David Brooks and the higher b.s.

Brooks sees the dispersion of the poor people of New Orleans as a grand opportunity to launch a whole new ameliorative crusade. Now that their neighborhoods, where they were “trapped” in a cycle of poverty and dependency, have been destroyed, they should not be put back in such situations, but rather be spread around among middle class white neighborhoods, where they will pick up middle-class standards and expectations and so improve their behavior and become more independent. Brooks calls this “cultural integration.” It fits the pattern of what the liberals who call themselves conservatives are always pushing in one form or another. Design a program to change what people are. Invade the world so as to turn Muslims into liberal democrats. Invite the world into America, also in order to turn Muslims, as well as Africans, Chinese, Laotians and everyone else, into liberal democrats. Spread poor black people into middle class neighborhoods so as to alter their behavior. The column ends:

We can’t win a grandiose war on poverty. But after the tragedy comes the opportunity. This is the post-Katrina moment. Let’s not blow it.

That ending inspired me to write Brooks an e-mail:

Living in the aerie of the New York Times really has disconnected you from reality, hasn’t it? You propose this way-out, intrusive social engineering scheme and then, as if the only way it could not succeed was if we did something really stupid, you add, “Let’s not blow it.”

It would be as if I put forward a plan to end poverty, or turn Muslims into liberal Democrats, or make blacks as intelligent as Japanese, or make women as good in physics as men, or invent a perpetual motion machine, or give everyone eternal youth, and then added, “Let’s not blow it.”

As I said, in your aerie, you are eerily detached from reality.

Carl Simpson also comments on the Brooks column:

This is the kind of hypocritical, arrogant self-righteousness that really infuriates me about folks like Brooks—and leftists in general. His proposal is nothing less than Busing and Section 8 housing writ large. Those were some really spectacular triumphs of LBJ’s “Great Society”!

When it became apparent that whites were fleeing to the suburbs to protect their kids from the pathologies of blacks after the abolition of segregation, leftists responded with a two-pronged approach. One was to force the busing of inner-city blacks to suburban schools via court order—a policy still largely in place. Second was the introduction of Section 8 housing vouchers—a means of re-settling the urban underclass in suburbs and small towns, which were overwhelmingly white in most sections of the country. Despite all the crowing from Republicans about “welfare reform” in the 1990s, the program remains in place.

Wealthy leftists like Brooks, whose kids typically attend exclusive private schools and live in gated communities, never have to worry about the results of such state-forced integration with gangstas and junkies. Their maids and gardeners leave after 5:00 PM after all, and the security guards lock the gates behind them. As with their great fondness for military adventurism, they reveal themselves as utter hypocrites—chickenhawks…. Sorry for going off on a personal attack, which I usually try to avoid, but I find his whole attitude to be disgusting in the extreme.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 09, 2005 12:17 AM | Send