David Brooks uses a column full of nonsense (patio man? seriously?) to drag out an interesting point at the very end:
But the shift in public opinion is not from right to left, or from anti-government to pro-government, it's from risk to caution, from disorder to consolidation.
There is a deep current of bourgeois culture running through American suburbia. It is not right wing, but it is conservative: a distrust of those far away; a belief in convention and respectability; and a strong reaction against anything that threatens to undermine the stability of the established order.
Democrats have done well in suburbia recently because they have run the kind of candidates who seem like the safer choice -- socially moderate, pragmatic and fiscally hawkish. They, or any party, will run astray if they threaten the mood of chastened sobriety that has swept over the subdivisions.
Patio Man wants change. But this is no time for more risk or more debt. Debt in the future is no solution to the debt racked up in the past. This is a back-to-basics moment, a return to safety and the fundamentals.
This is a fascinating argument, warts and all. Brooks has a point that many moderate voters are turning to Obama because of his judgment in the face of crisis and his unflappability. But I think Brooks mistakes just how far the situation has gone. The "stability of the established order" is already well undermined, and some of the sweeping changes that the government should make in the next years require rebuilding elements of it, including our infrastructure, our health-care systems, our schools, our jobs and wages. Brooks is taking the delightfully awkward position that we need to protect the status quo even though the status quo is terrible, because any change in the status quo would undermine social order and frighten the bourgeois.
Brooks' focus on patio man locks him in on a demographic that is really not that important -- patio men are typically set in their voting ways. They are also not as affected by this crisis as badly as many other groups because of their above-average wealth -- plumber man or woman, for instance, minority man or woman, or rural man or woman are all hit harder. It seems that bourgeois people are important to Brooks because Brooks is a bourgeois person. But I digress, and there is plenty to deal with in Brooks' last paragraphs there.
Democrats who won in 2006 did not win because they seemed "safer," they won because voters preferred their policies on the economy and Iraq. Maybe those policies made them seem safer compared to the Bush administration. Now Brooks wants to protect the "chastened sobriety" of the suburbs, but the pragmatism he lauds now calls for real change, not superficial, or else things will get worse. He talks of going back to the fundamentals, but presuming he doesn't mean the economic ideas of the late nineteenth century, what fundamentals means is countercyclical spending and, yes, debt to get us out of debt, because governments aren't people and don't operate by the same rules. Take Brooks out of the Great Consensus, I suppose.
--Tim Fernholz
