I'd guess Brooks was fine with reaching a hand down to help the grimy but appropirately grateful workers, but "information workers" were insufficiently deferential. That, plus Buckley showing him the power of the Dark Side. What a taco bowl of an argument. Did he ever get around to explaining the "sins"? Not enough foam on the latte?
Looks like it's the excessive woke, from which the "working class" (which apparently doesn't include baristas) is free, according to a Bourdieu fan sociologist called Musa al-Gharbi who hangs out with Jonathan Haidt. Al-Gharbi says (quoting Brooks) "Black people made most of their progress between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, before the rise of the educated class in the late 1960s, and that the educated class may have derailed that progress. He notes that gaps in wealth and homeownership between white and Black Americans have grown larger since 1968." Which sounds a lot like Byron Donalds saying how great Jim Crow was for the Culture.
So thanks to Wonkette I read his think piece and noticed that underneath the soothing drone of his prose, his argument is complete Rush Limbaugh. An endless stream of unsupported assertions ("in the 2010s there was a sharp rise in liberal insecurity" or some such claptrap) and the classic cherry-picked misleading summary of some poll or other. There's no there there. Al-Gharbi should be forced to write "correlation is not causation" 100 times on Brook's forehead.
A bunch of jolly white guys having jolly fun together, such jolly fun, old boy, doncha know? Why bother your pretty little head about policies or ideology?
Just think what a better world this would be if an unseasonal squall had whipped up that afternoon and the good ship Gobsmack had gone down with all passengers (save the working-class deckhands!)
They're not radicalised, they're playing the latest game-fad. They're not even Hedonic Revolutionaries, since that's how they've always been, making them ultraconservatives.
I am guilty of a bit of reaching-for-working-class in this, because though I and my other first-generation siblings started working at six years of age in my father's small business in which he wore all collars, he spoke six languages and read Sartre, and my mother started U. at sixteen years of age, but be that as it may:
I grew-up working-class, and at least in _our_ working-class there was nothing more working-class than scrimping and pressuring and doing anything else you could to get your sons (that's how it was) into an elite university so that they didn't have to be working-class.
There's this moment in "Platoon", it's been about four decades so pardon my paraphrase:
'Hey, new guy! Whatʼs a damn-college-boy like you doing _here_?'
—'I couldnʼt sit around while guys like you fought this war for guys like me.'
'JESUS! That makes no sense. What a damn-college-boy thing to do!'
I'm somewhat of the American-exceptionalist view that it's not normal for US to have a rigorous bourgeoisie-proletariat class system because of the traditional extreme social mobility, which has a lot to do with the traditional extreme openness to immigration, but was also a real national culture, which Lincoln described, where most of the young have to do hard labor (like rail splitting) and when they older get to own businesses (or become lawyers) or are comfortable in some way. Except for historical moments like the Gilded Age in the 1880s or the Reaganaut Age from the 1980s that I hope we're finally starting to work our way out of (not if Trump's employers have their way).
The U.S. was where you went because here, if you were white enough, you could work 90-hour weeks in unsafe conditions, be cheated and sexually harassed by your employer, and not starve.
Not much, maybe, but once you're not starving all the time you can think of something else beside getting food (my father was down to 95lbs as a P.W., and he reported later that under those condition you can _not_ be a good citizen) and you might even start to think you had _rights_….
Criticizing Brooks is like hitting one of those ballasted punching clowns: no matter how precisely your blows land, he pops back up with another clueless op-ed.
Interesting how Bobo thought the "information economy" negated Marx's ideas, since that's exactly where I was about thirty years ago as a technophilic Libertarian, pretty much ignorant of politics. I was convinced I could make a criticism of Marxism around something like "intellect is not labor" or some such, and made the mistake of actually READING Left writings because I realized I didn't know jack-shit about the subject... which got me reading Michael Harrington and Marx and watching Roger And Me and that led me down the rocky path of libertarian socialism where I am today, now realizing the information economy actually DOES look a hell of a lot like the factory floor. And that ignorance of politics is a stupid thing.
Also - I had forgotten about the dumbass sandwich shop anecdote, how (even though I'm sure it never happened) Brooks' high-school-education friend COULD have fucking ASKED SOMEONE about the sammich choices - there are humans working there, after all! - but, rather than fucking LEARN SOMETHING and possibly have a new experience, it was off to Mexican (probably Taco Bell, reliably down-market and predictable).
" I’ve found the elite, educated-class progressivism a lot less attractive than the working-class progressivism of Frances Perkins that I read about when I was young."
yes, surely, and Brooks makes it clear that he has only ever 'read' about those working class progressives. won't run into many at Applebee's salad bar. what an overpaid pompous ass he is.
one can be fairly certain that Brooks has never read either you or driftglass on the subject of Himself, and completely certain that he has never considered those criticisms introspectively.
David Brook's career is one of the great con jobs of history. He should be giving classes on that instead of humility, which to be fair is part of the con. Maybe those elite students at Yale were supposed to read between the lines?
The problem is fetichisation, whether of the working classes as Virtue—as if It were always clad in dungarees and the Firesign Theatre's 'wide belt and work-shirt'—or of The Educated Elite as Vice. (Fetichisation lumps together the people who brought us Vietnam with the ones who brought us vaccines, ways of getting accurate cannabinoid measurements, and the modern physics that let's us finally have some idea of What's Really Going On.)
Every institution has its domains of usefulness and harm, for different groups of people…they're all made of people.
If you live in some cities or do certain work EVERYONE went to an elite university...It's really just a thing people laugh about. They do the same jobs as others.
They seem fine with their lot in life? They did not expect the fine education they received to bring a walled garden in Manhattan as a side-benefit.
They are happy with what they are doing.
But they are often socialists or close to it--it would be ungrateful to whine that you're taking in a housemate to make ends meet when children are picking crops and mining silver.
But I am older, and maybe our expectations of the finest education are lower?
As the rich get richer, perhaps one can feel one's not-richness more palpably?
Or maybe if the whole thing costs half a million that changes the expectations?
Or maybe if it is pitched as a lottery to automatically select the next world rulers?
Or maybe these jobs people have completely don't exist for younger folk. But as you imply, some DO. I'm talking math teacher or opening a bakery or union organizing or whatnot.
Or DB doesn't know what he's talking about.
I don't know but the way we do thing in America doesn't seem to benefit many people at all --except not in the way he cares about. Is there another option? He wouldn't like it but it's always worth considering.
No one is mentioning the role of student debt. If students at elite universities are harnessed to a monthly debt payment as large as a rent payment, how can they be satisfied with any job that doesn’t pay enough to live let alone prosper after the debt is paid every month? And who can blame them? (Non elite school students are equally burdened and many more so because they lack help from parents and other means of getting by) This debt does not end with bankruptcy or even death at times. I knew a couple who had life insurance policies just for their student debt not to help their spouses in any other way.
I believe that power loves to burden students with this debt not just for financial gain for banks but because it dampens down political action and ambition for anything other than financial gain to service debt. With debt hanging over their heads how can students study philosophy or literature, or take a gap year and travel to see how the rest of the world lives? Who will be willing to quit school and live with the working class to write expose novels or organize or take political risks for a better world? Who will even think about anything except finding a job well paying enough to pay debts? Who will rock the boat?
Students don’t study the Humanities because they are afraid to.
I'd guess Brooks was fine with reaching a hand down to help the grimy but appropirately grateful workers, but "information workers" were insufficiently deferential. That, plus Buckley showing him the power of the Dark Side. What a taco bowl of an argument. Did he ever get around to explaining the "sins"? Not enough foam on the latte?
Looks like it's the excessive woke, from which the "working class" (which apparently doesn't include baristas) is free, according to a Bourdieu fan sociologist called Musa al-Gharbi who hangs out with Jonathan Haidt. Al-Gharbi says (quoting Brooks) "Black people made most of their progress between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, before the rise of the educated class in the late 1960s, and that the educated class may have derailed that progress. He notes that gaps in wealth and homeownership between white and Black Americans have grown larger since 1968." Which sounds a lot like Byron Donalds saying how great Jim Crow was for the Culture.
So thanks to Wonkette I read his think piece and noticed that underneath the soothing drone of his prose, his argument is complete Rush Limbaugh. An endless stream of unsupported assertions ("in the 2010s there was a sharp rise in liberal insecurity" or some such claptrap) and the classic cherry-picked misleading summary of some poll or other. There's no there there. Al-Gharbi should be forced to write "correlation is not causation" 100 times on Brook's forehead.
And before 1960 America didn't have an educated class? Roll over Harvard, and tell Princeton the news.
But you gotta give it up for
"The third dynamic is the inflammation"
It sounds like Brooks is one Celestine Prophecy away from running a rightwing EST.
lolololol
Yeah. There's 2 marks in there somewhere.
Meditate on this at second level.
This sounds like the start of some authentic chakra-bomping newage flapdoodle.
Move Fast & Burn Stuff!
A bunch of jolly white guys having jolly fun together, such jolly fun, old boy, doncha know? Why bother your pretty little head about policies or ideology?
Just think what a better world this would be if an unseasonal squall had whipped up that afternoon and the good ship Gobsmack had gone down with all passengers (save the working-class deckhands!)
The climate didn't change fast enough!
Or if the orcas had radicalized earlier and overturned the boat.
They're not radicalised, they're playing the latest game-fad. They're not even Hedonic Revolutionaries, since that's how they've always been, making them ultraconservatives.
NIMBY*s!
Not In My Boat Yard!
I am guilty of a bit of reaching-for-working-class in this, because though I and my other first-generation siblings started working at six years of age in my father's small business in which he wore all collars, he spoke six languages and read Sartre, and my mother started U. at sixteen years of age, but be that as it may:
I grew-up working-class, and at least in _our_ working-class there was nothing more working-class than scrimping and pressuring and doing anything else you could to get your sons (that's how it was) into an elite university so that they didn't have to be working-class.
There's this moment in "Platoon", it's been about four decades so pardon my paraphrase:
'Hey, new guy! Whatʼs a damn-college-boy like you doing _here_?'
—'I couldnʼt sit around while guys like you fought this war for guys like me.'
'JESUS! That makes no sense. What a damn-college-boy thing to do!'
Ha, yes.
I'm somewhat of the American-exceptionalist view that it's not normal for US to have a rigorous bourgeoisie-proletariat class system because of the traditional extreme social mobility, which has a lot to do with the traditional extreme openness to immigration, but was also a real national culture, which Lincoln described, where most of the young have to do hard labor (like rail splitting) and when they older get to own businesses (or become lawyers) or are comfortable in some way. Except for historical moments like the Gilded Age in the 1880s or the Reaganaut Age from the 1980s that I hope we're finally starting to work our way out of (not if Trump's employers have their way).
The U.S. was where you went because here, if you were white enough, you could work 90-hour weeks in unsafe conditions, be cheated and sexually harassed by your employer, and not starve.
Not much, maybe, but once you're not starving all the time you can think of something else beside getting food (my father was down to 95lbs as a P.W., and he reported later that under those condition you can _not_ be a good citizen) and you might even start to think you had _rights_….
Criticizing Brooks is like hitting one of those ballasted punching clowns: no matter how precisely your blows land, he pops back up with another clueless op-ed.
Interesting how Bobo thought the "information economy" negated Marx's ideas, since that's exactly where I was about thirty years ago as a technophilic Libertarian, pretty much ignorant of politics. I was convinced I could make a criticism of Marxism around something like "intellect is not labor" or some such, and made the mistake of actually READING Left writings because I realized I didn't know jack-shit about the subject... which got me reading Michael Harrington and Marx and watching Roger And Me and that led me down the rocky path of libertarian socialism where I am today, now realizing the information economy actually DOES look a hell of a lot like the factory floor. And that ignorance of politics is a stupid thing.
Also - I had forgotten about the dumbass sandwich shop anecdote, how (even though I'm sure it never happened) Brooks' high-school-education friend COULD have fucking ASKED SOMEONE about the sammich choices - there are humans working there, after all! - but, rather than fucking LEARN SOMETHING and possibly have a new experience, it was off to Mexican (probably Taco Bell, reliably down-market and predictable).
" I’ve found the elite, educated-class progressivism a lot less attractive than the working-class progressivism of Frances Perkins that I read about when I was young."
yes, surely, and Brooks makes it clear that he has only ever 'read' about those working class progressives. won't run into many at Applebee's salad bar. what an overpaid pompous ass he is.
one can be fairly certain that Brooks has never read either you or driftglass on the subject of Himself, and completely certain that he has never considered those criticisms introspectively.
I keep this around to remind me.
No way this gets to talk down to me.
https://substack.com/@brawlatthepoetscafe/note/c-58541344?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=insr
David Brook's career is one of the great con jobs of history. He should be giving classes on that instead of humility, which to be fair is part of the con. Maybe those elite students at Yale were supposed to read between the lines?
There's a pretty comfortable gig out there for the right kind of asshole.
Please please please tell me that photo is AI. If that's real life I need to have a serious discussion with the universe.
Sadly, no. It’s been around for a few years at this point.
[sigh]
I know – I was just struck by how genuinely artificial he looks.
Last bozo left on the bus...
Kind of a roundabout way to go after student Gaza protesters.
Either that or the usual gobbledegook.
Thanks for saving me from reading it.
Cherce.
"I'm sorry, I thought you were going to stop at two."
is where the 2 marks reside.
Aw, thanks
The problem is fetichisation, whether of the working classes as Virtue—as if It were always clad in dungarees and the Firesign Theatre's 'wide belt and work-shirt'—or of The Educated Elite as Vice. (Fetichisation lumps together the people who brought us Vietnam with the ones who brought us vaccines, ways of getting accurate cannabinoid measurements, and the modern physics that let's us finally have some idea of What's Really Going On.)
Every institution has its domains of usefulness and harm, for different groups of people…they're all made of people.
If you live in some cities or do certain work EVERYONE went to an elite university...It's really just a thing people laugh about. They do the same jobs as others.
They seem fine with their lot in life? They did not expect the fine education they received to bring a walled garden in Manhattan as a side-benefit.
They are happy with what they are doing.
But they are often socialists or close to it--it would be ungrateful to whine that you're taking in a housemate to make ends meet when children are picking crops and mining silver.
But I am older, and maybe our expectations of the finest education are lower?
As the rich get richer, perhaps one can feel one's not-richness more palpably?
Or maybe if the whole thing costs half a million that changes the expectations?
Or maybe if it is pitched as a lottery to automatically select the next world rulers?
Or maybe these jobs people have completely don't exist for younger folk. But as you imply, some DO. I'm talking math teacher or opening a bakery or union organizing or whatnot.
Or DB doesn't know what he's talking about.
I don't know but the way we do thing in America doesn't seem to benefit many people at all --except not in the way he cares about. Is there another option? He wouldn't like it but it's always worth considering.
No one is mentioning the role of student debt. If students at elite universities are harnessed to a monthly debt payment as large as a rent payment, how can they be satisfied with any job that doesn’t pay enough to live let alone prosper after the debt is paid every month? And who can blame them? (Non elite school students are equally burdened and many more so because they lack help from parents and other means of getting by) This debt does not end with bankruptcy or even death at times. I knew a couple who had life insurance policies just for their student debt not to help their spouses in any other way.
I believe that power loves to burden students with this debt not just for financial gain for banks but because it dampens down political action and ambition for anything other than financial gain to service debt. With debt hanging over their heads how can students study philosophy or literature, or take a gap year and travel to see how the rest of the world lives? Who will be willing to quit school and live with the working class to write expose novels or organize or take political risks for a better world? Who will even think about anything except finding a job well paying enough to pay debts? Who will rock the boat?
Students don’t study the Humanities because they are afraid to.