Moderates' Story is Bad, and So is David Brooks' Column

David Brooks: columnist, weed expert and Iraq War genius (Getty Images via TheWrap)

The first set of Democratic Party debates are over, and we're already just about drowning in bad-faith concern-trolling from anti-Trump conservatives and "moderates" about how the Democratic Party is at risk of moving too far left. And now one of the weirdest of the #NeverTrump-ers, David Brooks, has offered a creative new take: not just that "moderation" is smarter and safer from an electoral perspective or even a practical perspective, but that it's actually more exciting.

David Brooks, for anyone unaware, is a distinguished conservative mind who has gifted us with articles like "The Collapse of the Dream Palaces" (in which he memorably writes, in the Year of Our Lord 2003, that "the war in Iraq is over") and "Weed: Been There. Done That." Naturally, with talents and insight like that, he's had a long tenure at the nation's Paper Of Record, the New York Times, where the piece in question comes from. But I do think the issues worth discussing go beyond this one piece, and David Brooks, and the Times, which is a point I'll come back to toward the end of this post. For now, let's start with Brooks' new gem.

"American progressives have a story to tell," Brooks begins,

and they are not afraid to tell it. In this story global capitalism is a war zone. Free trade is a racket. Big business and big pharma are rapacious villains that crush the common man.

Ok. Fair enough, so far.

In this context you need a government prepared for war. You need a government fired by economic nationalism, willing to play trade hardball against our foes.

Aaand we've already gone of the rails. No, progressives do not want "economic nationalism" that "play[s] hardball against our foes." While neocons like Brooks might not be able to think outside the framework of "America and her enemies," any good progressive is. The reason trade deals like NAFTA and the (proposed but never ratified) Trans-Pacific Partnership are bad is not because they benefit China, or Mexico, or any other country; that's the Donald Trump narrative of why they're bad. The reality is not that they are designed to benefit one country, but that they're designed to benefit an international investor class at the expense of everybody else. Just look at who pushes for them and helps influence them (even while the proposed agreements are still kept secret from the public): corporate lobbyists! The problem with these "free trade" agreements is not that they put America under the power of other countries (they don't) but that they put average, working people in all the countries involved at the mercy of corporate behemoths by, for instance, restricting the governments' ability to enact environmental and labor regulations. The solution isn't protectionism or "economic nationalism," it's new trade agreements that are designed to benefit regular people and not giant corporations. But we're not even two paragraphs in with Brooks' piece, so we won't get too hung up on this point.

You need a centralized industrial policy to shift investment where it’s needed. You need a government that will protect you, control you and give you things: free college, free child care. As in any war, you want government that is centralized and paternalistic.

Again, no. The point of progressivism and leftism in general isn't to put everything under the power of some centralized government bureaucracy, it's to take power away from corporate bureaucracy and put it in the hands of the people. The fact that Brooks has already this badly misrepresented the ideology he's writing in opposition to should tell you how good the rest of this piece will be.

Moderates have a different story to tell, but in both parties moderates are afraid to tell it. Moderates are afraid to break from the gloom and carnage mind-set that populists like Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders insist on.

No they aren't! Does Joe Biden, perhaps the most "moderate" (read: right-wing) candidate in the Democratic field, seem afraid to promote his view of the world? And the conflation of Trump, Warren and Sanders under the label "populist" (as if there's some moral equivalence between demonizing immigrants on the one hand and calling for a higher top marginal tax rate on the other) is obscene, but also extremely typical.

But hope is warranted and must be displayed. In the moderate story, global capitalism is a challenge but also an opportunity field. Over the past genration more people have been lifted out of poverty than ever before. For the first time we have a mass global middle class. This opens up new opportunities, liberates masses of talent and leads to more creativity than ever before.

Brooks cites nothing to back up his sunny, optimistic view of global capitalism (which is currently plagued by increasing inequality and, oh right, the threat of the total collapse of human civilization because of climate change) so this doesn't merit too much response.

In the moderate story, government has a bigger role than before, but it is not a fighting, combative role. It is a booster rocket role. It is to give people the skills needed to compete and flourish in this open, pluralistic world. It is to give people a secure base, so they can go off and live daring adventures. It is to mitigate the downsides of change, and so people can realize the unprecedented opportunities. Statecraft is soul craft. Through the policies they choose, governments can encourage their citizens to become one sort of person or another. Progressives want to create a government caste that is powerful and a population that is safe but dependent. Moderates, by contrast, are trying to create a citizenry that possesses the vigorous virtues — daring, empowered, always learning, always brave.

As noted, Brooks isn't about to stop misrepresenting progressivism, but it's revealing how much he feels compelled to lie. What does it say that he thinks it necessary to imply progressives want to turn us all into weaklings suckling from the government teat, and that he doesn't acknowledge the role that unions, universal healthcare and free higher education could play in making people "daring, empowered, always learning, always brave"? I'll leave it to the reader to answer that question for themselves.

How to do that? First, learn from the Nordic countries. American progressives sometimes imagine that the Nordic countries are socialist wonderlands. They are not. The Nordic countries have strong social supports and also open free-market economies. In fact, they can afford to have strong welfare policies only because they have dynamic free-market economies.

True enough, which might be why they still have much more inequitable distributions of wealth than the average American thinks is fair, and why they haven't been immune from the problem of increasing inequality.

No Nordic country has a minimum wage law. According to a JPMorgan Chase report, Nordic countries are more open to free trade than the U.S. They have fewer regulations on business creation, fewer licensing regulations.

Yeah they don't have minimum wage laws because they're so highly unionized they don't need them. Union density in Denmark, for instance, is about two-thirds; in the US it's 11%. What's David Brooks' proposal to increase our union density by a factor of six? And whatever Brooks means by "fewer regulations," the fact remains that in Sweden, for example, employers are required to negotiate with unions before making personnel changes, organizational changes, etc.—and that unions typically choose one-third of the members of their companies' boards of directors. You know who proposed a law to implement a similar concept here, in the United States? Elizabeth Warren, one of the dirty populist progressives that Brooks is warning us against.

As Charles Lane pointed out recently in The Washington Post, most Nordic countries have zero estate tax. Nordic health plans require patient co-payments and high deductibles, in stark contrast to Bernie Sanders’s plan. The Nordic countries tried wealth taxes of the sort Elizabeth Warren is proposing, and all except Norway abandoned them because they were unworkable.

Yeah and Nordic countries also have some of the highest income tax rates in the world, which Brooks, again, conveniently leaves out. Also, while I guess it's a good sign in terms of the shifting Overton window when even David Brooks is saying we should emulate the Nordic countries' healthcare systems, he's once again leaving out some rather significant details. In Norway, for instance, hospital admissions and in-patient treatment are completely free; however, if you're having out-patient care you have a copayment—of about 15 dollars. And you'll really have to save up to afford the 35-dollar copayment for same-day surgery from a GP or a specialist. But I'm glad to see David coming out in favor of government-owned hospitals, which are a hallmark of Nordic healthcare systems.

The Nordic countries show that social solidarity and economic freedom are not opposite, but go hand in hand. That’s the general approach we want here.

Guess it's time to start raising taxes and rejuvenating the labor movement, then!

Second, never coddle. Progressives are always trying to give away free stuff. They reduce citizens to children on Christmas morning. For example, Warren and Sanders want to make public college free. But as common sense and recent research tells us, when you give people something free, they value it less. They are more likely to drop out when times get hard.

Hey, David, you know what else the Nordic countries all have? Free college. So much for emulating them. I knew that idea wouldn't last long in this column.

Moderates want to help but not infantilize. They want to help students finish college, but they want them to at least partly earn their way, to have skin in the game. They want to produce a country that is not full of passive recipients but audacious pioneers.

You know, some people might say that students who actually work to maintain good grades and graduate college are "earning their way" and shouldn't be asked to fork over money, on top of their hard academic work, to get a diploma. Good thing David Brooks and the Sensible Moderates know better than those clowns.

Third, drive decision-making downward. People become energetic, responsible adults by making decisions for themselves, their families and their communities. Moderates are always aiming to make responsibility, agency and choice as local as possible.

For example, moderates support child care tax credits so parents can decide if they want a day-care model or a parent-stays-home model. But Warren wants to make it hard for families to have choice. She supports only federally funded day care, effectively forcing families into federally funded programs, limiting their choice and making them wards of the system.

Oh boy, tax credits? I knew this was gonna be exciting but I might just explode! Also, you know who else has government-funded childcare? The frigging Nordic countries that David Brooks was saying we should emulate four paragraphs ago.

Fourth, bring on the world. International competition is more rigorous than national competition. Moderates think Americans can meet that test. Warren’s Green Manufacturing Plan would shield American companies from that competition when competing for government contracts. They wouldn’t have to be excellent, just American.

Yes, heaven forbid that the US government turn to American companies for contracts. The American working class is just doing so well already there's no need for their government to try to help make sure they have jobs or anything.

Fifth, ignite from below. Warren wants to centralize economic decisions, creating a Department of Economic Development — a top-down council of government dirigistes. Moderates emphasize tools that regular people can choose to build their own lives and maximize their own opportunities: wage subsidies, subsidies to help people move to opportunities, charter schools.

Newsflash, David: economic decision are already centralized, they just happen to be centralized in the boardrooms of the powerful companies that run the economy. And that's a problem that's only going to get worse as economic inequality increases, as it's been doing for decades. Oh, and charter schools and wage subsidies? Like I said, the excitement just never ends!

These are stark differences, different worldviews. So far in this campaign you’ve heard only one. But moderates have another story, and it is the better one.

Really? Because, based on this article, it actually sounds like it sucks. In fact, it doesn't seem like much of a story at all. And the idea that we've been deprived of our precious moderate voices even as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination is Joe Biden, a guy who's been bragging about his great working relationship with segregationists, is so absurd that only a New York Times columnist could actually believe it.

And that's the article. Another bunch of vapid drivel from a guy who's made a successful career out of being wrong all the time and who represents the views of about five rich, white Ivy League- or University of Chicago-educated dorks who have successfully rebranded themselves as the Principled Conservative Opposition to Donald Trump. Fire them all and give their columns to the first Trump-supporters you can pick off the street, I say, if you're so insistent on having "conservative voices" represented in media. At least that way we'd be hearing the perspective of a significant chunk of the country, and we wouldn't have to deal with gullible liberals thinking these concern-trolling grifters deserve any more attention than they've already gotten.

So what do we take from all of this? That David Brooks and those like him are just a bunch of idiots? Hardly. No, he knows what he's doing. Columns like this one aren't designed to actually engage with the arguments of progressivism or present a well-developed alternative. They're designed to let the people who get uncomfortable listening to Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders nod their heads and smile in agreement as they read their copy of the Times, feeling righteous, as they cling to an economic and political system that's careening toward utter disaster, and pooh-pooh any proposals to seriously reform it.

That is, of course, the social function of the Times and other outlets like it: to manufacture consent for the status quo among their elite audiences. So, coming to the broader point that I promised you at the beginning of this piece: as we go into this election, please, please do not let these people impact your vote. Whoever you vote for, at the very least, for the love of all things decent, don't be persuaded by these professional whiners no matter how much they bleat about "electability" or alienating swing voters or hilariously try, as in the column discussed here, to make their ideology seem inspiring or cool. They represent the broken status quo that gave us Trump, and Trump himself is a minor hiccup compared to the horrors we can look forward to if we follow David Brooks' advice and shun any "radical" change. To be blunt, we are running out of time, and we're as good as screwed if we don't act fast.