Lest we forget: Arthur Brooks is Bad
On a recent episode of “The Deep Life,” Cal Newport dedicates the full hour or so to interviewing Arthur Brooks, fresh off of co-authoring a book with Oprah about happiness.
While many people might know Brooks as an amiable, bespectacled, academic, I first learned about him when he was president of the American Enterprise Institute. While his tenure at AEI was mentioned several times during the interview, the fact that it was a right-leaning if not right-wing think tank wasn’t.
While at AEI, one of Brooks’ books made it onto President George W. Bush’s nightstand, earning him a meeting with the man. Maybe Cal Newport (who recently misidentified “the National Review” as a reliable media source when surely meaning “The National Journal”) doesn’t see anything insidious about Brooks or his work — which is a problem.
In a 2010 review of Brooks’ book The Battle: How the Fight Between FREE ENTERPRISE and BIG GOVERNMENT Will Shape America’s Future, Jonathan Chait, then writing at The New Republic, illustrated just how fatuous a scholar Brooks was.
The thesis of the book was that the 2008 financial crisis so panicked entrepreneur-loving Americans that they elected Barack Obama president, a man with a deep-seated hatred for the free market.
Never mind that Obama possessed no such feelings or that even his boldest proposals were rehashes of Republican ideas from an arguably more reasonable time. Also pay no mind to majorities of the US population feeling that the economic system unfairly helps the already-rich.
The intransigent opposition the Obama administration faced from the Republicans in Congress resulted from pure partisanship, nothing more, not least a desire to govern or solve real problems. Republicans cannot win elections based on their actual political program, so Brooks aided in turning policies that distribute income upward into a culture war issue.
And this…is why Obama’s notion of technocratic compromise has failed to find a willing partner. No amount of evidence or technocratic brainpower can convince Brooks that a particular problem requires some new government intervention.
What’s most interesting about the analysis, though, is that despite having been written 13 years ago, Chait’s diagnoses of Republican derangement remain true today (emphasis mine):
The feverish, incoherent explanation that Brooks offers is a nice illustration of the extent to which Republicans view Obama’s presidency not merely as wrong, but as essentially illegitimate.
Republicans who refuse to believe that they can ever legitimately lose elections have been at it for a long time.
The Clinton presidency was illegitimate because he didn’t win an outright majority of the popular vote, something no Republican candidate has done since 1992 (with the singular exception of George W. Bush in 2004).
The Obama presidency was illegitimate because, well, reasons.
The Biden presidency is illegitimate because, well, Obama...?
The Republican base is motivated by animus towards diversity in America while the Republican elite is motivated, as always, by hoarding as much money and power as it can. Brooks managed to make the case for the elite by turning people’s opinions on economics into culture war fodder. No one likes a sore winner, though, so he goes on to play the victim, saying that the silent majority of pro-market Americans have been silenced by the mainstream media.
Sound familiar?
However, messaging that people in favor of public welfare programs are somehow morally deficient rather than reasonably coming to different conclusions about policy has a long and shameful pedigree.
It seems like Newport has a bit of a blindspot when it comes to politics, often characterizing anti-capitalist criticism as conspiratorial thinking about “mustache-twirlers” rather than on the inherent logic and character of the system.
Perhaps he ought to give Marxism a try, or at the very least, let his listeners know that his latest guest was instrumental in articulating a flimsy and disingenuous argument justifying obstruction and political paralysis.
