Reversal of Styles. Fortunes: Status Quo
David Brooks makes the point that "For all of Washington’s talk, we are not on the verge of a budget breakthrough if a political strategy remains elusive." It appears my comment has been scotched again, even though I was pretty nice to Brooks today, tho here I've scrapped some of the nice:
This essay is a reversal of style for our Mr. Brooks. Brooks generally begins with substance & concludes with an insupportable spate of nonsense. Today he starts with balderdash but ends on a note of essential truth.
So he begins: This has been a great month for conversation. Right. If "conversation" is defined as two people standing in a room yelling at each other with their ears covered.
Next we read, These ... liberals are certainly not going to hand control of the government to the few remaining budget hawks and tell them to go remake the welfare state. We don't live in a welfare state. Our social safety net has more holes in it than do the safety nets of any other economically-advanced country, & more holes than many less affluent countries.
In the good ole days the leadership class practice[d] self-restraint. Yeah, those canings on the floor of the House were gentlemanly banter. The Civil War was a blip. The impeachment of President Clinton was a quaint anomaly.
Nowadays, Each party has its own version of who the evil elites are. First, it's facile, but not useful, to characterize self-interest as "evil." A banker or a businessman will argue that his first duty is to his shareholders, and the public be damned. It's his duty to water down regulations & invest in high-profit, if shady & ultimately nonproductive (to society), enterprises. Similarly, a union leader (there are a few left) will say his duty is to workers. Both would say they are doing their respective jobs, even though they are at loggerheads 99% of the time.
Second, and more important, one version of who the elites are is based on fact, & the other version is a set of cynical talking points designed to confuse the voting public & redirect their anger against those who would help them. This partly explains the midterm election results in which the Party of Banksters & Tycoons took over control of the House whilst their poor, unemployed & addled partisans railed against "socialism" & "Kenyan economics." Republicans & their secret backers are pure frauds.
ConservaDems, including President Obama, are frauds, too, but their stated ideals & policies -- as opposed to their legislative & executive actions -- come down on the side of the people. They claim to want to "bend the arc of history toward justice." That they oversaw a process that largely failed to do so also helps explain the midterm election results.
The real version of who the special-interest elites are is the one described by liberals & liberal Democrats. Throughout our history, liberals have moved the country toward the Revolutionary ideal of equal opportunity. They have met constant resistance from conservatives who want to preserve the inequalities of the status quo. Republicans today are carrying that conservatism to extremes not seen since the pre-income tax days of the Gilded Age. Conservatives want to turn the clock back on the the nation's foundational goals, and they are succeeding. Every single piece of legislation that increases inequality is a step backward. Until we have legislators who write laws to reduce the increasing disparity between rich and poor, Brooks' "evil elites," whoever they may be, are winning.
The President and the Congress have stacked the deck against the American people. As Brooks concludes in his one great truism, Just don't expect the big change to emanate from Washington in the near term. This is Mr. Brooks' first acknowledgment that a core element of his "evil elites" work in Washington, D.C. Let us applaud him for at last recognizing this one true thing. Little by little, our Mr. Brooks may see the error of his ways.
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