Opinion | Why I Am Not a Liberal -
By: David Brooks (The New York Times)
David Brooks is the poster child for the utter failure of the Reagan legacy. Brooks illustrates why the Republican Party of Reagan had to be drowned in Newt Gingrich's bathtub.
David Brooks points to a study by Susan Meyer from the University of Chicago that quantifies the common sense understanding that simply throwing money at someone won't make a better person. Duh. Brooks is trying to show his neoliberal street cred by lambasting government poverty programs. Dear Mr. Brooks, that common sense applies to the rich, too. It's not a poverty issue, it's a human nature issue. Throwing free money at anyone, poor or rich, only creates a sense of unearned entitlement. Reagan and the neoliberal grifters he unleashed always leave out the part about earning an entitlement. One of the Reagan legacy's greatest failures was to ignore that throwing more money at the rich only creates assholes; it doesn't magically transform a wealthy asshole into a better person. Elon Musk is the richest guy on the planet and it hasn't made him a better person. All the tax cuts, carve outs, and unearned entitlements have only made Musk a bigger asshole. Elon Musk proves, beyond any doubt, that the Reagan induced neoliberalism has been wrong from the beginning. And David Brooks is a poster child for neoliberal duplicity.
The red herrings of 'neoconservatism' and phony 'progressives' cannot hide the fact that the neoliberal heritage of Ronald Reagan has been a disaster. Republicans like Brooks sold out the United States with free trade, tax cuts, and unearned entitlements for the wealthy. David Brooks is a advocate for far left thinkers that favor the rich.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Last May a study came out suggesting that merely giving people money doesn't do much to lift them out of poverty. Families with at least one child received $333 a month. They had more money to spend, which is a good thing, but the children fared no better than similar children who didn't get the cash. They were no more likely to develop language skills or demonstrate cognitive development. They were no more likely to avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays.
These results shouldn't have been a big surprise. As Kelsey Piper noted in an essay for The Argument, a different study published last year gave families $500 a month for two years and found no big effects on the adult recipients' psychological well-being and financial security. A study that gave $1,000 a month did not produce better health, career, education or sleep outcomes or even more time with their children.
Way back in 1997, Susan E. Mayer, a University of Chicago sociologist and behavioral economist, published "What Money Can't Buy." She began her research believing that cash transfers would make a big difference in people's lives but was persuaded by the evidence that even if you doubled a family's income, it would have a limited effect on their children's dropout and teenage pregnancy rates or other outcomes. She stated her findings clearly: "The results in this book imply that once children's basic material needs are met, characteristics of their parents become more important to how they turn out than anything additional money can buy."
She added, "Parental income is not as important to children's outcomes as many social scientists have thought." Rising out of poverty also requires the nonmaterial qualities we now call human capital, such as skills, diligence, honesty, good health and reliability. Mayer concludes, "Children of parents with these attributes do well even when their parents do not have much income."
As a society, we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor, but we're not very good at nurturing the human capital they would need to get out of poverty. As a result, we do an OK job supporting people who are in long-term poverty but a poor job of helping them lift out of poverty. As Piper noted in a subsequent post, we spend more money combating poverty today than the entire U.S. G.D.P. from 1969, yet "the share of Americans whose pretransfer income places them in absolute poverty has barely fallen."
Piper's essay kicked up a bit of an internet storm. You might have thought the progressive reaction would have been: We need to keep giving poor people money, but we also need to focus on the human and behavioral factors that will enable them to build comfortable, independent lives. But that wasn't the reaction. The progressives I saw doubled down on the thesis: Poor people just need money.
Matt Bruenig’s contention, also in The Argument, was typical. He scorned the very idea that focusing on human capital is a good way to improve social mobility. He wrote, “Cash is the key part of every welfare state in the developed world and absolutely critical for keeping poverty down.” We shouldn’t make fighting poverty overly complicated, he argued. “As a policy matter, these are mostly solved problems.” Just write people checks.
This is consistent with something I’ve noticed all my life — the materialist bent of progressive thought: the assumption that material conditions drive history, not cultural or moral ones. A couple of decades ago, Thomas Frank published “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” based on befuddlement that Kansans were apparently voting against their economic self-interest. Doesn’t economics drive voting behavior? Progressives have often argued that improving schools is mostly about spending more money, that crime is mostly the product of material deprivation.
Conservatism, as you know, is a complete mess in America right now. But reading conservative authors like Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson does give you an adequate appreciation for the power of nonmaterial forces — culture, moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and community cohesion. That body of work teaches you, as Burke wrote, that manners and morals are more important than laws. You should have limited expectations about politics because not everything can be solved with a policy.
Many years ago, I came across a study that neatly illustrated the power of culture. The researcher Nima Sanandaji calculated the poverty rate of Americans with Swedish ancestry. It was 6.7 percent. They also looked at the poverty rate in Sweden, using the American standard of poverty, and it was also 6.7 percent. Different political systems, same outcome.
Neoconservatism came along and took conservative insights and applied them to policymaking. During the Iraq war the word “neocon” came to mean the opposite of its real meaning, but originally it was a movement within the Democratic Party to correct the policy failures of the Great Society. Thinkers like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer had been poor immigrant kids. They were willing to spend money to fight poverty, but they wanted the programs to nurture the values that they had seen firsthand help people rise: hard work, family and community cohesion, reliability, a passionate commitment to education. These values tend to inhere in communities before they are transmitted to individuals.
Progressives, by contrast, are quick to talk about money but slow to talk about the values side of the equation. That’s in part for the best of reasons. They don’t want to blame the victims or contribute to the canard that people are poor because they are lazy.
But there’s something deeper. Progressivism emerges from a different lineage. Karl Marx influenced many people who are not Marxist, and he saw the world through a material-determinism lens — people’s consciousnesses are shaped by their material conditions.
Since the dawn of the Progressive movement over a century ago, the left has been more technocratic. Those early Progressives tried to make a science of society and govern according to scientific principles.
Today the social sciences are the narrow doorway all of human knowledge has to pass through if it’s going to influence policymaking. We want studies! The social sciences are great. I use them all the time. But when overly quantitative, they can misrepresent reality. They see only what can be quantified. They see only masses of people whose data can be tabulated, not unique individuals. As Christian Smith, a Notre Dame sociologist, has been arguing for decades, the social scientists obliterate the subjective experiences of the people they study. Human agency disappears if research subjects are reduced to a bunch of variables that can be correlated. People who overly rely on social science knowledge are going to tend to focus on money because it can be counted more easily than culture. People who rely on government to solve problems will tend to overemphasize the power of money because that’s the thing government most easily controls.
This materialistic bent leads to all sorts of bad judgments. For example, Joe Biden and his team had one job: to make sure Donald Trump never set foot in the White House again. They tried to accomplish that the only way they knew how: throw money at the problem. The vast bulk of the new Biden spending went to red states to employ workers without college degrees. Politically, the project was a complete failure. Populism is not primarily economic; it’s about respect, values, national identity and many other things. All that spending did not win anybody over.
Today most of our problems are moral, relational and spiritual more than they are economic. There is the crisis of disconnection, the collapse of social trust, the loss of faith in institutions, the destruction of moral norms in the White House, the rise of amoral gangsterism around the world.
I’ve been driven away from the right over the past decade, but I can’t join the left because I just don’t think that tradition of thought grasps reality in all its fullness. I wish both right and left could embrace the more complex truth that the neocon Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed in his famous maxim: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture and save it from itself.”
If you can find some lefties who are willing to spend money fighting poverty but also willing to promote the traditional values and practices that enable people to rise, you can sign me up for the revolution.
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You want to end poverty? Build factories, create jobs that anchor a community in the American Dream.
Unearned entitlements for the poor to the rich won't move the needle on poverty. Free money only creates an expectation for the next check by both the poor and the rich. And David Brooks can't talk his way out of that common sense truth. David Brook's neoliberal idealism is what got us into this mess.
Yeah, MAGA includes a lot of stupid crap. But MAGA isn't nearly as destructive as has been neoliberalism. Ronald Reagan is politically dead. Erect a statue but don't try to bring him back. The Unites States can't afford Reagan's legacy any longer.
That has never been tried before? Clearly poverty is not going to go below 10% , unless the social safety net is expanded. Without the social safety net we have now the rate would be 5 or 6 points higher on a regular basis.
The idea that poverty can be ended by better capitalism is nonsense.
The "social safety net" has done nothing but enable the leeches. They are more than content to live off the taxpayer dime while contributing absolutely nothing.
So, why the nostalgia for post-World War II America?
How has institutionalizing unearned entitlements worked out? How is living from TANF check to TANF check any different than living from paycheck to paycheck?
Your argument is based upon the idea that money is the single most important motivation for progress in society. But that doesn't account for college educated workers flipping burgers and stocking shelves. We've spent a lot of money educating the poor and they still have difficulty finding jobs that will lift them out of poverty. We have working poor in this country. Throwing money at the working poor may improve their lifestyle but won't provide the opportunity to pursue their dreams.
So, why are you ignoring the need for a collective shift in values? Why are you ignoring that economics is not enough to solve the problem of poverty?
What do you think "investing in inclusive prosperity" means? Why aren't the exploitive practices an unearned entitlement of the rich? How do we rebalance the safety net by maintaining or increasing dependence on that safety net?
My prompt: "Can poverty be addressed by creating jobs that anchor a community in the American Dream?"
Gemini 2.5 Flash:
Poverty can indeed be addressed by creating jobs that anchor a community, and this approach is a cornerstone of many economic development and poverty reduction strategies. This is because jobs do more than just provide a source of income; they offer a sense of dignity, purpose, and stability, which are all crucial components of the "American Dream." However, the effectiveness of this strategy depends on the quality of the jobs and the surrounding community support systems.
My prompt: "Could manufacturing be more effective than retail and service businesses at creating better jobs that can alleviate poverty within a community?"
Gemini 2.5 Flash:
Yes, manufacturing is often considered more effective than retail and service businesses at creating jobs that can alleviate poverty within a community. While all jobs contribute to a local economy, manufacturing jobs tend to offer better wages and benefits, providing a more reliable pathway to economic stability and upward mobility.
My prompt: "We know that community support or safety net includes things like mass transit, affordable child and elder daycare, adequate post high school education, and banking. The community safety net also creates jobs. What other community support would be needed for alleviating poverty using a community development approach?"
Gemini 2.5 Flash:
For a community development approach to alleviating poverty to be effective, it needs to extend beyond job creation and the safety net you described to include: affordable housing, accessible and quality healthcare, and strong social support networks. These elements are crucial because they address the systemic barriers that can prevent people from holding onto jobs and achieving economic stability.
That's the neoliberal duplicity that justifies unearned entitlements for the rich.
That's an expansion of unearned entitlements for the rich.
Throwing money at society (poor and rich) has not created conditions that generate jobs that anchor a community in the American Dream. That's not a failing of capitalism; that is a failing of government policy.
That's because Democrats jumped on policies for Free Trade, favoring financial services, and throwing money at society. Democrats abandoned the working class for the white collar class. All government money thrown at society will rise to the top of the economy; that's an economic truth. Democrat's approach to poverty since Johnson's Great Society has served to make the rich richer.
Democratic policies to abate poverty hasn't abated poverty. Democrats have only made the rich richer, created government subsidized exploitive practices, and established the working poor as a new class in society.