I don’t typically read David Brooks, but DougJ induced me to. And his most recent column is an interesting one indeed. He starts by blathering about how he doesn’t like memorials these days, which can’t just be the subject of the column because that would be something Andy Rooney would do, but rather is the hook into the main argument of the piece. I can see how the basic takeaway would be “the elites are restless,” as Brooks is their Tribune. But I’m not so sure that’s the takeaway. Take this quote:

Legitimate power is built on a series of paradoxes: that leaders have to wield power while knowing they are corrupted by it; that great leaders are superior to their followers while also being of them; that the higher they rise, the more they feel like instruments in larger designs. [...] Democratic followership is also built on a series of paradoxes: that we are all created equal but that we also elevate those who are extraordinary; that we choose our leaders but also have to defer to them and trust their discretion; that we’re proud individuals but only really thrive as a group, organized and led by just authority.

Brooks’s formulation here is that leaders are (not should be, but are, if I read him correctly) extraordinary people who are superior to us plebs, and they deserve our mainly uncritical support. This is not a shocking new concept for him, it’s basic neoconservatism. According to Bradley Thompson, the basic purpose of the public to neocons is merely to back great statesmen uncritically, in exchange for which we get the moral satisfaction of being part of The Nation. I have my issues with Thompson’s book, but Thompson’s argument is that neoconservatism is most definitely not an organic outgrowth of Western liberal thought, but instead is an alternately conscious and semi-conscious venture to subvert and roll back all that stuff, which is not only true, but obvious. Let me do some slight editing to his piece and tell me if it makes more sense (changes in bold):

The monarchy is built on a series of paradoxes: that kings have to wield power while knowing they are corrupted by it; that kings are superior to their subjects while also being of them; that the higher they rise, the more they feel like instruments in larger designs. The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials are about how to navigate those paradoxes.

These days many Americans seem incapable of thinking about these paradoxes. Those “Question Authority” bumper stickers no longer symbolize an attempt to distinguish just and unjust authority. They symbolize an attitude of opposing the monarchy.

[...]

Maybe before we can build great monuments to leaders we have to relearn the art of being a subject. Being a subject is also built on a series of paradoxes: that we are all created equal but that we also elevate those who are extraordinary by birth; that God chooses our leaders but we have to defer to them and trust their great and abundant discretion; that we’re proud individuals but only really thrive as a group, organized and led by the king.

I don’t know if America has a monarchy problem; it certainly has a subject problem.

Mind you, this doesn’t prove anything, but it’s incredible how easy those references fit in there, how easily you can turn this sort of argumentation into the something that made John Locke so fucking angry that he sat down and wrote two treatises in response to it. But that is essentially what neoconservatism is: reintroducing dormant and dead ideas with a few words changed so that people don’t just laugh at them. Brooks wants to restore the monarch/subject relationship as the normal one in the Western world, likely because that’s the only way his neocon pals would be able to get away with their grand theories of politics. But all this is profoundly un-American. A president is not superior to any other American, at least in theory. You can’t arrest the King, but you can arrest a president if they do something wrong. They hold no real power, it’s the public’s, and the president is merely the temporary caretaker of the office, as Reagan put it. The presidency was set up as a deliberate reaction to monarchy, in that it was (and is) a Constitutionally weak office that had to share power with other people. Brooks talks about Jefferson but has apparently never heard the widely-told story about how Jefferson delighted in being savaged by the opposition press, and saw it as a proof that he had succeeded in preventing the monarchy from taking hold. Deference is the opposite of what the man intended to be expressed toward him. I will grant that there has to be some level of trust for democracy to work–one has to assume that elected officials are doing their best (however imperfectly) to serve the country. We owe elected officials the ability to do their jobs, nothing more. And skepticism is actually good for democracy, as it leads to more scrutiny, while deference is often catastrophic–it let Bush explode the deficit during a decent economy, let Obama get away with civil liberties violations, etc. Brooks clearly envisions leaders overcoming corruption through character and sheer power of will, but that’s not often the case.

I do believe that most politicians are doing what they think is best for the country (again, however imperfectly). But what is clear at this point in our history is that their best simply hasn’t been good enough over the past decade, not by a long shot, but no matter what happens the same people remain atop the government, businesses, and media institutions that let it all happen. Within that timeframe we’ve launched a pointless, disastrous war in Iraq, watched a major American city sink beneath a flood, saw the global economy nearly go under due to hypercomplicated bond trading (which might still happen, BTW), and then had politicians terrified of doing what was necessary to shorten the recession. To a lesser extent, we had a debt ceiling standoff, too. I think it’s safe to say that elected officials got almost all of that stuff wrong, and the media reported little of it correctly at the time or since. But hardly any heads have rolled. How can that not make a person cynical? (Answer: that person supported all that stuff. As Brooks did.) Now, there might be some hidden narrative in those years of a strong, functional government and solid institutions that remain in decent shape beside being battered, but I don’t see it. And Brooks, naturally, doesn’t make a case, since he is the king of vagueness. Instead he reaches to the lazy man’s argument, unsubstantiated moral generalization:

It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else.

More people are cynical than they were during Vietnam, when the government carried out a multiyear policy of deliberate deception toward the public over the state of the Vietnam War? More people are cynical now than after Watergate, in which a president (oh, I’m sorry David, wise statesman) was ordering crimes and then having them covered up? Yes, I do think so. Because at least in Vietnam and Watergate they had Walter Cronkite. Us, we have Wolf Blitzer. And David Brooks.