David Brooks: Misproving his point

I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail on Brooks' latest foray into Orwellianism. The basic gist of his op-ed is that there are a lot of lower middle/working class Republicans out there who agree with the right on social values and foreign policy but disagree on economics. Brooks thinks that to secure these voters they should push the "opportunity society" agenda.

I find this a pretty fanciful solution to a misdiagnosed problem. All the Pew study seems to confirm is Thomas Frank's thesis that working class voters are voting against their economic interests in favor of symbolic appeals to patriotism and rural values.

Brooks admits that the leadership of the Republican party has little sympathy with the real material concerns of the working class, but he fails to realize that the economic interests of that leadership is strongly antithetical to those of the working and lower middle classes. The "business class conservatives" can't reach out to the poor and middle in any real way because those are the groups they are exploiting. The last thing the right wants is to talk about class - if they did, they'd lose.

Brooks also fails to understand that if even if they wanted to, the elite right couldn't reach out to the "poor Republicans" on economic issue. The opportunity society, by further undermining the social safety net, will actually make their situation worse. Bush spending has scarcely "laid down a welcome mat" to the poor: the overwhelming percentage of that money has gone to corporations and defense contracts.

Finally, Brooks has been pretty slippery in his definitions. To talk about the poor, the working class, and the middle class are all very different things. Spending some money in inner cities isn't going to cancel our the big benefit cuts coming at the middle class as part of Bush's social security plan. Flattening the tax code to the benefit of the top and the expense of the middle, or smashing labor unions, isn't going to help much either.

Brooks is right about one thing. Democrats don't believe that people can make it "on our own." The core liberal message is that we are not alone - that we are all in this together. As individuals, we are indeed largely at the mercy of forces "beyond our control." It is by acting together that we can really achieve something. But that's not something a wealthy columnist would know or care much about.