Concerned

Drawing by Roz Chast, via Fine Art America.

Concern troll David Brooks is concerned today about the narratology ("What Is the Democratic Story?"):

There’s a lot of discussion about how far left the Democratic Party should go these days. Is it destroying its electoral chances when its members call for a single-payer health plan or abolishing ICE?

That’s an important question, but the most important question is what story is the Democratic Party telling? As Alasdair MacIntyre argued many years ago, you can’t know what to do unless you know what story you are a part of. Story is more important than policies.

Ah, a name—a clue, perhaps, to whatever it is Brooks has been doing wrong with this concept. Alasdair MacIntyre (b.1929), Dr. Google tells me, is a Scottish moral philosopher, a Thomist in his ultimate phase starting in the late 1970s, interested in

reclaiming various forms of moral rationality and argumentation that claim neither ultimate finality nor incorrigible certainty (the mistaken project of the Enlightenment), but nevertheless do not simply bottom out into relativistic or emotivist denials of any moral rationality whatsoever (according to him, the mistaken conclusion of Nietzsche, Sartre, and Stevenson). He does this by returning to the tradition of Aristotelian ethics with its teleological account of the good and moral persons, which reached a fuller articulation in the medieval writings of Thomas Aquinas and which in modern times was first rejected by the Enlightenment.

"I'd say", as Brooks would say from a standpoint of comparable ignorance, that's typically unfair to the Enlightenment, limiting your view to that sequence of philosophers from Descartes to Kant who really expected to put everything on a footing of unquestionable certainty (a project ultimately founded by Aquinas himself) and ignoring all the wonderful skeptics and anecdotalists from Montaigne through Hume and Rousseau and relativists from Montesquieu to Herder who give the period its color and delight; to me Descartes and Kant were weird and necessarily failures, and the central Enlightenment project was realizing, within the radical uncertainty that comes from a wider knowledge of the world's different civilizations, a permanent state of progress—so that certainty would remain forever over the horizon, just beyond the unbounded room for improvement occupying your whole field of vision. Which is probably also unattainable, but a warmer and livelier ideal.

Where stories come into MacIntyre's thinking, in "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science", is in the contemplation of what he calls an epistemological crisis, when the beliefs you live by seem to be crumbling around you and you literally don't know what to do, like Emma in Jane Austen's novel or Hamlet in Shakespeare: the way you escape is be constructing a new narrative around yourself, as Emma does with Mr. Knightly's help and Hamlet fails to do:

“When an epistemological crisis is resolved, it is by the construction of a new narrative which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them” (EC, in The Tasks of Philosophy, p. 5). The resolution of the crisis may lead one to recognize that human understanding is always incomplete and that progress in enquiry is therefore open ended. For MacIntyre, the resolution of an epistemological crisis cannot promise the neat clarity of a shift from a failed body of theory to a truthful one.

I actually love the sound of this. But it's your personal story he's talking about, the story of which you are the protagonist at the center of your network of connections and identities. You can't properly tie it, as Brooks does, to the concept of a grand "national narrative" in the kind of popular history books and great man biographies he likes to read, where an entire country in unison tells itself a heartwarming story about how lovely it is and then goes shopping for a new one (in the op-ed pages) when the old one starts wearing out; MacIntyre himself ties himself into a sophisticated identity politics, in which it's our individual stories that must respond to our identity responsibilities:

The enslavement and oppression of black Americans, the subjugation of Ireland, and the genocide of the Jews in Europe remained quite relevant to the responsibilities of citizens of the United States, England, and Germany in 1981, as they still do today.  Thus an American who said “I never owned any slaves,” “the Englishman who says ‘I never did any wrong to Ireland,’” or “the young German who believes that being born after 1945 means that what Nazis did to Jews has no moral relevance to his relationship to his Jewish contemporaries” all exhibit a kind of intellectual and moral failure. “I am born with a past, and to cut myself off from that past in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships”....

So you can see what Brooks likes in the shiny signifiers of narrativity (I'm afraid Brooks likes stories so much because he finds they're easier than arguments), opposition to modernism, focus on "virtues", and secular religiosity (MacIntyre may be a Thomist but he's on his third marriage), and you can see he hasn't read any further than that. He's just pleased to feel he's got somebody who belongs to the same party as he does.

It follows, naturally, that the "stories" Brooks hears in the utterance of political parties tell aren't really stories, although the Trump one comes close:

The story Donald Trump tells is that we good-hearted, decent people of Middle America have been betrayed by stupid elites who screw us and been threatened by foreigners who are out to get us.

That's a story about the people in his rally audiences, but it doesn't go anywhere (it omits the Trump concluding promise, that everything will change simply by virtue of his presence). The "stories" he ascribes to Democrats to illustrate the conflicts within the party are nothing but commonplace ideas of political responsibility, perfectly nice slogans that don't really conflict at all:

the compassion story associated with Mario Cuomo and Ted Kennedy: Too many Americans are poor, marginalized and left behind. We must care for our brothers and sisters because we are all one family.... the brainpower/meritocracy story associated with Gary Hart and later the New Democrats: Americans are masters at innovation. We must use our best minds to come up with innovative plans.... the traditional socialist story associated with Bernie Sanders: America is rived by the class conflict. The bankers and the oligarchs are exploiting the middles. We need a fighter who will go out and battle concentrated economic power.... the multicultural story: American history has been marked by systems of oppression. Those who have been oppressed — women, African-Americans, Latinos — need to stand together and fight for justice...

The only moderately funny thing in this dreary column is the teaser copy supplied by some editor, with reference to those last two:

Choosing between a focus on race or class is the wrong choice to begin with.

It certainly is! But what gets Brooks's knickers in a twist is precisely when somebody rejects the choice; this is Brooks's contribution to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez panic:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has risen to prominence blending these two languages into one: racial justice socialism. “I can’t name a single issue with roots in race that doesn’t have economic implications,” she declares, “and I cannot think of a single economic issue that doesn’t have racial implications. The idea that we have to separate them is a con.”

This would be a very dangerous path for Democrats to adopt, Brooks thinks, because both Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama decided not to take it:

They did because Americans trust business more than the state, so socialism has never played well. They did it because if you throw race into your economic arguments you end up turning off potential allies in swing states like Wisconsin, Iowa and Pennsylvania. They did it because if you throw economics into your race arguments you end up dividing your coalitions on those issues.

Very little clue what "throwing economics into your race arguments" means, but if "race arguments" are something like the "race records" of the 1920s to 1940s, products designed for sale to an exclusively African American audience, I don't think Democrats really need to think of it that way (in the case of the race records, white people finally found out that the music was too good to miss, and I'd like to believe something like that has been happening to many white Democrats in recent years as we've come to realize through Trayvon Martin and the others, and the horrors of the immigration system, and not least the heroic work black women do for the party, how much needs to be done). And if Brooks thinks black audiences can't deal with economics, like soppressata on the deli menu, he's just projecting.

And as to socialism, the word is losing its toxicity—not all the way, but that American Culture & Faith Institute survey last year that found 37% of voters claimed to prefer socialism to capitalism was a pretty dramatic development—and the thing itself  has become almost not frightening enough ("You Democrats have just gone too far left on everything," my Cuban small businessman friend told me the other day, "except free health care and free college, we have to have that"). When the concern trolls gather the way they've been doing to warn us off AOC, remember they don't have our best interests at heart. They may, like Brooks, not really know what they're saying, but their instincts are flop-sweating, and something has them frightened.

Brooks's touching belief that "by 2020 everybody will be exhausted by the climate of negativism and hostility" gets some play from Steve M and Driftglass.