David Brooks Is Slowly Realizing He Is A Parasite

Deputizing E. Digby Baltzell was a strange choice, but sure

“Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.” - David Brooks, New York Times, August 2nd, 2023.

It took 62 years, but New York Times columnist David Brooks has finally gained some meaningful insight into how class works in America. This is not a lament, but the celebration of seeing a ray of hope in the gloomy cognitive wasteland of establishment punditry.

It is unknown what brought on this bout of realization for Mr. Brooks. The trauma of Trump? New shampoo? Maybe he slipped on a banana peel and hit his head so hard his brain finally started working. The catalyst remains unclear.

And it is hard to imagine a brain more ossified on this particular topic. David Brooks has made himself quite a lot of money whispering sweet nothings into the ears of the American elite about how worthy they are of power. A modern courtier for the American moneyed aristocracy and their cronies who rule under the legitimation story known as The Meritocracy.

For the uninitiated, the current ruling class in the United States tells themselves a lurid fairy tale about why they are on top (and why others are on the bottom) of the social order. The story involves fantastic claims including that the ruling political, economic, and cultural elite work harder and are more talented than everyone else. That this is obviously not true does not dissuade them from preaching (and patronizing others that preach) this sermon as they see it as part of manufacturing consent for their rule. Even for establishment narratives engineered for mass consumption it is a rather facile ideology, basically one step beyond I pulled a sword from a stone!

The elite in other countries, including those in the so-called West, typically incorporate some diluted version of this story into their establishment narrative, but they also appreciate that few will believe it when the same families have been running things for over six hundred years. The myth of meritocracy is present, but also translucent.

Even among the Davos crowd, The Meritocracy is understood to be an ideology largely limited to promoting new entrants into the professional classes that serve the moneyed elite. This is why it is not uncommon to see a cohort of hyper-ambitious lower-class killers in the pinstripe mafia of accountants, bankers, and tax lawyers. They are climbing the greasy pole of class power and losing much of their sense of mercy along the way.

Brooks and his fellow commissars for the liberal order have worked tirelessly over the years to conjure a specter to haunt and confound critics of The Meritocracy. The specter of the Cognitive Elite, which are part of a purported Creative Class. It is always an open question as to whether these spells actually beguile any sizeable portion of the general population or have just ensorcelled the establishment media and think tank set who all are too happy to welcome the affirming demonry.

In any case, it’s total bullshit. There is no solid evidence that those that dominate elite institutions and social networks in the United States are more intelligent or “creative” than anyone else. It is, as always, power trying to legitimize itself through whatever means are available. The princes of Europe had the nobility and the church, whereas the American oligarchs have the mainstream media, the modern universities (refashioned divinity schools), and the ngo-industrial complex. Many such cases.

The reproduction of the American ruling class into the same families over and over again poses a real difficulty for the marketers of meritocracy. Especially when one sees the sons and daughters of the elite seamlessly transitioning into elite positions without any substantively demonstrable merit. The arduous task of explaining this class dynamic in meritocratic terms is so challenging that meritocracy apologists frequently just throw up a cloud of dust and yell Equality of opportunity! before scampering into the darkness.

Those advocates not in on the joke (or without any sense of shame) attempt a variety of intellectual acrobatics to explain how these blatantly obvious displays of nepotism and self-dealing by the American elite are not setting agendas and deciding outcomes. In desperation, they often resort to singing the old eugenics homily. An American standard pioneered in the ever-harmonious Ivy League, but tough on the ear after recognizing the new song is just a remix of the pseudoscientific tune that served as the soundtrack for the mass-murder programs of the twentieth century.

Throughout his career, Brooks has defended The Meritocracy as a just and righteous sorting of American society. In a 2001 piece for The Atlantic, he used the students at Princeton University as the basis for a model of a young American being prepared to enter the meritocratic elite. He dubbed this model The Organization Kid.

In short, at the top of the meritocratic ladder we have in America a generation of students who are extraordinarily bright, morally earnest, and incredibly industrious. They like to study and socialize in groups. They create and join organizations with great enthusiasm. They are responsible, safety-conscious, and mature. They feel no compelling need to rebel—not even a hint of one. They not only defer to authority; they admire it. "Alienation" is a word one almost never hears from them. They regard the universe as beneficent, orderly, and meaningful. At the schools and colleges where the next leadership class is being bred, one finds not angry revolutionaries, despondent slackers, or dark cynics but the Organization Kid.

Brooks concedes in the article that Princeton is a primary recruitment pipeline for Wall Street and management consulting firms - two industries that provide no social utility and are repeatedly caught breaking the meager laws that apply to them. In reality, the Organization Kid is merely joining a high-class mafia. The honor is in the dollar.

In earlier days when Brooks faced even slight opposition to his pollyannish view of The Meritocracy he reverted to a common practice among ideologues of all stripes: This is not the real version of these ideas in practice.

One encounters this exculpation regularly among Marxist-Leninists who claim that the Marxist-Leninist programs enacted in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, and the Eastern Bloc are all somehow not demonstrative of the actual practice of Marxist-Leninist principles.

In a 2012 response to a book critiquing the meritocracy by Chris Hayes, Brooks made it clear that transgressions and improprieties by the meritocratic elite were not the fault of meritocracy itself because real meritocracy had never been tried.

I’d say today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.

Phenomena like the test-prep industry are just the icing on the cake, giving some upper-middle-class applicants a slight edge over other upper-middle-class applicants. The real advantages are much deeper and more honest.

The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our meritocracy. The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.

Dear reader, please take a moment to appreciate the sheer absurdity of this argument. That if only the rich and powerful admitted to themselves they were elite they would behave with more social responsibility. That the problem with The Meritocracy is that the people siphoning off all the wealth and social prestige they can get their greedy little hands on just can’t admit to themselves that they are elites. They build landscape-altering mega mansions, join highly exclusive social clubs, and demand to have their names put on buildings when they make a tax-deductible charitable contribution. But, alas, they just cannot admit to themselves their membership in the ruling class. If only they knew they were elite. If-only-they-knew!

Brooks vs. Baltzell

An almost surreal moment occurs when reading Brooks’ column. He quotes E. Digby Baltzell’s line that “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” It would be difficult to find two American intellectuals focused on elite sociology who offer more divergent views of the source of class issues in America than Brooks and Baltzell.

Baltzell’s argument about the dangers of caste is in direct opposition to the Cognitive Elite/Creative Class narrative that Mr. Brooks has constantly championed in his previous writings, especially his much ballyhooed Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.

The Bobo book is a love letter to The Meritocracy with even mild criticism of the class laced with jocosity and affection. To Brooks, the bourgeoisie becoming bohemian due to peacocking differently with their consumption habits than their rich parents is indicative of some sort of major cultural shift within the elite. Pointing out that the bohemian movement in the United States was always filled with upper class kids obsessed with performative lifestyles gets lost in the shuffle.

The ruling class are the ultimate slaves to fashion because trends and ever-shifting etiquette are all about social status signaling. In truth, the entire purpose of fashion and continuously evolving manners within elite culture is to exclude social undesirables from power by showing they lack the right kind of sophistication.

This becomes entertaining when the elite try to do this to each other. Or so The Real Housewives franchise success suggests - a reality TV show series that originally presented itself as dispassionately exploring the lives of people living in gated communities, but quickly degenerated into a medley of ham-handed setups for plastic surgery specimens to throw half-full wine glasses at each other.

In that recent column, Brooks almost stumbles into this social dynamic when discussing the evolving elite lexicon, which he obnoxiously labels cultural capital.

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

Oh, you’re so close to getting it!

The problem, of course, is that the Bobo whisperer is still buying into the basic premise about who the elite are, and how they got there. And part of his analysis always rests on this fraudulent notion of innate ability translating into merit, whereas the last thing E. Digby Baltzell would claim is that intrinsic and immutable qualities like cognition are the determining variable in the class equation.

In his most famous work, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America, Baltzell details how the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite transformed from a more open and pregnable aristocratic class into a closed caste system. He largely demonstrates his case by showing the different attitudes of the WASP elite in the same families in different generations. As the enlightenment ideals of John and John Quincy Adams transform into the class anxieties and bigotry of Henry Adams.

In the book, published in the period right after the assassination of President Kennedy and just before the major Civil Rights laws of President Johnson, Baltzell consciously ignores racial discrimination against Black Americans and instead primarily focuses on elite anti-Semitism.

He notes that Jews were considerably integrated into the WASP elite well before 1776, with many of the male early Jewish settlers and successful merchants of New York all but forced to marry into prominent Protestant families due to so few Jewish women at that time being able or willing to brave traveling across the Atlantic Ocean. Jane Austen’s truth prevailed, a man with a great fortune had to marry, no matter how slim the pickings.

As the colonies developed, and New York stopped being Dutch and started being Anglo-American, a small wealthy corridor of Jewish families established themselves in New York and found only modest opposition to their achieving high social position in the city. Many of the names of these powerful Anglo and German-Jewish families still mark the buildings and streets of New York City: Guggenheim, Sulzberger, Lehman, Warburg, Schiff, Loeb, Seligman, etc. Similar dynamics played out in other cities in the north, notably Boston and Philadelphia.

A parallel social rise occurred in the southern states, with many prominent members of the Southern Planter Class coming from Jewish families. This continued on through the Civil War with Confederate President Jefferson Davis appointing Judah Benjamin his secretary of state. Due to his high position in the Confederate government, Benjamin has the dubious distinction of being the first Jew appointed to a cabinet position in North America.

It is one of the great ironies of The New York Times’ 1619 Project that the newspaper was led by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger when the project launched. While the Sulzberger family has long been one of the prominent German-Jewish families of New York City, the Ochs family were unrepentant slave owning southerners who promoted secession and fought for the Confederacy. Oh well, family is family.

Baltzell’s point is not to celebrate the old stock of American elites for their appreciation of diversity so much as to note the non-linear nature of elite exclusion based on ethnic characteristics as marked by higher and lower periods of elite anti-Semitism. In colonial and early America, Jews were not only untrammeled but free to claim social prominence without any special frustration or particularly debilitating discrimination.

So, what happened?

Baltzell notes that the Jewish population in New York City in 1880 was roughly 3%. By 1920, it was 30% and rising. A trend mirrored by other southern and eastern European immigrant groups in that time period, notably Italians. The waves of immigration were so large they changed the human demography of the land to a degree not seen since the initial European colonization in the seventeenth century.

The massive immigration of people outside the Anglo-American cultural experience unnerved the WASP elite. The types of Jews arriving in the turn of the century wave were also foreign to the old stock American establishment, including the established German-Jewish community, which were horrified by the disheveled appearance and alien manners of the eastern European Jews.

The slur “kike” may have even have been coined by the older stock American Jews to refer to the new eastern European Jews before becoming a general insult for all Jews. The established German-Jewish families felt embarrassed by the immigrants from the east and worked diligently to assimilate them into American culture as fast possible. Part of this impulse was certainly charitable, but a significant motivation was a sense of collective embarrassment and concern for maintaining social status. They could not fully disassociate, so they had to educate and assimilate.

Nowhere was this sense of social anxiety more evident than in the older stock American Jews’ relentless campaign to eradicate Yiddish, which they considered not a language of its own, but a bastardization of German and Hebrew. Cleansing this mongrel tongue, which was dismissed as “street talk” by the well-established American Jews, became part of the impetus for the creation of innovative mutual aid societies that helped turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants adapt and prosper in America faster than many of their new arrival counterparts.

Though the campaign to help immigrant Jews learn English and assimilate into being Americans was a triumph for the older stock American Jews, Yiddish stubbornly persisted despite their best efforts, and remained a cultural force well into the 1920s before eventually fading as a spoken language due to the hegemony of English. It would not be until after World War 2 that the descendants of the turn-of-the century immigrants diligently worked to rediscover the language. A project that continues to this day.

While the older stock American Jews were rushing to integrate the new arrivals, the WASP elite mostly bunkered down in their exclusive clubs; happy to profit off the cheap immigrant labor but loathe to associate with those fresh off the boat. The big wave of Italian and Polish immigrants also exacerbated the pre-existing tension and discomfort the old stock Protestant elite had with the increasing visibility and influence of Catholicism in America. Something their WASP ancestors surely would have been unhappy with as well.

According to Baltzell, this bunker mentality degraded into casteism for many in the WASP elite. Under his somewhat idiosyncratic definition, casteism is a view that only people with certain ethnic and familial backgrounds are worthy of elite association and therefore elevation in public affairs. This is certainly not a clean match with the casteism of India, but an incorporation of the Indian caste system’s immutable aspect in which a social order judges and sorts one purely on their background and other forces not under their individual control.

Baltzell contrasts casteism with aristocracy, which he certainly defines in much more idealistic terms than a materialist would. Aristocracy literally means rule by the best, which Baltzell defines not as being talented, but public spirited. This is the context of the quote Brooks used in his piece. True Baltzellian aristocrats forgo focusing on the rights of privilege in order to pursue the duty of leadership.

It is not a coincidence that this ethos pairs well with the gospel of Luke’s existential mandate that To whom much is given, much will be required. Baltzell traces modern American racism and anti-Semitism in part to the rise of Darwinism and the fall of Christian morals within elite institutions. He spends an inordinate amount of the book trashing Herbert Spencer and the WASP elite for embracing Spencer’s social Darwinism. An elite dinner at Delmonico’s celebrating Spencer is ruminated upon to an excessive degree. But the point is finely made, and Baltzell does well to highlight the pressure put on William Graham Sumner at Yale for teaching Spencer over the gospels as an ultimately doomed last stand against the embrace of eugenics by a WASP elite that perceived themselves under siege by hordes of striving foreign-born interlopers.

Social Darwinism was The Meritocracy of its day. A legitimation story to explain why it was just and right that the current elite were the current elite.

Spencer would later be joined by members of the old stock American elite in his ostensibly scientific quest to promote the survival of the fittest. Which, as fate would have it, meant preserving the interests of the incumbent American WASP elite. What a coincidence.

Madison Grant, a descendant of both the early Dutch settlers and the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, became a key figure in the eugenics movement with the publication of his opus The Passing of the Great Race. The book’s promotion of “Nordic Theory” would form the intellectual basis for the Immigration Act of 1924, which introduced racial quotas to preserve the dominance of the so-called Nordic stock. Nordic stock roughly meant people from the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Germany. Adolf Hitler wrote a personal note to Grant after publication that said, “This book is my Bible.”

Perhaps the most well-rooted American WASP to fall prey to Baltzell’s casteism was Henry Adams. A direct descendant of two American presidents and the son of the United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, Henry Adams could certainly make a claim to elite American heritage. He was also a celebrated writer of history in his own right and his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize a year after his death in 1919.

Baltzell points to Adams’ truly venomous anti-Semitism as indicative of a larger trend among the American WASP elite in the early twentieth century of conflating Jews with the ills of modernity itself. As traditional land wealth gave way to the dominance of international finance and science pushed aside the faith of their fathers, many among the WASP elite suddenly felt impotent and rudderless. Adams speaks directly to this in his autobiography, of feeling that his classical education had become useless and that his refined worldview steeped in the established traditions of elite cultivation put him out of step with the times in which he lived. Adams regularly used Jew as a stand-in for the finance capitalism of Wall Street, a force he hated, once writing that “I live only and solely with the hope of seeing their demise, with all their accursed Judaism. I want to see all the lenders at interest taken out and executed.”

Henry Adams happened to be in France during the Dreyfus affair and corresponded with WASP friends in America to exclaim that the Jew Dreyfus was clearly guilty of treason. He condemned Emile Zola as a fool, wondered whether the Jews championing Dreyfus’ cause deserved similar scrutiny, and celebrated Dreyfus’ persecutors as heroes defending their country from spies. Adams would only concede Dreyfus was probably innocent after his exoneration, when the evidence of his supposed treason had been thoroughly discredited.

If on the left anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, then on the right it should be said that anti-Semitism is the traditionalism of fools. The simplicity of homogenizing the kaleidoscopic forces destroying their beloved social order into a single cause was too seductive for many WASP elites to resist. The transformation and ethnicization of all the caustic aspects of liquid modernity into a singular Jewish Problem by Adams, Grant, and their elite peers would help lay the tracks for darker locomotions.

A tragic irony of this new upper-class anti-Semitism in America is that many of the elite social clubs that had been co-founded by Jews would not take their sons as members. This would lead to upper class Jews having to resign in disgrace from clubs they had proudly been associated with for decades.

There is likely no better illustration of this irony than the Knickerbocker Club discriminating against Jews for membership after the massive immigration wave in the late 1800s. One of the founders of the Knickerbocker Club was Moses Lazarus, the father of Emma Lazarus whose poem celebrating immigration graces the Statute of Liberty. Similar social reversals happened throughout elite urban and country clubs in the northeast, with the Union League of Philadelphia frustrating Jewish applicants despite one of its founders being Joseph Seligman.

Ah, how fickle that cultural capital can be. Especially when elites feel under threat.

Again, elite legitimacy is always a complete fabrication, and you are abysmally stupid if you believe otherwise. A ruling class is simply a group of humans cooperating/conspiring to invent a story as to why they should be able to exploit other humans. There is nothing underneath an elite legitimation story - material or immaterial. It is surface in its entirety; power perceived is power achieved.

Character: The Last Refuge of Denial

It has been amusing to watch David Brooks gravitate away from his earlier work on how wonderful the meritocratic ruling class is, and towards a deepening despair at the world that class created. He praised and polished the machinery, but now bemoans the discharge.

Shortly after Brooks’ semi-self-aware column on the many hypocrisies of his class came out in The New York Times, The Atlantic published a breathlessly vapid article by Brooks titled How America Got Mean.

A common complaint about Brooks’ writing style is that it meanders and rarely drifts into making a coherent point. In that sense, it is a very Brooksian piece of writing. But the piece does logically flow as part of Brooks’ larger project of emphasizing that most floaty of floating signifiers: character.

Brooks appears to like the concept of character because it has such a loose definition that people will have difficulty critiquing anything he says, because it has no intrinsic meaning anyway. Proclaiming the importance of good character is an effortless platitude. No one will seriously speak to the virtue of having bad character. He is an American, not an American’t!

To the extent Brooks makes any point at all in his many recent writings on character it resembles a refrain of American society going to hell for want of morals. A sentiment echoed repeatedly in The Atlantic article.

Forgive a Freudian observation, but it is hard not to see that established male intellectuals typically increase the frequency of their jeremiads about a collapse in character and morals in chronological symmetry with losing some lead in the pencil. It is a rather sad phenomenon as male menopause could be perceived - especially by a member of the purported Cognitive Elite - as a happy liberation from the harsher aspects of sexual desire and compulsion.

Or maybe the aging man of the Creative Class’ prayer is Lord, free me to pursue true cognitive excellence without distraction, but not yet.

During his emeritus howl in The Atlantic Brooks lets fly several references and factoids that are devoid of any illuminating context or consistent meaning, with many of the claims made on moral education in America completely detached from the historical record.

While it is certainly true that character development and moral education concerned previous generations of Americans, there is no evidence that a lack of this instruction is the source of current unhappiness and meanness in the country. Nor is there evidence that previous generations of Americans had any success with improving public morals through the programs Brooks mentions. He cites The Great Books programs as evidence of public interest in moral cultivation, but it is hard to think of anything more performative and superficial than displaying what books you have read to others. The status signaling aspect of the later Great Books packages, much like home encyclopedias, was marketed to the aspirational (pretentious) American middle class.

In the final analysis, there is not even any evidence to support Brooks’ foundational claim that contemporary Americans are not receiving a moral education. If anything, a great number of Americans are too idealistic, and a Puritanism has once again taken hold. For these Americans, every action in life, no matter how benign, must either be morally right or morally wrong.

The manifestation of political activism in the age of social media, often mindlessly labeled “cancel culture,” is a case in point. The cancel campaigns are moralistic to the point of neurosis. Everything is now a question of moral purity, with the most minor of transgressions pounced on with a ferocity rivaled in American history only by the Salem witch trials. The moral formation is not only present, but strident.

By the end of the article, Brooks has basically given up on any specific program for improving the character of Americans. Instead, he vaguely gestures at some ethereal notion of everyone just being a better person.

Look, I understand why people don’t want to get all moralistic in public. Many of those who do are self-righteous prigs, or rank hypocrites. And all of this is only a start. But healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended by people who think and talk in moral terms, who try to model and inculcate moral behavior, who understand that we have to build moral communities because on our own, we are all selfish and flawed. Moral formation is best when it’s humble. It means giving people the skills and habits that will help them be considerate to others in the complex situations of life. It means helping people behave in ways that make other people feel included, seen, and respected. That’s very different from how we treat people now—in ways that make them feel sad and lonely, and that make them grow unkind.

A featured piece in The Atlantic with all the insight of a Be the change you wish to see in the world bumper sticker. Stunning and brave.

Though, in fairness, that hollowness is all the character and moral education argument is anyway. There is no way to actually put any meat on the bone and flesh out the details of a national program of moral renewal because character education, like the Creative Class, is also just a specter. There is simply nothing there.

What David Brooks appears to be slowly realizing, especially evident in that recent New York Times column, is that he and his class are parasites. They stole the wealth of the country, then - under the guise of meritocracy - implemented Byzantine challenges to see who is deserving enough to get some of it back. They hijacked public institutions to serve their private interests while masking their usurpation with cries of moral rectitude. And in their unquenchable quest for power and position they have relentlessly attacked family and community, leaving an atomized and alienated shell of a people in their wake.

In other words, it is David Brooks’ class that is the actual cause of misery and unhappiness in America today. The Meritocracy is the disease, not the cure; a septic will to power camouflaged with credentials.

Write a feature on that, Bobo boy.