“It’s Better To Think Good Than To Do Good”

The New York Times, in a piece by David Brooks, points out to the “woke” audience what we muggles pretty much already knew:  that being “woke” is more about saying one believes the right things than doing the right thing.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned on “Meet the Press” that for all the horror of the recent school shootings, we shouldn’t be scaremongering. There’s much less gun violence over all in schools today than in the early 1990s. Four times as many students were killed per year back then than in recent years.

This comment elicited a lot of hatred on social media, of a very interesting kind. The general diagnosis was that I was doing something wrong by not maximizing the size of the problem. I was draining moral urgency and providing comfort to the status quo.

“Woke” isn’t just a liberal phenomenon – Brooks points out rightly that it crosses ideological lines; the relentless purity-testing of the Ron Paul, and now some of the more, er, “focused” Trump fans, shows this.  Conservatives get triggered, too – some by the mere mention of David Brooks.

But it’s become a caricature on the left:  when “progressive” plutocrats take private jets halfway around the world to hobnob about pollution, when “progressives” propose gun controls that can not affect crime but will impact law-abiding citizens, when “progs” propose minimum wage laws that will result in fewer people earning less money, when they jam down bad healthcare to promote…healthcare?

Read the whole thing.

One thought on ““It’s Better To Think Good Than To Do Good”

  1. Do you long for the days when Brooks was an inconsequential haberdashery critic as much as I do?

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