David Brooks is not a good person.
I’m often mildly offended by Brooks’s writing. I think he’s (mostly) a lazy columnist who dresses up culture war outrage with faux social science language. But it’s only a mild offense. There are plenty of bad columnists out there, and the best response is simply not to read them.
But yesterday’s column was a bridge too far. The state of Colorado has just officially legalized pot. David Brooks wants us to know that this is a Very Bad Thing. He tries to convince us of this by telling the story of how he smoked up for awhile in high school, but then got over it and became a Well Rounded Individual. The police never enter into his story. The threat of jail time or expulsion from school never impact his decision-making. He tried pot, got bored of it, and moved on to other things. This ought to be the beginning of a column supporting Colorado’s policy decision — I imagine plenty of Colorado teens will go through the same cycle. But no, because David Brooks is a culture warrior. Here’s the conclusion of the article, in all its offensive glory:
The people who debate these policy changes usually cite the health risks users would face or the tax revenues the state might realize. Many people these days shy away from talk about the moral status of drug use because that would imply that one sort of life you might choose is better than another sort of life.
But, of course, these are the core questions: Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture? What sort of individuals and behaviors do our governments want to encourage? I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.
In legalizing weed, citizens of Colorado are, indeed, enhancing individual freedom. But they are also nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be.
Look, David Brooks is not an idiot. He is surely aware that our current drug laws are not only “subtly tip[ping] the scale to favor temperate citizenship,” but also landing thousands upon thousands of people in jail for being kids who try illicit substances. And he is also aware that those laws apply overwhelmingly to people who don’t share his race and class privileges. It is pretty damn hard to “be the sort of person most of us want to be” if you land in prison because you got caught with some weed.
Brooks knows all this. Of course he does. In 2014, it is almost impossible NOT to know all this. The debate over marijuana use has changed steadily from “I didn’t inhale” to “sure, I tried it when I was a kid.” That’s not because our society has fallen in love with “tax revenues for states.” It’s because of the moral exhaustion that comes from all the lives laid waste by the War on Drugs. Marijuana prohibition has worked about as well as alcohol prohibition. Maybe its time to try something new.
But David Brooks is a culture warrior with column inches to fill. So he ignores his racial privilege and his class privilege and the prisons filled with non-violent drug offenders, and instead phones in a column about “nurturing a moral ecology” where other kids don’t have the same experiences he had when he was young.
This isn’t Brooks being lazy. Lazy is his normal motif. Lazy would be to write another column about the moral failings of Obamacare.
No, this column tells us something deeper about David Brooks. At the end of the day, he isn’t just a lazy pundit with a prestigious perch at The New York Times. He’s also a downright awful person. He uses his power to fight against society correcting its most obvious mistakes. He doesn’t deserve to be ignored. He deserves to be shamed.