David Brooks Misses the Point Again: What Has Gone Wrong with American Society . . . .

Speaking of the inability of centrist powerbrokers to see and learn (I'm building on what I just published about the teachable moment for American Catholicism): David Brooks is singing his very tired old song again today in an op-ed statement in the New York Times.  You know the song, the one whose irritating little tune never varies and whose shallow lyrics have grown so threadbare you can't believe the elevator wants to keep piping them into your ears one more day as you ascend and descend:

It's that old song about how all that's wrong with American society in the first decades of the new millennium is due to the self-indulgent behavior and moral fragmentation of middle-class and working-class people.  And has nothing at all to do with the self-indulgence and moral fragmentation of the super-rich whose gross accumulation of unprecedented wealth just happens to have gone hand-in-hand with the fragmentation of American society.

So that one would think anyone with half a brain and a conscience might begin to wonder if there's a correlation: let a few people grab the vast bulk of the resources of a society for themselves, and social chaos ensues.  Always has.  Always will.  

Instead, Brooks blames those who have been the object and not the subject of the economic suffering that has resulted in social chaos.  He blames them for being, well, objects and not subjects.  As if the fault for their objectification  lies in the hands of middle- and working-class Americans and not the extremely wealthy who have turned the rest of their fellow citizens into pawns in ruthless economic games designed to enrich only a few.

There's not a single word in Brooks's analysis today of the "segmentation" of society, of "social breakdown," of "social deterioration," of "social disruption": not a single word in any of this analysis about the role of the super-rich in creating the conditions that have led to all of these things.  Not a single world, in fact, about the wealthy, the rich, the 1%.

As in previous articles in which Brooks offers similar analysis, the focus is, laserlike, on the supposed moral failings of middle-class and working-class Americans who have been unable to delay gratification, to curb their self-indulgence, to stay married, to get educated, to hold onto jobs and work hard at them.

For someone who claims to read and understand Reinhold Niebuhr, this is simply astonishing to me--the moral obtuseness of David Brooks's analysis of what's wrong with American society today.