I think we have a winner.

It’s a bit early to call it, especially in such a competitive field, but right now I am really leaning towards this contribution from David Brooks:

He’d do it because this is the beating center of American life — the place where the trajectory of American politics is being determined.

— David Brooks, Midwest at Dusk, New York Times (November 4, 2010)

Keep in mind what an impressive achievement is just to be the stupidest sentence in a single Op-Ed column by a commentator who apparently cannot find the Midwest U.S. on a map.^[1] But while most of the column is just dumb, the notion that the beating center of American life is simply identical with, or even has a good goddamn to do with, the trajectory of American politics (meaning the state-by-state results of seasonal U.S. elections) or whether or not the U.S. will remain a predominant power (!) is not only stupid, but immensely narrow-minded and pernicious, and a pretty good one-sentence illustration of everything that is wrong with David Brooks, as a commentator and as a human being.

(Via William Easterly, via Jesse Walker 2010-11-05.)

See also:

• GT 2010-10-06: Team sport

1. ^[1] … that region of America that starts in central New York and Pennsylvania and then stretches out through Ohio and Indiana before spreading out to include Wisconsin and Arkansas. Dude, really? ↩

• On the Town with Bad Decision Dinosaur. Dorothy, Cat and Girl (2010-09-24). (Linked Friday 2010-09-24.)

• Food deserts and zoning. Stephen Smith, Market Urbanism (2010-09-13). by Stephen Smith The other day I put up a post detailing the restrictions that small-scale restaurants and food carts face, but I should mention that grocery stores and supermarkets also face similar restrictions.  Like restrictions on restaurants, they end hitting poor, urban, black neighborhoods the hardest, creating the phenomenon... (Linked Friday 2010-09-24.)

• Apparently, starvation blockades are bad for the economy. Who knew? John Markley, The Superfluous Man (2010-09-06). David Brooks has a column in The New York Times entitled "Nation Building Works," in which he attempts to vindicate the US government's past seven years in Iraq. From the article (via Cheryl Cline at der Blaustrumpf):“Iraq has made substantial progress since 2003,” the International Monetary Fund reports. Inflation is... (Linked Friday 2010-09-24.)

• Haystack vs How The Internet Works. Danny O'Brien, Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka (2010-09-14). There’s been a lot of alarming but rather brief statements in the past few days about Haystack, the anti-censorship software connected with the Iranian Green Movement.  Austin Heap, the co-creator of Haystack and co-founder of parent non-profit, the Censorship Research Center, stated that the CRC had “halted ongoing testing of... (Linked Saturday 2010-09-25.)

• Libertarian Review Archives Online. Brian Doherty, Brian Doherty: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-09-09). One of Reason's high-quality competitors from the 1970s-80s has a semi-complete archives now available online. It's a fabulous compendium of Carter-ish era libertarian historical fun. David Boaz explains the mag and what it accomplished, focusing on its amazing editor the late Roy Childs. (Linked Saturday 2010-09-25.)

• Openness is a lot of work. jonoscript, Not The User's Fault (2010-09-24). You can’t just make something “open” and expect magic to happen. Openness is a lot of work. This is true whether you’re making an open-source software project, a website with user-generated content, a political movement, a charity, or any other kind of organization where you expect volunteers to show up... (Linked Saturday 2010-09-25.)

• George Lucas Stole Chewbacca, But It’s Okay. Michael, Binary Bonsai (2010-09-18). Foreword The creation of Star Wars is comprehensive mythology onto itself, populated by rarely documented anecdotes, the likes of “the Millennium Falcon was inspired by a hamburger, with the outrigger cockpit being an olive off to the side” (1) or “My original inspiration for Chewbacca was my dog Indiana.” (2),... (Linked Sunday 2010-09-26.)

• Of Hayek and Rubber Tomatoes. Timothy B. Lee, Cato Unbound (2010-09-24). Henry Farrell writes that “Hayek argues that markets are superior because they allow the ‘dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’ to be aggregated in a useful way.” He then faults Hayek for failing to acknowledge a key limitation of the price mechanism:... (Linked Sunday 2010-09-26.)

• “I’ve Never Seen a Poor Person Give Anyone a Job” Kevin Carson, Center for a Stateless Society (2010-09-16). “I’ve never seen a poor person give anyone a job.”  The cliche is commonly repeated on the Right, in polemics against what they call “class warfare” — not that there’s actually much of it being waged by Democrats, except when they’re fighting on the same side as the Republicans.  See... (Linked Sunday 2010-09-26.)

• I Am Detained By The Feds For Not Answering Questions. PKL, KNIFE TRICKS (2010-04-23). Sherman Oaks, CaliforniaI was detained last night by federal authorities at San Francisco International Airport for refusing to answer questions about why I had travelled outside the United States.The end result is that, after waiting for about half an hour and refusing to answer further questions, I was released –... (Linked Sunday 2010-09-26.)

• 10 Brief Responses To 700 Comments About Refusing To Answer Questions At Passport Control. PKL, KNIFE TRICKS (2010-09-11). Phuket Island, ThailandMy post about refusing to answer questions from Customs and Border Protection officers when re-entering the U.S. has resulted in a lot of debate. My thanks to everyone who joined the conversation, including the authors of the more than one hundred posts that called me a douchebag. Let... (Linked Sunday 2010-09-26.)

• Deregulating food. Stephen Smith, Market Urbanism (2010-09-11). by Stephen Smith Urban planners like to discuss heavy things – roads, buildings, cars, trains. Food, though an integral part of humans’ lives, generally doesn’t enter into the equation as more than a footnote. This may be because food service is governed by different departments than buildings, streets, and vehicles,... (Linked Sunday 2010-09-26.)

• feministhulk: SO MUCH HEGEMONY TO SMASH, SO LITTLE TIME! HULK OFTEN RELY HEAVILY ON DAY PLANNER, THOUGH TRY TO STAY FLEXIBLE. Twitter / feministhulk (2010-09-01). feministhulk: SO MUCH HEGEMONY TO SMASH, SO LITTLE TIME! HULK OFTEN RELY HEAVILY ON DAY PLANNER, THOUGH TRY TO STAY FLEXIBLE. (Linked Wednesday 2010-09-01.)

• Concern About Police Secrecy = "Tilting at Windmills"? Radley Balko, Hit & Run (2010-09-01). My column this week was about the continuing secrecy of Virginia's largest police departments and the way the state's law enforcement community is opposing efforts to make the departments even marginally more transparent. The journalist sounding the alarm about all of this is Michael Pope, who writes for Northern Virginia's... (Linked Wednesday 2010-09-01.)

• Can Preschoolers Think? cherylcline, der Blaustrumpf (2010-09-02). As I’ve said before, the NYT often shows up The Onion in terms of laughs.  This week, the NYT featured an unintentionally funny article about preschool depression accompanied by even funnier photos: Kiran didn’t seem like the type of kid parents should worry about. “He was the easy one,” his... (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• Social Individualism and Solidarity. Darian Worden, Center for a Stateless Society (2010-08-26). A functional libertarian political order will rise the strongest from fertile ground. To maximize individual liberty it is necessary to promote the best kind of individualism at all levels. Controversy over the building of various mosques and the Park 51 Islamic cultural center shows the influence of anti-Muslim sentiment on... (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• New Anarchist Platformist archive. Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-08-24). Anarchism and the Platformist Tradition is a new archive with a nice collection of platformist texts, starting, naturally, with the 1926 Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft), but including both prior and subsequent contributions to the platformist tradition. Whether or not you ultimately agree with the approaches... (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• Practical support for microenterprise. Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-08-24). I've been featuring the 500 Friends of Reading Frenzy! Kickstarter project in the sidebar here since it was launched. It's now in its last week for funding, and 75% on its way to a goal of $5000. Reading Frenzy is a remarkable operation: a tiny shop which has been able... (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• E. Armand, "The Gulf" Shawn P. Wilbur, Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth (2010-08-08). This short piece by Emile Armand appeared in Horace Traubel's The Conservator in 1910. It's an interesting piece to have appeared in a magazine dominated by the shadow of Walt Whitman—and an interesting example of Armand's thought.THE GULFAll the societies of the vanguard—Social Democrats, revolutionaries of all shades, various communists—say... (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• What is David Brooks for? der Blaustrumpf » What is David Brooks for? (2010-09-02). Vulture Economics (Cont'd): every mushroom cloud has a silver lining. (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• Some Hard Facts on Copyright. Kevin Carson, Center for a Stateless Society (2010-09-02). I’ve referred to Nina Paley quite a bit in recent columns.  Her song “Copying is Not Theft” and her Mimi and Eunice cartoons skewer the moral pretensions of the Copyright Nazis more effectively than just about anything I’ve seen. In a more serious vein, I just ran onto her interview... (Linked Thursday 2010-09-02.)

• The Ruling Class. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-09-02). Few essays attracted as much attention from right-wing readers this summer as "America's Ruling Class—and the Perils of Revolution," an extended argument that an incestuous social set "rules uneasily over the majority of Americans." Written by Angelo Codevilla of the Claremont Institute and first published in The American Spectator, this... (Linked Friday 2010-09-03.)

• Spinster aunt casts jaundiced eye at popular television show. Jill, I Blame The Patriarchy (2010-08-04). Hollywood has long been recognized by the Global Cabal of Spinster Aunts as Ground Zero for American misogyny. Like everything that gurgles forth from that foul city, this Mad Men sensation that’s sweeping the nation has many sicko antifeminist repercussions. Never heard of Mad Men? It’s a “critically acclaimed” —... (Linked Friday 2010-09-03.)

• Revolutionary Letter #4 by Diane di Prima. editor@arthurmag.com, ARTHUR MAGAZINE (2010-08-29). Revolutionary Letter #4 by Diane di Prima Left to themselves people grow their hair. Left to themselves they take off their shoes. Left to themselves they make love sleep easily share blankets, dope & children they are not lazy or afraid they plant seeds, they smile, they speak to one... (Linked Friday 2010-09-03.)

• Walking While Black in America Today... Brad DeLong, Grasping Reality with a Ten-Foot-Long Flexible Trunk (2010-01-25). Ta-Nehisi Coates: Ta-Nehisi Coates: Fear, Parenting, and the Police: We talked some, last week, about how fear drives black parents. I think this is the sort of case that I was thinking about: The photos taken by Jordan Miles' mother show his face covered with raw, red bruises, his cheek... (Linked Wednesday 2010-01-27.)

• Populism. Ezra Klein (2010-01-27). Stopped clocks and all that, I guess. The rest of Brooks's column is, in fact, nonsense; but this is spot-on: "Populism is popular with the ruling class. Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.’s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.’s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.’s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.’s. Members of the ruling class love populism because they think it will help their section of the elite gain power."

  Of course, the reason that the rest of Brooks's column is nonsense is because Brooks identifies this as a problem with "populism." It's not. It's a problem with populism as filtered through electoral politics. Or, to get to the heart of it, it's a problem with electoral politics. Which is always based around zero-sum power plays and consists more or less entirely in only nominally opposed power-elite factions playing off fear of one another in order to secure support from a captive voter base. (Linked Wednesday 2010-01-27.)

To-day, in the online edition of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, you’ll find the following column — in which I find myself in the unusual position of saying that David Brooks did say one true thing in his New York Times column:

The Health Care Debate Has Been “Meaningful”? It Just Ain’t So!

There’s no I in health care reform

Credit where credit is due: David Brooks does say one true thing in his New York Times column The Values Question (Nov. 24) on government health care reform: The system after reform will look as it does today, only bigger and more expensive.

Brooks is certainly right that no health care reform proposal with any chance in mainstream partisan politics promises any fundamental change to the status quo. What we have had is a system where pervasive government regulation, subsidy, and mandated captive markets corral workers into an industry driven by sky-high costs, managed by bureaucratic pencil-pushing and corporate economizing (often at the expense of innocent people’s health or lives), and owned by a handful of uncompetitive, well-entrenched incumbent corporations. No mainstream reform proposal will change anything about that. The proposals mainly concerned themselves with introducing new government subsidies and new captive-market mandates to force yet more workers and money into the broken system.

But Brooks takes all this as a sign that the health care debate is about fundamental values. I think it’s a sign that conventional political debate is a superficial squabble over meaningless details. The real debate is about grammar.

— Charles Johnson, The Freeman Online (2009-12-22): The Health Care Debate Has Been Meaningful? It Just Ain’t So!

For more on why (although, if you’ve been here a while, you might be abe to guess), you can read the whole thing at the Freeman’s website. The column will also be appearing in print in the March 2010 magazine.

See also:

• GT 2009-11-12: In which women’s access to abortion becomes public-optional
• GT 2007-10-25: Radical healthcare reform