Guest Post: Oh, DaveBro
In which Frank Spring Writes In Praise of Division, Distrust, and Discord
Hello, friends. It’s good to be back. Let’s fight.
When civility is important
In one formulation, the nation, or society, or Americans, or whatever you want to call the mass of people living inside this country and at least nominally governed by its laws and policies, is a patient. That patient is suffering from a very complex ailment. And we, as citizens, work together like doctors to try to save the patient’s life. We may have differences of opinion about how to do so - indeed, our discussions may occasionally become quite heated - but we all have the patient’s best interests at heart, and we assume the same of others. When we disagree with our colleagues, we proceed on the basis that that is because they are simply mistaken, and reasonable minds can always disagree (ideally without being disagreeable).
I don’t know if it’s original to him, but this formulation was bestowed on us nearly two years ago by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Even summarizing it, I can see - nay, I can feel - its appeal. Calm; steady; reasonable; an elegant ethic from a more civilized era. It is something you want very much to be true.
Donald Trump was acquitted in his Senate impeachment trial o̶n̶e̶ ̶h̶u̶n̶d̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ about a month ago in a landmark victory for transparent corruption and malfeasance. This is what David Brooks had to say on the subject:
I’m sorry to have done that to you. I wish I didn’t have to. I promise I’ll get us past that tweet as quickly as possible.
We will not pause long to reflect on Brooks’s stupefying ignorance of what, exactly, congressional Democrats have been doing over the past three years, such as passing absolute rafts of domestic legislation, including an infrastructure deal negotiated with the White House on which Trump famously reneged, all of which go on to die in the Republican-held Senate. Nor will we excessively trouble ourselves -- as Brooks certainly has not -- with the reflection that Democrats have absolutely no chance of advancing any sort of policy agenda at all that this Senate and Administration wouldn’t immediately toss into the grinder. Hell, we won’t even linger on the exceedingly good question of how, exactly, Democrats could legitimately ignore the swaying, towering pile of evidence of presidential wrongdoing and expect democracy to survive if they didn’t at least try to do something about the fact that the emperor is out here in front of god and everybody as naked as the day he was born.
I’ve shown you this breathtaking analysis from Brooks because it is a perfect distillation of his doctor/patient formulation: If only some of the doctors hadn’t spent all that time giving another doctor a hard time, and more time trying to help the patient, the patient would be better off.
Which, sure, that sounds reasonable; very hard for a team of doctors to save a patient if some of them are hellbent on kicking another doctor out of the operating room. You want focus in an O.R.; decorum; unity, even!
On the other hand, and I really do hate to bring this up but it feels like someone should, it’s also very hard to treat a patient if one of the doctors is obviously only interested in distracting everyone by gassily airing various personal grievances, pilfering the patient’s pockets, and occasionally throwing a tantrum by pouring bleach down the sick person’s throat. I realize I’m stretching the metaphor a bit, but that feels like a fair read of how Trump has approached the institutions of American democracy.
Brooks unburdened himself of this medical metaphor in a column about student mobs, a phenomenon, it should be noted, that really doesn’t exist at all, at least not in the way Brooks imagines when he gazes off into the middle distances and pictures a nation of erudite, objective professors driven from their classrooms in a hail of eggs for failing to understand the arbitrary and impenetrably complex new social codes that viciously protect the fragile emotional states of today’s youth. The man has an active imagination, you have to give him that. The medical metaphor is an expression of mistake theory, or the idea that social ills are the result of mistaken, but well-intentioned, policies, of which Brooks is an avowed subscriber.
Mistake theory stands in contrast to conflict theory, which is the idea that public problems result from bad faith and dubious motives - malice, avarice, you know, the classics. It is the counter, essentially, to Joe Biden’s famous nostrum for public servants that you can question a colleague’s judgment, but never their motives.
There it is again. Surely you felt it, too - that steady, settling feeling that comes from hearing something truly calm, truly level-headed. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with wanting this to be the way government works; it is unreasonable to expect a group of people to always agree on anything, so all we can reasonably ask is that everyone’s heart be in the right place, and that when we disagree we do so reasonably. This view is, in my experience, common in liberal circles, and understandably so, because it contains within it the possibility that any disagreement might evolve into a moment of shared understanding and collaborative or collective action, the very basis of liberal (and indeed leftist) politics.
It has therefore followed that anyone who breaks this convention of assuming the best motives and disagreeing without being disagreeable appears, well, unreasonable. If we’re all a bunch of doctors trying our damndest to save a patient, then the doctor who keeps accusing other doctors of malicious malpractice is being petulant, irrational, and dangerous.
Except, of course, that it should be clear enough by now that there is no reading of the functioning of American government over the last decade (or two, or three, or more) that can be explained by anything other than malice and avarice on the part of the leadership of at last one of the major political parties specifically and most of its federal representatives more broadly. To name names: One cannot credibly look at the conduct of Mitch McConnell (backed to the hilt by his Senate caucus) toward Barack Obama’s policy agenda and see someone who was working toward the same greater goal of a more just country and a healthier democracy. If one were inclined to give McConnell any benefit of the doubt during the presidency of Obama (who, so the story goes, read every single David Brooks column), that instinct has to fail in light of what has happened since, as the Republican Party has slid totally into what George Packer recently described as a “nihilistic pursuit of power at all costs.”
The result has been a federal agenda of irresponsible deregulation, cartoonish corruption, and rank, abject cruelty. It might be best not to linger on specifics, but it’s worth noting that any one of family separations, the attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and the “apocalyptic” tax bill would be considered the moral low point of virtually any other administration and attendant Congress. In this one, only the family separations policy is guaranteed to make the short list.
This is not a new phenomenon. We are, at the very least, a decade into seeing the same group of people thwart egalitarian policy and advance any notion with the potential to make our country more predatory and hostile to human thriving. To return to the metaphor: By now it should be clear to anyone watching that one group of doctors is trying to save the patient, while another harvests healthy organs to sell at a profit. The only thing that has changed is that a few years ago the organ-dealers were at least pretending.
No one wants to see a fistfight in an operating room - it is not unreasonable to crave an air of professional decorum in a place with such high stakes - but we are transparently past the point where the actual healers can pretend that the organ-dealers are doing anything other than what they are.
In such circumstances, accusations of malicious malpractice cease to sound unreasonable - they are, after all, merely a statement of fact - and acting upon those accusations goes from being potential misconduct to an ethical obligation. And, contrarily, insisting that everyone stop shouting, that everyone remember that we’re all in this together, that everyone just get along, goes from being the dignified, mature approach of a sober custodian and appears to be what it is: cowardly, fantastical, and deranged.
This is what is so appalling about Brooks’s analysis of the Trump impeachment, and what is fatally flawed about his entire way of thinking. It would be wonderful if the political enemies of equality in America were simply wrong-headed. May we all live in that country (perhaps even soon).
The present moment, though, reveals the need for better than fuzzy encomiums to contentless collegiality, and mistake theory for what it is: a greasy, sugary indulgence, moral and intellectual junk food on which Brooks and his adherents have feasted for decades, harmless as the occasional treat but which in large quantities will give your democracy fatal heart disease.
In a sense, it is hard not to pity Brooks a bit. The man has spent his entire career - decades, now - in a flop sweat trying to establish his ideas as the stuff of sober, mature citizenship and himself as a model of personal and intellectual gravity. Now, in the back-nine of his career and at a moment of legitimate moral crisis for the country, he and his ideas could hardly be more offensively trivial.
What I’m reading
I’m finishing up Kawai Strong Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors and recommend it highly. This gorgeous, lyrical story follows the members of a Hawaiian family on their journeys far from - and back to - the islands and culture that made and shape them. Can’t believe it’s Washburn’s first novel. This dude can write. -F.S.
What I’m watching
Toast of London, available on Netflix. Any attempt to describe the premise of this comedy will fail to do it justice; the show’s mix of stage-direction and performance style in service of a character sketch about a dissolute and absurd aging stage actor is unique (although it slightly recalls the late, lamented Canadian series Slings and Arrows). It takes a couple of episodes to find its feet, and then it just gets better and better. I don’t know why it works but it does and I can’t stop laughing, please, someone who is good at television watch this thing and tell me what it is. -F.S.
What I’m listening to
My son is a lad of eclectic tastes, and one of his more unexpected inclinations is an enthusiasm for jazz; he particularly likes to fall asleep to Kind of Blue. The boy is 9 months old and already a touch pretentious, which I can’t help but admire. My own interest in jazz has waxed and waned over the years, always around a baseline of “engaged amateur fan”, and my son’s predilection has me going back to my own favorites. Let me recommend to y’all the work of saxophonist Dexter Gordon. There is a tendency in snobbery of all kinds to use the word “accessible” as a kind of pejorative (as in: “this beer is very ‘accessible’” for “you uninitiated proles will find this uninteresting, basic drink potable”), which I absolutely deplore because if you want people to experience a thing then they definitionally need to get access to it, I mean come on. So I say without pejorative and in full praise that Dexter Gordon’s style is highly accessible; he didn’t create or advance a new genre, like Charlie Parker or Miles Davis, and didn’t seem terribly interested in making music based on increasingly esoteric and impenetrable musical principles, like John Coltrane. He was just an incredibly good saxophonist; I’m recommending Ballads here, so you can get full advantage of his rich tones and simple but subtle mastery of his craft. -F.S.
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