Governance without politics: David Brooks's plan to make America great again

Comment published in New York Times online blog, in reply to Times opinion writer David Brooks, “ ”building a nation that balances the dynamism of capitalism with biblical morality": January 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/opinion/after-the-womens-march.html?comments#commentsContainer:

This promises to make us like China, while also providing an alibi for a trade war with them. To China's "capitalism with Asian values," we can have capitalism with Christian (or Judeo-Christian, or European, or in some identifiable sense "American") "values." It also means economics plus morality, and without politics. Cohen is dead wrong here because while a politics may need a morality, a morality is not a politics nor a substitute for one.

This eclipse of the political may be why Brooks in this piece disdains the very idea of social movements. He is certainly wrong that most social change initiates with politicians and political parties. The eight-hour day and the weekend, women’s right to vote, the ending of anti-gay laws, the ending of various tyrannical regimes including in our own Revolution, and many other things changed because politicians don’t lead the people they represent but follow them.

That every demand for justice would, in recognition of the absence of considerations of justice wherever those of the market and profit hold sway,  be met with a call for morality and religion only ensures that there will to this extent be no real political discourse, thought, or action, and that, therefore, everything about the society we live in that many of us find problematic will remain as it is.