Picking on David Brooks

Matt Taibbi’s latest critique of David Brooks is making the rounds on the interwebs and perfectly illustrates nearly everything wrong with our favorite NY Times writer.  In a recent discussion on the Times website with Gail Collins, Brooks managed to hold up Duke’s victory over Butler in the NCAA Championship as a metaphor for how the rich in society today work harder than the poor.

Taibbi does a good job tearing apart that argument:

I would give just about anything to sit David Brooks down in front of some single mother somewhere who’s pulling two shitty minimum-wage jobs just to be able to afford a pair of $19 Mossimo sneakers at Target for her kid, and have him tell her, with a straight face, that her main problem is that she doesn’t work as hard as Jamie Dimon.

Only a person who has never actually held a real job could say something like this. There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.

…

Brooks is right that most of the people in that 5% bracket log heavy hours, but where he’s wrong is in failing to recognize that most of us have enough shame to know that what we do for a living isn’t really working. I pull absolutely insane hours in my current profession, to the point of having almost no social life at all, but I know better than to call what I do for a living work. I was on a demolition crew when I was much younger, the kind of job where you have to wear a dust mask all day long, carry buckets full of concrete, and then spend all night picking fiberglass shards out of your forearms from ripping insulation out of the wall.

Like Taibbi I have some experience working blue-collar jobs.  I spent the summer after my senior year of high school working on a landscaping crew and nothing I will ever do the rest of my life will even begin to compare to that. I had it easy too.  I only had to work five days a week for one summer and my boss let me miss a couple of weeks for vacations.  Most of the guys I worked with worked seven days a week and will for the rest of their lives just to keep food on the table and a roof over their families’ heads.  They’ll never have the opportunity to improve their lot in life; their best hope is to give their kids more opportunity than they have.

And Brooks wonders why so many people resent the rich?  Brooks makes six digits a year to write a column twice a week.  He enjoys financial security, can afford the best health insurance, lives in a great neighborhood with little crime, wants for nothing and even has a great degree of control over his own work.  He can work when he wants and write about what he wants.  And what does he usually write about?  He writes about how poor people are simply poor because they don’t work as hard as rich people like him work.

Clearly those poor people working shitty jobs for minimum wage every day of the week just so they can afford to to share an apartment with 3 other families and feed their kids what barely even passes for food are just a bunch of lazy and ungrateful schmucks.  If they worked harder they would have jobs where they didn’t need to worry about whether getting sick for a day would cost them their job and keep their kids from eating.  If they worked a little harder they could afford health insurance.  If they worked a little harder their jobs wouldn’t be being outsourced to India and China.

Many liberals like to point to David Brooks as an example of a conservative they like and can find common ground with.  Brooks encourages this with some of his writing because he wants people to like him.  However, the truth about Brooks is that he represents much of what is wrong with our society today.  His lips have been so firmly attached to rich people’s asses for so long that he’s come to believe his own bs.

As the actions of the richest in our society have grown increasingly ridiculous, and the fact that they literally steal from the rest of us has become clear, they’ve grown impossible to defend.  Yet Brooks just keeps trying.  As a result, there’s really no discernible difference today between Brooks’ attitude towards the non-rich and the “let them eat cake” attitude of the French aristocracy towards their poor before the French Revolution.