David Brooks leaning ever so slightly to the right. 

            “Just right of center.”  In baseball, we call it “the gap.”  That is the sweet spot in which New York Times pundit David Brooks informs us he has found himself.  He did so in a column syndicated as “Greetings from just right of center.”*  Of course, center field has been dragged all the way to the right field foul line.  David is self-identifying just to the right of that line, close to the grandstand seats.

            Brooks reveals that Edmund Burke is his all-time favorite right fielder.  That would be Edmund Burke the British Whig (1729-1797), who was perhaps best known in his own time for supporting a reactionary royalist war against revolutionary France.  For God and King.  That Edmund Burke, now known as the father of “modern” conservatism.  And so he may be.  He apparently represents what Brooks calls “progressive conservatism.”  As so, by association, we are to believe that Brooks is a “progressive conservative.”

            Somehow, Brooks stumbles upon the assertion that Burke knew:

“…that the world is more complex that we can know and that we should be skeptical of handing too much power to government planners.”

            Burke, it turns out, if you look at his actions rather than his writings, is more of a government schemer than planner.  More Alexander Haig with a dash of Henry Kissinger thrown in than a “little government” conservative like…like, well, Herbert Hoover.  Burke would have fit right in with the neo-con schemers who thought “freedom” (however defined) would flourish in a Middle East vassal state.  That is exactly how Burke thought about post-revolutionary France, only he was selling royalism.  Oh, right, that was conservatism in his day.  Just right of center.

Center Field is Missing

            So Brooks claims the center, the “silly spot” he calls it, whatever that means, or, “a step to the right of it.”  Just.  One. Step.  But wait.  He is, just this once, misinformed, and not just self-informed, because the center has disappeared.  It is disparu—disappeared—to borrow from the French.  It has been ripped from the political stage just as it was during the French Revolution.  Certainly no Republican is standing anywhere near there, unless you want to trot out a name like Olympia Snow, just to have something to argue about.

            The center is all about as if.  As if some observers of our gridlock polity could judiciously propose a new tax and still occupy the center, as was the case for two hundred years.  I am sorry, but if you say the word “tax” today, you are far, far to the left.  The new left.  The left that begins just to the left of the right field line.

            In this skewed field, the bailout and the stimulus are the new socialism.  Keynesians are now socialists.  Hank Paulson is a socialist.  TARP, which, if I am not mistaken, garnered at least a few Republican votes:  socialist.  Was that then the center?  If so, it is gone today.  And where was the Great Decider?  If TARP was socialism, he could have nixed it.  He was still president after all.

            Brooks disingenuously pines for the sunshine moment when President Obama took office, when, Brooks opines, the “culture war was winding down.”  He then has the temerity to blame the Obama administration or reigniting it by creating the impression of a “federal onslaught.”  That would be the stimulus package and health care reform—the stimulus package that ostensibly saved us from Great Depression 2.0.  That would be the health care reform plan that was designed to bring the U.S. out of its near-Third World standing with regard to access to health care.  That was the onslaught.

            If Brooks is arguing from the center (or “one step” right), then 75% of American policy academics are hard-core Marxists—the kind who clean their Kalashnikovs during student advising hours. 

            Brooks alleges that the Obama administration, “either wittingly or unwittingly, made big government-vs.-small government the center of debate.”  I remember things differently.  I remember distinctly standing on the cusp of economic disaster while the Republicans decided to make big government-vs.-small government the center of debate.  And this is exactly what I don’t like about Brooks.  He is a stealth revisionist.  He sneaks in there and redefines things while we are not looking.  Like where the center is. “It’s where I am,” he says.  Brooks is offensive, not because he represents the hubris of ideas, like Kissinger, but because he represents the hubris of ego, like Haig. 

            Brooks can blame Obama for the Tea Party all he wants, but history will show that the Tea Party erupted as a result of:  a) a shocking and gargantuan intervention in the economy to prevent a Depression, b) the reluctant introduction of a Republican Nixon-era idea that carrying subsidized health insurance be made mandatory, and c) Rupert Murdoch’s introduction of yellow journalism on the airwaves.

The Real Problem with David Brooks

            That Brooks is irritating goes without saying.  I know his voice best from those “All Things Considered” segments with E.J. Dionne.  Inevitably, Dionne leads off with some of his glass-half-full analysis that lets us know he sees light at the end of the tunnel.  Then Brooks unleashes a snide smack-down while cluing us in to some “real world” perspective that has more to do with Archie Bunker than Edmund Burke.

            Brooks is a problem because, on the face of it, he can seem reasonable.  He says he is reasonable.  But really he just wants to stick it to E.J. and collect those bonus points.

            It would have been nice if we could have just had a poll, and everybody who wanted to avoid a bailout and the massive debt it engendered could just step aside and say, “I’ll take the Depression.”  I can only guess that Brooks would opt for the Depression, because that’s what Burke would have done, taken his chances like a man—or some such nonsense. Actually, Burke would have had the exchequer cover it, because a Depression would have sullied the British Crown.

            Brooks points to a Pew Research Center poll that indicates that those who identify as liberals has remained flat at 24 percent of the electorate, while those who identify as conservative have risen 10 percentage points to 42 percent, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll.  This, of course, dissembles, because “liberals” don’t identify as liberals any more than overweight people self-identify as obese.  Perhaps the Post should conduct that poll about who prefers Depression 2.0 to a government intervention.  We might even be able to grant a redo now that Greece has set off ominous rumblings of a double dip.  We could get a contagion going in Europe, have Germany decline the bailout as no doubt Brooks would advise, sink Europe, and reimport the contagion here.  Only this time do nothing because conservatives are on the rise.  Let moral hazard rule.

            If the center has disappeared, it has disappeared because anyone daring to stand there is hounded from the left and the right, but particularly from the likes of Brooks, and those just to his right.  Try to stand for cutting Social Security benefits and raising Social Security taxes and see if the center holds.  And perhaps we should point out, as Brooks would not, that eight years of Republican rule most recently gutted the Social Security Trust Fund to pay for unfunded foreign adventures—very Burkeian, that.

Independent Shmendependent

            One more thing:  Independents are not necessarily centrists. They are just as likely to be radical left or right libertarians.  And they are not necessarily more sensible than moderate Democrats.  Or rational.  I would include moderate Republicans in that statement but I can’t find any.  Except, of course, David Brooks.

            Independents may be saying “A pox on both of your houses,” but that doesn’t mean they agree on anything except that they hate politics.  And who doesn’t?

            The reason we are stumbling, nearly broken, is that Big Money has captured the American political system.  Most of that Big Money comes from Big Business, which is, of course, aligned with the Republicans.  Some comes from Big Ideology.  A much smaller percentage comes from Big Labor (usually government-funded labor, funded directly or indirectly).  That is presumably why independents hate the two parties.  They just want the best deal for their personal interests as they see them.  This is true whether they are national defense hawks, national deficit hawks, or they just want pot legalized.

            Brooks, in the end, dissembles.  He accuses Obama of “sounding like an orthodox Reagan-era Democrat.”  That is of course code for the “L” word.  The truth is, Obama is nothing like a Tip O’Neil.  Those days are dead and gone, as is our center.  We are like a softball team that is short one person, so nobody plays center field and any ball hit there is an automatic out.

            And you can be certain, rock-solid certain, that David Brooks will never play that position, even shaded a step to the right.

* The syndicated title, “Greetings from just right of center,” as found in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, was much better than the original, “The Government War.”