DAVID BROOKS’ IDENTITY CRISIS:
This self-congratulatory interpretation of America’s recent past has long found favor not only among newspaper columnists, but also with politicians campaigning for high office, our current president not least among them. It is our national equivalent of sacred scripture—a secular version of the salvation history in which Christians profess to believe.
Alas, Brooks continues, “Then came Iraq and Afghanistan and America lost faith in itself and its global role.” The audacity of that sentence—equivalent perhaps to “Then came bin Laden and the Towers fell”—brought me up short. In the blink of an eye, context disappears as Brooks skirts past the question of how and why the United States enmeshed itself in two unwinnable wars. He chooses instead to focus on America losing its faith.
Pursuant to its global role, Brooks contends that until Iraq and Afghanistan “came,” the United States had shared with others “vital ideals” that define the American way of life. Those ideals include “democracy and capitalism,” of course: so far, so good. But Brooks’s inventory of operative ideals does not stop there. Also included are “feminism, multiculturalism, human rights, egalitarianism, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the dream of racial justice.” All of these together, Brooks writes, come “intertwined in a progressive package that puts individual dignity at the center.”
Credit Brooks with accurately describing the contents of that “progressive package,” particularly its present-day preoccupation with race, gender, and sexuality. Yet the conservative that Brooks once professed to be would have balked at the reference to “individual dignity.” In a progressive context, individual dignity is a euphemism. It is a leftwing equivalent of “free enterprise,” a term employed by some right-wingers to provide a moral gloss to policies that exalt market values over human values.
As a practical matter, today’s progressives have no intention of contenting themselves with mere dignity. They aim to redistribute power in ways that will play to their own preferences on matters related to race, gender, sexuality and a host of other issues. No surprise there: Politics ain’t beanbag.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards incredibly sharp trouser creases.