THE POLITICAL AND THE CULTURAL. To get off the precise subject of whether David Brooks column X is a joke (and I'm not exactly sure what that means, in any case), I'm surprised to see Ross Douthat drawing such a stark distinction between cultural commentary and political writing. So in the example here, Douthat criticizes me for analyzing Brooks' column on hipster parents through the prism of politics and suggests that "maybe [Brooks] was just annoyed by adultescent parents who dress their kids like "sad-parody club clones of mom and dad" and decided to write a somewhat silly column about it because, you know, not every column can be about how to partition Iraq, or the marriage gap between upper-middle class and working-class America, or grading the substantive achievements of the Democratic Congress to date." Maybe. But not every political attack or controversy is about how to partition Iraq or increase the marriage rates. What people don't like about liberals, for instance, isn't that they support universal health care and a living wage, it's that they sip lattes and speak French and are effete (I spend every weekend wrestling bears and eating animal flesh specifically to disprove this! Does no one watch!?). The cultural critique actually is the political one -- these aren't people you can trust to keep you safe -- and whether Brooks' motivation is partisan or not, his lampooning of Park Slope parents was just another entry in the New-York-Liberals-are-flakey-and-weak genre. And, indeed, Ross's critique of American politics is, I'd submit, quite cultural in origin, in that it connects the low marriage rates springing from a sexualized and promiscuous culture to a variety of socioeconomic problems. Now, one can argue whether Brooks is actually engaged a similar pursuit -- I think he is, Ross doesn't -- but there's not some obvious line between talking about culture and making a political critique, particularly not when you're on a major op-ed page or political blog and are thus being read by an audience expecting politics. --Ezra Klein
