David Brooks flew to London so now he’s an expert on British politics, and in his New York Times column this morning, he explains why “the British political system is basically functional while the American system is not.” Here’s the crux of what makes their system so admirable in his eyes:
Britain is also blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous. But the plusses outweigh the minuses.
It has long been the supreme fantasy of establishment guardians in general, and David Brooks in particular, that American politics would be dominated by an incestuous, culturally homogeneous, superior elite “who live in [Washington] and who have often known each other since prep school.” And while these establishment guardians love to endlessly masquerade as spokespeople for the Ordinary American, what they most loathe is the interference by the dirty rabble in what should be their exclusive, harmonious club of political stewardship, where conflicts are amicably resolved by ladies and gentlemen of the highest breeding without any messy public conflict.
I wonder if he spoke with any of Friedman’s cabbies?
arguingwithsignposts
About sums up my opinion of David Brooks. via
aimai
Well, last time I was in London the entire country was in an uproar since it had only recently been discovered that the entire political class–those nice people who argue with each other over policy–had been shopping their names and their influence to various foreigners, arms dealers, and etc… In addition this extremely wealthy class had been shown to get and maintain its wealth the old fashioned way–by sucking off gthe public teat and grotesquely taking advantage of every tax break and perequisite available to members of parliament at the same time that it was slashing services for the neediest. It was nearly bipartisan, or tri-partisan, but the one thing it wasn’t was sophisticated, intellectual, principled, or for the good of the country.
Oh, and fuck david brooks with a london cab and a double decker bus.
aimai
ben
I wish David Brooks would tell us what he really wants: a nice old-fashioned monarchy that would take care of all the dirty business of ruling and keeping the plebes in place so that people like David could hobnob in peace.
aimai
@arguingwithsignposts:
Wait, is Brooks the chicken in this scenario? Because only then do I understand it.
aimai
danimal
Maybe. Is there an Applebee’s in London?
ETA: Answering my own question, there’s this: http://applebeesfish.com/index.html
Don’t know if there’s a salad bar, though.
arguingwithsignposts
@aimai: lol. i never thought of it that way, but you might be right.
I always viewed it in light of “keep fucking that chicken, Bobo.”
Just Some Fuckhead
I wish I could be an expert on anything like Brooks and Friedman. That shit is amazing, the way they just effortlessly and intuitively absorb complexities by casting their awesome minds on the periphery of a situation.
Is there any way we can get these geniuses into scientific research?
burnspbesq
Yawn. Must be a slow news day.
Brooks and Grrenwald deserve each other.
TheMightyTrowel
I cannot begin to express my disdain. Those of us who are not knee-jerk tory authoritarian sympathisers have been really really really unhappy about the re-eton-isation of british politics. It is disgusting and reflects the growing wealth gap and the increasing rigidity of the class system and it’s been in the news as a national concern regularly for the last 14 months.
F#cking uninformed, would-be-lordling wanker .
[edited to remove word I made up but thought was real]
dmsilev
Could we possibly convince the British to keep him? We could argue that we took Andrew Sullivan, so they owe us one.
arguingwithsignposts
@TheMightyTrowel: Has anyone checked to see if Sully is slobbering over that Brooks column?
aimai
Also, you learn more in one half hour of Yes, Prime Minister than you do in five years of combined Brooks and Friedman columns. I heartily recommend the entire series for its exploration of just what British political culture (and all political culture in a democracy) is really like.
aimai
burnspbesq
Now I’m going to have Frankie Goes to Hollywood rattling around in my head all day.
You really suck, Cole.
dmsilev
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Speaking as someone in that field, thanks but no thanks. Science has a glut of overinflated egos pontificating outside their realm of actual expertise; we don’t need to import overinflated egos with no actual expertise.
trollhattan
Ugh. Is there anybody who spends their energy awaiting Brooks’ opinion on anything? Why/how does he have a job? (Feel free to apply the question WRT to the Bidnez und Economics Editor of Das Atlantic.)
I must be an Obot, because I think he’s doing a better job representing us in the UK than did his predecessor. Although, there’s still time for him to yell “Yo, Cameron” at the banquet tonight.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13506898
Hunter Gathers
I don’t know which is worse: Bobo’s upper class bullshit or the sloppy wet blowjob that Congress just gave Bibi. Either way this little blue-white orb ruled by psychotic apes is truly fucked.
Jazz Superluminar
would it matter? He use it as supporting evidence anyway.
That op-ed is one of the dumbest things anyone’s written on the British political system in a long time.
Just Some Fuckhead
@trollhattan: Any truth to the rumor that Obama gave the Queen a slow sensual back rub?
TheMightyTrowel
@arguingwithsignposts: I value my sanity, my time and my eyeballs (which I would have to scoop out with a rusty spoon) to read through Sully’s archives.
piratedan
Obviously Brooks needs to be sentenced to reading the Flashman books (by George MacDonald Fraser) to understand that the empire succeeded despite the rank idiocy generated from the finest british schools, not because of it.
djesno
@aimai: Right there with ya!
Culture of Truth
The Wizarding world is dominated by folks who knew each other at Hogwarts. And what does that get you? Enslaved house elves and an upper class of civil servants too cowardly to stand up to you-know-who
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
This makes
itthe Applebee’s salad bar gossipy and often incestuous.Fixed.
Jewish Steel
A smoothly functioning machine like the Cameron’s coalition government? That’s an interesting perspective you’ve got there, David.
dmsilev
@Just Some Fuckhead: Well, he did give her an iPod (on a previous visit; it was apparently quite the scandal du jour).
burnspbesq
@Hunter Gathers:
“sloppy wet blowjob that Congress just gave Bibi.”
Did he come in McConnell’s face?
Amir_Khalid
@aimai:
Seconded. And for those curious to know about Thatcherite Conservatives, I also recommend The New Statesman, which starred Rik Mayall as Tory MP Alan B’stard.
Just Some Fuckhead
@dmsilev:
Was it preloaded with some Barry White?
Brachiator
So, let me see if I have this straight. Brooks, the Lord of the Applebee Dance, is whining that the Village is not sufficiently insular?
Also, I guess he must have missed the last round of British elections, or the ongoing agony of the unstable political coalition which forms the current government.
@aimai:
Or even an episode of BBC Friday Night Comedy, also available on iTunes and elsewhere.
Hmmm. Have no idea how I offended the deities of moderation.
djesno
@efgoldman: somehow, that would just prove his point. in fact, anything uncomfortable to the ruling caste proves the point about the unsophisticated underclass lurking seven concentric circles beneath them, but what the fuck? we don’t know how good we have it, right? maybe a baseball bat to the face (metaphorically, mind you) would make them know how good THEY have had it. i don’t have my hopes up, though. humility and gratitude is not their milieu.
djesno
nor is capitalizing sentences mine!
Surly Duff
Hold-on, his enlightening observation is that British politics work better than U.S politics because the British are even more elite and inslulated than the U.S.? What we need is more bowing down to the masters of the Universe?
catclub
Yglesias promptly took apart Brooks facile, inaccurate observations of cause and effect.
Could also be wrong, but at least made sense.
Roger Moore
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Only if it’s in the “can we dissect their brains to see what makes them tick” sense. Otherwise we’d rather not have them.
Jewish Steel
I heart heart heart Frankie Goes to Hollywood, btw.
When WP refuses permission to edit comments it’s really saying, “No! Don’t change a thing. You’re perfect the way you are.”
Tom Levenson
@arguingwithsignposts: Waste not want not, I guess.
But boy, is Brooks a terrible writer. Dishonest and inaccurate, of course, but just on the abuse-of-language scale, awful.
Zifnab
And when they fart, it smells like rainbows.
Seriously, though, I think he’s edging around the tail end of a point. When politicians know each other and are friendly with each other, they’re less likely to descend into default bigotry. Barney Frank isn’t the Big Gay From Boston, he’s the man you have lunch with on Tuesdays at the local deli. Tom Coburn isn’t a bristly haired luddite from fly-over country, he’s your tennis partner and your C-street roommate and the guy you talk to when you’re cheating with your staffer’s wife.
When politicians deal with each other as people and not ideological incarnates or regional avatars, they can strike deals and bargain to mutual benefit. When everyone gets painted up with devil horns, compromise grinds to a halt. Because who wants to compromise with Satan?
So Broder longs for the days when Villagers met and mingled and worked towards the common good. And that is something we really should regret losing. But he has no grasp of the significance of the legislation actually on the table. So he gets all confused and funny in the head when Democrats and Republicans fail to come together to butcher Medicare or double tax rates or bomb the Middle East. He doesn’t understand that this breakdown in friendship is the RESULT of the breakdown in efforts to work towards a common good.
Judas Escargot
@TheMightyTrowel:
IMO a big part of our cultural problem here in the US is that we’ve been somehow “re-infected” by the British and their classism.
I’m sure the influx of expatriate UK writers/bloggers since the 1990s hasn’t helped much.
Jay C
As it happened, Brooks’ “British” column was my morning toilet reading today, and a more appropriate venue I couldn’t imagine….
It’s just SO typical of David Brooks’ (ever-increasingly trite, stale, predictable and off-base) shtick: Pointing out an obvious, basic political truism (e.g., that British and American political systems are different), adding some dollop of sociological bafflegab, then standing back expecting to admired for his Insights and Wisdom.
Feh. Maybe Bobo should talk to a couple of London cabbies (though, like New York, I gather they’re mainly Indian); even if he can’t milk it for a couple of books a la Tom Friedman, he might get something approaching a notion of what real people actually think…
But then he wouldn’t be Bobo….
Special Patrol Group
The great Matt Taibbi was the first to correctly label David Brooks as an “elitist fuckhead.” Seemed obvious enough to me. Anyone who’s been skeptical of that observation up to now ought to reread this bit from Elitist Fuckhead David Brooks:
Jay-zus, what an elitist fuckhead David Brooks is.
Mr Furious
Leave it Greenwald to use 99 words when his response to Brooks should have been, “What a fucking jackass.”
rickstersherpa
It is curious that Brooks talks fawnly of Cameron and his budget which (it appears to want to energize the “little people” by starving them and restoring the U.K. to a proper Aristocracy that it was in 1900 before Lloyd George, Churchill, the Liberals, and WWI made overthrew that old world comes out the same day as more evidence that austerity and Government cuts in face of recession just produces more recession and deficits:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13519792
But Brooks is pretty fact proof.
Alexandra
David Brooks’ views on UK politics are irrelevant. There are probably a couple of thousand people in the UK who know who he is, let alone agree with him. About as relevant as Richard Littlejohn’s views on congressional elections…
TheMightyTrowel
BTW this article got simultaneously printed in the Guardian. Normally I’d avoid the G’s comment section for fear of being sucked into the cess pit of primeval ooze from which most of the commenters seem to originate; however, I highly recommend even the slimiest of internet trolls recoiling in horror at what David Brooks writes. GO NOW.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Gosh, the people of a tiny and homogenous country are different?! Stop the presses!
@Just Some Fuckhead:
As test subjects.
Dave
Oh, and way to gloss over the disaster that has been Cameron’s austerity program, Bobo. The damn thing shrunk the GDP in the UK by a quarter-point at the end of 2010 and only grew it by the same half-point in the first quarter of 2011. Which means that austerity has basically ground the UK economy to a halt.
But no, it’s a serious plan. Forget the plebes that get crushed by it.
bryanD
The Oxbridge system of Britain is emulated by the Ivy League in the USA and the Rhode Scholarship program helps keep it that way. The highly centralized government within the public government—written of by Halberstam in The Best and The Brightest, for example—is just taken for granted in the UK where social classification of people are not cloaked in taboo.
Brooks seeming to play Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm with the “if only”s must be marked down as him giving contrarian fan service to the American Exceptionalist mythos.
Ash Can
LOL! Bobo makes an ass of himself. Again. Not news — you could set your watch to this guy — but worth a few lulz anyway.
bkny
@Hunter Gathers: the reception that prick received was truly sickening/disgraceful/majorlyfuckedup. i had to mute it after 5 minutes and the 14th standing O.
scav
@Zifnab: Well, as though our lot don’t know each other. It plays well to cast each other as incarnate demons on stage and prance about looking cod-pieced up. They probably do their friendly lunching behind closed doors in the same elegant venues they otherwise would. It’s the Worldwide Wrestling Federation in Three-Piece Suits to some degree although we’re beginning to get some true believers. And it’s not as though the UK is lacking it’s own loons. Politicos will play nice when it pays well.
Citizen Alan
Also too, I’m not surprised to see Bobo wax poetically about incestuousness. I’ve always thought he had the Innsmouth look about him.
George
Why are you linking to Greenwald? Do you want to make ABL angrier?
Brachiator
Meanwhile, some cool pics of Obama in England
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
Jackanapes like David Brooks are precisely why we do not have “a functioning political culture.”
I seriously wish that smug c#nt some major bodily harm.
Emma
Anyone who says Thatcher was part of the solution rather than the single largest component of the problem is away with the fairies.
From the comments at the Guardian site. They are clobbering him in a very very British way.
opie jeanne
@aimai: When were you there? Sounds like the same behavior we’ve been trying to fend off here for the past 10+ years.
We were there a year ago, headed home May 22. They had just elected the current PM but it was outside London, in East Sussex, that we heard people talk the most about it. They were glad that the Conservatives had won. In London we heard very little about it. ( We met a Royal Asshole in Rye. When we checked into his hotel we mentioned that we really didn’t know what was going on in the US, so he thought it was a cute joke to tell us that Obama had been assassinated.)
We spent most of that trip in Ireland, driving in a huge loop from Dublin to West Cork, to Galway and back to Dublin. Everyone was carrying a new book about how they’d been fucked by the bankers, basically the same story as here.
terraformer
Pretty much laying out the founding principle of neo-feudalism. It’s our land; you’re just living on it and supporting me and my friends.
We’ve been here before. Alas.
MonkeyBoy
For those who haven’t done so yet, add or vote up snarky Amazon tags on Bobo’s latest book. It is therapeutic.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
david brooks showing the english what americans call a spotted dick.
R-Jud
@Dave:
The sad part is that a lot of the planned public sector cuts are yet to come. And then there’s the NHS “reform” plans, which are actually NHS privatization plans. That’s making a lot of middle Englanders, who voted for the Tories, angry. Their ham-fisted attempt to sell off ALL the state forests didn’t win them any hearts, either.
Fucking Tories.
Alex S.
Shouldn’t he praise the systems that did relatively well during the recession, like Germany and Scandinavia?
Yurpean
Yes, our political culture is more functional than yours is at present, but to attribute it to the fact we’re currently ruled by a load of old Etonians is asinine. As is the rest of his article.
The worst thing though is that our politicians seem to be listening to him – last week he met both David Cameron and Ed Milliband (Leader of the opposition).
Just Some Fuckhead
@burnspbesq: That’s bullshit Burns and if you don’t like me calling it bullshit, you can just GTFO, comprende?
Jazz Superluminar
well he is also wrong, but mostly due to his annoying habit of viewing everything political through an institutional lens.
Oh, and Cameron’s brilliant austerity measures have meant we’re borrowing an additional £10bn this month, due to falling tax revenues. And a Chinese credit rating agency has downgraded our debt. Brilliant.
YAFB
Anyone who starts a sentence “As the British politician Oliver Letwin has argued” without completing that sentence with the phrase “we can discount that, since he is an overprivileged congenital idiot” deserves every ounce of ridicule you can muster.
The best thing about the British polity is that wankers like Brooks don’t figure in it.
I’d suggest he get out of the elite ghetto and explore how the rest of the country views his nirvana, but he’d get eaten alive once people had gotten over his accent and been through the “You’re from New York? Do you know so-and-so?” ritual and figured out they were talking to an ambulatory arse.
Omnes Omnibus
@Alex S.: Are you daft?
Hawes
David Brooks, neo-Federalist.
Janeane The Acerbic Goblin
@aimai:
I love that series, and yes, you could learn a ton about politics (not just British politics) from that show.
Reading Brooks, Friedman, and the usual illiterates posing as authors only makes you angry, stupid, and constipated.
JPL
Whatever happened to American exceptionalism?
giltay
I’m sure this has been said before, but Brooks thinks what makes the UK political system great is that it’s run by an old boys’ network out of London? WTF?
And here I liked the constitution, the fact that the head of state is a powerless symbol of her subjects, the upper house having less authority than the lower house (because it is less legitimate), the real leader in the government being accountable to Parliament, a non-elected (less political, more professional) judicial branch, more than two viable political parties …
ppcli
@aimai: Absolutely – both Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister are indispensable viewing. (I got hooked when the CBC aired them in the 70’s, and I bought the DVD’s as soon as they became available.) I slightly prefer Yes Minister, since the political leanings seemed to me to become a bit Thatchery in the later years.
The special transition episode, where Jim Hacker becomes Party Leader and then PM on the strength of a) in his position as Euro community contact (since he’s at that point “Minister of Administrative Affairs”) he goes along with regulations on fat content that effectively outlaw the British sausage. b) He persuades the Brussels bureaucrat in charge to *name* the newly acceptable, low fat sausage as “The British Sausage” (Saucisse Anglais, etc….) c) Presents the whole affair as an effort by Brussels bureaucrats to “outlaw the British sausage”, while Jim Hacker “saved the British sausage”.
Contemporary politics in a nutshell right there. Bask in credit for saving the thing, when you’ve actually eliminated the thing and saved the name. I thought of this episode when the Republicans started trying to spin their voucher plan as “Saving Medicare”. Because it will still be called Medicare, after all.
Alex S.
@Omnes Omnibus:
Dunno, just an idea…
giltay
No, wait, I get it. The UK has a functioning system of government and the US doesn’t because the good guys are in power in the UK and the bad guys are in power in the US.
Cat
@TheMightyTrowel:
You must be new here. Made up words are encouraged.
harokin
This column, coming shortly after DougJ’s “I’m goin’ galt” announcement, convinces me that “David Brooks” is nothing more than DougJ’s greatest trick.
Omnes Omnibus
@giltay: Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner.
ppcli
Absotively.
scav
Don’t miss this one but approach with caution for kittah lovers.
opie jeanne
@TheMightyTrowel: My favorite line is (if Brooks believes that… “he must be away with the fairies.”
Just Some Fuckhead
@Cat:
I can’t let myself be restrained by others antiquated notions concerning root words, prefixes, suffixes and syllables. I have to be free to fly, to engendeer my own communicus wordsiness.
Citizen Alan
@Hawes:
David Brooks, neo-
Federalist-Feudalist.negative 1
@burnspbesq: If you have Frankie Goes to Hollywood in your head, just… Relax.
JPL
@Just Some Fuckhead: And you certainly do!
Dennis SGMM
Yes, the British tradition of stocking the government with people “who have often known each other since prep school” certainly paid off in handling Britain’s colonial empire. The world is still paying off all of the fuckups that those clubby little bastards set in motion.
slippy
Brooks doesn’t look any less disgusting with a British aristocrat’s cock in his mouth than he does with David Koch’s cock in his mouth.
I don’t see the difference.
Benjamin Cisco
Only Our Miss Brooks could opine that the problem with the Washington power structure is that they don’t blow each other ENOUGH.
eemom
Backpfeifengesicht.
Because, no matter how often one may hiss “die, you insufferable sack of shit” at Brooks, he won’t.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Shorter BoBo: Britain’s political system is still delightfully unsullied by the lesser breeds, Catholics and proles.
Yeah, I said it.
Bender
Nice article and all, Mr. Brooks, but what we all need to know to truly evaluate government by Our Urban Elites is… what are the British ruling class’s pant-leg creases like?
Benjamin Cisco
Humph. Seems all the moldy oldies are making a comeback.
__
They’re still eating the hell out of some pie, too.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
These people are weird about functionality. As in, the purpose of democracy (or whatever system) is to optimize government’s functionality. Silly me, I thought democracy was supposed to be a value in and of itself.
rikryah
fuck Brooks.
that.is.all
burnspbesq
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Apparently, you’ve mistaken me for someone who cares what you think.
Carl Nyberg
@Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen: Word.
It doesn’t surprise me that David Brooks thinks this way.
Seems rather tone deaf to put it in writing.
But hey, when things go to shit, the elites can always claim truthfully that they didn’t hide that they were fucking the rest of us. It’s just that masses chose not to listen to the sources telling people what the real deal was.
Nutella
He starts right out displaying his ignorance by using the American term ‘prep school’ for what the Brits call ‘public school’ and goes downhill from there.
Just Some Fuckhead
@burnspbesq: That’s bullshit, Burns! I’m calling it like I see it.
The Raven
It’s a global problem, and it goes back to Nixon’s administration at least. Somehow we’ve started acting like aristocracy is a good thing, and I can only wonder at it.
All hail our new democratic overlords!
SRW1
Is that the new “”He came in here and he trashed the place, and it’s not his place”?
Has David B. I been dead long enough for David B. II to claim his mantle?
Paul in KY
@efgoldman: You’d put a smile on my face if you were able to do that :-)
fasteddie9318
@Just Some Fuckhead: LOL
Paul in KY
@Brachiator: Thanks for the link. Liked the shot of the Pres. trying to whup some youngun in ping pong.
You can see he’s a competitor. I’d bet he’s a pretty good bowler by now.
slag
Nobody could have predicted that David Brooks would come away from his stay at Blandings chock full of the feudal spirit.
NobodySpecial
Funny thing is, there’s a lot of Good Ol’ Boyism right here in America, which is why you can have two guys from the same fraternity running for President against each other and the leading political and judiciary lights coming from an increasingly select membership of a few schools.
Oh well. Thus it has always been.
burnspbesq
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Did you graduate from the same umpiring school as John Roberts, you blind fuck?
Just Some Fuckhead
@burnspbesq: What is with you and the bullshit, Burns?!
geisha gurl
hey did you hear? burn and fuckhead are meeting at the bike racks after school to fight.
geisha gurl
hey did you hear? burns and fuckhead are meeting at the bike racks after school to fight.
Just Some Fuckhead
@geisha gurl: That is bullshit!
burnspbesq
@geisha gurl:
Wrong. We’re meeting under the football stadium to make out.
burnspbesq
@geisha gurl:
Wanna make it a threesome?
geisha gurl
We are all required to wear cut out BoBo masks and don Union Jack t-shirts to stay on topic.
Jeffro
If they haven’t already, I have a feeling the boys at Sadly, No! are going to have some fun with this one…
Chet
I am a dull and simple lad
Cannot tell water from champagne
And I have never met the Queen
And I wish I had never read one of his books
I wish I knew not of David Brooks
Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa…
jazzgurl
What the arse is this idiot savant on about! He is clueless about Britain,the culture,their way of life. These blanket statements are atypical of an ignorant and uneducated and unexposed fool!
4jkb4ia
Glenn must have had that epic rant inside him for some time.
El Cid
I hate to break it to Brooks, but every systematic political, historical, and sociological study of US power elites and in particular those in powerful positions to determine policy (often from the position of being policy advisers) do in fact share in common attendance at prestigious elite prep schools and other upper-class formation institutions.
But then, this is the god-damned US of A, and any empirical studies establishing frequent and significant commonalities in the dominant upper classes and policymaking elites is some sorta un-so-fisticated Marxism because it is and I’ve got all sorts of friends high up and they ain’t like that and look at President so and so you’re wrong so SHUT UP.