The premise of AEI President Arthur Brooks' new book, The Battle, according to Jonathan Chait, is that America is engaged in some kind of culture war between a minority of statist liberals and free-enterprise loving conservatives who apparently are cool with letting your house burn down if you can't pay the fire department to put it out. The statist-liberal faction is led by President Barack Obama, who Brooks says hates capitalism because of a commencement speech he made at Arizona State in which he stated:
You're taught to chase after the usual brass rings, being on this ‘who's who' list or that top 100 list, how much money you make and how big your corner office is; whether you have a fancy enough title or a nice enough car. ... Let me suggest that such an approach won't get you where you want to go. It displays a poverty of ambition.
Chait points out that's not all he said:
Does Brooks believe that money and fame are everything? Brooks certainly does not cite the numerous times Obama has praised the free enterprise system or the importance of entrepreneurship. Nor, for obvious reasons, does he mention that Obama's speech at Arizona State was not an attack on the idea of getting rich, but rather an attack on following conventional and short-term measures of success. Indeed, in that very speech Obama extolled “two guys in a garage named Hewlett and Packard” as visionary entrepreneurs setting the standard for the kind of fresh thinking he was urging upon his young audience. In short, “what you need to know about President Obama’s views about the free enterprise system” tells you exactly nothing about his views about the free enterprise system.
Chait goes on to ether Brooks for several more pages, but the review might as well have stopped there. If Brooks is too intellectually dishonest to avoid taking a quote out of context in order to prove a thesis for which he has no other evidence, there's really not much hope for the rest of the book. Brooks' thesis sounds like it lacks the explicit race-baiting of Dinesh D'Souza's latest offering, but all we're doing here is selecting for taste, since Brooks obviously isn't beneath the same kind of rank manipulation in order to prove a weak argument. Where D'Souza champions the cultural prejudices of a certain segment of the conservative movement and Republican Party, Brooks flatters them by giving them a more plausible intellectual pretext.
You expect this kind of stuff from someone in the Breitbart stable, not the president of a major American think tank. Brink Lindsey, a former vice president at the libertarian Cato institute, was forced out after, among other things, writing a review for TAP about how much Brooks' book sucked. That in itself tells you a great deal about the financial and social incentives for conservatives to simply avoid anything resembling honest discourse. It doesn't really matter whether we're talking about journalism or think tanks, as long as there's a huge audience in the conservative movement that just wants to be lied to, that's what's going to happen.
