Humility Lessons

Harold Lloyd in Hal Roach's Haunted Spooks, 1920, via.

David Brooks, 21 May

Aside from a few protesters and a depraved president, most of us have understood we need to suspend the old individualistic American creed. In the midst of a complex epidemiological disaster, to be anti-authority is to be ignorant. In the midst of a contagion, to act as if you are self-sufficient is just selfish.

David Brooks, 28 May

But it’s too easy to offload all blame on Trump. Trump’s problem is not only that he’s emotionally damaged; it is that he is unlettered. He has no literary, spiritual or historical resources to draw upon in a crisis.

David Brooks, 25 June

There are five gigantic changes happening in America right now. The first is that we are losing the fight against Covid-19. Our behavior doesn’t have anything to do with the reality around us. We just got tired so we’re giving up.

David Brooks, 3 July ("The National Humiliation We Need")

It wasn’t Trump who went out to bars in Tempe, 

Austin and Los Angeles in June. 

It wasn’t Trump who put on hospital gowns 

and told the American people you could suspend 

the lockdown if your cause was just. Once 

you told people they could suspend the lockdown 

for one thing, they were going to suspend it for others.

Does anybody know what that is about the hospital gowns? It's in the position where Brooks would normally put a bothsides antinomy, so I suppose to counterbalance the Republican individualist bargoers he's referring to some group of Social Justice Warriors going out undistanced, but why would they be wearing hospital gowns, especially when PPE supplies could still be precarious? Dr. Google is baffled; he finds some Wisconsin family planning advocates in hospital gowns picketing Scott Walker in 2015 over abortion law, and a bunch of Darrel Issa's San Diego constituents in hospital gowns in 2017 protesting Issa's vote against Obamacare, but in 2020 it's just nurses protesting the lack of PPE, and they obviously couldn't have been wearing gowns because they couldn't spare any.

Not to mention that the results are largely in and the George Floyd protests, outdoors, active, and mostly masked, didn't lead to any significant increase in Covid infections. Is Brooks suggesting that protesters are to blame nevertheless because they gave bargoers the idea of hanging out without masks in confined quarters?

Anyhow as we follow the arc of his thinking from early March, when he was lamenting how Covid-19 was going to tear us apart, through late March, when he was applauding how it was going to bring us together, and so forth, it's been a challenge for him to come up with that master narrative, but what he seems to be settling on at the moment is this concept of a "national humiliation" which has unveiled how terrible we all are:

We Americans enter the July 4 weekend of 2020 humiliated as almost never before. We had one collective project this year and that was to crush Covid-19, and we failed....

Americans are reacting in two positive ways. We’re seeing incredible shifts in attitudes toward race. Roughly 60 percent of Americans now believe that African-Americans face a great deal or a lot of discrimination. People have been waiting for a white backlash since the riots, or since the statues started toppling. There isn’t much if any evidence of a backlash. There’s evidence of a fore-lash.

Second, Americans have decided to get rid of Donald Trump. His mishandling of Covid-19 hurt him among seniors. His racist catcalls in a time of racial reckoning have damaged him among all groups.

That's odd to start with: I don't see how the important development in attitudes on racial discrimination is a response to the Covid crisis. I thought it was a response to the video of George Floyd being murdered by a smirking policeman who was clearly enjoying himself while his colleagues stood by, in violation of all our ethical rules, not to mention the rules of police procedure. It's actually 62% of all Americans (in a June Democracy Fund poll) who now believe black people face "a great deal or a lot of discrimination", but that's 56% of white people (up from 49% a month earlier in May) plus 84% of African Americans and in between for other minority groups. I think the jury's out as to the significance of the backlash against the "riots" and statue topplings (you can tell from Brooks's references to these epiphenomena of the broad and continuing movement of peaceful  protest, instead of the movement itself, that he himself is a little too close to the backlash, as a Republican, to see it). Trump and his Republicans, who are pretty much the whole of the Republican party just now, are openly relying on it for their hopes of reelection, with their appeal to "law and order" and harping on those statues (but 44% still oppose taking the statues down, as against 32% in favor). We haven't seen yet how much support Trump will be able to claw back that way.

And then the very widespread desire to get rid of Trump isn't just a response to the Covid, as Brooks himself points out, and I don't think it's limited to those two factors either. I think the key factor is his increasing looking like a loser, as epitomized in that video of Trump trying to sell a Bible in Lafayette Square. A lot of people can't bring themselves to understand that his handling of Covid-19 has killed people by the tens of thousands, but do realize that his refusal to wear a mask and hyping of snake oil treatments make him look really pathetically stupid. And even then, it's not "Americans" who have made the decision but (so far) 51% of them at current count, which really isn't the same thing, though I'm happy to feel encouraged by it.

The real subject of the column is that unrestrainable desire to make everybody responsible—the American republic as a single thing with a mind of its own—for what's going on, as a way of letting himself or his party off the hook, I think.

Our fixation on the awfulness of Donald Trump has distracted us from the larger problems and rendered us strangely passive in the face of them. Sure, this was a Republican failure, but it was also a collective failure, and it follows a few decades of collective failures.

Republicans are a collectivity. There isn't a single issue in the repertoire he lists where they don't have a party responsibility:

On the day Trump leaves office, we’ll still have a younger generation with worse life prospects than their parents had faced. We’ll still have a cultural elite that knows little about people in red America and daily sends the message that they are illegitimate. We’ll still have yawning inequalities, residential segregation, crumbling social capital, a crisis in family formation.

Including that canard about the "cultural elite" and the "people in red America", the fire of ressentiment Republicans have been patiently stoking since 1968 among potential Republican voters, as a kind of excuse for conservative-Evangelical bigotry and white supremacy—rousing them to rage at the way TV comedies (that's all the "cultural elite" is, including The Beverly Hillbillies and Dukes of Hazzard, which I think were not produced by socialists and radical feminists) seems to see loose women and gay men and and above all African Americans as their equals. Not "people in red America", either, but those particularly sexist and racist white people who are self-righteous and assertive enough to make it red (as opposed to all the humbler, poorer, darker, and younger people in those states who don't manage to vote coherently or in many cases at all).

Democrats may have failed to fight inequality with much spirit or toughness, but Republicans have actively pushed it, denying rights to women, workers, minority groups—not just in fair housing and employment but voting, without which "red America" turns out to be not so red, as we've been starting to see over the last couple of years. The moral posturing of "red America" on "family values" hides the fact that if there's a crisis in family formation it is driven by economic inequality, and at its most damaging in "red America". David Brooks doesn't want you to notice that, and continues to trace it to the tolerance of the "cultural elite" (as represented by Maud and Murphy Brown, I guess) somehow infecting the population of the Bible Belt while leaving Boston and Berkeley unscathed.

What’s the core problem? Damon Linker is on to a piece of it: “It amounts to a refusal on the part of lots of Americans to think in terms of the social whole — of what’s best for the community, of the common or public good. Each of us thinks we know what’s best for ourselves.”

I’d add that this individualism, atomism and selfishness is downstream from a deeper crisis of legitimacy. In 1970, in a moment like our own, Irving Kristol wrote, “In the same way as men cannot for long tolerate a sense of spiritual meaninglessness in their individual lives, so they cannot for long accept a society in which power, privilege, and property are not distributed according to some morally meaningful criteria.”

That's Kristol writing in defense not of the young revolutionaries of 1970, needless to say, but "liberal capitalism at its apogee", and not against them either but against fanatical libertarians:

a society in which it was agreed that there was a strong correlation between certain personal virtues---frugality, industry, sobriety, reliability, piety--and the way in which power, privilege, and property were distributed. And this correlation was taken to be the sign of a just society, not merely of a free one. Samuel Smiles or Horatio Alger would have regarded Professor Hayek's writings as slanderous of his fellow Christians, blasphemous of God, and ultimately subversive of the social order.

Brooks, consciously or not, is conducting the same 50-year-old parochial food fight within the right wing, neoconservative vs. libertarian, which is why he doesn't seem to have any idea that anybody else exists.

I mean, that there is and has been for a century a US political party representing an intellectual movement that long ago decided to think in terms of the social whole and common good against atomism and selfishness. That's who decided on an appropriate response to Covid-19 at the outset (it took the first responders a little while to get there, especially in New York, because of conflict between two different liberal imperatives, the need to protect public health and the need to protect parents' ability to care for their children, which depends on the school system they hesitated to shut down). We didn't have a collective humiliation; we had an extremely rough start, but we've worked through it. We didn't decide to get rid of Trump this spring; we've been wanting to get rid of him forever. We didn't suddenly realize there was an inequality problem, though our ideas on coping with it and power to do something about it seem to be increasing over the last couple of years to an extraordinary degree.

Brooks seems to think the entire Democratic party lives inside a TV studio and spends all its time making fun of hillbillies, and we have nothing to say to him. That's probably true unless he manages to find a new pair of ears. In the meantime, he has absolutely nothing to say to us.