There is a shitload to unpack in David Brook's most recent column and I have spent the last few hours unpacking. Dave cites to three scholarly sources, I read each except the 92-page article which I skimmed, and one of the scholarly sources, a tweet, cited to another which I also read.
Dave's topic is Republicans disconnect from reality which he frames as "We live in a country in epistemological crisis." Not believing experts, "Fake News!" allegations, "The election is rigged!", distrust, uneducated White disaffection. So, it's a crisis of knowledge and that is rooted in distrust which is rooted in getting burned by experts who the uneducated Whites did trust, disaffection: feeling uneducated, unappreciated, rooted in or resulting in, I'm not sure which is chicken and which is egg, unhappiness.
Now, Dave is a proud member and booster of the Establishment. He is an intellectual heir of Walter Lippmann, of elites "manufacturing consensus" among the great unwashed. Government in the early 20th century had just gotten too goddamned complex for the average Joe to make heads or tails of. Lippmann argued that elites like hisself should be gatekeepers of knowledge and should instruct the great unwashed on correct thinking. He recommended to Franklin D. Roosevelt a dictatorship. Lippmann debated the perpetually sunny democrat, John Dewey, on this. We had a pandemic the experts couldn't control in the early 20th century; we got into the Great War, we had the Great Depression that we couldn't figure how to get out of. There was nothing great about the body of work the experts performed for the average Joe in the early 20th century and he came to distrust them.Sounds like rational voting behavior to me! but not to Lippmann, who sided squarely with the experts The parallel to the early 21st century is subtle as a two-by-four between the eyes. I was insulted by Lippmann's prescription and sided firmly with Dewey (although I had to agree with Lippmann's diagnosis). Until 2016. All to say, Dave Brooks is a consent manufacturer.
This is a telling graph and I'm going to have to leave it with this telling graph and unwashed commentary on same on accounta I'm too tired:
So as you can see the study ends in 2016. We could have hoped for more. The most substantial drop in uneducated White happiness occurred when? In 2004-2008. What was going on then? Not much, just the wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, based on faulty expert judgment that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (remember “yellow cake”);
not based on Saddam having any involvement in the 9/11 attacks; Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, the best and tbe brightest, remember? The foreign policy “Dream Team”! Crap, crap, and crap. Then in aught eight, Lehman Brothers and the beginning of the Great Recession. How’s that for history repeating itself? However, before getting too committed to that graph, remember "garbage in, garbage out?” The prettiest graphical representation of data is only as good as the data itself and on that point the authors of the study who created the graph write,
This study was limited by several factors. First, the measure of happiness was a single item rather than a more psychometrically vetted multiple-item scale of well-being or mental health symptoms. Although we were able to use four measures of SES, all were self-reported rather than objectively verified. In some cases, n’s were too low for Black Americans to perform
certain analyses.
Which then confused me. I initially thought "n’s were too low for Black Americans to perform" meant like the happiness problems Blacks were asked to perform on this "test" were too difficult for them or something. However, n there refers to sample size: Among U.S. adults ages 30 and over in the nationally representative General Social Survey (n = 44,198). In clearer language it means "On some measures we could not perform certain analyses because Blacks were under-represented in our survey group.” Which conflicts with "nationally representative" and with the number, 44,198, which is humongous, of respondents in the survey.
But Dave Brooks loves learned people--Who amongst us does not love learned people?, learned people are one of the core groups of experts Dave puts his trust in (another is columnists at elite newspapers) and I must say that I am surprised that the Boca Raton News would have made Dave's grade, for the article that contained the graph is co-authored by a Lynn University professor, Lynn being based in Boca, and is published by lynn.edu.
When I pick up tomorrow remind me to mention that David Brooks once cited to something that didn't support what Dave wrote the cite supported. I do believe I found this problem recur here. Apologize for any inconvenience.
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