New York Times opinion writer David Brooks? column on income and social inequality has provoked a torrent of negative commentary in the blogosphere after he called for a mandatory national service program to unite the country?s increasingly divergent ?upper and lower tribes.?
Bloggers and writers also took issue with the tone of Brooks? piece on Tuesday, headlined ?The Great Divorce,? with its references to the ?lower tribe? of American society, ?removed from traditional bourgeois norms? and living in ?disorganized postmodern neighborhoods.?
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It was the kind of language that launched a thousand blog posts complaining of Brooks? apparently snotty attitude.
?Un-freakin?-believable. There hasn?t been this much upper-class-twit obliviousness concentrated in one person since Marie Antoinette,? wrote a blogger at The Mahablog.
?Disorganized postmodern neighborhoods! So they can?t make it to the employment office because the layout is confusing and someone deconstructed all the street signs? Or is it that they?re so spellbound by all the Kathy Acker novels in the shop windows, they can?t commence to a-entrepreneurin??? read a post at Alicublog.
?There are people that just don?t get it, people that don?t get it on purpose as satire, and then there?s David Brooks (who should be regularly harvested for the rich oil of contempt for anyone who makes less than six figures that he drips with) who somehow manages to make ?not getting it? into an exciting new field of scientific endeavor,? added Zandar at the progressive blog Balloon Juice in a post titled ?Divorced From Reality.?
?The Poors could learn the proper care and feeding of their betters BMW?s (old clean diapers are best for buffing and don?t move the seat, please) and the Rich could learn the joy of drinking PBR?s unironically until one day the Great Awakening arrives and they once again link arms in brotherhood as they celebrate the eternal verities that make America great: faith, free enterprise, family, and hating on the coloreds,? wrote TBogg sarcastically at FireDogLake.
A New York Times staffer told POLITICO that Brooks was ?too swamped to comment? on the reaction to his column, but that the columnist would probably agree with the premise of this article on the need for a national service program.
Other bloggers took aim at Brooks? claim that those in the ?upper tribe? of society were not responsible for the plight of the ?lower tribe.?
?It?s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It?s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the elites,? Brooks had argued in his column. ?The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive.?
?Brooks is smart enough to know that inequality is a serious problem in America and you won?t find him defending the right?s inequality deniers ? those who argue that big income gaps are mostly a statistical illusion? But Brooks practices a different kind of denial, arguing that the behavior of those at the top of the income ladder has nothing to do with hardship at the bottom,? responded David Callahan at the Policy Shop blog.
Still others objected to the notion of a national, mandatory service program that would bring the two ?tribes? together.
?We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement,? Brooks wrote in his column.
?It?s not surprising that Brooks? solution would involve a mandatory government program,? wrote Daniel Larison at The American Conservative. ?If the country keeps becoming more socially and economically stratified, ?jamming? people from different classes together is probably a good way to heighten tensions between them. All of this seems like a deliberate effort to avoid addressing problems of wage stagnation, rising cost of living, and other factors that prevent stable family formation.?
?Guess what; we had that once. It was called the draft. It brought together the ?tribes,? and it seemed to work pretty well. (The only downside was that if that if there was a war, some of them ended up dead.)? wrote a blogger at BarkBarkWoofWoof, noting the obvious political obstacles to its implementation. ?If President Obama tried to bring back the draft, the conservatives would go nuts: Slavery! Indoctrination! Social engineering!?
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/politico_rss/rss_politico_mostpop/http___www_politico_com_news_stories0212_72302_html/44380082/SIG=11m0ql0e4/*http%3A//www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72302.html
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