RIP David Brooks

'stackrolled

Can barely stand that this guy has his books arranged by color FFS

Does he have a movement disorder or does he always have to pee during his PBS spots or what

Any woman with his teeth would never, ever be on TV, not even as a talking head on PBS

(see also: any woman as unattractive as fucking Mitch McConnell would never be elected to that office)

Why do I do this to myself every Friday night

He always seems so eager and boyish. He's 59 years old for crying out loud.

In my mind the Aspen Ideas Festival is 200 copies of David Brooks nattering on to one another

i.e. a nightmare

name of said festival surely a contradiction in terms

is it guys leaving their wives for their much younger research assistants pic.twitter.com/u8QCPEBvA2

— Josh Fruhlinger (@jfruh) July 30, 2021

Brooks's latest big read for the Atlantic posits the creative class (or bobos) as the furry mogwai who seemed cute and harmless in the late '90s with their fancy strollers and coffee drinks but who, as their cultural power has grown, have transformed into vicious gremlins who now poison our politics and culture. I thought his idea that the US class structure, which used to be a monolithic sandwich of upper/middle/lower, has now bifurcated into two separate red and blue hierarchies was interesting. He still has a knack for cultural taxonomy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/blame-the-bobos-creative-class/619492/

Trump voters listed the media—the epitome of creative-class production—as the biggest threat to America.

oh was that the reason

Soooo many unexamined assumptions in that piece. So many questions that go unanswered because he doesn't even bother to ask them. He just lays down ideas that would fall apart if he took his own logic just one or two steps further, but he never, ever does. If you really tried to pick it apart, you'd probably give yourself a stroke.

Brooks is an absolute idiot, and that piece was nothing one wouldn't expect from him. Lazy, myopic crap.

article would have been way more entertaining if he actually used the mogwai/gremlin analogy

Don't give them a soy latte after midnight

This essay about the gentry of Yakima that he references is kind of interesting. His conclusion:

Power resides in group photos of half-soused overweight men in ill-fitting polo shirts, in gated communities and local philanthropic boards. You’ll rarely, if ever, see these things on CNN or in the New York Times, but they’re no less essential to understanding how and why our society works the way it does.

https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/american-gentry

That was great, thanks.

Yes, I thought it was fascinating. The author has a book coming out (on a very different topic from European history) which I immediately added to my wish list. I am wondering about the working class in these small towns and why they seem more aligned politically with the local gentry than with the politics of the urban working class (which is much more liberal). It seems the consensus of the elite creative class is that these small-town working class people are being snowed by conservative hot button issues of race, guns and God, when they should be more attuned to the economic barriers that are keeping them down. But it's not clear that liberals are really offering them a better deal even on a purely economic level. If the power of the local gentry is reduced by government intervention, most likely their economic ownership will be replaced by big national corporations that will only siphon more of the profits out of the locality. At least the local gentry keep a lot of the money in the community. Someone in the comments mentioned that this has already happened in the case of finance. Local banks once formed a basis for a local gentry. Deregulation has changed that by allowing national banks to expand into every state, town and locality. So now those gentry have been replaced with large corporations, which are more aligned with the elite educated axis of power, and perhaps more blue-tinged on social issues, but also now take all those profits out of the community.

I've been thinking of a lot of issues related to this over the past month as I visit my (small, remote, rural, poor) hometown. Lots of big, fancy lakefront properties with custom homes, lots of giant boats and RVs and jetskis and four-wheelers and other toys but also lots of abject generational poverty, substandard housing, lack of resources, social safety net, substance abuse, etc.

Being local, or being able to engage in the 'so who are your parents / where did you grow up?' conversation long enough to arrive at shared acquaintances or experiences goes an awful long way.

The guys who own the construction companies or regional grocery empire or beverage wholesaler or small manufacturing warehouse went to school with or know the families and history of the people who work for them.

The workers know the rich family's gossip and history as well, and since they never left the area to go to somewhere bigger and fancier they obviously are true locals, definitely not the suburban or tourist types. Choosing to live here means they've sided with us against the liberals way down in Detroit or Minneapolis or Chicago or Milwaukee.

It isn't their fault they pay shit wages, it's because of the democrats downstate and in Washington who keep taxing them unfairly. Plus they like fishing and hunting just as much as the workers do, they just have a fancier boat and go to Wyoming or Montana every fall to hunt. Plus somebody's got to work on their fancy boat and build the wraparound porch on their giant waterfront home, maybe it'll be my cousin or friend who lucks out and gets that job.

so you're saying perceived cultural differences are being used as a wedge issue to dissolve class consciousness before it can even appear. interesting, i wonder if anyone has ever predicted this

xxp and xp: Yep.

I'm no historian, so I assume I'm missing something, but I found that Yakima piece's point elusive. Why call these people "gentry" and talk so much about the assets they own, when they are almost all capitalists who employ labor? He mentions owning apartment complexes as one form of gentry-hood, but not many of the other examples involved rent, which is more what I would associate with that term. Sorry to be a dull marxist, but what about that piece isn't captured by "[local] capitalists own the means of production, and therefore wield [local] social and political power"...?

I think his point was more that these businesses are mostly inherited and are basically just printing money at this point.

sorry to be the other dull capitalist but yep that's how capital works.

like five times a year there is some shitty diagnosis of america's problems that dimly sees some fragment of capitalism and acts like it's de toqueville. sorry but not sorry to be so dismissive since really when has anything mentioned by david brooks EVER been worth thinking about or talking about?

dull marxist i mean. i need to be off the internet today

I wouldn't say he's diagnosing America's ills, it's more that he's talking about narratives - the local gentry (who are extractive but not entrepreneurial at this point because the money printing operations are running on their own) are the Republican base but generally receive less coverage as elites (leading to Cletus Safaris and the myth that it was working class whites who form the backbone of Trumpism, for one).

The finance bros and billionaire class who are more prominent the public consciousness are about as likely to be Democrats (of a sort) these days, their internationalist capitalism is grating to nationalist capitalists (a tale as old as fascism). And the callback to medieval and Roman mores of violence call to mind the likelihood of the state giving up its monopoly - what's the Thiel/Nextdooor app that wants to become a private police force?

this is more or less haute vs petit bourgeoisie right? what’s new about the specific alignments & disjunctures noted here? there *are* new things happening in this regard but are they in this piece? not sure what to do with the pre-capitalist references either, do we need them here

thread needs to turn back to straight David Brooks h8

My TV isn't working so my Friday nights have been so peaceful, compared to David-Brooks-on-PBS rageful

milo: I think you must be talking about the Brooks piece, which I didn't read lol, as I don't think the words Republican or Democrat appear in the Wyman piece. I believe Citizen is the private vigilantism app you're thinking of.

The word "capitalism" doesn't appear in the Wyman either, which is what initially irked me. And yeah having a subscription to Harpers during the W years made me kneejerk recoil to essays that reach back to the classical period to make points about present-day USA, though at least Lapham was talking about American imperialism not people who own a handful of McDonalds franchises

Sorry quincie! I started reading the Brooks, but had to bail as soon as I read: "We had a clear idea of what class conflict, when it came, would look like—members of the working classes would align with progressive intellectuals to take on the capitalist elite."

I'm talking about Wyman, you'd have to pay me to read a word of David Brooks. He doesn't mention Republican or Democrat, but they're tacit elements in play any time you're talking about the American civil order, where power lies and urban/rural issues. The people he's talking about are now cruising along at 85%+ Republican, right?

I don't see a problem using historical illustration - and the issue you raise about his use of gentry is part of that. A primarily rentier gentry is a more modern concept than local lords that profit in other ways (such as using forced labor from serfs and slaves for their profit making concerns).

(I don’t think there are any earth-shattering revelations there but it’s a blog post so it would be a bit of a miracle if there were.)

To me, the Wyman piece reinforces how geographically defined our 2 political parties have become. Democrats are the party of the big cities, Republicans are the party of the small towns. Within those geographic boundaries, the party alignment cuts across class and income distinctions, to a surprising extent. Demographically, big cities are the future, but due to some quirks of our constitution, small towns get a disproportionate representation in Washington, so the GOP punches above its weight at the national level.

I fixed my TV just so I could hate watch DB tonight :(

Democrats are the party of the big cities, Republicans are the party of the small towns.

Worth noting, though, that Democrats are also the party of the small cities. There are a lot of them and they add up.

at least we're not talking about David Brooks or his puddle-deep thoughts any more

It's Friday, which means I hate-watched DB on the PBS Newshour, which means I started googling DB shit, which means I looked at his bullshit project with the fucking aspen institute, which got me to read this and now I am so filled with DB hate aaaaaaaagh AGH https://weareweavers.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Weave-Relationalist-Manifesto.pdf

I mean I didn't really read it, who could possibly even, I mean for god's sake, UGH why does it exist and why does David Brooks exist, in my life, I didn't ask for this I swear

Weeeeee are weavers
I believe Brooks can get me through the night

it met an intern two and a half decades younger https://t.co/eH3YYzXf02

— inverted vibe curve: burgertown must be defended (@PatBlanchfield) December 8, 2021

lol

some real uh insights here

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opinion/america-falling-apart.html

i dunno david could it be your cohort of conservative boomers who systematically sacrificed union protections and every semblance of bottom-up community solidarity it could find in exchange for lining the pockets of the ruling class?? NAWWWW it’s probably… cancel culture or something

I had a moment's joy in my heart.

then you found out he was still alive

Yes, that was the letdown.

But there must also be some spiritual or moral problem at the core of this. Over the past several years, and over a wide range of different behaviors, Americans have been acting in fewer pro-social and relational ways and in more antisocial and self-destructive ways. But why?

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MUBVq2pxBZY/maxresdefault.jpg

Because the people who have the most stuff don't want to share it with people who have less stuff, especially the ones who don't look like them.

either way it definitely comes down to choices that people make on an individual level, nothing wrong with that framework at all

THIS FUCKING GUY

SHUT UP

SHUT UP

SHUT UUUUUUUUUP!!!!!!!!!!!!

in a fair society david brooks's pooping out his columns would be considered antisocial behavior

they totally are

in a fair society David Brooks' head would be on a pike as you Uber into Poughkeepsie.