David Brooks making sense?

Pundit Under Protest - NYTimes.com

This is the first time I've ever commented on a David Brooks op-ed. He is usually way to establishment and hoi falloi for my taste. His defense of the wall street elite and the condescending manner and tone of his writing has just never done anything for me. I usually simply read about him or what other commentators think of his writing.

That being said, this article bears some notice. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that our political system is limping along, barely functional. His comments about both Republicans and Democrats make some sense, though in the Dems case grossly over simplified. I don't think you can say that when one party is regressively dedicated to the perverse pursuit of the new gilded age of wealth for the few and will bring down an entire economy to achieve their ends that all the other party can propose is the preservation of medicare. It just doesn't work that way. When one party's only goal is to make things intentionally so bad that the only relief possible is to put them back in power, the political equation is hopelessly out of balance.

Mentally, they (Democrats) are living in the era of affluence, but, actually, they are living in the era of austerity. They still have these grand spending ideas, but there is no longer any money to pay for them and there won’t be for decades. Democrats dream New Deal dreams, propose nothing and try to win elections by making sure nobody ever touches Medicare.

We don't live in an age of austerity. We live in an age of wealth beyond any one's imagination. The money is in the hands of the corporate raiders of the middle class. The purveyors of the global economy chasing wealth outside our borders. It's not cost effective to continue the American Dream for the less fortunate. They are cast aside as the moneyed interests of the corporate elite pursue ever higher profit margins.

A better analysis of the current doomed political atmosphere we are currently plodding through would be then, to lay the blame on the corporatism that pervades both parties. The insidious infestation of corporate money and influence, openly courted by the GOP and only a little less so by the Dems has pretty much thrown much of Mr. Brooks four shopping baskets under the bus. Mr. Brooks may be covering the coming political campaign under protest, but he'll cover it along with the rest of the corporatist media. It is refreshing though, to read from one of the most establishment, corporatist writers out there, his own admission of the futility of his job. Proposing any programs that might actually help the nation get past the current collective depression is an exercise in fantasy writing. He knows his ideas will be discarded out of hand. Yet he plods on...

More work to do....