Warlord Schoolboy

I'd almost forgotten what a dunce David Schoolboy Brooks is because I never read him anymore, but this terrible piece was somehow unavoidable.  In it, Schoolboy offers no actual argument for escalating in Afghanistan. He just refers to unnamed gladiators like himself to taunt and bully Obama with that great question of modern statecraft: "are you man enough to go to war"?

Glenn Greenwald has previously sent Schoolboy to the corner for chest-beating in class.  He does it again this time (as does Amy Davidson at the New Yorker), so I'm reluctant to mention the man again.  The problem is that Schoolboy spent the Bush years not only defending all pointless invasions but also establishing himself as the national spokesperson for middle-class values.  In other words, he has specialized in defining extreme right-wing positions - particularly military conflict-resolution and economic plutocracy - as the foundation of bourgeois utopia. 

A few people call Schoolboy on this publicly, and Greenwald is exemplary in railing tirelessly against the weird, myopic hypocrisy of media and political elites who are happy to spend money we don't have for war but not for health care.  To me they sound like the clueless leaders of France during Napoleon III's mid-19th century Second Empire, a period when France should have been democratizing and developing its social capacities for various kinds of economic and social development, and when it instead became increasingly militaristic and economically second-rate.  Schoolboy's term "tenacity" accidentally invoked not Churchill but Nixon in Vietnam.  The middle-class lets people like Brooks speak for it only at its own mortal peril.

Schoolboy published the day after his own paper shone yet another light into the cesspool of Afghan leadership with a story revealing that Ahmed Wali Karzai, already suspected of being a major opium trafficker, is a CIA operative who helps them run a paramilitary force in Kahdahar province. The past couple of weeks have seen increasing exposure of Afghan and "AfPak" reality, including Jane Mayer's report that the CIA is also running a U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan (see also UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston), Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's unpopular visit to Pakistan, marked by the market bombing in Peshawar (and Clinton pushing "the button on a computer that randomly chose more than 700 lottery winners"),  and the U.S. visit of Afghan democracy activist Malalai Joya, whose book, A Woman Among Warlords, is a reminder of the costs of the real-world version of the armchair warlord schoolboys.
 

The End of Integration

Schoolboy Brooks makes it clear today that the American political Right never did want integration after all, decades of sanctimonious protest notwithstanding.

You'll recall that the Supreme Court's recent decision in the Seattle and Louisville cases banned the use of race in the pursuit of racial integration. Today Brooks unleashes all the phony sorrowfulness of which he is capable, covering world history in two hundred words while shedding crocodile tears over his claim that human nature wants to live in homogeneous groups.

It is more accurate to say that most white Americans want to live in homogeneous groups. The more "conservative" you are, the more likely you are to desire overwhelming white environments, judging by the historical evidence of conservative hostility to every single stage of the civil rights movement in this century and the last. Remember in the second Austin Powers film where Scott tries to talk back to his dad Dr. Evil and Dr. Evil blocks every sentence, then the first word, then the first syllable, then the first tiny sound? Brooks's Dr. Evil is so in charge he doesn't even have to interrupt anymore.

Brooks' permanent job is to make conservative preferences look like human nature and laws of physics, and this piece is a case in point. For years conservatives said they were just defending individual rights, and said they loved integration, said they were anti-racist, said there was no evidence that resegregation was happening, said their insistence on colorblindess wasn't causing it even if it did exist, said the best way to end racism was to stop using the category race. Now they can drop the facade. Brooks in effect confesses that they didn't want integration at all (while saying he's sorry the "dream" of integration has died). Unable to resist his normal hypocritical piety, Brooks says integration's death is just the way the world is, as opposed to the way conservatives said it outta be over and over while they tirelessly organized against every generation of racial remedy in each of the last fifteen generations.

I've also posted my own analysis of the Breyer dissent. I think Breyer offered a profound attack on the fundamental empirical and legal claims of the conservative "colorblindness" position. Anti-racists should be rallying right now, and his dissent could help. Are we really this apathetic? Failure to fix the racial divide in this century, like we did in all the other ones, is going to wreck all of our societies, as it already is.

Culture War Dumbness

David "Schoolboy" Brooks outdoes himself today with a particularly desparate, silly piece blaming fears of immigration on college elites. Don't ask about the logic, which would be like looking for the Sermon on the Mount in a long dribble of uncooked batter. The basic idea is that working people don't have any real economic problems after 30 years of Republican rule that has seen zero real income growth for about 80% of the population - they just don't like the liberal cosmopolitanism of college-educated elites. The essay is an aggravating five-minute escape from any known reality here on Earth One, where Schoolboy's culture-warrior pals have been helping destroy the economic base of their beloved "regular folks" while telling them their real enemies are liberals who send money to save Darfur. Gaaah!

Schoolboy's New York Times pals wrote a good editorial on Monday that he obviously didn't read. The editorial reported that accoreding to a study by Frank Levy and Peter Temin, two MIT economists, the top 1 percent of Americans (average income, $1.1 million) took almost a quarter of the nations income, "their largest share since 1929." There's a connection between the Republican's happy inequality boom and the anger of Brooks' "nationalists," which someday may finally focus on the real cause - conservative economic policies that reward the destruction of jobs.

A better account of growing inequality appeared in the same paper on Sunday. "The orthodoxy surrounding income inequality is being undermined by research that looks at institutional issues: changes in the way the corporate world measures the performance of workers, the decline of unions, and government wage and tax policy." Doh!

And for a sad tale of the king of Clintonian economics, Larry Summers, now suprised by inequality, see a short Sunday Magazine piece. "I'm finding my way," Summers says about the effects of his own policies. Far better is an interview with the producer of "Entourage," Doug Ellin, with his jaundiced desire to exploit the dumbness of Beemer lust and related more expensive desires. He doesn't make the Schoolboy mistake of confusing the desire to be rich with a noble vision for a red-state America.

Dumbness and the Fight Against It

Today's New York Times has a nice illustration of the battle for what's left of the middle-class mind. There's Paul Krugman fighting dumbness by showing how the media has turned politics into a beauty contest that prevents people from voting on the basis of issues. "listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush's tax lies [in the 2000 campaign], not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern."

In the other corner, representing dumbness, is David "Schoolboy" Brooks, with another of his grandiloquent philosophical frameworks leading to Reaganite cliches. Painting himself as a "Hamilitonian" in an epic battle with "mainstream liberals" and populists, he concludes, "Government is really bad at rigging or softening competition. It can do some good when it helps people compete." This distinction rests on a Schoolboy contrast between job retraining, job protections, and jobs programs (where gov is bad), and portable pensions and health insurance and skill-based immigration and encouragement of marriage (where gov is good). In fact all Schoolboy does is slam programs for workers and praise programs for the middle-classes. Blue-collar is bad, white-collar is good. Programs that make blue-collar people like white-collar people are good. Schoolboy wants a world in which gated commuters are subsidized and nobody else is - a paradise of bobos, paid for by everybody else.

If we don't start catching on to this classic middle-class dumbness, were not going anywhere except down.

Which reminds me: in March I blogged about Pakistani lawyers in revolt; this past week the U.S. press has realized that the protests have spread widely enough to be threatening to the Musharraf regime.