A New York Times Columnist Admits He Should Probably Be Arrested

David Brooks, presumably talking about how great he is. Photo via Flickr user Miller Center

David Brooks is a deeply strange man with strange opinions who makes a living writing op-ed columns in the New York Times that make everyone feel uncomfortable and angry because they adopt a tone of smooth white-guy Reasonableness while advocating ideas that are completely insane.

So today, while most of the towns where media folks live were covered in snow, Brooks’s target audience—bloggers who want to write mean shit about him and his fucked-up columns—huddled under the covers with a mug of warm cocoa and had a field day ripping apart his latest opus, which is called “Weed: Been There. Done That.” (Edgy title, bro.)

The column starts out with an admission:

“For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together.”

Trying to imagine what the heck this guy would look like when he’s “silly”? Please stop. In any case, that first bit is just a lead-up to Brooks’s explanation of why his group of (presumably white, upper-middle class) friends stopped smoking pot. For one thing, they got bored of it—it was “fun, for a bit, but it was kind of repetitive,” he writes. For another, one of his buddies “became a full-on stoner,” which as Brooks describes it is a fate too awful to contemplate—“something sad happened to him as he sunk deeper into pothead life.” (I’m imagining a dude who bought a bong, a bunch of shitty Bob Marley posters, and today leads a perfectly pleasant life raising alpacas and playing in a folk-punk band. Today he occasionally talks about his old high-school friend Dave, who “would usually pay for the weed, but was kind of a dick.”)

Finally, Brooks gets to the reason he’s writing this column:

“I don’t have any problem with somebody who gets high from time to time, but I guess, on the whole, I think being stoned is not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure and should be discouraged more than encouraged. We now have a couple states—Colorado and Washington—that have gone into the business of effectively encouraging drug use.

[…]

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.”

One way to look at this column is that it’s a very highfalutin way of Brooks saying that he wishes now he’d been arrested when he was a teenager. It’s pretty clear he disapproves of states legalizing marijuana—legalization “encourages” drugs, drugs are bad, mmmkay?—and when you say something should be illegal, don’t you mean that everyone who breaks that law should be put in jail, or fined, or forced to go to rehab, or (in lil’ Brooks’s case) put in front of a juvenile judge?

Obviously, Brooks isn’t saying that, since his narrative of teen drug use sounds totally harmless. He toked up, he decided it wasn’t for him, and went on to such great heights of success that he’s now routinely mocked and derided by writers from across the political spectrum—all without the government interfering with him. What Brooks is really saying is that he does not give a shit about what laws actually do.

People like Brooks—by which I mean “centrists” who have massive platforms to express their milquetoast views and get treated as serious people despite everything, so basically, I just mean Brooks and like three or four other white dudes his age—are very good at spinning pseudo-philosophical narratives about what is good for society and how government can encourage morality and the conflict of freedom and responsibility and high-minded shit like that. They are not very good at talking about the real-world consequences of laws. That’s how you get stuff like Brooks’s fellow NYT columnist Ross Douthat writing about how gay marriage weakens traditional marriage-related values while tiptoeing around the fact that denying gay people the legal benefits of wedlock makes them second-class citizens. It’s also how you get Brooks writing about how governments need to encourage behaviors through laws today, but complaining about how “balky” and inefficient a tool government is just last month. Guys like Brooks are so accustomed to no one paying attention to what they’re saying that they’ve stopped paying attention themselves.

In practice, it doesn't matter much to teens in Brooks’s demographic whether weed is legal or not. They’ll smoke, they’ll like it or they won’t, they’ll write much later about how it was a youthful indiscretion. (Barack Obama did pretty much the same thing, and he apparently isn’t in favor of legal weed either.) But if you’re a poor black kid, you’re much more likely to get arrested for weed, and in that case you won’t be looking back and musing about how governments need to discourage marijuana use—you’ll understand, as Brooks apparently doesn’t, that that kind of discouragement inevitably involves putting people in cages.

I actually agree with Brooks on one thing, which is that being a stoner isn’t particularly awesome, and society (not necessarily the government) probably should try to avoid everyone being high all the time. That doesn’t take laws, though—the use of both alcohol and tobacco has been on a long-term decline for years now, but not because the government stepped in and made those substances illegal. It turns out that if you educate people about the risks of doing drugs, a lot of them will decide not to fuck themselves up too badly on them. We don’t need David Brooks or the government to help us decide whether pot is good or bad.

@HCheadle