interesting how an addict can strip the republican congress of good character. Maybe that's because it was made of poor human material to begin with.
Partisanship is different than party identification of course. Would that it were the case that the people cast aside by the forces of modernity you mention, capitalism chief among them, would form an identity based upon being treated like so much refuse! Then there could be solidarity, as deregulated capitalism has created a global dystopia for the great majority of people, (think I am joking? See climate change, opioid crisis, rise of fascism).
What you are calling 'idolatry' is just plain old commodity fetishism at the level of identity. It's not politics causing this, it's just that politics is the neatest vehicle to tap into human enthusiasm for the purpose of advertising dollars and profit. People search for meaning, and meaning making is good business.
There is an interesting similarity between your closing paragraph and Marx's thesis in On the Jewish Question. Namely that a deeper universal element of humanity is frustrated and isolated by the modern nation state under the conditions of capitalism, and a new form of life must emerge so that people are treated as humans by humans for human ends. But it's not really just Marx,
think of Augustine's definition of sin, 'To love what is meant to be used and to use what is meant to be loved.'
The great contradiction in your party's history is that it has espoused communal and familial ideals, while always siding with big business against the many. And for 40 years has opposed every effort to widen our circle of humanity.
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I must suspect the conclusions reached by a column which is based on the principle of "If politics is going to get better we need better myths." Myths? Not policy, not income equality, not health care. Myths? Really? Myths have their place in this world, but they don't occupy nearly as much space as you think they do
Also: Politics does NOT rest on "deeper communal bonds;" it arises from a much more fundamental source: human bonds, biological bonds, those of we humans as a species. Not the Protestant Church, David, not the Boys Clubs or the Spinners or Woke or all those other social groups which your columns turn into an idol. Idolatry is what happens when people give ultimate allegiance to something that should be serving only an intermediate purpose, such as the social groups mentioned above.
Also: "Politics these days makes categorical demands on people. It demands that they remain in a state of febrile excitement caused by this or that scandal or hatred of the moment. " Wrong! Really, David, how can you write things like this? Obama didn't make this demand, Clinton didn't, even Bush didn't, it's just Trump. Is that how short your memory is, you think "politics" has changed so fundamentally in 10 months? You are a better thinker than that. Write with more consideration, more truth.
If my "idolatry" comprises equal rights for all, equitable taxation for all, reasonable gun laws, clean water and air, affordable health care for all, separation of church and state and a world class public education system...well so be it.
BRILLIANT! The most cogent reason I have ever read that answers “Why Trump?”
“Trump’s supporters follow him because he gets his facts wrong, but he gets his myths right. He tells the morality tale that works for them”
Thank you Mr. Brooks!
1
stevie nicks i believe sang, "tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies", There is humility in that. Admitting i am powerless over my inability to vote for Hillary Clinton was the first step. Hindsight is 2020, the year. like a slingshot, stretch backward and then we can be launched forward.
I left institutional Christianity many years ago because of its idolization of political power, nationalism and its addiction to American exceptionalism. The mythos of America's "Christian Origins" drives a pathetic entitlement that sub-drives euro-supremacy and racial condescension. "This country is OUR country, a bright-shining city on a hill."
This narrative is not able to accept multiculturalism because it contradicts a missional worldview wherein "others" are to be loved, but in condescension as wayward children...and ultimately to be cast aside in derision when they don't "come around". Moderation, compromise, tolerance...the current mythos condemns these as being "lukewarm", therefore likely to be "spit out" by God; and working with others is seen as being "unequally yoked"...
I hope that this column is not perceived as an excuse for continuing to do nothing in the face of policies that can bring great harm to the planet and humanity. Yes, live your best life, as Oprah would say, but do not ignore the circumstances at hand. An active resistance is necessary from each citizen. If the outcry were greater, those that are speaking out would feel that they too could keep their involvement as just one aspect of their lives. Given the humanitarian crisis(es) this political regime wants to create that's not been possible for so many of us.
"What you see is good people desperately trying to connect in an America where bonds are attenuated...financial stress*...or to even have a spiritual narrative that gives meaning to life."
*especially
...(the picture of the lady carrying the poster!)
Urgently, we need to rise above party politics and, with help from experts and wise ex-officials, find quick, practical solutions.
(Should we all cry for America?)
David's heart is large, his memory not so much: "It’s not even about which party has the better philosophy, as it was in the Reagan era."
Did we really have a philosophical struggle wherein the Southern Strategy pressed St. Ronnie to chose Philadelphia, Mississippi, infamous site of the brutal torture and murder of 3 civil rights workers? Or to believe the ludicrous cocktail napkin-drawing of the "Laffer Curve" notion that lowering everybody's taxes leads to increased tax revenue? Or that Grenada needed a full-scale US military invasion? Or that yelling "Tear Down This Wall" was useful? Or that inviting Reagan's aged butler to a White House din-din did anything for black people? The St. Ronnie era was not a philosophical triumph, just another rich white person's commie-baiting circus with no bread for the masses..
1
Nice work, Mr. Brooks; an excellent column that, I’ll charitably assume not by design, is attracting the predictable wrath of partisan readers whose comments - projecting insult and even outrage - merely prove your point.
Where do we even start to repair/rebuild the communal bonds? In fact, I would argue that meritocratic system is the only way out. First and foremost, we should all accept the truth that we are created differently. We should finally abandon the lie "all men are created equal". Second, US government should apologize and compensate African Americans. Seriously, this thing will never go away. One way or the other, we are paying the prices. We should do it right and fix it once for all! Instead of tax cut, what we should have is an one-time "patriotic tax". Afterwards, we should get rid of affirmative action and legacy programs. College entrance should be de-identified and every applicant should be evaluated by AI. Clearly AI is much smarter than humans and the data collected will be used to improve future selections.
Because of the arrival of automation and AI, US should only take immigrants with special skills. There will be mass layoffs and we need to reduce burdens. I support basic incomes but they must work.
Honestly, the future is not very bright and Homo sapiens are in serious troubles. We need to be more realistic.
In a time of existential threat, moderation itself is an idol. There is no ambiguity about our present dilemna.
What conseravtives like Mr. Brooks seem to find hard to admit (though there were some notable epiphanies in Germany and the UK following the 2008 financial crisis) is that at the core of the corrosion of social cohesion, out of which grows the poison of narcissistic alienation leading to neo-tribalism and ideological idolatry, lies none other than capitalism, once again today lording it over humanity in a particularly vicious neoliberal-globalist incarnation which has shredded the networks of security and opportunity created in the wake of the post WWII-order in the West. None of this is particulary new, either. Don't read Marx for solutions, perhaps, but his diagnosis (and its refinements by the Frankfurt School and other non-dogmatic leftist thinkers) is still pretty much spot on.
1
An “ enveloping moral culture”? A “ spiritual narrative that gives meaning to life”? Did we have those things in the past and now we have lost them? We certainly did not have them during the period of Native American genocide, or the periods of African slavery, Jim Crow or segregation. I beg to differ with you, David. We have come far by making politics our idol. The victories of voting rights, civil rights, gay rights and gender equality have all been attained by making politics of the right kind our idol. The Republicans have poisoned the political atmosphere and they have decided to worship the wrong idols. But that does mean that we break our own political idols and pay homage to some lily-livered god of moderation. Atavism dies hard in human beings, David, and we need our idols to chart a course for the future, whatever or wherever that might be.
But Christians aren't allowed to worship false idols. Idolatry is the fundamental taboo in these Abrahamic religions.
"Born-again or evangelical Christians and white Catholics, strongly supported Donald Trump" (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a...
Perhaps the reason the opposition fails is that they don't see politics as a religious indoctrination let alone a fanaticism. Rather they see politics as, well, politics:
Definition of politics, 1:
a: the art or science of government
b: the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy
c: the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government
Definition of idolatry
1: the worship of a physical object as a god
2: immoderate attachment or devotion to something
Christ was supposed to be enough.
If Trumpers are Christians ('Evangelicals' no less), but they've turned Trump into their golden calf, then they've wandered into some blatant blasphemy.
"They became stiff-necked and in their rebellion appointed a leader in order to return to their slavery"
Nehemiah 9:16-21
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So according to Brooks, we're supposed to create new myths to solve the problems which using our old myths have caused us throughout history. Brooks again sounds to me like he's trying to use a 19th Century solution to solve a 21st Century problem.
Manafort ran Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign in the South.
Remember when the Gipper went to Mississippi to applaud "states' rights," the dog whistle doctrine justifying racism and slavery?
Lovely people. Hard to feel nostalgic for the "good old days," Mr. Brooks. Very hard.
Once again, Mr. Brooks turns on his "both sides" machine to try and obfuscate the fact that it is the Republican party that destroyed the governing consensus with racist/sexist/homophobic appeals to a dwindling white, rural community. Much like when the Times uses "Congress" to describe how a bill was blocked, here it is "partisanship" that does the work.
Reject the golden calf.
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Interesting.
Reminds me of Ray Moore and the 10 Commandments and also the Religious Right.
One of the first commandments is thou shalt not have false gods, thou shalt not bow down and worship them.
Greed and power are other false gods; yet Moore and company worship greed and power.
Go figure.
That book you recommended, How To Think by Alan Jacobs, should be required reading for everyone.
To many in America, especially in the south, guns are an idol to be worshipped. They cannot part with their guns at any cost.
1
This column applies to about 99% of the NYT commenters. Yes, Mr. Trump is pretty egregious. But an utter obsession with politics, the US Presidency, Mr. Trump, and the Republican party is a big mistake. It is not good for your mental health! There is a lot more going on in the world than the US Presidency and Congress. Thank God. Government can never provide everything that the left expects from it.
Mr Brooks, idolatry had started with gold - and not just in biblical times - here in this country, in the last 30-40 years. Where Rich people have hired lobbyists, who have bought politicians and elections. The common people have been fooled and liked to enough that now all they can understand and believe is the biggest lie. For a generation the GOP had run politics like a reality TV show - Clinton Infidelity, Whitewater Scandal, Saddam's WMD, Gay secret agenda, Swiftboat campaign, Obama is a Muslim, Birtherism, Death Panels, "Climate Change Hoax", Obamacare is Socialism - and on and on. so, now that a Real Reality TV star has taken over politics and the whole country seems as divided as reality TV show - why are we shocked - or dismayed. it's the natural progression of things - "as you sow, so you reap".
Its the best of times, it's the worst of times ... Mr Brooks - sit back and enojoy the end of Democracy in America.
David - you continue to put my feelings into words. Thank you
That picture of the Lady holding that sign is heartbreaking. She has truly forgotten her first love and lacks maturation. Lord have mercy!
1 John 5:21 “Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.”
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David Brooks, the moderate, ever the voice of reason in an age of shouting extremes! I guess to be moderate is to stand by and do or say nothing as first the Tea Party and then the Trumpites steamroller your fellow moderates. No matter. The GOP now runs all three branches of the federal government and I'm sure you take great solace in that. What's your idol. David?
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I can answer that. Mr. Brooks idol is a false idol: The Grand Myth of Conservatism.
David - John Kasich will be looking for a speech writer in 2020. Just sayin...!
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At few weeks ago, when he told an utterly irrelevant tale about a friend's inability to comprehend cold cuts, Mr. Brooks reached a point at which no other person understands, shares, or cares about his thoughts. This article does nothing to dislodge him from that location.
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Idolatry can be another name for addiction, for fear, for brains seeking status quo in times which information comes at us at lightning speed. As those comets of information speed past us we reach for one and grab its tail clinging to it as our own. Not even knowing what it means “Republican” Democrat” “race” “gender” we know it is more comforting than grabbing every single morsel of data that comes by. If there is no teacher or leader that can help us sort this out then chaos results. In our brains in our life and relationships and in the leaders we choose.
This quote below comes from Isabel Allende;
“Every time I asked a question, that magnificent teacher, instead of giving the answer, showed me how to find it. She taught me to organise my thoughts, to do research, to read and listen, to seek alternatives, to resolve old problems with new solutions, to argue logically. Above all, she taught me not to believe anything blindly, to doubt, and to question even what seemed irrefutably true, such as man's superiority over woman, or one race or social class over another.”It is hard to read a newspaper or listen to the news and not believe anything blindly; its what is put in front of us or rather what we choose to watch.
I don't think your conclusion is correct, despite your rather compelling charactersizations of the role modern politics can have in otherwise non stellar lives.
The answer you tend requires "deeper communal bonds .." and which "...probably can't be fixed by political means".
Nope, I think you've over-thought it and, by the way, you're a frog in the heating water. You've forgotten (or it has become too normal) just how extreme FOX is. Which is to say the extrmeme US political climate and associated strife is primarilly fanned by FOX news.
The answer then is get rid of fox news - how don't know - reintroduce the fairness doctrine or just do something otherwise to kill it.
I suspect strongly that in its absence political sensiblities will tend back to the middle and mirror normal civil social sensibilities.
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" ... It demands that they remain in a state of febrile excitement caused by this or that ... "
In order to maintain some detachment that permits rational analysis of issues and events, I find I must carefully ration my indignation. Otherwise, I fall into an unfocussed rage at what the world has become. I think this has happened (sans rationing) on both ends of the political spectrum. And in our rage, we lose the power to change things.
1
Well, any port in a storm.
Religion, family, friends, and neighborhood failed me. Where to turn? Politics, war by other means, saved the day for me. Now I have some interesting things to learn every day, and passionate people to discuss them with. It's a real-life soap opera in which we all have have roles.
If the shoe fits, wear it without complaining about having to pay a price. Reality is usually disappointing, but utopias are merely fables.
No falser the idolatry than an achieved greatness lacking the requisite order whence a more perfect union is formed MOVING FORWARD. Hence ne'er less met than the twain 'tween a "great" that never was and the myth that it can be accessed retroactively regardless.
"To be a moderate is to be at war with idolatry."
And here for years I thought I thought I was a liberal, when all along I was a moderate. Whodathunkit?
If I am to accept your conclusion, Mr. Brooks, then you need to explain at what point on the political spectrum one becomes fact-seeking rather than fact-averse. If there's one defining element of the Trump-supporting right end of the spectrum it would have to be the cognitive dissonance one must embrace to reconcile deeply-held beliefs (myths) with the facts.
6
Few things in politics is more frightening than idolatry.
One need only look at the faces of the adoring masses whipped into hysterical frenzy, to know where it will all be leading to next.
History is full of such examples.
Few with happy-endings.
And now America finds itself in such a position with Donald Trump and his almost cult-like followers, who continue to support him even as he plans to rob them blind and jettison the entire country in the process.
But somewhow, what everyone seems to forget is that they only represent a minority of the American electorate -- and we wouldn't be where we are now without the gerrymandering efforts of the G.O.P. and the antiquated Electoral College.
While Mr. Trump and his divisive brand of politics might have lied his way into the Oval Office with a load of myths, it may prove hard for the truth to keep him there.
And we can only thank Mr. Mueller's investigtion for that.
4
I have in my lifetime of 86 years, I have run the gamut of sides of politics.
I grew up in a Republican family (my father ever ran for the US Senate in the primaries of 1944.) Eisenhower was the last good honorable Republican. I wanted Rockefeller to represent the GOP in 1960 but I did vote for Nixon. unfortunately.
I voted Democratic in 1972 for Carter, again in1976 and an Independent 1980. By then I had become an independent voter, getting out of the GOP. Unfortunately in Pennsylvania, an Independent cannot vote in the Primaries, the only thing I could do was switch to being a Democrat in order to vote in the Primaries. So that is where I stand now.
Words like "socialists," "liberals," are meaningless. I accept the term "progressive." Which to my mind, I want something done positively for the country like fixing the infrastructure and reducing the military/industrial complex.
There I said it all.
18
Here comes another problem in American politics, the two party system. Why an Independent cannot vote as an Independent. That doesn't make any sense.
1
Great post, Paul. Don't forget that Theodore Roosevelt (R) also called himself a "progressive." He had no time for conservatism.
1
You are accurately describing what happens to animals if you feed them regularly. They become dependent and supine.
For the US to arrive at this point it has had to travel along way through complacency into ignorance. The startling statistics on people who cannot read and have passed through the education system is food for thought. The media could do with abandoning any idea of fair and balanced. Ignorance cannot exist with knowledge. There is no wisdom in not knowing.
2
The last paragraph presents a problem for me. David Brooks outlines legitimate qualities related to idolatry. However, he pivots the idea into a call to action. Mr. Brooks appears to suggest all political activism outside the realm of "moderate" falls within the boundaries of idolatry. Here, I have to disagree.
We need a degree of radicalism in order to affect change. In a world where politics always operates in moderation, slavery still exists and the Vietnam War never ended. The question is whether our radicalism is principled, informed, and appropriate in conduct. Here, we have a massive imbalance.
Extremism on the left and right are not equivalent. The Bernie Sanders movement promotes public higher education and health care as a universal right. Apparently, these ideas are "revolutionary" to moderates. Moderation effectively supports failed health and education policies principled on moderate ideas. Obamacare would have worked much better if not for self-inflicted moderation eliminating the public option.
What does the Right have by way of comparison? De-funding government and racist appeasement. Instead of trying to help people, every conversation is prefaced on individual satisfaction with some dog whistle subtext. These are racial, sexist, religious or otherwise. What sort of creed is that?
Thanks but I'd rather avoid moderating my human decency. We don't need to play identity politics but if the center looks like the center today, I'll stick to radicalism.
12
I agree with David to an extent, but I also think our current social/political circumstances have something to do with not-so-deeply-retained racism and bigotry. I would love to believe it's just about filling a void, but it's more than that. Politics in these circumstances isn't so much an idol but a means for expressing what we once thought by be eradicated but was only repressed.
4
“If politics is going to get better we need better myths..."
No, we need to get over myths and look at objective reality. This administration has no respect, zero, for objective reality. That is true of the entire Republican party.
Mr. Brooks, who still lionizes Reagan, can’t bring himself to admit that the myth of trickle down doesn’t work.
12
Brooks is not the first to see quazi-religious motives in political allegiances. The social forces he describes did not just pop up out of the ground like so many dragons' teeth. Back in the '50s Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, "Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.” That "holy cause" is largely in Hoffer's work secular, just as it is now.
Myths? Myths got us where we are now because they don't work very well! The Myth of how great Ronald Reagan was has been failing since he took office - we've just had to face more and more reality unprepared for it. Myths are no good. We need honesty, true reality. We can form those bonds you talk about only when we accept the reality of who we are now and respect one another and treat each other well. We don't need no stinking' myths.
3
When Politics Becomes Your Idol,
you know society is broken and people are desperate, peons fighting amongst themselves for the crumbs that the elites throw at them (in Trump's case paper towels).
That's the end result of crony, unfettered capitalism.
7
Mr. Brooks, once again deludes himself and missed the most important news yesterday. Mr. Brooks goes all over the place once again trying to present false equivalences between the right and the left. I think Mr. Brooks missed the most important bit of news yesterday, which told us that around 126 million Americans received Russian ads through their social media links, and many of them passed them on to others. That's a lot of people. If you were looking for dirt on Hillary, here it was, handed to you on a sliver platter, found in the social media pages, and you "shared" it with others. This, for me, partially explains why people were so willing to chant "lock her up" at Trump rallies. Just last night, I saw a clip of Jeanine Pirro - former Westchester County Prosecutor and judge turned FOX news contributor-- a former officer of the court, chanting her own version of "its time to shut it down (Mueller investigation) and lock her up" on national television. All of these folks filled with their own personal version of what the reality is and should be in America, and where we should look for wrong doing. We have always had deep divisions in this country. Didn't we have to use troops to protect Black children on their way in to segregated schools? Didn't we witness the fire hoses and police dogs turned on peaceful protesters in the 1950s and sixties? And, did we not witness the hatred in the shouting of white bystanders, as their way of life was coming to a close?
5
How do we explain the growth if independents who do not affiliated with any party? How do we explain the nearly half of the American electorate who do not bother to vote at all?
2
Powerhouse. "What seemed to offer you more control begins to control you." But who is going to read this? Not those who would benefit. Preaching to the choir. Sad.
Poppycock, Mr. Brooks.
There is a simplistic false equivalency in your column.
Our country was forged in politics. No god chose a president for us.
Our reality president, our idol, is not supposed to be an idol. He is supposed to be held accountable for his actions, He is supposed to be on equal footing with the other branches of government.
The irony is that President Trump attacked President Obama relentlessly, demeaning him, belittling him, delegitimizing him.
Yet now he is demanding fealty from his sycophants, which they willingly give him (remember how Comey said Trump demanded loyalty?). Look at his first cabinet meeting where his cabinet members had to kowtow, kiss Trump's you-know-what, as he went around the table and his underlings effusively praised their overlord.
Look at his demand of his Republicans -- they are his, he is not theirs - as he demands they protect him.
Look at how Ryan and McConnell do Trump's bidding, how the Republicans refuse to hold Trump accountable.
Look at how the bone spur president wraps himself in the flag, wraps himself in the 2nd Amendment, wraps himself in the military.
I do not have a false sense of what politics can accomplish. I do not idolize any politician. I do think we can do better than President Trump and VP Pence.
I believe what Winston Churchill said, that democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all the others.
32
Things fall apart
The center cannot hold ...
The best lack all conviction,
While the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats captured it and Achebe understood it.
It perfectly describes what republican propaganda has done to this country.
Look around at those who continue to buy into and support the Trump anarchy. They are today's good Germans of the 1930s.
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The factor that I think reinforces people's fear and channels their anger is TV like Fox News where every event is twisted to keep a narrative of lies and falsities justified. Religious groups supporting someone who spews hate; a president who belittles a war hero like John McCain or a gold star family and yet feels that he can lead a charge against football players that are peacefully demonstrating against racial injustice. Trump tries to represent the patriot while humiliating the real patriots of our country. His followers lap it up and can't seem to discern the contradictions. Every turn his press secretary and Fox talking heads interpret the horror for his followers and twist it until a sane person has to be shaking their head.
12
The erosion of "attachments" isn't random. The apologists for capitalist ideology celebrate that capitalism destroys families and communities with its "creative dynamism". As we have gotten richer in stuff, we have gotten poorer in the dense networks of relationships that Brooks laments the loss of. Neither Left nor Right understand this, so neither party knows what to do about it. We need to look to Europe or Japan for healthier places where families and communities are supported, not destroyed, in the context of free markets balanced with social Health.
3
In the battle between ''myth vs. facts,'' the entertainer apparently wins. President Trump is entertaining, Hilary Clinton was and is not, neither was President Obama. And yes, Trump "..tells the morality tale that works for them,'' his supporters.
However, not give sole credit to Brooks theory of "politics becoming our idol." The Russians, with their history of entertaining storytellers, from Tolstoy to Dostoevsky, apparently helped more than we know with the stories they promoted, i.e..."dirt on Hillary via emails, fabricated Facebook ads meant to divide us....
3
Dear Mr Brooks,
Please beware once again of false equivalency. There are not "two sides" to this problem. "Yes we can" is an optimistic, democratic and inclusive project; "Only I can do it" as you are fully aware, is not.
24
I think no matter what our differences, we as Americans can all agree on one thing: no matter what the political landscape, David Brooks is going to make out just fine.
6
The false equivalence is offensive. The implicit "myths" of my progressive lifetime have not changed. They are about love, equality, justice, peace, the rich diversity of humanity, the ineffable beauty of art and the elegance of science. I suggest that these things are true.
The Republican myths are truly mythological. That we live in a meritocracy. That free markets solve all problems. That racism is a hoax. That climate change is a hoax. That we are a Christian nation. That gay folks are fundamentally flawed. I suggest that these things are false.
The difference matters and neither false equivalence nor a call for "moderation" can change the truth.
22
Thank you. Wonderfully put. Wholeheartedly agree!
Your very thoughtful essay has evoked some serious responses from many thoughtful people. Shows what could be done. Trump has managed to puncture a venomous vein in the american psyche. How did we manage to go from Obama to Trump so quickly? Something very sad and poisonous about us has been revealed.
6
This idolitry holds true for the people who voted for Trump and the people who slavishly follow a leader, whether it would be Trump, Clinton, or Bernie. They want to believe in the perfect person and refuse to see the person as a whole, flaws and all. However, this especially holds true for anyone who is currently identifying and voting for GOP candidates. How can conspiracy with Russia and a tax reform that only benefits the 1% while hurting everyone else be a party platform that any Republican (except billionaires) identify with? I’m not so sure that Brooks is on target here unless he’s looking in a mirror and trying to reconcile his beliefs with his Republican status.
2
This is a brilliant column. Thank you, Mr. Brooks.
The photo of the woman holding the TRUMP IS "OUR" SAVIOR is both frightening and telling. What truly concerns me is that Donald Trump is neither admired nor respected--even, I think, by many of his supporters; but he is idol-ized. Nor, I suspect, does Trump deep down want to be admired or respected; but he does, I think, want to be worshipped. He does seem to mythologize himself as a 'savior'--only I--figure. We're playing a dark and dangerous mythological game in our society and democracy--and, perhaps, being played by dark and dangerous characters. It's time--indeed past time--to demythologize Trump.
2
What we really need is secure attachment, and that is in increasingly short supply. Technology is stealing the opportunity to develop as humans were designed to.
1
"Trump’s supporters follow him because he gets his facts wrong, but he gets his myths right. He tells the morality tale that works for them."
The best summation that I have read about Trump and his supporters.
6
>If politics is going to get better we need better myths, unifying ones that are built on social equality.<
Sort of like "Stronger Together." And "The arc of justice may be long but it bends towards justice."
I say this not to mock you, but to point out how hard it is to deliberately create a positive, productive myth. You're about the 100th writer I've seen point out the need. And the need is utterly compelling.
But there's a reason they're always asking *someone else* to do it.
"Stronger together" convinces me, but it no longer convinces a majority. Thirty years of relentless, well-funded, carefully strategized hatred will do that. Especially when it's combined with the admitted complexities of living in an increasingly diverse society: one where all wealth flows to the very top.
1
Once again David Brooks draws us to the big picture in this cyclical phase of populism in America. He points out the social strife toward government and other social institutions is based on myths that the populists embrace both on the left and right. I suspect he is trying to say that we should raise our consciousness toward the economic and political inequality which is the basis for this social movement here and in Europe. Unfortunately, when one becomes an idolist, one loses the sense of reasonableness. There is some truth in what Marx said: religion is the opium of the masses just like wealth can be the opium for the masses as well. The myth that wealth is knowledge is our current problem. Mythologizing wealth, one's political party via idolism hides inequality. Address inequality and idolatry and populism disintegrates. It seems David Brooks knows how to synthesize all the social psychology, political science, sociology and anthropology in his columns.
Being a republican has nothing to do with who David Brooks is. Read him for what he says and not the party he belongs to!
2
This is what happens when religions get imbued in politics. Separation of Church and State is not followed. This is what is causing such a great divide.
The Alt-right politicians are using religious beliefs to appeal to the masses. The left at least is more inclusive. Moderation is the key in all things, but most find it boring. It appears that whether in relationships or politics we are all depending on titillation to keep us engaged. No one is appealing to our better angels and this is what is left out of the equation So we end up with the government we now have.
We all need to read or re-read Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm and The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. Those books explain how we decide what leaders to follow, often against our own best interests. They were required reading for high schoolers in our district in the late eighties and early nineties. Should br again!
2
We had a unifying myth: "E pluribus unum." In my childhood that noble sentiment was debased and narrowed when we went from it to "Under God." It's about time to restore the unity created from all groups--whether religious or not--as the central theme of our country.
1
All this family, faith, and community stuff is nostalgia for a simpler time in America. A time when "more important dependencies" meant self-imposed ignorance, bigotry and discrimination. But we don't live in the 19th century.
We live in a rapidly changing, incoherent, dangerous world and democratic politics, no matter how messy, is the only thing between us and total chaos.
Politicians don't touch people in any personal "hug and handshake" way. Probably never have. But the social and fraternal and communal-interest clubs and organizations that used to bind people together locally and intimately are pretty much gone -- or just hanging on. It's PTAs and Rotary Clubs and Elks Clubs and unions and ethnic clubs and organizations. Many always were exclusive, but they did provide a central theme and glue. Perhaps politics and parties fill the void today. It's a convenient, impersonal shortcut to grouping that depends on biased news sources, social media and fake glue. "Trump talks like me. He understands me. He hates the same people I hate. He visited my factory." And suddenly this charlatan IS their man. Or maybe the real shortcut -- he or she is a Democrat or a Republican, just like me. Donald Trump is a fake friend. Others, less strategic about it, are equally fake. But it works. Boy, does it work.
Proscriptions against idolatry begin with the First Commandment; the cautionary tale of the Golden Calf hits the nail harder than any rules about sex, lies, or even murder.
Strange gods will, as both Brooks and Moses note, one on his laptop, the other on a stone iPad, hasten the downfall of humanity.
For Brooks the answer lies in a revival of pancake breakfasts and Rotary Club fundraisers. For Moses, and later Jesus, the answer was a renewed dedication to justice: food for the hungry, solace for the widow, peace in a world where lions and lambs smile at each other.
Imagine politicians devoted to justice thud defined. Given our current state, such a feat of imagination is herculean, but according to those who originally warned us about strange gods, that's the image to which we must bow down.
Actually, the pancake breakfasts might not be a bad start.
David,
Why do you complicate everything with 'studies' of sociological issues when we all know that they are pseudo-sciences.
They never employ adequate 'control groups' and always ignore the myriad of limitless factors that make us unique as individuals.
This is not complicated.
We have a very large number of people who are uninformed, too lazy to get informed, and who consistently vote against their own interests.
Case in point: The current Republican tax proposals, 80% of the benefits flowing to the ultra-weathy: see, Krugman, Paul, today in your paper.
How can these voters conclude that 1) the .01% need more money, and, 2) that money will somehow trickle down to them?
What are these people thinking?
Politics isn't an idol, but political identity can easily be a religion. That is, it is both the salvation and the unquestioned doctrinal truth that we can adhere to without doubt.
Criticize Trump, and in return you'll hear that he is better than Hillary. Call and response, formalized like prayer. You get the same doctrinal absolutes on the left when you talk of the right and they talk of racists. It is as if we have Books of Common Prayer for our new age.
The danger of doctrine, of a kind of faithful identity, is that it can be abused. People who believe without seeing can be manipulated. And at the moment the right is being manipulated - to demonize the left, to believe education the enemy, to accept as dogma policies which are a disaster, to believe that there can be no compromise with the solid unyielding discipline of a Bishop faced with an unrepentant sinner.
But don't get cocky left... it's happening to you as well, as we turn every man into a rapist and every Trumpeteer into a racist, and every act of unkindness into a political statement of micro-agression. The left is not ascendent, so they are safer from manipulation by the political class for a bit.
Thinking, questioning authority, skepticism, political agnosticism and a healthy dose of cynicism about our what our pundits preach and our leader's motives are good guides for political identity. Don't believe anything you read, or hear, and only a fraction of what you see.
1
I totally see the idolatry that David Brooks describes amongst the staunch trump supporters who I see on the network evening news. I see it less on the PBS News Hour (which is actually more than 4 times longer than the 12 minutes devoted to news on the regular networks). And I don't see this idolatry at all amongst the Republicans that I know personally. They all seem to distance themselves from "little hand" trump and claim to believe in fiscal moderation and limited government– hallmarks of the GOP faithful, but nowhere to be seen in "little hand." However they believe that he is a master tactician and a genius businessman and give him props for his successes, which are impressive, ...I too must admit.
I can only speak for myself, but I don't identify with the Democratic Party. I have always found them to be disingenuous, sniveling, deceitful, hypocritical, and snobby. When possible I don't vote for them, but recently it has not been possible. [You see, I live in NYS and throwing the Green Party some votes is occasionally safe.]
I fear that our best long term hope is to see this through. Only when my Republican friends see their tax bills, their neighbor's sick child lacking basic health care, and a Grand Dragon with a talk show on Fox will they they realize that the swamp they are swimming in is near boiling.
I saw a movie recently that was released several years ago and seems more poignant now that it probably did at the time– Idiocracy. I suggest you watch it.
According to Brooks' prescription it's time to call it a day and go frolic in a meadow and everything will take care of itself. Wishful thinking and romantic nostalgia are not useful in addressing the needs of a growing population and a stressed natural environment. Myths are just that: stories made up to explain processes inexplicable to untrained and fearful minds.
Religion is the delivery system for the soothing lies that the majority seem to crave. The absence of religion does not equate with the absence of morality. The only way to prove that hypothesis is the long awaited NYT headline.
1
This is an incisive piece, but it prompts a couple of observations along different lines.
One is that many Trump voters in 2016 had been Obama voters in 2008, if not in 2012. Whether they have latterly become party-bound is a moot question, but apparently they were not a couple of election cycles ago.
The other is that when Trump captured the Republican nomination he was by no means a representative of the Republican Party. I'd say he still isn't, though he has the party in his thrall for now and may have affected it for years to come. Like a bacterium, he has power over the host body without being a part of it.
The idolatry of rank-and-file Trump Republicans does not seem to be fixed on the party, but on the cult of escapist nativism of which Trump is the high priest. Given a cult group to belong to, people are very slow to care if their idol demands everything and gives nothing.
My Trump-voting friends and family members did not vote for Trump because they were hurting financially. As a group, they are doing quite well and are looking forward to comfortable retirements with defined-benefit pension plans.
They voted for Trump because they built their lives around the great White lie.
What is the lie?
That we whites are burdened by financially supporting-- through our taxes-- a large and ever-increasing Untermensch of African and Latino heritage.
I am becoming increasingly concerned with the anti-Black and anti-Latino fervor that my own relations and friends are now exhibiting in simple everyday conversations.
“Idolatry is what happens when people give ultimate allegiance to something that should be serving only an intermediate purpose....” This narrative describes the growing resistance to what Republicans have surrendered to in the Trump WH and leadership of the Republican Party. “I am not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat” has been replaced by circumstances.
It’s hard to make a case that Democrats are idolaters. It’s easy to make a case for one to recognize the idolatry of Republicans. Republicans have unifying monolithic beliefs: the rich merited their riches whether they inherited them or “earned them”, taxes are theft, democracy is not the solution , democracy is the problem, are part of the Republican creed. Democrats are more disorganized. Democrats believe that all Americans have a right to education, safe environment, food, workplace, universal healthcare, equal justice etc. The only thing that unites Democrats is Republican efforts to undermine rights, abolish means to make safety more important than profits, abolish universal education, freedom of speech for individuals, the humanity of women, and all races.
Republican idolatry is encapsulated in Trump. Trump’s violation of “traditional”values are overlooked, ignored. His pathological lying, and attacking the weakest, his multiple marriages and charges of sexual assault, his business failures and affinity for Putin above our intelligence community are moot in his “Messianic” entitlement.
1
A retired woman on Medicare and Social Security holding a sign "Trump is our savior". Saving her exactly from what? This is world class stupidity.
4
The photo of the foolish woman proclaiming Trump as her "savior" says it all. Like the fools at a revival meeting who think they can be healed by laying on of hands by some huckster, they will go home sicker and poorer and still believe that they have been healed. Self delusion and willful ignorance with a dollop of bigotry and an extra helping of greed is the power behind the Trump movement and the Republican Party. Their gift is that they can convince the suckers to buy the snake oil.
244
Do you not see the irony of Obama being elected with almost zero on his resume, and the millions who apparently took such a leap of faith on him as their savior? Isn't it reasonable to suggest that part of the reason for Trump's victory was disappointment in Obama's inability to deliver on the many noble promises he made, along with his party's devolution into extremism?
1
No, sorry, I don't. These Trump voters were not disillusioned Obama voters. Rather, they were voters who bought into the vilification of Obama and Clinton by a Republican party which had become extremist and sold Kool-Aid to the gullible. Any inability by Obama to deliver was the direct result of a Republican Party whose sole objective was to make him a one-term president (which failed) and to deny him any legislative accomplishment. He was not perfect, and he had his failings, but he was confronted by an obstructionist Republican Congress at every turn. They even refused to consider his nomination of Garland to SCOTUS, an egregious dereliction of duty.
Obama never really put Americans first, especially not if they are white. He put the US behind Asian workers before US workers, for example, when he expanded the H1B Visa program, and when he pushed for TPP. And Americans noticed that, which is why they pivoted to Trump who at least pretended to put Americans first.
Brooks seems to overlook the simple fact that a "faith" or "life creed" need not take the pre-modern "religious" form. but can be philosophical and philosophical, as well as simple rational empirical thinking about action in public life can lead to politics as , if not as world view," as the specification of a world view to action in public life at an optimal general level for large impact.
2
Good column as far as it goes, but its thesis doesn't cover situations like my parents' neighborhood in Wisconsin -- there, by the late '00s, multiple households of people who had been neighbors for 50 years were unable to have a civil conversation about public affairs and began avoiding each other due to the risk that, in some innocuous conversation, public affairs might come up. These people were in highly stable situations, raised kids together, prospered, and generally lacked the issues pointed out by Mr. Brooks, but they could no longer dine together. The difference? As retirees or semi-retirees, they interacted with fewer people in their daily lives, and a segment of them became consistent viewers of Fox News.
4
I agree with much of what David is saying, but casual attachment to a political party or politician, and active participation in political causes are two very different things. The latter takes a lot of time and work - time that can't be used for amusements. The main reason I do so (to some extent) is belief in their importance - and that someone has to do something so misguided or self-interested people don't always prevail.
2
As long as we blame the other side for this form of political madness, there will be no way out. When we remember how to work together for the good of the nation, only then will we see the way forward.
5
Moralizing that lays blame on individuals is abhorrent to leftists, who reach for systemic explanations for all social ills. They're allowed to get away with using the term "neoliberal" as a slur because the consequences of its opposite go unanalyzed and stand as paradisal conceptualizations. That the world can be manipulated by their own hands to become infinitely better than a market-system can generate on its own is an article of faith.
Baudelaire once said that life is a bit like a hospital in which each patient believes that he will recover if he is moved to another bed. That seems accurate. Leftists are still, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good." But as Eliot also wrote, "If humility and purity are not in the heart, they are not in the home: and if they are not in the home, they are not in the City." Of course there are systemic issues to address, but not ALL problems can be solved via alteration in our political and economic structure. Individual initiative, responsibility, and morality matter.
And Daniel Kahneman is right: The reasons we give for our beliefs aren't the reasons we hold most of them. They're instead justifications for holding beliefs the origins of which we ourselves don't fully understand. How can we hate each other for things none of us can truly help? We need calmness and humility, not zealotry. If politics is your idol, zealotry, eventual disappointment, emptiness, and misanthropy will ensue.
4
After reading this comment I was reminded of H.L. Mencken who said that "Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong."
2
David L. Jr., I don't think that Leftists are looking for the perfect solutions to our social and political challenges, I think if you check again, they are looking for ways to make human existence in this country and others, perhaps, better for folks. Better air to breathe, better water to drink along with roads and bridges that do not collapse or electrical grids that cannot withstand high winds. TS, Eliot was wrong, I am afraid, especially with today's politics and realities.
1
As is often the case, Brooks sounds thoughtful and I even believe he is sincere. However, as if often the case, there are two problems with his argument:
A. As is almost always the case, he lets it seem as though The Problem is general and bipartisan. False equivalence by failure to mention that it might in reality be more lopsided.
B. (And this may perhaps be newer) A major flaw in his argument, in that the group that does attend church regularly and does take (at least professed) pride in their community is the one that's also associated with the most egregious xenophobia and hatred, and the group most likely to rally to "blood and soil" nationalism.
So is this just a stubborn blind spot in Brooks' world view? He so wants his theories to be true. Too bad they don't hold water.
10
It is difficult to build a society with "deeper communal bonds" inside an economic system that demeans and degrades humans in the single-minded pursuit of profit.
7
Mr. Brooks hints at some of this, but there are three very big things very wrong in our country right now.
1. No one wants to compromise. It's win at all costs and winner takes all. This is especially true in politics, but this attitude is also permeating business as well. As a result, problems are not being solved and challenges are not being met.
2. The utter greed of the wealthy in our country right now is staggering. The rich are richer than they have ever been and yet they clamor to take more of the pie, whether through reduction of workers rights, tax cuts, changes in law or otherwise. This has led to an overarching lack of trust in our institutions and a loss of a sense of fairness in our system.
3. We have become rude and uncivil in our discourse. We are communicating terribly with each other.
Until these are addressed by a leader who is ethical and has character, we will be lost as a nation.
12
Any time the right wing wants to rejoin the adult world, we'll be happy to resume the adult business of building a future for our children.
But, to accomplish this, Republicans and conservatives at every level -- from the party leadership in D.C to Mr. Trump's delusional base -- will have to change every aspect of their current approach to public life. No more alternative facts. No more single-issue solidarity. No more false equivalencies. No more insistence on feeling persecuted by diversity. No more refusal to accept change.
But the GOP has spent decades constructing a vast network of wedges and fractures, all built on the common desire for safety and simplicity. There's no place left to build. The true peril never was the glass ceiling -- it was the glass floor, now irretrievably shattered.
9
Maybe in the past I've sold David Brooks short. Today he offers deep insight into the root of our national problem. Excellent!
Two observations:
First, "moderate" is a fraught word with negative implications, at least to many, so I wish Brooks had written, "To be wise is to reject idolatry." In other words, the key word in the whole piece is "balance."
Second, while more or less ridiculous and extreme identification with politics is common on both left and right, we should not lose track of the fact that the problem is far more prevalent and far more intractable on the right, owing to decades of cultivation by those who profit (literally and figuratively) from it. So now we have Trump and his "base." There is nothing of equivalent magnitude and pathology on the left.
10
When Republicans swing to the extreme right and Democrats stake out the "moderate" position, moderations becomes the new left wing bookend to the new right. At that point, compromise requires accepting a position in center of what Republicans have been advocating all along. Sad to say, but a swing to the right from one party requires a balancing swing to the left by the other. That's not necessarily idolatry, but is rather just the way things work in the real world.
1
"Everything is shaped on a deeper level, through the parables, fables and myths that our most fundamental groups use to define themselves."'
Yes David, Americans did have a myth to define themselves. It was call industrialism. Heavy industry got people off the farm and into the middle class with a standard of living hoi polloi had never seen.
As Cal Coolidge said, "The man who builds a factory builds a temple, that the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise." Industry was the myth we lived by.
But then about 37 years ago, Ronald Reagan tried to build an American myth based on Wall Street and finance. There were several problems with this new myth. The confluence of digital communications, container shipping, and corporate raiding made labor obsolete. Moreover, men and women who worked with their hands were disenfranchised. People were estranged from their lives' work, and this new myth offered no social palliatives much less good jobs.
David Brooks, among many others, never saw this coming. He wrote a panegyric about the graft of baby boomers and bohemians leading us to a new, grand society.
Now Donald Trump is seen as some kind of savior from anomie, yet a president who has stocked his cabinet chockablock with money managers and corporate insiders.
Yes David, we need a new myth to live by. An illiterate, unempathetic, unspiritual man is not the right guy for the job of creating myth.
3
Sorry Mr. Brooks, only one political party in the US promotes this vision of America. The Republican party prospers by pushing the myth that we as a nation are bitterly divided and alienated from each other by the escalation of feelings of fear fueled by the spreading and exaggeration of misinformation. There is only one party that is interested in learning the truth about the world now and that is the Democratic party.
1
I was having a tough time in the hospital last week and my wife and my son visited me every day. My wife was taking care of our bills which is something I usually do, and unbeknowst to my doctors the boy was bringing me a Burger King milkshake every day. I have had some down times in my life just like everybody else, but when you have a little money in the bank and people who love you backing you up, the need for political "saviors" diminishes rapidly. I feel sorry for the woman in the picture. She is lost in the world.
3
Reading the commentary shows that David Brooks is right about the disappearance of institutions. But it appears that each person has their own villain. For many the clear villain is someone not like them. It is those people, the ones who don’t believe in God or family, or capitalism or or freedom or whatever the writer believes. Trump will always appeal to these “better than the rest” people. He promises them a return to the glorious past, to time of a pure, holy America, an America that it wiped clean of what pollutes us. I have seen the enemy and he is us.
1
I have no way of understanding the subtleties of life in the big city, just as most Times readers have no way of understanding life in "fly-over country," but right now we rule the world, not for better or worse, clearly for the worse. I've noticed a tendency on the part of "commenters" to poke holes in David's thoughtful analyses, digging deep with assumptions that they will find buried within the motherload of conservative values which will burn their eyes. To paraphrase Paul Simon, "a man reads what he wants to read and disregards the rest." But if you want to get the "world" back, re-read the clues he offers here. The politics of those who push America ever more toward the cliff is not based upon fear and loathing, but on fear and disappointment. It's not based upon a desire for segregation, but on a sense of being despised and belittled as a community. It is not politics to them, it is togetherness, being a huddled mass and being condemned because outsiders assume they are huddled in infamy. But certainly, in your minds, you know better than I how to regain power without them; with one or two hands tied behind your back.
2
"If politics is going to get better we need better myths..." Yes. If anything at all is to get better the narrative has to change first. Therefore, we have to abandon myths that are delusional and dangerous, such as our exceptionalism as Americans, such as the "poor me" myth that makes even privileged people think they are victims. Deep down we Americans still cling to the myth of our Manifest Destiny. If we are to change our life we have to change our story and it starts with abandoning the old stories.
2
A large swath of Americans lack both intellectual and emotional intelligence, so are very susceptible to influence peddling and shown to be a danger to America's "Operational Security." Meaning, they do not realize that they have been compromised (intellectual laziness) and are now part of the problem (emotional stubbornness). Trump was coached to seize this swath using "fairy dust" sprinkled by others. He is compromised too and will not admit it either. Birds of a feather....become jail birds. Let's hope so....the preservation of the Constitution relies on it.
1
It took us 35 years t get to this awful place in the road. We won't get out of the ditch in 35 minutes. It will begin at home. I'm convinced that real societal change will be forced upon us by catastrophe, economic or war, yet again. We all will get a good look in the mirror once again.
1
Why do countries like Syria, Russia, North Korea and so many more authoritarian dictatorships have pictures of their “leaders”plastered on every wall and in every public and private building? Because in these countries the citizens are exhorted to give their loyalty to a “personality” and not to institutions. I fear we could be moving in the same direction with Trump supporters who seem willing to forego our most sacred Constitutional Rights (except the 2nd Amendment) as long as Trump reigns supreme.
1
The false equivalence prevalent in the fake moderate views expressed by Mr. Brooks is not really the fault of most Republican voters (and certainly not Democrats) but the fault of lame philosophizing hiding the petty partisanship by elites like Mr. Brooks. When are you going to accept that modern Republican and Conservative strategies (misinform, divide and conquer) killed formerly good strategies (educate, unify and compete fairly)? The good strategies on the Right died out about 50 years ago with the ascension of the likes of Nixon, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rove, Bannon and now Trump? This column has long been one of many usually unwitting enablers of the rotten state. Read George Will for more of the rottenness pretending to be reasonable.
2
How can two sides come together when one side shields all participation from the other side? Republicans tried to pass health care legislation by themselves without democrat participation and now they are doing the same thing with tax legislation. Before that it was the Supreme Court and Gorsuch. Brooks needs to look honestly at republicans and not equate them to democrats.
2
French writer and activist Simone Weil would probably take exception to the claim that "[t]hese days, partisanship is often totalistic." The idealistic Weil advocated for the abolition of political parties precisely because their tendency is always totalizing. Political life is necessary to civilization. It would seem that clinging to a two-party system is anti-political.
1
As always, an interesting article. However, on another level, I find it deeply frustrating.
David dismisses both parties - Democrat and Republican - as having no ideas that meet the needs of our era. I couldn't disagree more. While both parties offered competing and interesting ideas in the '70s and '80s (whether you disagreed with them or not), only the Democratic party has offered solutions in the decades since, Clinton through Obama, the biggest of which was the Affordable Care Act. Initiatives around equality, energy renewal and independence, enhanced saving incentives, worker protections were all pushed by Democrats amid extraordinarily intense Republican idolatry to unfettered capitallism and tax cuts for the wealthiest.
It's blind to treat Democratic efforts with such a broad, dismissive brush!
Nonetheless, I agree a spiritual gap exists where Americans seek more meaning in their lives. I'm a fervent, but not slavishly following, capitalist, and believe that we can't ignore that capitalism has contributed to this gap. Capital has no morality or spirituality and can move on a dime. . . humans are the opposite. Until we find ways to reconcile humans and capital, the issues David touches on will only get worse.
2
It is an interesting way to explain the dichotomy which seems to widen and harden evermore. Perhaps it explains the inexplicable devotion of Trump supporters to a man who violates all of the values said supporters ostensibly hold dear. I don't know.
However, I, and I suspect most other liberals, do not vote for Democrats because of some "visceral, even subconscious, attachment to a party group", but because on the whole the Dems attempt to help all of us, and the GOP, on the whole, attempts to help the few. I, we, are not motivated by animus towards our conservative compatriots, but rather our conviction that the Democrats offer better solutions.
At the risk of sounding trendy, this article smacks of false equivalency. If Trump's "morality tale" works for conservatives, it does not mean that liberals idolize Sanders or Obama. We support them as long as their actions reflect their words. Trump's actions seldom reflect his words. That is the difference.
3
More pop sociology from Mr. Brooks. But his analysis begs the most important question: why do lost people, people who have been stripped of their faith, their families, and their communities, turn to partisan politics to find succor? Why is partisan rancor their new faith and fighting creed?
Partisan hatreds do not form spontaneously; they have to be carefully taught. over long periods of time. The organized political right has been working toward this goal for decades, even if some of its house intellectuals, like Mr. Brooks, didn't see it or didn't want to see it. Today's Republican party is the product of conservative talk radio and Fox News. It is the product of men like Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell who shared the spotlight with "mainstream" and "moderate" Republicans, pouring out their vitriol on center stage for the rank and file to imbibe.
You don't see this sort of thing among Democrats, not because they're saints or because their families are still intact but because the organized left hasn't been preaching hatred of its political antagonists for the last fifty years.
Mr. Brooks wants us to understand the present crisis as the result of our common mistakes and of social forces beyond our control. That would be convenient for him --his analysis absolves him and conservative intellectuals like him for their part in aiding and abetting the forces on the right which gave rise to Donald Trump and have now captured the Republican party.
2
It is very ironic that Brooks notes that politics is often totalistic- the primary fault line between them and us.It fills the void left by the disintegration of other institutions.Yet not too many years ago pundits were concerned that entertainment havd displaced our interest in political activity and interests.
No longer is politics based on the quest to secure policy outcomes,the art of what is possible but rather resembles the schisms between Protestants and Catholics at the Reformation,the Shia versus Sunnis,orthe enmity between Hindus and Muslims'We owe a debt to our president for this magnificent transformation
It's human nature to idolize. We idolize sports stars, movie stars, and deities of all flavors. This is a weakness that Trump has exploited because our government hasn't helped but the rich and uber rich. It is understandable why the GOP has never helped the 99%ers, that is not what they do. The fault lands squarely on the heads of the Democratic party. The only people they have helped, besides themselves, are the money toting lobbyists that come to their office and buy what they need from Congress. Until we can figure this out as a nation things will only get worse.
It's ironic that so many of the frayed communal bond Brooks speaks of were damaged by horrible economic policies espoused by the political party he supports. Economic and social advancement has always taken on a mythic nature in this country, but advancement beyond class at birth was at least possible and common. Our social scientists and economists say it is becoming increasingly difficult in this era. This begets social decay, as was so clearly highlighted in Robert Putnam's Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Better myths won't help us; better jobs, universal healthcare, progressive tax policies, and equitable distribution of wealth will.
2
Idolatry works both ways--the extreme left shamelessly swooned over Bernie Sanders and considered him their savior. Bernie's over zealous followers really believed (and still do) that Bernie was "the one" who would bestow endless freebies and goodies upon America if he became president.
Both sides are equally guilty of relying on demagogues because what they promise sounds too good to be true.
1
I grew up in the kind of environment David is romanticizing: Rural small-town America back when such small towns were reasonably prosperous and stable.
It was a place where Catholics were still a suspicious minority.
It was also deeply Republican. People were proud of ancestors who served to protect the Union during the Civil War. They admired people who worked hard and lived within their means. They were willing to help people who had fallen on hard times even if that help often demanded that the people showed appropriate "appreciation."
A lot has changed in that town. The high school consolidated and moved out. The businesses that used to support the small dairy farms are gone.There is one gas station that sells milk and bread. The bank has turned into an ATM. There are still three churches, but their membership dwindled.
Young people leave for better jobs and a more attractive quality of life. Those who remain very often have problems with drugs and other social pathologies. They are not particularly political, but Trump's promises and his various deplorable messages resonate with them. They voted for him in last year's election.
It's true that politics won't fix what's wrong with those people and their community. But calling for reliance on those more important dependencies David cites is just as futile. The community bonds that existed in the 50s are gone. If politics can't help, those people are doomed.
1
Your analysis is incorrect as are your conclusions. Trump's core supporters are not the Americans who no longer hold fundamentalist religious beliefs, or live in single-parent homes, or find that their "fables" have been debunked. Rather, they hold fast to these fables and desperately fight to maintain white privilege. Their idol is not "politics." Their idol is a perception of white culture, social mores and religious beliefs that for the first time is preached by our President. We don't need better myths. We must continue to believe that truth and fact will prevail over fantasy.
Both sides might reply, "It ain't paranoia if they are really out to get you." And they are. The rich and semi rich want to keep all their advantages. The poor and semi-poor want some for themselves. Polluters want to continue polluting. Environmentalists want them to stop. IMHO, the rich and the polluters have figured out how to hoodwink the poor and the victims of pollution into believing that those trying to save them are the enemy. They have the media and the money to make it speak for them. We have the numbers, if we can only muster a way to get the message out. We need more political radicals, not less, and we need more of the rich, like Tom Steyer, to recognize that a top heavy economic ladder will collapse on a polluted planet, and put their money into the fight.
1
Mr. Brooks gives list of things that have become idols: ".....money, technology, alcohol, success, or politics." He should include religion. I'm not talking about the " false idols" that formal religions condemn. I'm talking about the actual religion- the way many people blindly follow their religious leader or the interpretations of their faith which have rationalized religious principles to fit their trial beliefs. Their religion is getting their myths right and as Mr.Brooks says, that's all that matters.
1
So it is both the left and the right at fault? Both the left and the right are turning politics into idolatry? Both sides are the problem?
Trump and his supporters are by far the biggest problem, with Republicans and "conservatives" as enablers. We all need to realize that and admit it and stop blaming "both sides." It may already be too late, but we can at least stop digging.
Although Mr. Brooks frames his argument in religious and spiritual terms, I think there is support for his central point in concepts related to social psychology. Social identity theory holds that as the strength of one's identification with a social group (the in-group) grows, one is increasingly motivated to act in accordance with that group's norms, beliefs and values while working to further its goals and agenda. Further, perceived threats to the group increasingly become perceived threats to self-concept. In-group bias (the tendency to give preferential treatment to one's group) intensifies and the tendency to see members of the out-group as "all the same" (the out-group homogeneity effect) increases. Confirmation bias (the tendency to seek only information that validates preexisting beliefs) leads members of the in-group to attend only to group-approved information sources, leading to group polarization (group beliefs become more extreme) and groupthink (the need to be consistent with group norms becomes more important than whether or not the group's position is correct). These common human cognitive and social biases suggest that Mr. Brooks has a point - the solution to our political problems lies, perhaps, not in politics, but in understanding and changing our social habits - starting with an awareness that our own social cognitions might be biased (avoiding the bias blindspot - the tendency to deny our own cognitive biases).
If partisanship is being used as "a cure for spiritual and social loneliness," what would Brooks say about the 40 percent of eligible voters who didn't bother to vote in 2016? Are they convinced that politics doesn't matter in their lives, or living in a state of blessed nirvana, insulated from the insanity?
Gosh, what if we all stopped voting? What would Buddha say?
Your thesis is based on an incorrect assumption. Mr. Trump and his cadre have simply abandoned truth in order to subjugate our nation to their economic power. With the help of media giants, and an uninformed electorate, they are winning.
The only basis for their cause and following are a radical anti abortion movement, racism, and white nationalism. The left is the left. Political is may be, but it bases its political judgments on clear issues of equality and justice for all.
Trump's "movement" have nothing to do with belief, and everything to do with money and power. It really is that shallow. The 1% want to have all of the pie.
1
I think there is a good deal of truth in this. The people I know with happy lives, good jobs, and stable relationships lean towards the middle of the political spectrum, no matter what their political party. It is the sad and the lonely, those with fewer economic options, those that feel adrift and powerless that drift towards the extremes. You see this in religion too. It doesn't matter if you are stuck in a low paying job with a bad home situation, if you are a member of the Army of the Lord. You are still somebody, somebody important.
1
Brooks can see the total failure of idol worship in the easy way in which the Conquistadors, mostly Spanish but also the Portugese-all licensed to take slaves by the Papacy and gold and silver by the European monarchical system. Europeans re-introduced large animals of burden and wheeled carts to the New World, ending the human toil and blood worship of local religions which demanded endless human sacrifices, both to feed the cities and religions of the pre Columbian empires. The new leaders from Spain ended the constant sacrifice of humans which were excuses to butcher the participants. The average Aztec or South American peasant saw that by trading his local party leaders in for the Spaniards, at least society gained horses, mules, big dogs,chickens and iron as well as decent farm food allowing them to raise their own children-not sell them as food. the skills of Europe might have allowed South America to develop as in the North were it not for permanent ideas about royalty and vestiges of the European system of empire and sovereignty.The refusal of many South Americans to abandon slavery in the 19th century kept them chained to their past much as our GOP tries to keep the USA stuck in an imagined pre war America , still innocent of involvement with the rest of the world , believing we are totally self sufficient as though this were 1917 and not a century later.
It is true that there are many lonely people who are susceptible to snake oil dealers. However the current toxic environment was created by Newt Gingrich in 1988 when he declared "civil war" against liberals. Angry and unstable people had a target for their unhappy lives. We are now reaping what the Republican party has been sowing for decades.
"It should be said that people on the left and on the right who try to use politics to find their moral meaning are turning politics into an idol. "
It should be said that Brooks never fails to condemn BOTH sides, when his thesis today describes only one: the know nothings of GOP who need to justify knowing nothing.
This is bad faith and moral cowardice on Brooks's part, which makes him part the problem he claims to be describing.
1 Samuel 5 tells the story of the Philistine idol of Dagon repeatedly falling before the ark of the covenant (in Dagon's own temple). After this happened, the ark was removed because the people saw that the hand of God was heavy on Dagon and on the people. It is hard to observe the current political environment and not see the "idols" of both Democrat and Republican parties falling repeatedly (even within the secular temples of partisan news outlets). For once, both parties look like the gangs that can't shoot straight. In a diverse and secular society it is hard to find shared ideals that will replace our fallen and partisan political idols. Even our flag is "torn" by groups who seize it and lift it up under different meanings. Growing incoherence in the political climate seems to be the order of the day, and effective "fixes" appear impossible. Possibly an increase in empathy and love of our all our neighbors (be they citizens or not) may provide a path towards greater respect and shared sense of purpose that will move us forward.
For all its diversity, America has many great people who have done many great things. But the American experiment is in shambles, and not because of politics, but because of extremisms. Prominent among those is worship of money--wealth as proof of success, as opposed to un-wealth, the proof of failure. Allied to that assumption is the cult of winners and losers. No matter how slim the “winning” margin is, the “winner” takes all… the presidency or the World Series. Being second is as to be last, and is a curse. The mentality that clings to such nonsense knows no sense of greater community, and knows only sectarianism.
America used to be described as the country where everything was big: buildings, cities, landscapes, mouths, and egos. American self-regard is extreme, but it is too small to tolerate a changing world. Remember: "permanent change is here to stay?" We refine our knowledge of the world, sometimes by inches, sometimes by miles, but the fragile mind is more at home in a nest of cozy old images.
1
Stretching the word idol to equate it with politics is to make the word meaningless. An idol is a thing, a thing to which we give power and authority. Politics is an activity. If we water down the meaning of words, then they begin to say nothing in particular and vague platitudes take the place of facts and truth. The result of such abuse of language is that we get columns that are logical and relatable, but ultimately meaningless. Instead of throwing the word idol into a stew that includes everything and anything humans do, let’s keep it simple and say that idols are false gods, objects of fetishistic attachment to which we ascribe powers that we wish they had and that we could control through worship and sacrifice. An idol can be a myth, such as god, or an object such as the cross, the Jewish star, the American flag, an actor, a popstar, or even a reality TV host. It isn’t politics that is the idol, it is the man currently running the country. That is where the danger lies. As a narcissist, he wants nothing more than to be considered godlike and to be worshipped. Nothing else matters to him. But making the president an idol makes him infallible, and if he doesn’t deliver it’s not his fault but ours for not being devout enough, for not worshipping him properly and giving him the respect an idol deserves and demands. Giving power to an idol is a way of avoiding reality and responsibility and having one in the WH is the real issue we face today.
1
What drivel. Our political system is the problem. Had we a parliamentary system, a democratic administration would have passed a true national healthcare system, and we might even have paid child care (subsidized). And this would have happened decades ago. Instead we have a system when an idealistic president like Obama can be thwarted by hard nosed enemies like McConnell. Of course the working class feels abandoned. Policies that make sense in the rest of the developed world cannot be enacted.
If better myths are what we need perhaps we should start by dropping the one about Reagan and the "better philosophy".
Reagan's administration was the most corrupt we have ever had. More of his staff were convicted of crimes than in any other administration and several others resigned under suspicion. The only other administration that is on track to beat this is the MAGA one that currently occupies the White House. One for which Mr. Brooks agitated.
It must be hard to see ones morals through rose-colored glasses.
To be a moderate is to be at war with idolatry." David Brooks
It is not the left and right, as Brooks suggest earlier in his column, who turn their politics into idolatry, but rather it is the right only, The left's political choices, be it FDR or Obama, delivered concrete changes to American society. Trump, on the other hand, who destroys healthcare, environment, tax structure, all to the detriment of most of his base, still remains popular with it selectorate. Classic illustration of idolatry, would you not agree, Mr. Brooks?
Mr. Brooks, it was your party that exacerbated the wealth gap in this country. "Trickle down!" "Welfare Queens!" The reality is that workers in this country are doing worse and worse, while your GOP politicians and THEIR friends do better and better. What breaks all the ties to family and institutions is having to work two or three jobs to pay rent, having to work on Sunday instead of going to work or spending time with your kids, and being in a constant state of anxiety about how to pay for the basic necessities of life. You and your GOP friends have passed laws that have forced many more Americans into this condition. And now you are blaming the victim. It is disgusting.
For those who believe in no deity, it is somewhat difficult to have much connection to those who are insisting that their Christian religion take precedent over rights the government is supposed to provide.
For those who work hard for a higher education and do it under difficult conditions, it is somewhat hard to feel any community with while watching the rich get into colleges only because their daddies have money and went to the college.
Life has, since two people stood on two feet instead of four, never been fair and equal. And the belief that community closeness will make it more so is to believe that unicorns are on sale at Walmart.
1
Chickens coming home to roost not going so well for you, eh, David? Your Republican party has lived off bad myths for decades: A Liberal Ivy League Elite controls the media and the levers of government, all to the harm of the "Real 'Muricans Of This Great Nation's Heartland;" Government is bad and wasteful; But there's a market solution to every problem. From Nixon; to Reagan; through the Bushes, and now to the GOP's crowning excess, they have all sung the same myths. And those myths are now the only policies the GOP has.
The fundamental reality is that the "totality of partisanship" that David Brooks references has its origin in the Religious Right of the Republican Party. The embrace of dogma, demonization, and the distortion of facts to fit their own ideological paradigm begins with he rejection of any empirical fact that invalidates the dogma. The intolerance endemic to religious fundamentalists was evidenced by their attempts to legislate their religious values into law, and a bigoted rejection of the "other". The cancerous political tumor that is Donald Trump metastasized in that environment of intolerance.
If it repeated daily, hundreds of times, that Trump is the source of his supporters problems, with an emotional message that undercuts their visceral connection to him and plays with their heads so that doubt creeps in, then, slowly, they will turn from him.
Even work up anger for him.
The people he conned into spending thousands on his phony Trump University all revered him at first I'm sure.
But they learned the hard lesson: Trump is a fraud as bad as the university. They sued him gladly… and madly.
People don't like it when they realize they are conned.
The Italian dictator, Mussolini, who brought ruin on nation, was hung by his feet in a public square after WW2 ended. His former supporters and his staunch opponents both reveled in defiling his corpse. People hate people who mess them up.
Find the messages that start to sow doubt in the relatively simple minds of Trump's people. Play on their heads.
Then, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Once again, hand-wringing and soul-searching about what's gone wrong. This is the wrong approach. What you wind up describing is the human condition, and that only changes gradually. The problem we are confronting is not the human condition (which will always be a work in progress). It is a race to the bottom. It is like the old Jerry Springer show has taken over the air waves. Just stop watching the stupid thing!
Ignore these distraction and go for the jugular. Let's end this nightmare. And the only way to do that is to vote for Democrats for everything. Of course, it would be best if there were good candidates. But regardless of their quality, we need a quick way to clean house. And then maybe a purged Republican Party can reconstitute itself and be a worthwhile second party. There's hope for us all if only everyone would get out and vote, and not for any Republican who has been going along with this disgusting sideshow.
1
I'm not sure I agree with Mr. Brook's premise, but it does present an interesting scenario. I am reminded of the Bill Moyer interviews with Joseph Campbell, who championed the understanding of myth and disparate religion as a basis for human understanding and our place in modern day civilization. Idols are a significant part of ancient and even recent civilizations, and they present a fingerprint into our own modern day behavior. If I remember correctly, Campbell promulgated the idea of a new, more 'relevant' religion, better suited to modern humanity.
The bottom line is we could all use a more enlightened, and well read populace, as an antidote to the daily insanity now experienced in our politics. Joseph Campbell would be a good place to begin.
I don't understand why Mr. Brooks won't finally admit that the only difference between Trump and Reagan - or the Republican Party of Trump and the Republican Party of Reagan - is not in substance but in its crudeness.
Reagan may have been a little less overt about it but cut through the rhetoric and its still an appeal to ignorance and hate based on lies. Trump is pretty much offering up the same appeal only he doesn't try (or is incapable) of sugar coating it with code words.
What we see in Trump's Republican Party is the unholyness and hypocrisy that has always been there. In a sense Trump has done a public service by showing us the true soul of the Republican Party and it is a very, very dark place indeed.
308
Right on!
Trump is Reagan without the acting, political and governing experience and talent. Trump lacks Reagan's gift for calling on welfare queens, strapping young bucks and states rights. Nancy and Ronnie made Hollywood conquer DC.
3
Reagan's infamous memorial visit to Bitburg, Germany - where he told former Nazi SS troops that they were also 'victims' - was same as Trump's announcements that there were good people on both sides of the Charlottesville demonstrations (i.e. - in typical GOP dog whistle mode - he meant that the neo-nazi's were also good people).
1
Republicans drove me away over the course of fifty years with incessantly vicious politics: the dog whistles, the personal destruction, the false flag issues. I used to split tickets, but about thirty years ago I saw that the pattern was unchanging and developed an allergy to the entire brand. How can you like a party so relentlessly negative? My reaction to them has become visceral. I don't view this as sad, I view it as necessary to uphold reason, hope and civility. For that reason, I avoid any person who spouts Republican memes and slogans or who buys into their themes. It's about survival as a real human being.
387
Paul, Avoiding Republicans is tough here in the Harrisburg area, even though Harrisburg went for Obama twice. For us there is the added sadness of questioning our faith, when 80% of White Evangelicals still approve of the man they voted into office. Hillary spoke the truth when she described the basket of deplorables.
1
Me, also. Used to be Republican until Bush-Chaney. Never again will I vote for anyone in that party.
2
Paul,
You echo my sentiments only more articulately. I have been volunteering on a local mayoral candidate all summer and fall, speaking to both Republicans and Democrats on the phone and at the door. Speaking to Republicans has generally been a demoralizing experience, with a few surprising and enlightened exceptions.
After the 2016 elections I cut ties with some distant conservative remaining family living in the south. I do not befriend anyone offline or online who is Republican because they generally are narrow, cruel, judgmental, even hateful, sanctimonious, reprimanding, blaming and humorless. They are also responsible for the on-going regression and destruction of this country.
1
David Brooks thinks we need better myths, but what we really need is the courage to face life without relying on myths. We need to respect the concept of objective reality and that requires the acceptance that the quest for truth involves hard work, a willingness to challenge one's long held opinions, and above all humility before the facts.
15
Social psychology about in-group dynamics is pretty well researched and documented. Time and again I return to Eric Hoffer's The True Believer to show a movement - good, bad or neither - can overwhelm orthodoxy with a lot less resources. Being a clear-eyed observer himself, Hoffer wrote his Magnum Opus with disinterested cogency.
Sadly, idolatry and myths are powerful opioids, especially when there are some truths at the peripherals. Why, even the paranoid have real enemies!
To convince the locals that coal mining may be a dead end job - even China is swearing off its energy hungry addiction - is well meaning but a tall order. The globalists really want the downtrodden a better life but immediate gratification is a craving many cannot resist. All it needs is a seminal moment like the financial crisis and a snake oil salesman like Trump or Bannon to sell the goods. Us-vs-them!
To be clear, there is nothing necessarily bad about team building until it gets to the extreme. Mao used to say China needs to sacrifice three generations to get China modernized. If he hadn't taken the movement to the extreme resulting in the Cultural Revolution, he might have considered a great man even by international standard. Alas, Mao's is more a norm than an exception. Extremism always ends with some sort of personality cult. Mao, Hitler or even James Jones. The moderates need not only to fight extremists but also to watch out for us-vs-them personality cult building in the extremist camps
1
My daughters had to read Eric Hoffer when they were in high school in the late eighties and early nineties. A friend at a local private school had to read Erich Fromm. Both authors explain how people fall behind leaders and into behavior that is sometimes contrary to their best interests. I think those books should be required reading in high schools and universities and, maybe especially, by adults trying to figure out what has happened to us.
2
Today? Obviously Brooks has never read Hofstadter's The Paranoid Tendency and other essays on a similar theme. All written overa 50 years ago. The only difference is that today the leadership of the Republican party (and that is what he is talking about here) have lost control of the paranoids and thus by inclination or of necessity exhibits ever more irrational and hypocritical behavior to satisfy the appetites of its voting base.
4
The other problems are highlighted by research that shows people will be believe anything demeaning, derogatory or slanderous by the opposite political viewpoint regardless of the veracity or facts. Many decades ago in school I was warned to be suspicious of anyone who made a statement that used the word all or everyone (and rightly so). These days it is common to see either the words or implication that all Democrats/all liberals or all Republicans/all conservatives believe (fill in the blank). For example, there are liberal gun owners that support the 2nd amendment and pro choice conservatives that support planned parenthood.
2
Here are defintions of politics offered by Merriam-Webster:
a :the art or science of government
b :the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy
c :the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government
In the time of Trump, our politics concentrates on definition "c" while ignoring "a" and "b." Our politics therefore does nothing for most people, who can't understand why the world they thought they could rely on seems to be falling apart.
"Winning and holding control over a government" is largely driven by the interests of wealthy people who don't need much from government but would like lower taxes and less regulation.
It is not idolatry to believe that government should address the real needs of real people. It is idolatry to worship increasing personal wealth at the expense of the rest of humanity.
9
To add some relevant quotes to your list:
Devil's Dictionary:
POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of
principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Devil's Wiktionary:
politics, n. A global game in which the players usually win and the spectators always lose.
Excellent article. The state of religion and community has been lost. The partisan political environment is out of control.
22
Agreed. Mr. Brooks has presented a remarkably objective view of not only
America’s fragmentation but it’s choice to allow literally everything including Russian collusion if that is what it takes to win an election.
Pope Francis spoke to 350 participants at an international conference in the Vatican on the Christian contribution to the future of Europe.
“Christians are called to promote political dialogue, especially where it is threatened and where conflict seems to prevail.”
“Favoring dialogue, in any form whatsoever, is a fundamental responsibility of politics,”
“Sadly, all too often we see how politics is becoming instead a forum for clashes between opposing forces. The voice of dialogue is replaced by shouted claims and demands. One often has the feeling that the primary goal is no longer the common good, and this perception is shared by more and more citizens.”
Mr. Brooks echoes the same sentiments.
23
In many ways great and small we are all flawed. Those flaws can drive us to the extremes of fanaticism or isolation. Politics I think is a mechanism that allows a level of participation that lessens the distance between the extremes into which we flawed humans all occasionally fall. We have a system in place that seems to strengthen the buffer against self destruction; that nudges us closer to each other rather than farther apart. We need to trust the system and let it work. As individuals we can support what we've seen as a success and join it or not to the degree that we can.
3
There are a lot of parallels between what Mr. Brooks describes and what ocurred in Venezuela with Chavez. Life has not gotten better there, actually it has become much, much worse in many, many ways. But the Chavistas continue to have a strong following because of the myths that he appealed to. And the opposition repeatedly underestimated his attraction, to the point that they made one mistake after another, never doing the self examination, self criticism necessary to come up with a decisive alternative to address the concerns deeply felt by the chavista followers.
16
What an excellent column... such fascinating ideas. I agree that people have made politics into zealotry and left other allegiances attenuated.
My two sense is that America needs younger, middle class (conservative) leaders to set a good example for the country. The older baby boomers have had their turn, they have made their millions (usually off real estate), scoffed at religion, abandoned common mores and lost interest in fighting for the middle class. It's time to give a new generation of leaders a chance. They have more on the line and can't afford to play games with politics. (When Hillary Clinton fought for free college, it never seem to matter to her... because let's face it she is too old and too rich to care.) This great nation of ours needs Congressional Term Limits Now!
9
That's a lot of needs there.
Here in Michigan, term limits have been a disaster of musical chairs and poor policy decisions. Political leaders run for one position, then another. Think quarterly earnings on Wall Street for an idea of how things become. With term limits, we have decades of nothing but tax cuts, yet our state income and education levels have dropped to 32nd from the top 10, while entire bridges (Rouge bridge) have massive gaping holes in them. We cannot fix our roads (that cost too much and you need revenue!) As to needing "conservative leaders", our state is so utterly gerrymandered, every single office is Republican, and what they are passing is....more tax cuts. Meanwhile, most grads leave as soon as college is complete. Think Kansas for further examples of this mindset.
"Today, partisanship for many people is not about which party has the better policies, as it was, say, in the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy." I don't know why the matter of income inequality, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unending Middle East Wars, out of control medical insurance costs, dying small towns, global warming, failing schools, poverty, racial conflict and other issues come to mind in making my political choices when Mr. Brooks asserts that I am controlled by a "cure for spiritual and social loneliness." I must have been deluding myself. Or is he talking to the Republican base?
43
It seems to me that you are exactly the type of true believer that Mr. Brooks is describing in his column.
When Democrats say that they speak “truth to power” all rational discussion ends and a shouting match begins.
Politics is not the idol and politics is not the problem. People have always been either diehard partisans or indifferent to politics. The indifferent are as large or larger than either partisan group. Many choose not to vote. Most vote to fulfill a civic duty rather to fulfill a partisan obligation.
The indifferent don't follow political issues. They tend to get their information on political issues from political ads. The indifferent are persuaded not by facts but by myths.
7
I always felt (enviously) that to be truly educated you should be able to "do" some Latin, and a little Greek, the better to appreciate what had gone before (golden and silver ages) that informed what was cherished now. That sort of thinking leads to a sense that individuals, as well as cultures, do not arise sui generis, but are formed by family, preceding generations, education and cultural inheritance.
Although we like to believe that people are created equal in some theological sense, and that does matter, some are better prepared for a successful life than others; all lives are of equal value largely in the abstract and the deeply personal...in ways that do not translate into happiness, opportunity, justice or fulfillment...but solutions are obscure. Ideally, in a liberal democracy, education is offered as a way to learn what cultural values offer individual fulfillment and self definition; a way to escape our individual inheritance.
That is difficult if we don't know what those values are... the ones that cause us to unite cross-politically in "thick" organizations that David laments the passing of.
It is an interesting time to be alive, to see the sense of what it means to be an individual unmoored from the context of family, history, and over arching institutions that encourage belonging.
Destruction of myth and cultural belief can happen relatively quickly; the "repair of the deeper communal bonds" will probably take generations. We live in a "copper" age.
9
Brooks' column reminds me of General John Kelly, Chief of Staff of Trump's White House, who said that lack of compromise led to America's Civil War.
Many attempts were made at compromise, but how does one compromise on slavery?
Trump said that there were good people on both sides of the issue of white supremacy defending monuments of Southern military generals fighting for keeping slavery.
Our politics are our beliefs about how our government should work.
America's idol, the Statue of Liberty, is a universal symbol of freedom and democracy.
21
The Statue of Liberty is not my idol.
Democracy is opposed to freedom. My ancestors were left alone in their liberty far more by their Bourbon sovereigns than they have ever been by their neighbors under the encroachments of democracy as it has displaced the limited republic that America one was.
It is the unfettered tyrannical demands of the majoritarian mob, the power to judge and punish and regulate everything leaving nothing private that makes a preoccupation with politics a necessary defense, as a man whose home is near a warzone is preoccupied with the sound of artillery.
The Statue of Liberty should be taken down if the border wall goes up. Or, at least the words inscribed there should be expunged, erased, and forgotten. This is no longer the America that has a universal symbol of freedom and democracy.
American Democracy is We the People voting in elections to choose our representatives to govern under a Constitution. It's the worst form of government except all others that have been tried.
1
When traditional identity marks are disappearing in the wake of modernity induced disruptive change, and the power centric western model of politics is unfolding fast with no concerns about the values and public good, everyone would like to be relevant through donning partisan identity mark. It was to avert this that Gandhi had visualised a different model of politics that was based on the moral-spiritual values, difficult to practice today though.
19
It is still possible. In fact it is coming, it is the only way out. As soon as we view each other as living breathing creatures emerging from the same single source of consciousness, we will recognize in each other the same awareness that flows through each of us. We each perceive ourselves as a nicely tailored package of blood guts bones and muscles, capable of feelings and perceptions. We think of each other as separate individuals and we are taught from childhood to identify each other as boy girl black white American British Nepali..Hindu Muslim Sikh Isai..slice and dice ourselves into as many possible identities. But once we realize we are really one thinking organism, viewing itself in countless countless unimaginable forms, we will start recognizing each other as our own self. Then we will be pained to see images of refugees, humans exploiting each other and we will vow never to inflict pain on another being, because we are the same "pain", the same "suffering". How can we not feel each other's pain?
1
Yes, this is what the cosmic unity principle is all about, which views life in all forms, animate/inanimate as an integrated whole.
The phenomenon not examined that is inherent in the operation of myth in social discourse is that myth, on all sides, is exploited and manipulated as a leveraging tool, a dividing tool, an antagonizing tool, by money and power interests, either directly or on a more diffused basis. Myth is mass advertising and rallying rhetoric and polemic.
From a larger perspective, David, what you've described in part here is a reversion to tribalism, where comfort, security and protection are sought by humans increasingly in distress. And we are an entire species in distress, experiencing great economic upheaval and instability with disruptive globalization, accelerating inequality, worldwide contamination and serious environmental damage, and the psychic battering of an unsustainable and accelerating pace of change. Not to mention the elephant in the room, the doom we all sense in our collective unconscious: climate change to a likely ruination of most if not all mammalian habitat, including our own, within a few centuries at most, with tremendous strife and peril in the meantime. It has already begun.
52
I have also come to the conclusion that politics cannot heal our deep political wounds. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this and was able to bridge from a moral position to the political world brilliantly. But the core of Dr. King was a deep personal faith in God and the goodness of all people. How many of us have that core belief today? How many of us are even trying to open our hearts to the possibility? The healing of the national wound happens when each of us tends to our own wounds, then helps a neighbor with theirs, who helps a neighbors with theirs, and so on. Dr. King, even with his own personal flaws, inspired people do exactly that.
16
Reading through the comments here, I get the strong feeling that intellectual ideas are but a semblance of the truth. To heal ourselves and our relationship to others, we need a deeper truth: the one that comes from revelation. That can only be prepared for by opening the heart, as you suggest, to whatever we need to hear and acknowledge. Our healing as a society and a nation must begin individually with humble, open souls, not projecting error onto others, which is, of course, there, as it is everywhere.
In an article about Mike Duncan's new book on the end of the Roman Republic, he argues that Trump is a classic demagouge - harnessing the frustration and anger of his supporters to get into power.
Earlier, John Kasich had remarked somewhere that he was surprised, as he campaigned across the country last year, about the amount of loneliness he encountered.
My sense is that both frustration/fear and loneliness contribute to Trump's core support - fanned by right-wing media. It remains to be seen whether it is unwavering.
19
Several years ago, I observed that conservatives spent more time on politics and achieved election success well beyond what would be expected, compared to the more numerous liberals and moderates.
I ascribed the conservative phenomena to a bunch of lonely, socially awkward people who found comfort and recreation in political activities. They enjoyed the meetings, the hours of clerical work in local campaign offices and, of course, the lively rallies.
In the Trump era, I came to realize that among conservative Republicans, the core group of busy party volunteers is comprised of people driven by something more than just recreation and social interaction.
David Brooks and the writers he cites are correct. The “something more” which I sensed is idolatry.
For the participants, the victories will become fewer and less sweet until the all-consuming idol consumes the worshipers.
22
This happens on the Left too. Constant political activism.
Today's system demands idolatry because it offers nothing else. This essay puts the cart before the horse. The system must be made functional before it can return to "normal."
6
I agree, but the "system" is "us."
Republican politics seems more a religion than an idol. Its prophets have set up their idols, chief among them the free market system, which must be kept pure and untainted by government. Donald Trump, being rich, is a suitable priest.
21
Yet the free market system would embrace, not cancel, international trade treaties. An unfettered free market has no concern whatever with the welfare of wage earners or people other than those controlling, or engaging in the profit/loss market at the level where the income varies with the success or failure of a particular market offer. The passionate embrace of an ideology by the very people it discounts most is one of the wonders of politics as idolatry. That said, it is wrong to point to Republicans without acknowledging the proposition (as Brooks does) that both sides engage in idolatrous thinking.
Idolatry is a religion with a lie as its god.
This is different than atheism, which argues that what religious people worship is simply not there.
I have the mental illnesses depression and schizophrenia, but I cannot tell most people that without risking my standing in their eyes. To some it's so foreign it's silly, to others it terrifies them and in the news mental illness or brain disease is synonomous with violence and mass shootings. Whatever the reaction, it's intense and I have never had anyone, ignorant of it, respond with innocent curiosity. So of course I never tell anyone. My siblings will not reveal it to their children so a lot of my behavior is caste as odd to them without any real discussion of it's cause. I would like to be seen as intelligent, gifted, wise for my experiences and off track in comparison to my peers because of an unavoidable brain disease that I have. Instead I am weird or a vagabond or a floater, and to some strangers, a danger to society. And in Nazi Germany I was the first minority to be gassed.
What is paradise for me then? Instead of being incomprehensible, I want to be trivial. I wnt my brain disease to be understood enough for it to be mentionable and inoffensive. I think that is what Brooks is getting at here with politics. Our political views should be trivial and mentionable. In our relationships, in our conversations with each other, at work or at Thanksgiving dinner to belong to a party or to be apolitical shouldn't lead to outrage, it should be an opportunity for discussion and it isn't and shouldn't be the whole of a persons life and one's defining characteristic
80
Innocent curiosity. How nice if we had that for so many things, including all illness, mental and physical, and if we were innocently curious towards the dying. I sat next to a stranger in a hospital waiting room once who bluntly told me that he had weeks to live, and for some reason I asked him what it was like. Exciting, he said, like when you feel the roller coaster is climbing to the top, and you are about to get a thrill. You are right, I think, about the importance of making the things that seem so momentus, become commonplace. In the world of the miraculous, everything is ordinary.
You have standing in my eyes, friend. You are wise and brave to point out the parallels between your own life and the current political environment. Thank you.
I'm tired of hearing Brooks rationalize Trump based on social disorientation or even hardships. Trump has not promised "working" people anything of substance, and he continually demonstrates through his actions that he doesn't have their interests at heart. The myths that Trump tells are all about white identity, male prerogative, racism and xenophobia. They are myths of victimization - somebody else who isn't like you is at fault. And even Trump himself plays the victim all the time, despite being wealthy, a TV celebrity, and elected President; whether a victim of the media, Hilary Clinton, Barrack Obama, or anyone else who criticizes him, including innocent Gold Star parents.
153
"The myths that Trump tells are all about white identity, male prerogative, racism and xenophobia".
I'm afraid that you are correct. We can talk about political issues until we are out of breath, but in the end it all comes back to race and gender identity. The know-nothings of the 19th century are operating under another name today.
It is frustrating, and it will not end any time soon. the only remedy is to gather more votes then they can. Many of the folks that are hurt the most stay home on election day----they must be convinced to go to the polls on a regular basis.
Voters minds will not be changed---red state voters will never vote blue-----the only way to stop them nationally is to out vote them.
I'm sorry sir, this is about party of course. But only in so far as too many republicans will surrender their country for their agenda. They do not do this for the symbol of the elephant, or their "Grande Old Party" moniker, but to please wealthy donors and a criminal in office. That is, Their agenda, too, surrenders the Republic and the Union. until this agenda is repudiated and Trump is impeached for conduct compromising his office, Democrats and others on the left must be partisan for the sake of honor and of country.
12
I think one issue in today’s politics is the creation of scapegoats by both parties. For the left, the scapegoat is the buffoonish, ignorant, amoral Trump. For the right, it’s “the swamp,” as personified by Hillary Clinton, among others. For the right, it’s also the so-called drive-by, fake news mainstream media. As the writer Rene Gerard noted years ago, the creation of scapegoats by a given group is deep in our wiring. It helps provide a (false) sense of security and cohesion by uniting us against the perceived shortcomings of the other. This is what we’re living through in this low point in our public life.
9
The left has not manufactured Trump as a scapegoat: Trump is an actual menace because of policy. For instance, he wants to destroy the environment, among other sick goals.
1
Trump is a scapegoat? He actually deserves even more blame than he gets.
1
What a movie the Trump phenomenon will make after Muller has done his job. It will make Watergate look like the Tom and Jerry cartoon before the main feature.
In a way, you have to feel sorry for Donald. A shonky real estate con man out of his depth in the White House. Duped by Putin, a subtle KGB professional. And now up against an investigator who is as good as they get.
Really, it ain't a fair fight.
8
Except that Trump has almost the entire GOP, the House, the Senate, and Fox News backing him up and fighting against this all the way. They may not have the logic and sharp thinking, but they have a lot of power.
1
really? ever heard of Republicans?
"Today, partisanship for many people is not about which party has the better policies, as it was, say, in the days of Eisenhower and Kennedy. It’s not even about which party has the better philosophy, as it was in the Reagan era."
Please David, I am with you in so many ways about the state of society and politics, but since you are not the same person you were thirty years ago, why do you need to inflame your readers with the ". . .which party has the better philosophy, as it was in the Reagan era" question? Which philosophy was that? Many of us don't get what you are talking about. Was it Trickle down? Invisible hand? Domino? Many are partisan today because they have learned from the past. Many are partisan because they haven't.
And thanks for worrying about us, but not everyone suffers from spiritual or social loneliness. I want to support your wrenching conversion away from the political party that disgusts us both right now, but you are insulting so many people—who have intrinsically voted for equality of legal rights for minority groups, for environmental protections, for a tax system that asks winners to pay a winner's share for the opportunity to partake in an economic system designed (and paid for) to benefit all—by implying that political belief is thoughtless and tribal. Many of us have thought carefully, for years, about our choice, and lacking religion or parental example to guide us, know exactly who to vote for, even when the choices are not perfect.
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Thanks, Woody. Eloquent take on something many of us feel.
Excellent!
A con man tells you everything you want to hear, and nothing that you need to know! Sound like someone we know?
There is a psychological process known as splitting, or black and white thinking. It can be symptomatic of a severe personality disorder, See link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
MY son had done a differential diagnosis on a patient a few months back. That individual was diagnosed with a thought disorder, because their view of life was centered around this splitting.
He changed the diagnosis to a mood disorder and realized that their splitting was a result of acculturation. He discovered that this lost, suffering soul had become a member of a growing and dangerous political organization.
This is a serious societal problem. Monsters often start with the weak and vulnerable. As they build, they appear to be more and more legitimate, gathering in folks that are not so disturbed, but perhaps disenfranchised in some way.
10
Evangelical Christians would seem to have no shortage of thriving religious, communal and familial attachments. How would you account for the fact that almost 80% of them voted for Trump?
81
Trump's disdain for truth gives his followers legitimacy to overlook their own failings. For the Evangelical failing to live up to Christian charity a Trump President rationalizes, "The love of money is the root of all evil."
I think the idea is that they have a professed preference for God and an actual preference for political idols.
" How would you account for the fact that almost 80% of them voted for Trump?"
Sick hatred, forgiven every Sunday by a fraudulent preacher.
Mr. Brooks seems to be suggesting that Americans should back away from politics and focus on matters he says are more meaningful, such as family and friends. This is strange advice coming from a political pundit who earns his living opining about politics. It is also BAD advice. We must be more engaged now than ever. If people were more engaged, they would be less easily fooled by three-word chants, such as “Build the wall” or “Lock her up.”
We are where we are because a substantial portion of the American electorate is woefully ignorant of the facts they would need to know to vote their economic interests. Today’s news even tells us that 8% or 16 million Americans can’t even read.
We retreat into more comfortable realms such as sports, religion, family, etc. at our peril. PAY ATTENTION!! That should be our mantra.
21
They promise and demand more and more and deliver less and less til they demand everything and give nothing. Estimated timeline on that? Here in the unparalleled USA it feels like it could last forever---can't say I'm unhappy. Feel just a little guilty, maybe, making money while all this is going on, but my God, how it rolls in. Maybe there's a reciprocal process going on: as the Trump time in office decreases, the more the people make! Plenty of idols to choose from.
2
Brooks hits the nail on the head when he asserts that the Trump faithful have fallen prey to idolatry. How we got to this place is a combination of societal upheaval, as Brooks argues, and the incredibly successful campaign by the GOP to demonize our democratic ideals and government over the past 50+ years. The GOP has successfully convinced a majority of Americans that the federal government is evil. The next logical step in this progression, as we are seeing now, is that democracy itself is perceived as evil by the oligarchy that controls our country. How many Republicans believe that each persons vote should count equally? When Brooks says that idols always ask for more... "until eventually they demand everything and give nothing" isn't the logical conclusion a dictatorship? Unfortunately we know that people are not going to change because they decide to embrace better myths as Brooks suggests. Reason won't be their savior; instead it will take a crises of biblical proportions for them to shed their idolatry. A more hopeful and realistic future is not to change the idolators but to seize control from them and their Trump idol, and we can take a big step in 2018 by throwing out their GOP enablers in Congress. With the upcoming midterm elections and the Wisconsin gerrymandering case to be decided by the Supreme Court, 2018 will be seen in history as the tipping point for regaining or losing our democracy.
14
This president has not lived up to his promises but that's beside the point to his supporters. His scorn for political tradition and civil behavior reassure his insecure millions who need to know how much Washington and the elites have reamed them for years. It's as though his base enjoys being the aggrieved victims who now have their savior in power and revel in the knowledge that the defeated Democrats and the hated Secretary are now on the outside looking in. Thumbing their noses at their erstwhile tormentors is emotionally more rewarding to the base than a few unkept promises.
8
Why can't these Trump supporters see that he is reaming them ten times worse than anyone has before?
2
David, we don’t need myths. We need practical solutions to America’s big problems: addiction, crumbling infrastructure, poor health care, lack of housing, degrading environment, etc, all problems too big and too far reaching for the me-me-me only me corporate mindset controlling Congress and unable to see that these things can be fixed only by a well-funded well-managed bigger government responsible to the people, not to corporate welfare.
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Mr. Brooks, something is wrong with this Administration. If I had voted Republican and Trump had been elected with this Cabinet of his, I would be just as worried about this State of Affairs.
You mentioned watching 'Boyhood' in the Trump era, while I saw 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape' two years ago and found it was a powerful portrayal of America in contemporary times.
The intrigue, the scandals, the high-heels, the fanatics shouting at each other, but for those of us who are American, all this is corrupting. This Political era is an aberration.
When a manual laborer tells me that he was brought up to hate a minority group, or the chairman of a large corporation employs Whites Only, I am going to feel that both are morally wrong, but have more understanding for the former.
The Trump Phenomena has been a bad influence on some of us where we are starting to emulate his behavior in tone, in sloppiness and greed. Trump understands 'how to give voice to the angst and anger to many middle-and working class Americans who believe their Government betrayed them and their nation is leaving them behind' - (Michael Godwin of the New York Post)
We need to Restore and Rebuild our Country, and joining you in feeling that in order to carry this out successfully, we will have a greater need of role models than ever before to emulate and go forward in harmony.
1
Brooks may be right about political belonging having a new emotional importance for people. But his call to move to moderate ideas misses the driving forces that have given politics that role in the first place.
Polarization allowed a significant number of people to become very wealthy. Whether it is the Murodocks and Aisles who created lucrative media kingdoms, or the lobbyists and operatives who learned they could extract fat salaries from selling power to billionaire donors and corporations (including, alas, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton), all the incentives were on the side of stoking visceral, partisan fear and loathing.
Profit streams produced the political tribalism and not the other way around. Wishful words about moderation will be futile until there is no longer this luxury market in buying and selling power.
2
"including, alas, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton), all the incentives were on the side of stoking visceral, partisan fear and loathing.'
Rubbish. Neither did what you claim, which destroys your credibility.
Politics is the secular battlefield for moral truths. The game is secular because the endgame is concrete legislation that may or may not make lives better. It is rooted in the here and now. It is the fight for better schools, fair pay, sound infrastructure, smart military defense, and social justice. It is not idolatry to fight for and stand up for legislation that one deems more just, more true, more fair. And it is not something one tastes or buys or becomes addicted to. It is the agreed upon frameworks we erect to stage the conversation about moral truths while it facilitates or hinders the legislation passed which upholds those truths. As actors on this stage one must get angry, or draw a line, when a profound moral truths are sullied-- like excluding transgenders from our military, or manufacturing a travel ban on Muslims, or scheming for hyper-capitalistic healthcare, or propping up education systems that overtly try to create student debt, or using jingoistic tactics secure obscene funding for our military. Maybe I am misunderstanding the essay with its emphasis on myths, because I agree we need myths that aim for social equality. Maybe politics is when myths become tangible, when myths become actual bridges and schools, when myths become real treaties formed, actual healthcare transformed, and inequality smothered.
9
"The heroes of this myth were educated, morally enlightened global citizens who went to competitive colleges, got invited to things like the Clinton Global Initiative, and who have the brainpower to run society and who might just be a little better than other people, by virtue of their achievements."
But Trump never really cast himself as being apart from this elitist type. Sure, he talks about forgotten people. Yet he still brags about having attended an Ivy League college, supposedly being intellectual, and having a self-described very good brain. Trump has always been a shameless name-dropper who pointedly tried reaching powerful people. And he claimed that his business success made him an obvious fit for our highest office.
So, no, Trump is not 'one of the people' and he has not given the disenfranchised a voice by entering politics. Trump embodies every sense of pretense and smugness which his supporters claim to loathe.
7
The only people that are more confused than Trump about the true state of things are the 99% of the people that voted for him.
The religious, ethnic, communal, and familial attachments Brooks extols have fueled racism, bigotry, snobbery, and patriarchy. Political partisanship is destructive when the political ideals it represents are destructive, but that is - thankfully - not always the case.
7
Mr. Brooks seems to be suggesting that Americans should back away from politics and focus on matters he says our more meaningful, such as family and friends. This is strange advice coming from a political pundit who earns his living opining about politics. It is also BAD advice. We must be more engaged now than ever. If people were more engaged, they would be less easily fooled by three-word chants, such as “Build the wall” or “Lock her up.”
We are where we are because a substantial portion of the American
electorate is woefully ignorant of the facts they would need to know to vote their economic interests. Today’s news even tells us that 8% or 16 million Americans can’t even read.
We retreat into more comfortable realms such as sports, religion, family, etc. at our peril. PAY ATTENTION!! That should be our mantra.
3
You can not have a healthy democracy without an educated electorate. We are in trouble when 8% of our citizens can not read.
1
With all due respect to the Bard, Ronald Reagan is the God of Republican idolatry. All he wanted was your vote. Then he destroyed unions. He abolished the fairness doctrine. And he exploded the national debt. Worst of all, he sold two of the greatest lies ever to Americans. He tricked the middle class into voting for trickle down Reaganomics. It's the only economic prescription that Republicans have had since Reagan, and it has been absolutely ruinous for the American middle class. Reagan also poisoned Americans' minds against the government. He got Americans to stop believing in the greater good. He told Americans they couldn't trust their government, and that the free market would be their salvation. This has been an excuse Republicans have used to ever since to justify or excuse their sabotage of government. Reagan wasn't morning in America. He was the beginning of its oligarchic decline. As long as Republicans idolize Reagan, they will never admit how much he contributed to America's decline.
30
Trickle down voodoo economics and if 'taxes are cut our revenue will increase'. Two false facts that have lasted over three decades. I guess we, as a nation, will never learn.
1
Agree wholeheartedly with your assessment. Reagan was the very shrewd and skillful messenger of the dog whistles which divided rather than raised and united our country. Has anyone ever heard such a racist characterization from a president as “The welfare queen “? Reagan was more skilled than Trump in his oratory but the message was the same- turn ordinary Americans against each other and their government, meanwhile giving the spoils to the rich.
2
Reagan was Trump with a smile as he stabbed you in the back. No more, no less. My favorite part was pretending, grade "b" actor style that he just couldn't remember anything about Iran-Contra.
When Mr. Brooks makes the statement that folks make politics their idol "when their other attachments wither away — religious, ethnic, communal and familial" I get confused. What about the evangelicals' embrace of Trump? Have their religious and ethnic ties withered away? Could've fooled me.
Maybe Trump supporters think their influence and dominance over our political life is withering. And you can the "visceral, even subconscious attachment" to Trumpamania in that context. But to make the blanket statement that these attachments have begun to totally disappear reduces Mr. Brooks' argument to incoherence.
2
Indeed, what has become of the fabric of our society? Yes, politics, in all their shallow and ego driven baseness. For far too many people, there are two aspect: either government has become just a backdrop to their lives, like wallpaper, or it has become their way of identifying themselves, given the lack of community, religion, etc. Both of these ways are deadly, and they collude to put us in peril.
1
No- governmental policies can be agents for change. Witness the New Deal or the VA benefits after WW2 that gave huge opportunities to citizens and created the greatest middle class that the world has ever seen. College and housing was all within reach of the average person. The moral decline in the country is in the neglect of the wellbeing of the citizens of this country and the purposeful withholding of a path to the Americans dream.
5
I am convinced that our myths have become every sides' weapon. Both liberals and conservatives and every other side use their stories to make myths that promote a specific agenda and only that specific agenda. So every myth is not wrong but they also are not completely correct either.
What we need right now are complete factual stories that Americans can argue about. A factory in Indiana that is closing. Many of its workers will be 50 years old and have 20 years tenure. What should done for health insurance for these people. Democrats will use the opportunity to argue for Medicare for all. Republicans will argue for tax cuts. Neither side accomplishes anything for the workers. Both sides are afraid that by working specifically at the problem right in front of them that the great mythical problems we have will never get solved. It is ironic that in an age where we have the media to to discuss thousands of specific stories, we ignore them in favor of ideological stories that fit our idolatry. We just cannot seem to find truth anymore.
1
The false equivalence of Mr. Brooks' article is problematic. Democrats don't attack the middle class and workers; Republicans have a long history of doing so while deflecting attention to "welfare queens" or Mexicans, football players or trans people, and thanks to the slow death of public education in the US, republicans are ever more successful.
Medicare for all would totally solve the health insurance problem of which you write. Why do you think it would not?
2
For a nation to be sufficiently meritocratic requires that there be sufficient equal opportunity for all. I'm not sure how the US can have meritocratic elites when social support for the most struggling of Americans is insufficient and social mobility in the US is so low. Of course if you are inclined to think a nation's highest achievers and their offspring must be virtuous and deserve their station you won't care about this.
And myths are fake, exploitative and have a tendency to be disbelieved. The US instead requires knowledge of the honest and appalling truth of its nature in comparison with other Western democracies. "American exceptionalism" has been exposed (and needs to be further exposed) as hiding American indecency and mediocrity for decades.
6
Look at the loon holding up her "Trump Is Our Savior" sign.
I have no doubt the lady was religiously raised cautioning her against idolizing false prophets, advice she happily ignored while idolizing the King of False Profits, a talented myth-making genius and snake oil sommelier that his worshippers would happily trade their healthcare, the national treasury and their national sovereignty for a few lumps of coal and a few pats on their white shoulders from their Trumpian Jesus.
Donald Trump is a world-class fraud for the Grand Old Phraud party via the Birther Lie fraud.
Maybe I don't appreciate fraud as much as the next white idiot, but I do have some appreciation for the truth, and the fact that a minority of fake Christians conspired with the Electoral College to anoint the worse false prophet in American history is yet another sign that religious-Republican-Russian church has become a deranged cult.
“It seems to me that those who claim to be 'true' and 'bible believing' Christians and yet spend all their time and energy spreading unhappiness and hatred for others - and are themselves consumed by it - are by the very definition of the term - false prophets.”
― Christina Engela
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.”
― H.L. Mencken
Donald Trump and Trump Nation are two false prophets in a hateful pod.
False Prophets R Us: Trump and the Trumpettes 2017
300
False profits. A double entendre indeed. Keep it coming, Socrates!
3
Thank you Mr. Brooks for clarifying what has been happening to us. I have had a difficult time sorting out how we got to this point where politics has taken on the characteristics of a blood sport. Long term friends have now turned against each other due to their differences in political philosophy. The right and left and their minions and pundits and aligned press are locked in a battle unfit for governance since it offers no quarter or mercy. The new politics of idols is rooted in extremism and it demands capitulation rather than compromise. When our news narratives favor the left or the right, they are no longer news. It's propaganda for idol worship and the people accept it as truth. Is no one left to defend the politics of moderation, of solutions, and of advancement?
2
I reject the use of religious thinking about idolatry to describe this, but I think he is on to something about the narrative that attracts people in politics today.
There is a morality tale, but on both sides. Yes, Trump's morality tale is that "those meritocrats are actually clueless idiots and full of drivel, and how virtue, wisdom and toughness is found in the regular people whom those folks look down upon."
The morality tale on the other side is virtue signaling, with a strong component of Others being stupid and worthless, with a claim to being "right" on the facts of every issue and to having only good motives, against those "wrong" on the facts of every issue and motivated only by bigotry, hate, and racism.
Those two ideas do describe much of the conversation, not least here in the NYT comments.
4
Agreed on the two tales Mark, but it is only rightly so. That each then does have an equivalence as 'another point of view is an observation without merit at best and otherwise liable to obfuscate things. Justice lies with reason. Maybe I misunderstand, because I'm too right. Apologies if needed then.
Funny how so many of us "virtue signalers" would actually like all of the "others" we despise (according to you) to have good affordable healthcare, good public schools, equal protection before the law, etc.
This column is nonsensical in its false equivalence. Republicans have to somehow come to terms with the truth of the very wrong thing that they, not the Democrats, have done in permitting this very very bad person to become president.
2
What is wrong with having a factual world as a benchmark? If someone is lying with no conscience, and unable to correct himself, do you meet halfway in the debate? Yes, you have to acknowledge emotions and feelings involved in the debate, but at the end, you do not build economic system or heath care system on emotions, do you?
Historically, whenever people driven by emotions and beliefs have a decisive voice in governing the country goes astray or collapses.
It's impossible to write this without seeming partisan, but it's an objective fact: the idolatry and partisanship that David laments is not symmetrical, it has been painstakingly cultivated on the right by Republicans. It probably began in the Newt Gingrich era, although as speaker even he managed to make deals with President Clinton. It got under way in earnest with Barack Obama's candidacy; even before his election the character assassination of this decent man began. And on the very evening of his inauguration, GOP leaders met at the Caucus Room restaurant and plotted a scorched earth policy, vowing to oppose everything he proposed, even if they had agreed with it five minutes previously. That poison paved the way for the tea party and ultimately for trump.
The Left has not orchestrated anything comparable. I don't know what it will take to heal the breach, and it doesn't help that the Republicans purged the party of nearly all moderate legislators; moderate rank and file keep their heads down and, so far, stick with the party; and moderate columnists like Brooks seem helpless to counter the blowhards of Fox, talk radio, Breitbart et al. Repairing "the deeper communal bonds that politics rest on, and which political conflict cannot heal" has been made difficult because today's Republican Party makes a fetish of rejecting the idea of community. They have borrowed from Thatcher that "there's no such thing as society".
166
I'd put it further back than that- Lee Atwater, or maybe even Joe McCarthy, who did terrible harm.
4
The irony of Thatcher’s comment is that a group of people who believe there is no such thing as society are a society themselves!
1
IndeedQ There may be bubbles and “ideological silos” on both sides, but it's highly asymmetrical, as recent Pew polls have shown. In 2010, almost half of Republicans but only one-third of Democrats polled said they would be “somewhat or very unhappy” if their children married someone of the opposite party. In 2014, Pew found that half of the “consistently conservative” said it was important to live in a place where most people shared their political views, but just over one-third (35%) of the "consistently liberal." Of these conservatives, 63% said most of their close friends shared their political views, but just under half of the liberals. Perhaps it is related to who controls Congress, but 63% of the “consistently conservative” like elected officials who stick to their positions, whereas 82% of the consistently liberal preferred representatives who make compromises. So no more false equivalency!
David Brooks has an excellent choice of words:
"What you see is good people desperately trying to connect in an America where bonds are attenuated — without stable families, tight communities, stable careers, ethnic roots or an enveloping moral culture. There’s just a whirl of changing stepfathers, changing homes, changing phone distractions, changing pop-culture references, financial stress and chronic drinking, which make it harder to sink down roots into something,..."
Yes, that describes the America I know, or rather one of the 100 America's
And it makes one of the deficiencies of democracy. We understand only our own in-group, our coworkers, our neighbors. A few miles down the freeway is a totally different world.
Change happens too fast. Perhaps not in Bison, Kansas. That town at the edge of which my grandfather had his farm has remained the same size of the past 100 years. I wonder how much it has changed since my family reunion 65 years ago.
What conservatives want is a return to that earlier era, the simpler life in which everybody knew everyone else in town. In which what mattered was the weather and the harvest, not the national government which was a distant abstraction.
Americans want to focus on baseball and church picnics, not learn about the politics of foreign countries.
And American democracy, filled with uneducated masses, makes mistakes.
An immoral war in Vietnam, an invasion in Iraq built on false premises, we cannot handle complexity.
11
I agree with you.
My husband's family (grandfather) came from Sweden to a small town in the Central Valley of California with nothing but a strong religious base, a hard working ethic, and excessively oppressive and strict family rules. Everyone worked hard to sell eggs, raise turkeys and harvest fruit. His father suffered under the yoke of hard work and no fun. He became an electrician, his wife a nurse and they raised three children: two were professionals-- an engineer and a lawyer, and they could hardly wait to get out of that scene!
These people who voted for Trump did not carry the majority. They actually do not believe in democracy--they believe that their minority should rule! And their numbers are worse now. Most people support some rational thinking about issues of gun control,women's rights,the environment,health care,universal education. Where is the strong middle, and I do not mean middle America? The should try and understand why California is successful! I am tired of trying to understand them. The outliers, those who think America owes them a great life have forgotten that they need to take some responsibility for it. Picnics all of your life without a thoughtful look forward brings trouble. There is no going back whether change is speeding up or not. Actually the Republicans do expect people to take responsibility for their lives, so those who voted for Don are in real trouble if they look there for help! I understand them, I do not excuse them.
6
I propose a study be completed by the Congressional Budget Office and published broadly showing: What amount does each of the 50 states (a) pay to Washington in federal taxes and (b) receive from Washington in federal funding? The Study should show the latest year and each of the last 20 years with totals. Based on that factual study let the public discussion begin: Which are the dependent states (receive more than they contribute) and which are contributing states (pay more than they receive) and by how much and for how long? And why should that pattern continue? I suggest in advance that the pattern should continue no longer and, perhaps, there should be a payback over several years of the excessive funds the dependent states have received. Will the Republicans support this program? If not, why not?
7
One myth is that things are worse now and the past was full of happy people who stayed in family units and went to church. Nope. If you study public history at all (That's the history of common people) and not just the history of wars fought, you'll find that there was always family instability, always alcohol addiction, always fear of a different moral culture. The time of the greatest desertion of families by fathers was during the Great Depression. Puritans, those moral, church-going folks, had to pass laws to punish husbands if their wives committed suicide because there was an epidemic of miserable women committing suicide because of their miserable religion and marriages. In the US Puritan women were running away to join the Native Americans because that was preferable to being Puritan wives. And do you think Charles Dickens wrote so much about homelessness, child labor, and crime because the Victorian age was perfect?
We baby boomers had parents who stayed together but I hardly know any boomers who think their parents were happy together.
One myth we need to break is that the past was better, happier, more prosperous. No it wasn't, not for many people. Right now is one of the best, least violent, most prosperous times ever. Apparently, it's easier for some to complain than to study history.
214
I absolutely agree with you!
What I did not say in my comment above, was that the electrician, my husband's father, was also an alcoholic. It came from deep unhappiness and an unhappy marriage that just would not end. But it provided for the children at a basic level so the kids could escape. So, Trump supporters, what is the government supposed to do about that?
1
President Adams also addressed this in a pamphlet re: the number of men who abandoned their families to go adventuring out West, leaving wives and children behind to keep farms together the best they could. I'm intrigued by the suicide rates amongst Puritan wives- could you direct me to a citation? I once did research at Trinity Church's archives in Manhattan and although I did notice an occasional suicide, deaths from childbed fever predominated.
1
A lot of this is true, but it neglects to recognize that those pockets of places where there is little violence and general prosperity are countered by places where violence and misery abounds. It's not just ghetoized inner cities; now it includes rural small towns and cities where hope and opportunity has disappeared.
I have not seen "Boyhood," but I'm guessing that it's the story of those devastated communities. If politics can't help those lost souls, I don't know what will happen to them. It's clear they lack the agency to fix themselves.
"If politics is going to get better we need better myths...." Hmmm, I don't think we necessarily need "better myths." Rather we need fewer myths. In an age of cyber attacks, climate change, mass epidemics, overpopulation and environmental degradation, and religious extremism of all sorts, I'd be reassured by more reliance on rational debate and deliberation, and on empirical evidence and science.
19
I don't know if it's that simple I have deeply partisan relatives who have strong familial bonds and really none of the ills mentioned here. Their friends and communities are deeply partisan, as well. I don't know about their ills, but I do know that they share the same media sources and that they repeat what they hear there.
11
@dukesphere: So true. Brooks suggests Trumps followers are all good people who are struggling to deal with challenges. In fact there are huge numbers of comfortable, financially stable Americans who like what Trump gives them; permission to blame and hate. And as other commenters have noted, this sickening lurch to extremism is something leading Republicans and their media compatriots have been cultivating for years right under out noses.
6
I hope you'll take a moment to consider what it says about your world view that you begin the list of things damaging the social fabric of America with "a whirl of *changing* stepfathers."
1
@Danny P: What are you questioning here?
It’s been said, intelligently I think, that the only proper game for adults is politics. And to play at this game effectively, you need a viewpoint. So, I’m not so sure that it’s a bad thing when politics becomes your idol. Surely, politics make a better idol than 5000-calorie diner delights, or Stephen Paddock’s casino poker slots (remember him in these days of Manafort and Papadopoulis?)
But another thought. The fence posts that form the boundaries of acceptable social interaction in David’s world, that protect community and spirituality, even decency, are rather close-spaced. Yet it’s precisely within that bounded enclosure that we find the most intense expressions of partisan identity, at least on the right that is David’s primary target of analysis this fine Tuesday. We all have fence posts that allow us to maintain a purchase on reality, on sanity, on meaning; but some enclose far more expansive areas than others. It seems to me that the more expansive the area within the fence posts of acceptable interaction and being, the more likely that the ambler can balance different viewpoints objectively. Just an errant thought.
I suppose that David’s message is cautionary: the Hebrews were found by Charlton Heston on his descent from Mt. Sinai to be worshiping graven idols, and let’s not forget what happened to Edward G. Robinson.
If you’re going to set fence posts so closely, don’t complain about the in-bred contagions that pass so easily from Bubba to Clem.
5
Food for thought. Just a corrective, so 'politics' won't be misconstrued as an embarrassment. You described "politicking" perhaps, not politics ( the latter being the art of the possible, a noble undertaking meant to serve our needs...by way of finding the best time and circumstances and funds, by dedicated 'public servants' to do the right thing).
3
"The excessive dependence on politics has to be displaced by the expulsive power of more important dependencies, whether family, friendship, neighborhood, community, faith or basic life creed."
I agree 100%. But we have created an economic system that weakens dependency on families, friendship, neighborhood and community. We cannot change our dependencies for the better without changing our economy. We need local economies, not global. We need small independent businesses, not corporations invading our local communities. We need to educate children to be good neighbors and love where they are from, rather than educating children to leave their home towns to become "world leaders". We must learn to value things that have no economic value, and thus are not going to move the Dow ever higher. In short, we must make our economy serve people, not make our people serve the economy. If we do these things we can create an environment in which human virtue can take root. As Wendell Berry says, this is an "age of divorce", things that should be together have been torn apart. It is our job to piece it back together again, slowly, one thing at a time.
19
"If politics is going to get better we need better myths, unifying ones that are built on social equality."
We do not need better myths. Rather one should be able to recognize what is true.
49
I think he’s using “myth” in the Joseph Campbell sense. Which means trouble coz myths are foundational.
Go to First Baptist Church Dallas' website and see Sean Hannity at First Baptist to understand how deeply political idolatry as become ingrained in churches. There is no longer a distinction between religious affiliation and political affiliation in many churches.
99
You are so right. Strnge as it may seem to many Republicans today, the religious Democrats I know practice their religion much as Jesus told us to do. I feel strongly that Republicans have staked out religion and patriotism as their bailiwick so that everyone believes that myth. Only their brand of religion and patriotism qualify as good. It’s a strange world we live in today. Black is white, up is down, the sky is green and the grass is blue.
1
Once again we have a shining example of false equivalence. We are expected to believe that both sides are using politics to substitute for the failings of religious and community institutions. This is simply not the case.
Being a republican has come to mean being a member of a homogeneous white, rural, Christian patriarchal-driven tribe.
It is a party of exclusion where only people who pledge allegiance to this hierarchical structure can be considered “real” Americans and righteous, hardworking human beings with God-ordained rights. Those who are outside this paradigm are deemed to be anti-Christian, anti-white, anti- traditional American values, anti-family and are thus judged to be undeserving of basic human & constitutional rights.
The left differs in that it includes a variety of nationalities, ethnic, religious and non-religious, racial groups, different socioeconomic classes, the LGBT community and the environmentalists; all of whom subscribe to different philosophies and aspirations. You would be hard press to find significant homogeneity in the left (a key component of tribalism).
The right votes in order to dominate those that it fears; whereas the left votes just to have the right to coexist and to acquire the basic rights enshrined in the US constitution.
There is no comparison……and there is no moral equivalence between the two.....
1227
Surprisingly, your comment actually supports the point that Brooks is making, not in a "you prove what he's talking about" way, but in that it sounds to me like you agree with him.
Rethink the idea as an idol of offense and an idol of defense. The republicans are united in homogeneity which their partisan identity neatly overlaps with. If we portray the Democrat identity as mere cosmopolitanism (mere because that's not such a lofty goal) its real easy to fit that partisan identity comfortably onto the "different philosophies and aspirations" of the many different groups.
To say democratic voters all just really research and understand all the different policy areas democrats support is going too far to try and differentiate them from Republicans. That differentiates them from human nature. In reality, many of these identity groups understand that they are under attack by the GOP, and band together to fight back without necessarily knowing why healthcare needs a mandate or we need to deploy troops in Niger.
A stronger attack on Dem idolatry would be to point out that when Republicans have scandals, other republicans pray for them and forgive them. Democrats throw the bums out a la Anthony Wiener or John Edwards or Al Gore. But again, that's probably because of the nature of the identity bestowed by the idol rather than deeply held moral convictions. Just being on the right side of history can be an accident, and for many people right now it is.
4
Your description of what "being a republican has come to mean" is simplistic, divisive and - most importantly - naive. Sadly, this kind of broad brush thinking is pervasive - both on the left and the right. It is destructive. Which pretty much proves Mr. Brooks' broader point about politics, idolatry and, in the end, failure.
5
standing ovation for you!
4
Religion, politics, anthropology, psychology - these are tools for us to use. The basic fact remains that right is right and wrong is wrong and each of us knows the difference at some level of our being.
4
This op-ed reminded me of a scene from Dr. Zhivago that occurs during the civil war between Reds and Whites. Omar Sharif, shanghaied by a Red cavalry unit, has treated them through multiple battles and just wants to go home. Everyone including commander except for the political officer support his request. The political officer, a weasel of a man, rants on about other concerns falling by the wayside as the political fights will be primary, dominating every discussion and endeavor. A knowledge of Russian history tells you where people like this guy will take his country.
Personally I vote for Omar Sharif. Unfortunately most of what I see in Facebook and other forums, especially non-political ones, are the constant intrusion of political sound bites. The weasels seem to be everywhere. That cannot be good.
8
If we lived in a country whose government truly was of and for the people (for example, a Scandinavian country - countries where the "happiness index" is high), there would be no need for a column such as this. As both political parties have basically caused the havoc we are in - paid off by corporations and the rich and thus abandoning the poor-to-middle classes - idolatry is here, and yes, it represents a desperate measure for many people who feel increasingly left behind economically.
8
But it's not both parties! This is very clear if you look dispassionately at the past decade.
The false equivalence shown in David's column, and people's inability to see past their religious faith in the Republican Party, are a lot of the reason we are in our current mess, which is wholly owned by a long line of Republicans dating back to Reagan and before.
1
Ellen I live in Canada which I believe is one of the countries where democracy rules and answering the needs of the citizens is one of the responsibility of the government. Nobody here writes like David Brooks. Here in Quebec it is 2017 and we are evolving as our technology, economy and society evolve. The world is not going to evolve to suit me Brooks, the GOP or the Democrats plans for the planet and you will kill us all. Mr Brooks is no more sane than Mr Trump except Mr Brooks is smarter and better educated.
1
To achieve the social equality Brooks would have us understand he is for (as long as it does not disrupt the status quo) it takes politics.
1
Your column implies that politics are just some hobby and that the current issue of todays politics are the lack of social niceties. But this ignores the very obvious fact that politics directly impact peoples access to resources and general quality of life. Your stance of being a moderate then really is less a "war with idolatry" than a rejection of meaningful decision or actions other than shrugging.
9
Well done again Mr. Brooks... thank you.
We truly need deep communal bonds and societal focus on the elements of life that are truly transformative. Instead our society seems consumed by the addictive, and ultimately destructive, thrill of "us versus them" that is played out in politics and social media.
6
I am not sure I buy this.
Is it not equally possible that the centralization of conventional media, combined with the onset of social (disintermediated) media has amplified the trend of using wedge issues to solidify a political base? Also, perhaps that certain nefarious groups have discovered ways to use media to invoke outrage, that most basic and powerful motivator of our lizard brain.
I think, in this case, Mr. Brooks is trying too hard.
3
For those who, like Mr. Brooks, have made it in our society it is understandable that they would just like to be left alone so they could enjoy their success, and not be bothered by annoying political fanatics.
Were I in his shoes, I would probably feel exactly the same way.
Unfortunately the majority of the population does not have this option.
According to the AFL-CIO, 5,000 American workers are fired every year for
attempting to organize Unions in their workplace. There is not a single metropolitan area in the country where the minimum wage can pay for even a one bedroom apartment. As living standards continue to crash for
the workers, rates of alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide keep rising.
With no Socialist or Labor Party, American workers lack self respect: they mistakenly blame themselves rather than the evil political system for their tragic lives. They need more political involvement, not less.
As an old Comrade wrote to the workers:
"Politics got us into this mess. And only politics can get us out."
558
You nailed it. And those who think that a minimum wage of $15 an hour will solve problems don't know basic arithmetic. Not everyone is married to someone who earns a good salary. Not everyone is married or living with someone. That $15/hour amounts to about $32K per year. That is hard to live on with rising rents, the cost of buying or leasing a car, the price of gasoline, car insurance, health care (insurance, co-pays, and out of pocket expenses), excise taxes, sales taxes, etc.
3
Einstein wrote that "problems cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them."
The working class also blame illegal immigrants and legal immigrants thinking they are opposing them and don't have a right to be here. But if the end of a society is to increase profits for the wealthy they, the immigrants and illegal immigrants whose livelihoods are always tenuous because their presence is without legal standing, are just plain more attractive. They're a cheap labor force that cannot organize and do not have access to education.
The illegals also have no political opportunity. The only thing better is slaves and fools. We cannot organize our society or are own lives solely around profits or we end up treating ourselves and others like tools.
1
Isn't everything pretty much a myth?
Achievements such as attending competitive colleges, invitations to elite societies, or being a global citizen somehow makes one "a little better" sounds like a myth to me.
Getting gobs of money, being "successful" having more power than others (such as starstruck actress wannabees), family, friendship, neighborhood, faith, etc. certainly aren't always admirable myths, are they?
And in your list of better myths for which to strive, I'm sure it was just an oversight that you left out "actual facts", "truth" and "honor".
Right?
4
The phenomenon of idol-ism in politics is largely in part due to the rise of "Identity Politics" throughout our nation's political platform. Identity politics, to its core, is the utmost partisan belief in that an attack of your "party" is the same as an attack designated at you. Both sides of the political spectrum, right and left, have come to a point in which a simple criticism of either side is seen as a full-blown verbal assault against a group of people with similar ideals that you share. I believe that this form of politics is to blame for the increasing polarization of ideology in our nation today. For instance, many news organizations have begun to act as identity-feeding propaganda machines that cater to a certain party in hopes of undying loyalty towards an either leftist or rightist political philosophy. The Trump-toting republicans of our society are no more different than any antifa-style Dem. member; being in that both sides share brick-headed allegiance towards their party's cause because they feel that their party's politics, in a sense, represent who they themselves are as people. I wholeheartedly agree with the author when he states, "When politics is used as a cure for spiritual and social loneliness, it’s harder to win people over with policy or philosophical arguments". When people succumb to radical partisan politics, any agreement sought to join both sides together is eradicated as there is no middle ground between two contrasting, extreme ideologies.
6
It seems that as a country we moved from being citizens of a "state" (I'm a Virginian, I'm a Californian, etc) to becoming Americans (especially after World War II; Europeans largely did the same thing. The liberal world order that was established which made this possible is falling apart before our eyes which is driving people back to those old sorts of loyalties. Except it seems in America instead of reverting to our state identities (states seem rather impotent today) many, as Brooks points out, are reverting to groups that give them a perception of power and meaning (racial, political, or economic groups). Of course this is the fundamental principle of idolatry.
2
I would say David Brooks is describing the fate of the political Right in this country. Those on the Left have a politics of action - they see politics as a means to an end. Only the social conservatives see politics as an end in itself, that end being the imposition of their morality on the rest of the country.
17
Politics should be a vehicle for good governance. That so many make their living as lobbyists, pundits, provacateurs and politicians and have sold out their duties to America to the highest bidder does not change that duty.
Where are the ones who take this duty seriously??
7
The extremists on both ends of the political spectrum make the most noise, get the most press, pull the best ratings.
Nothing sells better than outlandish statements and behavior. The press, having a need to feed the media beast 24/7, eat it up and amplify it for better effect and ratings. And it becomes a viscous feedback loop. Outlandish statements begets more press, begets better ratings.
Rinse and repeat.
Moderation for the greater good can't compete.
How is moderation ever going to be able to break this cycle?
Like most changes in politics, it will only come from an epic disaster. A war, a recession, a depression.
If it's war, we can only hope it isn't the nuclear variety.
130
I believe Maine is on the right track; a simple change to Ranked Choice Voting will get us off the hard left/hard right rails we're on today.
Perhaps it can even restore real discussion without the partisan spin.
1
Moderation does not make revolution. Road kill is a synonym for moderates. Revolution redefines moderation. And so does civil war. The winners are always moderate in their own minds and histories.
1
If we could reform our primary system for selection of general election candidates, that would help. Primary elections draw out the true believers and tend to elect extreme candidates. If we could open up primaries to all voters, maybe we would then see more moderates willing to work with each other.
For the most part, Americans are, politically, usual right of center, and most Americans don't spend every idle hour trolling the internet in an effort to find themselves, their identity, and a "community" of others as adherents to a political point of view, philosophy, and way of life as David posits . In fact, this recent presidential campaign degraded in to a Halloween horror that confused many Americans, who, given a normal election, one that was not dominated by the uncivilized uncouth Republican standard bearer whose campaign was lifted by Russian interference that played on people's emotions beyond the normal circumstances of a presidential election cycle's shenanigans. We are not socially or civically degenerating -- the American public was lied to, confused by, and taken advantage of by Donald Trump and his rapacious group of henchmen.
6
Strange column.
The world of families was just as stressed, people just as fallible, when the movie "Boyhood" came out three years ago. Jobs are more plentiful now. As much as Republicans hate recognizing the recovery, it has made life better, more stable, for millions.
Trump and the Republicans are doing their dead level best to make things worse -- disrupting healthcare for millions, making retirement saving harder, making family planning services unattainable, sliding back to dirty air and water that will damage millions, especially children -- but the worse effects have not been felt yet.
Where are those people 'on the left' who are making an idol of politics? There's some tribal identity, sure, but it's not monolithic or expressed consistently through politics.
There's a national consensus on many positions the Right labels as Left -- like there being no need for a tax cut for the wealthiest or corporations, or the right of LGBT people to live normal lives, or the need for tax money to fund PUBLIC schools. Maybe this public refusal to accept right-wing megamedia's message that up is down and empty is full makes it feel like the Left has a political idol.
If there is an idol for the Left, we can call it Reality (sure, not Bernie Sanders' scheme for single payer). Where were Republicans as their white voters slid into opioid addiction or when they decided they like their Obamacare. Their political idol was busy taking, never giving.
18
Mr. Brooks is constantly searching for hidden moral principles, and always finding them in religious dogma. Our society must not be allowed to slog through the marsh of Bronze Age mythology. The single most important ideal our Founding Fathers laid down is that "We the people ..." must determine our own fate through political means.
Our Founding Fathers did not, "believe that our politics probably can’t be fixed by political means." They created a government based on the idea that we must use political means, rather than violence, to fix our politics and all our problems. Only once in over two centuries did "the last best hope of mankind" take up arms to solve our political problems. Men on both sides of our Civil War claimed to have god on their side, and that level of certainty is always dangerous. Mr. Brooks should not be so naïve as to think we will all listen to our personal preacher, each with their own moral principles, and come to a simple and just rapprochement.
361
John Taylor is very carefully picking his words to try to make his point. He says: "Our Founding Fathers did not, 'believe that our politics probably can’t be fixed by political means.' Along with his references to "religious dogma", the implication is that our Founding Fathers did not care about religion. But the Declaration of Independence says: "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This is the heart of what our country is about, and it does have a spiritual element.
Very well stated. I nominate you to write the next column.
Thanks again John for getting to the root.
"It needs repair of the deeper communal bonds that politics rest on, and which political conflict cannot heal."
However, term limits, time limited campaigning, spending limits, truthfulness policing by media of all advertisements, and free nation-sponsored real debates would go a long way to putting "politics in its place."
5
Parties and ironically what was considered to be perhaps the most anti-Communist party of all, the Republican Party, seem to have become what Pope Pius X! said about the Communists: "The Communism of today, more emphatically than similar movements in the past, conceals in itself a false messianic idea. A pseudo-ideal of justice, of equality and fraternity in labor impregnates all its doctrine and activity with a deceptive mysticism, which communicates a zealous and contagious enthusiasm to the multitudes entrapped by delusive promises." That party is above country is clear with these political parties of today, but it is also party above reality.
3
To repair societal bonds, you will have to reform the corporate world and make it less greedy Doran among other things, their workers time. No free time= no community. No living wage means desperate fragile people who move around a lot...You up for reforming the corporate world and it's power over its employees?
4
"Partisanship...today takes the form of a visceral, even subconscious, attachment to a party group."
I would agree with the above, but only for those on the far right and left. As a middle of the road Democrat I can still see clearly my beliefs in the issues of importance to me. No all are liberal, not all are conservative.
Trump is bad for our Democracy, no doubt about it. But so was Nixon, and look what happened with him. And there is good coming from all this turmoil, candidates running for office.
We have elections taking place next Tuesday here in Atlanta. Over a dozen candidates running for Mayor alone, both R's and D's. Half a dozen flyers in the mail every day. Three pages of ballots with three columns on each page. And "it's" just a off season election. That's good for our country.
Democracy got a jolt with Trump and is reacting. The 2018 elections will be historic, citizens will be coming out of the woodwork to run. And vote!
4
Better myths and heroes? Observing how Americans love to cut down the tall poppies, to put heroes on pedestals the easier to tear them down, I don't think better heroes have the stamina to last long enough to be mythologized, even if they survive to beat the odds. Politics and government are irreparably corrupt and untrustworthy. Devotion to them is literally insanity.
1
Associating politics with myths and narratives avoids the plain fact that politics is about the distribution of resources. When those with the most resources game the political system and control the government, we have oligarchy and totalitarianism. Under such conditions, the people quite naturally become pessimistic and search for saviors.
Today's media make it easy for hucksters, con men, and apologists for the oligarchs to hold sway, especially since a large percentage of people are easily entertained by the drama of the day, whether it involves kneeling football players, hurricanes, or criminal investigations.
The need for myth and narrative is far less than the need for a truly informed citizenry, and we're not likely to have one without a wider knowledge of how our political system actually functions. That knowledge will have to be communicated through nonfictional narrative, sometimes known as history, and it will have to be done in such a way that the American people understand exactly how their government was stolen and who took it.
9
"If politics is going to get better we need better myths..."
No, what we need is an intelligent populace, capable of critical thinking.
95
David Brooks writes, "If politics is going to get better we need better myths, unifying ones that are built on social equality." If equality is our goal then politics should be about the concrete steps needed to attain that goal. The struggle against racism would be a good starting point. So far Mr. Brooks has written nothing about voter suppression, the mass incarceration of people of color, racial profiling, or the built-in inequalities of education. If he is serious about social equality then Mr. Brooks will begin to dedicate his column to these and related subjects.
24
Lord Brooks is delusionally out of touch with his Republican Party if he thinks its politicians have even a scintilla of interest in “social equality.”
3
The cover photo on this story epitomizes Mr. Brooks point, possibly as well as his words. Trump is our "savior".
No he isn't. And people who sink into that idolatry are going to be severely disappointed when they find that they have lost what little heathcare they had because it has become too expensive, lost their jobs because companies continue to move to Mexico with disregard for the existence of NAFTA or not, and don't receive even one penny of increased income because of the enormous tax cuts that will go solely to the rich.
It is going to be a very hard landing with severe condemnation, "weeping and gnashing of teeth." It is a puzzlement that conservatives can't see that far ahead. They've built a house of cards to stand as idols on top of, with promises to the voters that they have no chance of keeping while meeting the promises to their rich donors who don't even need the money.
12
To improve politics, empathize with the other person’s myths and values, then appeal to those myths and values rather than your own to make your case.
When defending the EPA, tell the libertarian who prioritizes property rights that pollution is a form of trespass, and therefore the government should regulate. That sort of appeal to the other person’s values will likely succeed where a “praise Mother Earth” ethic fails.
Brooks is right but there should be more emphasis on appeals to the other side’s proud values and traditions.
352
Curt, I am fortunate that as a family full of democrats, I have many many relatives and neighbors and friends who have voted Republican all their lives. Not once have I lost respect for them. In fact our love for them grows multi-folds each day. These are thinking breathing highly performing highly intelligent well placed educated individuals. As democrats we were told to hate them! As democrats we were told to view them as deplorables. Not happening. We love them, no matter their religion color politics.
2
I'm sorry but I really don't understand. What proud values and traditions are built around relaxing standards that result in toxins going into drinking water or drilling in national parks or allowing known carcinogen-causing pesticides to be used? What values encapsulate pollution in any form? When your libertarian finds himself drinking polluted spring water, his values will change.
Mr. Brooks is wrong. Politics is part of the democratic process that our Founding Fathers set out for us to ensure that we can achieve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
6
The polluters have already covered that argument. The ongoing destruction of the planet is just a myth. Global warming isn't real. Chemicals dumped in the water isn't causing cancer and DNA changes. It's all a lefty plot to take away
progress.
The pursuit of wealth doesn't care about facts.
3
I concluded a while ago that the national anthem and the U.S. flag have become idols for many of our fellow citizens; David Brooks makes a convincing argument that the idolization of politics is the foundational issue. It is so easy to get people worked up about things, and so difficult to get them to take a breath and to think before reacting. As much as I fear the ways politicians can take advantage of this triumph of feeling over reason, I fear even more what will happen when, as Brooks quotes Any Crouch saying of Jeffrey Satinover, the idols "...eventually demand everything and give nothing." In this contemporary version of the emperor with no clothes, what will the crowd do when the truth cannot be ignored any longer?
19
An increasingly common experience, my own and by others around me, is the attenuation of political discussion within families and friends. If I am getting Mr Brooks idea the diminished conversation is common bonds of family and friends has been replaced by the allegiance to party.
6
Brooks presumes there are not large sectors of the electorate who ultimately care much much more about their 401k's than they do about the country - many many people are more loyal to their company's interest(s) and what's good for its stock price/their industry, as opposed to what's in the long-term interest of America as a whole.
Greed is good, and should be (must be ?) celebrated, Amen.
After all, as Amanda Taub reported in these pages, a very large percentage of Americans surprisingly don't even think that living in a democracy is essential:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/americas/western-liberal-democr...
Additionally, with a GOP'er in the White House, a majority of the GOP are o.k. for His Unhinged Unfitness to just declare the 2020 election can't be held until the voter rolls are purged to GOPers' satisfaction:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/08/10/52-pe...
It's not so much that politics are the idol of Americans, as it is that large portions of the populace don't actually support the very tenets of America anymore, when push comes to shove.
Apparently, they support something else - something more convenient, less messy.
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And this follows a decades long project of the GOP to not just define Democrats and liberals as the opposition political party, but as anti-American and subversive enemies. So it makes sense, in a sick way, that many Republican voters would be OK with suspending political norms and Constitutional rules to prevent the "enemy" from gaining power and "destroying" America -- they actually believe they are *saving* America by doing so "MAGA". Republicans as a political party do not view their electoral prospects as a temporary, and subject to electoral reversal, position. They view at as a means to rule, increasingly by any means necessary.
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Do not underestimate the need and power of beliefs that bind people into groups, which I call tribes. This need is a component of our biological wiring.
Evolution made us this way.
I'll put on my anthropologist hat. As our minds developed, our species invented cultural schemes that bound us into groups. These could be rituals. They could also be beliefs. Religions would have sprung from that seed. Deity worship would have come next. As societies became larger and more complicated, these beliefs evolved into systems of government used to control and further bind us together. The reason all this happened was to enhance our reproductive fitness because those that stayed together thrived. That's 200,000 years of evolution in one short paragraph.
That's why politics has become an idol. We need that idol and have become disconnected from traditional ones. Political media have become our houses of worship. The pundits are the high priests.
Rejection of opposition policy is now an article of faith. You don't count. We do. The Protestants and Catholics thought each other to be dogs. Same for the Sunni and Shia. Same for the Republicans and Democrats.
Anyone out there feel like praying?
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Or, perhaps, better than "better myths" or "more important dependencies", what we really need is a better ability to REASON. To understand that the REASON we need myths and dependencies is because, as creatures which evolved over millennia with the prime directive being survival, we are captives to our survival instincts and the emotions which arise from those instincts.
And in addition to those emotions which endear us to myths and dependencies, there is that most powerful instinct/emotion of all --- fear. And the most potent antidote to fear (even more potent than comforting myths and dependencies) is power, in all its various guises, including the comfort derived from the power of the tribe.
Tribal attachments. That's what's driving so much of what currently afflicts the planet.
Can REASONING human beings understand that we must harness the fear instinct and the lust for tribal power it has embedded within us? And that this understanding must be especially harnessed by those who already have the power?
I doubt it. We can't (and certainly don't) even talk about it.
To me, that's just the nature of the beast and no appeals to our "better" instincts is going to solve the problem until we fully confront the instinctual beasts that we are.
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I am independent. I neither belong to this group or that group. We will have balance again. It's gonna take a bit. You need to give it time. 2 years or 4 years. Long enough to forget. Some day balance will return though to this or that. Some times I think that people say too much. Too many words.
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I think the solution is that we can hopefully all become independent. We need not get boxed into being a republican or democrat. That was how I felt through out the election season. If you were not in love with Hillary, you were not a "democrat" enough. Seriously? Gag. It was so stifling.
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Since it took decades to get here, I would estimate at least a decade, or two, or three to return to some semblance of balance.
It is good to be independent, but some times I think "independents" wear the term a bit too proudly. Some times it's good to belong to a group: a group can be a community. Your pastiche of Hemingway stoicism ("gonna take a bit," "[through?] to this or that," "Too many words") rings hollow to me. Hemingway, after all, fought in the Spanish Civil War because he believed takings sides was some times necessary . . . Anyway, interesting comment. Wish you the best.
When I watch our elected and appointed officials lying to us about how they are making things better for Americans like me I wonder which America I'm living in and who they are addressing. It's people like Newt Gingrich who started a lot of the polarization but he doesn't have to live with the consequences of what he started. In fact no one in DC is dealing with the consequences of the neglect our country has been subjected to for the past 8 years due to obstructionism perpetrated by the GOP in revenge for the election of an African American president. The truth is that the GOP hasn't gotten over Watergate and what that did to the country.
The list of what the GOP has been willing to destroy in America is quite long. Not only does it include the ACA, it includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and every social program that benefits Americans who aren't rich. They have used every lie or racist theme they can to divide Americans and make us vote against our own best interests. They have cheapened political discourse in America with their dirty tricks. It shouldn't be surprising when no decent person wants to run for president or any other office in America.
In many ways the GOP and their offshoots have destroyed community in America. Trump and the current administration are just the cherry on the sundae.
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Henry in Westchester. Your comments are important. Thank you for concise thoughts which draw a picture of the current state of affairs.
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Gingrich is as responsible as anyone, Trump included, for the degradation of our nation’s political discourse. He set a milestone with “Newtspeak” and his GOPAC thesaurus of defamation against what he defined not as his opponents but as his political enemies, painting them not as misguided but as immoral, and distorting the English language to ban the adjectival form “Democratic” because it sounded too positive. Orwell wasn’t that far wrong with 1984, just a decade or so early..
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there's plenty of community: probably 95% of the electorate believes and respects the bill of rights and the constitution.
beyond that we are arguing. but that is normal in a democracy. it is our right to disagree with one another. liberals seems very annoyed by this concept.
A well written column and thought provoking. I agree with the idea of idol warship of politics as being an issue, but I fee that there is another side to the issue as well. Ironically it is that nothing is sacred anymore. News and politics has become real life "entertainment". We live in a perpetual reality show, 24 hour news cycles desperate to keep up those ratings. I appreciate the press for doing their jobs and informing us, but to say it is out of hand is beyond an understatement. People who view politics as a religion is unfortunately not new, so that alone cannot account for the current state of affairs.
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While polarized politics and societal strata strive against each other, moderation once again proves the better path. "Moderates", in politics, religion or economics are often derided by those at the fringes as being boring or unable to commit. However, the government programs, religious groups and economic philosophies which allow for nuance and integrity in compromise actually achieve the better outcomes. Too bad that the moderates don't scream or tweet as loudly as the fringes, but that is the nature of moderation.
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Politics is the very thing that has attenuated the bonds of home, family stability, community and morality. It attacks ethnic diversity. It builds useless walls, speaks without thinking, threatens world peace and embraces skinheads and neo-Nazis.
Ironically, the very people who were spiritually and socially lonely sought to make things far worse by voting for chaos. When a decent, intelligent and empathetic human being left the presidency, they marched by the millions and elected a vulgar, ignorant narcissist.
The Republican Party paved the way for this upheaval by an endless attack on reason and common sense. They stonewalled at every opportunity, demonized their political opposition and led by filibuster and obstruction. Voters who weren’t in on the game didn’t know where the pain was coming from, so in their low-information state they voted for change.
And what a change. Everything evil thing that was previously laid at the feet of the Democrats is now being used by Republicans to attack the most vulnerable members of society.
The body politic emerges from the cumulative will and desire of the people. The fact that it is a diseased wreck is a reflection of what this country has become: a bastion of shallow moralizing, pointless resentment, fevered rhetoric, illogical reasoning and a desire to punish the weak and idolize the strong.
If politics is to get better, we don’t need better myths. We need smarter people.
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As I have continued to read several of the op-ed pieces, something which I haven't done in quite some time, I have wondered who would really come out and state the obvious; our fellow countrymen and women went to the polls to vote for a man whom they knew was lacking in any intellectual curiosity, morality, or sense of justice, to lead the nation. Where did they think he would lead them? Did they really believe he was going to do anything for the classes of people whom he swindled out of their labor and wages? His idea of making America Great Again is using his fingers in the middle of the night to demean and antagonize any person or group whom he doesn't like. And for some reason, I get this uneasy feeling that those that voted for him still won't realize just how much it's costing them and their children, in the long run. Good luck with getting those smarter voters.
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What Mr. Brooks elides is the fact that the most important idol is the state itself. Whether or not patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels (such as Donald Trump), it serves as the basis by which we accept and honor the often useless sacrifice of lives and the infliction of death on innocents who have the misfortune to be collateral damage in wars against our enemies of the day. If one believes that our country is God's own favorite, then the idolatry is even more obvious.
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gemli,
Smarter people is the key.
Case in point.
Tax breaks to the .01% that the economically marginalized applaud, though there is no evidence or hope that they will benefit.
Why do so many economically marginalized people believe that billionaires need more money, and when that happens, the marginalized will somehow benefit?
There's a word for this: stupid.
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