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Thomas Zimmer Aug 23, 2023

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

Democracy Americana

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Tom Levenson Aug 23, 2023

@tzimmer_history Thanks for doing this. I"ve been thinking on similar lines.

One striking thing about Brooks is his absolute inability to address politics. His desperate urge to transform every issue into a cultural framework is a reaction, I believe, to his unacknowledged awareness that all his political claims throughout his career have been wrong.

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Mark Paul

@tomlevenson @tzimmer_history Yes, well done. Brooks’ inability to address politics is matched only by his inability to report. The trends he cites on sadness and meanness vary wildly by geography and demographics. Does that mean Calif. & NY are doing better on moral development than Kentucky? He says, “We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration.” Yet not a word about SEL, under attack by the right for doing precisely that.