Link Banana

Two people I respect a great deal, Marc Ambinder and David Brooks, both think the failure of the bailout yesterday makes obvious the full-scale meltdown of the GOP. Here’s Brooks:

House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame. It has been interesting to watch them on their single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party. Not long ago, they led an anti-immigration crusade that drove away Hispanic support. Then, too, they listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most American minds.

Now they have once again confused talk radio with reality. If this economy slides, they will go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century. With this vote, they’ve taken responsibility for this economy, and they will be held accountable. The short-term blows will fall on John McCain, the long-term stress on the existence of the G.O.P. as we know it.

Sounding a tad more conservative than usual, David Brooks laments America’s spending well beyond its means:

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.

David Brooks again earns my admiration. From his well-executed history of nerdiness:

But the biggest change was not Silicon Valley itself. Rather, the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of designers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis.

They can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experiment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names. They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated.

I’m sure this isn’t the best David Brooks column in recent weeks, but its another good and interesting one. His contention: the Bible — all dogmatism — is going to have a hard time in the next century.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

David Brooks penned an interesting column in today’s New York Times. The basic premise:

The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

David Brooks penned an interesting column today. Diverting from the usual machinations of domestic politics, he wrote about the Middle Ages:

As many historians have written, Europeans in the Middle Ages lived with an almost childlike emotional intensity. There were stark contrasts between daytime and darkness, between summer heat and winter cold, between misery and exuberance, and good and evil. Certain distinctions were less recognized, namely between the sacred and the profane.

Material things were consecrated with spiritual powers. God was thought to live in the stones of the cathedrals, and miracles inhered in the bones of the saints. The world seemed spiritually alive, and the power of spirit could overshadow politics. As Johan Huizinga wrote in “The Autumn of the Middle Ages,” “The most revealing map of Europe in these centuries would be a map, not of political or commercial capitals, but of the constellation of sanctuaries, the points of material contact with the unseen world.”

This David Brooks column, like his recent one of Rank-Link Imbalance, seems a tad to generic for it’s own good. But I liked this bit:

But the new do-gooders have absorbed the disappointments of the past decades. They have a much more decentralized worldview. They don’t believe government on its own can be innovative. A thousand different private groups have to try new things. Then we measure to see what works.

It strikes me as a good counterargument to Thomas Friedman’s slightly silly concerns in “Generation Q”, which I took issue with at the time.

You’re probably aware that conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. died earlier this week. You may not be aware that he gave David Brooks a job because of piece of satire he wrote about the man. That and other details are in the best eulogy for him I’ve read.

“Buckley spent most of his infancy working on his memoirs,” I wrote in my faux-biography. “By the time he had learned to talk, he had finished three volumes: ‘The World Before Buckley,’ which traced the history of the world prior to his conception; ‘The Seeds of Utopia,’ which outlined his effect on world events during the nine months of his gestation; and ‘The Glorious Dawn,’ which described the profound ramifications of his birth on the social order.”

In David Brook’s slightly gimmicky — not that there’s anything wrong with that — column, he offers useful (if odd) analogy for the two Democratic contenders:

Listen, the essential competition in many consumer sectors is between commodity providers and experience providers, the companies that just deliver product and the companies that deliver a sensation, too. There’s Safeway, and then there is Whole Foods. There’s the PC, and then there’s the Mac. There are Holiday Inns, and there are W Hotels. There’s Walgreens, and there’s The Body Shop.

If you couldn’t tell, he is saying that Senator Clinton is a Holiday Inn.

David Brooks has some interesting and important things to say (as usual) about what McCain has to do to win the support of his party and the country come November.

Finally, McCain is going to have to beef up his domestic policy offerings. He has some excellent ideas, like his plan to control health care costs, which he doesn’t explain well. But he has not yet focused sufficiently on the group that is always the key to Republican success or failure — the suburban working class.

Picture a suburban townhouse community filled with families making $40,000 to $60,000 a year. Maybe there’s a single mother in one unit who hates her job but needs the benefits. Maybe there are immigrant parents with associate degrees watching their son drop out of school in another. The definition of being middle class has changed, as many have noticed. It used to be a destination. Now it’s an uncertain place. It’s a struggle just to stay there. Any candidate who can’t talk specifically to these concerns is doomed.

David Brooks’s latest column is well worth reading.

But then a great tightening occurred. Conservative institutions and interest groups proliferated in Washington. The definition of who was a true conservative narrowed. It became necessary to pass certain purity tests — on immigration, abortion, taxes and Terri Schiavo.

An oppositional mentality set in: if the liberals worried about global warming, it was necessary to regard it as a hoax. If The New York Times editorial page worried about waterboarding, then the code of conservative correctness required one to think it O.K.

Apostates and deviationists were expelled or found wanting, and the boundaries of acceptable thought narrowed. Moderate Republicans were expelled for squishiness. Millions of coastal suburbanites left the party in disgust.

David Brooks’s column in yesterday’s New York Times tackles the hard-to-discern problem of what really motivates voters. Though the piece raises nearly as man questions as answers, it’s well worth reading.

In reality, we voters — all of us — make emotional, intuitive decisions about who we prefer, and then come up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain the choices that were already made beneath conscious awareness. “People often act without knowing why they do what they do,” Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, noted in an e-mail message to me this week. “The fashion of political writing this year is to suggest that people choose their candidate by their stand on the issues, but this strikes me as highly implausible.”

I’ve been waiting for a counterpoint to this for some time, and Salon has finally offered it. In a piece that’s more about realism than Kristol himself, Stephen Walt argues that what America (and thus the NY Times Op-Ed page) needs is some hard-nosed realists.

Hiring Kristol did not bring an “opposing view” to the Times’ Op-Ed page, of course, because columnist David Brooks already represents the same worldview that Kristol does. Nor does the Times’ roster of liberal pundits provide a full complement of “opposing views.” Most liberal commentators share the neocons’ belief that it is America’s right and responsibility to exercise “global leadership,” even when that role involves the aggressive use of American military power and constant interference in other countries’ affairs. The Times’ Thomas Friedman was an energetic supporter of the Iraq war until it went south, and Nicholas Kristof is a passionate advocate of U.S. intervention in Darfur. Columnists like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have been sharply critical of the neoconservatives’ worst follies, but both proceed from the familiar liberal internationalism that has characterized the American foreign policy establishment for many years.

What’s missing in America’s mainstream media is the voice of realism. As the label implies, realists think foreign policy should be based on the world as it really is, rather than what we might like it to be. Realists see international politics as an inherently competitive realm where states constantly compete for advantage and where security is often precarious. But realists understand that being overly alarmist and aggressive can get states into just as much trouble as being excessively trusting or complacent. …

I found this odd. Slate’s Jacob Weinberg had this to say about the relationship between the two men (emphasis mine):

But don’t assume that the common qualities or shared goals of McCain and Obama would result in a civil contest. In early 2006, McCain denounced Obama in an unusually nasty letter for a perceived betrayal on the lobbying reform bill. Obama responded (in a joking context, but still) that his goal was to learn how to be as much of a prima donna as McCain. The front-runners are enough alike to dislike each other intensely.

While David Brooks said this:

John McCain has cordial relations with Obama…

Someone’s lying, but who?

David Brooks’s prescient remarks on Huckabee’s Iowa victory:

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

Will Huckabee move on and lead this new conservatism? Highly doubtful. The past few weeks have exposed his serious flaws as a presidential candidate. His foreign policy knowledge is minimal. His lapses into amateurishness simply won’t fly in a national campaign.

He’s also got some great words about Obama’s victory in Iowa. I feel like I’ve recently become a rabid Brooks fanboy. I’m strangely comfortable with that reality.

In Part 2 of David Brooks’s 2007 Sidneys, I found an excellent story from the too-often drunk and strident Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens had supported the American invasion of Iraq, and his writings saying so were part of what convinced Mark Daily to enlist. When Hitchens learned of Daily’s death “in theater” he felt the expected doubt and regret.

This Vanity Fair story is about Hitchens’s efforts to work through his feelings, and will probably make you cry. Well, at least it made me cry.

David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, has an tradition of giving out annual awards for good magazine pieces. In 2006, he described the prize as such:

The Sidney Awards, named for Sidney Hook, are a nice way to honor the best magazine essays of the year and to pass along a few nutritious holiday reading recommendations.

2007 was the first year I came across the columnist’s winners, and they’re pretty solid — and an excellent way fill the void caused by a lack of other good journalism. And I wouldn’t deny that seeing this great idea was part of the reason I started Link Banana.