Provably false

In an op-ed that I liked for a moment but am coming to thing is muddled and meandering, David Brooks offers this advice to the presidential candidates:

don’t expect people to cast votes according to their income. Democrats do as well among top earners as Republicans.

I mean, unless he's looking at some incredibly narrow sliver of the income spectrum up around $10 million a year, isn't this just provably false?

If you read it, you'll see why he's stuck asserting something like this. He starts with the I think true assertion that people's happiness in their personal lives is quite significantly at odds with their sense of dread about the larger state of the country and the world. What they want, he posits, is a government that doesn't intrude on that personal happiness but that is able, somehow, to address the problems at the root of that dread. In this view, most Americans care little about money, just as long as the government is quietly at work addressing the sources of our national anxiety and leaving us all alone. "People are more interested in repairing the nation’s health than in boosting their personal bottom line."

What he's suggesting is in some sense impossible. It's not unthinkable that a good president, at the helm of a good government and a reasonably friendly Congress could make some pretty significant strides towards addressing the macro issues of the day and do so with minimal interference in peoples' lives. But it would be difficult. And indeed, part of the problem here is that Brooks isn't specific enough about the sort of interference America loathes. Is it taxes? Is it decency laws? Is it fear of health reform or urbanization? He doesn't say, and frankly, I don't think there's a right answer, or that he knows it if there is.

But either way, I think what Brooks really means, whether he realizes it or not, is that there's a widespread cognitive dissonance across the country--people want problems solved without any personal sacrifice or investment in solving those problems. How nice that would be! But also, I'm afraid, not terribly feasibly.

So what kind of leader can pull this off? Here he suggests: "don’t try to be inspiring or rely on the pure power of authenticity," Brooks writes. "In these cynical days, voters are not interested in uplift." Cough, Barack Obama, cough! This may be true, or it may not. But as far as getting the job done goes, it's tough, at least for me, to imagine an America in which our national turmoil is calmed without a president who's able to unite the very people concerned by that turmoil with an uplifting sense of national purpose.