I’ve really backed off on the Op-Eds since immersing myself in the blogosphere. One of my few remaining ‘go-to’s has been David Brooks. Today he irritates me. A summary quote:
The United States is becoming a broken society.
The article is full of similarly broad “the kids these days!”- style whining about how society is changing, etc. Impossible to verify rigorously. This kind of loose thinking is at the foundation of political bias and, in my view, creates exactly the sorts of problems that he’s complaining about.
I’m even sympathetic to some of the conclusion, which basically boils down to devolving power to lower levels of government. But I get there a completely different way. Ugh.
Update: I am, unsurprisingly, much closer to Arnold Kling on this, whose commentary caricatures Brooks’ column less than mine. I’m not sure about this elite conspiracy thing, but that might be because he loved Halberstam’s the Best and the Brightest and I put it down out of boredom. It was written 40 years ago or something…
Update 2: Brooks fleshes out his pessimism
Not Unreasonable 