Mzgraciev: The opportunist coalition

Shorter David Brooks: "The Opportunity Coalition", New York Times, January 31, 2014

I could spend the remainder of President Obama's term—sorry, I mean his other term, I keep forgetting he's already had one—making small incremental improvements in my general critique, gently mocking some of the themes proposed in his State of the Union address on Tuesday if I can be bothered to find out what they were (didn't he say something about patent law?). I might even score some points that way.

Or alternatively I could think of myself as liberated from the need to campaign against the president, since he's definitely not running any more, and try to think in larger terms, transcending the tired categories of small-government conservative and big-government liberal: I could come out as a Whig!

The most useful view of Brooks's amazing column might be that proposed by Matt Yglesias:

David Brooks’ proposed “Whig” policies sound exactly like the policies Obama already has: http://t.co/9z1lZdC5p5
— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 31, 2014

I must say, I'm extremely stimulated by the concept of Obama as American Whig, in the mold of Clay and Webster and young Abraham Lincoln, a proponent of powerful Congressional government engaged in industrial planning through the massive expansion of publicly supplied education and government-funded infrastructure, and rejecting idiotic imperial adventures like the conquest of Texas. The only big thing missing is the bedrock Whig insistence on high taxes through the protective tariff, something Obama (and Brooks and Yglesias) would be unlikely to support (then again the old Whigs themselves might have turned free traders as the industrial economy matured, and probably would have warmed to the income tax as an alternative way of funding their big-government programs).

I don't quite get how Brooks sees himself as Whiggish in this sense, though, or how he gets to reproach Obama for failing to be a Whig, except that alcohol prohibition was a popular idea in segments of the Whig tendency, and Brooks has always been big on morals legislation. Perhaps he is a little confused by the other, trans-Atlantic Whiggery, that of his beloved Edmund Burke, ancestor of the free-trade Liberals of 19th-century England.

Fictional history from the Ill Bethisad wiki.

His assertion that Whigs

argued that it is better to help people move between classes than to pit classes against each other.

is, I think, an anachronism in the first place, language that would never have occurred to anybody in the 1830s and 1840s to use, and the bizarre Reaganite idea that you could resolve inequality by making everybody an entrepreneur and eliminate the icky working class altogether. I guess you could say abolishing slavery, as most Whigs hoped someday to do, would help African Americans "move between classes", in opposition to John Brown's preferred program, but the Free Labor movement that was a key element of the Whig coalition paid less attention to social mobility than to making it tolerable, even rewarding, to be a member of the proletariat, a concept to which our postmodern conservatives for some reason take vehement exception.

One thing, of course, for which we remember our American Whigs is the hope they placed, as they came to grapple with slavery, in a compromise between good and evil: in the Compromise of 1850 brokered by the great Whig Henry Clay. We can see a line from there to Obama through the Henry Clay of the 20th century, the late Edward Kennedy, and his triumphs in working with the Dark Side to produce serious federal funding for education (No Child Left Behind) and universal health insurance (the Affordable Care Act) by cutting in all the rent-seekers for a share of the take.

Brooks seems to be taking an interest in getting Obama into this kind of work, assembling a coalition of opportunists, as it were, to "structure neighborhoods so that teenagers are more likely to thrive" (fewer of those pool halls and more soda counters!) and "get young men wage subsidies so they are worth marrying" (what about a plot of land, or a bride-price for the girls' anxious papas?)—

he could create a group of Simpson-Bowles-type commissions — with legislators, mayors, governors and others brought together to offer concrete proposals on mobility issues from the beginning to the end of the life span

—without seeming to realize that the president has been there all along looking for partners and not finding them. Certainly not finding them in the conservative division of the pandritry of the New York Times.

The big thing about the Compromise of 1850 is that it didn't placate the slaveholders, not even slightly, and in the end the only solution was to stop taking their hopes and fears into consideration at all and get rid of the Peculiar Institution altogether (not to mention a huge and dreadful war). The same kind of thing seems to be happening with the Kennedy-Obama approach to health care, and I expect it too will eventually have to yield to the more radical approach, while Brooks dodders ever deeper into the past of his perfervid imagination.

Album cover, 2010.

The inevitable Driftglass reminds us that he has been calling Brooks a Whig for years; Brooks is behind even in regard to his own writing.