Americans Are Less Enthusiastic About War and “Leaders,” and This Makes David Brooks Sad

David Brooks’ column today
may be the most optimistic assessment of the public mood I’ve ever
seen in a major newspaper. He wouldn’t call it
optimistic—he seems to think he’s describing a dystopian hellhole
of the mind—but you aren’t obliged to agree with him about
that.

Brooks starts by noting that a recent Pew survey
shows Americans less enthusiastic than ever about Washington
throwing its weight around in the rest of the world. He adds that
this doesn’t represent a new isolationism: Large majorities favor
economic and cultural engagement with other nations, and when it
comes to decentralized activism, as opposed to D.C.-based power
politics, most of us “have enormous confidence in personalized
peer-to-peer efforts to promote democracy, human rights and
development.”

Now untethered from the Pew poll,
Brooks launches into a broad-brush history of American attitudes
toward authority. In the wake of World War II, he claims, the
country had “a basic faith in big units—big armies, corporations
and unions,” and it “tended to embrace a hierarchical leadership
style.” Now “that faith in big units has eroded—in all spheres of
life. Management hierarchies have been flattened. Today people are
more likely to believe that history is driven by people gathering
in the squares and not from the top down. The liberal order is not
a single system organized and defended by American military
strength; it’s a spontaneous network of direct people-to-people
contacts, flowing along the arteries of the Internet.” In the
popular view, “The real power in the world is not military or
political. It is the power of individuals to withdraw their
consent.”

When it comes time to argue against the worldview he has
sketched out, Brooks doesn’t have much to offer. He says it’s
“naïve to believe that the world’s problems can be conquered
through conflict-free cooperation and that the menaces to
civilization, whether in the form of Putin or Iran, can be simply
not faced.” Now, there are several strong arguments to be made
against those of us who’d rather see Putin and the mullahs brought
down by mass movements of Russians and Iranians rather than by
sword-rattling Americans, but You guys think this can be done
without conflict is not one of them. The last big wave of
these movements was the Arab Spring, and while people have plenty
of complaints about how that went down, I don’t think
anyone believes it was conflict-free. Except apparently
Brooks, who writes as though conflicts are only conflicts if one
side is being directed from the Oval Office.

Indeed, he writes as though history itself should be directed
from the Oval Office. Here’s his final paragraph:

We live in a country in which many people act as if
history is leaderless. Events emerge spontaneously from the ground
up. Such a society is very hard to lead and summon. It can be
governed only by someone who arouses intense moral loyalty, and
even that may be fleeting.

“As if” history is leaderless? Is Brooks in thrall to some
ridiculous 19th-century
Great Man theory of history? Of course history is leaderless.
You can’t centrally plan history, and if Americans are losing the
illusion that you can then that may be the best news Brooks has
told us yet. Let him sit there longing for a leader “who arouses
intense moral loyalty”; the rest of us can raise our glasses in a
toast to ungovernability.