Nobody Can Screw Up A Good Idea Like David Brooks

David Brooks, the NYT's token "conservative" columnist takes on Charles Murray's new book Coming Apart in his Jan. 31 column. He predictably oversimplifies and misinterprets Murray's work, but he really craps on it in the penultimate paragraph, where he gives into the predictable leftist impulse for totalitarian social planning:

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

Right, Brooks, because the poor proles can't possibly get their lives together without being forced to by government bureaucrats smart coastal elites like you. What could go wrong? I can tell you, out here in rural southeast Ohio, we tell each other nearly every day "If only we had some New York City slickers to come out here and tell us how to live!"

Please, Brooks, take a trip out here. I don't imagine you're good for much real work, but I've got a farm with miles of fence that always need clearing and repairing, hay to haul, livestock to tend to, horses to train. I'm willing to put a shovel in your hand and let you try ... or wasn't that the kind of "example" you were hoping to set?

Brooks focuses on Murray's bottom 30% as the troubled demographic and uses it to assert that the traditional American "salt of the earth" type is a myth:

Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

 I think if you look at the demographic that makes up that bottom 30% what you'll find that the majority is not traditional, heartland Americans. The traditional heartland American resides largely in the middle 50% that Brooks never even mentions in his column. Furthermore, the plight and lifestyle of the rural poor is quite a bit different than that of the urban poor. Also, the demographics are skewed somewhat by cost of living differences and lifestyle choices. Successful elites in Silicon Valley , D.C. or Manhattan would regard my income as nothing special. And it isn't, in their areas. But, by the same token, an executive at my company recently paid more than $700k for a modest house in on a small suburban lot. Meanwhile, I live like a comparative king out here in rural southeast Ohio on enough land to hold his whole subdivision, for a fraction of that purchase price. You don't need to earn the incomes that the top 20% do to live very comfortably out here and the coastal elites don't really have a good understanding of the extent of that disparity.