David Brooks: To Form a More Blinder Union

In this article, David Brooks lays bare the warp and woof of his ideal America.  He introduces his philosophy, aptly described by Matt Welch as banal authoritarianism, by way of whining about the lack of puissance in today’s memorials and monuments:

If you go to the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials in Washington, you are invited to look up in admiration. Lincoln and Jefferson are presented as the embodiments of just authority. They are strong and powerful but also humanized. Jefferson is a graceful aristocratic democrat. Lincoln is sober and enduring. Both used power in the service of higher ideas, which are engraved nearby on the walls….

The monuments that get built these days are mostly duds. That’s because they say nothing about just authority. The World War II memorial is a nullity. It tells you nothing about the war or why American power was mobilized to fight it…  Even the more successful recent monuments evade the thorny subjects of strength and power. The Vietnam memorial is about tragedy. The Korean memorial is about vulnerability.

One could say Mr. Brook’s foray into architectural criticism is a dud.  As Jesse Walker notes, Robert McNamara represents the quintessential authoritative force of the Vietnam War, but a “commanding Lincoln- or Jefferson-style monument to Robert McNamara would be perceived as a perverse joke, and rightly so.”  Check out Mr. Walker’s article and links for why the Vietnam memorial is pretty awesome as is.




The second half of the article gets down to the core of Brooksian political philosophy (of which symbolic architecture criticism is a mere offshoot).  Brooksian metaphysics hold that individuals are made to be docile followers of a few exalted leaders.  He uses the rest of the article to diagnose what he sees as our "followership problem."  So, the monumentally boring word-vomit about our national monuments allows Mr. Brooks to ask (and then answer) this burning question:  “Why can’t today’s memorial designers think straight about just authority?” 

Fortunately, David knows why.  Ya see, first:  “We live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims than to those who wield power.”  He fears too much time is devoted to “stories” about “oppression, racism, and cruelty.”  Hence, precious little air-time and deep, personal reflection is given to the myths that have propped up illegitimate leaders since time immemorial.  As a self-professed master of political science and philosophy, Mr. Brooks knows very well how story telling allows totalitarians to enthrall their oppressed masses.  But I guess we should know the level of concern Mr. Brooks has for oppressed victims.  

The next culprit, in Mr. Brooks mind, is “our fervent devotion to equality, to the notion that all people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect.”  Surely, Mr. Brooks’ view of equality is more nuanced than this sentence suggests, so I won’t mock him quite yet.  He goes on:  “It’s hard in this frame of mind to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves.”  How does one disentangle this claim?  I’ve already given his premise a generous reading, so I’ll forgo interpretation of this particular non sequitur.  Let’s just say, it is a bizarre indictment of a free society. 

As we approach the denouement, Mr. Brooks reveals his fundamental gripe about the state of our republic.  With the Congress' public approval rating hovering in the teens, Mr. Brooks places the blame squarely on the nation’s leaders damn society of gadflies we’ve become:

But the main problem is our inability to think properly about how power should be used to bind and build. Legitimate power is built on a series of paradoxes: that leaders have to wield power while knowing they are corrupted by it; that great leaders are superior to their followers while also being of them; that the higher they rise, the more they feel like instruments in larger designs. The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials are about how to navigate those paradoxes.

Nobody denies the paradoxes inherent in political power.  Precious few understood the paradoxes of political power better than Publius.  In their writings, presented to the American people as The Federalist Papers, they presented a theory and design of governance that recognized the grave dangers and limited role of national power.  Nowhere in their writings did they suggest, as Mr. Brooks does, that good government required “good followers—able to recognize just authority, admire it, be grateful for it, and emulate it.” 

No, quite contrary to Mr. Brooks, our founders warned of a complacent citizenry.  Madison recognized that, “no government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable.”  His co-author Hamilton (closest in philosophical bent to Mr. Brooks, though still miles away), said of the people, “that their confidence in and obedience to a government will commonly be proportioned to the goodness or badness of its administration.”  And Thomas Jefferson, Minister to France while the Federalist Papers were being written, wrote at length about how much faith citizens should place in the “authorities”, and puts it succinctly here:  “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.” 

These eminent thinkers analyzed the “paradoxes” of state authority through a liberty versus power paradigm.  Perhaps Mr. Brooks cognitive dissonance stems from his belief that the “liberty vs. power” paradigm is no longer “germane.”  

In this thoroughly creepy article, Mr. Brooks reveals that his optimal vision of government requires a dramatic societal change in the way citizens relate to their overlords.  He longs for a society that keeps the common man in check by making sure they remember their place in the “hierarchy”.  Intellectuals must praise the government ten times before they publicly criticize one abuse of power, lest the plebeians dare question their affinity to the political class.  Politicians will more effectively serve the common good once transparency watch-dogs are replaced by boot-licking bards of state.  As an added bonus, class warfare would be no more, since all the grunts of society would feel a common bond through their interminable obeisance to shared leaders.  Alas, Mr. Brooks reveals whence his long called-for solidarity and unity must come:  an all out campaign to subvert the common individual to the grandeur of the state.