Agent Provocateur
David Brooks is one of my favorite people in Washington. It is something of a cliché to preface all criticism of Brooks with a declaration of this sort, but that doesn’t make it any less true. My admiration for Brooks extends so far that I am willing to overlook the possibility that he is, in fact, a French sleeper agent.

Let us review some of the evidence. In his path-breaking book Bobos in Paradise (2000), he described a wonderful transformation in which Americans had turned a blind eye to longstanding cultural disputes and embraced a fairly secular, apolitical ethos that emphasized aesthetics, design, and food as the lodestars of a fulfilled life. Tellingly, Brooks — who has spent time in France’s Mini-Me, Belgium — invoked two thoroughly French concepts to describe these people: “Bourgeois Bohemians.”

These Gallicized Americans congregated in liberal enclaves like Burlington, Vt. Alas, Brooks discovered them during a docile period, the fin-de-siècle of the Clinton years, and he mistook their obsessions with runny cheese and distressed furniture for post-partisanship. As soon as George W. Bush took the oath of office, never mind invaded Iraq, the Burlingtonites and Parisians alike became inflamed with ideological hatred.

Earlier in the 1990s, Brooks had become the leading scribe for an intellectual campaign at The Weekly Standard that he dubbed “National Greatness.” Much of this stuff was well argued and brilliantly written, but classically froggy in its outlook. It looked to restore a past era of greatness when — it was imagined — all eyes were on America’s civilizational happening. Very pretty buildings and nifty inventions used to pop up all over the place during our glory days, he said, but not so much anymore. The danger for Americans in 1997, Brooks wrote (during a period of remarkable innovation, one might add), was that “if they think of nothing but their narrow self-interest, of their commercial activities, they lose a sense of grand aspiration and noble purpose.” Imagine how much more persuasive that must have been in the original French.

Now consider the latest evidence. In a recent column in the New York Times, Brooks argued that Barack Obama’s coming tsunami of public-works spending should be targeted at locking in the latest trends in middle-class living: “the new localism.” In exurbs around the country, people want more cafés, farmers’ markets, concert halls, and meeting places. Rather than spend money on refurbishing and expanding the existing interstate highway system, Brooks wrote, the government should underwrite a grand cultural strategy whereby we augment this trend by funding new town squares where we can read Le Monde over cups of café au lait. Or something.

My point here isn’t to ridicule the idea. Brooks is right that if we’re going to have a “once-in-a-half-century infrastructure investment,” we might indeed want to put some thought into it instead of reflexively refilling the same old public-sector troughs and slush buckets. But first, it’s worth noting that there is something deeply . . . Continental about this approach to public policy. The French are connoisseurs of using the state as an engine of cultural policymaking. In America, the idea of using government to guide and form culture is still deeply — and, with hope, enduringly — controversial.

Second, Brooks is a gifted trend spotter — and setter — but spotting trends and locking them into national policy planning is the sort of thing that makes the ghost of Friedrich Hayek cry. The French, too, are wonderful at trend spotting. Does anyone remember their effort in the 1980s to put an “informatique” in every home? These networked computer terminals were a sensation — you could find out when the Jerry Lewis Marathon began from your own home! — and the wave of the future. Now hundreds of thousands of them collect dust in funky antiques shops. Maybe America can beat the French at their own game, but I’d rather we didn’t try to play it.

— JONAH GOLDBERG

Don’t think you’re guilty of rattling off automatic responses and one-liners? Blogger Ike Pigott wants us to think otherwise.

He suggests you revisit your online communication – blogs, comments, forum posts, tweets – to see if you’ve fallen into a …

@Cooper – this particular shoe doesn’t fit you. Have no worries!

@Ivana – I am a fan of modular thinking when it comes to presentations, particularly if it means the overall track can deviate to the benefit of specific audiences.

In Carl’s case, there was no filter to signal that a particular anecdote or turn of phrase was overheating, or stale. As long as you’re aware of your students and their individual proclivities to cling to a comfort zone, then you’ve done your job. (Maybe just using Carl as a cautionary tale would be enough…)

The main idea I drew from this thoughtful posting was: Don’t be predictable. Grow. Develop. Nurture your creativity, as you nurture others as you LISTEN AND LEARN!

Thanks for the reminder.

And I’m not sharing, because I don’t want to out him. He’s a genuinely nice guy.