A back in his Crick

Ossi Oswalda in Ernst Lubitsch's Die Puppe (The Doll), 1919. Via Fritzi.

David Brooks was feeling awful when he was typing his title last night, "The Governing Cancer of our Time", but luckily he'd forgotten about it by the time he got his index cards lined up, and the unpleasant metaphor had wandered away. I wonder, though, what the cancer was going to be a metaphor for?

We live in a big, diverse society. There are essentially two ways to maintain order and get things done in such a society — politics or some form of dictatorship. Either through compromise or brute force.

Bigness, or diversity? It's clear that he regards these as problems in need of a solution in American public life, things that have to be dealt with, perhaps by unpalatable expedients. Need to lose weight? Chop off your legs or go on a diet, the choice is yours. Need to do something about that uncontrollable diversity? I'm afraid you'll have to get some politics. It's a slightly scary procedure, but less invasive than a dictatorship, and most patients survive.

I prefer to think of diversity and politics as positive goods, and interdependent, as the great English democratic socialist political thinker Bernard Crick suggested, in his 1962 essay In Defence of Politics:

Conciliation is better than violence — but it is not always possible; diversity is better than unity — but it does not always exist. But both are always desirable.

And indeed Brooks himself seems to suggest such a positive view of politics at least:

Politics is an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions. You try to find some way to balance or reconcile or compromise those interests, or at least a majority of them.

Speaking of Bernard Crick!

Politics arises from accepting the fact of the simultaneous existence of different groups, hence different interests and different traditions, within a territorial unit under a common rule.... the activity by which government is made possible when differing interests in an area to be governed grow powerful enough to need to be conciliated...

Ding ding ding ding ding! David Brooks Plagiarism Watch alert!

The downside of politics is that people never really get everything they want. It’s messy, limited and no issue is ever really settled. Politics is a muddled activity in which people have to recognize restraints and settle for less than they want.

Politics may be a messy, mundane, inconclusive, tangled business.... Politics is often settling for less than what we want.

Nevertheless

it’s better than the alternative: rule by some authoritarian tyrant who tries to govern by clobbering everyone in his way.

The method of rule of the tyrant and the oligarch is quite simply to clobber, coerce or overawe all or most of these other groups in the interest of their own.

And here comes the post-plagiarism reference, in paragraph 5, with the legit quote in quotation marks, to make it look as if he pulled the preceding four grafs out of his teeming brain:

As Bernard Crick wrote in his book, “In Defence of Politics,” “Politics is a way of ruling divided societies without undue violence.”

As is usually the case of late, all he's really got today is Trump, Trump, Trump, the fiends are marching. A gesture at bothsiderism, inevitably, but it's really pathetic:

Over the past generation we have seen the rise of a group of people who are against politics. These groups — best exemplified by the Tea Party but not exclusive to the right — want to elect people who have no political experience. They want “outsiders.” They delegitimize compromise and deal-making.

Who exactly are those people without political experience on the non-right? (Bernie Sanders, for one, has been in elected office pretty much continuously for the past 35 years—Hillary Clinton, of course, has a bit of experience too, if not quite on that scale.) The reference to deal-making (one of two, actually) is pretty comical as well, given that Trump really doesn't offer anything else but his celebrated expertise in making deals, the art of.

I'm grateful to Brooksy, though, once again, for drawing our attention to the wonderful Bernard Crick, whose writing in this small monograph beautifully defends politics not only against tyrants and would-be tyrants but also against the antipolitical, revolutionary "saints" of socialism and social democracy, in favor of the muddling and less revolutionary politicized toilers for socialism in

the British Labour Government of 1945-51. For it was the strongest socialist government there has ever been in a leading industrial power. It arose, like the other social-democratic regimes, in a context already political. Social democracy has been, as it were, an extension of existing political habits and values, not a reversal or a sudden challenge to non-political regimes. The exercise of power in a free society is a great teacher of responsibility. The leadership of the British Labour Party, though it did not lose all sense of vision, had certainly acquired by 1950 a remarkable sense that politics is the art of the possible. The main source of wonder about that administration was not that they went as far as they did in great acts of nationalisation, but that they were so uninventive in social reforms, particularly in relation to education. 

Socialist rhetoric, then, has been more frightening (to those who cultivate their fears) than socialist practice. Rhetoric is the great sword of opposition. But this is not to deny that long oppositions incubate anti-political spirit. 'Oppression maketh a wise man mad'; prolonged opposition makes a good man desperate and fanciful. The rank and file of the British Labour movement [in the New Left of ca. 1962] is rich indeed in 'saints'.

Driftglass enumerates some of the Brooks lies-of-the-day.