David Brooks appears to have never heard of a man named Barack Obama:We no longer have a leadership class — of the sort that existed as late as the Truman and Eisenhower administrations — that believes that governing means finding an equilibrium between different economic interests and a balance between political factions. Instead, we have the politics of solipsism. The political culture encourages politicians and activists to imagine that the country’s problems would be solved if other people’s interests and values magically disappeared.
The democratic triumph has created a nation that runs up huge debt and is increasingly incapable of finding a balance between competing interests. Today, the country faces three intertwined economic challenges. We have to make the welfare state fiscally sustainable. We have to do it in a way that preserves the economic dynamism in the country — that provides incentives for creative destruction. We also have to do it in a way that preserves social cohesion — that reduces the growing economic and lifestyle gaps between the educated and less educated.
Indeed, it appears that Brooks has never heard of the Democratic Party. Of the major legislative successes in the 111th Congress, at least two of them -- the stimulus package and health-care reform -- were specifically crafted with balancing differing economic interests and political factions. The stimulus package contained a large percentage of tax cuts, and the template for health-care reform was drawn from Republican plans that preserved a place for the private insurance market and tried to control overall health-care costs. Brooks might not like the structure of the Affordable Care Act, but it's impossible to pretend like it isn't a moderate attempt to balance competing interests for the purpose of solving -- or at least, beginning to solve -- a long-term problem.
Insofar that there's a faction of the country that's uninterested in compromise, it is the Republican Party. To return to Pew's political typology, Republicans of all stripes are more likely to prefer politicians who don't compromise to politicians who do. This is reflected in the GOP's refusal to settle for anything other than total acquiescence to their agenda and in the GOP's refusal to compromise with a Democratic majority on anything of substance. Even on issues where conservatives clearly stood to gain -- the structure of a health-care bill, for instance -- Republicans refused to offer anything constructive, opting instead to demagogue reform as much as possible. Brooks' "pox on both houses" wording is a nice rhetorical trick, but it's far from the truth.
On a separate note, I also found this very odd:
A few things have been lost in this transition. Because we take it as a matter of faith that the people are good, we are no longer alert to arrangements that may corrode the character of the nation. For example, many generations had a moral aversion to debt. They believed that to go into debt was to indulge your basest urges and to surrender your future independence. That aversion has clearly been overcome.
I've never understood this moralized conception of debt. In and of itself, debt isn't a bad thing. Going into debt to earn a second degree or purchase a home isn't a moral failing; it's an investment in your own future and an attempt to better yourself. On the other end, going into debt to subsidize a fancy car is probably a bad idea. Debt is a tool, and going into debt isn't automatically a terrible thing. The same is true of governments; the debt incurred while trying to bring an economy back to speed is good. The debt incurred while fighting wars and issuing tax cuts is, by contrast, less than ideal. That Brooks insists on spreading a categorically anti-debt perspective is, I think, a shame.
