The Blather of David Brooks

My wife can't stand the columnist David Brooks. She can't stand many talking heads on television, most often because she dislikes the unmusical sounds of their voices.  I like Brooks better than she does. He's often interesting and not mean-spirited and doesn't hate President Obama, which is rare among Republican talk leaders. He's smarter than George Will and much saner than Charles Krauthammer. Brooks can be witty at times. But he doesn't understand ordinary people--he's particularly thick when writing about folks not among the nation's elite.

On March 11, our newspaper reprinted a recent column by Brooks on families. In the column he claimed that what is missing from dysfunctional families is norms.  "There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically." 

The people he has in mind here are those who did not go to college and are (this goes without saying, of course) usually one-parent families, probably African-American.  He would never say out loud that they were black people, because that would be racist. 

In the world of Brooks, lacking the robotic good behavior of college graduates, the lower classes have no rules and behave in random ways.

I see a problem with that argument. There is no class of people who live without norms, rules, whatever. Even people in federal prisons have their own sets of norms, which might be different from the norms of David Brooks. (I have not compared them, to be honest.)

Brooks believes that America's norms were "destroyed in a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another." Yet I have never met anyone of any economic or social class who took that position. This basic assertion by Brooks (I have to say) is bullshit.