The journalists, columnists, editors, and one blogger (also along for the ride was the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal, and Cynthia Tucker from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) lunched with Obama, David Axelrod, Anita Dunn, Bill Burton, and Robert Gibbs. It was, of course, off the record, so stop emailing Gail about it already Maureen jeez!

Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo brand new to the official White House press pool, so now Marshall gets to hang out with the grown-up journalists (and David Brooks).

Considering his conservative leanings, it should come as no surprise to hear that Brooks disagrees with Carter. Tea baggers can't be racist, because Brooks himself saw them talking to black people during last weekend's protest. That's proof.

No, Barack Obama's health care opponents aren't fueled by racism. They're simply continuing — um —the age old Jefferson v. Hamilton debate.

...My impression is that race is largely beside the point. There are other, equally important strains in American history that are far more germane to the current conflicts.

For example, for generations schoolchildren studied the long debate between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. Hamiltonians stood for urbanism, industrialism and federal power. Jeffersonians were suspicious of urban elites and financial concentration and believed in small-town virtues and limited government.

So, the Jeffersonians begot the Jacksonians, who hated "the fusion of federal and financial power" and "cosmopolitan elites." Those elites are now sitting pretty within Obama's administration. Or that's how Brooks paints the President's administration "movement:"

Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.

The "left" probably wouldn't be too thrilled by the fact that Brooks readily dismisses the racism argument. Nor would they appreciate the confusing fact that Brooks equates Huey Long, who advocated wealth distribution, and Hitler-sympathizer and anti-Communist priest Charles Coughlin. (Not to mention a subtle attempt to characterize Obama's team as inhabitants of an Ivory Tower looking to "fuse" control.)

Yes, liberals would have a field day in the comments section. But, so too would the right.

According to Brooks, the ongoing debate's a perfectly natural "populist backlash" against Obama's government takeover. These protests are the American way, regardless of one's political leanings.

This populist tendency continued through the centuries. Sometimes it took right-wing forms, sometimes left-wing ones. Sometimes it was agrarian. Sometimes it was more union-oriented. Often it was extreme, conspiratorial and rude.

The populist tendency has always used the same sort of rhetoric: for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers.

Even though Brooks does kind of make sense, the angry wing-nuts will go ape shit over being linked, however tenuously, to their left-leaning rivals. The lefties, you see, are against the rich, while the right's against big government. There's absolutely no relation.

By both dismissing racism and claiming the right's like the left — even in terms of hyperbolic media — his comments section would have become the ultimate ideological battle field. And it's there that both sides could realize their common confusion and call the whole thing off. See? Comment prohibition hurts America.

See, there's been this recession, lately, and it has kinda fucked over a lot of people, around the country. Hit particularly hard: state governments, many of which are facing massive budget shortfalls. The worst state of all is California, which is just basically going to cease to exist in a month or two.

Mr. Douthat notices (or rather he noticed suburban sprawl advocate and anti-rail city scholar Joel Kotkin noticing) that many of the hardest hit states are "blue" states! The entire argument, basically, is that California is blowing up, and Texas is fine, and so therefore Democrats can't govern.

Of course, California (which has, we thought, a Republican governor?) is in so much trouble because they have no property taxes to speak of (the tax having been capped at an absurdly low rate back in 1978) (taxes might've harmed the robust and never-ending growth of their vibrant real estate sector!) and, last we checked, Texas was facing a $750 million shortfall in their unemployment fund until their governor was "forced" to accept something called "stimulus" money from the federal government (money that a majority of governors would like to receive more of!), and finally the entire existence of the deep red deeply fucked Deep South is sort of glossed over, but the fact that his argument is so specious is not even the point. The point is that Bill Kristol could've written something this tossed-off and stupid (though Kristol would not have diplomatically noted that "clearly part of the blame for the current crisis rests with decisions made in George W. Bush's Washington").

He is talking about how Senators are lonely, and desperate for love, or something.

You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don't know about you guys, but in my view, they're all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They're guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

And some people are like, "who is he talking about? Lindsey Graham? Mitch McConnell?" And other people are like he is such a sexist because he is freaked out by sexual harassment and that happens to ladies all the time and he doesn't care!

But, yeah, it really just seems like a really lame attempt at a gay panic joke of the sort that old straight dudes always think are funny. "One of those queers touched me once, it was gross!" And the fact that "Republican senator" can basically stand in for "one of those queers," in that joke, as made by a conservative columnist, is proof of how far we have come, as a nation.

So, um, yeah, earlier this week David Brooks waxed Gladwellian while filling in for Bob Herbert with a column breathlessly headlined "End of Philosophy." But it was more about "Reassessing Morality." Or as he phrases "moral thinking." Whatever. He's quick to point out sometimes we just, like, blink, and make snap judgments:

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don't have to decide if it's disgusting. You just know.

Yessir, kind of like when you smell hot-ass bullshit in a column. You just know! But we digress. The Blink camouflage is just cover for his main point on our new moral sensibility:

What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there's an increasing appreciation that evolution isn't just about competition. It's also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats.

Oh, kind of like Gawker commenters and Jimmy Fallon? Word, I got you. Cooperation. So in sum, David is letting us know that Morality 3.101 is all about a blend of rational and emotional processing. And remaining open to this emotional side engenders a "warmer view of human nature" that is "nice" and suffices as a handy explanation for the "haphazard way we live our lives," dude. Awesome.

As a former bullshit artist philosophy major, my moral impulse is to look squinty-eyed in Mr. Brooks general direction, but I'm persuaded by his message of hope and cooperation. Unfortunately, it's all too much to fit in a Twitter. So now what do we do?

Well, I've long been a fan of NY Mag's Approval Matrix, and think it's an approach that can be translated for effectiveness beyond the approval of a niche agazine. For example, I once sent Gawker a Melanin Matrix to help determine cultural cachet.

Now, inspired by the Brooks column and the spirit of camaraderie, we've come up with a scatter-graph of recent news to give us some sense of perspective on this new Morality Matrix. On one axis we go from "Rational" to "Emotional." The other we go from "Selfish" to "Selfless." With any luck, Philosophy will get to one day live again.

Photoshop expertise provided by Mari.

He dreams he's trapped in academia—strange academia:

My only company are the four gargoyles which adorn the corners of my diploma. They smile at me sinisterly.

As I say, this is how my nightmares always end.

That purple sunshine is killer. Sometimes David dreamed he was in the bookstore—zombie bookstore:

"Stop! Please!" I shout. "I can't read all these!"

"Oh, but you can," one of the zombies replies in an evil voices. "After all, this is what you're going to spend your life doing." And they begin laughing menacingly, echoing louder and louder until I'm finally crushed under the weight of the books, and I wake to find myself in the small office, chained to the degree.

Worst of all is when David dreamed he was watching the Brady Bunch in a room with wallpaper—trippy wallpaper:

I go back to the Brady Bunch and don't look up until a half-hour later, after Greg and Cindy have apologized to Bobby for stealing his skateboard. I notice the wallpaper is very strange.

Instead of the floral print I had expected, the guy is pasting up copies of Critical Inquiry and the American Journal of British Philology and The Annals of the Conference on Latin American Linguistics. When the walls are covered, the man leaves without a word. I notice that the room seems to be shrinking, the walls coming in on each other.

Doing that blue pyramid blotter in a colorful setting is a rookie mistake, dude. Explain yourself!

We contacted him to get his thoughts on the article, but Brooks came up blank. "Weird. I have no memory of that piece," he said.

HEH. [Chicago Maroon]

Will is there, presumably. The only two other people known in attendance, other than Obama and his transition spokesman, write for the Times, according to liberal media spies. From the pool report:

Thanks to an enterprising photographer, a shot through a window showed op-ed stalwarts William Kristol and David Brooks are also part of this unlikely gathering of tight, right suits.

Tight and right? Sexxxy.

(There's Obama tonight, going into Will's actual stately/gay light-yellow house, in the AP photo above.)

Surely Brooks and Kristol will share the juiciest moments from this war-hawk key party with Times readers, now that Change has come to DC's off-the-record cocktail-party insider clusterfuck, right?

This recession will probably have its own social profile. In particular, it’s likely to produce a new social group: the formerly middle class. These are people who achieved middle-class status at the tail end of the long boom, and then lost it. To them, the gap between where they are and where they used to be will seem wide and daunting.

Yes, in David Brooks' formulation, we are a nation of people who became middle class sometime in the 1990s, and have now lost it all, in the last month or so, spiraling back to poverty. We're not so much a nation that became middle class during the big government industrial economy days of the post-war period, and one that then saw its middle class squeezed to the margins as the Reagan years ushered in the greatest disparity of wealth since the Gilded Age. You forgot about the greatness of our service economy and the fantastic prosperity retail jobs brought to everyone!

In the months ahead, the members of the formerly middle class will suffer career reversals. Paco Underhill, the retailing expert, tells me that 20 percent of the mall storefronts could soon be empty. That fact alone means that thousands of service-economy workers will experience the self-doubt that goes with unemployment.

It's sure gonna suck to lose the job security, benefits, and legendary social safety net of the service economy, right?

It is remarkable that a man can write a column that is basically spot-on, if also 20 years out of date, on "the big picture" (hello, Fear of Falling fans!) while being so obstinately, intentionally incorrect in every detail. No, wait, "remarkable" is the wrong word, because it is a David Brooks column, and that is exactly what he does, professionally. (See also the last time we caught him doing this, here.)

R.I.P. the middle class, we're sure the conservative intellectuals will have some great ideas for how to help you guys out come 2012. Maybe you'll need tax cuts?

Yup! Cerberus! Oh well, that's the free market! Says a source: "[Sun Editor Seth] Lipsky gave up trying to raise money after the bailout failed to pass."

So it turns out it is not only middle-class social conservatives in Kansas who will vote Republican against their economic self-interest. Zionist New York plutocrat neoconservatives will too. Even if it means silencing their mouthpiece forever! Don't worry, Seth, Republicans will continue doing the talking (out of both sides of their mouths) for you, as conservative columnist David Brooks did today:

What we need in this situation is authority. Not heavy-handed government regulation, but the steady and powerful hand of some public institutions that can guard against the corrupting influences of sloppy money and then prevent destructive contagions when the credit dries up.

And lest some of you liberals fail to grasp the nuance of the argument here, there is a very important difference between "heavy-handed government regulation" and "steady and powerful public institutions": the former is run by career civil servants and latter by former investment bankers who would only deign to work for the private sector if it meant allowing them to skip out on the capital gains taxes on that half-billion portfolio of Goldman stock they had to unload to take the job. Because conservatives know better than to trust anyone who claims not to be motivated by pure economic self-interest! Which is maybe why they should all get out of the antiquated business of running newspapers and into something truly profitable! Such as……

"The more you see the less you know/The less you find out as you go/I knew much more then than I do now." [U2 "City of Blinding Lights"]

"Barack Obama has won the Iowa caucuses. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to feel moved by this. An African-American man wins a closely fought campaign in a pivotal state. He beats two strong opponents, including the mighty Clinton machine. He does it in a system that favors rural voters. He does it by getting young voters to come out to the caucuses...This is a huge moment. It's one of those times when a movement that seemed ethereal and idealistic became a reality and took on political substance." [David Brooks, New York Times]

"A self-ordained professor's tongue/Too serious to fool/Spouted out that liberty/Is just equality in school/"Equality," I spoke the word/As if a wedding vow./Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.." [Bob Dylan]

Also to note: Not one presidential candidate (according to a quick search on Wikipedia) used a song by an African-American as a campaign song. The closest thing was when Bob Dole ripped off Sam and Dave's Soul Man turning it into the soulless doleful Dole Man in 96. Obama, when he started out, was using "Better Way," a song by Ben Harper, who is half-black, but sometime along the way switched to the all-white U2. Weird and duly noted.

This strawman of "regular, everyday people" of the awesome Heather's is ludicrous—we only write about public figures. (Fun fact: In the fameball internet reality show age, more people than ever work to make themselves public figures!) Who's an everyday person? A chest-baring T.V. talking head and her millionaire boyfriend, who was the subject of a long New Yorker profile? A Pulitzer-prize winning author and his Ted Turner-loving wife? A man who set up a website that obsessively chronicles his every appearance as an extra in a Hollywood film? Bridezillas who crave wedding coverage in the New York Times? Anyone who puts more than five pictures of himself on Facebook? Anyone who's auditioned for a reality show? Anyone with a blog?

As for David Brooks, there are at least three errors in those four sentences, two of them of omission or lack of qualification. It's definitely not my place to get into the Byzantries [NOT A WORD! But you know what I mean, no? Paging Grant Barrett!] of our pay system. Let's just say this place pays better for young word-folks than the publication for which he phones in columns and leave it at that.

Best I can tell, because he sometimes reads The New Yorker and Slate, and the former recently published a much-discussed rumination by Sasha Frere-Jones about race and indie rock, a Carl Wilson rejoinder to which was published in the latter. Obviously, David Brooks doesn't know anything about indie rock—or hip-hop or punk—but that's okay, because David Brooks knows how to turn anything into a David Brooks column.

David Brooks also appears to know Steven Van Zandt, of the E Street Band, who he tells us "fell for the Beatles and discovered the blues and early rock music that inspired them." Of course, because cliches and commonplaces aren't ever deducted from the word count or pay check, David Brooks's account of rock music begins with the Beatles's 1964 appearance on Ed Sullivan. To be exact, it begins like this: "On Feb. 9, 1964, the Beatles played on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.'" Then there were the '70s, "a great moment for musical integration." But, then, at "some point toward the end of the 1970s or the early 1980s, the era of integration gave way to the era of fragmentation. There are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock."

It turns out that "people have been writing about the fragmentation of American music for decades." Here's where Brooks makes mention of the Frere-Jones/Wilson debate. But really, you see, people like Sasha Frere-Jones and Carl Wilson, who can name music acts besides the Beatles, Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, and U2 (who grew famous long after "the era of integration" ended, but who's counting?), miss the forest for the trees! No, Brooks, explains, what's going on now/happened twenty years ago (whatever!) to music is happening because:"Technology drives some of the fragmentation. Computers allow musicians to produce a broader range of sounds. Top 40 radio no longer serves as the gateway for the listening public. Music industry executives can use market research to divide consumers into narrower and narrower slices."

"But other causes flow from the temper of the times. It's considered inappropriate or even immoral for white musicians to appropriate African-American styles. And there's the rise of the mass educated class." And wait, back to little Stevie: he's starting a high-school curriculum about the history of American popular music. Why? "He argues that if the Rolling Stones came along now, they wouldn't be able to get mass airtime because there is no broadcast vehicle for all-purpose rock. And he says that most young musicians don't know the roots and traditions of their music. They don't have broad musical vocabularies to draw on when they are writing songs."

Alright, so popular music has splintered, and some people believe there are ways to unsplinter it. But, come on, why does David Brooks really care about Van Zandt's music-class plan? Could it be that a deadline is looming?

"It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion," he concludes. "This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy."

There you have it: the David Brooks pivot in all its glory. Basically: 'there are a lot of details and specificities and technicalities to all the things I hear about, but really there's one theme that runs through it all: I heard it.'

The Segmented Society [NYT]

When given this kind of freedom of choice, people seem to want to produce athletic Aryans with a passion for housekeeping. There is tremendous market demand for DNA from blue-eyed, blond-haired, 6-foot-2 finely sculpted hunks who roast their own coffee. These are the kind of guys you see jogging in the park and nothing moves. They've got a stomach, a chest and flanks, but as they bounce along nothing jiggles, not even their hair. They're like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime from the shoulders down, and Trent Lott from the scalp up.

The National Pastime [NYT]

My two-doors-down office neighbor, David Brooks... had the misfortune to stop in the hallway right before school pickup time and ask how I was doing. 'I wake in the morning and go to bed at night stalked by a feeling of incipient failure!' I stopped hyperventilating long enough to almost scream. He blinked for a moment, impassively.

'Some people thrive on that,' he said. Yes, I thought, I've built an entire career in just that way.

End of (School) Year Frenzy [NYT]