Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) January 8, 2024: The self-styled conservative columnist David Brooks (born in 1961) published "What Biden Needs to Tell Us" in the New York Times (dated January 4, 2024):
David Brooks is also the author, most recently on the new 2023 book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House) - which I discuss in my OEN article "David Brooks' Accessible new 2023 Book" (dated November 27, 2023):
Now, in Brooks' "What Biden Needs to Tell Us," he sets up and operationally defines and explains certain contrasting key terms: a zero-sum mindset versus a positive-sum mindset; liberal democratic capitalism versus populism (also known as liberalism versus populism, for shirt); the forces of civilization versus the forces of barbarism.
According to Brooks, "Populism thrives on a zero-sum mindset. . . . America's populist in chief, Donald Trump, exemplifies this mentality. . . . MAGA is the zero-sum concept in political form. . . . Every day for Trump is an Us/Them dominance game."
According to Brooks, President Joe Biden has not been doing enough to articulate and advance "a vision for how to return to a positive-sum world of growth, innovation and peace."
In certain ways, the positive vision that Brooks envisions is somewhat consonant with Heather McGhee's 2021 book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World/ Penguin Random House) - even though he does not happen to mention her book.
In any event, Brooks also says, "We are in the middle of a multifront conflict that pits the forces of civilization against the forces of barbarism. In a civilized world, people create rules and norms to make competition fair, whether it's economic, intellectual or political competition. Barbarians seek to tear down those rules so thuggery can prevail."
In addition, Brooks says, "Biden needs to paint a portrait of America's future not with statistics but with a vision of a way of life. Liberal capitalism involves a set of concrete social actions: starting a business; building better schools; working together with people in companies; rising from poverty to buy a house; raising children not to be culture warriors but workers and innovators.
"This liberal dream is still ingrained in the nation's bones. It's been covered over by several years of bitterness, disillusion and pessimism. Maybe Biden can reach something deep in every American and revive the optimism that used to be our defining national trait."
Now, the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) discusses what Brooks refers to as "the optimism that used to be our defining national trait in more than one of the essays that he reprinted in his first book Frontiers in American Catholicism: Essays on Ideology and Culture (Macmillan, 1957, pp. 10, 12-13, and 30-32).
Over the years, I have often discussed Ong's works in my OEN articles - for example, in my article "Thomas J. Farrell on Thomas J. Farrell" (dated November 17, 2023):
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