David Brooks: Still Comforting the Comfortable

In the latest Missive From the Brooks Cave, David Brooks complains that Hillary Clinton's campaign lacks any idealism, that it isn't connecting with voters, and that where a visionary might have two or three great ideas, Hillary "piles on an arid hodgepodge of 8 or 9 programs."

Brooks calls this "pure interest group liberalism-- buying votes with federal money." Brooks wants the American people to be "free," but his freedom is never very clear. Free to do what? With what? Free to explore what the state's offer? The states have never been very good guarantors of human flourishing; civil rights have come in fits and starts from cities, only to be adopted nationally as a good idea or, more often, as a necessity imposed by the idea that all men are created equal. State laws traditionally have done more to enshrine inequality.

When we look out over the vast world of nations and states and what they've tried, we know what works. We've seen it. We have a pattern language of polities and projects that make them work. The only thing preventing their implementation is power plays and the special interests of those in power. If Hillary can keep a few of those alive, and make a few more viable, good luck to her then.

Brooks is here to comfort the comfortable. Again.

(And really, Rod Dreher? Rod Dreher? The guy whose policy ideas amount to "Democracy and Christianity are incompatible; we should 'go Amish' on the United States to keep ourselves away from the world?" I like Rod mostly as a bellweather of how not to think about what God wants from us. Because, you see, when given a choice between loving humanity and loving "the rules", Rod will always go with the rules.)

Too much bullshit for me

A woman today said,

But I like Donald Trump. I do! Listen, I have worked around a lot of men, and... listen, this was a man talking to a man. This is the way men talk. And I miss the days when a man talked like a man. I don't think the press should make too much of this. I like him. He makes mistakes, but I like him because he's better than the kind of talker who never makes mistakes.

And then I really, really had to turn off the right wing radio because that was just too much bullshit for me to handle.