Eleitores para Elites: Você me vê agora? - David Brooks (New York Times)

Eleitores para Elites: Você me vê agora?

Por David Brooks, New York Times – 06/11/2024

 

Entramos em uma nova era política. Nos últimos 40 anos, mais ou menos, vivemos na era da informação. Nós, da classe educada, decidimos, com alguma justificativa, que a economia pós-industrial seria construída por pessoas como nós, então adaptamos as políticas sociais para atender às nossas necessidades.

 

Nossa política educacional empurrou as pessoas para o curso que seguimos — faculdades de quatro anos para que elas se qualificassem para os “empregos do futuro”. Enquanto isso, o treinamento vocacional murchou. Adotamos uma política de livre comércio que transferiu empregos industriais para países de salário baixos no exterior para que pudéssemos concentrar nossas energias em empresas de economia do conhecimento administradas por pessoas com diplomas avançados. O setor financeiro e de consultoria cresceu rapidamente, enquanto o emprego na indústria encolheu.

 

A geografia não tinha importância — se o capital e a mão de obra altamente qualificada quisessem se aglomerar em Austin, São Francisco e Washington, não importava realmente o que acontecesse com todas as outras comunidades deixadas para trás. As políticas de imigração deram às pessoas altamente educadas acesso a mão de obra barata, enquanto os trabalhadores menos qualificados enfrentavam uma nova competição. Mudamos para tecnologias verdes favorecidas por pessoas que trabalham em pixels, e desfavorecemos pessoas na indústria e no transporte cujos meios de subsistência dependem de combustíveis fósseis.

 

Aquele grande barulho de sucção que a eleição fez foi o da redistribuição de respeito. Pessoas que subiram na escada acadêmica foram homenageadas com elogios, enquanto aquelas que não subiram foram tornadas invisíveis. A situação era particularmente difícil para os meninos. No ensino médio, dois terços dos 10% melhores da classe são meninas, enquanto cerca de dois terços dos alunos no decil inferior são meninos. As escolas não são criadas para o sucesso masculino; isso tem consequências pessoais e nacionais ao longo da vida.

 

A sociedade funcionava como um vasto sistema de segregação, elevando os academicamente talentosos acima de todos os outros. Em pouco tempo, a divisão de diplomas se tornou o abismo mais importante na vida americana. Graduados do ensino médio morrem nove anos antes das pessoas com ensino superior. Eles morrem de overdoses de opioides em uma taxa seis vezes maior. Eles se casam menos e se divorciam mais e são mais propensos a ter um filho fora do casamento. Eles são mais propensos a serem obesos.

 

Um estudo recente do American Enterprise Institute descobriu que 24% das pessoas que se formaram no ensino médio, no máximo, não têm amigos próximos. Eles são menos propensos do que graduados da faculdade a visitar espaços públicos ou se juntar a grupos comunitários e ligas esportivas. Eles não falam no jargão correto de justiça social ou mantêm o tipo de crenças de luxo que são marcas registradas de virtude pública.

 

Esses abismos levaram à perda de fé, à perda de confiança, a uma sensação de traição. Nove dias antes das eleições, visitei uma igreja cristã no Tennessee. O culto foi iluminado por uma fé genuína, é verdade, mas também por uma atmosfera corrosiva de amargura, agressão e traição. Enquanto o pastor falava sobre os Judas que buscam nos destruir, a frase “mundo sombrio” surgiu na minha cabeça — uma imagem de um povo que se sente vivendo sob constante ameaça e em uma cultura de extrema desconfiança. Essas pessoas, e muitos outros americanos, não estavam interessados na política de alegria que Kamala Harris e os outros formandos em direito estavam oferecendo.

 

O Partido Democrata tem uma função: combater a desigualdade. Mas havia um grande abismo de desigualdade bem diante de seus narizes e, de alguma forma, muitos democratas não o viam. Muitos na esquerda se concentraram na desigualdade racial, desigualdade de gênero e desigualdade L.G.B.T.Q. Acho que é difícil focar na desigualdade de classes quando você foi para uma faculdade multibilionária e faz seminários sobre greenwashing ambiental e diversidade para grandes corporações. Donald Trump é um narcisista monstruoso, mas há algo estranho em uma classe educada que olha no espelho da sociedade e vê apenas a si mesma.

 

Enquanto a esquerda se voltava para a arte performática identitária, Donald Trump entrou na guerra de classes ate o pescoço. Seu ressentimento de homem nascido no Queens pelas elites de Manhattan se encaixou magicamente com a animosidade de classe sentida pela população rural em todo o país. Sua mensagem era simples: essas pessoas traíram você, e elas são idiotas para começar.

 

Em 2024, ele construiu exatamente o que o Partido Democrata tentou construir — uma maioria multirracial da classe trabalhadora. Seu apoio aumentou entre trabalhadores negros e hispânicos. Ele registrou ganhos surpreendentes em lugares como Nova Jersey, Bronx, Chicago, Dallas e Houston. De acordo com as pesquisas de boca de urna da NBC, ele conquistou um terço dos eleitores de cor. Ele é o primeiro republicano a ganhar a maioria dos votos em 20 anos.

 

Os democratas obviamente precisam repensar bastante. O governo Biden tentou cortejar a classe trabalhadora com subsídios e estímulos, mas não há solução econômica para o que é principalmente uma crise de respeito. Haverá alguns na esquerda que dirão que Trump venceu por causa do racismo, sexismo e autoritarismo inerentes ao povo americano. Aparentemente, essas pessoas adoram perder e querem fazer isso de novo e de novo e de novo. O resto de nós precisa olhar para esse resultado com humildade.

 

Os eleitores americanos nem sempre são sábios, mas geralmente são sensatos e têm algo a nos ensinar. Meu pensamento inicial é que preciso reexaminar meus próprios antecedentes. Sou moderado. Gosto quando os candidatos democratas correm para o centro. Mas tenho que confessar que Harris fez isso de forma bastante eficaz e não funcionou. Talvez os democratas tenham que adotar uma disrupção no estilo Bernie Sanders — algo que deixará pessoas como eu desconfortáveis.

 

O Partido Democrata pode fazer isso? O partido das universidades, dos subúrbios ricos e dos núcleos urbanos hipsters pode fazer isso? Bem, Donald Trump sequestrou um partido corporativo, que dificilmente parecia um veículo para a revolta proletária, e fez exatamente isso. Aqueles de nós que condescendem com Trump devem ter humildade — ele fez algo que nenhum de nós poderia fazer.

 

Mas estamos entrando em um período de corredeiras. Trump é um semeador de caos, não de fascismo. Nos próximos anos, uma praga de desordem descerá sobre a América, e talvez o mundo, sacudindo tudo. Se você odeia polarização, espere até experimentarmos a desordem global. Mas no caos há oportunidade para uma nova sociedade e uma nova resposta ao ataque político, econômico e psicológico de Trump. Estes são os tempos que testam as almas das pessoas, e veremos do que somos feitos.

  

Os EUA estão ficando latino-americanizados? - David Brooks (NYT)

 Não me digam!

Depois de um século e meio de avanços espetaculares à frente dos atrasados hermanos hemisféricos south of Rio Grande, os EUA estariam, incrivelmente, ficando mais “latino-americanos”, na desigualdade social, na corrupção política, na violência policial e na deterioração geral das condições de vida?

Até onde vai esse declínio?

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Joe Biden Is Succeeding [???]

David Brooks

The New York Times, 20.11.2021

Joe Biden came to the White House at a pivotal moment in American history. We had become a country dividing into two nations, one highly educated and affluent and the other left behind. The economic gaps further inflamed cultural and social gaps, creating an atmosphere of intense polarization, cultural hostility, alienation, bitterness and resentment.

As president, Biden had mostly economic levers to try to bridge this cold civil war. He championed three gigantic pieces of legislation to create a more equal, more just and more united society: the Covid stimulus bill, the infrastructure bill and what became Build Back Better, to invest in human infrastructure.

All of these bills were written to funnel money to the parts of the country that were less educated, less affluent, left behind. Adam Hersh, a visiting economist at the Economic Policy Institute, projects that more than 80 percent of the new jobs created by the infrastructure plan will not require a college degree.

These gigantic proposals were bold endeavors. Some thought them too bold. Economist Larry Summers thought the stimulus package, for example, was too big. It could overstimulate the economy and lead to inflation.

Larry is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known and someone I really admire. If I were an economist, I might have agreed with him. But I’m a journalist with a sociological bent. For over a decade I have been covering a country that was economically, socially and morally coming apart. I figured one way to reverse that was to turbocharge the economy and create white-hot labor markets that would lift wages at the bottom. If inflation was a byproduct, so be it. The trade-off is worth it to prevent a national rupture.

The Biden $1.9 trillion stimulus package passed and has been tremendously successful. It heated the overall economy. The Conference Board projects that real G.D.P. growth will be about 5 percent this quarter. The unemployment rate is falling. Retail sales are surging. About two-thirds of Americans feel their household’s financial situation is good.

But the best part is that the benefits are flowing to those down the educational and income ladder. In just the first month of payments, the expanded Child Tax Credit piece of the stimulus bill kept three million American children out of poverty. Pay for hourly workers in the leisure and hospitality sector jumped 13 percent in August compared with the previous year. By June, there were more nonfarm job openings than there had been at any time in American history. Workers have tremendous power these days.

The infrastructure bill Biden just signed will boost American productivity for years to come. As Ellen Zentner of Morgan Stanley told The Economist recently, it’s a rule of thumb that an extra $100 billion in annual infrastructure spending could increase growth by roughly a tenth of a percentage point — which is significant in an economy the size of ours. Federal infrastructure spending will be almost as large a share of annual GDP as the average level during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

But Summers was right. The stimulus — along with all the supply chain and labor shortage disruptions that are inevitable when coming out of a pandemic — has boosted inflation. In addition, Americans are exhausted by a pandemic that seems to never end.

And they are taking it out on Democrats. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll revealed that voters now prefer Republican congressional candidates in their own districts by 51 percent to 41 percent. That’s the largest G.O.P. lead since this poll started asking the question, 40 years ago.

If presidencies were judged by short-term popularity, the Biden effort would look pretty bad. But that’s a terrible measure. First-term presidents almost always see their party get hammered in the midterm after their inauguration. That’s especially true if the president achieved big things. Michigan State political scientist Matt Grossmann looked at House popular vote trends since 1953. Often when presidents succeeded in passing major legislation — Republicans as well as Democrats — voters swung against the president’s party. Look, just to take a recent example, at how Obamacare preceded a Democratic shellacking in 2010. People distrust change. Success mobilizes opposition. It’s often only in retrospect that these policies become popular and even sacred.

Presidents are judged by history, not the distraction and exhaustion of the moment. Did the person in the Oval Office address the core problem of the moment? The Biden administration passes that test. Sure, there have been failures — the shameful Afghanistan withdrawal, failing to renounce the excesses of the cultural left. But this administration will be judged by whether it reduced inequality, spread opportunity, created the material basis for greater national unity.

It is doing that.

My fear is not that Democrats lose the midterms — it will have totally been worth it. My fear is that Democrats in Congress will make fantastic policies like the expanded Child Tax Credit temporary to make budget numbers look good. If they do that the coming Republican majorities will simply let these policies expire.

If that happens then all this will have been in vain. The Democrats will have squandered what has truly been a set of historic accomplishments. Voters may judge Democrats harshly next November, but if they act with strength history will judge them well.

Really Good Books, Part II - David Brooks (NYT)

Ver a primeira parte neste link: http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2014/05/really-good-books-part-i-david-brooks_23.html

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Really Good Books, Part II

The New York Times, May 26, 2014

David Brooks

On Friday, I offered some of my favorite books, as possibilities for summer reading. The books of Part Two come in two baskets, which we’ll call Athens and Jerusalem. The Athens books fire external ambition; the Jerusalem books focus on the inner spirit.

We’ll start the Athens basket with “The Peloponnesian War,” by Thucydides. In Homer, we see characters who are driven by a competitive desire to be excellent at something, to display their prowess and win eternal fame. This ambition drives Homeric heroes to excellence, but it also makes them narcissistic, touchy and prone to cycles of anger and revenge.

Through the figure of Pericles, Thucydides shows us how to live a life of civilized ambition, in which individual achievement is fused with patriotic service. He also reminds us that in politics the lows are lower than the highs are high. That is, when politicians mess up, the size of the damage they cause is larger than the size of the benefit they create when they do well.

Some of my favorite biographies are about people who followed the Periclean mold and dedicated themselves to public service: Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton; Edmund Morris’s series on Theodore Roosevelt; Winston Churchill’s endearing “My Early Life.”

These books arouse energy and aspiration. They have the risk-embracing spirit found in W.H. Auden’s famous poem, “Leap Before You Look,” which opens:

“The sense of danger must not disappear:

The way is certainly both short and steep,

However gradual it looks from here;

Look if you like, but you will have to leap.”

And ends this way:

“A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep

Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:

Although I love you, you will have to leap;

Our dream of safety has to disappear.”

The books in the Jerusalem basket interrogate worldly ambition and encourage righteousness. Of all the authors I’ve read, the one with the most capacious mind is Augustine — for his understanding of human psychology, his sonorous emotions and his intellectual rigor.

“The Confessions” is a religious book, but it can also be read as a memoir of an ambitious young man who came to realize how perverse life can be when it is dedicated to fulfilling the self’s own desires. “I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me,” Augustine wrote. “I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love, and from the very depth of my need hated myself.” Gradually, he orders his love, putting the higher loves above lower ones, and surrendering to God’s ultimate love. He also reconciles with his mother, Monica, the ultimate helicopter mom.

Toward the end of Monica’s life, mother and son sit sweetly in a garden, their conversation rising to higher things. There is a long beautiful sentence, which is hard to parse, but which conveys the spirit of elevation. It repeats the word “hushed.” The tumult of the flesh is hushed. The waters and the air are hushed, and “by not thinking on self surmount self.” Even Augustine’s voracious ambition is hushed in this surrender.

For Jewish takes on inner elevation, I’d recommend “The Lonely Man of Faith” by Joseph Soloveitchik and “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. For Christians, you can’t go wrong with Dorothy Day’s “The Long Loneliness,” or Sheldon Vanauken’s “A Severe Mercy,” which you should not read on airplanes, because you will cry.

Let’s end the inner-life basket with two books on love. Scott Spencer’s “Endless Love” is about youthful passion. It opens this way: “When I was 17 and in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time ruined everything I loved. ...”

For mature love, we have to turn to George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.” It took me six runs to get into this book, because I was unready for it, but, in middle age, it is hard not to be awed by her characterizations. Some samples:

“She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was.”

“We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.”

“His soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.”

I suppose at the end of these bookish columns, I should tell you what I think books can’t do. They can’t carve your convictions about the world. Only life can do that — only relationships, struggle, love, play and work. Books can give you vocabularies and frameworks to help you understand and decide, but life provides exactly the education you need.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 27, 2014, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Really Good Books, Part II.

Really Good Books, Part I - David Brooks

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST

Really Good Books, Part I

MAY 22, 2014

David Brooks

People are always asking me what my favorite books are. I’ve held off listing them because it seems self-indulgent. But, with summer almost here, I thought I might spend a couple columns recommending eight books that have been pivotal in my life.

“A Collection of Essays,” by George Orwell. If you want to learn how to write, the best way to start is by imitating C.S. Lewis and George Orwell. These two Englishmen, born five years apart, never used a pompous word if a short and plain one would do. Orwell was a master of the welcoming first sentence. He wrote an essay called “England Your England” while sheltering from German bombs during World War II. Here is his opening: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

Here’s the first sentence of his essay on Gandhi: “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases.”

Here’s how he opened an essay on his schoolboy days, “Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into the routine of school life) I began wetting my bed.”

There’s a disarming rhythm to each of those sentences; reality is odd, and it takes a few shimmies to get it right. Orwell was famous for sticking close to reality, for facing unpleasant facts, for describing ideas not ideologically but as they actually played out in concrete circumstances. Imperialism wasn’t an idea; it was a lone official haplessly shooting an elephant.

His other lesson for writers, even opinion writers, is that it’s a mistake to think you are an activist, championing some movement. That’s the path to mental stagnation. The job is just to try to understand what’s going on.

“Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy. This is a novel about characters who are not quite in control of themselves. Kitty goes to the ball in a perfect dress. Even the strip of velvet around her neck fits just so. She is swept up in a sort of ecstasy of movement until a glance at the man she thinks is her beau crushes her in an instant.

Levin falls in love in a way he didn’t plan. He experiences unexpected transcendence cutting grass, of all things. He cannot account for his own happiness, which is in excess of what he deserves, and still has to hide the noose at dark moments for fear he might use it.

Anna is a magnetic person propelled by a love that is ardent and unexpected but also headlong and unpredictable. She’s ultimately unable to surmount the consequences of her actions or even live with the moral injuries she causes. Was Anna right to follow her heart? Should she have settled for a mediocre life in line with convention? This is a foxlike love story, with many angles, which does not lead to easy answers.

“Rationalism in Politics” by Michael Oakeshott. This essay dismantles a common form of contemporary hubris — the belief that it is possible to solve political problems as if they were engineering problems, with rational planning. Oakeshott distinguishes between technical knowledge and practical knowledge. Technical knowledge is the sort of information that can be put in a recipe in a cookbook. Practical knowledge is the rest of what the master chef actually knows: the habits, skills, intuitions and traditions of the craft. Practical knowledge exists only in use; it can be imparted but not taught. Technocrats and ideologues possess abstract technical knowledge and think that is all there is. Their prefab plans come apart because they simplify reality, and don’t understand how society works and the rest of what we know.

“All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren. This is nominally a novel about Huey Long. But it is also a novel about irony, the way good can come from bad, and bad can come from good, the way people march into public life imagining they are white lambs only to be turned into guilty goats. The main characters are tainted and mottled, part admirable, part noxious. The book asks if in politics you have to sell your soul in order to have the power to serve the poor.

It’s written in an elegiac tone that I’m a sucker for. “The Great Gatsby,” “Brideshead Revisited” and Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier” are also written in this tone. The narrator of “All the King’s Men” has to lose his innocence to understand the multiplicity and sadness of the truth.

Most of today’s books are about limitation — about being propelled by passions we can’t control into a complex world we can’t understand. For Tuesday, I’ll find some books that are more self-assured.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 23, 2014, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Really Good Books, Part I.