David Brooks and Pottery Barn Imperialism

One of the reasons I continue to read David Brooks is that he is often unintentionally revealing. Since he is, I think, quite sincere, he does not indulge in clever subterfuge in making his arguments. Thus he sometimes lays bare what otherwise remains hidden behind what Andrew Sullivan last week (ironically) called "noble lies."

In his June 13 column, Brooks tries to lay the blame for Iraq's current travails at the foot of Barack Obama. Before American troops left in 2011, he writes:

American diplomats rode herd on Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to restrain his sectarian impulses. American generals would threaten to physically block Iraq troop movements if Maliki ordered any action that seemed likely to polarize the nation.

After U.S. troops left, he writes:

Almost immediately things began to deteriorate. There were no advisers left to restrain Maliki’s sectarian tendencies. The American efforts to professionalize the Iraqi Army came undone.

Brooks never acknowledges the obvious (though unstated) assumption behind all of this: that Iraq could not be expected to function without the United States. It seems that Nuri al-Maliki (hand-picked by George W. Bush in 2007, by the way) bears no responsibility for indulging his "sectarian impulses" (and note that Maliki is ruled by "impulse," not thought or calculation), and the Iraqi army bears no responsibility for not being professional. It is all due to the absence of Americans, who of course, know best.

Brooks says, quite without irony, that "Iraq is in danger of becoming a non-nation." It never occurs to him that a state that--according to him--cannot function without American diplomats riding herd and American generals threatening its leader might already be a "non-nation."

Without knowing it, Brooks embraces an imperial role for the United States. It was America's job to control the Iraqi government, make it do the right thing. The United States should have stayed in Iraq for as long as it took. Leaving Iraq was "American underreach."

Brooks also embraces the reflexive American-centric mindset far too common on both the left and the right in the United States: the idea that whatever happens abroad happens because of something the United States either did or did not do. An incorrect American policy of withdrawal led to this state of affairs. It necessarily follows that whatever is going on in Iraq now can be fixed by the correct American policy.

Neither of those things is true. It is an illusion that Americans cherish because they think it gives them control over a chaotic world.

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 broke Iraq. Iraqis thus far have not been able to put it back together. Maybe they never will. The lesson to be learned from that, however, is not what Brooks would have us believe: "The dangers of American underreach have been lavishly and horrifically displayed."

In the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, Colin Powell allegedly talked about the so-called "Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it." The true lesson of Iraq is this: that American military intervention can easily break a country. It does not follow that American military intervention can just as easily make a country. Having disastrously bungled in breaking Iraq, Brooks would now have the United States once again bungle in trying to make it.

What the United States must "own" is not the state of Iraq, but the responsibility for breaking that state. Those are not the same thing. Responsibility begins with not making the situation worse by repeating the original mistake.

David Brooks, it seems, never learned that lesson. One hopes Barack Obama has.

Fear Can Be Productive, Fearlessness Destructive

There is something different happening in this economic downturn. It's not just the fact that the recovery has been stubbornly slow, but the political response to it. For the first time in modern American history, conservatives have no fear of the social consequences of economic distress.

This is an unprecedented situation, and a dangerous one. It has turned one of the two political parties into an uncompromising, extremist faction blinded by ideology.

In his column in the New York Times last Friday, David Brooks argues that Republicans today are not extreme, they just have a different viewpoint: "many Republicans have now come to the conclusion that the welfare-state model is in its death throes." Democrats, on the other hand, fail to see the writing on the wall and are simply re-arranging the deck chairs on the old Titanic.

The behavior of today's Republican Party is a problem for those like Brooks who see themselves as responsible conservatives. No reasonable person wants to defend the people who still question where the president was born, or the people in Michigan who put a sign saying "Obama Presidential Library" on a bullet-hole pocked outhouse last week, or even legislators who are willing to take the government to the brink of default.

So Brooks ignores that kind of embarrassing extremism and focuses instead on this big-picture "viewpoint" that he clearly views as much more intellectually respectable. The problem is this: the very viewpoint he identifies is also an extremist one.

Brooks implicitly suggests that the perception of extremism is due to the extremity of the situation: we are at a turning point in world history: the "welfare-state model" is dying. I would respond that we are now seeing the domestic economic and political consequences of a real turning point in world history that came over twenty years ago: the death of communism.

The limited welfare state in this country came into being as a response to two great crises of American capitalism--the depression of the 1890s and the Great Depression of the 1930s. What we call the "welfare state" was initially the product of two large movements that followed those economic calamities: the Progressivism of the early 20th century and the New Deal.

In both cases, intelligent American political leaders had one central insight: the only way to preserve American capitalism from the threat of revolution was to reform it, to moderate it, to curb its worst excesses. As Theodore Roosevelt put it in 1912:

There is urgent necessity of applying both common sense and the highest ethical standard to this movement for better economic conditions among the mass of our people if we are to make it one of healthy evolution and not one of revolution.

Without reform, revolution was inevitable. The true conservative, TR knew, was a reformer.

The reformers of both eras knew there was something worse out there as a possibility: the specter of communism. That radical ideology gave disgruntled workers an alternative that promised a more just and equitable society. The wisest of the capitalists understood the threat this ideology represented, and more importantly, they knew that the only way to preserve capitalism was to reform and limit it. On some level, they were scared--but this was the good kind of scared, the kind that sees a real threat and responds to it rationally and reasonably, producing something better.

The result was a regulatory system that began modestly under TR with legislation like the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Hepburn Act (which empowered the Interstate Commerce Commission so that it could effectively regulate the railroad industry). Under FDR, the result was Social Security and unemployment insurance, both of which were designed (at least in part) to prevent future economic downturns from spiraling out of control. The New Deal also saw the creation of the SEC to regulate Wall Street and the Glass-Steagall Act to regulate the banks.

The result of all of this reform was the emergence of the United States as the great economic powerhouse of the mid-to-late 20th century.

What is different in this latest crisis of capitalism is that capitalists today are not scared of the "mass of our people." Ever since the collapse of the Soviet empire and communism 20 years ago, American conservatives have had no fear of social unrest, at home or abroad. They believe that there is no alternative for frustrated workers, so these reforms of the 20th century are no longer needed. They can turn back the clock on reforms they never really liked, ones they'd only grudgingly accepted as necessary to preserve social peace.

With nothing to fear, they have spent the last 20 years trying to undermine the regulatory state and the limited welfare state. They've deregulated the financial industries, repealed Glass-Steagal. They've repeatedly cut taxes to "starve the beast." They've encouraged the growing income disparity that has left the middle and lower classes stagnant or declining while the wealthiest accumulate ever-greater shares of the national wealth.

And when as a result it all came crashing down in 2008, they blamed not the tax cuts, not the increasing concentration of wealth at the very top, not the deregulation, not the banks, not the markets. Instead, they blamed the unions, people on unemployment, recipients of public assistance, government workers. The people they no longer feared, the people they've long seen as impediments to even greater profits and concentrations of wealth.

The Republican Party has, for the last three years, acted like people who think they hold all the cards. They don't need to compromise. The worse the economy gets, the better it is for them politically, the easier it becomes to scapegoat the government and administer the final death blows to the welfare state. They are not afraid.

Unlike smart conservatives in earlier ages, today's conservatives see no reason to curb the excesses of capitalism. Far from it. They rail against "Obamacare" despite the fact that it retains (and arguably subsidizes) the private insurance system and is dominated by conservative ideas of health insurance reform. They whine that the modest financial industry reforms of the Dodd-Frank Act mark the end of freedom.

More cruelly, rather than trying to take the edge off in tough times, they seem intent on sharpening the pain inflicted by the failings of the economic system.

Feeling no fear, seeing no need to reform, they are pressing what they see as their advantages--not only do they refuse to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, they are pushing for further cuts in tax rates that are already unusually low. Rather than bolster the protections against the vicissitudes of the economic system (like unemployment insurance and food stamps), they seek to diminish or remove them. Rather than make concessions to unions to help workers, they try to destroy them.

The argument (such as it is) that Brooks makes is that we cannot afford the "welfare-state model" anymore. In this perverse vision, government is so big that it has strangled capitalism (fact--there are 500,000 fewer federal government employees today than there were in 1980, though there are 82 million more Americans). Now the welfare state is too expensive, we can't afford it, it has outlived its usefulness, so now it has to go.

But the historical reality is different. Yes, undeniably, the modern welfare state would be impossible without the wealth creation of capitalism. But it was also the emergence of the regulatory state and the welfare state that made possible the continued growth of capitalism after its near self-destruction in the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s.

Without adequate regulation, without government policies to moderate its impact, free market capitalism produces socially destabilizing and destructive swings of boom and bust.

Smart conservatives in America's past knew that. Today, a precious few like David Frum occasionally try to pull conservatism back in that direction (e.g., reminding them that opposition to "Obamacare" is not enough, they need an alternative that addresses the problem of the uninsured).

But mostly, people like David Brooks, people who should know better, enable modern conservatism's short-sightedness by elevating it to a respectable "viewpoint" and ignoring its extremism.

It is extreme. It is short-sighted. It is stupid. And worst of all, it is self-destructive.

It used to be that conservatives were wise enough to fear extremism. Today, they embrace it.

Newtpocalypse Now

Just as it seemed like we were about to see the Season Finale of the 2012 Republican race, we got a rerun. Newt is back. Again.

The big question is "why?"

I would like to think that Gingrich's victory was due to the fundamental questions he raised in his attacks on Romney's record at Bain Capital. But everyone who saw the two debates last week knows that it was something else, something much more base and disturbing. Newt didn't win this primary with economic populism.

If Gingrich's victory in South Carolina on Saturday was in fact a Tea Party victory--and it is repeated elsewhere--then we will have to put to rest the idea that that movement is just about taxes and spending. It will be the culture war all over again.

It was, I think, extremely revealing to see Gingrich in victory. For one brief moment at the start, he actually seemed, as he said, "humbled." It didn't last long.

Within minutes, Gingrich seemed to forget he no longer had to demagogue for votes in South Carolina. But that's because the demagoguery he used here during the last week was nothing new. It was vintage Gingrich. You see, he's on a mission to save America.

As I've noted previously, Newt Gingrich is a child of the 1960s. His is not the 1960s of the civil rights movement, the war on poverty, anti-war demonstrations, and the sexual revolution, however, but of the opposition to all of those things.

I thought the most telling lines from his speech were those that clearly referred to Newt's pining for a bygone, pre-1960s, era. He unambiguously dated the start of the decline he proposes to reverse. He attacked the "elites who have been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American and become some kind of other system."

The decline began, in other words, in the early 1960s. In Newt's world, the progressive changes of all the years since amount to an attack on--or even the destruction of--what he calls "the America that we love." The proponents of those changes, he sneered, don't like "classical America."

(Somehow, this does not constitute "dividing" Americans in his book--since, of course, those "others" don't love "the America that we love" and thus are not real Americans.)

This is unabashedly reactionary politics. For all his dabbling in futurism, candidate Gingrich has his gaze fixed firmly on the past.

Nothing Gingrich said better demonstrated how out of touch with modern America he is than his extended ode to the diversity of the current Republican field. "We produce leadership from an amazing range of places," he said. "I watched tonight the fine speeches of the other three candidates on our side and I was struck by how much they reflected the openness of the American system.... You look at the four of us and you see that anyone can come from a wide range of backgrounds."

Think about that for a moment. A 68-year-old white man with a net worth in the millions of dollars, looked around him, saw three other fairly wealthy white men also running for president, and saw diversity, a "wide range of backgrounds." In what world is that true? In the America of the 1950s, of course.

Certainly, there are differences among the four--geographic, religious, economic, etc. Only Romney was born to wealth and privilege. But compare that to the last primary contest in the Democratic Party, that came down to a battle between a white woman and a black man, neither of whom would have been able to vote 100 years ago. That's what diversity looks like in modern America. And Newt's coded message to his supporters was that is not "the America that we love."

The rest of the speech, as others have noted, was a long list of resentments against various kinds of "elites." If it weren't so despicable, I could almost admire how effortlessly Gingrich appeals to bigotry without resorting to the overtly objectionable terms that the progress of the last half century has driven from polite political discourse.

He doesn't use racial epithets, he calls President Obama a "food stamp president" who wants "your children to have a life of dependence." He doesn't call him a communist, he says Obama isn't inspired by American exceptionalism but by "the radicalism of Saul Alinsky" and the ideas of "people who don't like the classical America." And, of course, Obama has "extremist left-wing friends in San Francisco."

This is not about taxes and spending. Those topics were barely mentioned by Gingrich. He has no real answers to our economic woes, other than the tired Republican bromides of cutting taxes and abolishing regulation. So, in the grand old reactionary tradition, he rails against imaginary threats like the "growing anti-religious bigotry of our elites."

That line worked in South Carolina, but will it work outside of South Carolina? Perhaps this state will prove an aberration, and Gingrich's reactionary culture war will not play elsewhere. The answer will be telling.

No doubt, part of Gingrich's strength was due to Romney's weakness. Back in November, before the Republican debate here at Wofford, a CBS News reporter asked me about the contest here:

"If you look at politicians who've done well in South Carolina historically - Strom Thurmond, Jim DeMint - generally speaking, they're people that at least the public perceives as straight shooters," Byrnes said, "I don't think a lot of people feel comfortable that they know who [Romney] is."

I think the results Saturday reflect that fact. Romney, bless his heart, tries to tap some of the same cultural anger and resentment that Gingrich does. Saturday night, he again said that this election is a fight "for the soul of America." But to most voters here (and elsewhere, I suspect), Romney comes across as someone without a soul--or, perhaps, as someone who would sell his soul for the presidency.

By contrast, when Gingrich turned his wrath on Juan Williams and (in the disgusting words of supporters here in South Carolina) "put him in his place," he seemed all too sincere and real.

"I articulate the deepest held values of the American people," Newt solemnly intoned. For anyone remotely familiar with the facts of Gingrich's life, that assertion was jaw-dropping. "Yes, you just don't live them!" is the only reasonable response.

But as I noted last month, Gingrich sees himself as a world-historical figure. His utter shamelessness comes from that conviction. Gingrich holds himself to a different standard. "It doesn't matter what I do," he told his second wife when she called him on his hypocrisy. "People need to hear what I have to say."

He believes he is above conventional morality, because only he can save civilization. He truly believes that. That conviction served him well in South Carolina, particularly when contrasted to Romney's self-evident falseness.

The irony is that the combination of "authenticity" and willingness to place ends over means was typical of the '60s leftist radicals Newt disdains. As George Will nicely put it, Gingrich "would have made a marvelous Marxist." Tactically, he is one.

Gingrich's portrait of Obama is a fantasy, a left-wing mirror image of Gingrich himself. The Manichean divide Newt presented Saturday night exists only in his mind--because, for him, it must exist. His reactionary ideology demands it. He needs Obama to be the embodiment of everything he despises, so that he can save America from disaster.

Last week, David Brooks observed: "I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return."

Gingrich's speech last night was the primal scream of that receding roar, and his current rise in the polls suggests that he and what he stands for will not go quietly.

The Impending Crisis

Washington, D.C. is full these days of talk of impending crisis and "grand bargains." For an American historian, those terms inevitably are reminiscent of the great compromises of the pre-Civil War era, all of which had something to do with the great divisive issue of the day, slavery. Can those crises tell us anything about today's events?

At first glance, the answer would seem to be "no." Slavery divided the country along sectional, not party, lines. But there are aspects of those crises that do provide some insight into the Republican, or more accurately, Tea Party approach to the debt limit.

And that pattern involves raising issues of policy to matters of dogmatic principle.

Earlier this week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that if the Republicans do not take the deal that the Democrats are currently offering, it will mean that they are no longer a "normal" party. Yesterday, David Frum argued that the

coming vote [on the debt ceiling] is one where almost every House Republican will want to be on the losing side. But if they all get their wish – then they win. And of course … the country and the world loses, and loses horribly.

This idea of a compromise where everyone wants to be on the “losing side” is reminiscent of the Compromise of 1850, which preceded the Civil War by little more than 10 years. The difficulty of resolving the issues in 1850 were a harbinger of the utter inability to find a compromise a decade later.

The mindset today is similar to the one that prevailed in 1850.  This morning on NPR's "On Point," Major Garrett of the National Journal said that the idea now is for a "too big to fail" or "big bang" deal; i.e., if everything is included, if all outstanding issues are addressed, then members of Congress will have to vote for it.

That was how Congress initially approached the problems of 1850.  The "Great Compromiser" Henry Clay, leader of a special Senate committee, proposed what was called an "Omnibus" bill.  According to James McPherson, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, "this package was designed to attract a majority from both sections by inducing each to accept the parts it did not like in order to get the parts it wanted."

It sounded like a good idea. The problem was, "as the legislators labored through the heat of a Washington summer" (sound familiar?), most congressmen "signified their intention to vote against the package in order to defeat the parts they opposed."  Clay's Omnibus bill was defeated.

It is not a stretch to see the same thing happening to any "too big to fail" deal today. Republican leaders like Speaker John Boehner have been saying that a deal that includes any increase in tax revenue cannot pass the House. Minority leader Nancy Pelosi yesterday reacted strongly against any agreement that cut Social Security or Medicare.

So the prospects are not bright.

But there was a Compromise of 1850. Perhaps that holds out some path forward? Sadly, probably not. 

After his bill was voted down on July 31, Clay left Washington in despair, fearing that the failure of his bill would mean disunion. Stephen Douglas, as McPherson puts it, decided to "pick up the pieces" and pass the bill--"in pieces." He divided the Omnibus into five parts, and then assembled ad hoc majorities for each of the five parts. This allowed most members of Congress to vote against the parts they did not like, while voting for those they did like.

In 1850, there were enough legislators willing to oppose the pull of sectional loyalty to make compromise possible. It is questionable whether such a strategy could prevail today. As stunning as it may be to say, today's uncompromising attitude, particularly coming from Tea Party types, seems even greater than the sectional stubbornness of 1850.

The next few weeks should tell us whether we are in worse shape than we were in 1850. Most Republicans in Congress (41 in the Senate and 236 in the House) have signed Grover Norquist's pledge not to raise any tax ever. Perhaps they will revolt, as some did in the recent vote on ethanol subsidies, and show themselves to be a "normal" party. But if not, there will be no "grand bargain."

[In my next post, I will examine the similarities between the Tea Party's demonization of compromise and the mindset of the leading opponent of compromise in 1850, John C. Calhoun.]

Not So Enlightened

I try to like David Brooks. I really do.

Almost alone among the columnists of the New York Times, Brooks makes a consistent effort to incorporate serious scholarship into his pieces, and I value that. Sometimes I learn something from it.

The problem is almost always what Brooks does with the ideas he introduces. This past Tuesday's column is a case in point. Most of the column is a reasonable discussion of two branches of the Enlightenment, the French and Scottish (or British, as Brooks also calls it). Brooks explains that the former was more wedded to the supremacy of reason, while the latter "emphasized its limits." Brooks cites a recent dissertation on the subject which highlights Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke as exemplars of the two views. He even nods to the important (but almost unknown among the American public) historiographical debate over whether the American Revolution was a true "revolution," noting that "Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or British Enlightenment," and that this question was "a bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton and it's a bone of contention today."

All of that is interesting and fairly presented. But then comes the final paragraph, which largely undoes whatever good Brooks has achieved: "The Scots were right and the French were wrong." So much for a reasoned discussion, so much for careful considerations of the strengths of each point of view. For Brooks, it has to be a categorical statement of right and wrong. You can check your shades of grey at the door.

Brooks is certainly entitled to prefer Burke to Paine, and Hamilton to Jefferson, and what he calls the Scottish Enlightenment's resulting "style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance." But in his blanket dismissal of Paine and Jefferson (and everyone else associated with the French Enlightenment) as simply "wrong," Brooks undermines his claims to intellectual seriousness.

Let's take a specific case to show the silliness of this binary simplicity. The great intellectual battle fought between Paine and Burke was over the French Revolution. Paine wrote his classic Rights of Man in response to Burke's equally classic Reflections on the Revolution in France. Conservatives credit Burke with anticipating the radical excesses of the Reign of Terror years before they happened, and see in that perceptive insight a vindication of his general conservatism. Fair enough.

But let's look at other conclusions Burke reached from the philosophical precepts Brooks so admires. Burke supported the established Anglican Church (a status quo that denied Catholics the right to vote or hold office until 1829), as well as hereditary monarchy and aristocracy. In defending monarchy, Burke states: "No experience has taught us that in any other course or method than that of an hereditary crown our liberties can be perpetuated and preserved." Paine responds simply: "Would we make any office hereditary that required wisdom and abilities to fill it?" Burke's reliance on tradition blinded him to the possibility that monarchy was not the best or only system for protecting liberty, while Paine's belief that the fact that "something has existed for ages tells us nothing about its value" led him to apply reason and find monarchy wanting. Whatever Burke's virtues, history's verdict gives this one to Paine.

It is worth noting that Hamilton largely agreed with Burke on this point. At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton proposed that the president and senators should be elected for life. In private, he wrote that he actually preferred a hereditary monarch: "He ought to be hereditary and to have so much power that it will not be his interest to risk much to acquire more." This side of Hamilton, a product of the philosophy Brooks so admires, is rarely cited by modern conservatives who often act as if Hamilton is the only one of the founders whose political thought is worth studying. In this case, we're lucky there were others like Madison and Jefferson who knew that monarchy had no place in the new American republic.

The point is not that Burke and Hamilton are not worthy of study or even admiration. Both are. But so are Paine and Jefferson. Brooks' blithe dismissal of the latter as simply "wrong" shuts down discussion. The irony is that Brooks is trying in his column to denounce the "polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics." While I agree with Brooks that there is too much demagoguery today, his conclusion that one branch of the Enlightenment is right while the other is wrong has more in common with the "Jacobin style" he derides than the Burkean "modesty" he extols.

The reason "Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or British Enlightenment" is that the answer is not one or the other, but both. If Brooks were truly interested in intellectual inquiry instead of scoring a quick political point, he'd see that the enemy is not so much "abstraction" as the simplistic, binary thinking in which he engages when he dismisses the French Enlightenment as "wrong."

The New Left and the Tea Party

David Brooks' latest attempt at historical comparison suffers from the same superficiality that too often dominates his writing. The Tea Party movement, he tells us, is much like the New Left of the 1960s. That's only true if you rewrite the history of the 1960s.

Let's begin with the way Brooks uses the term "New Left." For him, it is a catch-all phrase, effectively meaning anyone who protested, marched, went to a concert, or got high. The New Left, he tells us, "was bohemian ... was motivated by war ... [and] went to Woodstock." If that's what Brooks thinks the New Left was, he really has no idea what he is talking about.

When I teach the history of the 1960s, one of the first things I make sure students understand is that the term "New Left" had a particular meaning, and that it isn't the stereotypical "hippy" identity that the title of this piece invokes.

The New Left was an explicitly political movement, whose birth is often traced to a political manifesto, the Port Huron Statement of 1962, which in turn was inspired by the work of the sociologist C. Wright Mills, especially his book, The Power Elite.

From the Port Huron statement's first sentence, it is clear that Brooks is wrong in painting the movement as "bohemian" rather than "bourgeois." It states: "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." In short, utterly middle class.

The New Left was motivated by war, in a sense, but Port Huron preceded escalation in Vietnam and was concerned with the general threat of nuclear annihilation. More generally, it reflected a sense of unease, a concern not that things were changing too fast, but that they were not changing fast enough: "Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear."

More specifically, it was motivated by the civil rights movement and sought to bring its ideals of non-violence and the pursuit of human dignity beyond that single cause to all American institutions. It was, at least initially, hopeful and idealistic. But eventually, as the Vietnam war escalated, and the nation became ever more divided, the New Left became increasingly Marxist in its orientation, with the most radical element, the Weather Underground, even advocating revolutionary violence. But through it all, its advocates were ever serious and engaged with politics.

By contrast, the people who were called "hippies" were more often representative of the counterculture, which, while its membership could sometimes overlap with the New Left, was not particularly political. The counterculture's inspiration came, not surprisingly, from cultural influences like the Beats of the 1950s (Jack Kerouac rather than C. Wright Mills). It found its inspiration in music, it was more concerned with social norms than government policies. These are the "bohemians" at Woodstock that Brooks is thinking of. These are the people who retreated in disillusionment to the mountains of Vermont to form communes; they are not the ones who took to the streets.

According to Brooks, "the core commonality" between the movements of the 1960s and today's Tea Party "is this: Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures." What Brooks is really describing here is populism, which goes back at least to Andrew Jackson and his fight against the "monster" national bank, and reached its heyday in the 1890s.

Whatever the New Left was, it wasn't populist. Populism is often reactionary, yearning for an idyllic past (usually one that that never really existed outside the realm of myth). The Tea Party movement seems in some ways to fit that description, with its explicit evocation of the American Revolution and pseudo-libertarian rejection of modern government and modern values. The New Left, by contrast, was explicitly forward-looking. Its goal was to create something self-consciously new, what it called "participatory democracy." It was predominantly a youth movement, while the Tea Party demographic tends to be more middle-aged.

Brooks is right about one thing: the Tea Party movement's radicalism is "anticonservative." It is, in fact, radically reactionary. What he misses in his insistence on the similarity between the New Left and the Tea Party movement is potentially the significant difference between the two: the former never had a realistic chance to control the Democratic Party. It was, in part, the failure of the anti-war movement to change even the Democratic Party's platform in 1968 to oppose the war in Vietnam that led some to advocate violence. By contrast, the Tea Party is making a concerted effort to take over today's Republican Party. The way that even relatively moderate GOP figures such as Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty have recently adapted their rhetoric to fit Tea Party expectations makes me doubt Brooks' conclusion that "the Tea Partiers will not take over the G.O.P." In some ways, they already have.

Student-Gladiators

David Brooks, as he too frequently does, takes an interesting idea and reduces it to trite banalities. Yes, there are some virtues in big time college sports. But there is a price paid, by the vast majority of the players, that makes the analogy to Roman gladiators all-too-fitting.

Teaching at a small college that manages to balance team sports with academic quality, I bristle at the way Brooks glosses over the abysmal academic record of so many big-time university sports programs. The vast majority of Wofford's athletes will never play professional sports after graduation. In that, they are much like their big-time counterparts. But unlike too many of them, Wofford grads will have had coaches who care about academics, and virtually all of the student-athletes will leave the college with a degree that will equip them for a life outside sports.

It would have been nice if Brooks, while effusing over the "common emotional experiences" of the fans, had given a thought to the student-athletes in the arena.