Thomas ZimmerAug 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
Show threadNoah Cook

@tzimmer_history Brooks is utterly oblivious.

His previous essay on happiness had him confusing happy/sad normal days with actual MDD, and he misused medical statistics in irresponsible ways that were pretty transparently "hey, this stat matches my assumptions".

I'm not surprised to see that he's as bad at playing historian as he is at playing doctor. The Atlantic's editorial staff have pretty much vanished, as near as I can tell, leaving their authors free to make stuff up.

Aug 24, 2023 at 3:45pmWeb
Show threadThomas ZimmerAug 24, 2023
@UncivilServant I think the more concerning explanation is that, ideologically and politically, this is the kind of diagnosis the leadership at The Atlantic favors and therefore happily platforms.
Show threadNoah CookAug 24, 2023

@tzimmer_history Good point. It's a hard ideology to nail down, since it's almost a faux-centrism. I mean that where centrism supports evidence-based policy, they seem to prefer "White suburban college educated common sense" and genuinely believe the two to be identical.

It's not populism, and not quite populism's cousin in a business suit. But I do think that to name a thing makes it easier to distinguish, otherwise it's easy to dismiss, as I did, as a simple lapse of standards.