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Brooks attacks Palin
David Brooks in an interview before New York’s liberal elite at the Cirque Restaurant this week uses shockingly strong language about Sarah Palin, saying she “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party” because of her rejection of the intellect. Yet in the same interview Brooks says that President Bush rejects the intellect just as Palin does, and he has never called Bush a fatal cancer to the Republican party.
He also predicts Obama will win by nine points.
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October 10
Thucydides writes:
Brooks’s performance at Le Cirque has destroyed what little respect I had left for him. He claims that candidate Palin and President Bush not only scorn liberal ideas, but scorn ideas entirely. He offers nothing to support this. We don’t know much about Palin’s intellectuality apart from some fairly thoughtful comments in her campaign speeches, but we do know that Bush reads serious books, and has invited their authors to the White House for lengthy discussions of their works. It would appear that Brooks was pandering to the prejudices of his audience by saying things he does not know to be true, perhaps knows not to be true.
On the other hand Brooks thinks Obama “has the great intellect” based on Obama’s interest in Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Obama has identified as one of his favorite philosophers. Niebuhr was a theologian of familiar pacifist and socialist views, and a New Deal enthusiast. This was somewhat leavened by a recognition of Augustinean limitations of human nature, but Niebuhr failed to draw the necessary conclusions—that flawed human nature sets limits to the ambitions of socialist theory in remaking man and society.
When Brooks learned of Obama’s interest in Niebuhr, he was giddy: “And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.” This is not only sycophantic, it is disgusting. This is the token supposed “conservative” columnist at the NY Times. The notion that Obama, a Columbia graduate, is a “great intellect” because he has heard of or knows something about Niebuhr, a fairly well known though second rate figure on the left, is ridiculous, and tell us more about Brooks’s limitations than it does about Obama’s capacities. That Brooks’s comments pass without ridicule also tells us a lot about our so-called educated elites (miseducated would be more accurate).
LA replies:
While Brooks’s language about Palin was shockingly offensive, I was not entirely out of sympathy with his substantive point, because, as I discussed at length last month, there does seem to be a highly emotional, non-intellectual kind of conservatism that her nomination inspired, involving identification with her as a person and symbol, and a rejection of conservative principle if it gets in the way of that identification.
At the same time, I agree with what you said about Brooks’s sycophantic praise for Obama’s great intellect. An “intellectual” who publicly boasts that he can be seduced by a politician making a single positive reference to Reinhold Niebuhr is beyond contemptible. But our society is such that worthless people such as Brooks are now the dominant type.
Which, along with many other signs of the times, suggests that for the foreseeable future decent people will not be able to exercise influence in mainstream society and will not be welcome there. Which again points to the need for building culturally separate communities, where a life worthy of Western man and woman can be lived and strengthened, and, from that independent and separate base, can perhaps begin to influence the general society as the latter continues to go downhill and realizes that it is lost and needs new principles and new leadersrhip.
Laura G. writes:
It is just too expected that the dreadful David Brooks is trashing Palin. How and why he gets the gig as “Republican Conservative” in Fox discussion panels is one of the great mysteries of life. We are so, so screwed. Please do let me know if you have a plan for survival for the next two decades. Me, I am telling my children to max out all their credit cards and then cut them up. Just join in the line for the never-never plan goodies.
David B. writes:
In 1976, much was made that Reinhold Niebuhr was Jimmy Carter’s favorite philosopher. It seems that you are nobody without Niebuhr.
LA replies:
LOL!
True!
To be persona grata in liberal society, you need to have a volume of Niebuhr in your pocket, and a person of color at your side (unless, like Obama, you’re already a person of color).
Thucydides writes:
One wonders whether there is not an element of unconscious racial condescension in Brooks’s being so easily amazed by Obama’s reference to Niebuhr, similar to Joe Biden’s description of Obama during the primaries as “clean, bright, articulate…”
It is hard to imagine that Brooks would have gotten so excited had some other politician, say McCain, mentioned Niebuhr. Clearly Brooks is completely unimpressed by Bush’s serious reading and engagement with ideas.
Brooks’s giddiness over Obama lies, I think, in the fact that notwithstanding that Obama’s views are probably somewhat more leftwing than Brooks would like, Obama represents a face of the black race so far above what Brooks expects, that Brooks can support him without too much bad conscience. It is an opportunity for Brooks to engage not only in moral preening but self congratulation, as well as win plaudits from the parochial New York liberal crowd, which apparently is more than enough to compensate him for any sacrifice of principle involved in supporting a candidate farther left than Brooks would ordinarily prefer.
LA replies:
“similar to Joe Biden’s description of Obama during the primaries as ‘clean, bright, articulate…’”
But that Biden comment, which got him in a bit of trouble at the time (not for the “bright” and “articulate” but for the “clean”), was far less condescending/sycophantic than this more recent Biden comment we’ve discussed:
The Republican party and some of the blogs and others on the far right, are trying very hard to paint a picture of this man, they’re trying the best as they can to mischaracterize who he is and what he stands for. All this stuff about how different Barack Obama is, they’re not just used to somebody really smart. They’re just not used to somebody who’s really well educated. They just don’t know quite how to handle it. Cause if he’s as smart as Barack is he must not be from my neighborhood.
Hmm, can the same statement be condescending and sycophantic? Well, when a white liberal is talking about a black, it would seem that the answer is yes.
Kristor writes:
A word of thanks to Thucydides for the beautifully written paragraph:
Brooks’s giddiness over Obama lies, I think, in the fact that notwithstanding that Obama’s views are probably somewhat more leftwing than Brooks would like, Obama represents a face of the black race so far above what Brooks expects, that Brooks can support him without too much bad conscience. It is an opportunity for Brooks to engage not only in moral preening but self congratulation, as well as win plaudits from the parochial New York liberal crowd, which apparently is more than enough to compensate him for any sacrifice of principle involved in supporting a candidate farther left than Brooks would ordinarily prefer.
It’s like a little jewel, no? And it was not carefully written, either, but off the cuff, quickly. One can tell because it would have profited from a comma here and there. Nevertheless it is delicious. VFR is so blessed.
Thucydides writes:
Regarding Brooks’s take on Obama, I do think Obama has an above average intelligence, but so what? Why get giddy? Of course, intelligence is only one factor in a good leader. There have been studies showing that the most successful business executives have above average, but not extremely high intelligence, say in the 115—123 range. Higher levels of intelligence may not be consistent with decisiveness—too much pondering.
I am surprised at how often it seems to be assumed the higher the intelligence, the better or more qualified the person. However, highly intelligent people seem to be more prone to being propagandized, and to getting caught up in confining patterns of ideological thought. One needs to be intelligent to be wise, but wisdom and intelligence are not the same thing. A highly intelligent person, working with a false view of the human situation as liberals do, can be very superficial in judgment and in feeling. There is a long and sad record of intellectuals getting so caught up in ideas of dubious validity that they lose sight of the basic demands of human decency.
Whatever his native intelligence, Obama passes as being more judicious than I think he really is, based on his having picked up the technique, at which Clinton was also quite skilled, of seeming to listen attentively to other points of view—before going on with the party line anyway. The piece on the Le Cirque event showed Brooks quite taken in by this. But this is not so much a feature of intelligence as a technique of manipulation, especially where there is no evidence that anything Obama has listened to has changed his mind.
Going beyond the Obama context, liberals’ worship of apparent intelligence is a measure of how desperate they are to be thought smart and knowledgeable themselves. However, in my experience, many of them don’t really want to do the work.
In liberal circles, all it takes to be thought intelligent is to confirm existing liberal prejudices, if possible with a bit of style, or some new argument. In this smug and complacent crowd, itself the epitome of the bourgeois vulgarity they imagine they oppose, no heavy lifting is required. Brooks fit in very nicely with this at Le Cirque.
Alan Levine writes:
It is an interesting reflection of David Brooks’ concerns that in the October 10 NY Times he found it deplorable that certain elites, notably lawyers and investment bankers, support the Democrats rather than the Republicans.
I suspect the rest of us would find the fact that those two groups oppose the Republicans the first reassuring news about the GOP in a long time.
Shrewsbury writes:
Now that William F. Buckley, Jr., has gone to his reward, the only columnist that Shrewsbury strenuously and absolutely avoids is the Brooks entity. Of Buckley’s columns, Shrewsbury once wrote, “Read two paragraphs, and lose the will to live. His sonorous compilations of absolutely nothing read like an absurd computer-generated pastiche of the work of an author excruciatingly orotund and gaseous in the original.” But the emanations of Brooks are far worse. In Brooks’s work, as in the work of no other publicist, does Shrewsbury notice a whiff of actual, for want of a better word, evil. This has puzzled him, and he can explain it only as a result of the sense one gets from the writings of the Brooks entity that he knows he is lying—that he is, in short, an Obama of the op-ed page, appearing to be and saying whatever he has to say in order to get for David Brooks everything that David Brooks wants to get, the rest of the world be damned.
People are worried that the Negroes will riot if Obama loses. They don’t ask themselves what they will do if he wins. Shrewsbury sez: If he loses they may riot for a day and a night; if he wins, they will riot for four years.
This election has less a feeling of elections past and more the feeling of a suave but totalitarian coup d’etat: the iron curtain of the media’s utter refusal to look into Obama’s past or policies, the frenetic and apparently ubiquitous efforts at vote fraud, the Nuremberg rallies and personality cult, etc.
Shrewsbury continues:
And suppose the Obamanation wins, let’s say in a near-landslide with 55 percent of the vote. Since the Gadarean-swine media is unanimously convinced that any decent, rational human being could not do other than vote for Obama, that would force the conclusion that 45 percent of the American electorate remains “racist.” Thus, so far from proving that America is no longer a “racist” country, Obama’s election with only 55 percent of the vote will in fact underline the need for the Fairness Doctrine, diversity training, massive re-education programs, continual holding of white people’s feet to the fire, even more strident mass-media propaganda, etc., etc. Only when he wins 100 percent of the vote can we know that racism is entirely extirpated here. And, of course, practically that can only happen when the white middle and working classes have been utterly eradicated—at least culturally, but maybe not just culturally.
It is because the Obamanation will have a virtually totalitarian control over the media, will have the bureaucracy entirely in lockstep with him, and will be appointing hundreds of vile bezonians to federal judgeships, that Shrewsbury cannot agree with Mr. Auster that his victory is preferable to a McCain victory. (And indeed, that Shrewsbury should disagree with Der Austermeister is a certain sign that we are approaching the end-times.)
LA replies:
The media are always saying, “If Obama wins it shows America has left her racism behind her. If not, not.” But no one ever has broken this down as Shrewsbury has just done. If 51 percent against Obama means America is still racist, and if 51 percent for Obama means America is no longer racist, then in the latter case 49 percent of America is still racist. There’s no purgation, no relief from our racism at all.
If Shrewsbury feels I am wrong on the election, he should feel free to argue against my position as much as he likes. At the same time, apart from my stated preference, I hope Shrewsbury is aware that I have been posting a great deal that is very critical of Obama.
Shrewsbury’s prediction of what happens in an Obama presidency makes me think this. It’s true that Obama is mildmannered and non-threatening. But one thing we know he’s good at, and that is organizing, whether community organizing, or organizing a campaign. If he becomes president, he will be good at organizing the government, as Shrewsbury has said: filling the bureaucracy and the judgeships with his people, and having the media prevent any real scrutiny of what he is up to . This is something to be thought about.
Shrewsbury replies:
“I hope Shrewsbury is aware that I have been posting a great deal that is very critical of Obama….”
Are you kiddin’ me? One cannot live without at least a little sanity, and Shrewsbury visits VFR obsessively, like a rat hitting a bar that gives him a little jolt of cocaine. Well, perhaps not the most apropos metaphor, but you get the picture….
John Hagan writes:
You can add Christopher Buckley (son of WFB) to the list with David Brooks. He has an article at Tina Brown’s new web magazine, The Daily Beast: “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama”.
LA replies:
I stopped reading the article when he referred to Kathleen Parker as “superb and very dishy.” Are we supposed to take seriously an article purporting to explain his preference for president, after he stops to tell us about which women he finds attractive?
“Hmm, I really like my National Review colleague Kathleen Parker, what a dish … Now, to get back to the reasons I think Barack Obama ought to be president of the United States…”
John Hagan replies:
This Buckley has always been a nonentity. I don’t get NR any longer, so I did not know he was even writing for the paper edition.
LA replies:
Funny, in drafting my last e-mail to you, I called him a nonentity, then deleted the word, because I thought it was too harsh. But then you called him one. I guess it was just destiny that one or the other of us was going to call him that.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 08, 2008 08:52 PM | Send
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