Dean Baker concentrates his fire on David Brooks again, despite my suggestion that he avoid high blood pressure by not reading him. Baker takes issue with this gem from Brooks’s latest column:
“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.”
Baker’s criticisms are all well founded, of course, but there’s a more fundamental problem with the quoted paragraph. It’s total, ahistorical gibberish, made up on the spur of the moment to support another of Brooks’s absurd theses. I defy anyone to cite a founder of this democracy, or any democracy, who opined that “democratic systems were based on a balance between self-doubt and self-confidence”. I heard about this guy, for instance, who said this one particular democratic system was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. But then, maybe Brooks knows something he didn’t know. This is simply a variant of Brooks’s typical “there are two kinds of people in the world” argument, with his side, as always, on the side of reason.
I suppose if one were to torture some words and phrases from some historical moment, the mangled remains, once the cries for mercy died down, might, when viewed in the dark, yield up something one could interpret as being suggestive of Brooks’s formulation. In his world, maybe that’s enough. The balance of his paragraph makes even less sense. This is what passes for deep thought in this day and age. Were only Brooks afflicted with a modicum of the self-doubt he urges on the rest of us, we would all be better off.
Postscript: I hereby make a solemn promise not to mention David Brooks again for at least a month. This could become as addictive as ice cream, and far less nutritious.
