David Brooks being somewhat perplexing, again

David Brooks never seems to be able to get through a whole column without saying something dubious.   His latest is interesting, though:  Why I am not a Liberal.

I am somewhat sympathetic to the main line of argument, as it happens:

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....

Further down, he points to this study, too:

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.

(Presumably, one can also point to the cultural aspects of Jewish upbringing that has lead to their prominence in business and professions, too.)

And here is he key contention:

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....

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. 

The thing I have some issue with, however, is that he doesn't address the fact that the allegedly conservative Right can (and does) use this way of thinking to justify economic policy that is clearly in the interests of the rich (using poor justification that isn't backed by evidence - such as trickle down economics); and Progressive concern over not leaving behind the poor economically is more consistent with the "community cohesion" and "conservative values" that Brooks yearns for.   

That said, I can't not agree with the suggestion that Left social ideas can lead to a fragmented society in terms of ideas about how a good life is lived; and at the moment, the more communitarian social structure of Asia nations (or perhaps, East Asia in particular) seems to be very appealing compared to the "freedom to live anyway you want" of the West.  And what's going on in Indonesia at the moment doesn't really support Brooks, either!

I do therefore agree that Democrats (and Left parties of all countries) do best when they encourage shared values and unity, over emphasising the rights of individualism in terms of culture (such as promoting identity politics.)   We seem to be lacking that in Left wing leadership at the moment.  

Anyway, one day I will have time to work out more to say about this.  Work is so busy at the moment...  

 Update:  Thinking a bit more about it, perhaps my issue with Brooks' column is that he is saying that values are more important than mere economic fairness of a society, whereas I would have thought the argument should be that both are important?