Moralizing Nostalgia Leads to Bad History – and Helps the Anti-Democratic Right
David Brooks’ “How America Got Mean” offers an ahistorical tale that obscures rather than illuminates – and provides fertile ground for a politics of reaction.
A thread, based on my new piece:
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/moralizing-nostalgia-leads-to-bad
Moralizing Nostalgia Leads to Bad History – and Helps the Anti-Democratic Right
David Brooks’ “How America Got Mean” offers an ahistorical tale that obscures rather than illuminates – and provides fertile ground for a politics of reaction
The story Brooks tells is one of moral decay – where once there was personal virtue and a whole network of institutions dedicated to “moral formation,” there is now a black hole of amoral emptiness that people try to fill by engaging in “moral war” and “tribalism.” 2/
Brooks’ story doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and is indicative of a much larger problem: A pervasive longing for a golden past that never really existed, providing dangerously fertile ground for a reactionary politics of weaponized nostalgia. 3/
There are at least three major problems with the diagnosis Brooks presents here. First, he operates entirely on the level of individual behavior, unwilling to grapple with the systemic injustices and inequalities against which individual morality must fail as an antidote. 4/
Secondly, Brooks completely obscures the specifics and the stakes of the political conflict that is shaping the country and has shaped much of U.S. history by dissolving everything into an ultimately apolitical morality tale. 5/
Look closely at the phenomena Brooks presents as evidence for his morality tale and they point to a concrete political conflict. For that, however, Brooks has nothing but contempt. Brooks is as disgusted as he is frustrated by what he perceives as silly “tribalism.” 6/
Brooks is either entirely oblivious or utterly dismissive of the actual stakes in the current political struggle; that people might engage in politics because their basic rights and civil liberties are under assault seems beyond him. 7/
Are trans people just reveling in “tribalism” because they feel spiritually empty? Are women mobilizing because they are looking to fill the moral void – or could it have something to do with the fact that millions have been degraded to the status of second-class citizens? 8/
Are Black Lives Matter activists merely flocking to “identity politics” because they are so “internally fragile” – or are they organizing because they are trying to somehow get the country to address racist police violence? 9/
The piece is over 11,000 words long. Yet there is nothing here about the political and ideological conflict over fundamentally incompatible ideas of what this country should be – a white Christian patriarchal society or an egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy. 10/
The third major problem with David Brooks’ interpretation: It is based on an utterly ahistorical understanding of the past and a rather bizarrely distorted perspective on U.S. history. Brooks is simply not a trustworthy narrator of how we got to where we are today. 11/
How does he reconcile his argument with the fact that the era of supposedly intact moral education, when “America was awash in morally formative institutions,” coincided with the worst forms of slavery, genocidal violence, and white supremacist apartheid? 12/
What does Brooks make of the fact that significant progress towards multiracial, pluralistic democracy was made after “moral formation” was, according to the author, largely abandoned? The answer is: He doesn’t. 13/
The message seems to be (my words, not his): “This society was horrible when all this morality formation was ubiquitous, and it has gotten so much better since that was abandoned – and yet, all of today’s problems can be traced to the tragic abandonment of morality formation.” 14/
Brooks presents insufficient evidence to support an inconsistent and ahistorical diagnosis. But his view of America appeals to people across a relatively wide ideological spectrum not in spite of these flaws. They are precisely what makes the argument so attractive. 15/
To the center-Right, and “moderate” (former) Republicans, Brooks offers an apologist narrative for anyone who doesn’t want to engage in critical introspection over the question of how the party they used to support until very recently ended up uniting behind Donald Trump. 16/
No need to inquire about their own role in conservative politics, in fostering a cultural and ideological environment in which Trumpism could flourish. What could they have possibly done to avert a crisis that was brought about by secular amorality? Not their fault, certainly. 17/
Thomas Zimmer
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