CONSERVATIVE NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST DAVID BROOKS is a fixture in a national media that caters to the upper middle class and professoriate. He not only has a Times column; he also appears weekly on the PBS “NewsHour” television program, and on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” He writes for The Atlantic Monthly, the conservative journal The Weekly Standard and other outlets.

I’ve read Brooks’s writing since 2001. In December of that year, he wrote a landmark piece for The Atlantic titled, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible,” in which he more or less solidified the cultural iconography of “Red States” and “Blue States”:

“Different sorts of institutions dominate life in these two places. In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing. In Red America the Wal-Marts are massive, with parking lots the size of state parks. In Blue America the stores are small but the markups are big.

“… We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books and attend more plays than the people in the Red heartland. We’re more sophisticated and cosmopolitan — just ask us about our alumni trips to China or Provence, or our interest in Buddhism.”

In some ways, Brooks is an appealing author to read. While he too often resorts to caricature, he’s a perceptive caricaturist:

“Red America makes social distinctions that Blue America doesn’t. For example, in Franklin County there seems to be a distinction between those fiercely independent people who live in the hills and people who live in the valleys.

“… There also seems to be an important distinction between men who work outdoors and men who work indoors. The outdoor guys wear faded black T-shirts they once picked up at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and wrecked jeans that appear to be washed faithfully at least once a year. They’ve got wraparound NASCAR sunglasses, maybe a NAPA auto parts cap, (and) are heavily accessorized, and their accessories are meant to show how hard they work, so they will often have a gigantic wad of keys hanging from a belt loop …”

The above sample is reasonably representative of Brooks’s oeuvre. The thing I’ve come to understand about Brooks in the last 14 years is the role he’s assigned himself in the conservative movement: his job is to do Republican outreach to the NPR set.

While he and I usually come at politics from different directions, I often find myself enjoying his writing. However, when I read Brooks’s latest Times column, I felt an old wound being prodded:

“Roughly 10 percent of the children born to college grads grow up in single-parent households. Nearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do. There are a bunch of charts that look like open scissors. In the 1960s or 1970s, college-educated and noncollege-educated families behaved roughly the same. But since then, behavior patterns have ever more sharply diverged. High-school-educated parents dine with their children less than college-educated parents, read to them less, talk to them less, take them to church less, encourage them less and spend less time engaging in developmental activity.”

Leaving aside the fact that Brooks is ignoring the reasons poor people deprive their kids of those advantages — such as, when you’re working two minimum-wage jobs and trying to get the car you need to get to one of them out of impound because you can’t afford to register it and it got towed, and your kids go to an underfunded school where after-school activities have been cut to the bone and middle-class people won’t give it adequate funding because Those People go there, none of which is your fault — he is doing something with a long and malignant history in this country: casting poverty as the result of moral failings.

This is not only ignorant and arrogant. It is, itself, morally depraved.

Brooks is assuming, first of all, that middle-class people are more virtuous than the poor (after all, why else would they be doing better?). I actually can speak from direct personal experience about this, since I grew up in both a poorer area (the flats in Richmond) and a middle-class area (When I was 14 my family move to Benicia, which back then was probably as close as Northern California got to “Mayberry, RFD.”) In my experience, poverty means the consequences of any misbehavior become much more, not less, severe.

In my high school class in Benicia, there were kids — a whole lot of them — who dealt drugs. Not just pot, but cocaine, barbiturates, amphetamines — the “hard stuff.” The only difference between them and Richmond kids who dealt drugs was that the suburban kids dealt out of suburban houses owned by people who had political power, so the consequences of getting caught were usually dad making a show of giving them a lecture, the drugs being flushed down the toilet, and being grounded for two weeks. All because they were “good” kids, not poorer and darker-skinned.

The Richmond kids were subject to raids by the cops, being hauled away in handcuffs, and then being sentenced to lengthy prison terms at Fouts Springs youth prison — or, if they were older than 16, Folsom or San Quentin.
Poor people, in a billion little ways, are judged and dealt with much more harshly, for practically every offense, than middle class folks are.

In my experience, the only difference between poor and middle-class people is miles, money and luck. There is no moral difference — if anything I found, amid the poverty and violence, more virtue, more godliness, more agape love, in Richmond than anywhere else I’ve lived.

If David Brooks knew any of the people I grew up with — if he knew the truth of their lives, what they have endured and what they have achieved despite their poverty — then he would be begging their forgiveness for the calumnies he has perpetuated.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.