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David Brooks' column is wrong to say that the problem of our time is that "economic priorities took the top spot and obliterated everything else." The problem was the nature of those "economic priorities." /1 nyti.ms/2RMDrly
Passive voice alert: "Society came to be seen as an atomized collection of individual economic units pursuing self-interest. Selfishness was normalized." This was the Reagan/Thatcher view. Why not name it as such. 2/
In a mind-bending act of bothsidesism, Brooks somehow blames "left wing moral relativism" (along with "market fundamentalism") for taking "the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules." Really? 3/
Brooks uncharacteristically abandons the passive voice when he claims that one of the causes of the economic downturn of the 1970s was that, "Unions got greedy." He doesn't mention the vigorous assault on organized labor that also marked that era. 4/
More passive voice, which takes a deeply-contested idea to have been the universally-accepted norm: "Anything you could legally do to make money was deemed O.K." 5/
Here's another claim in which agency and power completely disappear: "A billion-dollar salary for a hedge fund manager? Perfectly acceptable." Perfectly acceptable to whom, David Brooks? 6/
@nytopinion, please get this man a copy of Strunk and White asap: "Social trust arises from a covenant...But that covenant was ripped." Um, yes but please tell us who did the ripping. 7/
"Human beings are moral animals, & suddenly American moral animals found themselves in an amoral economic system, which felt increasingly alienating and gross." It's no mystery how we got here; this framing makes it sound mysterious rather than the direct result of policies. 8/
More obfuscation of agency: "We wound up with the secession of the successful, and...we wound up decimating the social trust that is actually a prerequisite for economic prosperity." Did we collectively do the decimating? 9/
Rather than condemning the political rhetoric and policy choices (deregulation, for example) which got us here, he blames the "culture" and takes this to be a collective failure. He says things like, "We turned off the moral lens," spreading the blame to all of us. 10/
On the occasions when he abandons passive voice, Brooks rarely mentions specific actors, i.e., "We ripped the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules." By universalizing the process, he obfuscates how this happened. /11
Moreover, I would argue that the market doesn't have "its own rules." Policy shapes how they operate and conservative policy has insulated them from democratic oversight. Look at what Trump has done to the CFPB, to take one example. 12/
I don't disagree that "capitalism needs to be embedded in moral norms and it needs to serve a larger social good." But this begs the question: which social norms and what is the social good? 13/
The tension at the heart of Brooks' piece is that the New Deal order, which he opposes, produced many of the economic and social goods that Brooks celebrates while the Reagan revolution helped produce many of the conditions he deplores. 14/
A more general point is that Brooks and other conservatives want to reproduce the benefits that we can attribute to the New Deal order, while repudiating most of its characteristic policies. /15
The shift to blaming an amorphous "culture" provides a way to sidestep the role that deregulation, the decimation of the labor movement, the denigration of public spending and public goods have played in producing the problems Brooks and others rightly decry. /16
