Under the header "Stop Making Sense", Our Mister Brooks tackles Drew Westen's new book "THE POLITICAL BRAIN:The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation" in today's NYT here. Now I haven't read Westen's book, so I withhold any judgement on its content, or for that matter Brooks' judgement of the book. What I can judge is Brooks' free-floating assumptions about American politics and his own comments that have little if anything to do with the book under review.
Let's start off the review with a literary allusion followed by a swift "loaded" term, shall we? "Between 2000 and 2006, a specter haunted the community of fundamentalist Democrats." The wha of who? (F)undamentalist Democrats? Who uses this term? I've never heard anyone use it, but my knowledge is limited. Oh Great Gazoogle, enlighten me - who uses "fundamentalist Democrats"? Hmmm. Cal Thomas does. Some commenter at StormFront's site ("White Pride World Wide") does. Free Republic does. Other wing nut sites also use the term. And , in fairness, Pandagon and Democratic Underground commenters have also used the term. On balance, it appears to be used more as an epithet by anti-Democrats than as a spontaneous name arising from the "community". Kind of like how O'Reilly calls me a Nazi, whereas I tend to prefer Kossack. Let me be clear - Brooks is NOT talking about Fundamentalist Christians who are Democrats; no, he's decided to inject a term used almost exclusively by the Far Right into the first sentence of his book review.
"Members of this community looked around and observed their moral and intellectual superiority. They observed that their policies were better for the middle classes. And yet the middle classes did not support Democrats. They tended to vote, in large numbers, for the morally and intellectually inferior party, the one, moreover, that catered to the interests of the rich."
Here he gets just a little tricky - he doesn't speak of "voters" or "Americans"; instead he refers to the "middle classes" (I suppose that includes upper-, lower- and middle-middle class, but I am not up on contemporary divisions of the middle class, so I'm not sure how many there are); therefore any attempt to point out that, in the real world, real people DO support Democrats (y'know, like how more people voted for Al Gore than George Bush) is deflected pre-emptively. That might be true of the LOWER class(es), you see, but NOT the middle classes. It almost goes without saying that having set up this "middle-classes"-only version of Democratic angst, he promptly drops it and never speaks of the middle-classes again in the course of his review.
"Serious thinkers set to work, and produced a long shelf of books answering this question." (The question being, How come?) He helpfully summarizes this shelf - "First, Democrats lose because they are too intelligent. Their arguments are too complicated for American voters. Second, Democrats lose because they are too tolerant. They refuse to cater to racism and hatred. Finally, Democrats lose because they are not good at the dark art of politics." Emphasis added...Helpful summary done with, we now learn of the fate of that shelf full of books- "This literature was never taken seriously by sophisticated Democrats..." Okey-dokey. As a semi-sophisticated Democrat (I use a cloth to blow my nose) I'm not sure that I would call this "literature", but point taken. This, of course, is what underlies the whole point of Our Mister Brooks' foray into book-reviewin' land; Bill Clinton (one would assume he qualifies as a "sophisticated Democrat") has given a positive blurb to Westen's book so it seems the Grey Lady must deign to actually review it. Isn't this also a back-handed attempt to justify the Times' lack of review attention to many, many of the titles that presumably fill that shelf full of books?
As to the "meat" of the review, as I said, I ain't qualified. But somebody, either Westen or Brooks, is dead wrong on at least one point. "Ronald Reagan used the word "confiscation" in reference to taxation, and was able to persuade people to agree to lower taxes. He called Nicaraguan contras "freedom fighters" and was able to secure them funding." Um, I thought the whole point of the Iran-contra thingy is that Reagan was not able to secure them funding, y'know the Boland Amendment and all. Maybe Brooks means "able to secure them funding" from gun-running, drug-running compadres who liked the sound of "freedom fighters". He goes on to trash the book (of course) with a series of zingers very similar to the "Well, if global warming is real, how come it snowed in my backyard?" tack. But then, as he's beginning to wrap up, comes this truly head-scratching line- "Of course it’s rare that one comes across a book that so avidly flatters the prejudices of its partisan readers." In what world does Our Mister Brooks live? No, no, I get it now. He really doesn't come across them; he's a rich, NYT writer, he probably doesn't go to Goodwill or Salvation Army very often. Me, I go to a lot of thrift stores and let me tell you, I come across an awful lot of books that avidly flatter the prejudices of their partisan readers...Rush, Coulter, Savage, Hewitt, on and on and on.
To be a sport, I'll let Our Mister Brooks have the last word. He's mangling Antonio Damasio's work on the neural basis of emotions, he's effectively describing how Reason works while calling it "Emotion", but he gets paid for this stuff - "In this more sophisticated view, emotions are produced by learning. As we go through life, we learn what cause leads to what effect. When, later on, we face similar situations, the emotions highlight possible outcomes, drawing us toward some actions and steering us away from others."
I lied; I'm not a sport. One last quote, "The best way to win votes — and this will be a shocker — is to offer people an accurate view of the world and a set of policies that seem likely to produce good results. This is how you make voters happy." With insight like this, I'm surprised he doesn't run for office himself.