David Brooks’ political dream

Like many members of the political establishment, the NYT columnist hates debates and the common folk

By Glenn Greenwald

NY Times columnist David Brooks

Topics:David Brooks

(updated below – Update II)

David Brooks flew to London so now he’s an expert on British politics, and in his New York Times column this morning, he explains why “the British political system is basically functional while the American system is not.” Here’s the crux of what makes their system so admirable in his eyes:

Britain is also blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous. But the plusses outweigh the minuses.

It has long been the supreme fantasy of establishment guardians in general, and David Brooks in particular, that American politics would be dominated by an incestuous, culturally homogeneous, superior elite “who live in [Washington] and who have often known each other since prep school.” And while these establishment guardians love to endlessly masquerade as spokespeople for the Ordinary American, what they most loathe is the interference by the dirty rabble in what should be their exclusive, harmonious club of political stewardship, where conflicts are amicably resolved by ladies and gentlemen of the highest breeding without any messy public conflict.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, Brooks fondly recollected that “once, there was a financial elite in this country” — “middle-aged men with names like Mellon and McCloy led Wall Street firms, corporate boards and white-shoe law firms and occasionally emerged to serve in government” – but that glorious “cohesive financial elite began to fall apart” in the 1960s. The 2008 financial crisis, celebrated Brooks, would lead to a rejuvenation of political power of “the sort that used to be wielded by the Mellons and Rockefellers and other rich men in private clubs” — “unlimited authority to a small coterie of policy makers” that “does not rely on any system of checks and balances, but on the wisdom and public spiritedness of those in charge.” This would usher in “an era of the educated establishment.” ”A new center and a new establishment is emerging,” he gushed, one that will be disliked by liberals and conservatives alike; in other words, once you get rid of the commoners and the rambunctious ideologues, the somber, Serious elites will impose, with top-down magnanimity, true centrist wisdom (which just coincidentally happens to match the specific centrist-right views of David Brooks).

Brooks is widely loved by establishment figures because he thinks like them, speaks for them, and tirelessly defends their interests, most especially with this democracy-hating mindset. The obvious flaw in his post-financial-crisis fantasy was that the near-economic-collapse was the direct result of the very council of oligarchical elites he yearned to empower (“the safe heads from the investment banks. . . people like [former Goldman CEO Hank] Paulson . . . [and former Goldman CEO] Robert Rubin”) — just as the architects and bipartisan cheerleaders of the Iraq War (prominently including Brooks) continue to wield Seriousness status and exert dominance over America’s foreign and military policy.

But more generally, what Brooks so envies about British political culture — a small, incestuous, aristocratic, homogenized group of trans-ideological elites harmoniously resolving their differences — is exactly what already drives American policy and politics. And that is what establishment spokespeople like Brooks always mean when they yearn for “bipartisanship”: wise old men getting together in secret and reaching agreements that exclude democratic debate and render irrelevant genuine differences among the citizenry.

Consider last week’s non-public deal between Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell to extend the most controversial and abused provisions of the Patriot Act by four years without any reforms. Here’s how Associated Press described the impetus for that agreement:

The idea is to pass the extension with as little debate as possible to avoid a protracted and familiar argument over the expanded power the law gives to the government.

Similarly, the White House — without a shred of democratic consent or Congressional debate — was able to start a new war in Libya and fight it for more than the 60 days allowed (under the best case scenario) by the War Powers Resolution because the public is wary of the costs and purposes of that war, and unilateral presidential war-making avoids such messy debates, as one key member of the President’s own party acknowledged:

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-California, told CNN before news of the letter broke that he believed Obama was trying to “bring democracy to Libya while shredding the Constitution of the United States” . . . . [Sherman] says congressional leaders in both parties are letting this go and shirking responsibility because they don’t want to have to take a tough vote on whether to give the president authority for military action in Libya. “Americans are not of one mind on this, and some of my colleagues would just as soon not do their job because this is a difficult part of it,” Sherman said.

When the President’s Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission — the ultimate dream of bipartisanship fetishists and “centrist” (i.e., corporatist)-elite ideologues — met to plot solutions to the nation’s fiscal problems, they met in total secrecy, with the idea that they would unveil their majestic wisdom to the public and Congress would then simply enact it without any opportunity to change it. The Federal Reserve has long managed America’s economy in virtually complete darkness, and fought vehemently with the aid of establishment consensus to avoid even the most minimal transparency and audit, succeeding in avoiding all but the most watered-down version. Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance takes place behind closed doors: dominated by corporatist elites and their lobbyists (whom Brooks charmingly considers noble “experts”) and away from the knowledge or involvement of the prying, ignorant masses; that, for instance, was how President Obama’s health care legislation was actually shaped, and it’s obviously how virtually all foreign policy is shaped and implemented.

Indeed, the Congress — from top to bottom — is now structured to avoid any actual democratic debate and instead ensures the resolution of all matters in secret. In response to last night’s 74-8 cloture vote on the Patriot Act, the always-superb, hyper-informed commenter pow wow — in a comment that I highly recommend everyone read — explained perfectly how this works. Citing the joint efforts of both parties’ leadership to block any debate over authorization of the war in Libya, he explained: “the Party (= fundraising) organizations and their leadership [] operate almost entirely off the public record and out of public view. Their objective at all times: avoid unpredictable democratic floor action, and the accountability of public debate.”

It is true that public opinion very occasionally plays an important role in determining what happens in Washington (it sidetracked Bush’s efforts to privatize Social Security, and is likely to prevent any serious dismantling of Medicare). But that’s what Brooks and his like-minded establishment mavens are angriest about: that the ignorant, ignoble masses very periodically are able to prevent David Brooks’ establishment political views from being implemented; that dreary problem would be solved by vesting all political power in “people who live in [Washington] and who have often known each other since prep school” — and who think just like David Brooks.

One can debate whether that undemocratic model is desirable. But what’s not debatable is whether American political culture is already dominated by that model. It plainly is. And that’s what explains most of what has happened — and continues to happen — to the country.

* * * * *

As for Brooks’ idealization of British politics, I’ll leave that to actual experts in British politics to address, but what I do know is that British political elites were every bit as deceitful in the run-up to the Iraq war as America’s political and media class. I’d assume, though, that Brooks — in light of his own conduct — does not consider that to be a negative and probably considers it a positive.

UPDATE: In comments, spinozista points to this observation from Thomas Jefferson, in his 1824 letter to Henry Lee, that so perfectly captures David Brooks and his like-minded comrades:

Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, Liberals and Serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last one of Aristocrats and Democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all.

What I find most odious about Brooks and most of the members of the establishment media who think like him is not that they are in Jefferson’s category (1) — though they obviously are. It’s that they never stop insisting on the deceitful pretense that they’re in category (2).

UPDATE II: Someone who actually understands British politics — this British journalist from the British newspaper Telegraph — explains that Brooks has no idea what he’s talking about.

: Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald. More Glenn Greenwald

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David Brooks: “I have heard of Jeremy Lin”

Is it an "anomaly" for a professional athlete to be religious? (No)

By Alex Pareene

David Brooks

Topics:David Brooks, New York Times, Sports, Basketball, Jeremy LIn, Religion

David Brooks had to write a column about something, and his deadline was fast approaching, so he glanced at the sports page and saw something about New York Knicks phenom Jeremy Lin, and he was like, yeah, that works. Next stop, most-emailed list!

Lin is a point guard who rocketed to near-instant celebrity when he came off the bench and had a series of monster games, dragging the Knicks to a .500 record while their two biggest superstars were sitting out games. His celebrity then became a “mania” in part because he’s Asian-American and a Harvard graduate, two rarities in the NBA. It also obviously doesn’t hurt that he plays for the dominant team in the nation’s biggest media market (also it’s the fallow period between football and baseball). That’s basically the whole deal, and if you’d like to learn more read Andrew Leonard’s account of the early social media explosion and Alexander Chee’s take on Lin and Asian-American identity. Whatever you do, don’t read David Brooks’ take on the Lin phenomenon, because David Brooks doesn’t understand basketball or social media or race or religion or American society in general.

Here is Brooks’ first paragraph:

Jeremy Lin is anomalous in all sorts of ways. He’s a Harvard grad in the N.B.A., an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports.

Here is the next sentence:

We’ve become accustomed to the faith-driven athlete and coach, from Billy Sunday to Tim Tebow.

Haha OK. This is the point where you hit “select all” and then “delete” and start your column again. Brooks must’ve started this thing like 10 minutes before his deadline. (No time to edit it!)

So, yes, a “religious person in professional sports” is like the least anomalous thing in the world, besides maybe “a racist comment under a YouTube video.” Or “an old white guy in political punditry.” (Also, minor note, but: I think there’s actually a decent number — enough to make Lin not particularly “anomalous” — of prominent Asians and Asian-Americans in professional sports, unless you’re only defining “Asian-American” as “of East Asian descent” and you’re only counting the “big four” leagues as “professional sports.” And you’re not really counting baseball.)

While Lin’s Christianity is obviously of great importance to Lin, it honestly has barely anything to do with what made him an instant superstar, except for when hacks want to compare him to Tim Tebow, which is dumb, because Lin is suddenly famous because he’s really good at his sport while Tebow’s whole shtick is succeeding despite being awful at being a quarterback. (If Lin had been a college superstar and high draft pick who was famously inept at the fundamentals of his position, the Tebow thing would be an accurate comparison, but Lin is in fact the opposite of that.)

Having contradicted his own faulty premise five sentences into his column, Brooks rambles on about how he has noticed that being good at sports and being pious is sort of contradictory, because being good at sports doesn’t involve much “humility” or “self-abnegation.” Then we have some boilerplate theological musings, about how sports is like modern society and how Abrahamic religious values contradict modern cultural values, especially regarding individual achievement. (YAWN.)

But even while grappling with the tension between religious values and contemporary cultural values, which is basically well within Brooks’ wheelhouse, he demonstrates a hilarious misunderstanding of sports, and what sports are “about,” because Mr. Brooks has been spending far too much time in his cloistered elite liberal media ivory tower munching on brie and arugula and not enough time among Real Americans in their “Sporting Taverns” watching “The Big Game” over a pint of mass-market domestic lager.

For many religious teachers, humility is the primary virtue. You achieve loftiness of spirit by performing the most menial services. (That’s why shepherds are perpetually becoming kings in the Bible.) You achieve your identity through self-effacement. You achieve strength by acknowledging your weaknesses. You lead most boldly when you consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause.

I could be wrong, but “consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause” is basically step three of “how to be good at team sports,” after “be gifted physically” and “practice a lot.” (And acknowledging your weaknesses? Like when Magic would spend the off-season practicing “the weakest part of his game” until he improved it?)

The “two moral universes” of religion and societal achievement may be “irreconcilable” — I am not a religious person and hence don’t care — but that has very little to do with Jeremy Lin, or basketball, or politics, which Brooks for some reason brings up in the last paragraph, because he wants to pretend this column has been about something other than extended free-associative riffing on the fact that a famous person is religious.

In conclusion, the New York Times should probably consider having someone take a quick glance at David Brooks’ columns before they publish them.

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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12. David Brooks

The moderate conservative columnist hides appalling opinions behind "reasonable" language

By Alex Pareene

Topics:Salon Hack List 2011, New York Times, David Brooks, Media, Media Criticism

Last year, we gave New York Times columnist and liberal editors’ favorite moderate conservative David Brooks grief for being milquetoast and lazy. But this year, let’s hand it to the guy: When you want a truly vile opinion dressed up to sound innocuous, Brooks is your guy.

He can make a defense of racist demagoguing sound benign. He obfuscates and misleads on income inequality, while, as always, accusing those damned coastal liberal elites of disrespecting Real Americans. Accusing liberals of disrespecting Real Americans is one of Brooks’ go-to lines, even though there’s absolutely no evidence that he has any clue whatsoever how the middle and working classes live in America in 2011.

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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Paul Krugman and the art of calling out a colleague

The New York Times columnist demolishes familiar arguments made by unnamed hacks

By Alex Pareene

Paul Krugman, David Brooks and Thomas Friedman (Credit: AP)

Topics:The New York Times, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Income inequality

The New York Times opinion section, like the Senate, has this rule where you aren’t allowed to call out a colleague by name when you think he or she is full of shit. As in the Senate, this rule is silly and anachronistic and enforces a strained phony cordiality at the expense of honesty. It doesn’t ever stop Paul Krugman, though, who simply responds to his columnist peers’ dumb arguments without ever referring to them by name.

For example: David Brooks, whose most annoying schtick is to write something that sounds reasonable until you realize what he’s actually arguing (like, for example, “people often don’t intervene when they see something horrible happening” is a very interesting point, unless your real point is that this is because of hippies and the terrible ’60s), wrote earlier this month that American income equality is overstated, and that the real income gap worth examining is that between the college-educated upper middle class, who are doing well, and those with only a high school education, who have been left behind by our post-industrial economy. (In this case Brooks’ “actual” point is that “Blue inequality” is merely the resentment of educated liberals who hate success while “Red states” have the real authentic American inequality.)

Krugman, in a column published three days later, wrote:

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

Hah, I wonder who those “pundits” are, don’t you? He went on:

In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.

It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.

Oh, those usual suspects!

In today’s New York Times, Krugman’s column on the doomed supercommittee contains what I would characterize as a slightly off-topic tangent:

Oh, and let me give a special shout-out to “centrist” pundits who won’t admit that President Obama has already given them what they want. The dialogue seems to go like this. Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?” Mr. Obama: “I support a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes.” Pundit: “Why won’t the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?”

You see, admitting that one side is willing to make concessions, while the other isn’t, would tarnish one’s centrist credentials. And the result is that the G.O.P. pays no price for refusing to give an inch.

These so-called “centrist” pundits sound pretty dumb, right? Here’s New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, earlier this week:

Here we are in America again on the eve of a major budgetary decision by yet another bipartisan “supercommittee,” and does anyone know what President Obama’s preferred outcome is? Exactly which taxes does he want raised, and which spending does he want cut? The president’s politics on this issue seems to be a bowl of poll-tested mush.

How funny, this sounds a lot like what Paul Krugman’s unnamed idiot “centrist” pundit keeps saying.

To my knowledge, no one bothers to do this with Maureen Dowd columns, because she rarely makes arguments worth engaging with.

[Second example via Weigel]

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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The politics of selfishness

David Brooks is right: Special interests paralyze Washington. But he lionizes those who fixed the game for the rich

By Joan Walsh

David Brooks

Topics:David Brooks, Economics, The Labor Movement

Life is too short to refute every silly David Brooks column, but Friday’s meditation on “The Politics of Solipsism” is so backward, I couldn’t ignore it. Brooks writes about something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: today’s hyper-partisanship, and the related inability to solve the country’s big problems. But the twisted way Brooks identifies its causes makes me worry he has a kind of political or moral dyslexia. The big tell that Brooks has it bollixed is his quoting the late neoconservative Irving Kristol lamenting the politics of not only solipsism, but selfishness – when Kristol was one of the leading thinkers and rabble-rousers behind that sea-change in American political life.

Brooks quotes Kristol on the loss of true “public spiritedness,” which Kristol defined as “curbing one’s passions and moderating one’s opinions in order to achieve a large consensus that will ensure domestic tranquility.” Both men seem to hark back to a golden age when political and opinion leaders tried to balance the competing interests of different groups — labor and business, and the wealthy and the struggling, mainly — and in fact, there actually was an era like that. But Kristol played a central role in halting it, in rewriting that notion of public spiritedness and laying the intellectual foundations for the bitter class warfare — the haves attacking the have-nots — that over the last 30 years brought us the neo-Gilded Age economy we have now.

For most of the 20th century — arguably since the Gilded Age, and certainly after the New Deal — there was a bipartisan tradition of elites looking to harmonize the interests of labor and capital, to protect capitalism by blunting its sharpest edges, stoking consumer demand with decent wages, and making sure workers weren’t miserable enough to rebel. Groups like the Twentieth Century Fund and the Committee on Economic Development brought together scholars, CEOs, union leaders and other civic-minded folks to use research, data and reason to address the social and political challenges of the day. The foundations established by robber barons and other corporate titans, like Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller, similarly saw themselves as mediating institutions, above the partisan fray but with a concern for the public interest. Of course, none of those groups, or the era’s think tanks like the Brookings Institution or the Rand Corp., succeeded in absolute fairness and objectivity: Some tilted left, some right, some each way at different times, depending on the issue. But there was an ethic of “public-spiritedness” that is much scarcer today — and that’s because the American right did its best to eradicate it, led by thinkers like Kristol.

In the 1970s corporate America began a conscious and well-funded effort to roll back the gains of the 1960s, undermine labor unions, beat back business regulations and slash taxes, and Kristol was at the heart of it. The former liberal attacked foundations for funding anti-corporate groups, and urged them to invest in their own think tanks and interest groups. “When you give away your stockholders’ money, your philanthropy must serve the longer-term interests of the corporation. Corporate philanthropy should not be, and cannot be, disinterested.” That doesn’t sound terribly public-spirited to me.

In his great book “The Paradox of American Democracy,” John Judis charts Kristol’s influence. “Kristol’s recommendations on corporate philanthropy ran directly counter to the historic assumptions that had motivated American elites, but in the midst of the renewed class struggle of the 1970s, they found a receptive audience.” In the late 70s, Nixon Treasury Secretary and stockbroker William Simon proclaimed, “The only thing that can save the Republican Party … is a counterintelligentsia,” and he quoted Kristol to justify his plan to nurture a web of writers and social scientists to fight ‘the dominant socialist-statist-collectivist’ orthodoxy” he believed ran Washington, think tanks and the media.

Simon took over the right-wing Olin Foundation, the Business Roundtable joined the fray, and the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute challenged groups like the centrist Brookings Institution (and smeared it as representing the left.) Corporate America stepped up its presence in Washington as well. The number of businesses with lobbying (or “public affairs”) offices in Washington grew from 100 in 1968 to over 500 in 1978; the number of corporate PACs jumped from less than 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 in 1980. In the early ’70s, labor PACs outspent business PACs in congressional races; by the mid-’70s, they were about equal and by 1980, business PACs pulled into the lead, to stay. That year unions represented less than a quarter of PAC spending, down from half in 1974.

Their assault on labor throughout the ’70s was remarkable and unrelenting. Jefferson Cowie’s “Stayin’ Alive” provides a sobering rundown: In the early 1950s, workers filed about 3,000 complaints about dismissal for union activity with the National Labor Relations Board; by 1980, the number was over 18,000. At its heyday organized labor had won two-thirds of workplace votes to unionize; by the end of the ’70s they were losing most of them. Workers were de-unionizing at an astonishing pace: 583 workplaces voted out their unions in 1978-79, 20 times the number of the early ’50s. But it wasn’t spontaneous worker revolt, only this time against and not for unions; at a time of economic stagnation, one brand-new industry boomed: management consultants advising how to bust unions or keep them out — legally, when possible; surreptitiously, when not. And of course, the pace accelerated under Ronald Reagan: In the mid-’70s, under Gerald Ford, the National Labor Relations Board sided with business 35 percent of the time, according to John Judis; in the early ’80s, that jumped to 72 percent. And of course, the percentage of workers represented by unions dropped from a high of 35 percent in 1955 to less than 25 percent in the mid-’70s and continued to decline, to only about 12 percent today (it’s only 7 percent of private sector workers).

Meanwhile, Kristol’s journal the Public Interest published neocon porn like Jude Wanninski’s fantasy that cutting taxes would increase both government revenue and private investment — “supply side economics” that today’s Republicans still believe, even though Reagan-era deficits and the Bush tax cuts proved such notions tragically wrong.

The result was the disfigured American political and economic landscape we have today. The wages of non-supervisory workers stagnated in 1973, and then declined. The income gap, which had narrowed in the decades after World War II, began to widen again, and it’s now wider than any time since 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression. The tax overhauls pushed by Bush and Reagan meant that 40 percent of the country’s wealth is now held by the top 1 percent. Unemployment, stuck at 9 percent, is today hailed as good news, because at least the economy seems to be creating jobs — but the new jobs can’t make up for the jobs lost in the public sector, as a new bipartisan consensus focuses on the deficit at the expense of the unemployed. Brooks doesn’t seem to understand that his team’s notion of “public spiritedness” has prevailed, even if the deficit isn’t being slashed as much as he’d like.

To be fair to Brooks, he identifies growing social inequality as one of the big problems our current political paralysis can’t seem to address. But his answer makes no sense: “The political culture encourages politicians and activists to imagine that the country’s problems would be solved if other people’s interests and values magically disappeared,” he worries. “Voters will have to embrace institutional arrangements that restrain their desire to spend on themselves right now.”

But in fact, only one side — Irving Kristol’s — behaved as if the country would be better off if other people’s interests magically disappeared, and he and his friends did their best to make that happen. Right now, the voters who need to restrain their desire to spend on themselves are the uber-rich. Brooks even praises Paul Ryan’s budget as representing “progress in getting Americans to accept the need for self-restraint,” when Ryan would increase the deficit, not shrink it, with more budget-busting tax cuts.

As always in the GOP universe, it seems the only people who should practice self-restraint are unions, working people and low-income families who depend on social services. The most glaring solipsism evident today is Brooks’ own.

: Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh

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David Brooks’ dream world for the trust-fund set

His buzzed-up new fiction/science amalgam had me leaping to my feet -- to yell, "Die, yuppie scum, die!"

By PZ Myers

David Brooks' dream world for the trust-fund set

Topics:David Brooks, Books

I made it almost a third of the way through the arid wasteland of David Brooks’ didactic novel, “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement,” before I succumbed. I had begun reading it determined to be dispassionate and analytic and fair, but I couldn’t bear it for long: I learned to loathe Harold and Erica, the two upscale avatars of upper-middle-class values that Brooks marches through life in the story. And then I began to resent the omniscient narrator who narrates this exercise in unthinking consumption and privilege that is, supposedly, the ideal of happiness; it’s like watching a creepy middle-aged man fuss over his Barbie and Ken dolls, posing them in their expensive accessories and cars and houses and occasionally wiggling them in simulated carnal relations (have no worries, though: Like Barbie and Ken, no genitals appear anywhere in the book), while periodically pausing to tell his audience how cool it all is, and what is going on inside his dolls’ soft plastic heads.

I did manage to work my way through the whole book, however, by an expediency that I recommend to anyone else who must suffer through it. I simply chanted to myself, “Die, yuppie scum, die,” when I reached the end of each page, and it made the time fly by marvelously well. In addition, there is a blissful moment of catharsis when you reach the last page and one of the characters does die, although it isn’t in a tragic explosion involving a tennis racket, an overdose of organic fair-trade coffee, and an assassination squad of rogue economists at Davos, as I was hoping. That’s not a spoiler, by the way; the book is supposed to be all about the happy, productive life histories of Harold and Erica, from birth to death, so it’s no surprise that at least one dies. It is incomplete, in that the other one survives … an unsatisfying ending that I could happily resolve with one more bloody page, and that represents the only case I can imagine in which I’d ever ask David Brooks to write another word.

So what is this book about? It’s a bizarre chimera, an unholy grafting together of a novel, the story of Harold’s and Erica’s lives, and an ideological, psychological, neurological and pseudo-scientific collection of materialist explanations for their happy situation. Every chapter whipsaws the reader between a fictional narrative about some exemplary event in their history — birth, education, being attractive and popular, careers, relationships, corporate revenues, morality, European vacations and other such universal concerns — and a pedagogical and often facile digression into the supposed neural substrates that drive and reward decisions that will make these two happy and fulfilled. Neither part stands alone, and together … I’m sure there were delusions of a soaring synergy that would drive deep insights, but instead it’s a battle between two clashing fairy tales to see which one would bore us or infuriate us first.

Consider the novel element first. It contains a straightforward narrative, a description of two people’s trajectory through life. The plot is deadly dull: Erica, for instance, ascends smoothly from private school to business management to business leader to significant government functionary to the inner circles of Davos to a blissful retirement spent wallowing in high culture, with only brief stutters — losing a tennis match, a failed business, a brief marital infidelity — which she powers through with the discipline of her will, pausing only long enough for David Brooks to lecture the reader on how the mind overcomes adversity. What story there is here is pure mainlined bourgeois wish fulfillment, a kind of yuppie Mary Sue for the whole of the trust-fund set. There aren’t even any losers to contrast with Erica’s unending winningness, because everyone around them seems to be rising on the same cheerful bubble of privilege.

Nothing changes. In the introduction, Brooks even mentions this, that the story “takes place perpetually in the current moment, the early twenty-first century,” so the characters are born in this decade, grow up in this decade, work in this decade, die in this decade. Brooks has created a world where history doesn’t matter and there are no troubling external intrusions on the blithe reality of Harold and Erica. If ever you are in the market for the antithesis of the Great Russian Novel, here it is, the petty provincial string of anecdotes about only two characters who never experience a moment of self-doubt or inner turmoil.

The characters had potential, at least, and shouldn’t have been so bland. Erica is Chicana-Asian, but the ethnicity is entirely nominal, and once she asserts herself to a patronizing billionaire with a private school and gains entry into the world of entitlement with his charity, any pretense of diversity is jettisoned, and she becomes merely Ambitious, Focused Businessperson, with the superpowers of Discipline and Drive. Even her sex is largely irrelevant, but to be fair, so is Harold’s: They are a complementary pair of androgynous droids who, we are told, love each other deeply. Harold slots nicely into his role, too, as the Dreamy Academic Dilettante with the powers of Creativity and Synthesis.

There is nothing wrong with establishing a couple of clearly defined personalities in the story, of course. The awkwardness lies in how we learn about them; David Brooks is a “tell, don’t show” kind of guy, and instead of revealing these personalities by their actions and speech, we’re simply told by the omniscient narrator about the qualities of their characters. For a book that promises depth and insight into human values, this strategy is an admission of failure and narrative suicide. I don’t care about Erica and Harold, and while Brooks may tout the importance of the emotional surges and connections that bring people together, I sure don’t feel anything about their decisions. I’m just told.

For example, Erica makes a life-defining career decision: She meets a woman who runs a restaurant chain, who is thin and well-dressed in a conservative business suit, and Erica can imagine being like her someday, as Brooks tells us. And then, “Erica was suddenly consumed by a burning desire to be a business leader.” What, how? Was it the suit? I don’t know. We leapt from a superficial description of the appearance of a visitor to Erica’s school to “Something had lit the furnace of the little engine of ambition, which from this day forth would know no rest,” and on that train of stock phrases, a personality is fixed and launched unchangingly toward the end of the book.

Even Brooks would concede that his novel-within-the-book is not “Dr. Zhivago,” and I don’t think we’re supposed to get any lyrical insight from his plodding prose. The special quality of “The Social Animal” is billed as being its melding of information from neuroscience into the story, to help us better understand how the unconscious mind forms our characters and helps us achieve success.

The book fails neuroscience, too.

I don’t even necessarily disagree with the biological and psychological studies sprinkled in short, pithy summaries like shriveled little raisins of evidence in the gloppy porridge of his story; it’s that they’re just laid out so superficially and so discretely, with no discussion of how or to what degree or of context and significance. It’s a collection of factlets. I imagine them as conclusions written down on 3-by-5 cards, committed to memory, ready to be succinctly flashed as displays of erudition at a business meeting, and nothing more.

The issue here is that Brooks is dealing with complex matters, and by trying to stuff all of the factors that might impinge on the entirety of two lives, he commits himself to dashing off no more than a few paragraphs about each, leaving them dangling unconnected to one another and certainly doing nothing to complement the literary deficiencies of the book. They are instead so incongruous that they almost provide moments of comic relief.

Harold and Erica, for instance, begin to fall in love. In the fictional episode of the book, this is represented by a moment of flat affect, when they are working out on their bicycles and take a moment of rest at the top of a hill to hold hands. That’s “lovely,” Harold thinks. Then, a few pages later, we get the technical explanation of what’s going on: Harold’s ventral tegmentum and caudate nucleus are releasing dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine!

Woo, as Homer Simpson would say, hoo. Harold’s brain must be having a wild time.

That’s it. Brooks drops the technical names of two brain regions and a couple of neurotransmitters, briefly mentions their association with learning and reward centers, and we hear nothing more about them for the rest of the book, and nothing in his abbreviated description helps us understand how or why or what. A proximate mechanical explanation is no explanation at all, especially if given to an audience that most likely has little awareness of what a brain nucleus represents, or what these chemicals do. They are polysyllabic magical incantations that allow shallow people to pretend to have knowledge.

The technicalities don’t illuminate the story in any way, and the story undercuts the science. Ultimately, the neuroscience in the book feels a micrometer deep and a boring lifetime long, with the fiction of Harold and Erica giving the impression that it’s built on a sample size of two, and both of them utterly imaginary.

I don’t know whom this book is really written for. It’s definitely not going to satisfy any scientists, or even any informed people who want to know more about how the brain works — there’s no technical meat on the bones of this farce. It’s certainly not going to satisfy anyone hoping for literary quality, or beauty and poetry, or even a good story. I suspect that its only virtue is in uniting C.P. Snow’s two cultures, both of which will be populated with peeved readers flinging the book with great force across rooms everywhere.