The secret of his failure

I finally understand David Brooks.

It's not that he doesn't believe the things he writes, or that he is constantly looking for a way to suck up to the powerful (though he is.) It's that he is basically a functional amnesiac, who doesn't even understand the basic concept of intellectual consistency, and has no reason to want to put it into practice.

"In the past two decades, the United States has become a much more interesting place. Companies like Starbucks, Apple, Crate & Barrel, Microsoft and many others enlivened daily life."

One of the things David Brooks loves to do is insult latte sipping, Crate & Barrel shopping effete liberal elites. In THIS column, however, he claims that the very symbols of effete liberal elitism make the United States more interesting and enliven daily life. There seems to be a conflict here, until you realize that David Brooks has, for all intents and purposes, never read a David Brooks column and doesn't know what David Brooks thinks. His memory is wiped clean every evening when he goes to sleep. Where some of us might look at things like, say, the growth of Starbucks, and see complex difficult to parse trends, David Brooks glances at them, spots one facet, comments on it, and then the next day takes another glance, spots another facet, and comments on that, without ever having to resolve the conflict between his beliefs. Through this method he manages to say a host of conflicting things that all contain a grain of truth but are, fundamentally, wrongheaded because they fail to take into account other facets of the phenomena he's describing (E.G. The fact that chain stores have driven interesting local stores out of business, which homogenizes American life rather than enlivening it, and the fact that there is not a single thing at Crate & Barrel that a sane healthy person would want to purchase.)

Let's continue.

Despite decades of affluence, longstanding issues like health care, education, energy and entitlement debt have not been adequately addressed.

But David Brooks, you support a party that does everything it can NOT to address these issues. Oh right. You don't know that. You're unaware of your own history of advocacy. Sorry. Yeah. These are serious problems. Thank you for discovering them, David Brooks.

Raised in prosperity, favored by genetics, these young meritocrats [who elected Obama] will have to govern in a period when the demands on the nation’s wealth outstrip the supply. They will grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices. They will have to make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession. They will have to struggle to keep their promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, pass an expensive health care plan and all the rest.

In other words they will have to deal with all the stuff that the Republicans let slip by the wayside for the last 8 years (as opposed to Bill Clinton who worked on balancing the budget and took a shot at health care, even though he was unsuccessful.) They will have to deal with the horrible fallout from the disaster that your chosen party visited upon America.

But you've already forgotten the Bush administration and your place among the pundocracy that supported it. You're just looking at how things are now without wondering how we got here, and whether there are any lessons we can learn from the past to help us act more wisely in the future. Because you're David Brooks. And that's what you do.