Is Patio Man a Neo-Hooverite?
I found today’s David Brooks column extremely confusing on a number of levels. For one thing, I’m unclear on who “Patio Man” is since patios or patio-like spaces are an extremely common feature of the American landscape — existing in rural areas, suburbs of all kinds, but also many urban neighborhoods. Brooks says that he “is the quintessential suburban American, the service economy worker, the guy who wears khakis to work each day, with the security badge on the belt clip around his waist” and also that he “lives in northern Virginia, along the I-4 corridor near Orlando, Fla., in or near Columbus, Ohio, along the Front Range of Colorado, in the converging megalopolis between Albuquerque and Santa Fe and in many other places.” Demographically, those places don’t have a great deal in common — northern Virginia much wealthier than Columbus, etc.
But the basic idea seems to be that Patio Man is a white male suburbanite. Then Brooks says:
In times of turmoil, he has gravitated toward the party that could restore his sense of order. In the 1970s, crime and social breakdown seemed like the biggest threats to order, and he gravitated to the G.O.P. In the late 1990s, Republican revolutionaries seemed to bring instability, and he softened on Clinton. Then terrorism threatened his equilibrium and he helped re-elect Bush. Then, post-Iraq and post-Katrina, administrative incompetence led him a bit the other way.
It’s probably true that white male suburbanites shifted to some extent throughout all these events, but at the same time one has to keep in mind that white male suburbanites are just much more conservative than are non-white males or white males who live in big cities or white women. Bill Clinton won the 1996 election pretty handily, but Dole won white men by a very safe 49-38 margin. In that context, it’s hard to know how we’re supposed to think about this:
Patio Man wants change. But this is no time for more risk or more debt. Debt in the future is no solution to the debt racked up in the past. This is a back-to-basics moment, a return to safety and the fundamentals.
Patio Man, in other words, would prefer it if President Obama come into office in 2009 and govern in a relatively conservative manner. But this is just another way of observing that Patio man is a conservative. Most likely, Obama will win the election. But I’m absolutely positive that most white male suburbanites will vote for John McCain. And if Obama becomes President, most white male suburbanites won’t approve of his job performance. And most white male suburbanites definitely won’t vote for his re-election. But by the same token, non-whites definitely will vote for Obama in 2008 and if he wins they’ll do it again in 2012.
Meanwhile, the real point here seems to be that Brooks thinks it would be a mistake for the federal government to take on additional debt. But Brooks is wrong. You don’t need to take my word for it, or even listen to Brooks’ colleague the Nobel Prize winning economist — everyone from Ben Bernanke to Maya MacGuinneas is rejecting neo-Hooverism. As for the public at large, I seriously doubt that most people have a considered opinion on the merits of Keynesian stimulus. What I do know is that the electorate as a whole will react very poorly to the United States falling into a severe, years-long economic slump while they’ll reward a reasonably hasty turnaround. Smart politicians are going to do what it takes to avoid a severe slump and trust the public to judge them based on results.
74 Responses to “Is Patio Man a Neo-Hooverite?”
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October 21st, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Brooks thinks the “quintessential suburban American” is Tom Smykoski. Hmmm, I thought it was Peter Gibbons and Lawrence.
October 21st, 2008 at 5:49 pm
At some point in the not too distant future, straight white Christians will no longer be a majority of the people in this country. At some point perhaps ten or twenty years beyond that date, the national media will realize this, and stop acting as if the votes of straight white people alone determine the country’s political trajectory.
October 21st, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Worst superhero ever.
October 21st, 2008 at 5:52 pm
You don’t need to take my word for it, or even listen to Brooks’ colleague the Nobel Prize winning economist — everyone from Ben Bernanke to Maya MacGuinneas is rejecting neo-Hooverism.
I still like “The Shrill One” better.
October 21st, 2008 at 5:55 pm
As a white man with a patio might I add that Brooks is a raging asshole. He should do a little more thinking and a little less time coming up with the goofy, false pseudodemographic constructs.
October 21st, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Ah, the classics! “I’m going to make up a mythical voter who will mouth my talking points because I think it sounds more credible than if I just told you this is my opinion.”
Based on where Brooks pulled these “facts” from, if he was talking to Patio Man, Patio Man doesn’t live in the suburbs, he lives in a suburb of Brooks’ small intestine.
October 21st, 2008 at 5:56 pm
That’s a hell of a lot of words to say Brooks is an idiot. Which most of us knew already. He’s never demonstrated he knows anything about anyone outside the beltway.
October 21st, 2008 at 5:59 pm
At some point in the not too distant future, straight white Christians will no longer be a majority of the people in this country. At some point perhaps ten or twenty years beyond that date, the national media will realize this, and stop acting as if the votes of straight white people alone determine the country’s political trajectory.
I doubt it. When did women get the vote again?
October 21st, 2008 at 6:04 pm
“I still like “The Shrill One” better.”
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Krugman R’lyeh wagn’nagl Nobel Prize fhtagn!
[In his house at R'lyeh dread Krugman waits dreaming with his Nobel Medal and $1,400 large, byotches.]
[c.f. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/07/the_history_of_.html
October 21st, 2008 at 6:04 pm
And I think Brooks is, and has been for some time, “head up a** man.” Why is he allowed to take up valuable time and space?
October 21st, 2008 at 6:07 pm
This kind of junk is why I despise Brooks so much. It’s total imagination on his part. He’s sitting in Manhattan pondering mythical Americans. “Patio Man is surprised at how much the bankruptcy of Sharper Image has upset him.” Seriously?
My daughter is 3 and likes to make up stories about pink robots – perhaps an Times column is in her future.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Patio Man was an idea that he came up with to base his Bobo’s in Paradise book on. There was a short article by Brooks in The Atlantic a few years ago where he used his “sociological divining rod” to explain the basis of Patio Man. In short, he’s a guy who lives to hang out on his porch and grill red meat for the neighbors so they can admire his stainless steel grill. The article is funny if you read it with a grain of salt. If you expect a serious read then skip it.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Debt in the future is no solution to the debt racked up in the past.
I nominate this for the most dishonest, silly line Brooks has ever written.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Sorry the Brooks article was in the Weekly Standard, not The Atlantic. Here’s the link if anyone wants to read it. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/531wlvng.asp
October 21st, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Re “Smart politicians are going to do what it takes to avoid a severe slump and trust the public to judge them based on results.”
———–
And stealing another $5 Trillion of our money and pissing it away is going to impress us how?
It is not just a matter of spending — its a matter of investments which benefit all of us versus looting/whoring for the benefit of special interests.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:16 pm
You’re overthinking this. Brooks is a rich conservative who lives in an elite liberal suburb– Bethesda, Maryland. He gets paid to represent a conservative viewpoint. Unfortunately for him, neither liberals nor conservatives particularly give a shit about what rich conservatives in Bethesda think about the issues.
Therefore, he projects his own opinions onto a stock character– based on the type of schlub who Brooks considers to be the archetypal Republican voter upon which he has a raging, but highly condescending mancrush. As a foil, he uses his favorite liberal strawman, the Bobo, which is likely based on his irritating phony-ass neighbors who annoy him while he’s waiting in line at Whole Foods.
Expecting a serious, data-driven analysis in a David Brooks column is sort of like expecting the Sunday Comic Pages to be funny. It was never a safe bet, and it’s been a lost cause for many years now.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Brooks seems to have misspelled the name, but I remember Paddy O’Mann!
Aye, ol’ Paddy was the most genial barkeep in all of Flatbush, always ready with a reasonably-clean glass o’ watered-down Ancient Age and a ready ear for hearin’ yer troubles. Haven’t heard much from Paddy since he moved to the converging megalopolis between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but it’s good to know he’s alive and well.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Brooks is a wormy, dandruff-ridden, four-eyed, male-pattern baldness fuddy-duddy, chickenhawk neocon boomer mediocrity. There must be 44,229 fellows just like him from Suffern, N.Y. to Englewood Cliffs , N.J. My cat is cuter, smarter, tougher, wittier, and more interesting.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:37 pm
David Brooks is an elitist fuckhead. Well, he is.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Someone needs to write a satirical piece on Social-Pundit Man, who makes up stupid terms to describe groups that are mostly the product of his Village-idiot imagination.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Well, at least David Brooks can draw upon his experience and research as a major political sociologist.
Others simply pull their own prejudices out of the air; Brooks, on the other hand, always rigidly checks his preconceptions against the best and most insightful of population research.
What?
October 21st, 2008 at 7:04 pm
My personal hell would be an eternity of reading columns by David Brooks, Tom Friedman, and Maureen Dowd. It would be nothing but mixed metaphors, lazy analogies, insipid armchair sociology, and half-baked generalizations.
Unfortunately, I will spend eternity not existing.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:05 pm
I am not a Brooks hater by any means, but I must say that that his column today was stupid as fuck.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:17 pm
But I’m absolutely positive that most white male suburbanites will vote for John McCain.
I’m pretty sure that McCain will win a majority of white male suburbanites. I am not sure McCain will win a majority of white males. (Bill Clinton lost 49-38, with Perot in the race. Bush won 60-38 in an election that installed him into office. We have a different situation here.)
max
['We shall see.']
October 21st, 2008 at 7:17 pm
“lives in northern Virginia, along the I-4 corridor near Orlando, Fla., in or near Columbus, Ohio, along the Front Range of Colorado, in the converging megalopolis between Albuquerque and Santa Fe and in many other places.”
He forgot to add “the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
October 21st, 2008 at 7:19 pm
I’m a newly Medicare eligible senior who became politically alive when Bush was trumping up his reasons for the invasion of Iraq in 2002. I have watched David Brooks prognosticate hundreds of times on PBS and other stations and probably agreed with him less than 5. (Yes, Palin IS a cancer on the Republican party!)I doubt a week goes by when he doesn’t drop William F Buckley’s name in some form or another. Brooks is a climber and kisser of the worst order. The man gets paid for drooling words. His drool just happens to have slightly more class than Hannity and Co.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Matt, I think you’re misreading the piece. I don’t see anything from Brooks about what policy is correct. He’s saying that this group won’t like those policies even if they are correct.
Whether we should care what Patio Man thinks is another matter, both because the Dems should be able to govern without this demographic and because people’s policy views might not matter that much.
Still, Brooks is onto something here. Just because the Republicans have self-destructed is no reason for us to believe that we’ve somehow won some sort of ideological contest.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Nobody has patios anymore. We have decks. Christ is Brooks out of it.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Someone should point out to Brooks that if there is going to be any converging between Albuquerque and Santa Fe someone will have to figure out what to do with the Sandia, Santa Ana, Jemez, San Felipe and Cochiti Pueblos that lie between the two cities. I know we have a bad history of stealing Native lands, but New Mexico Pueblos have much better (and often Native) lawyers now.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Matt:
I am against Hooverism as well, but keep in mind that FDR did not completely reject Hooverism; FDR was very hesitant and half-hearted in increasing the national debt until World War II.
October 21st, 2008 at 8:37 pm
He should do a little more thinking and a little less time coming up with the goofy, false pseudodemographic constructs.
===
Yeah. I liked it better when columnists just made up conversations with fictional cabdrivers. But then, you can’t write wafer-thin pseudo-scientific sociological books about fictional cabdrivers.
October 21st, 2008 at 8:53 pm
It seems quite possible to me that Brooks is just losing it, like one of those robots in the movies who short out, go crazy, and finally explode. (The same goes for Kristol in his recent column about how The People are always right except when they’re wrong, and how if they finally defy The Media Elites and support McCain, they will be Right after all.)
These two guys were hired to make the Republican line look at least plausible and to give the know-nothings and Armageddonists representation on the New York Times. Recently their first task has become impossible, but these two guys can’t NOT be Republicans. If they fail to support McCain-Palin, they will no longer serve to protect the Times from the raging Armageddonist mob of loonies, and they will be in breach of contract.
At the same time, they see the handwriting on the wall. They’re still are going to be around after Jan. 20, and they don’t want to seem too ridiculous then. So what can they do?
So enjoy the show while those two bastards wiggle around trying to follow their marching orders while still making sense.
October 21st, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Does he have a cadre of vampy young ladies ensconced in a tunnel underground sniffing strange gases to divine this kind of thing?
What does David Brooks know about patios?
October 21st, 2008 at 9:18 pm
AlanC 9: I think that the point is that Patio Man is like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Friedman’s Taxi Driver. None of them have an opinion about anything.
I just read Brooks’ column, and it was worse than I had expected. A flimsy fiction construction serving to support on of Brooks’s assigned ideas. He has to be aware by now that most of his smartest readers know that he’s faking it, but he just maunders on.
Sulzberger and the other get what they want. If Sulzberger wants a couple stupid Republicans, he gets a couple stupid Republicans. He’s put Brooks and Kristol at the very top of the opinion biz.
October 21st, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Kelsey Grammer as Patio Man and Jon Voight as Joe the Plumber (excellent character actor). Oh, and Stephen Baldwin as Joe Six-Pack. Janine Turner is a shoo-in for Caribou Barbie, AKA Hockey Mom.
Fox is working on the pilot now.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Patio Man! Able to pour a single malt scotch and make it neat! Deftly lounging where no urbanite has lounged before. Look! Scratching his balls! It’s a slug… it’s a sloth … It’s PATIO MAN!
Adam is right. Worst super hero ever. Can we knock off all the security, soccer, hockey mom, nascar dad, patio man, plumber, BS analysis? I feel stupider every time they trot one of these monikers out. GAH!
October 21st, 2008 at 10:23 pm
For those wishing to update their wingnut dictionary, “all-American” = “making up stereotypes about middle class white Christian men who don’t get a hard-on when reading Thucydides and Hobbes.” David Brooks is what happens when you raise a Jonah Goldberg in captivity, but don’t teach it what words mean, like how “Applebee’s salad bar” makes as much sense as “McDonald’s moose burger buffet.”
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:23 am
I had my students (university sophomores) read Brooks’ original “Patio Man” back in 2002 when the article first appeared in the Weekly Standard.
Every single one of them thought it was a satirical critique of mindless suburban consumerism. Sort of a 21st-century Babbitt who had moved way out beyond Zenith’s city limits.
No, I kept trying to tell them, Brooks was extolling the virtues of some mythical American everyman from some suburban utopia that exists only in Brooks’ overheated imagination.
I think that back then Brooks believed we had entered some post-race, post-industrial, post-tribal, post-class America where male identity was fashioned instead by patterns of consumption at big-box retailers and suburban auto malls. America was not so much the City on a Hill that the Puritans imagined it to be but one of New Jerusalem’s ex-urbs.
I can only imagine the despair Brooks must be enduring as his hero Patio Man contemplates his withered 401K, his soon-to-be repo’d Yukon Denali, and his foreclosed-on McMansion.
October 22nd, 2008 at 3:25 am
Brook’s Patio Man would probably report Friedman’s Cab Driver to Homeland Security.
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:03 am
Here in Michigan my patio is too damned cold to be out pondering about “real america”. Why do listen to Brooks again?
October 22nd, 2008 at 8:30 am
“I found today’s David Brooks column extremely confusing ”
So another normal Brooks polemic, ho hum.
I live in a rural area and I don’t have a patio. I have a deck. And I would appreciate it if you KIDS GET OFF MY DECK!
October 22nd, 2008 at 9:17 am
Patio Man, aka, White Middle Class Suburban Man!
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:28 am
Isn’t it interesting that Brook’s needs to hide his opinions behind a projected character of ‘patio man’. His column today represents the dead end of his thinking — he has no real policy recommendations that he can defend so he projects his predilections on a mythical character.
I’ve found some of the things that Brooks and George Will have had to say over the past year or so interesting. But as we come to the end of this election cycle, it is clear that both have reached a dead end and that end reveals the real problem in their thinking and in their education.
Both have served as cultural commentators reflecting on the political culture more than on policy, philosophy or economic theory and practice. They are intellectuals of the most superficial sort. Their education apparently never encouraged them to engage with the ideas of a Keynes or a John Rawls or John Stuart Mill or, heaven forbid, a Karl Marx. The superficiality of their thought enables them to pander to their base rather than challenge anyone’s thinking.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:47 am
I’m a middle aged, middle class, white male suburbanite with a patio. Thus, as a font of unerring wisdom, let me state that Brooks is a twit.
December 11th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
According to the front of its menu, Jasper’s has been a landmark in the Rogue Valley for more than 30 years. And according to the word on the street, it’s always full of people. Well, it sure was when my dining companion and I stopped by
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I am from Western and learning to speak English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: “Dubai guaranteed sunshine and the world only seven star hotel.”
With best wishes
, Laurence.