David Brooks Kvetches about Trump. Sanders. Ben Carson, and Jeremy Corbyn

My least favorite journalist-David Brooks, naturally-has a piece kvetching about the rise of 'An ethos of expressive individualism' shown by the rise of three American candidates and one Brit: Trump. Sanders, Ben Carson, and British Labor party candidate Jeremy Corbyn.

Americans are just too individualist and not civic-minded enough today-like they were in the Old Days.

This is why he is an inspiration for Very Serious People everywhere:

First, political parties, like institutions across society, are accorded less respect than in decades past. But we’re also seeing the political effects of a broader culture shift, the rise of what sociologists call expressive individualism."

"There has always been a tension between self and society. Americans have always wanted to remain true to individual consciousness, but they also knew they were citizens, members of a joint national project, tied to one another by bonds as deep as the bonds of marriage and community."

"As much as they might differ, there was some responsibility to maintain coalitions with people unlike themselves. That meant maintaining conversations and relationships, tolerating difference, living with dialectics and working with opposites. The Democratic Party was once an illogical coalition between Northeastern progressives and Southern evangelicals. The G.O.P. was an alliance between business and the farm belt."

"But in the ethos of expressive individualism, individual authenticity is the supreme value. Compromise and coalition-building is regarded as a dirty and tainted activity. People congregate in segregated cultural and ideological bubbles and convince themselves that the purest example of their type could actually win."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/opinion/the-anti-party-men-trump-carson-sanders-and-corbyn.html

This is a strange argument. The Democrats' old coalition wasn't put together to be civic minded it was an accident of historical contingencies. Throughout most of its history-ironically until George McGovern in 1972-there was no Democratic party as such but three distinct Democratic parties-the old Dixiecrat Democratic party of the Solid South, the Northeastern liberals and Catholic, ethnic whites from the old Tammany Hall immigrant machine-Richard Daley's Chicago, etc.

This wasn't done in the name of civic mindedness. And when the coalition imploded in 1968 it wasn't the Democratic party's choice to become ''expressively individualist.'

If the two parties are constituted on more logical and consistent grounds today this doesn't mean we are less or more 'individual' or 'civic minded.'

UPDATE: I should also point out that Trump is nothing new: he is actually George Wallace Redux. So 'expressive individualism' is not so new either.

No surprise that I'm not bowled over by David Brooks, he is little more than a vaporizer of the VSP set. His Sensible Centrism is confused on many levels. The kind of moderates and centrists he dreams of are a figment of his imagination. The truth is, informed and passionate people normally have a partisan point of view.

But Brooks thinks that this is the heart of the problem-people having strong view points. For Brooks, partisanship is Original Sin.

Mr. Brooks doesn't get that if you want to see what a moderate looks like it's Donald Trump.

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/08/yes-donald-trump-is-moderate-candidate.html

Back to Brooks:

"This phenomenon is even more extreme in Britain. The British Labour Party suffered a crushing election defeat in May because people did not think its leader was strong enough, and because they thought its policy agenda was too far left."

"And yet at the moment the favorite to become the next leader of the British Labour Party is Jeremy Corbyn. Mr. Corbyn has existed for decades on the leftward fringe of the Labour Party, tolerated as sort of a nice but dotty uncle."

This is a false reading of what happened in Britain. Labour didn't lose because it was too far Left. It lost because so many on the Left voted for SNP. After all, the coalition share of the vote collapsed-as Liberal Democrat support collapsed but these voters mostly went to SNP rather than Labour. 

So Labour's real problem is that the Left is disillusioned with them. Indeed, the whole SNP phenomenon is less that the Scots really feel a need for independence from Britain-after all they had asked become part of Britain-but that they are tired of conservative policies. 

One way they might be able to bring back SNP voters is by a move leftward.