NY Times David Brooks: "Children of Polarization." Next generation is practical,

[muntrv]

anti-ideological, modest, centrist?

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/opinion/04brooks.html?th&emc=th

Last fall, I taught a political theory course at Duke University, as part of my lifelong quest to teach at every college I never could have gotten into out of high school. I asked my students to write a paper defining their political philosophy, because I thought it would be useful for them to organize their views into a coherent statement.

When I look back on those papers (which the students have given me permission to write about), I’m struck by the universal tone of postboomer pragmatism.

Today’s college students, remember, were born around 1987. They were 2 or 3 when the Berlin Wall fell. They have come into political consciousness amid impeachment, jihad, polarization and Iraq. Many of them seem to have reacted to these hothouse clashes not by becoming embroiled in the zealotry but by quietly drifting away from that whole political mode.

In general, their writing is calm, optimistic and ironical. Most students in my class showed an aversion to broad philosophical arguments and valued the readings that were concrete and even wonky. Many wrote that they had moved lately toward the center.

Remington Kendall, for example, grew up on a struggling ranch in Idaho. His father died when he was young and his family was poor enough at times to qualify for welfare, though his mother refused it. Duke, with its affluence and its liberal attitudes, was a different universe.

Kendall arrived deeply conservative and remains offended by people who won’t work hard to support themselves. But he now finds himself, as he says, cursed by centrism — trapped between the Pat Robertsons on the right and the Democratic elites on the left, many of whom he finds personally distasteful.

More at link...

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[Cocoa]

1. Did Brooks really teach at Duke?

maybe so, but don't take Brooks's word for any of his anecdotes. He's been known to make stuff up to advance his demographic theories...

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/booboos_in_paradise/

<snip>

As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home. "On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most-expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s," he wrote. "I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it."

Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The "Steak and Lobster" combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. "Most of our checks are over $20," said Becka, my waitress. "There are a lot of ways to spend over $20."

The easiest way to spend over $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts "turn-of-the-century elegance." I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed. After it was published in the Atlantic, the nearby Mercersburg Academy boarding school invited Brooks as part of its speaker series. He spent the night at the inn. "For breakfast I made a goat-cheese-and-sun-dried-tomato tart," Sandy said. "He said he just wanted scrambled eggs."

I looked at another of Brooks’s more celebrated articles, an August 2002 piece in the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard in which he discerned a new American archetype he dubbed "Patio Man." Patio Man, in Brooks’s description, "walks into a Home Depot or Lowe’s or one of the other mega hardware complexes and his eyes are glistening with a faraway missionary zeal, like one of those old prophets gazing into the promised land. His lips are parted and twitching slightly." Patio Man, Brooks wrote, lives in one of the new Sprinkler Cities, "the fast-growing suburbs mostly in the South and West that are the homes of the new-style American dream."

more...

[Igel]

3. Seems likely.

http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2006/03/brooks_woodruff.html

"Two distinguished political journalists will join the faculty of Duke University’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy next fall to conduct seminars focusing on the intersection of media, politics and political ideology....

"David Brooks, a New York Times columnist and regular commentator on PBS’ 'The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” will teach “Policy Wars: Liberalism and Conservatism in America'."

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

2. uhh... I would look a little further afield.

I don't think a class of university students is a good place to evaluvate such a thing when the most polarized to the right are not going to be represented when they truely believe that universities are literally a force of evil.

[Cerridwen]

4. "able to afford Duke thanks to financial aid"

"they’ve also seen government fail to deliver at home"

Guess their financial aid was all from private institutions?

[SoCalDem]

5. David Brooks TEACHING?? There's a chilling thought.

"Most" children grow up with a fairness mentality.

As a toddler, they learn to share and it continues throughout their early years.

Sharing is the cornerstone of liberalism.

I guess with "teachers" like Brooks, fairness can be replaced with greed..

[GeorgeGist]

6. Wow ...

two whole Duke students (mythical I suspect) and Brooks has proven his hypothesis.