David Brooks is back from some sort of smugness-reinforcing hiatus. He has returned to assure us that, all things considered, political complacency is preferable to political passion, just as he furtively assured us, three years back, that the indecently wealthy aren't really any happier than we the penurious, thus we should accept, with loads of pity and no little complacency, the national scourge of wealth inequality.
"[U]nless you are in the business of politics, covering it or columnizing about it, politics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen’s mind," advises Brooks. Which is odd--not so much the proportion as the sentiment. Here's a man who prides himself on his friendly familiarity with antiquity's fundamentals as they related to civics--the ancient Greeks knew of no nobler engagement than that of civic affairs--yet here he is, advising a kind of civic sloth.
And we know why (although Brooks, I suspect, doesn't suspect we know why). Government is being acutely activist at the moment, given Obamacare's rollout, and Brooks prefers that we not notice any consequent governmental helpfulness. Government, Brooks continues, is "too balky an instrument" to be a helpful and positive force in people's lives. "As we’re seeing even with the Obamacare implementation, government is good at check-writing, like Social Security, but it is not nimble in the face of complexity. It doesn’t adapt to failure well."
To smugly dismiss Social Security's elaborateness as mere "check-writing" is as laughable as it is pathetically resentful of Social Security's vast success. And of course Brooks omits any consideration of Medicare's complexities--another "not nimble" government program that somehow comes in at about one-tenth the administrative cost of private health insurance.
As for adapting to failure well, does Brooks have in mind capitalism's brilliantly nimble adaptation to the assorted and sudden calamities of the Great Depression? You don't remember that? Well, you've probably also forgotten how American government so characteristically failed in tackling the immense complexities of defeating 20th-century fascism.
Brooks' real jawdropper, though, is this: "The best government is boring, gradual and orderly. It’s steady reform, not exciting transformation."
President Obama couldn't agree with Brooks more. Indeed, that's precisely what he's been laboring at--and requesting a bit of help with--for the past five years: gradual, orderly reform wherever the need for reform is vividly indicated; say, for instance, in America's wretchedly inadequate system of health insurance.
Did Obama opt for the "exciting" and altogether sensible transformation of single-payer? No, in Brooks' Burkean spirit, he adopted a Republican plan of conceptually conservative origin--for which he's been vilified by Brooks' decidedly unhelpful party of disorderly extremism and abrupt radicalism.
And it's that which Brooks encourages you to pay little mind to.
Pay no attention to the douche bag behind the curtain says the Great and Powerful Brooks.
Posted by: Peter G | December 03, 2013 at 09:22 AM
It's in the Repub's interest to keep the base ignorant and uninformed
Posted by: merl | December 04, 2013 at 10:51 AM