Huffington Post - New York, NY, USA - If I hadn't known what to expect from the title ("Stop Making Sense"), I could guess from the well crafted first sentence, with all the resonance of the opening lines of a Dickens novel: "Between 2000 and 2006, a specter haunted the community of fundamentalist Democrats. Members of this community looked around and observed their moral and intellectual superiority."
By this point I could guess that "the worst of times" in this tale about my recently published book was not going to be preceded by "the best of times." In fact, the times only got worse: "Serious thinkers set to work, and produced a long shelf of books answering this question. Their answers tended to rely on similar themes. First, Democrats lose because they are too intelligent. Their arguments are too complicated for American voters. Second, Democrats lose because they are too tolerant. They refuse to cater to racism and hatred. Finally, Democrats lose because they are not good at the dark art of politics. Republicans, though they are knuckle-dragging simpletons when it comes to policy, are devilishly clever when it comes to electioneering."
So began conservative commentator
David Brooks' review of my book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. It was well suited, I thought, for the National Review and other humor magazines, but alas, it was in a different venue, the New York Times Book Review, which, under the direction of a right-wing book editor, is increasingly publishing reviews from conservative commentators of books written from the left, essentially jamming the radar of readers who can no long tell from reviews in the prestigious newspaper whether a book is not worth reading or a reviewer is not worth reading.
As Brooks tells it, my central thesis is that the way to win elections is through "crude emotional outbursts," which makes him wonder aloud how I might explain why
Howard Dean didn't win the 2004 Democratic primary election against the more emotionally subdued
John Kerry. Of course, he wouldn't have had to wonder if he'd gone to the index and found the cleverly-concealed entry under "Dean, Howard." (Perhaps he was confused when he didn't see it under the Hs.)
