A Letter to David Brooks

I enjoy beating up on David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times. He's an easy whipping boy as a right wing apologist. Except he's well-read and well-educated and it's hard to fathom how any educated person can go along with the fundamentalist jingoism of today's Republicans. Well, apparently he asked himself the same question and has been questioning the party lately. Here's a letter I wrote in response to his latest column.

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I read your columns to keep up with the conservative world, as is my duty as someone who claims to be well-informed. Lately your columns have broken from their former lock-step with the right wing, which is good. I think you've picked up on what's wrong with the current state of the right wing. It has become rigid, intolerant, small-minded, mean-spirited, and generally out of touch with traditional Christian and Conservative values of compassion and common sense economics, like balanced budgets.

In your column this Sunday, I underlined two things. First was your comment on Lincoln's governing style, where you noted that "he brought men of wildly different opinions and interests into his cabinet". One of the most obvious failures of the W regime is the lack of diversity -- of opinion, background, or belief. The monolith culture of the White House and Republicans in general has led to a political culture of incompetence. It is my belief that as the older, white, rural peoples of America increasingly feel that there time has come, and as such, they are becoming more reactionary and rigid, and the Republican party has catered to their xenophobic, racist, misogynistic fears. Effective leaders have always understood the necessity of compromise and inclusion, and that effective governance always takes precedence over being right.

The second thing was "within the framework of the Constitution". The current Republican party seems to feel that the correct way to deal with the law is to ignore it or re-write it as it sees fit. The United States is a country ruled by law, not by men, and the Republicans seem to have forgotten this most cherished aspect of American Democracy. They have capitalized on people's xenophobic fears and ignorance to turn our country into an international laughing stock that is ruled by a theocratic puppet who takes orders from his VP and cabinet. Respect for the law is viewed as something for sissies.

There is incredible irony of a country trying to export democracy and the rule of law while at home we can see all the signs of a whithering democracy and the erosion of the rule of law: non-competitive Congressional elections with gerrymandered election districts that violate a variety of Constitutional amendments; a president who lost the popular election; a dynastic, wealthy-beyond-dreams, ruling family where a state governor (Jeb Bush) was able to effectively decide a Presidential election for his brother (with a little help from the Supreme Court); the self-same ruling family has business ties with Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the 9/11 hijackers came from, that go back 3 decades, who we continue to support despite being engaged in a "war on terror"; a Republican-controlled legislature that re-writes the law to suit the President's whims, as is the case with the domestic spying fiasco (it's not about spying on al Qaeda, it's about following the law of the land when you do); an executive branch that seeks to apply the law selectively to themselves (as with the Patriot act and the anti-torture legislation); a black-box approach to governing, where the Attorney General, the VP, and the President all say, "trust us, we're not breaking the law (that badly)."

We need to bring back the good old days of Reagan, when the Republicans were able to offer a healthy mix of favors to their wealthy base, favors to the conservative heartland (in the form of some token racist punishment for welfare recipients or something along those lines), and a policy largely dedicated to a balanced budget and an effective, well managed military. While the Republican party has long pursued and supported mad-man visions since American victory in WWII, from Hoover's FBI to Senator McCarthy to Nixon to Charlie Wilson's Afghanistan adventure, the forces of common sense and the collective good usually stepped in and the legal process was used to clean up the mess. This was usually due to some sense of accountability on the part of elected officials not just to base voters, but to the American people as a whole. The fact that the Republicans no longer feel any obligation to anyone but the 30% or so that support them says to me that a tyrannical minority has seized power and opposed their will on the majority of the country that does not support them. It is pertinent to note that the 70 (or 60% or however you measure the majority of people that don't approve of W or the Republicans) have failed to raise any meaningful or effective opposition. Voters and citizens must be held accountable to some extent for the failure of democracy here at home, because democracy requires citizen participation in voting for things other than America's next teen idol.

Your last comment about disagreeing with the notion that "democracy is good for many cultures, but not for Arabs," probably scares me the most. Democracy is an uniquely Western concept that has been a part of our cultural fabric in one way or another since the classical times of the Greeks and Romans. Actually, most of our ideals are shaped by these cultures. It seems obvious to me that Arab culture, which stretches back into the desert for thousands of years, with a long-standing tradition of violence, blood feuds, and dictatorship, is just not suited for Democracy. What so many middle aged white men can't seem to understand is that they way the see the world, they way they learned, and the way they were brought up, is simply one way amongst many. I know you're a smart and well educated guy, but sometimes I wonder if you have ever spent more than a week at a time away from America and realized that never in a million years will you begin to fathom what makes these people tick.

Imagine if we'd poured all the money we've poured into Iraq into alternative energy research. We would be running all of our fossil fuel burning devices off of whatever back-to-the-future-like device $500 billion worth of research would come up with. And we could happily watch from afar as the Arabs self-destruct in a wave of fundamentalist fury -- or, God forbid, as they rise to the occasion and figure out how to integrate modernity into their culture. But instead, the US has succumbed to the exact same fundamentalist fury, as a large swath of the white, rural, population feels everything it holds sacred is being swept under the carpet. As your colleague Thomas L. Friedman has pointed out, we are living in a new global landscape where it is increasingly hard to hold on to old customs and beliefs in a brave new world of international competitiveness.

Ultimately, if rural ("red state") America fails to adopt to the changing demands of world markets, they will be wiped off the face of the earth, so it's understandable why they are so mad -- they can fail the axe swinging in the breeze. What's sad is how they fail to see that the people they vote for are more responsible than anyone for guaranteeing the elimination of their way of life. Imagine if the Republicans had poured billions of dollars into developing cellulosic ethanol, which would have created tens of thousands of farming jobs in the heartland, instead of protecting their friends in the oil business and mega-agricorps with undying faith and loyalty.

Just as Lincoln pressed harder in his civil war efforts, we must push much harder in the war on terror. We do this by severing all ties to the oil producing nations and stop funding terrorism with our SUVs. This is the "brutal" sacrifice Americans must make to maintain our way of life, before our country becomes a one-party dictatorship, like China, where dissent is outlawed and dissidents are locked up for their beliefs. The clue phone is ringing. Will conservative white men be able to answer it? Or will their on-going belief that the way of the middle class American white man is the way of life for the entire world destroy them, and us along with them? Full-disclosure: I'm an upper middle class over educated Jewish white man who makes a living writing computer software. I'm in the minority at my work place -- most of my colleagues are Indian or Chinese.