Brooks to Working Class: "You're Not Poor Enough (Yet)"

Brooks To Working Class: “You’re Not Poor Enough (Yet)”

David Brooks chides liberals today in “Dollars and Sense” for their excess of concern for the poor, suggesting that liberals have adopted an overly negative view of reality. Liberals are so bummed out because they’ve “read thousands of gloomy articles about downsizing, outsourcing and wage stagnation”. Somewhere, there are liberal statistician/elves slavering away, compiling dreary economic statistics to keep their liberal masters in a state of permanent midnight. Always with the negative waves Moriarty, always with the negative waves.

It’s the usual Brooks mush, citing to unidentified opinion polls to support his peculiar suppositions. He cheerily cites to an essay that estimated that “only” 19 percent of males and 27 percent of females are poor or working poor. Uh, wake me when it reaches 50 percent? Brooks takes flight from an article posted on a Democratic website over the summer by Steve Rose, whom Brooks mislabels as a “liberal economist”. If he were a true liberal, his stuff wouldn’t be up at DonkeyRising. If you look at Rose’s work, he is clearly in the “Brooks wing” of the Democratic Party. You find such nuggets as “While liberals think that having more than 45 million people being uninsured is a travesty, it still means that over 80 percent of the population does have coverage”. That’s like Vince Ricardo touting the CIA as a career choice: “Are you interested in joining? The benefits are terrific. The trick is not to get killed. That's really the key to the benefit program.”

So the key to learning how to stop worrying and love the economic bomb is to be within the majority who have health insurance, and who are not among the poor or working poor. Along those lines, Brooks references an anonymous poll that ostensibly demonstrates that families with average annual incomes “feel as if they're doing quite well and don't feel oppressed by forces beyond their control.” You can just imagine the wording of that poll/p.o.s.

Brooks eventually gets to the reason he’s been spooning out his economic fluffernutter, when he ties it into his stock social/cultural theories of American conservative values. I like to think of Brooks as the Times’ domestic Moustache of Understanding. Tom “Aarfy” Friedman patrols the foreign beat, while Brooks walks among us, right here at home, misconstruing the blindingly obvious at every turn. Values Are Flat. Or something like that.

Brooks advises: "If you are a middle-class woman, you have more to fear from divorce than from outsourcing. If you have a daughter, you're right to worry more about her having a child before marriage than about her being a victim of globalization. This country's prosperity is threatened more by homes where no one reads to children than it is by big pharmaceutical companies. . . . Conservatives, especially evangelicals, have had free rein to offer their own recipe for social renewal: churches that restrain male selfishness, decency standards that check hedonism, social norms that discourage childbearing outside wedlock."

So, if the Democratic Party is to survive, its future must be as a kind of marginalized Amen Corner to the Rightwing of the Republican Party. We must all throw in with the effort to convince the poor and working poor that they need to get married up, religioused up, and hung up, before they can be initiated into the Magical World of the Morally Prosperous! Pay no mind to your lack of a job, money for rent, healthcare, etc. Those things are just nagging distractions.

If, on the other hand, you evince concern over the economic, health and educational conditions that produce poverty, you are necessarily selfish, a hedonist, a bastard promoter, and necessarily against families, niceness and heaven itself.

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children;wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They kneltdown at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

'Oh, Man. look here. Look, look, down here.' exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling,wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Wheregraceful youth should have filled their features out, andtouched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelledhand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, andpulled them into shreds. Where angels might have satenthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. Nochange, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in anygrade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, hasmonsters half so horrible and dread. Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to himin this way, he tried to say they were fine children, butthe words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lieof such enormous magnitude.

'Spirit. are they yours.' Scrooge could say no more.

'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down uponthem. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers.This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both,and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy,for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless thewriting be erased. Deny it.' cried the Spirit, stretching outits hand towards the city. 'Slander those who tell it ye.Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse.And abide the end.' 'Have they no refuge or resource.' cried Scrooge. 'Are there no prisons.' said the Spirit, turning on himfor the last time with his own words. 'Are there no workhouses.'"