The Retreat to Tribalism -- David Brooks

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/opinion/the-retreat-to-tribalism.html?emc=edit_th_20180102&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=59914923

JAN. 1, 2018

Imagine three kids running around a maypole, forming a chain with their arms. The innermost kid is holding the pole with one hand. The faster they run, the more centrifugal force there is tearing the chain apart. The tighter they grip, the more centripetal force there is holding the chain together. Eventually centrifugal force exceeds centripetal force and the chain breaks.

That’s essentially what is happening in this country, N.Y.U.’s Jonathan Haidt argued in a lecture delivered to the Manhattan Institute in November. He listed some of the reasons centrifugal forces may now exceed centripetal: the loss of the common enemies we had in World War II and the Cold War, an increasingly fragmented media, the radicalization of the Republican Party, and a new form of identity politics, especially on campus.

Haidt made the interesting point that identity politics per se is not the problem. Identity politics is just political mobilization around group characteristics. The problem is that identity politics has dropped its centripetal elements and become entirely centrifugal.

Martin Luther King described segregation and injustice as forces tearing us apart. He appealed to universal principles and our common humanity as ways to heal prejudice and unite the nation. He appealed to common religious principles, the creed of our founding fathers and a common language of love to drive out prejudice. King “framed our greatest moral failing as an opportunity for centripetal redemption,” Haidt observed.

From an identity politics that emphasized our common humanity, we’ve gone to an identity politics that emphasizes having a common enemy. On campus these days, current events are often depicted as pure power struggles — oppressors acting to preserve their privilege over the virtuous oppressed.

“A funny thing happens,” Haidt said, “when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side in each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose.”

The problem is that tribal common-enemy thinking tears a diverse nation apart.

This pattern is not just on campus. Look at the negative polarization that marks our politics. Parties, too, are no longer bound together by creeds but by enemies.

In 1994, only 16 percent of Democrats had a “very unfavorable” view of the G.O.P. Now, 38 percent do. Then, only 17 percent of Republicans had a “very unfavorable” view of Democrats. Now, 43 percent do. When the Pew Research Center asked Democrats and Republicans to talk about each other, they tended to use the same words: closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, lazy, unintelligent.

Furthermore, it won’t be easy to go back to the common-humanity form of politics. King was operating when there was high social trust. He could draw on a biblical metaphysic debated over 3,000 years. He could draw on an American civil religion that had been refined over 300 years.

Over the past two generations, however, excessive individualism and bad schooling have corroded both of those sources of cohesion.

In 1995, the French intellectual Pascal Bruckner published “The Temptation of Innocence,” in which he argued that excessive individualism paradoxically leads to in-group/out-group tribalism. Modern individualism releases each person from social obligation, but “being guided only by the lantern of his own understanding, the individual loses all assurance of a place, an order, a definition. He may have gained freedom, but he has lost security.”

In societies like ours, individuals are responsible for their own identity, happiness and success. “Everyone must sell himself as a person in order to be accepted,” Bruckner wrote. We all are constantly comparing ourselves to others and, of course, coming up short. The biggest anxiety is moral. We each have to write our own gospel that defines our own virtue.

The easiest way to do that is to tell a tribal oppressor/oppressed story and build your own innocence on your status as victim. Just about everybody can find a personal victim story. Once you’ve identified your herd’s oppressor — the neoliberal order, the media elite, white males, whatever — your goodness is secure. You have virtue without obligation. Nothing is your fault.

“What is moral order today? Not so much the reign of right-thinking people as that of right-suffering, the cult of everyday despair,” Bruckner continued. “I suffer, therefore I am worthy. … Suffering is analogous to baptism, a dubbing that inducts us into the order of a higher humanity, hoisting us above our peers.”

Haidt and Bruckner are very different writers, with different philosophies. But they both point to the fact that we’ve regressed from a sophisticated moral ethos to a primitive one. The crooked timber school of humanity says the line between good and evil runs through each person and we fight injustice on the basis of our common humanity. The oppressor/oppressed morality says the line runs between tribes. That makes it easy to feel good about yourself. But it makes you very hard to live with.

The View From Trump Tower - David Brooks, Nov. 11, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/opinion/the-view-from-trump-tower.html

The View From Trump Tower

David Brooks Nov. 11, 2016

If your social circles are like mine, you spent Tuesday night swapping miserable texts. Not all, but many of my friends and family members were outraged, stunned, disgusted and devastated. This is victory for white supremacy, people wrote, for misogyny, nativism and authoritarianism. Fascism is descending.

I was on PBS trying to make sense of what was happening while trying to text various people off the ledge. At one point I was opining about the results while a disbelieving text flashed across my phone: “Change It! Change It! CHAAAANGE IT!”

Those emotional reactions were a fitting first-night response to the greatest political shock of our lifetimes. Still, this is probably not the best mentality for the coming era.

In the first place, emotions like disgust don’t do justice to the complexity of Donald Trump’s supporters. The disgusted posture risks turning politics into a Manichaean civil war between the alleged children of light and the alleged children of darkness — between us enlightened, college-educated tolerant people and the supposed primitive horde driven by dark fears and prejudices. That crude and ignorant condescension is what feeds the Trump phenomenon in the first place.

Second, we simply don’t yet know how much racism or misogyny motivated Trump voters. It is true that those voters are willing to tolerate a lot more bigotry in their candidate than I’d be willing to tolerate. But if you were stuck in a jobless town, watching your friends OD on opiates, scrambling every month to pay the electric bill, and then along came a guy who seemed able to fix your problems and hear your voice, maybe you would stomach some ugliness, too.

Third, outrage and disgust impede learning. This century is still being formed and none of us understand it yet. The century really began on 9/11, and so far it has been marked by strong reactions against globalism and cosmopolitanism — by terrorism, tribalism and authoritarianism.

Populism of the Trump/Le Pen/Brexit variety has always been a warning sign, a warning sign that there is some deeper dysfunction in our economic, social and cultural systems. If you want to take that warning sign and dismiss it as simple bigotry, you’re never going to pause to understand what’s going on and you will never know how to constructively respond.

Finally, it seems important to be humbled and taught by this horrific election result. Trump’s main problem in governing is not going to be some fascistic ideology; his main problem is going to be his own attention span, ignorance and incompetence. If he’s left to bloviate while others are left to run the country and push through infrastructure plans, maybe things won’t be disastrous.

The job for the rest of us is to rebind the fabric of society, community by community, and to construct a political movement for the post-Trump era. I suspect the coming political movements will be identified on two axes: open and closed and individual and social.

Those who believe in open trade, relatively open immigration, an active foreign policy and racial integration. Those who believe in closed believe in protective trade, closed borders, a withdrawn foreign policy and ethnic separatism.

Those who favor individual believe in individual initiative, designing programs to incentivize enterprise and removing regulatory barriers. Those who believe in social believe that social mobility happens within rich communities — that people can undertake daring adventures when they have a secure social and emotional base.

Donald Trump is probably going to make the G.O.P. the party of individual/closed. He’s going to start with the traditional Republican agenda of getting government out of the way, and he’s going to add walls, protectionism and xenophobia. That will leave people isolated in the face of the challenges of the information age economy, and it will close off the dynamism and diversity that always marked this crossroads of the nation.

The Democrats are probably going to be the party of social/closed. The coming Sanders-Warren party will advocate proposals that help communities with early education programs and the like, but that party will close off trade, withdraw from the world, close off integration with hyper-race-conscious categories and close off debate with political correctness.

Which is why I’ve been thinking we need a third party that is social/open. This compassionate globalist party would support the free trade and skilled immigration that fuel growth. But it would also flood the zone for those challenged in the high-skill global economy — offering programs to rebuild community, foster economic security and boost mobility. It would integrate the white working class and minority groups by emphasizing that we are all part of a single American idea.

Trump’s bigotry, dishonesty and promise-breaking will have to be denounced. We can’t go morally numb. But he needs to be replaced with a program that addresses the problems that fueled his ascent.

After all, the guy will probably resign or be impeached within a year. The future is closer than you think.

The Biden Formation Story- David Brooks

The Biden Formation Story

David Brooks SEPT. 15, 2015

Last month I wrote that Joe Biden should not run for president this year. The electorate is in an anti-establishment mood, and as a longtime insider, Biden, I argued, would suffer from the same disadvantages Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are now enduring, without any of their advantages. It would end badly.

But then came Biden’s moment with Stephen Colbert. His discussion of his own grief over his son Beau’s death was beautiful and genuine and revealed the golden heart that everybody knows is at the core of the man.

Biden talked about Beau. “My son was better than me. And he was better than me in almost every way.” He gestured toward how fluid grief is, how it goes round and round, hides for a few hours and then suddenly overwhelms. But there was something else embedded in that Colbert moment: a formation story.

Every presidential candidate needs a narrative to explain how his or her character was formed. They need a story line that begins outside of politics with some experience or life-defining crucible moment that then defines the nature of their public service.

Candidates like John F. Kennedy and John McCain were formed by war. Candidates like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were formed by their rise from broken homes and their dedication to lift others and heal divisions. Without a clear formation story, a candidate is just a hodgepodge of positions and logos.

Democrats this year are looking for a formation story that proves commitment. This is a party that is moving boldly leftward. Its voters want to know their candidate has the inner drive to push through structural changes, not just half measures.

Bernie Sanders has such a story. From his days at the University of Chicago onward, he has been a pile driver for progressive causes, regardless of the prevailing winds. Hillary Clinton hasn’t yet presented a clear formation story. She talks about being a grandmother, which humanizes her, but doesn’t explain how she got to be the person she is.

With Colbert, one saw the kernel of a Biden formation story that could connect not only with Democratic voters but with other voters as well. It is a story of dual loss: his wife and daughter decades ago and his son this year. Out of that loss comes a great empathy, a connection to those who are suffering in this economy and this world. Out of that loss comes a hypercharged sense of mission. Out of that loss comes a liberation from the fear of failure that dogs most politicians, and causes them to dodge, prevaricate and spin.

People who have suffered a loss often want to connect their tragedy to some larger redemptive mission. Biden could plausibly and genuinely emerge sadder but more empathetic and more driven. That would be not only a natural reaction, but also the basis for a compelling campaign. Biden would then benefit from the greater verbal self-discipline he has developed while vice president and from the fact that this year, as Donald Trump proves, voters seem tolerant of free-talkers.

Democratic voters aren’t the only ones looking for a strong formation story. Republicans are looking for one, too, but the nature of the Republican race is different. If Democrats are arguing over what positions to fight for, Republicans are arguing about how to fight.

Republican presidential candidates have found that the strongest way to win favor on the stump is to attack the leaders of their party in Congress for being timid and inept. Many Republican voters are alienated from their party’s leadership. They’re looking for a candidate who can lead a mutiny.

Donald Trump’s mutiny story is pretty clear. In doing business deal after business deal, he mastered the skills needed to take on the morons who are now running the party and the world. Ben Carson’s story is clear, too. Through his faith and through his medical career he developed the purity of heart and the discipline of will required to walk into Washington without being corrupted by the rottenness found there.

The Republican desire for a mutiny has kept Trump and Carson aloft longer than most people supposed. I still think they will implode. Their followers need them to be the superheroes they are portraying themselves to be. But politics is hard, especially for beginners, and sooner or later they will flounder and look like they’re in over their heads. At that point it’s all over. At that point, a Bush, Rubio, Kasich or Walker will have an opening to tell a different and more positive story.

On the Democratic side, a Biden run would be more formidable than I thought last month. You need emotion to beat emotion. With Stephen Colbert he revealed a story and suggested a campaign that is moving, compelling and in tune with the moment.

The Big Decisions by David Brooks

Aug 25, 2015

Let's say you had the chance to become a vampire. With one magical bite you would gain immortality, superhuman strength and a life of glamorous intensity. Your friends who have undergone the transformation say the experience is incredible. They drink animal blood, not human blood, and say everything about their new existence provides them with fun, companionship and meaning.

Would you do it? Would you consent to receive the life-altering bite, even knowing that once changed you could never go back?

The difficulty of the choice is that you'd have to use your human self and preferences to try to guess whether you'd enjoy having a vampire self and preferences. Becoming a vampire is transformational. You would literally become a different self. How can you possibly know what it would feel like to be this different version of you or whether you would like it?

In her book "Transformative Experience," L. A. Paul, a philosophy professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says life is filled with decisions that are a bit like this. Life is filled with forks in the road in which you end up changing who you are and what you want.

People who have a child suddenly become different. Joining the military is another transformational experience. So are marrying, changing careers, immigrating, switching religions.

In each of these cases the current you is trying to make an important decision, without having the chance to know what it will feel like to be the future you.

Paul's point is that we're fundamentally ignorant about many of the biggest choices of our lives and that it's not possible to make purely rational decisions. "You shouldn't fool yourself," she writes. "You have no idea what you are getting into."

The decision to have a child is the purest version of this choice. On average, people who have a child suffer a loss of reported well-being. They're more exhausted and report lower life satisfaction. And yet few parents can imagine going back and being their old pre-parental selves. Parents are like self-fulfilled vampires. Their rich new lives would have seemed incomprehensible to their old childless selves.

So how do you make transformational decisions? You have to ask the right questions, Paul argues. Don't ask, Will I like parenting? You can't know. Instead, acknowledge that you, like all people, are born with an intense desire to know. Ask, Do I have a profound desire to discover what it would be like to be this new me, to experience this new mode of living?

As she puts it, "The best response to this situation is to choose based on whether we want to discover who we'll become."

Live life as a series of revelations.

Personally, I think Paul's description of the problem is ingenious but her solution is incomplete. Would you really trust yourself to raise and nurture a child simply on the basis of self-revelation? Curiosity is too thin, relativistic and ephemeral.

I'd say to really make these decisions well you need to step outside the modern conception of ourselves as cognitive creatures who are most sophisticated when we rely on rationality.

The most reliable decision-making guides are more "primitive." We're historical creatures. We have inherited certain life scripts from evolution and culture, and there's often a lot of wisdom in following those life scripts. We're social creatures. Often we undertake big transformational challenges not because it fulfills our desires, but because it is good for our kind.

We're mystical creatures. Often when people make a transformational choice they feel it less as a choice and more as a calling. They feel there was something that destined them to be with this spouse or in that vocation.

Most important, we're moral creatures. When faced with a transformational choice the weakest question may be, What do I desire? Our desires change all the time. The strongest questions may be: Which path will make me a better person? Will joining the military give me more courage? Will becoming a parent make me more capable of selfless love?

Our moral intuitions are more durable than our desires, based on a universal standard of right and wrong. The person who shoots for virtue will more reliably be happy with her new self, and will at least have a nice quality to help her cope with whatever comes.

Which brings us to the core social point. These days we think of a lot of decisions as if they were shopping choices. When we're shopping for something, we act as autonomous creatures who are looking for the product that will produce the most pleasure or utility. But choosing to have a child or selecting a spouse, faith or life course is not like that. It's probably safer to ask "What do I admire?" than "What do I want?"

When Rapists Win - by Brooks, David

Aug 28, 2015

The ISIS atrocities have descended like distant nightmares upon the numbed conscious of the world. The first beheadings of Americans had the power to shock, but since then there has been a steady barrage of inhumanity: mass executions of Christians and others, throwing gay men from rooftops, the destruction of ancient archaeological treasures, the routine use of poison gas.

Even the recent reports in The Times about the Islamic State's highly structured rape program have produced shock but barely a ripple of action.

And yet something bigger is going on. It's as if some secret wormhole into different historical epoch has been discovered and the knowledge of centuries is being unlearned.

This is happening in the moral sphere. State-sponsored slavery seemed like a thing of the past, but now ISIS is an unapologetic slave state. Yazidi women are carefully cataloged, warehoused and bid upon.

The rapes are theocratized. The rapists pray devoutly before and after the act. The religious leader's handbook governing the rape program has a handy Frequently Asked Questions section for the young rapists:

"Question 12: May a man kiss the female slave of another, with the owner's permission?

"A man may not kiss the female slave of another, for kissing [involves] pleasure, and pleasure is prohibited unless [the man] owns [the slave] exclusively.

"Question 13: Is it permissible to have intercourse with a female slave who hasn't reached puberty?

"It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn't reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse; however, if she is not fit for intercourse it is enough to enjoy her without intercourse."

This wasn't supposed to happen in the 21st century. Western experts have stared the thing in the face, trying to figure out the cause and significance of the moral disaster we are witnessing. There was a very fine essay in The New York Review of Books by a veteran Middle East expert who chose to remain anonymous and who more or less threw up his hands.

"The clearest evidence that we do not understand this phenomenon is our consistent inability to predict -- still less control -- these developments," the author writes. Every time we think ISIS has appalled the world and sabotaged itself, it holds its own or gains strength.

Writing in The National Interest, Ross Harrison shows how the ISIS wormhole into a different moral epoch is accompanied by a political wormhole designed to take the Middle East into a different geostrategic epoch. For the past many decades the Middle East has been defined by nation- states and the Arab mind has been influenced by nationalism. But these nation-states have been weakened (Egypt) or destroyed (Iraq and Syria). Nationalism no longer mobilizes popular passion or provides a convincing historical narrative.

ISIS has arisen, Harrison argues, to bury nationalism and to destroy the Arab nation-state.

"It is tapping into a belief that the pre-nationalist Islamic era represents the glorious halcyon days for the Arab world, while the later era in which secular nationalism flourished was one of decline and foreign domination," he writes.

ISIS consistently tries to destroy the borders between nation-states. It undermines, confuses or smashes national identities. It eliminates national and pre-caliphate memories.

Meanwhile, it offers a confident vision of the future: a unified caliphate. It fills the vacuum left by decaying nationalist ideologies. As Harrison puts it, "ISIS has cut off almost all pathways to a future other than its self-proclaimed caliphate. The intent is to use this as a wedge with which to expand beyond its base in Iraq and Syria and weaken secular nationalist bonds in Lebanon, Jordan and in even more innately nationalist countries like Egypt."

President Obama has said that ISIS stands for nothing but savagery. That's clearly incorrect. Our military leaders speak of the struggle against ISIS as an attempt to kill as many ISIS leaders and soldiers as possible. But this is a war about a vision of history. ISIS ideas have legitimacy because it controls territory and has a place to enact them.

So far the response to ISIS has been pathetic. The U.S. pledged $500 million to train and equip Syrian moderates, hoping to create 15,000 fighters. After three years we turned out a grand total of 60 fighters, of whom a third were immediately captured.

It's time to stop underestimating this force as some group of self-discrediting madmen. ISIS is a moral and political threat to the fragile and ugly stability that exists in what's left in the Middle East. ISIS will thrive and spread its ideas for as long as it has its land.

We are looking into a future with a resurgent Iran, a contagious ISIS and a collapsing state order. If this isn't a cause for alarm and reappraisal, I don't know what is.

Conflict and Ego

February 6, 2015   DAVID BROOKS

If you read the online versions of newspaper columns you can click over to the reader comments, which are often critical, vituperative and insulting. I've found that I can only deal with these comments by following the adage, ''Love your enemy.''

It's too psychologically damaging to read these comments as evaluations of my intelligence, morals or professional skill. But if I read them with the (possibly delusional) attitude that these are treasured friends bringing me lovely gifts of perspective, then my eye slides over the insults and I can usually learn something. The key is to get the question of my self-worth out of the way -- which is actually possible unless the insulter is really creative.

It's not only newspaper columnists who face this kind of problem. Everybody who is on the Internet is subject to insult, trolling, hating and cruelty. Most of these online assaults are dominance plays. They are attempts by the insulter to assert his or her own superior status through displays of gratuitous cruelty toward a target.

The natural but worst way to respond is to enter into the logic of this status contest. If he puffs himself up, you puff yourself up. But if you do this you put yourself and your own status at center stage. You enter a cycle of keyboard vengeance. You end up with a painfully distended ego, forever in danger, needing to assert itself, and sensitive to sleights.

Clearly, the best way to respond is to step out of the game. It's to get out of the status competition. Enmity is a nasty frame of mind. Pride is painful. The person who can quiet the self can see the world clearly, can learn the subject and master the situation.

Historically, we reserve special admiration for those who can quiet the self even in the heat of conflict. Abraham Lincoln was caught in the middle of a horrific civil war. It would have been natural for him to live with his instincts aflame -- filled with indignation toward those who started the war, enmity toward those who killed his men and who would end up killing him. But his second inaugural is a masterpiece of rising above the natural urge toward animosity and instead adopting an elevated stance.

The terror theater that the Islamic State, or ISIS, is perpetrating these days is certainly in a different category than Internet nastiness. But the beheadings and the monstrous act of human incineration are also insults designed to generate a visceral response.

They are a different kind of play of dominance. They are attempts by insignificant men to get the world to recognize their power and status.

These Islamic State guys burn hostages alive because it wins praise from their colleagues, because it earns attention and because it wins the sort of perverse respect that accompanies fear. We often say that terrorism is an act of war, but that's wrong. Terrorism is an act of taunting. These murderous videos are attempts to make the rest of us feel powerless, at once undone by fear and addled by disgust.

The natural and worst way to respond is with the soul inflamed. If they execute one of our guys, we'll -- as Jordan did -- execute two of their guys. If they chest-thump, we'll chest-thump. If they kill, we'll kill.

This sort of strategy is just an ISIS recruiting tool. It sucks us into their nihilistic status war: Their barbarism and our response.

The world is full of invisible young men yearning to feel significant, who'd love to shock the world and light folks on fire in an epic status contest with the reigning powers.

The best way to respond is to quiet our disgust and quiet our instincts. It is to step out of their game. It is to reassert the primacy of our game. The world's mission in the Middle East is not to defeat ISIS, which is just a barbaric roadblock. It's to reassert the primacy of pluralism, freedom and democracy. It's to tamp down zeal and cultivate self-doubt. The world has to destroy the Islamic State with hard power, but only as a means to that higher moral end.

Many people have lost faith in that democratic mission, but without that mission we're just one more army in a contest of barbarism. Our acts are nothing but volleys in a status war.

In this column, I've tried to describe the interplay of conflict and ego, in arenas that are trivial (the comments section) and in arenas that are monstrous (the war against the Islamic State). In all cases, conflict inflames the ego, distorts it and degrades it.

The people we admire break that chain. They quiet the self and step outside the status war. They focus on the larger mission. They reject the puerile logic of honor codes and status rivalries, and enter a more civilized logic, that doesn't turn us into our enemies.

Rating the Republicans

The New York Times   January 16, 2015    DAVID BROOKS

If the Republican presidential campaign were ''American Idol'' or ''The Voice,'' this would be the out-of-town auditions phase. Governors across the country are giving State of the State addresses, unveiling their visions. Let's spin the chairs and grade the contenders, to see who deserves a shot at the big show.

John Kasich: A. The Ohio governor is easily the most underestimated Republican this year. He just won a landslide victory in the swingiest of the swing states. He carried 86 of Ohio's 88 counties. He won Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, and which President Obama won by 40 points in 2012.

Kasich is the Republican version of Jerry Brown: experienced but undisciplined in an honest, unvarnished way. If he shows he can raise money, and if voters want someone fresh but seasoned and managerial, he might be the guy.

The inaugural address he delivered on Monday was a straight-up values speech. But it wasn't about values the way Pat Robertson used to define them. It was traditional values expressed in inclusive, largely secular form. ''I think the erosion of basic values that made our nation great is the most serious problem facing our state and our nation today,'' he said. ''And I'm not talking about those volatile issues.''

He built his speech around empathy, resilience, responsibility and other virtues: ''You know why this happened? Too fixated on ourselves. It's all about me. And somehow we have lost the beautiful sound of our neighbors' voices. Moving beyond ourselves and trying to share in the experience of others helps us open our minds, allows us to grow as people. It helps us become less self-righteous. Did you ever find that in yourself? I do ... self-righteous.''

Kasich has a long conservative record, but in his speech he celebrated government workers, like the woman who runs his job and family services department. He argued that economic growth is not an end unto itself, especially when it's not widely shared.

Kasich, a working-class kid, spoke as a small government conservative who sometimes uses government to advance Judeo-Christian values. His mantra is, ''When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he's probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small, but he is going to ask you what you did for the poor.''

Chris Christie: A-minus. Bridgegate did some damage, but it clearly wasn't fatal. Whatever can be said about Christie, he grabs attention -- essential in a crowded field.

Like all smart Republicans in the post-Romney era (yes, we're in it), Christie is working hard to prove he understands the everyday concerns of the poor and the middle class. He spent a good chunk of his address describing his efforts to work with the Democratic mayor of Camden to bring in jobs, fight poverty and reduce crime in that city. It was a bipartisan, government-efficiency pitch: ''We terminated the city police department and, partnering with the county, put a new metro division on the streets with 400 officers for the same price we were paying for 260. ... What are the results? Murder down 51 percent, in what was once called the most dangerous city in America.''

As Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post noticed, Christie defined anxiety as America's most daunting problem. He said that as he traveled the country, ''anxiety was the most palpable emotion that I saw and felt. More than anger, more than fear.'' Christie hasn't quite nailed down the nature of that anxiety, or what to do about it, but he's clearly hit on an essential theme for an era of economic growth but dissatisfaction.

Scott Walker and Mike Pence: B-plus. The Wisconsin and Indiana governors are both versions of what used to be called working-class, Sam's Club Republicanism. Walker never graduated from college.

In their State of the State addresses, both boasted about the same sorts of accomplishments: dropping unemployment rates, state surpluses, rising graduation rates, lower taxes. Walker mentioned jobs programs for people with disabilities. Pence, who has devoted more effort to fighting poverty, touted his new pre-K education program. Both have good records, but neither speech had anything that was narratively or thematically innovative or of much interest to people outside their states.

At this stage in the race it's best to evaluate candidates the way you evaluate pitchers during the first week of spring training. Don't think about polls, donor gossip or who has the front-runner label. Ask who makes the catcher's glove pop loudest. Who has the stuff that makes you do a double take?

Among the governors, Kasich and Christie have shown they can take the values of religious conservatives and use them to inform Republican economic and domestic priorities. That's essential if the party is going retain its business and religious base and also reach the struggling and disaffected.

Support Our Students

January 20, 2015, DAVID BROOKS

All college commencements are happy, but community-college commencements are the happiest of all. Many of the graduates are the first in their extended family to have earned degrees. When their name is read, big cheering sections erupt with horns and roars from the stands. Many students are older; you'll see 50- or 60-year-old women grasping their diplomas awash in happy tears. The graduates often know exactly where they're going to work; they walk with an extra sense of security as they head off campus.

These bright days serve as evidence that America can live up to its dream of social mobility, that there is hope at a time when the ladder upward seems creaky and inadequate.

So when President Obama unveils his community-college plan in the State of the Union address Tuesday night, it represents an opportunity -- an opportunity to create days like that for more students.

Obama's headline idea is to make community college free. It would reduce two years of tuition costs to zero for students with decent grades and who graduate within three years.

The evidence from a similar program in Tennessee suggests that the simple free label has an important psychological effect. Enrollment there surged when high school students learned that they could go to community college for nothing.

The problem is that getting students to enroll is neither hard nor important. The important task is to help students graduate. Community college drop out rates now hover somewhere between 66 percent and 80 percent.

Spending $60 billion over 10 years to make community college free will do little to reduce that. In the first place, community college is already free for most poor and working-class students who qualify for Pell grants and other aid. In 2012, 38 percent of community-college students had their tuition covered entirely by grant aid and an additional 33 percent had fees of less than $1,000.

The Obama plan would largely be a subsidy for the middle- and upper-middle-class students who are now paying tuition and who could afford to pay it in the years ahead.

The smart thing to do would be to scrap the Obama tuition plan. Students who go to community college free now have tragically high dropout rates. The $60 billion could then be spent on things that are mentioned in President Obama's proposal -- but not prioritized or fleshed out -- which would actually increase graduation rates.

First, you'd focus on living expenses. Tuition represents only a fifth of the costs of community-college life. The bulk is textbooks, housing, transportation and so on. Students often have to take on full-time or near-full-time jobs to cover the costs, and, once they do that, they're much more likely to lose touch with college.

You'd subsidize guidance counselors and mentors. Community colleges are not sticky places. Many students don't have intimate relationships with anyone who can guide them through the maze of registration, who might help bond them to campus.

You'd figure out the remedial education mess. Half of all community-college students arrive unprepared for college work. Remedial courses are supposed to bring them up to speed, but it's not clear they work, so some states are dropping remediation, which could leave even more students at sea.

 You'd focus on child care. A quarter of college students nationwide have dependent children. Even more students at community colleges do. Less than half of community colleges now have any day-care facilities. Many students drop out because something happens at home and there's no one to take care of the kids.

In short, you wouldn't write government checks for tuition. You'd strengthen structures around the schools. You'd focus on the lived environment of actual students and create relationships and cushions to help them thrive.

We've had two generations of human capital policies. Human Capital 1.0 was designed to give people access to schools and other facilities. It was based on the 1970s liberal orthodoxy that poor people just need more money, that the government could write checks and mobility will improve.

Human Capital 2.0 is designed to help people not just enroll but to complete school and thrive. Its based on a much more sophisticated understanding of how people actually live, on the importance of social capital, on the difficulty of living in disorganized circumstances. The new research emphasizes noncognitive skills -- motivation, grit and attachment -- and how to use policy levers to boost these things.

The tuition piece of the Obama proposal is Human Capital 1.0. It is locked in 1970s liberal orthodoxy. Congress should take the proposal, scrap it and rededicate the money toward programs that will actually boost completion, that will surround colleges, students and their families with supporting structures. We don't need another program that will lure students into colleges only to have them struggle and drop out.

The Child in the Basement By David Brooks

The New York Times

January 13, 2015

Maybe you're familiar with Ursula Le Guin's short story, ''The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.'' It's about a sweet and peaceful city with lovely parks and delightful music.

The people in the city are genuinely happy. They enjoy their handsome buildings and a ''magnificent'' farmers' market.

Le Guin describes a festival day with delicious beer and horse races: ''An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute.''

It is an idyllic, magical place.

But then Le Guin describes one more feature of Omelas. In the basement of one of the buildings, there is a small broom-closet-sized room with a locked door and no windows. A small child is locked inside the room. It looks about 6, but, actually, the child is nearly 10. ''It is feeble minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition and neglect.''

Occasionally, the door opens and people look in. The child used to cry out, ''Please let me out. I will be good!'' But the people never answered and now the child just whimpers. It is terribly thin, lives on a half-bowl of cornmeal a day and must sit in its own excrement.

''They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas,'' Le Guin writes. ''Some of them have come to see it; others are content merely to know it is there. They all know it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children ... depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.''

That is the social contract in Omelas. One child suffers horribly so that the rest can be happy. If the child were let free or comforted, Omelas would be destroyed. Most people feel horrible for the child, and some parents hold their kids tighter, and then they return to their happiness.

But some go to see the child in the room and then keep walking. They don't want to be part of that social contract. ''They leave Omelas; they walk ahead into the darkness and they do not come back.''

In one reading this is a parable about exploitation. According to this reading, many of us live in societies whose prosperity depends on some faraway child in the basement. When we buy a cellphone or a piece of cheap clothing, there is some exploited worker -- a child in the basement. We tolerate exploitation, telling each other that their misery is necessary for overall affluence, though maybe it's not.

In another reading, the story is a challenge to the utilitarian mind-set so prevalent today.

In theory, most of us subscribe to a set of values based on the idea that a human being is an end not a means. You can't justifiably use a human being as an object. It is wrong to enslave a person, even if that slavery might produce a large good. It is wrong to kill a person for his organs, even if many lives might be saved.

And yet we don't actually live according to that moral imperative. Life is filled with tragic trade-offs. In many different venues, the suffering of the few is justified by those trying to deliver the greatest good for the greatest number.

Companies succeed because they fire people, even if a whole family depends on them. Schools become prestigious because they reject people -- even if they put a lifetime of work into their application. Leaders fighting a war on terror accidentally kill innocents. These are children in the basement of our survival and happiness.

The story compels readers to ask if they are willing to live according to those contracts. Some are not. They walk away from prosperity, and they make some radical commitment. They would rather work toward some inner purity.

The rest of us live with the trade-offs. The story reminds us of the inner numbing this creates. The people who stay in Omelas aren't bad; they just find it easier and easier to live with the misery they depend upon. I've found that this story rivets people because it confronts them with all the tragic compromises built into modern life -- all the children in the basements -- and, at the same time, it elicits some desire to struggle against bland acceptance of it all.

In another reading, the whole city of Omelas is just different pieces of one person's psychology, a person living in the busy modern world, and that person's idealism and moral sensitivity is the shriveling child locked in the basement.