I'm worried about David Brooks' brain.
On September 17, the left side wrote a column berating GOP presidential candidate "Thurston Howell Romney" for having "lost any sense of the social compact" and signing on to the Republican Party's current "hyperindividualistic and atomistic social view."
On September 20, the right side celebrated SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk for his "grand lifestyle, grand riches, grand vision and grand verbiage," pronouncing that "if growth is ever going to rebound, the U.S. will need a grandiosity rebound and the policies that encourage rich people with brass."
Then today it was back to the left side for a lament over the GOP's loss of its traditional commitment to social cohesion in favor of pure free market economics. The party, says leftside, "appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens."
What the brain seems to want is gilded-age capitalism with a communitarian heart. I fear that David's head is about to explode.
Kevin Schultz | Sep 28, 2012 | 1:36pm
While I can’t speak to the medical possibilities of Brooks’ brain exploding (talk about self-deportation!), I can say that the two arguments you read here are not so distant. The linchpin is the last piece on the death of traditional Burkean conservatism. With that piece in mind, I read the paean to Musk as a call for our money-making yearnings to be directed toward world-altering challenges—space explorations, the internet—rather than just making a ton of money so you can live in a gated community somewhere. Musk’s work is not simply to get rich and screw everyone else, it’s to re-imagine the world a la Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It’s quite conceivable that Musk’s trajectory will eventually turn to things like education and social justice just as has happened with Bill Gates, and that fits within the traditional conservative component (even if the luddite conservatives like Russell Kirk would cringe). At least Musk’s trajectory in that direction is more plausible than some Wall Street deriviatives trader.