Poor David Brooks — the guy’s timing is simply awful. Here he is, offering a column — “Meet the Poor Republicans” — that tries to explain why a particular contingent of not-so-well-off voters has lately been voting for the GOP. His answer? Unlike the poor folks who vote for the Democrats, these poor people “agree with Horatio Alger”: they believe that they’ve got a reasonable shot at moving up the ladder, living the American dream, making a fortune and leaving that word “poor” behind. Poor Democrats, on the other hand, tend to be people who think that the cards are stacked against them.
Unfortunately for Brooks, his column ran on the very same day that the Times kicked off a mega-series on “Class in America” — the central premise of which is that there’s a lot less class mobility in America than people believe. (Lest you conservatives fear that this is simply a plot by that filthy liberal Times rag to fill our heads with lies, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story last week reporting pretty much exactly the same thing.)
This juxtaposition of material couldn’t possibly have been intended by the Times’ news editors to make Brooks look like a condescending idiot or a closet Democrat, but that’s the result. Because there’s no way to put these two articles together without concluding that those poor people out there who vote Republican because they think they have a chance to get ahead, those people whose praises Brooks are singing, are, sadly, chumps. They have been sold a bridge. They believe in something that, like creationism or Saddam Hussein’s WMD arsenal, is contra-factual. On the other hand, those poor Democrats, however unfashionably glum and not-with-the-morning-in-America program they may be, seem to have a clearer picture of the state of the union.
One could go further and begin to lay out how the policies of the Bush-era GOP, supported by Brooks’ “poor Republicans,” are only further locking in the sort of class immobility the Times (and Journal) articles note. But let’s not kick Brooks while his own paper has tripped him sprawling, face-down, on the political floor.
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