David Brooks is mad and it is funny

The New York Times’ David Brooks has been the paper’s conservative columnist since 2003. He is not a religious fanatic, he is not openly racist, he is not fervently nativist. Brooks is a typical conservative moderate. He is in favor of racism, sexism, and the destruction of all social protection for the country's poor. However, like most moderate pundits, he argues for his repressive ideology by using respectful language and pretending to rely on facts. The current election cycle has been difficult for people like Brooks to deal with. The rise of Donald Trump has shocked pundits like Brooks, and driven them to panic over the future of the Republican Party. To illustrate this, let's take a look at who David Brooks is and how he has reacted to the rise of The Donald.

In 2015, riots broke out in the city of Baltimore over the police murder of a young black man named Freddie Gray. The riots prompted many liberals to call for more government social programs to help create job opportunities and alleviate poverty. In response Brooks argued that the, “real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition.” Given the fact that he cites no sources for this mammoth statement, a skeptical reader might wonder how Brooks gained these insights into the lives of those who struggle with poverty. Brooks is the son of a university professor who grew up in the wealthy suburbs of Philadelphia. He graduated from the University of Chicago and went on to work for the right wing publication National Review. While working there he attended yachting expeditions, Bach concerts, dinners at William Buckley’s Park Avenue apartment, and constant exposure to the lives of the rich and famous . Six months after the aforementioned Freddie Gray article, he wrote the article My $120,000 Vacation. In the article he details his experiences on the

Four Seasons’ new 24-day, round-the-world fantasy trip…for 24 days you fly around the earth in a Four Seasons-branded private jet, taking off in Seattle and stopping in, among other places, Tokyo, Beijing, the Maldives, the Serengeti, St. Petersburg, Marrakesh and New York, going from Four Seasons to Four Seasons, with various outings off campus offered at every two- or three-night stop…If Magellan had had his own 757 and a global archipelago of sumptuous breakfast buffets, his trip would have been something like this.

Brooks lives an affluent lifestyle and he always has, by his own admission he has little to no experience talking with people that struggle to make ends meet. Yet somehow he feels confident enough about his perspective on the psychological causes of poverty in America to write that government assistance to its citizens is bad, and, “the real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology.”

Brooks also attempts to root his arguments against government provided social protection in logic. Citing an article published by the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post, Brooks writes that, “in 2013 the federal government spent nearly $14,000 per poor person.” Here Brooks repeats the standard intellectual Republican mantra about why poverty relief plans are bad for people in poverty.
As Dean Baker explains, the $14,000 number is wrong on so many levels.

Around 40 percent of these payments are Medicaid payments that go directly to doctors and other health care providers. We pay twice as much per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries, with little to show in the way of outcomes. We can think of these high health care costs as a generous payment to the poor, but what this actually means is that every time David Brooks' cardiologist neighbor raises his fees, David Brooks will complain about how we are being too generous to the poor.

The other point that an honest columnist would be forced to make is that the vast majority of these payments do not go to people who are below the poverty line and therefore don't count in the denominator for his "poor person" calculation. The cutoff for Medicaid is well above the poverty level in most states. The same is true for food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and most of the other programs that make up Brooks' $14,000 per person figure. In other words, he has taken the spending that goes to a much larger population and divided it by the number of people who are classified as poor.

If Brooks actually wants to tell readers what we spend on poor people, it's not hard to find the data. The average family of three on TANF gets less than $500 a month. The average food stamp benefit is $133 per person. If low income people are working, they can get around $5,000 a year from the EITC for a single person with two children at the poverty level. (They would get less at lower income levels.)

These programs account for the vast majority of federal government payments to poor people. It won't get you anywhere near David Brooks' $14,000 per person per year, but why spoil a good story with facts?

So we see his argument on this subject is without merit, but is interesting that his thoughts are quite in line with the rest of mainstream Republican thinking. The Koch brothers have dominated mainstream Republicanism over the last 8 years, and their think tanks have been trying relentlessly to push the argument that welfare hurts its recipients for decades. Brooks and the Koch brothers’ opposition to government assistance is best embodied by Paul Ryan, the supposedly “wonky” Republican Speaker of House. Ryan is in favor of massive cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and aid to college students, while he proposes tax cuts disproportionally assisting the wealthiest 1% of Americans.

Trump crashes the party

What has been described is a brief overview of how moderate Republicanism operates. It does not insult the appearance of someone else’s wife (Donald Trump), and it does not ally itself with conspiracy theorists and religious extremists (Ted Cruz). Rather, it quietly cuts taxes for the rich while slashing social spending for 99% of Americans. This is how Republicanism, by and large, has operated successfully for the past 4 decades. The racism and religious extremism is supposed to be reserved for the voting base, something that is employed by Republican Party allies who are kept at arm’s length. So when you do get a Donald Trump character who hijacks the party by being an open bigot who talks about the size of his penis during a nationally televised debate you better believe it’s gonna rustle David Brooks’ jimmies.

Brooks’ response to the rise of Trump and Cruz is quite similar to the seven stages of grief. At first Brooks was in denial. In late October 2015, while Trump had been for several weeks outpolling the only other viable moderate Republican candidate, Marco Rubio, by 20 points, Brooks published a column titled The Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio Moment in which he talked about how the emergence of Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan is great for the Republican Party. He made little mention of Trump and only expressed mild concern about his continued success. Still in denial, in early December he wrote an article titled, No, Donald Trump Won’t Win. The article is a humorous example of Brooks’ stupidity. He begins by crafting a simplistic analogy between politics and shopping for a rug. Following this he provides his trademark psychoanalysis with such lines as, “Human beings have multiple selves. The mind dances from this module to that module…Just because voters aren’t making final decisions doesn’t mean they are passive. They’re in the dressing room. They’re trying on different outfits. Most of them are finding they like a lot of different conflicting choices.” To close the article Brooks writes, “The voting booth focuses the mind, the experience is no longer about self-expression and feeling good in the moment.”

By February of 2016, Brooks had entered the anger stage and in a frustrated tone called on “members of the Republican governing class” to stop the Trump and Cruz madness. By March, Brooks was exhibiting guilt and depression. Brooks writes that he has been out of touch with the average Republican voter, and he seems to resign himself to the likelihood of a Trump candidacy.

In true elitist fashion, Brooks is now seeking a less democratic alternative. After Trump failed to win the Wisconsin primaries it is becoming likely that he will be unable to clinch the nomination thereby leading to a contested convention where the elite of the Republican Party can overrule their voting base to select Ohio governor John Kasich. Completely sidestepping the fact that Trump and Cruz received far more votes than any other Republican contender and by the logic of the American democratic system one of them should be the Republican nominee, a desperate Brooks argues for the creation of a “Lincoln Caucus” that would potentially, “create a democratic path toward a Republican nominee who is not Trump or Cruz.”

The fact that Brooks is willing to do away with American democracy in order to have what he calls the “Republican governing class” choose its own nominee shouldn’t be surprising. He is an elitist who is used to having his Republican Party the way he wants it and now the great unwashed masses are taking away his bourgeois respectability.

Is David Brooks mad? Yes, he is confirmed for mad.