David Brooks gets nostalgic for the 18th century

Sandy Levinson

David Brooks continues to be perhaps the most vexing of the NYTimes's columnists. He is clearly smart and often quite interesting. But, with regularity, he writes columns whose flaws seem obvious. So consider his column in today's Times, in which he basically laments the collapse of the Federalist Party in the 1800 election. That is, he beleives that the United States is (or ought to be) a "republic," very definitely not a "democracy." (No doubt he would regard it as a strength of the United States Constitution that it is "undemocratic.") As Gordon Wood points out in his magisterial Oxford history of the United States between 1789-1815, the Federalists (like, for that matter, most of those who framed the Constitution) decidedly mistrusted the masses and wished for leadership by elites who could be counted on to identify and then to act on "the public interest" instead of crasser interests (such as the preferences of their unenlightened constituents, who were expected to defer to their betters rather than prefer officeholders who took constituents' views all that seriously).

For better or worse, this vision of American politics, which among other things is based on the premise that there will be no "factious" political parties, was, as some say about decisions like Plessy, "wrong the day it was decided," and that was made clear for all to see no later than 1800. But the call for a return to a "republican" political order is a constant of American politics. It is the heart of the Progressive vision of high technocracy (and non-partisan elections) and of Michael Sandel's emphasis on the politics of the "public good" instead of a necessarily selfish "liberalism." One could also see such elements in the revival of "civic republicanism" that was an important part of the legal academy in the '80's (led by, among others, Cass Sunstein, who is now a leading member of the Obama Administration). Though Brooks is a Republican, Democrats, like Sunstein and Obama, are certainly attracted to it. (Perhaps this helps to explain why the "community organizer President" basically suspended any community organizing, which is too "democratic." Brooks very much likes that Obama.)

I don't mean to demean that vision. I suspect that all of us share the nostalgia at one time or another. Who actually likes the current decadent form of party "competition," well captured in the current Onion? But, as my then-colleague at Ohio State, David Kettler, pointed out in a brilliant essay some 40 years ago, republican nostalgists avoid coming to terms with the fact that it rested on a particular vision of political sociology, including, among other things, the deference by lower orders to their elite betters. (Not surprisingly, Brooks is nostalgic for the "establishment" that continued to possess a great deal of influence into the 1960s and itself collasped in the wake of Vietnam and the civil rights movement.) Brooks is ultimately engaging in fantasy, hoping that by some truly magical process a self-interested consumerist culture that has been systematically created over the past 200 years will simply disappear. However explicable his hope, it is deeply unserious. He needs, among other things, to reread Daniel Bell's Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (not to mention The Communist Manifesto, which notes that under the pressure of capitalism "all that is solid," such as the kind of society for which Brooks is so nostalgiv, "melts into air").
Posted 6:26 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]