Pundit takes three-strikes for blaming Baltimore’s poor
11th May 2015 · 0 Comments
By Paul Kleyman
New America Media Columnist
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks is well regarded for his thoughtfulness and occasional expressions of outrage against excesses of the right.
Yet, while I always enjoy his intelligent and ever-civil weekly sparring with liberal columnist Mark Shields on the “PBS News Hour,” his latest column on the protests in Baltimore is typical of the smug default so many ideological conservatives have to blaming the victims.
In this case, the self-described centrist makes allowances for modest progress—saying massive public spending on the poor–$15 trillion since the 1960s—has brought about modest improvements. Why not more? Brooks’ warm pink, kinder-gentler conservatism offers answers that hardly differ from the blood-red right’s.
Left unaddressed, writes Brooks, the “social psychology” of impoverished communities today leaves Black youth like Freddie Gray rudderless: “Where half the high school students don’t bother to show up for school on a given day, then the problems go deeper.” Fair enough, but what’s made that happen?
America’s Failed Leadership
For all of their earnest chatter about those aimless kids and their heroin-addicted mothers (Brooks drops in that about Gray’s mom), somehow the failure of American leadership never fits into the conservative scheme of things.
Just look at family breakdown since the “Reagan Revolution” three decades ago — mass incarceration of Black and poor men, a rise of the for-profit prison-industrial complex, wage stagnation for the women left behind — there’s your three-strikes.
But where’s the life sentence for U.S. political leadership in failing in its responsibility. It wouldn’t take much to list three other strikes—starting with Baltimore’s foreclosures—and three more again—nine strikes and the side is out for America’s inequality team.
Brooks tees up the conservative myopia with his typically presumably above-the-fray headline, “The Nature of Poverty.”
His fatuous erudition sniffs down his nose at the poor and dark, as do other conservative columnists, such as Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post and Peter Wehner of Commentary, who have toted the large amounts of anti-poverty spending per capita on the poor. In particular, he notes, the large sums expended on housing in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived and died.
They do make their allowances. The War on Poverty money “was not totally wasted,” says Brooks. But somehow communities like Freddie Gray’s Sandtown-Winchester find themselves untransformed, crime-ridden and without a grocery store or even a restaurant.
Yet, as so often happens with paternalistic pundits of the right, their argument detours from one promising social examination—enormous public spending having had few results — toward cowardly old saws — fingerpointing to failures of family cohesion and personal responsibility among those same objects of public largess in the trillions.
Conservatives’ Notion of “Real Barriers”
The “real barriers” to upward mobility, as Brooks puts it, “are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood that either encourages or discourages responsibility, future-oriented thinking and practical ambition.”
Even the community’s unspoken code of civil interaction, especially with the police, “dissolved,” says Brooks. “The informal guardrails of life were gone, and all was arbitrary harshness.”
Individuals in this environment “are left without the norms that middle-class people take for granted.” Youth in such circumstances can hardly be expected to “guide themselves.”
This leaves readers with the unspoken trope that, given the situation, those individuals can only be controlled, say with curve balls painting the policy corners and some pointed brush-backs thrown at the head to keep them in line.
Argument Empty as Orioles Game
What of American society’s three-strikes? Maybe conservatives don’t see many of the headlines that have occupied this nation in recent months. There are all those cops militaristically trained and ill-supervised, the failures of taxpayer dollars to support truly effective educational and after-school programs (or enough school counselors to make a difference for many), and the deep decline of affordable housing under both GOP and Democratic administrations.
David Brooks laments how Mean Street USA has lapsed into a realm of “arbitrary harshness.” Arbitrary? Anyone examining patterns of social segregation by class and race in these United States might just notice the purposeful pattern.
Not so arbitrary.
Certainly, personal responsibility must play a significant role, but wielding it as a cudgel of blame utterly fails to nudge the national discussion away from rightest public policy clichés and toward an honest discussion of solutions.
For all of his reputation as an erudite “centrist,” David Brooks falls well short of being that “thinker” he states we need, “who can describe poverty through the lens of social psychology.”
Vague psychobabble like this plays to an ethic as empty as Baltimore’s Camden Yards was Wednesday, when the Orioles took the field, but with real people barred from the stands.
This article originally published in the May 11, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
