War on poverty: the first time was tragedy, the second time is farce

The atrocious David Brooks was on the Charlie Rose show Monday night, selling his nostrum that the hurricane disaster “is an opportunity to have a national debate on the size of government.” What he means is that he wants a vast expansion of government to address poverty, which, he informs us, government has been neglecting all these years! That’s right, government has been neglecting the problems of the poor for the last 40 years. Brooks, who still keeps referring to himself as a “conservative” in order to legitimize his liberal ideas, is not only not a conservative, he’s not even a neoconservative. He gives no sign of remembering—if he ever knew it—the initial neoconservative insight of 30 years ago, that poverty programs, by creating an entitlement mentality and legitimizing illegitimacy, harmed recipients’ ability to function, destroyed the family and natural social networks, increased poverty, and harmed society as a whole. He’s not aware that the problems he thinks are caused by government neglect of the poor were caused by the very sorts of well-meaning government programs he’s now proposing. No, for Brooks, it’s 1962 all over again, Michael Harrington’s The Other America has just been published, and it’s a new world.

It’s true that Brooks throws little qualifiers into his pitch, such as that he’s not proposing massive programs as in the past. But this is just to cover himself. When he talks about planting the underclass in middle class neighborhoods, that is the old time social engineering ideology at work, which destroyed one neighborhood after another.

It is truly bizarre to see Brooks, curator of the Higher Consumerism and exponent of Bourgeois Bohemianism (work in a software company and buy expensive antiques by day, frequent S&M clubs at night) turning into an evangelical for Great Society II. It reminds me of his previous low point, his column last year advocating homosexual marriage. Brooks, who had never once in his writing career struck the slightest spiritual or moral note, suddenly turned homosexual marriage into a spiritual and moral cause, expressed in a sickly-sweet, sentimental language utterly foreign to usual writing style. To paraphrase the old saying, if you stop believing in truth, you won’t believe in nothing, you’ll believe in anything.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 13, 2005 12:56 AM | Send