David Brooks and Tom Frank
If Not Capitalism, Then What?
By David Brooks
Posted Thursday, Dec. 7, 2000, at 4:33 PM ETDear Tom,
You tantalize me. You say you're going off to Singapore, but you don't say why. Is the Baffler starting a special Singapore edition? I'd hate to be your distribution manager. Or maybe the AFL-CIO runs union discipline training sessions over there? Maybe you only say you are going to Singapore, but you're actually going to Hong Kong to get some suits made in the context of a free market economy, and you're ashamed to admit it to your friends (especially that guy at the next desk with the 40-ounce bottle of beer).
In any case, it's been a pleasure. It's always interesting and difficult for me to have a conversation with somebody who has fundamental doubts about capitalism. It's interesting because never in American history has there been an era in which capitalism and business people had higher prestige, when there have been so few mortal enemies to capitalism. And so it's good to hear from somebody outside that mainstream. I'm beginning to have serious doubts about consumerism, myself. When the mentality of shopping takes over everything--including religion and politics--then you are living in a shallow, bourgeois wasteland. Gone are the noble visions and the high ideals. This election bugged me because the candidates ran as if they were competing rate plans for cell phone companies: My plan gives you more choices. My plan gives you more prescription drugs on weekends and holidays.
But it's difficult conversing with someone who fundamentally questions capitalism because I never know what the answer is to the question: As opposed to what? It's like the Seattle WTO protesters. We know what they were against, but not what they're for.
This always leaves me confused. For example, throughout our discussion you have come back several times to the question of union strength: Will unions get blamed for a coming recession, etc.
Like almost every conservative I know, I have nothing against unions. Unions are necessary parts of the economy in order to balance the interests of workers against the interests of employers. When a strike occurs, I simply have no political view as to which side to be on any more than I have a view about which side to be on when AOL merges with Time Warner. It's a private contract process; it's up to the parties to arrive at some mutually beneficial deal.
A few years ago, I was on a panel before a very left-wing audience, and I was asked which side I took on the UPS strike. I said I took no side. Why should I? But the people in the audience clearly saw a union victory in that strike (and every other strike) as one step toward something larger. Toward what? A workers' paradise? That's cloud coocoo land. Unions are capitalist enterprises just like any other.
Well, you can't respond. You're off on a plane, I hope flying business class.
Best,
David
If Not Capitalism, Then What?
By David Brooks
Posted Thursday, Dec. 7, 2000, at 4:33 PM ETReader Comments from The Fray:
[Wednesday Notes from the Fray Editor: And what does the Grinch have to do with it? Click here to find out. Kevin Thomson wants to know how elastic the term BoBo is: "Are you talking about 20,000,000+ people or about 500 people? Are you talking about the 5% of Americans with advanced degrees or about the .01% that might get their wedding announcement in the Times?" And Aaron Varhola--"Union Dems vs Bobo Dems"-- thinks the Democrats should run a candidate who knows something about sport and popular culture.]
Is this the only country in the world where nearly 40% of the people don't have the foggiest idea of who they are and what they are to become? Would a scientific study reveal that only in America are people so completely unaware of where they are in the economic world? Shouldn't somebody be seriously studying this question? Did this situation suddenly occur, or have Americans always been out-to-lunch on this question? If the 40% figure accurately reflects where people think they are, or soon will be on the ladder of economic success, it explains a good deal about the recent election and why GW got as many votes as he did. The answer is a very harsh one; Americans are incredibly stupid about the facts of life. They are a pushover for brainwashing, and soft in the head for Republican propaganda. Just keep putting out that message: If you're not a millionaire or expect to be one soon, something is wrong with you. And, omigod, 40% of Americans believe it's so. How did they get that way, and what's going to happen to this country and in this country when those 40% wake up and realize that they have been had? There is a time bomb ticking in this country and it will not simply tick forever.
--Richard Walrath
(To reply, click
here.)
In order for people to mistakenly believe that they're in the top one percent, when in fact they're not, they must have a falsely low notion of everyone else's income, not falsely high. In other words, they haven't been fooled by techno-libertarian free-marketeers talking up the New Prosperity, they've been fooled by crypto-socialist paleo-lefties repeating that the rich are getting richer on the backs of the poor. Once they've swallowed that line, what are vast numbers of reasonably-prosperous people to conclude but that their comfort represents top-one-percent wealth?
--Comrade Ogilvy
(To reply, click
here.)
Americans do have a strong sense of natural law and of an eternal moral order. These powerful instincts were responsible for the profound feeling of revulsion that Ken Starr inspired in the public. We have always been forgiving of simple human weakness, but revolted by those who pervert justice and morality and misuse power.
--Paul Gottlieb
(To reply, click
here.)
[Monday notes from the Fray Editor: Quick response on this one. Should Mr Frank bear a grudge against Mr Brooks? Is he tall and amusing? And a first citation of Ayn Rand--always a Fray favorite but not usually this early in the week--here.]
Mr Franks makes a critical mistake in describing "Reagan Democrats" as siding with conservatives on social issues. It is exactly the opposite. Reagan democrats (I was a reluctant one in 1980) voted for conservatives on economic issues, not social ones. We fled the left because of its idiotic anti-business ideologies and incompetent managerial irresponsibility. We did not move to the right on social issues, however. In fact, most conservatives (except for the fundamentalists) have been moving steadily to the left on social issues since the '60's, just as liberals have been increasingly marginalized on economic issues, and moving to the center.
Economic "conservatives" who believe in the free market are actually believers in "liberal values", in which the value attached to anything is determined not by its fundamental worth, but whatever the market determines. So, those who immerse themselves in "the marketplace" begin to use the notion of relative value in everything in their life, and free market economics, championed by conservatives, actually produces a nation of cultural liberals.
Social conservatives actually believe in fundamental values, and often in fundamental religion. Yet they have mixed feelings about the marketplace--on the one hand they don't like the idea of allowing anyone to take control of it, because they fear an overt liberal agenda with do so, and yet they also fear what the marketplace is doing to them. Their fear and anger at the open marketplace is displaced, however, and heaped upon liberal cultural movements instead, which accounts for the self-denying vitriol of the social conservatives. They can't admit that their marriage to economic conservatives is what is actually killing of their world of traditional values.
There is no real contradiction between liberal cultural values and conservative economic ones. And the social conservative movement continues to fight its battles in an increasingly leftward direction. We're not arguing about whether to show Elvis' hips on TV anymore, you may have noticed. But there is of course a growing tension between those who truly do believe in intrinsic, innate, inherent cultural values, and those who see such values as relative. The "Bo-bos" are those who have embraced the world of relative values, and those who react to them are those who cling to fundamental values. And that is a warfare of values that has not yet even surfaced fully, because the social conservatives are still in bed with their enemy, the free-market economic conservatives. And Frank is right to think that someday soon they will wake up and smell the Starbucks, and realized that the people they have been in bed with are slowly poisoning them. When that day comes, say in about 20-30 years, we will probably have another massive cultural clash as in the '60's.
--Conrad Goehausen
(To reply, or to read a fuller version of this post, click
here.)
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Reader Comments from The Fray:
[Wednesday Notes from the Fray Editor: And what does the Grinch have to do with it? Click here to find out. Kevin Thomson wants to know how elastic the term BoBo is: "Are you talking about 20,000,000+ people or about 500 people? Are you talking about the 5% of Americans with advanced degrees or about the .01% that might get their wedding announcement in the Times?" And Aaron Varhola--"Union Dems vs Bobo Dems"-- thinks the Democrats should run a candidate who knows something about sport and popular culture.]
Is this the only country in the world where nearly 40% of the people don't have the foggiest idea of who they are and what they are to become? Would a scientific study reveal that only in America are people so completely unaware of where they are in the economic world? Shouldn't somebody be seriously studying this question? Did this situation suddenly occur, or have Americans always been out-to-lunch on this question? If the 40% figure accurately reflects where people think they are, or soon will be on the ladder of economic success, it explains a good deal about the recent election and why GW got as many votes as he did. The answer is a very harsh one; Americans are incredibly stupid about the facts of life. They are a pushover for brainwashing, and soft in the head for Republican propaganda. Just keep putting out that message: If you're not a millionaire or expect to be one soon, something is wrong with you. And, omigod, 40% of Americans believe it's so. How did they get that way, and what's going to happen to this country and in this country when those 40% wake up and realize that they have been had? There is a time bomb ticking in this country and it will not simply tick forever.
--Richard Walrath
(To reply, click here.)
In order for people to mistakenly believe that they're in the top one percent, when in fact they're not, they must have a falsely low notion of everyone else's income, not falsely high. In other words, they haven't been fooled by techno-libertarian free-marketeers talking up the New Prosperity, they've been fooled by crypto-socialist paleo-lefties repeating that the rich are getting richer on the backs of the poor. Once they've swallowed that line, what are vast numbers of reasonably-prosperous people to conclude but that their comfort represents top-one-percent wealth?
--Comrade Ogilvy
(To reply, click here.)
Americans do have a strong sense of natural law and of an eternal moral order. These powerful instincts were responsible for the profound feeling of revulsion that Ken Starr inspired in the public. We have always been forgiving of simple human weakness, but revolted by those who pervert justice and morality and misuse power.
--Paul Gottlieb
(To reply, click here.)
[Monday notes from the Fray Editor: Quick response on this one. Should Mr Frank bear a grudge against Mr Brooks? Is he tall and amusing? And a first citation of Ayn Rand--always a Fray favorite but not usually this early in the week--here.]
Mr Franks makes a critical mistake in describing "Reagan Democrats" as siding with conservatives on social issues. It is exactly the opposite. Reagan democrats (I was a reluctant one in 1980) voted for conservatives on economic issues, not social ones. We fled the left because of its idiotic anti-business ideologies and incompetent managerial irresponsibility. We did not move to the right on social issues, however. In fact, most conservatives (except for the fundamentalists) have been moving steadily to the left on social issues since the '60's, just as liberals have been increasingly marginalized on economic issues, and moving to the center.
Economic "conservatives" who believe in the free market are actually believers in "liberal values", in which the value attached to anything is determined not by its fundamental worth, but whatever the market determines. So, those who immerse themselves in "the marketplace" begin to use the notion of relative value in everything in their life, and free market economics, championed by conservatives, actually produces a nation of cultural liberals.
Social conservatives actually believe in fundamental values, and often in fundamental religion. Yet they have mixed feelings about the marketplace--on the one hand they don't like the idea of allowing anyone to take control of it, because they fear an overt liberal agenda with do so, and yet they also fear what the marketplace is doing to them. Their fear and anger at the open marketplace is displaced, however, and heaped upon liberal cultural movements instead, which accounts for the self-denying vitriol of the social conservatives. They can't admit that their marriage to economic conservatives is what is actually killing of their world of traditional values.
There is no real contradiction between liberal cultural values and conservative economic ones. And the social conservative movement continues to fight its battles in an increasingly leftward direction. We're not arguing about whether to show Elvis' hips on TV anymore, you may have noticed. But there is of course a growing tension between those who truly do believe in intrinsic, innate, inherent cultural values, and those who see such values as relative. The "Bo-bos" are those who have embraced the world of relative values, and those who react to them are those who cling to fundamental values. And that is a warfare of values that has not yet even surfaced fully, because the social conservatives are still in bed with their enemy, the free-market economic conservatives. And Frank is right to think that someday soon they will wake up and smell the Starbucks, and realized that the people they have been in bed with are slowly poisoning them. When that day comes, say in about 20-30 years, we will probably have another massive cultural clash as in the '60's.
--Conrad Goehausen
(To reply, or to read a fuller version of this post, click here.)