Muscular moderation

Hold your guts up. Via Mind-Body Moderate.

David Brooks announces that

It’s time to entertain the possibility that President Obama is a right-wing extremist. 

"I say, Holmes, is that an unconventional thought seeping out of the Times?" "I believe so, Watson. A Friedmanity, to be precise, like 'the earth is flat'. It is intended to attract our attention." "Ah, clever bastards."

After all, look at where he’s taking the country over his second term.

"I say, is Obama taking the country somewhere?" "I don't believe they've given him the keys."

It's time to entertain the possibility that David Brooks is a Communist provocateur. I mean, look at what he's calling out Obama for in his current column.

We're living in a country whose government is unable to control its expenditures, as all the Wise Ones agree. Indeed, in some areas it's hard to say they're wrong. The federal, state, and local authorities spend over a trillion dollars a year (around $3000 [jump]
per capita) on health care, to deliver much less product at a far higher price than, say, socialist Belgium or capitalist Taiwan. Defense spending remains where the Iraq war sent it at $700 billion a year, 4.2% of the gross domestic product (or more than its 13 closest competitors), with the best the Pentagon can do being that it hopes to be ready to conduct an audit by 2014 (no, I didn't hear anybody quizzing Hagel about that either), and then they might know enough about what they have to figure out what they might be able to cut.

Yet what does Brooks choose to complain about? Obama's budget doesn't propose enough spending!

Under his budget, domestic discretionary spending would be lower as a share of G.D.P. than it was under Reagan, both Bushes and Nixon. When it comes to this category, Obama’s budget would take us back to Eisenhower levels.

The president is increasing total revenues to a historically high 20 percent of G.D.P. by 2023. Federal spending would remain at a way-above-average 22 percent of G.D.P. But Washington still can’t seem to devote enough money to address the challenges faced by the less-educated and ease the segmentation of America.

In particular he wants funding for more men to finish college within six years, find good-paying jobs, and marry the mothers of their children. Oh, he waves around a statistic much loved by celebrity racist Charles Murray (53% of babies born to women under 30 in the US are born to unmarried women) to make himself sound conservative, but don't be fooled: this is redistribution by helicopter drop on the scale of the original G.I. Bill.

Except that Brooks immediately forgets what it was he came to the kitchen to fetch, if you know what I mean (I was just looking for a logical transition and I ended up eating all the metaphors):

I generally come to celebrate, not criticize, this budget. 

 "Do you come here often?" "I generally come to bury Caesar, how about you?" "I'm just celebrating, my president had a budget. Cutest little thing ever!" "I'll drink to that."

Obama has the guts to take on special interests in his own party. He works hard to reduce inequality. He understands that entitlement programs represent a fundamental threat to the sustainability of the welfare state.

"My God, man, if we don't stop this promiscuous feeding of the hungry and clothing of the naked we won't be able to feed the hungry and clothe the naked!" "What mugs we shall look, eh?"

Remind Americans that their country can’t be a rising nation if we have an entitlements system fit for an aging and declining one. Right now, we are the North Korea of fiscal policy. We’re living under the insane sequester that cuts those programs we should be increasing and spares exactly those old-age programs we should be reforming.

I'm trying to imagine what "North Korea of fiscal policy" might mean in a world where it meant something, but I'm not getting anywhere.

Brooks finally does. Gets somewhere, I mean, though not anywhere you might expect: someplace that truly is original, not to say completely insane (or at any rate psychotically bipolar).

What he longs for is to do to wussy centrism what Dr. Arnold at Rugby tried to do with milk-toast Christianity, to muscularize it. That is, it's not going to use any namby-pamby, half-liberal and half-conservative ideas. Rather it will be "bold at both ends" at one and the same time: lavishing money on furnishing men with good-paying jobs, but only in the hope of persuading them to get married (and presumably nothing for women, whose views on marriage are understood not to have changed in the last 60 years);  stripping the cupboards bare over at Medicare and Social Security, but only for the (liberal) sake of the grandchildren. A centrism with teeth, a centrism so repellent that it will be even more unelectable than today's Republicans... or is that the point?

"The tool works at both ends". By Ted Slampyak, from The Art of Manliness.