NP - A Moral Scolding from David Brooks

[David Morris]

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/david-brooks-age-of-innocence-8950471

David Brooks diagnoses ou National downfall:

"Leaders today do not believe their job is to restrain popular will.
Their job is to flatter and satisfy it. A gigantic polling apparatus
has developed to help leaders anticipate and respond to popular whims.
Democratic politicians adopt the mind-set of marketing executives.
Give the customer what he wants. The customer is always right."
[...]
"Having lost a sense of their own frailty, many voters have come to
regard their desires as entitlements. The American decentralized
system of checks and balances has transmogrified into a fragmented
system that scatters responsibility. Congress is capable of passing
laws that give people benefits with borrowed money, but it gridlocks
when it tries to impose self-restraint.
[...]
"Western democratic systems were based on a balance between self-doubt
and self-confidence. They worked because there were structures that
protected the voters from themselves and the rulers from themselves.
Once people lost a sense of their own weakness, the self-doubt went
away and the chastening structures were overwhelmed. It became madness
to restrain your own desires because surely your rivals over yonder
would not be restraining theirs."

Charles Pierce responds:

Does this person honestly believe that the people who depend on things
like Medicaid and Social Security, and small-business loans and Pell
grants, are emboldened by the circumstances of their lives? Does he
believe that these people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and only
asking that the system be a little bit more fair are actually as smug
and entitled as every syllable he's ever written proclaims Brooks to
be? All over America, people are absolutely petrified that somebody in
their family might get sick, thereby bankrupting them forever. All
over America, people are worried that their mortgages are laden with
small-print land mines. All over America, people are living in sheer
abject terror that the job will disappear, or the rest of their 401K
will go up in smoke, or grandma's Alzheimer's will offer them the
choice of eating government cheese or letting the old girl die in her
own filth in some unregulated nursing home. These are the people that
David Brooks believes are destroying the country because their
unreasoning hubris prevents government from making their lives even
more difficult. I'm fking done with this nonsense. The man should be
pelted with rotting fish.


Pierce is a treasure.