On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.

This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

But Brooks’ plea for sanity was lost on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who responded to the column on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show this morning. Ryan said that if Republicans gave up the loopholes now without securing a deal to lower marginal tax rates overall, they would lose an opportunity to demand new tax cuts in the future:

RYAN: What happens if you do what he’s saying, is then you can’t lower tax rates. So it does affect marginal tax rates. In order to lower marginal tax rates, you have to take away those loopholes so you can lower those tax rates. If you want to do what we call being revenue neutral … If you take a deal like that, you’re necessarily requiring tax rates to be higher for everybody. You need lower tax rates by going after tax loopholes. If you take away the tax loopholes without lowering tax rates, then you deny Congress the ability to lower everybody’s tax rates and you keep people’s tax rates high.

Listen here:

Ryan is arguing that raising taxes on corporate jet owners and others is only acceptable if the money raised is plowed back into new tax cuts, not to paying down the deficit. He is clearly more interested in cutting taxes than dealing with the deficit, and is willing to let these egregious loopholes stay in the tax code until he can best exploit their removal to lower taxes sometime in the future.

Given the conservative preference for cutting taxes on high-income earning “job creators,” its conceivable Ryan would use the new taxes on corporate jet owners to help fund a new tax cut for people who happen to own corporate jets. Ironically, just moments earlier in the interview, Ryan attacked President Obama for wanting to close the loopholes, saying doing so would generate an insignificant about of revenue to pay down the deficit. But when it comes to tax cuts, closing those same loopholes would apparently generate plenty of revenue.

BROOKS: And my problem with the Republican Party right now, including Paul, is that if you offered them 80-20, they say no. If you offered them 90-10, they’d say no. If you offered them 99-1 they’d say no. And that’s because we’ve substituted governance for brokerism, for rigidity that Ronald Regan didn’t have.

And to me, this rigidity comes from this polarizing world view that they’re a bunch of socialists over there. You know, again, I’ve spent a lot of time with the president. I’ve spent a lot of time with the people around him. They’re liberals! … But they’re not idiots. And they’re not Europeans, and they don’t want to be a European welfare state. … It’s American liberalism, and it’s not inflexible.

Watch it:

David Brooks’ latest column has already been subjected to a lot of solid criticism, but I did want to highlight one thing he says which I think inadvertently illustrates why formal models are important and intuitive thinking about virtue won’t cut the mustard:

It all makes one doubt the wizardry of the economic surgeons and appreciate the old wisdom of common sense: simple regulations, low debt, high savings, hard work, few distortions. You don’t have to be a genius to come up with an economic policy like that.

Try to draw up a model—a simple one, but one where you do try to make sure that your numbers all add up—in which everyone has high savings rather than high debt. Households have high savings. Firms have high savings. The government has high savings. And the governments of your trading partners have high savings. But so do their citizens. And their firms, too. It’s the old wisdom of common sense! You’ll find that it doesn’t add up. Japanese people save by lending money to the Japanese government, which borrows. I borrow to buy a condo, and the money I’m borrowing is the money other people have saved in the bank. You put your money in the bank rather than leaving it under the mattress because the bank pays you interest. But they pay you interest because they can charge interest to other people—people who are in debt.

The old wisdom isn’t nutty or anything. Borrowing a ton of money so you can buy a fancy new car is probably a worse idea than buying a cheap used car and saving your money. But if you’re poor live in a city with bad mass transit and you borrow money to buy a cheap used car so you can make sure you’re on time for work every day, you’re making a prudent investment in your own future. Likewise, if you’ve got a successful store and you take out a loan to open a second location, you’re building the future of the American economy. Thriftiness is a good character trait because it tends to make people averse to accumulating debts for frivolous reasons. But if you try to build a systemic model, you’ll see that universal thrift doesn’t work at all.

Indeed, though thrifty people play an important role in making the economy function, they do so in part because their thrift creates resources that others can use to be venturesome and fuel innovation, entrepreneurship, and prosperity. Capitalist success stories are built on the ability and willingness of people to fail. For every hugely successful startup, you’ve got a dozen or more failures and behind those failures you’ve got bad loans. The willingness to issue those loans makes the world go ’round, and we need the savers because without them there’s no money to lend.

But the overall message is: Don’t be arrogant. This year, don’t engage in reckless new borrowing or reckless new cutting. Focus on the fundamentals. Cut programs that don’t enhance productivity. Spend more on those that do.

So leaving aside the fact that it’s a bit difficult to know exactly which programs enhance productivity and which don’t (arrogant, even), obviously “do more productivity-enhancing stuff” is never terrible advice. But it just can’t be emphasized enough that even though the American economy is in fact sub-optimal on the supply side in many ways, this is also true of every other economy on earth at every other time on earth. When nations fall into a macroeconomic funk, it’s natural—and in some ways even a bit healthy—for people to start focusing on structural problems that they didn’t care about so much a few years ago in fatter times. But it can also get morbid. The United States is one of the most productive countries in the entirety of human history and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics we’re more productive than ever:

Nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased at a 2.8 percent annual rate during the first quarter of 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, with output rising 4.0 percent and hours rising 1.1 percent. (All quarterly percent changes in this release are seasonally adjusted annual rates.) From the first quarter of 2009 to the first quarter of 2010, output increased 3.0 percent while hours fell 3.0 percent, yielding an increase in productivity of 6.1 percent (tables A, and 2). This gain in productivity from the same quarter a year ago was the largest since output per hour increased 6.1 percent over the four-quarter period ending in the first quarter of 2002.

For a look at what that means in practice, take a gander at the CBO’s estimate of potential output:

Over the long-run, boosting our productivity growth rate will help us become more prosperous. But over the short-run, our potential to produce goods and services simply isn’t the issue. The issue is that because of demand shortfalls, that potential isn’t being used.

Having said all that, the really odd thing about Brooks’ column is that after bashing stimulus proponents for many grafs, he turns out to basically agree with stimulus proponents:

First, extend unemployment insurance; that’s a foolish place to begin budget-balancing. Second, you need to mitigate the pain caused by the state governments that are slashing spending.

Exactly. But if that’s what Brooks thinks, he should be complaining about conservative senators who don’t want to do those things, not about Paul Krugman.

But positing this as a stark conflict between a US/Denmark/Japan “democratic capitalism” camp and a Russia/China/Saudi Arabia/Iran/Venezuela “state capitalism” camp seems very misleading. What about France? Clearly a democracy. Lots of private firms. Clearly impacted by neoliberalism. But less impacted than other western countries. Still lots of state ownership of enterprises. Or Norway with one of the world’s biggest sovereign wealth funds. Or for that matter Singapore, which isn’t a democracy but is often seem as one of the most free market countries in the world but with, again, two big sovereign wealth funds—Temasek Holdings and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation. How does Hydro Québec fit into Brooks scheme?

Norway, Where Oil-Based State Capitalism and Democracy Are Great Tastes That Taste Great Together

I think he’s raising important questions here, but precisely because people aren’t accustomed to thinking about the implications of this kind of state capitalism it’s important to try to think clearly about what’s happening and not rush to proclaim a new form of Cold War.

Statue of Charles Sumner, Cambridge, MA (my photo, available under cc license)

David Brooks’ latest column contains an aside about how “There’s about to be a backlash against the Ivy League lock on the court.”

I sort of doubt it. But obviously at any given time there’s a certain level of anti-Ivy League sentiment about. My experience with this, however, is that it’s a bit self-deluded. The people you hear participating in this backlash are almost invariably graduates of excellent non-Ivy colleges featuring highly competitive admissions—Michigan, University of California, Texas, Brooks’ own University of Chicago, etc. And obviously there’s nothing wrong with a little good-natured rivalry among alumni of different institutions. But the tendency is for this lumpenelite to treat the battle between famous, high-quality, highly competitive non-Ivy schools and famous, high-quality, highly competitive Ivies as some kind of yawning class divide in which the non-Ivies are the populists.

Realistically, this is just a particularly silly instantiation of Michael Kinsley’s reverse snobbery. The fact of the matter is that over seventy percent of Americans don’t have bachelor’s degrees at all. That’s a substantial class divide that tracks onto some very real gaps in social and economic status and has real political and cultural meaning, including lots of potential for backlash, though I doubt we’ll see a backlash against the idea that judges should have gone to law school. What’s more, even among the minority of Americans who have bachelor’s degrees, most of those people go to relatively uncompetitive schools (e.g.).

At any rate, as far as Elena Kagan’s concerned its not a big deal. But many graduates of fancy, hard-to-get-into colleges suffer from serious misperceptions about the state of higher education in the United States. This kind of view whereby Ivy League vs non-Ivy is a salient divide is a big part of that. The main splits are college/no-college and competitive/non-competitive admissions, not Chicago versus Penn.

(cc photo by Lars Ploughman)

David Brooks has a Moynihanish column in which he says people overrate policy and underestimate the role of culture in determining outcomes. “The influence of politics and policy,” he writes “is usually swamped by the influence of culture, ethnicity, psychology and a dozen other factors.” In the course of making the case he writes:

If you combine the influence of ethnicity and region, you get astounding lifestyle gaps. The average Asian-American in New Jersey lives an amazing 26 years longer and is 11 times more likely to have a graduate degree than the average American Indian in South Dakota.

Brad DeLong replies:

If you wanted to find a stupider example to try to support the claim that “differences in policy really do not matter very much” than comparing American Indians in South Dakota and Asian-Americans in New Jersey, I suppose you probably could.

But it would take a really long time to find one, and you would have to work really hard to do so.

I think that’s an unfair reading of Brooks’ point. Consider his example of the kind of policies that do make a difference later in the column:

Therefore, the first rule of policy-making should be, don’t promulgate a policy that will destroy social bonds. If you take tribes of people, exile them from their homelands and ship them to strange, arid lands, you’re going to produce bad outcomes for generations.

I’m not certain that’s the right analysis of poor outcomes among South Dakotan Native Americans, but it seems like a credible account.

My problem with Brooks’ argument is something else. He notes that Asians do well not only in rich states like New Jersey, but also in economically distressed areas. But obviously Asians living in South Korea and Japan (or New Jersey) do much better than Asians living in North Korea. That’s policy. Chinese people living in San Francisco or Hong King or Singapore do much better than Chinese people living in Jiangxi. That’s policy. And the China disparity is much smaller in 2010 than it was in 1980, which is also policy.

Brooks counters by noting that Swedish-Americans and people in Sweden have similar outcomes, which he characterizes as “two groups with similar historical backgrounds living in entirely different political systems.” I think the real lesson here is that Sweden and the US (especially the parts of the US where Swedes tended to settle) actually don’t have entirely different political systems. North Korea and South Korea have entirely different political systems. Sweden and Zimbabwe have entirely different political systems. The United States and Uzbekistan have entirely different political systems. The United States and Sweden are both stable democracies with market economies, substantial welfare states, and relatively low levels of public corruption. I think the real lesson of Brooks’ story is that the policy differences between stable market/welfare democracies are not that large and especially that controversies about tax levels are overblown in terms of their consequences.

But power trumps principle. In nearly every arena of political life, group relationships have replaced person-to-person relationships. The tempo of the Senate is now set by partisan lunches every Tuesday, whereas the body almost never meets for conversation as a whole. The Senate is now in the process of using reconciliation — rule by simple majority — to try to pass health care.

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.

Not only is Brooks “crying in his soup,” but he has his facts wrong. As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein points out, the highest frequency of reconciliation use “was in the ’80s, not the Aughts.” The 2003 Bush tax cuts were passed on an almost strictly partisan 50-50 vote that required then-Vice President Dick Cheney to break the tie, and the Medicare prescription drug benefit wasn’t passed using reconciliation. Klein concludes that “Brooks isn’t wrong in the sense that ‘I disagree with him.’ He’s wrong in the sense that the column requires a correction.”

Truly the last refuge of the damned is to complain about the nature of the congressional procedure that the majority is using to pass its agenda. Everyone knows that 100 percent of the people who like the underlying health care bill will approve of the use of the procedural mechanisms necessary to enact it, whereas 100 percent of the process-objectors will also be people who don’t like the bill. But instead of admitting it, we have hypocritical Republican opposition to “self-executing” rules and we have David Brooks crying in his soup over budget reconciliation:

In the United States, leaders in the House of Representatives have done an effective job in getting their members to think in group, not person-to-person, terms. Members usually vote as party blocs. Individuals have very little power. That’s why representatives are often subtle and smart as individuals, but crude and partisan as a collective. The social psychology of the House is a clan psychology, not an interpersonal psychology.

The Senate, on the other hand, has historically been home to more person-to-person thinking. This is because the Senate is smaller and because of Senate rules. Until recently, the Senate leaders couldn’t just ram things through on party-line votes. Because a simple majority did not rule, and because one senator had the ability to bring the whole body to a halt, senators had an incentive, every day, to develop alliances and relationships with people in the other party.

Well boo-frickin-hoo.

At any rate, I personally find the egomania of US Senators probably their least attractive quality. There’s something right and proper, I think, about the attitude most House members have. Most of them are seriously committed to a vision of the national interest and they recognize that you can’t achieve that vision without individuals subordinating themselves to a larger organization. If everyone agrees to accept a little discipline and not try to get their way on everything, then ultimately everyone winds up getting more of their way at the end of the day because it’s possible to get things done. This is how the vast majority of legislatures in well-functioning democracies operate. And, indeed, one shouldn’t overstate the level of party discipline in the House—it’s a lot compared to the Senate, but it’s like child’s play compared to what you see in most countries.

Last, I think the idea that majority voting in the US Senate would be the death-knell for bipartisanship reflects a pretty odd degree of ignorance about the way the American political system works. When Newt Gingrich was Speaker and Bill Clinton was President, we got bipartisan bills. When Ronald Reagan was President and Tip O’Neil was Speaker we got bipartisan bills. Unified partisan control is relatively rare, and unified partisan control with large majorities is extremely rare. Why shouldn’t it result in rare instances of partisan policymaking?

David Brooks’ columns sometimes strike liberals as not just wrong, but somehow insidious, tricky, an effort to put one over on the public. Aside from the evident sexual tension, today’s effort on John Thune strikes me as almost the reverse. Brooks’ project is to build up Senator Thune as some kind of Great Plains David Cameron who can construct a more reasonable version of the conservative project and bring the GOP back to power. I’m not, myself, a moderate conservative but I think this is a worthy project. And the Idea of John Thune seems like a good idea:

He doesn’t have radical plans to cut the federal leviathan. He just wants to restrain the growth of government to bring deficits down. He doesn’t have ambitions to restructure the tax code. He just wants to lift burdens on small business.

He says his prairie background has given him a preference for small companies and local government. When he criticizes the Democrats, it is for mixing big government with big business: the bailouts of Wall Street, the subsidies to the big auto and energy corporations. His populism is not angry. He doesn’t rail against the malefactors of wealth. But it’s there, a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban.

But there’s no evidence that any of this is real. As Brooks concedes, “His positions on the issues are unremarkable.” At the end of the day, as Brooks says, “He is down-the-line conservative on social, economic and foreign policy matters.”

Brooks may say that Thune “just wants to restrain the growth of government to bring deficits down” but orthodox conservative dogma involves tax policy that implies either gutting the federal government or else massive deficits. For example, Jim DeMint proposed an alternative to the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act that was focused on large permanent tax cuts. It would have added $3.1 trillion to the deficit over ten years—about triple the cost of ARRA—with no end in sight. And John Thune voted for it.

The weirdest thing here is the idea that Thune is praiseworthy for his opposition to “the bailouts of Wall Street.” For one thing, David Brooks thinks (and I agree) that voting yes on the TARP bill was the right thing to do. For another thing, John Thune voted for TARP along with the GOP party leadership. He’s done what the bulk of the GOP did, namely when everyone’s butt was on the line he voted for bailouts as a necessary evil, but then after Inauguration Day turned around and started hypocritically slamming them while going to war on behalf of financial services companies looking to avoid regulation.

I could be wrong about this, but I suspect that Obama is more than familiar with Brookings’s work on health-care cost-containment, particularly since Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director, was a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and has spent a good chunk of his recent years working on the problem of how to contain health-care costs. And it’s not as if the Administration hasn’t been talking — I would argue perhaps talking too much—about “bending the curve” when it comes to health-care costs. Brooks’s piece is written as if the real hurdle to change is that the Obama Administration doesn’t realize what’s wrong with the health-care system, so that if Obama just read the right texts, he would be willing to push for fundamental reform. But the Administration knows more than enough about the problems with health care. It’s just trying to figure out how to come up with a politically possible solution.

The fact that the Brookings report’s title is chosen to echo a phrase popularized by the Obama administration should perhaps have been a clue that the administration is aware of the basic shape of the problem. The fact that one of the authors of the report, David Cutler, was Obama’s chief health economics adviser during the campaign also seems relevant. Unless this is just pure low partisan politics, Brooks seems to be manifesting a weird form of the cult of the presidency problem, in which he suggests that sheer White House willpower could generate congressional support for controversial cost control measures.

But if you want to find villains in our failure to focus on controlling long-term costs, Obama is the last person you should point your finger at. The administration has done more than anyone else to focus attention on this issue. Second come moderate Democrats in congress who’ve also emphasized this. Third come congressional liberals, who don’t seem that interested in the subject but also seem perfectly willing to embrace it as a goal of reform as long as reform succeeds in expanding access. Then you’ve got the congressional Republicans who’ve given no sign of interests in bargaining in good faith. And then you’ve got the right-wing demagogues who now have every politicians in American convinced that any move toward cost control will get you denounced as eager to euthenize grandma. Insofar as respectable conservative like Brooks would like to see health care spending brought under control at some point, their failure to confront these voices is going to make that impossible.

As David Frum has written, the right is waging this war in a way that makes future conservatism impossible:

Even worse will be the way this fight is won: basically by convincing older Americans already covered by a government health program, Medicare, that Obama’s reform plans will reduce their coverage. In other words, we’ll have sent a powerful message to the entire political system to avoid at all hazards any tinkering with Medicare except to make it more generous for the already covered.

If we win, we’ll trumpet the success as a great triumph for liberty and individualism. Really though it will be a triumph for inertia. To the extent that anybody in the conservative world still aspires to any kind of future reform and improvement of America’s ossified government, that should be a very ashy victory indeed.

The perversity of winning this kind of pyrrhic victory is what convinced people that congressional Republicans might prefer to make a deal. But it seems that those who believed that were mistaken.

At the moment, I feel politically closer to Barack Obama than to House Minority Leader John Boehner (and that’s even while being greatly exercised about the current health care bills). On the other hand, I feel politically closer to Lindsey Graham than to Henry Waxman.

As Isaac Chotiner observes, this doesn’t really make sense:

Henry Waxman will likely end up voting with Barack Obama well over 90% of the time (Obama had a more liberal voting record in the Senate than Waxman does in the House). Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham might sound like a moderate but according to the 2007 rankings, he was solidly in the middle of the Republican caucus.

My hunch is that Brooks prefers Obama’s style and attitude to Boehner’s–just as he (Brooks) prefers Graham’s moderate tone to Waxman’s more visible partisanship. But senate votes matter to people’s lives, and I have the suspicion that if Brooks paid more attention to them, rather than to the personalities of Washington politicians, he might find himself drifting leftward on the political spectrum.

Exactly right.* Tastes differ. Some people like the genteel ways of the Senate compared to the cutthroat partisanship of the House. Others feel that Senators act like self-important blowhards and respect the gritty determination of the House. But that’s just about personalities. On the big issues of the day, Graham and Boehner are very similar (no carbon pricing, no tax increases for any reason, neo-Hooverite approach to the recession) and Obama and Waxman are also very similar. And these positions on the issues matter. A lot. These are literally life and death differences for many people.

*I wouldn’t rely on National Journal rankings, personally, but just about any system would reach the right conclusion.

BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

HARWOOD: What?

BROOKS: I can only imagine what happens to you guys.

O’DONNELL: Sorry, who was that?

BROOKS: I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you.

Brooks said that he has “spoken to a lot of young women who are Senate staffers and they’ll have these middle age guys who are sort of in the middle of a mid-life crisis. Emotionally needy, they don’t know how to do it and sort of like these St. Bernards drooling everywhere.” Watch it:

When O’Donnell asked if he had “a couple drinks at lunch,” Brooks said that he was just “trying not to be too dignified and stuffy.”

Transcript:

O’DONNELL: What, what’s happened?

BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

HARWOOD: What?

BROOKS: I can only imagine what happens to you guys.

O’DONNELL: Sorry, who was that?

BROOKS: I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you. But so, a lot of them spend so much time needing people’s love and yet they are shooting upwards their whole life, they’re not that great in normal human relationships. And so, they’re like freaks, they don’t know how to, they’re lonely. They reach out. I’ve spoken to a lot of young women who are Senate staffers and they’ll have these middle age guys who are sort of in the middle of a mid-life crisis. Emotionally needy, they don’t know how to do it and sort of like these St. Bernards drooling everywhere. And you find a lot of this happens in mid-life and among very powerful people who are extremely lonely.

O’DONNELL: Can I ask one other question David? Do you think, what about female or women politicians? Are they dignified and are there examples of when they have not? Or does it tend to be the men who less dignified?

BROOKS: Yeah, I think that’s mostly a matter of genetics. I do think that…I do think there’s loneliness.

O’DONNELL: That was just a softball, David, and you really hit it very well.

BROOKS: Yeah, I wish I could think of sort of St. Bernards, sloppy women who are licking their aides, but but no, I can’t think of any.

HARWOOD: I’m not going there.

O’DONNELL: Did you have a couple drinks at lunch, David? I mean, this is clearly.

BROOKS: No, you’ve hit me…I’m trying not to be too dignified and stuffy.

O’DONNELL: Well, David Brooks as always, thank you very much. That was a lot of fun. You may not have gotten best column of the week, but you got best appearance of the week, certainly.

There’s definitely something nice about being out of power. I feel like all day every day for the past week, I’ve been watching conservatives on television ranting and raving about how Democratic efforts to control health care costs and reform the system will lead to rationing and your grandma being turned into soylent green. In part precisely in order to avoid those accusations, the bills on the table probably don’t actually do enough to really throttle health cost inflation. So now for their trouble David Brooks treats Democratic legislators to a vicious lashing for not doing enough to control costs, during which time he somehow manages not to mention the scorched earth anti-rationing campaign being waged by the opposition party.

Here’s GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says President Barack Obama wants to ration health care for Americans and involve the government in decisions on what treatments individual citizens can receive.

During an appearance Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” McConnell said Obama supports “a national rationing board, to determine what kind of treatments would be available for American citizens. Typically, those in single payer countries like Canada and Britain involve delays in treatment, denial of care, those kind of things.”

Now McConnell is just lying here. Straight-out lying. And by doing so he’s making it extremely difficult for the Senate to take anything other than fairly modest steps toward cost control. It’s fine—welcome, even—for conservative pundits to criticize current legislation for not going far enough in this regard. But if you want to make that argument you owe it to the world to get real about the context here and spare a lash or two for the folks who’ve been pushing legislation in this direction. But the right is, as Jon Chait points out, very conveniently having it both ways on the health spending issue, simultaneously whining about expense of giving health insurance to the currently uninsured while positioning themselves as the defenders of unlimited services.

Good for David Brooks:

More than any current member of the Supreme Court, she worked her way up through the furnace levels of the American legal system. [...] She is quite liberal. But there’s little evidence that she is motivated by racialist thinking or an activist attitude. [...] When you read her opinions, race and gender are invisible. I’m obviously not qualified to judge the legal quality of her opinions. But when you read the documents merely as examples of persuasive writing, you find that they are almost entirely impersonal and deracinated.

This should be totally obvious. That it’s not obvious to so many speaks to two things. One is the deranged nature of Supreme Court confirmation battles. Consistent differences have emerged between the kinds of justices conservatives want and the kinds of justices liberals want, but it’s considered out of bounds for politicians to just say “The President has a different ideology from me, he’s appointing a judge whose decisions I anticipate disliking, and that’s one of the reasons I voted for the other guy.” Instead there are these incentives to concoct wild personality defects in the other side’s choices, or accuse them of deliberately subverting the law (“activism”), rather than of simply disagreeing about important issues.

Mix that up with this incredible race obsession held by many white conservatives, and it’s a toxic blend. Suddenly Judge Sotomayor’s participation in 1970s-vintage campus activist groups is a dire threat to the white race’s legal hegemony.

At a recent “opinion awards” ceremony sponsored by The Week, David Axelrod showered David Brooks with praise, continuing the somewhat weird phenomenon of a left-of-center administration making it clear that their favorite columnist is a only-somewhat-hostile conservative who as best I can tell opposes the vast majority of the administration’s major policy initiatives.

The appeal of a pundit outreach strategy focused primarily on the “reasonable right” is not lost on me—absent the outreach, it’s overwhelmingly likely that Brooks’ columns would be much harsher, whereas progressives who like most of Obama’s administration on the merits are likely to be nice anyway. But I do think it’s a bit shortsighted. I first thought about this when during the campaign Obama tried to assuage Jewish voters’ fears by courting Jeffrey Goldberg rather than by using one of the many, many, many progressive Jews in the punditry game. On the one hand, it’s arguably more effective to have the kind of guy who writes bogus stories about Iraq/al-Qaeda links in your corner than it would be to have a progressive Jew.

But the danger here is that while this sort of thing may work in the short-run, in the long-run one impact of this sort of courtship is to entrench Goldberg as the arbiter of what kinds of political opinions are kosher. And at the end of the day, a progressive politician is going to be better-off having progressive Jews in the position to define that.

Similarly with Brooks. The coverage Brooks has given Obama thus far has, I think, been on net helpful to the administration. But at the moment Obama’s riding high. His approval rating is in the sixties, his opponents are acting like idiots, and he’s no wracked by any kind of scandals. That sort of situation isn’t going to hold up forever. Any administration features some dark days sooner or later. And when those days come, the people in the media who’ll still stick with you are the people who really care about the substantive agenda. So for the long run, it’s useful to raise the stature of the kind of media figures who are going to be helpful for the long run. Brooks is a good conservative columnist, well-worth reading. But he really is a conservative columnist. And so elevating him as the columnist is ultimately going to be self-defeating.

David Brooks’ column about empirical research into the emotional underpinnings of moral judgment contained an oddly brief and sweeping remark about philosophy:

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people.

I really don’t think this is right. Philosophy has been interested in questions about the emotional elements of moral judgment for a long time. To cite just one famous eighteenth century author, Adam Smith wrote an important book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which “sentiments” are what we would call “emotions.” And Smith was part of a larger school of “sentimentalist” philosophers culminating in David Hume.

It’s true that Kant’s hugely influential moral thinking proceeds on a more-or-less exclusively rationalist basis, but latter-day Kantians like T.M. Scanlon and Christine Korsgaard who taught me this material are not blind to this issue and work to bring it into their thinking. And people working more in the Humean tradition have this even closer to the heart of their work. There’s a reason that Simon Blackburn’s main book on moral reasoning is called Ruling Passions.

But I think the main point that all modern philosophers would agree on is that one salient fact about human beings is that we have intuitive emotional moral responses to events and we also have the power to reason about those responses. A person who sees bailout funds going to a bank owned and operated by wealthy individuals and there’s an instinctive moral outrage, a desire to see the fat cats put in a bag and drowned. But that’s the beginning of a discussion about What Is To Be Done not the end. And the ensuing process of reasoning can range over empirical and theoretical issues in economics, to abstract moral principles and efforts to articulate coherent ideas about fairness and so forth. The emotional drivers are crucial, in other words, but so is the faculty of reason which can, yes, even be applied in “bookish” ways.

Of course arguably I should just tell people to read Actual Philosopher Hilzoy on this subject.

Today on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, conservative columnist David Brooks ridiculed those on the right who have said they want Obama to fail. During the segment, a caller — who claimed to be phoning in from “a club” in Georgia full of “all white folks, all millionaires and good Republicans” — begged Brooks to “come on board” with Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Fox News to “get on Mr. Obama’s case.” “We got to bring that man down,” the caller said, adding, “We just cannot have eight years of this black man.”

To his credit, Brooks first dismissed the caller’s racist comment and then railed against the right wing’s desire to attack Obama at every step:

BROOKS: It’s tremendously important to put color and prejudice aside and see him for what he is, which is just an incredibly impressive smart man. [...] And I just think it’s incredibly important to root for the guy, whether you agree with every policy. [...] But the idea that we shouldn’t be rooting for our president strikes me as not only, I don’t know about unpatriotic, it’s just stupid. We should be rooting for our president because it’s rooting for ourselves.

Watch it:

Brooks — who has recently become a constant critic of the Republican Party — isn’t the only conservative to hit back at Limbaugh this week. Yesterday, when CNN’s Rick Sanchez asked GOP Rep. Zach Wamp (TN) if he sides with Limbaugh, Wamp said Limbaugh is more of an “entertainer,” adding, “We really need serious-minded policy people to help chart this ship of state out of these rocky waters right now.”

Given that most of the Republicans who first criticized Limbaugh but then came crawling back to apologize were elected officials, it is more likely that Wamp will be the one that has to fall back in line.

“In short,” writes David Brooks, “the United States will never be Europe. It was born as a commercial republic. It’s addicted to the pace of commercial enterprise. After periodic pauses, the country inevitably returns to its elemental nature.”

And it’s true, the United States will never be Europe. Among other things, I find it doubtful that we’re going to build any Gothic cathedrals or Versailles-style palaces over here. But at the same time, before the United States was born as a commercial republic, the Netherlands (pictured above) was a commercial republic. For that matter, Venice was a commercial republic even before that. These days, the Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy. But it’s still pretty commercial in nature. Which doesn’t stop the Netherlands from having universal health care, a robust public transit network, and relatively strong labor unions. For that matter, I don’t think anyone could deny that Dutch-derived New York City has a pretty commercial nature. And yet New York has a “European-style” brand of walkable urbanism, relatively strong labor unions, and if federal policy where made by New York’s elected officials you can bet we’d have universal health care.

Now I doubt Brooks would deny any of that. But the point is that “Europe” is a very strange and shifting signifier in the discourse of the American right.

I was less persuaded by the case for doing education reform now. (Though, interestingly, David Brooks, who made the case for paring down even before Galston did this week, seemed high on Obama’s education reform plans–and precisely because he thinks they’re ambitious.)

On Brooks, I think this just shows that we shouldn’t take his timing objections very seriously. Brooks’s views about education policy are, on the merits, close to my views and close to Obama’s views. Consequently, he likes Obama’s education reform agenda. Brooks’ views on other matters are more conservative and he objects to them on the merits, but he’s pretending to be concerned about the timing. Feh. Meanwhile, one could argue for pursuing education reform now on the grounds that education reform is very important. But I think there’s a real technical reason for avoiding delay.

The first aspect of this is simply that the main pillar of federal K-12 education—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act whose most recent re-authorization was dubbed No Child Left Behind—is due to be reauthorized. Which is to say re-written. Congress and the White House can just stall on this, but since a bunch of people want to see a whole bunch of things changed, and since the schedule says it’s time to change the law, it would take time and political capital to maintain the status quo. Better to spend that time and political capital on making change for the better.

The second aspect of this is that macroeconomic considerations have compelled a very large short-run increase in federal education spending. The reason for this is that probably the least controversial aspect of federal fiscal stimulus is the idea that aid should be sent to state and local governments. The reason for that, in turn, is that such spending isn’t even really new net public sector activity. Rather, the federal government is stepping in to reduce the extent to which state and local governments need to enact pro-cyclical anti-stimulus in the form of spending cuts. Meanwhile, the main non-entitlement item in state budgets is education. So in practice, increased financial aid to states primarily entails a substantial shift in financial responsibility for education toward Washington. This by no means requires a rethinking of federal education policy, but it does make thinking harder about how that money is used a fairly natural complement to the macroeconomically dictated trend toward the federal government being responsible for more of the money.

Last, we’re talking about very different policy silos. It’s not as if Arne Duncan can tell the permanent staff at the Department of Education to lay off the schools and spend time thinking about AIG. The president probably should not, personally, be letting school reform take up a great deal of his time and mental energy. But the president had plenty of time in his past life as a State Senator, a U.S. Senator, and a Presidential candidate to outline his philosophy on this subject and he has the backbone of an education policy team in place. Having that team twiddle their thumbs won’t accomplish anything—they may as well press forward.