David Brooks doesn’t understand America

I’ve recently been working (though not hard enough) on trying to use the internet in a new way: namely, hate-reading less, and sharing fewer things on Twitter/Facebook/etc. that disgust me. “Look at this terrible thing” is so en vogue in 2016 that it’s hard to imagine social media as anything else sometimes, and I want to avoid that as much as I can.

That said, I can’t keep my mouth shut about today’s New York Times op-ed from David Brooks regarding Colin Kaepernick and the young athletes around the country who are emulating his example of kneeling for the national anthem. Brooks, a white man with a $4 million dollar home, has an unsurprisingly rosy view of our national ethos, and his most recent column is ensconced in onion-like layers of banal platitudes and impossibly misguided readings of American history. The piece is linked above; read it at the risk of your own blood pressure. I’ve selected a few choice passages that I’ll break down further below.

(Note: I know that the last thing the world needs is another privileged white guy believing he can speak on the behalf of others, but I think that when opportunities arise for white folks to spare people of color the emotional labor of exhaustively explaining how and why other white people are wrong about justice issues, we should take them.)

Ab Natione Condita

Brooks begins his puff piece with a curious interpretation of the earliest days of the America that was settled by Europeans. To wit:

When Europeans first settled this continent they had two big thoughts. The first was that God had called them to create a good and just society on this continent. The second was that they were screwing it up.

The first part of his statement is undoubtedly true, though the 17th century interpretation of “good and just” differs somewhat from mine. The earliest settlers found no room in their “good and just” society for the people who were already living here, in societies that were themselves millennia old; so removed were the Native Americans from their plans, in fact, that several centuries of genocidal policies towards the indigenous people of this continent followed.

Nor was there room for black people in this good and just place that our founders sought to create. They existed here, having been forcefully brought over in hellish conditions on slave ships, but they were not part of society. They were a free source of labor upon which to build that society without adding calluses to the dainty hands of their white masters.

Forgive me if I’m not working myself into a frenzy over the idea that one black athlete might feel as though our country’s song of national pride doesn’t quite apply to his own story. (That this same song is played before every football contest featuring a team — in our nation’s capital! — that plays under a virulently racist name and logo is some icing on the revisionist cake.)

He continues:

By 1776, this fusion of radical hope and radical self-criticism had become the country’s civic religion. This civic religion was based on a moral premise — that all men are created equal — and pointed toward a vision of a promised land — a place where your family or country of origin would have no bearing on your opportunities.

If you’re not the kind of person who walks around with their hands over their eyes bumping into things face first, I probably don’t need to tell you that a giant “NO BLACKS NEED APPLY” sign hung over all of this “radical hope” and “radical self-criticism.” This self-criticism took several hundred years to come around to, “Hey, maybe placing an entire race of people below animals on the social strata isn’t entirely just.”

In the following paragraph, which I’ll spare you by not excerpting, Brooks cites both Abraham Lincoln AND Martin Luther King, Jr., in order to make a point about how the national anthem actually serves our highest ideals. That’s two boxes checked for those of you playing along with our game of Ahistorical White Bingo. If Brooks had been writing his columns when MLK was alive, he’d probably have vomited one out that claimed the March on Washington was disrespectful to Abraham Lincoln, and that black people were too ungrateful for being freed from slavery. That he claims MLK on his own side — the same MLK who regretted the attitude of the white moderate above all else — is both disgusting and predictable.

The Sorkin Effect

Brooks continues banging away at his keyboard as though he’s hoping that a character in the next Aaron Sorkin drama will be based on himself. Indeed, his follow-up to this revisionist look at some of our greatest liberators seems like a gritty reboot of Jeff Daniels’ high-minded whitewashing of America’s (fake) past that made “The Newsroom” such a hit.

Over the years, America’s civic religion was nurtured the way all religions are nurtured: by sharing moments of reverence. Americans performed the same rituals on Thanksgiving and July 4; they sang the national anthem and said the Pledge in unison; they listened to the same speeches on national occasions and argued out the great controversies of our history.

We said the pledge in unison because the government decided that jingoistic indoctrination was the best way to get future generations to fight the Ruskies. “We” celebrated Thanksgiving, sure, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there was a group of people here who were probably less thrilled about the results of white conquest in the Americas. And boy howdy, I really shouldn’t have to point out that “argu[ing] out the great controversies of our history” is not even close to the same thing as solving them. But those pesky “controversies” — racial inequality, mass incarceration, the massive accumulation of wealth by a small number of individuals who made fortunes on the exploitation of others — are barely even problems, in the view of men like Brooks, because at least we talked about them! (By now it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that Brooks has previously written, terribly, about income inequality. I’ll say this for the Puritans: they left a hell of a legacy enabling Americans to hate the poor, believing it to be the disenfranchised’s own moral failing.)

Brooks soldiers on:

All of this evangelizing had a big effect. As late as 2003, Americans were the most patriotic people on earth, according to the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center.

That couldn’t’ve had anything to do with the fact that the government was still riding high on a wave of goodwill engendered by a brutal terrorist attack, which enabled them to successfully garner popular support for an unwinnable war whose motivations we were lied to about, could it? Was David Brooks in a sensory deprivation chamber for most of the early 2000's? (Given that this whole conversation was sparked by a football player refusing to engage in a brainless act of patriotic submission, I’d be remiss not to point out that the NFL has been paid millions of dollars by the Department of Defense to use its stage as a propaganda arm for the military. But by all means, clutch your pearls that something on the sports field became political!)

Old Man Yells At Cloud

Unsatisfied with being completely and utterly wrong about America’s past, Brooks wades into the murky depths of the present, and it gets even better from there:

Recently, the civic religion has been under assault. Many schools no longer teach American history, so students never learn the facts and tenets of their creed. A globalist mentality teaches students they are citizens of the world rather than citizens of America.

My god, he’s nailed it! We weren’t even allowed to use the past tense at my school, much less learn American history. And they definitely didn’t play the pledge of allegiance every single morning on the announcements!

All this paragraph tells me is that there is very little difference between the right and left in American politics, at least among the moneyed elite. The claim that Brooks espouses here — that the children of America are being victimized by a globalist conspiracy — is among the favorite talking points of right-wing lunatic Alex Jones, founder of InfoWars. A fear of people from other countries having influence in America being used to stoke patriotic populism — where have we seen that before? Certainly not in the more deranged of our two presidential candidates, that’s for sure.

Brooks continues, aghast at the young people:

There’s been a sharp decline in American patriotism. Today, only 52 percent of Americans are “extremely proud” of their country, a historical low. Among those 18 to 29, only 34 percent are extremely proud. Americans know less about their history and creed and are less likely to be fervent believers in it.

Jeepers, that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that America has done very little to be proud of in the lifetimes of people 18–29 years old? I can think of no better outcome of the fucked-up world that our older generations have created than the idea that young people just refusing to buy this bullshit anymore. The same generation that protested for an end to the war in Vietnam and plastered their cars with “BOMBING FOR PEACE IS LIKE FUCKING FOR CHASTITY” bumper stickers are now the country’s most ardent supporters of drone striking Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan back into the Stone Age. Is it just maybe possible that young people don’t want that blood on their hands, that they’re disgusted that their parents kowtowed to a government that wrapped itself in a flag in order to wage a self-interested war?

Please Be Quiet And Stop Making David Brooks Uncomfortable

Buckle up, because this next bit is a doozy:

If these common rituals are insulted, other people won’t be motivated to right your injustices because they’ll be less likely to feel that you are part of their story. People will become strangers to one another and will interact in cold instrumentalist terms.

What Brooks is saying here — and what your uncle on Facebook is saying, and what boneheads like Trent Dilfer are saying — is that they’d like these protests to stop because it makes them uncomfortable. The notion that America is not a pure meritocracy, that some portion of their success is not attributable strictly to their own hard work and gumption is unfathomable to people like this, because it implies that the converse is also true: that people who have it bad in this country aren’t necessarily at fault for the circumstances that surround them. It is so much easier to pretend that people who are suffering are suffering through some fault of their own, some character flaw that they refuse to stifle which would magically reverse their fortunes. Admitting this requires admitting the existence of privilege in the universe, which someone like Brooks is constitutionally incapable of having an honest reckoning with.

But by all means, don’t stand up (or kneel down) for what you believe in. Instead, wage your protest in some gauzy pro-American way — though I should point out that people like Brooks never do seem to get around to describing what kind of protest would be acceptable to them, do they? America gained its independence when people became so fed up with their living conditions that they became willing to literally wage war in the streets to get their freedom. Perhaps we should have just asked the British nicely, so as not to compromise our ideals.

(Oh, and about those “cold, instrumentalist” terms — perhaps no one has told Brooks that a majority-white legislature keeps slashing food stamps, or that financial institutions regularly target black Americans for high-interest predatory loans, or that agents of our government regularly gun down unarmed black citizens with zero compunction. The world cannot possibly get more cold and instrumentalist than it already is. I hope.)

“The Answer to What’s Wrong With America is America”

I’ll close with one of Brooks’ own final points:

I hear you when you say you are unhappy with the way things are going in America. But the answer to what’s wrong in America is America — the aspirations passed down generation after generation and sung in unison week by week.

Brooks might be “hearing” that people are unhappy with the way things are going, but he is most certainly not “listening.” This sentence alone is so desperately uncritical that it makes me want to smash my face into a car windshield. If he were actually listening, he’d never have written this column.

And now, the granddaddy of them all, the worst sentence I’ve read in quite some time: “The answer to what’s wrong in America is America.” The leap of logic required to believe something so mindless is one I find myself totally unable to make. Brooks’ rosy ideals gild a much less friendly truth: America works for men like him, has always worked for men like him, and will continue to work like men for him no matter who is in charge or how few people decide to put their patriotism on display. When you’ve known nothing but privilege, any step towards true equality feels like persecution.

These protests — which are about as peaceful and undisruptive as any protest can possibly be — threaten the comfortable notion that exists within Brooks’ head that the world is unfolding as it it should. It’s this above all else which tells me that there is no acceptable form of protest in the minds of white America. Demonstration and assembly, those constitutionally protected rights, are unacceptable. Silence is unacceptable. Sitting during the standy part is unacceptable. If all of these things, from physical movement to raising your voice, are unacceptable, I can only conclude that blackness itself is unacceptable to the white majority. And if that’s truly the case, then America doesn’t deserve an ounce of the praise that Brooks heaps upon it so lavishly.