I've been traveling and unable to read or respond to the comments. Let me just say that I think that Dan K is right, especially in his long comment above about the basic coherency of Obama's thinking and of the opportunism with which Brooks zeroes in on some of its inevitable contradictions and flaws.

Sure, Brooks "has a point;" almost everyone "has a point" in any debate. The question is why he chose to make that point, and not others, and how his use of the point serves a strategy that is evident in his other recent columns and, indeed, his record as a columnist.

In 2006, I noted here than on one of Brooks' feints to the left, he praised Obama's "deliberative mind," which he now characterizes as diffuse and dithering. This shift comes as the election approaches and Brooks gears up to do what he did in 2004 to disparage John Kerry to the benefit of the otherwise indefensible George W. Bush.

Brooks, a highly intelligent and insinuating writer, knows very well that he faces the formidable challenge of sowing at least some doubts about Obama among Times op-ed page readers, most of whom can be expected to vote for Obama. Brooks has spent a lot of time this winter and spring trying to convince readers that he is a deliberative columnist whose allegiances are open to persuasion, I have tracked this somewhat in past posts here. But as the election approaches, Brooks' columns are becoming basically the high end of the Republican ad campaign to sow doubts about Obama.

Sure, there are weaknesses in Obama: May I refer readers to my own past posts here, about Obama's neoliberalism,("Obama: Neoliberal or Civic Republican?") or about the elitism of some of his early supporters ("Obama's Greatest Weakness"), and so on? What matters about such criticisms, though, is whether a writer is airing them to benefit McCain or to strengthen Democratic self-awareness and candor.

There are also truly "disinterested" (that is, unbiased, public-spirited) critics, without any personal, partisan or ideological "interest" in the outcome but who do care for the republic and the good of the whole; I would like to think that such observers would by now have decided that Obama is the better bet for the very kind of discourse they rightly hope to preserve, but there is no dishonor in continuing to observe and to criticze without making or stating a choice. Their comments are still welcome and, indeed, often essential to democratic deliberation.

Brooks often poses as one of these disinterested observers, and sometimes he pulls it off. But to assess his credibility by that standard, you have to consider his record and his other recent columns -- blaming the mortgage meltdown on "a culture of debt" that has replaced "a culture of thrift"; claiming that Obama's European tour would have sickened Reinhold Niebuhr, and so on. (I can't think of anyone who would have "sickened" Niebhur more than David Brooks, for reasons I may someday find time and incination to explain.)

Obama is a somewhat professorial neoliberal, with communitarian and religious inflections, as Dan K. notes; he is also an experienced, if cautious, politician. He is also the first black man to make a truly credible run for the White House, and he has to balance the risk of making a false move against the risk of failing to fight when he must -- and the risk of picking the wrong things to fight on.

I would like to see him fight harder to describe the mortgage meltdown for what it is -- an assault by irresponsible Wall Street operators on the American people. It would take more guts for him to do this than we armchair warriors may recognize, but he will have to pick this and a couple of other issues to do it with, or else he is lost as surely as he will be if he gets "too" angry or picks the wrong issue. He has to summon a clean, magisterial anger of the kind we haven't yet seen in him, and summon it against McCain and Wall Street, if not also big Pharma or the military-industrial complex.

If that's what some people feel that Brooks was saying, sure, he has a point. But he wasn't saying it to prepare Obama for battle. He was saying it to demoralize Obama's supporters and clear some more wiggle room for the idea-less, temperamentally risky John McCain and his dozens of un-American advisors.

Posted at August 6, 2008 10:31 PM in response to Of Writers and Leaders

Let me respond to some of these thoughtful messages.

Chemjeff, the problem is that not all of the most important, pressing social needs can be made profitable to meet, especially if you're a corporation watching your quarterly bottom line and stocks. Deregulation as we've known it spurs really awful behavior. It's not "ideological," true, but the rest of us (i.e., the republic) have to analyze how to contain it. And sometimes this will involve putting bankers in jail, and other times it will involve defeating politicians (Democrats and Republicans) who enable and empower the predators. It's hard work. That's politics. The market alone won't take care of it.

To Andrew Strat, I'd say, beware of wondering how "we should interact with ordinary people." We are all ordinary people, and sometimes we have to be reminded of it, and to remind others. Sometimes, it's true, "elite" people like the two Roosevelt presidents -- secure in their fortunes, educated and networked at the best schools -- used those strengths and their own strengths of character (or at least their own murkier drives) to do a lot of good. There is always a need for them to counter what Teddy Roosevelt called the "malefactors of great wealth" and FDR called the "economic royalists," whose hatred he openly welcomed.

To Dan, I think you draw too extreme a two-sided portrait-- it is almost as if you "romanticize" the voraciousness and ugliness of America just as much as, say, the League of Women Voters used to romanticize the workings of democracy. In between, we have had strong urban and rural movements and even governments (the latter in Kansas, as Tom Frank reminds us) through which ordinary Americans, time and again, taught some decency to their "betters" rather than just clambering on board their ships. That will need to be done to a lot of Wall Street now.

Who can deny that a lot of American life is ugly, grasping, and reckless? It is indeed dispiriting. But to say that only a raw kind of liberalism enabled people to rise strikes me as wrong about of lot of urban history -- a longer discussion than I can get into here. I do have one piece on the ironies and ambivalences of this that might work here:
http://jimsleeper.com/articles/signature-pieces/Shanker,%20Democracy%20Journal.pdf

Posted at July 19, 2008 10:33 AM in response to Changing the Debate -- For Real

Dan, See my reply below.

Posted at July 19, 2008 12:20 AM in response to Changing the Debate -- For Real

Dan, I truly appreciate and partly sympathize with your heartfelt... pessimism! But let me make just a couple of points here:

The American republic was always too big, and always too ugly. But, for all its ugliness and even brutality, it really is something amazing, and for you to suggest that I'm pining for Amish-ness or a Platonic hiearchy reminds me of your constant vigilance against a tweedy, Ivy League elitism.

I don't know if you ever read my The Closest of Strangers or realize that my civic-republican moorings come not from romantic visions of New England town meetings but from messy struggles I was involved in in Brooklyn for more than a decade. You and I know how the decks have been stacked against the genuine liberation this country has made possible for millions of truly "tired, poor, huddled masses" who'd had no chance whatever in the countries they'd come from. But I worry that there is soemthing almost as cavalier in your dismissal of those accomplishments as you think there is in my affirmations of what the struggle should be.

It's not at all clear to me what kind of struggle you're holding out for, what kinds of affirmations you want to make. Are you a stoic?! That's honorale (and maybe I'll wind up there myself some day), but right now I'm more with Orwell's mix of social-democratic, laborite hopes combined with cold-eyed realism and "retrograde" appreciations for some of the distinctive resources in his national culture (the Britain of his time.) I don't give up on America because I don't see the alternative, much though I admire some aspects of life in other countries. And you? Jim Sleeper

Posted at July 18, 2008 10:44 PM in response to Changing the Debate -- For Real

Clearly, Koznik can't stop posting. He even replies to himself. All his posts say the same thing. Really, what's new and original in his tenth post as compared with his first?

Ellen: Please don't feed the trolls... or be a weed in the garden.

Over and out. The real discussion about this piece continues offline among people who have actually read Packer and Brooks and my post.

Posted at June 20, 2008 9:34 AM in response to The Conservatives' Conundrum -- and Ours

Koznik has now posted seven times to say that my piece says nothing and, moreover, that I supply no evidence to substantiate that nothingness. Leaving aside the strangeness of that argument, I’ll note simply that my post cites seven or eight Brooks’ columns that, taken together, show not just inconsistency but intellectual dishonesty and, in response to Koznik earlier, I supplied a letter from Todd Gitlin that identifies several more.

The larger purpose of the column, however, is not to imitate a legal brief or an argument in court, and its burden is not evidentiary, There are other ways of thinking than the lawyer's or prosecutor's or political debater's ways. Some people get this, some people don't. The closing excerpt from Robert Warshow gets at a part of the problem.

My concern is that Brooks, although of limited importance himself, is emblematic and therefore revealing of something we all do need to understand a lot better about what is going so wrong with this country. By indulging him, Packer too reflects a certain weakness -- in himself and The New Yorker and the chattering classes -- that Brooks exploits masterfully, not to any great consequence on his own account, but in ways that should wake people up.

If Brooks wants to evolve intellectually and politically and to break with his 20 years of carrying water for the Republicans and the conservative movement, God bless him, but let him explain himself, not just keep sliding around sophistically as he's been doing while re-electing George Bush and abetting a lot of needless bloodshed and social decay. If Packer wants to treat him as a legitimate witness, he whould demand no less than what I have just proposed.

Andrew Stat is right, I think, to challenge the notion of ideological consistency. I'm arguing not from the "left" or "right" as we generally understand them but from a civic-republican way of thinking that is capable of challenging both capitalism as we know it (namely, corporate, anti-republican capitalism, not the Lockean entrepreneurial kind) and a rights-based liberalism that acknowledges and cultivates no countervailing obligations and discipline.

Liberal states and republics have to rely on certain virtues and beliefs which the government itself cannot nurture, enforce, or even defend. So they have to be nourished and cultivated all the more intensively by civil society. The left and the right each have credible claims on certain truths about how to do this. but neither can do it alone. We have to have trustworthy, public vantage points from which to draw on and synthesize both. Brooks is capable of advancing that discussion, and Packer, too, but neither is doing it in pieces like Packer's or self-serving comments like Brooks'.

Posted at June 19, 2008 8:55 PM in response to The Conservatives' Conundrum -- and Ours

Notice the six comments above by "Koznik," all responding to a post which he insists said nothing and wasn't worth reading.

The effect of responses like his is to discourage and ultimately stop what others are trying to do in joining an interesting "pick-up game" of discussion and making it fruiful and encouraging. The best response to Koznik is to keep posting more constructive observations, including disagreements that are substantive.

One price we have already paid for persistent interventions like Koznik's is that some people who have messaged me privately with rich and informative reflections -- including more information that confirms my arguments and some that takes issue with them -- become disinclined to post their thoughts on a string full of acrimony and insult.

Others here could ask Koznik why he has interrupted a pick-up game six times to insist that it isn't worth playing, when he could easily find another game to join that would be more worth his time.

I won't take the liberty of posting the substantive comments I've received privately, but here is a letter which Todd Gitlin sent to the New York Times in December, 2005 about David Brooks. It was never published, although Todd tells me he did post it here in TPM awhile back and is glad to air it again:

To the Editor:

Re: "Multiple Reality Syndrome" by David Brooks(Dec. 4):

Mr. Brooks writes that earlier in the Iraq War, "Sometimes I'd come way from off-the-record conversations and background briefings [with administration officials] feeling my intelligence had been insulted, because, even in private, officials would ignore realities that were on newspapers' front pages.

I have just reread Mr. Brooks' dozens of columns on Iraq. He wrote that "senior members of his administration are capable of looking honestly at their mistakes (Dec. 9, 2003). He described the Bush administration as "drunk on truth serum," practicing "honesty and candor" (Dec. 13, 2003.) He proclaimed that Mr. Bush has "exceptional moral qualities" (November 23, 2004) and that "two years from now.... Bush's [inaugural speech, which is being derided from vagueness and from its detachment from the concrete realities, will still be practical and present in the world, yielding consequences every day. (January 22, 2005).

But he never informed his readers that Bush and his team insulted his intelligence. Thanks to Mr. Brooks, 27 months into his column, for finally getting around to telling us."

Todd Gitlin

I have received a number of thoughtful and telling messages about Packer and his New Yorker piece which the writers wouldn't want to post anywhere, so I'll forbear and simply urge others to keep elevating the strings of comment at TPM, thereby swamping the trolls. Thanks to Dan K, Andrew Strat, and others for doing just that.

Posted at June 19, 2008 9:31 AM in response to The Conservatives' Conundrum -- and Ours

Thanks to Quinn, among others, for getting my observations and arguments right.

I should add (and I've revised the last paragragh of the post to do so) that, indeed, it would take more than a typical American political "movement" and more than well-defined policy initiatives to get us out of the hole we are in. That argument is beyond the scope of a post like mine, but I was hinting at it in contrasting Istanbul and Hartford, CT.

Connecticut was once known as the land of "steady habits" grounded in civic-republican virtues that went back to the Puritan. Its growing economic and racial inequalities are straining that social fabric, as much in its upscale suburban redoubts as in its cities. Capital is flowing out and immigrants are flowing in too quickly for society to adjust, and some of the state's richest residents are those who, unlike most Americans, profit from those capital flows no matter which direction they're moving.

Istanbul, too, is changing, although it still has a pre-Wall St. culture of honor and, compared to Harford, a lot more ethnic and religious homogeneity, and a civic life grounded in widely shared, if residual Islamic assumptions and folkways, even among the many unreligious. (Istanbul also has a greater history of cosmopolitan tolerance of religious minorities, going back to the Ottomans, the big exception being Turkey's past conflicts with Greeks and Armenians, which involved territorial claims.)

The streets I walk in Istanbul are mostly in the old center city, but much of the larger city looks post-modern and sprawling now, bigger than either Los Angeles or New York; and while old habits and relations persist, they may well not last. For now, though, what Turks still lack in corporate efficiency and market inventiveness, they make up for amply in sheer human warmth, enthusiasm, and good will. One needn't be a romantic Orientalist to see and feel the differences from New York-- or Hartford.

Posted at June 15, 2008 4:11 AM in response to Obama: Neoliberal, or Civic Republican?

Thanks to K-town, Dan K, and others here who've written constructive comments. The "TPM Community" isn't negative; these posts get thousands of readers who don't post their own comments but do read the essays and pass them on to friends or by links, leaving the trolls behind.

My purpose in this post isn't to discuss specific policy proposals, much less indict Obama, but, as you and others have noted, to highlight some of the pressures and constraints of the American political system that have made his course hard and that have therefore left more than a few people doubting what he would actually do as president. Despite these doubts, I maintain some hopes for him, as I've mentioned. The best responses are those that carry the discussion forward, not those that attempt (and fail) drag it down. I just stop reading and scroll down right past the negative ones as soon as I see things like "WTF." I'm sure that others do, too.

Posted at June 14, 2008 12:21 AM in response to Obama: Neoliberal, or Civic Republican?

My wife grew up in Istanbul, and I know it fairly well. I'm sorry if the "pre-market culture of honor" phrase threw you off, but Ipods in internet cafes aren't as ubquitous or as consequential as you suggest, and what is likely to strike, say, a New Yorker or Washingtonian is the manners of the people in civil society and most retail business dealings, which I won't attempt to describe here. What I should have added was that the pre-market culture of honor is also more cosmopolitan than our own in New York, in ways that Americans, especially, are quite slow to understand. But that, too, is a longer discussion than what we should have right here.

Posted at June 5, 2008 3:30 AM in response to Obama in the Straits