Worth Reading #6: Jonathan Chait: David Brooks At His David Brook (Bonus Extra Why-Oh-Why-Can't-We-Have-a-Better-Press-Corps? for March 16, 2010)
Can we just shut the New York Times down now? This is just too embarrassing. And Jonathan Chait leaves out the most offensive and most stupid part of David Brooks's column: Brooks's claim that if the Democrats use Reconciliation to tweak the health care reform bill that the Senate has already passed, they will be transforning relations between Democrats and Republicans into ones "marked by calculation, rivalry and coldness... see[ing] members of another group as less than human: Nazi and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi, Sunni and Shiite..."
No, I did not believe it either when I first read it. I don't even think Nancy Pelosi owns a machete...
Jonathan Chait, pulling his punches:
David Brooks At His David Brooksiest: Today David Brooks has written the platonic ideal of a David Brooks column.... the template for nearly every David Brooks column... captur[ing] the major elements so perfectly that it almost feels as if every previous David Brooks column has been an homage to this one. It begins with an interesting little sociological ditty:
Human beings, the philosophers tell us, are social animals.... To help us in this social world, God, nature and culture have equipped us with a spirit of sympathy....
When reading this, you were probably wondering to yourself, How is this going to lead to the reluctant conclusion the Democrats are wrong? Don't worry, Brooks has a bridge:
Political leaders have an incentive to get their followers to use the group mode of cognition, not the person-to-person...
See where this is headed? No? Here you go:
Reconciliation has been used with increasing frequency. That was bad enough. But at least for the Bush tax cuts or the prescription drug bill, there was significant bipartisan support. Now we have pure reconciliation mixed with pure partisanship. Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything.... The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity...
So [to paraphrase Brooks:] using a majority vote procedure to pass legislation that the minority party has used strict partisan discipline into whipping its members into opposing is fundamentally about denying the humanity of the Other. It is a sad thing, and both parties sadly share some blame, but on the matter before us, the Republicans are in fact correct....
Brooks' conclusion is absurd. Does he really think that passing changes to the health care bill through reconciliation will materially effect how parties act in the future?... [W]e don't have to guess.... Bill Clinton passed the signature domestic achievement of his presidency, the 1993 deficit reduction bill, through reconciliation with zero Republican votes. Sadly, Brooks was not there to explain how this denied the Republicans' humanity. In 2001, George W. Bush did get some Democrats to support his tax cut, most of them after it was a fait accompli. Why did he go through reconciliation... because he didn't want to make the compromises he would have needed to get 60 votes.... So there you have it: a fun little sociological discussion followed by a reluctant, utterly incorrect defense of the current Republican position...