David Brooks’ Blind Spot

By David Corn  August 23, 2023

Trump supporters rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, on January 6, 2022, the first anniversary of the Trump-incited riot at the US Capitol. mpi04/MediaPunch/IPX

David Brooks believes he has diagnosed the problem with America: We’re too mean. In an essay in the Atlantic, titled “How America Got Mean,” the right-leaning New York Times columnist bemoans the rise of rudeness in American society. He presents the now-all-too-familiar statistics about depression, sadness, suicide, loneliness, and alienation—charting the worrisome trends in our nation—and cites the usual sources: social media, changing demographics, economic uncertainty, and the decline in participation in community organizations (PTA, bowling leagues, fraternal clubs, etc.). But Brooks believes he has identified another culprit: the lack of moral education.

He writes:

The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.

There once were societal efforts, he points out, to teach virtue as a public value—and that knitted us together. Yet (he continues) after World War II, we as a nation became more focused on such pesky internalities as our feelings and our desire to address individual resentments and worries through the feverish pursuit of personal needs. (The Me Decade! Or is it the Me Decades?) Consequently, Americans are not taught how to “restrain their selfishness,” how to develop “basic social and ethical skills” (such as disagreeing with someone constructively), and how to “find a purpose in life.”

I will leave it to the sociologists to assess the basics of Brooks’ argument. But I was intrigued by his failure to point a finger at a certain roster of politicians and pundits who have encouraged the rude-ification of American discourse. This seems quite the blind spot.

Brooks doesn’t ignore the realm of politics in his piece. He contends that in a “culture devoid of moral education,” Americans “have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.” In this bleak world, he asserts, people have sought to find meaning and belonging through participation in divisive and destructive politics.

Brooks offers a dismissive depiction of political involvement as not much more than joining “partisan tribes in search of belonging.” He writes, “The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to get resources for himself or his constituency; he is trying to admire himself. He’s trying to use politics to fill the hole in his soul. It doesn’t work.” These folks “end up in a lonely mob of isolated belligerents who merely obey the same orthodoxy.”

This is a rather snobbish view. Many people turn to politics out of necessity and communal concern. They give a damn about climate change. They or their neighbors need help obtaining health care or economic security. It’s not merely the selfish pursuit of ego satisfaction. If you worry about creeping authoritarianism, inequality, gun violence, racism, women’s freedom, and whatnot and want to do something about any of this, you turn to politics.

Brooks is equating political activism with the desire (or need) to fill an empty soul. No doubt, for many, politics is a performative act of self-identification, perhaps even self-validation. But generalizing that politically active Americans are robotic zombies desperately seeking recognition over purpose is an insult to many who give up their precious time to serve causes and campaigns. (Remember Twitter is not real life.) I wonder if Brooks would characterize churchgoers in a similar fashion.

And not all politics is mean—or has been. The national debate has been coarsened by a certain set of politicians, and they have mostly been Republicans.

“Political and media personalities gin up dramas in which our side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed,” Brooks writes. This is bland both-sidesism. He doesn’t name names, but he glancingly refers to Trump as an amoral authoritarian. Brooks doesn’t acknowledge the long line of Republicans and conservatives who have purposefully encouraged and exploited meanness in the era he chronicles.

We can go back to Joe McCarthy and his crude dehumanization of political foes, branding liberals and Democrats as subversive commies and insidious enemies of the state. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew took attack-politics to a new level in the White House. Ronald Reagan sought to whip up racist grievances with his phony assault on welfare queens. George H.W. Bush (with the help of Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater) ginned up sleazy politics in 1988.

After that, the GOP truly shifted into high gears on the Vituperation Express. Newt Gingrich rose to power explicitly urging his Republican comrades to be meaner. He counseled them to brand Democrats as immoral traitors. Republicans embraced Rush Limbaugh, who peddled hatred to millions, and named him an honorary member of the House GOP caucus. They promoted conspiracy theories about their political foes. (Hillary Clinton was involved in Vince Foster’s death!) With Fox News, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and, certainly, Trump, this trend worsened.

Commercial break: My book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy chronicles the party’s decades-long descent into malice. A new and expanded paperback version comes out on September 12.

While there have been Democratic meanies, this has not been a both-sides problem. In 2020, Joe Biden vowed he’d try to bring the country together to solve the challenges it faces. Trump assailed Biden for supposedly scheming with the Deep State, the media, antifa, communists, and Black radicals to destroy the United States. His unparalleled use of malevolent rhetoric has been accepted and embraced by the GOP and its leaders. Within the Republican cosmos, his meanness is a feature, not a bug. And as I point out in American Psychosis, it is the continuation of the party’s long-running turn toward viciousness.

Look at what Trump said at a rally last month in Waco, Texas:

With you at my side, we will totally obliterate the Deep State, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.

In a recent email he sent out to fleece his supporters, Trump, who has cheered on “Lock Her Up” chants, denounced his recent indictments and Biden: “Our once-free Republic where citizens were presumed innocent until proven guilty is gone. In its place is a Marxist Third World dictatorship led by an incompetent yet crooked tyrant… Communism has finally reached America’s shore.”

Trump spreads incivility, disrespect, hysteria, and paranoia. His inflammatory language—his racism and xenophobia—has inspired many and even led to bullying in schools. A 2020 investigation by the Washington Post found a rise in “Trump-connected persecution” of school children. Yet his abusive and vile conduct has been normalized and validated by a Republican Party and a conservative movement that for decades has increasingly relied on insults, cruelty, and conspiracy theories that demonize fellow Americans.

Pondering a rise in American rudeness without fully considering the GOP-driven rise in acrimony within our national discourse requires a willful avoidance of reality. I can imagine why this might be an uncomfortable subject for Brooks or anyone else who ever identified with and cheered on the Republican Party. All of that drumbeating led to the Trumpification of the GOP and the corrosive impact of that political phenomenon on the rest of the nation.

I’m not suggesting there is no need for moral education—though we would need a form unlike those of yore, one that addresses deep-rooted inequalities and biases. (Yes, woke moral education.) But it is not acts of hyper-politicization to observe that the quality of our politics shapes the quality of our national character (if there is such a thing) and to assign culpability, as would any good moral scold. If Brooks doesn’t agree that Trump and his fellow Republicans share a decent-sized portion of blame for America’s increased meanness, I’d be happy to debate him—politely.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

American Psychosis: Out in Paperback on September 12

You might have noticed the above (not-too-subtle) reference to the forthcoming publication of the expanded paperback edition of American Psychosis, which was a New York Times bestseller. Many thanks to those Our Land readers who purchased and read the book when it was first published—especially those who sent me smart comments about it. If you’re a new subscriber or somehow missed my many pleas last year, please consider buying the cheaper(!) paperback. Moreover, this version, with its lower price, is more suitable for purchase as a gift for a relative, friend, or foe who you believe would benefit from learning about the Republican Party’s seven-decade-long relationship with far-right extremism, paranoia, and tribalism. Dare your uncle to read it. You can pre-order now.

Whatever Happened to Our Service Economy?

I know that it’s easy to sound crotchety when griping about lousy or inane customer service from major corporations. But it’s rather stunning how these firms believe—or calculate—that they can get away with treating customers or potential customers so poorly.

Now you’re expecting my own sob story. Well, you’re right about that. I was away from home for several weeks, during which a terrible storm hit, bringing down power lines and uprooting trees throughout my neighborhood. We only lost a few branches. But a cable came down from my house and hung perilously low, spanning a sidewalk and a part of the lawn that typically functions as a highway for deer. I feared one of those pesky beasts would become entangled in the wire. I called Verizon. A technician promptly came out and reported back: It was a Comcast cable.

I am not currently a Comcast customer. (I have been in the past, and you never know about the future.) The cable must have been from a previous account at this house. I called Comcast and discovered there was no way to get through to a service representative without pretending to be a potential customer interested in signing up. After waiting for a while on hold, I had to explain to the person on the other end that I did not want to open an account and wished to speak to someone about removing the cable. Naturally, I was repeatedly cut off when transferred to the service department. Upon finally reaching the techies, I was given a ticket number and informed someone would call me back within the hour or, at the latest, the end of the day to schedule a visit. The whole process took about an hour.

As you might guess, no one called. I ran through this routine three times. (There was no way to directly contact the service department. I had to again and again pose as a prospective customer.) I never heard back. Now I am considering taking out a ladder and tending to the cable myself. If anything goes wrong, please cancel your Comcast subscription.

And there’s another thing: while on this trip, I received about six automated calls a day that referenced a credit card I have, rarely use, and do not keep in my wallet. To find out what the issue was, I needed to input the last four digits of my Social Security number. Was this a scam? I had received several notifications recently about hacks that gained access to databases containing my personal financial information. So I was not eager to provide the final quartet of my SSN to a robocall. I tried and I tried to find a way to reach a person, and the automated system would not allow it. Consequently, I took to refusing the call every time it came in. Still, the phone kept on ringing.

When I returned home, I fished out the card and called the number on the back for Barclays Bank. Turns out a bill had gotten lost in the mail, and I owed $29.00. That’s what an automated response told me. I paid it automatically. I never interacted with a person. Think I’ll cancel the card…if I can figure out how to do so.

The Mailbag

We are still way behind on processing the mail of recent weeks. A combination of a heavy flood of correspondence and a summer-stoked uptick in laziness among the workers in the mailroom means that fewer pieces of correspondence will receive an answer. I can assure you that every email that comes in is read. Or, at least, glanced at. Replies? Well, that takes more work.

Not surprising, my take on Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s thought-provoking blockbuster movie, which, I noted, refrained from showing us the horrific images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, provoked plenty of thoughts:

Kenneth Marion emailed:

Growing up I hid under my desk in a ridiculous drill in case of nuclear attack. As a young adult and auxiliary police officer in NYC in the 70s, I was tasked to check bomb shelters finding the water barrels empty, cracker packages eaten by rodents, and syringes and medicines gone. I think that those of us who came of age in the time of the shadow of the bomb do not need to be reminded/

I haven't seen the film but if it does not deploy images of the horror, it has missed a critical opportunity to warn those who came after us. Man's inhumanity to man goes on. Like the environmentalists who provide messages about the coming devastation, which have largely failed to move the needle, and who do not give up, neither should those who can bear the message of the terror of nuclear proliferation.

Jack Hafeli wrote:

Nice article about this excellent movie. As usual, your perspectives are appreciated. One issue I'd like to comment on: director Nolan's failure to show the audience the devastation wrought upon the target cities in Japan. The movie is about the man, not the event. Nolan and his star, Cillian Murphy, do a magnificent job of conveying Oppie's angst and horror at the awful power he'd unleashed. Further revealing the images to the audience would frankly have diminished the power of the scenes. Also, as the events occurred, those images were weeks from being available. Oppie's imaginings were, in some ways, even worse.

Susan Holland shared this:

Please read @AlisaValdesRod1 on Twitter and learn how local Hispanics were treated by the Manhattan Project. This backstory needs to be told. Those families were living there since the 1600s. Alicia Lynn Valdes is revealing the truth behind the treatment of the local Hispanic farmers. 

Sherri Yeager seconded this sentiment:

Downplaying the immediate and long-term suffering of Japanese civilians is certainly an unfortunate omission which you thankfully point out in your newsletter. The omission that you ignore, however, is what happens to Native Americans and Mexican Americans who lived and worked in the geographic area of New Mexico that was appropriated by the government for the Manhattan Project. Projecting the false narrative that these were desolate and uninhabited lands, this film covers up the economic, physical, and emotional consequences for local New Mexicans, and fails to consider their immediate and long-term exposure to radiation produced by nuclear test explosions.  

The gross disregard for the health and economic livelihoods of poor, non-white Americans—in this case New Mexican people of color—is the story that needs to be highlighted in a big-budget feature film. Not yet another effort to place the "conflicted" white guy on a pedestal. The personal conflict of Oppenheimer is right up there with the "tragedy” of Woodrow Wilson in the whitewashing of U.S. history.

Nancy Almand had this to say:

The other huge oversight that is ignored by Oppenheimer is the impact of the testing on those living in the area. Just more collateral damage.

Indeed. Read more about that here.

Joel Mael posed this query:

I have long noticed that question is rarely addressed. Would whites have dropped the bomb on other whites so quickly? Twice? Or at all?

Cabot Thunem took issue with those who say the movie gave short shrift to the arguments against dropping the bomb:

If you were not there, do not criticize any decision made. I was not even born yet, but if I had been fighting in the Pacific, I would have cheered the destruction rained down on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anything that reduced the ability of Japan to continue the war by even one day was acceptable.

We fired bombed Germany. Look at Dresden. Estimated deaths between 35,000 and 135,000. Is this dramatically different? End the ability to supply the war, and you end the war. I still have a visceral fear welling up every time I hear a warning siren followed by relief when it stops in a few seconds. I understand the angst associated with our nuking the Japanese civilians.

A lot has been written about President Harry Truman’s decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with some prominent historians noting that these attacks, especially the second, were not necessary to end World War II. Here’s one piece on this, co-written by the late Martin Sherwin, a co-author (with Kai Bird) of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the biography on which the movie is based.

Terra Williams emailed this contemplative response:

Having been born in 1939 into a family of Jewish immigrant ancestry, I sense in my very cells what my parents called "The Three Horrific H's: Holocaust, H-bomb, and Hiroshima." So, I thank you for calling out director Nolan for evaporating the moral question of America's decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as his failure to include in his film any actual scenes of the catastrophic suffering we caused. As you surely know, John Hersey's Hiroshima is as potent as any film in reporting how individual people actually experienced the realities of that horror. 

You rightly say, "The absence of the Japanese dead in Oppenheimer reinforces their position as the Other." Indeed, "othering" is a deeply conditioned pattern within Western culture. Philosopher Eugene Gendlin calls it the "I/it split," the visceral experience (not just a thought) of being a solipsistic "I" (me) over here, with everyone and everything else (other) being an "it" over there.

The Watch, Read, and Listen List

“The Victory March,” Citizen Cope. Citizen Cope is the stage name of Clarence Greenwood, a 55-year-old American songwriter, singer, and producer, who has crafted songs that blend blues, folk, rock, and soul. His tunes have been recorded by Carlos Santana, Richie Havens, and others, and I will admit that I’m not too familiar with his body of work. But the other day I heard his new single, “The Victory March,” and was entranced. Having listened to it several times and read the lyrics, I can’t tell you what it is about. Yet the song evokes a mood that mixes cynicism and romanticism and that reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” I realize that’s high praise. I don’t want to raise expectations but give it a listen.

Read Recent Issues of Our Land

August 17, 2023: Donald Trump, mob boss (then and now); Dumbass Comment of the Week (Matt Gaetz); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

August 12, 2023: From the Our Land archives: In Ohio, sex sells freedom; and more.

August 8, 2023: Ron DeSantis—not dead yet; Our Land on Cape Cod; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Mike Pence campaign); and more.

August 5, 2023: From the Our Land archives: The tale of Jeffrey Clark (Trump’s “co-conspirator 4”); Hightown, a crime drama that explores the underside of Cape Cod; and more.

August 1, 2023: What the Trump indictment won’t fix; the Covid wars; Freedy Johnston’s songwriting craftsmanship; and more.

July 25, 2023: Oppenheimer: a masterwork with a missing piece; wait, wait…I’m on a different news quiz show; the Our Land Zoom meeting report; summertime schedules; Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Barbie; and more.

July 22, 2023: How dangerous is No Labels?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Kevin Lincoln); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 18, 2023: RFK Jr.’s antisemitic lunacy; George Santos and Miles Guo—a Trumpland love story; the current relevance of the 1965 Night of Camp David; and more.

July 15, 2023: RFK. Jr.: Should we give a damn?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Lawrence Summers); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.