Things That Matter feels like a smart-enough guy talking with grandpa's matter-of-fact attitude. While Krauthammer shows early on he's not shy of hundred dollar words, he uses them in service to his point like grandpa might blame "the blacks" when the nuance and depth involved with "gentrification" may take a longer discussion he's not really trying to have. This isn't to say that he doesn't engage with interesting subject matter, but you feel hesitant in delving into his proclamations when he wants to sum them up in such declarative confidence.
For example, he has a piece called "The Central Axiom of Partisan Politics" you'll find it very quickly seeks to make characterizations of what liberals and conservatives think of each other. "Liberals suffer incurably from naivete, the stupidity of the good heart" he writes. Then to go on and chide the New York Times for wondering why crime keeps falling but prisons keep filling. His matter-of-fact insight: if you lock up the criminals, of course you're going to see a decline in crime. This isn't his investigation of private prisons or the reasons people are getting incarcerated. Just a "duh, New York Times" statement that's hardly defensible with just a touch a context and understanding for what the article was probably speaking to.
It's the same article where he sites a poll asking white men if they're angry. 3/4 said no. So, take their word for it?
Krauthammer does a number of profile pieces. It seems he habitually wants to draw bigger implications from a mini-exploration of a character, while trying to criticize the "liberal" idea that we're all fundamentally after the same things. He's got "life lessons we can all appreciate" without a fundamental understanding for why we should think we have the capacity to do so, apparently. You often can't tell if he appreciates an opponent's argument or where it came from, more than he wants to attack it on it's face.
Take his criticism of breeding the border collie for looks instead of brains. He wonders why we have to destroy this too "in a world of rising crime and falling standards" (1994). Does this not ring a little "save the whales?" I appreciate collies as much as the next former owner, but what do they really have to do with why the cities are failing and what are these standards precisely that you think have fallen?
He further uses take-it-for-granted language when criticizing a democrat for declaring there are corporate malefactors who have more to gain by our ongoing war in Iraq. One thinks Naomi Klein would be reeling.
It's symptomatic of his very "just what's on the surface" kind of take. Life sort of makes sense in a way that, when someone else needs a manual, they're missing out or making a caricature of themselves. I submit the line, "This project for the inculcation of proper human feelings through behavioral technique is either sinister or idiotic." This is a man who was a psychiatrist with a pithy regard for how people modify their behavior? He goes on to equate sensitivity training to Communist China breaking a person's conception of "individual."
It's not all "bad." Having recently criticized art myself, I found his take on the posh creatives hypocrisy over an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum dead on. I felt the entitlement and classism at war and could agree with the idea of not subsidizing "willful, offensive banality." I tend to agree about most things made out of different sized dicks.
He easily damns parents who sought "natural childbirth," who upon the child's death after complications, the midwife was put on trial. He reserves his sympathy for the child and would indite the parents. At the same time, I get the feeling he'd be the guy simply saying "think of the victim" in a discussion about the death penalty when all the messy facts about what the death penalty incites and involves might make him less sure of himself.
It only gets worse, unfortunately.
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