Plasma Pool

On November 3, 2008, the day before Barack Hussein Obama was elected president of the United States, David Brooks of The New York Times uses his column to remind Obama’s supporters that, Hey, guys, just because He’s probably gonna win, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to handle the opportunity history has handed you. In fact, you probably can’t. We “smart young liberals,” Brooks warns, are about to “meet a stone-cold scarcity that [we] do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.” Brooks’s pessimism about attempting massive reform in the midst of an economic disaster has been widely discussed and dismissed, largely because it offers no substantive alternative solution to the problems America faces. As a young economist who works in a U.S. department directly confronting the economic crisis puts it, “Brooks seems to disregard the fact that this moment of falling back to earth is exactly the time to embark on the next set of big domestic plans—health care, new financial architecture, energy independence”—which are, of course, the precise things Brooks himself argues that we must, as a country, immediately address. Brooks never acknowledges, much less offers any sort of explanation for, the myriad contradictions of his outlook.

Nonetheless, as popular, nationally syndicated, conservative political columnists go, Brooks is perhaps as intelligent and rational as it gets, sentence-to-sentence, reliably crafting smooth, logical arguments that tend to hang together well and avoid the paranoia, politicking and intermittent sociopathy that characterize the diatribes of many of his conservative colleagues. His friendly PBS NewsHour sparring with left-leaning syndicated columnist Mark Shields is informative, insightful, and refreshingly impartial. All of this is good and rare. Brooks is truly, in many respects, a credit to his profession.

His arguments, though, too often collapse under their own grandiose weight, unsupported by the evidence he presents, if he presents any. In his column of November 3, for instance, only a single piece of hard evidence even purports to undergird his claim—and it’s a tangentially relevant truism: “As Robert J. Samuelson writes in his forthcoming book, The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath, ‘Already, Americans face far more claims on their incomes than can be easily met.’” Brooks really needed to cite Samuelson for this? This isn’t common knowledge? Furthermore, how, precisely, does a blasé economic prognostication (one that could have been made just as well by a little girl whose father suddenly stops buying her a Snickers bar every Friday) serve as evidence of young smart liberals’ ineptness?¹ Before and after this bit from Samuelson Brooks offers a parade of truisms of his own, reminding us first that reform is difficult, then that the economy is in trouble and will get worse:

Raised in prosperity, favored by genetics, these young meritocrats will have to govern in a period when the demands on the nation’s wealth outstrip the supply. They will grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices. They will have to make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession. They will have to struggle to keep their promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, pass an expensive health care plan and all the rest. [...]

In the next few years, the nation’s wealth will either stagnate or shrink. The fiscal squeeze will grow severe. There will be fiercer struggles over scarce resources, starker divisions along factional lines. The challenge for the next president will be to cushion the pain of the current recession while at the same time trying to build a solid fiscal foundation so the country can thrive at some point in the future.

Most of this, with some nips and tucks, is, like Samuelson’s statement, quite true. But in what way, precisely, is it evidence for the notion that “smart young liberals” will be unable to cope with American challenges? At best, this is a list of estimations of the performance of particular economic metrics in an ambiguous, abstract future. It’s not an argument for anything. It could be an argument, but Brooks hasn’t done his work. He’s pointed some stuff out, then, later, made some (probably pretty good) guesses about what that stuff might do later.

We find a similar lack of attention to intellectual detail in the way Brooks conceives of and formulates his (accurate) claim that “smart young liberals” don’t have “a plan.” Of course they don’t. “They” have, instead, many interrelated, overlapping, and competing “plans,” most of which probably don’t exist yet; plans that will, one hopes, coalesce their architects into the beginnings of productive progressive political coalition. A plan of the sort Brooks wishes for is a pipe dream—especially a plan from the left, whose leading minds, as Brooks knows, tend to disagree far more so than those of the right, thanks largely to institutional structures that discourage or prohibit conservative dissent.

Brooks also makes no attempt to explain why smart young conservatives, should McCain have won, would so assuredly have been able to successfully confront the challenges he says will cripple liberals. Indeed, he exploits the near-certainty that Obama will win to avoid addressing young conservatives at all; had the election been predicted to be closer, Brooks could not have easily spent his column the day before laying out liberals’ doomed prospects with such certainty, in the future tense, without addressing his exclusion of smart young conservatives, who presumably would still have wanted a crack at governing, should McCain-Palin have won. Perhaps Brooks leaves this unaddressed because he takes for granted that the smart young conservatives of a McCain-victory future would have been guided by Brooks’s own Burkean, small-government, pragmatic conservatism, rather than by the corporatist and religious fanatics currently directing the American conservative movement—and so, in Brooks’s mind, would be likely to do just fine, and thus would require no mention.

But as Brooks well knows, should McCain have won, conservatives would have had to “grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices” and “make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession” as surely as liberals will have to. And although McCain’s “promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, [and] pass an expensive health care plan” were not as extensive or strident as Obama’s, had McCain won and not delivered, young conservatives and their ideological descendants would have eventually had to wrestle with those problems, too, either through bureaucratic politics, or—should they have waited too long to address healthcare, the dying planet, and an economy plagued by systemic inequality—through natural or human violence, or both.

Brooks offers, indeed, no evidence whatsoever to support thrust of his argument on November 3. He makes no attempt to explain how or why young liberals are supposed to be so thoroughly unprepared for the grave tasks that lie before them. Brooks’s arguments could be made with tangible evidence, but Brooks chooses not to make them. Predictions of failure or difficulty are fine, but they must be either solidly premised in fact or accompanied by a convincing argument for why, despite the lack of an argument based in fact, we should consider the author’s words worthy of our attention in the first place. For Brooks to wag his metaphorical finger at we upstart liberal gen-X, -Y, and -Zers for a supposed lack of rigorous thought while himself making a shoddy argument is hypocritical, condescending, and naïve. He ultimately deals too much in generalization and speculation dressed up as analysis for us rely on him for much more than his felicitous column-writing and his measured, often astute political commentary. Running on a paper’s op-ed page does not relieve him of the responsibility to support his opinion with facts. Who does Brooks think he is, George Will?

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1. I mean no offense to Samuelson, whose book I am acquainted with only through Brooks.