BROOKS’S BOBOS ABANDON GOP. Elsewhere in TimesSelectland, it must be said that David Brooks makes an insightful and valuable argument in his column on Sunday. Brooks, who has earned much-deserved mockery for his red and blue America shtick, in which he typically lambasts the coastal intelligentsia that he writes for and belongs to (“they can’t tell wheat from corn in a field, or a soldier’s rank by his insignia blah blah blah”), finally turns it on its head. Noting how the Republicans have endangered their majority by trampling their Northeastern moderate wing, he remarks, “it’s as if they are purposely trying to antagonize the married moms at the pseudo-New Urbanist outdoor cafes.” So, finally Brooks admits what liberals have been saying for years: that cultural/regional alienation cuts both ways in this country, and the proud heartland conservatives who use nouns like “Massachusettes” and “New York” as terms of abuse are the most deliberately responsible for it.
What is really interesting about Brooks’s column, though, is that he somewhat eschews the usual explanation for the Bobos’ alienation from the GOP (middle-class suburbanites are moderately pro-choice and don’t aggressively hate gays so they are turned off by the rise of the religious right.) Rather, Brooks points to the Bush Administration’s abandonment of empiricism and accountability in governance. Brooks argues that the professionals and managers who populate suburbs are used to following and enforcing accountablity for one’s job performance, and non-ideological fact-gathering in their work. So when they see two of the chief incompetents of the Iraq debacle going unpunished — Donald Rumsfeld is secure in his job and George Tenet was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom — they see a movement that does not know how to govern effectively. And the politicization of the domestic policy process disgusts them as well. Says Brooks:
The people in these offices manage information for a living, and when they see Republicans denying obvious trends, or shutting out relevant data, they say to themselves, “Those people are not like me.”
Brooks is right that the Republican leadership needs to return to responsible policy-making. He frames it as a matter of their political self-interest, and while the more important reason is the good of the country, I’ll settle for the reason Republicans might actually care about.
–Ben Adler
