David Brooks gets half a clue, and then blows it all
Brooks’ column is entitled, “What If We’re the Bad Guys Here?” To refresh your memory, Brooks is the resident guy on the right at the Times, but as tradition dictates he’s really a very strange kind of mushy-middle straddler. He also was famous as the guy who fell in love with the perfect crease in Obama’s pants and, as far as I know, has never fallen out of that love.
You may say “why read Brooks?”, and it’s a good question. My answer is that people like Brooks fascinate me. Intelligent but not wise, he often half gets it and half doesn’t, and seems to be attracted to the surface of things rather than their depth. In that, I think he’s not so very unusual, and as such it’s of interest to look at what he’s saying and the way he thinks.
His column contains a rather good description of how today’s “elites” – among whom he places himself, so there’s some insight there – have isolated themselves from many other Americans and incurred their wrath. But he seems to think that the worst thing about that is that it’s led to the rise of Donald Trump.
A sample of the column:
Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.
What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done? …
… [We anti-Trumpers tell a story in which] we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.
I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.
So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.
Brooks then goes on to a fairly comprehensive description of the isolation, selfishness, and – yes, I’ll use the word – privilege that so-called elites have set up for themselves and perpetuated. Here’s just one small part of what he writes about that:
The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
As I said, it’s rather long and covers a lot of ground. But there’s something curious about it, which is that he doesn’t seem to acknowledge that Trump is supported not just as a reaction by the underclass to elitism. There are plenty of educated people, and/or wealthy people, who support Trump as well, people who have a lot of achievements and a high IQ. Brooks doesn’t attempt to explain them; instead, he offers a reductionist “story” about Trump supporters as fleeing away from elites and towards Trump in reaction to those elites. That explanation seems to me to be true. But there’s a great deal more going on, and it has to do not just with elite privilege and exclusiveness and reaction against it, but with love of America, appreciation of history and the wisdom of the Constitution, and a host of other positive elements and policies that Trump offers.
But Brooks can’t afford to admit that, because he hates Trump.
Here’s where Brooks reveals his Trump-Derangement and self-serving blinders. These are the last two paragraphs of his piece [my emphasis]:
Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.
But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.
In answer to Brooks’ question in that last sentence: never, if Brooks’ column is any example. Because that next-to-last paragraph is a triumph of elitist stupidity, arrogance, and simple-minded justification. Brooks states that of course the charges against Trump are not just a political witch hunt – but Brooks feels no need to explain why that might be the case, but merely seems to claim it’s a self-evident truth that it is not politically motivated. The stretching of the legal elements of a crime to the breaking point, in order to charge Trump? No problem for Brooks. The fact that Trump, Biden’s main political rival, is indicted by the DOJ under Garland, in the venue and with a judge most likely to convict? No problem for Brooks. The unprecedented nature of such a charge? Brooks is fine with it. The fact that Hunter Biden was given a sweetheart deal by the same DOJ? Just peachy keen with Brooks, and no evidence of political bias.
And then the bizarre statement that Trump is a monster. What does that even mean? What is a “monster” in the political sense? Just as Obama’s pants crease proved to Brooks that he was erudite and sophisticated both as man and thinker, and would make a great president, so something about Trump (his hair? his bragging?) makes him a monster. And not just a monster, but a monster “in the way we’ve all been saying for years? Who is this “we,” keemosabe? And what have you been saying that describes him as a monster? That he watched prostitutes pee on a bed? What preposterous and untrue things do you still believe? Or is your revulsion mostly esthetic?
And Brooks says that Trump is a monster who deserves to go to prison. Is that because he’s guilty of a crime? If so, what crime, and on what are you basing your idea of his guilt? Are you even thinking of trying to counter substantive arguments that he is not guilty? Or is his guilt merely assumed? And if it’s assumed, is it really because you basically trust the legal system and neutral arbiters of justice? I suspect that, if you do, it’s because in recent years you usually like the results.
It also seems to me as though, at the end there, Brooks got tired. He knew he had to put in some sort of “bad Trump” disclaimer, but he was too weary to do it effectively and just put in a sort of telegraphese for other “elites” who agree with him on Trump’s obvious guilt and obvious monstrosity. No need to argue it or prove it. It’s virtue-signaling par excellence.
It is a worthwhile exercise to try to find sound reasons for why your opponents act as they do. If you deceive yourself with stereotypes, then the things you do to try to change the situation have a good chance of failing.
We here are perfectly aware of the leftist stereotype of people like us and how wrong it is. What I don’t see here is much effort on our part to try to understand them without stereotypes. I’ve seen it here from many commenters multiple times that leftists act from invidious motives because there is something wrong with them, or that leftists are simply creatures with broken brains who can’t fathom the consequences of what they do.
Since we’re at a substantial disadvantage, considering that they control so many of the institutions that used make this country work, and especially law enforcement, the military, and the education and health of our children, it would make a lot more sense for us to try to understand what they do and why in the terms that make sense to them, that one of them would recognize and say, “yes, that is what I think and why I do what I do.” Then we can figure out how to change the circumstances and incentives that enable their behavior.
Because that’s the only way out that doesn’t just end up in war. The side that wins that war is very likely to create, probably unintentionally, a country that is unrecognizable to us today, a much poorer and grimmer one.
well i do understand how they think what they do, but its beyond insane,
They really do live in a bubble these New Yorkers. We are a couple of retired Foreign Service officers in Florida who supported Trump from the beginning. None of the elites opining in the MSM has any idea that we exist – PHD in economics, accountant here. Well to do, 2 grown kids, we went to Ivy League schools. we feel inivisible, have more in common with the Blue collar workers we employ and talk with, some of whom we meet in the Republican party meetings. Our lawyer friends try to bridge the gap with the Democrats in the local county power structure and I can tell this is getting harder. At least I don’t have to deal with them. The whole WuFlu stuff and the reaction of terrified Karens plus the trans fantasies has made me reluctant to interact with anybody who seems the least bit D.
The best parts of this were the quotes from other much better and more interesting thinkers than Brooks.
Brooks analysis reminds me of something from de Tocqueville’s “L’Ancien Régime and the French Revolution”. Tocqueville examined the roots of the hatred for the aristocracy. He argues that the Old Regime was not extraordinarily oppressive by the standards of Europe in that period. However he points out the French aristocracy had for generations been abandoning their traditional duties and obligations while clinging with barnacle like tenacity to their privileges. The contradiction of denying any obligation to the lower classes and at the same time asserting a vast array of privileges over them bred a bitter resentment. I am no fan of the French Revolution but I can understand why there were mobs cheering to see the nobles sent to the guillotine.
David Brooks has always been somewhat interesting. He is also hilariously, unrelentingly, appallingly lacking in self knowledge. He persistently moralizes from a constantly shifting platform of dubious moral principles. Don’t like him today? Wait a while. He’ll have something new to say about what he said last time, rationalizing his complete failure to abide by his previously stated principles.
It is great to have people like Brooks around. The big mistake would be taking him seriously.
Frederick says “I don’t see here is much effort on our part to try to understand them without stereotypes.” I fail to find any who do not lapse into or fully embody their negative stereotypes as intolerant, bigoted and delusional. Pace, Brooks.
“I’ve seen it here from many commenters multiple times that leftists act from invidious motives because there is something wrong with them, or that leftists are simply creatures with broken brains who can’t fathom the consequences of what they do.” Well, what we see from them is what we get. So?
Otherwise, would Frederick care to lead by example?
Frederick brings up a great question. It’s one I’ve been asking for years. I will admit I am a dunce in terms of reading human motivations and psyche in general. I would really like to know how to actually talk to the leftists/Ds I know in a way that penetrates their mental wall, and have them respond by not resorting to name calling and their usual frothing at the mouth rage.
“Intelligent but not wise, he often half gets it and half doesn’t, and seems to be attracted to the surface of things rather than their depth.”
Well said. I used to think that he must be good if both the right and the left hated him, but his shallowness finally got to me. He’s not always wrong, but he’s rarely more than half right. Still that is better than some people.
“There are plenty of educated people, and/or wealthy people, who support Trump as well, people who have a lot of achievements and a high IQ. Brooks doesn’t attempt to explain them; instead, he offers a reductionist “story” about Trump supporters as fleeing away from elites and towards Trump in reaction to those elites.”
The debate is, or ought to be about policy — about whether what the country was doing for decades before Trump was for the best, and about whether Trump’s policies were in some ways an improvement. When I say the debate, I’m talking about whether one would have voted for or against Trump in 2016 or 2020. But for people like Brooks, it’s about being a better person than Trump. There’s no thought that maybe Biden’s policies would have justified voting against him. No, Trump is that much of a monster. He is a bad person. Therefore everything he does must be wrong and he must be crushed.
Trump supporters pick up the anti-elitist theme, and often it takes precedence over the policy debate. They’re putting the cart before the horse. Every society has an elite, and competent people do in some way constitute an elite. I wouldn’t have a problem with the elite if I felt they really were competent and acting in the national interest and in the interest of the average American who isn’t part of the elite. Bellyaching about the conceitedness of the elite has common through the years, but people usually felt that they could live with the people in power. The current bunch, though, has abused their privileges for too long.
“Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.”
The most true thing Brooks has written in years. Unfortunately, as Winston Churchill is attribute as saying. “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth but he always picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”
This is a thought that most in the world of do goodery will refuse to grapple with. It makes them uncomfortable that for example California spends a lot of money on the “homelessness problem” but it mostly just pays for salaries of graduates of various UofC colleges. Sometime a big shelter project and next year the problem is worse.
if he hadn’t branded sarah palin, as a ‘cancer on the party’ eight years before,
Brooks: “Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.”
Exactly. It’s a form of aristocracy.
I was the first of my family to graduate from college. My roots are in the blue-collar world. I’ve always appreciated carpenters, electricians, plumbers, utility workers, auto mechanoids, etc. as much as I do the services of lawyers, teachers, financial wizards, insurance brokers, and other white-collar workers. In a complex world, we need many skills and aptitudes. We used to have a strong middle class, but now it’s being hollowed out.
One thing I’ve noticed is how, since about 1998, the technology filed has produced more wealth faster than the world has ever seen. We now have several thousand people who have more money than the rest of the population combined. Being wealthy is not a bad thing, but when the government enacts policies that favor people with money over the average population, it’s bound to create animosity.
The war on fossil fuels to combat climate change is just such a policy. The elite won’t suffer. To them it’s a way of showing their virtue. To Joe Sixpak it’s a sentence to poverty.
The Founders gave us a government of the people and by the people with free markets that allowed upward and downward mobility. It’s now morphing back toward the old Medieval system of classes with the elite (aristocrats) holding tenaciously to their privileges.
Brooks hates Trump because Trump is a traitor to his class. Triumph sees and understands the blue-collar workers and those citizens who aren’t hooked on the idea of belonging to a privileged class. Trump respects what they bring to our society. The elites hate that. Thus, he must be stopped at all costs.
Forget it Jake… it’s Brooks-town.
He long ago lost his mind.
BUT… he does still get invited to all the cool kids’ parties.
Frederick:
You write: “What I don’t see here is much effort on our part to try to understand them without stereotypes.”
And yet such discussions have occurred here time and again. There are usually two sides, with quite a few people on each side: those who stereotype the left as evil, pure and simple, and those who try to explain a much more complex and varied set of reasons behind liberal thought. I have probably written literally hundreds of comments over the years, arguing for the latter point of view, as well as having written many posts on the subject. Just to take a few examples I found in a very very quick search: this, this, this, this, and this. That’s just a little sampler; there are more.
John Guilfoyle:
But what I find so interesting about Brooks is that he’s only lost half his mind.
@Frederick says: “I don’t see here is much effort on our part to try to understand them without stereotypes.”
But I think this phenomenon lends itself to stereotypes. The Democratic Party’s voting solidarity on any favored issue lends itself to stereotypes. The unanimity of the Legacy Corporate Media in its anti-Trump messaging, sometimes using the same exact phrases across the field, lends itself to stereotypes. The list of examples goes on and on – so many of these things become stereotypical because the behaviors, the responses, the mindsets are so similar as to be nearly identical across a population, and hence, predictable. It’s one of the features in the social landscape that makes it so difficult to engage.
I’ve tried quite a few times to reach out to Progressive acquaintances, on fairly innocuous but polarized issues, and I’m sure others here have, too. There’s an element of irrationality to these mindsets – and a sense that a discussion of objective facts will provoke hysteria or emotional extremes in response, if they tread in areas that point out inconsistencies or dissonance.
So I think it’s actually quite logical to resort to stereotypes in this instance, and I don’t think their use makes it any more difficult to understand Progressives. They’re bat shit crazy, a lot of them, and they don’t spend a lot of time thinking through the logic and consequence of their beliefs, to satisfy themselves that they are defensible on moral or ethical grounds. And any discussion that might explore these areas is often met with outright hostility, because it’s seen as a threat.
Give them credit though. Tactically, Progressives know how to network and keep their stories straight, present a unified front.
Brooks fundamental mistakes seem to be confusing indoctrination with education; and still thinking that the institutions that administer the indoctrination are elite.
Maybe his opinion of both was more or less true back when he was growing up and matriculating at an elite university; but he has had ample opportunity, and plenty of evidence to justify revising his thinking if he took an honest look.
Most of the people whom I know went to lesser schools and studied more mundane subjects than they would find at the schools with the elite label. Yet, they are managing organizations of significant size, teaching at Universities themselves, or serving others as Nurses and such. They are perfectly able to understand the issues that we face as a society, while actually performing meaningful work
.
I am sure that Brooks feels more virtuous for having bared his soul. I find the whole thing condescending and self-serving.
As to Frederick’s observations I, for one, would relish seeing some evidence of rationality from those on the Left. Wait. I amend that. Some rationality other than a naked lust for power.
I’m reminded of the scene in “Angels In America”, where the gay New Yorker and the Utah girl are getting ready to go to their respective beds.
GIRL: I’m Mormon. We don’t believe in gays.
NYER: Well, I’m gay, and we don’t believe in Mormons.
Stopped clock Boss… stopped clock.
Or…blind squirrel finding an acorn.
Not so much educated, as credentialed. You can attend an Ivy for twelve years, and not learns a think, but become very adept at parroting back to your instructors what they want to hear, and accepting the hive mind.
I have always thought of Brooks as something of a fool, his trouser cuff statement being a shining example of his foolishness. That is pure surface, as our hostess points out.
I want to know what someone actually thinks, rather than whether he dresses sharp. I would also prefer someone who is competent, but somewhat obnoxious, than someone oily, evil, and beloved by the fools in the press.
As a practicing lawyer and former litigator, I could JUST AS EASILY, and much more accurately – and with only publicly available facts – indict Hillary for illegally paying a foreign spy to write a fraudulent dossier which she then passed off to the FBI in order to overturn an election.
Can you imagine what a semi-competent prosecutor could find if he had unfettered access to a DOJ and FBI that hated Hillary?
Good Lord.
Abraxas: “Every society has an elite, and competent people do in some way constitute an elite. I wouldn’t have a problem with the elite if I felt they really were competent and acting in the national interest and in the interest of the average American who isn’t part of the elite.”
I like something that commentator Christopher Roach wrote at American Greatness in 2018:
The old aristocracy was born of battle, a warrior aristocracy. Then the reins were handed off to the bourgeois, the wealthy capitalist class. Today we have an aristocracy of opinion made up of the managerial elite. Their chief credential is their credentials, as well as their having professed the right opinions. Among this class, much of what passes for deep thinking—whether on economics, foreign policy, or anything else—is in fact a repetition of stale conventional wisdom.
From https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/16/what-good-is-nato/
Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
It’s astonishing how closely this hews to critical theory, isn’t it? And Marxism? Systems of power and oppression, people, systems of power and oppression.
quote: There are plenty of educated people, and/or wealthy people, who support Trump as well, people who have a lot of achievements and a high IQ. end quote
Whelp…count me among them.
I’m a working class kid dealing with an abusive childhood (still), but I’m up there in IQ and eventually earned a Ph.D. and worked as a university prof.
Trump’s personality and communication style have always grated on my nerves, but from when he first entered politics I saw he had a clear understanding of the fundamental policy problems the US had. I voted for him in 2016, and was delighted at the progress he made during his term in office.
I voted for his re-election in 2020. I think this country would have been way better off if he’d served a second term. And if he’s the Republican nominee this time around, I’ll certainly vote for him again.
I didn’t start out as a Republican. But I got red-pilled by reality in my late thirties. That was a while ago. I’m one of those changers you’ve written about, Neo.
Somewhat blunt and to the point.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2023/08/03/nyt-columnist-asks-what-if-were-the-bad-guys-here-the-answer-yes-you-are-n1716007
“I’ve tried quite a few times to reach out to Progressive acquaintances….There’s an element of irrationality to these mindsets – and a sense that a discussion of objective facts will provoke hysteria or emotional extremes in response, if they tread in areas that point out inconsistencies or dissonance.”
I think this is a good point. It brings to mind the cartoon Sundance runs periodically, showing someone sitting at a table with a cup of coffee, surrounded by flames. The caption is “I’m fine. Everything is fine.”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/07/31/illegal-aliens-with-work-authorization-now-permitted-to-become-police-officers-in-illinois/#more-249422
“…and then blows it all away.”
That’s either because he REALLY DOES NOT have a clue, or (what is more likely)…
…he CANNOT ALLOW himself to admit the truth (which would be too painful, too horrible, too impossible. Too DIFFICULT):
– To admit that Trump’s NOT a monster? Just can’t go there.
– To admit that he and his cohorts have been unjustifiably DEMONIZING Trump for years? Nope. CANNOT and WILL NOT even contemplate that possibility.
– To tell his readers that he’s been wrong all these years? And lose their respect? Lose his readership? Commit journalistic suicide?
Ah well, but then who amongst us TRULY has that kind of integrity…? Is truly honest? Is truly heroic?
To be sure, Brooks’s been intellectually bankrupt for quite a while now. (As is the case with all too many of his erstwhile colleagues, alas—and he’s not the worst of ’em, though OTOH maybe he is…because he tries to emit an aura of reasonableness; of balance…)
AKA he’s brainwashed….and uses his many gifts to brainwash others.
(Talk about epidemics!)
He really should stick to creased trousers.
Brooks is controlled opposition. He’s not paid to get a clue. He’s paid to give emotional validation to liberals. Megan McArdle and Ross Douthat are more adept than he is, so they get to be the controlled opposition who display independent thoughts every once in a while. The low-rent frauds write for The Bulwark and The Dispatch. The blockheads not entirely bought-and-paid-for write for National Review. David Frum and George Will are too wealthy to be bought; they’re autonomously poisonous. Collectively, they reflect the viewpoint of about 8% of street-level Republicans as well as the Senate Minority Leader and his camarilla.
The obvious fact about Brooks is, and always was, that he is profoundly shallow. That was noticed by whoever reviewed one of his BoBo books in NR, back in the day when that was still a conservative magazine. But he can write well, and he’s oddly perceptive. (Again, this was obvious from the first.) As I see it, he makes me imagine Sherlock Holmes with the power of observation intact, but entirely lacking the power to reason from what he observes.
But, as to what they think, one change that has arisen is the open refusal to debate. I’ve even stopped reading the lefties, unless I get a recommendation from a trusted source. They almost all sound like Krugman or Marcotte; unexamined premises galore.
I used to like arguing with leftists. I even dated a few. I don’t think that happens nowadays. But then again, do kids even date today, in the sense we did?
I will say that unexamined premises abound on our side, too, and I sympathize with Frederick’s point. E.g., very many will claim liberals now are on the right. Some are, and always were in my lifetime. But not all. There are real roots of the left going back, through Mill and Emerson, to Locke. But many on the right deny that. Increasingly, that is growing – I think due to the Claremont connection. (I don’t hate them, but I do fear the results of their increasing dominance. The “fusionists” came to dominate at NR – look at the result.)
https://pjmedia.com/blog/andrew-ian-dodge/2010/01/06/the-unbearable-elitism-of-david-brooks-n14812
And one more thing…
One thing I liked a lot about the Brooks piece is the way he unintentionally blew the cover on “meritocracy”, a term that gets my goat. I note that both sides claim that’s what they want, but Brooks does admit what it really comes down to, being good at schoolwork, and being the right sort. Conservatives get just as glowy eyed over it, and seem really to mean something similar.
The trouble is that the actual ability to choose people who will be good at what you want them to do is vanishingly rare. This is true even of those who are themselves damned good at their jobs. (They may even be a bit worse; I don’t know.) I often hear people claim to have that ability; I have yet to see it work.
History certainly isn’t encouraging about this. It’s almost a cliche that, until the dolts are weeded out, countries at war lose a lot because of the incompetents who rose in peacetime. I’ve also noted that people point to sports as a counter-example. That is, to a field where success is artificially defined. (And even then, there are some glaring examples of rotten managers thriving in baseball.)
Meritocracy, after all, was what Woodrow Wilson believed in, and what gave us Robert McNamara.
Das – I recall that Hillary also engaged in shenanigans with electors in 2016 that involved persuding them to go “faithless” and install her as president because Trump was a Russian agent.
What is the statute of limitations on this “fraud against the United States” deal?
The Lincoln Brown response was great. It’d be nice if Brooks read it, even if it would have no lasting impact on him.
I love the way Ivy League graduates pat themselves on the back for having graduated from an Ivy League school. I spent my junior year abroad on a program full of Ivy League graduates and I came to the following conclusion.
I think a B average from a large public university is more impressive than an A average from an Ivy League school. Big fish, little pond; big pond, little fish. At a large public university, you are thrown in and have to figure it out for yourself. There are resources, but you have to find them yourself. In a lecture full of 1000 students, it is hard to stand out. At the Ivy League schools, the incoming freshmen are held by the hand and lead to resources. (While it isn’t technically an Ivy League School, it is a very elite one: Cal Tech doesn’t include freshman grades in the graduating GPA. If my large public undergraduate university had done the same, my GPA would’ve been fantastic!)
I think a number of them feel guilty about having survived in those gilded academic cages which is why we are in the mess with “wokeness” now. The idiots want to make up for being in a bubble — without actually leaving the bubble — but think that destroying ALL of education is the way to do it. They know that even if their children graduate from an Ivy League school as idiots, they will still get good jobs because of their
Frederick, the most provincial people in America are those who live in the liberal bubble. Devoid of humility or introspection and convinced of their own superiority intellectually and morally. We read what they write and say. We know how they think. It’s all around us all the time. They have never made the effort to read what we write or say. Their igorance is deliberate and profound. It comes down to the hubris. And to the extent you are wandering toward false equivalence, stop.
A Presbyterian minister where I worshipped once joked that in a room of five Presbyterians you will find, on average, eight theological viewpoints. Funny. With more than a hint of truth.
In a room of fifty of David Brooks’ elites, you will find, on average, zero original thoughts. Anyone who has ever paid attention will notice that the unanimity of opinion on the key political issues of the day is alarming and disturbing. It’s creepy.
The effectiveness of the thought police in herding all of these people into the same beliefs is frightening. Of course, it makes their claims of intellectual merit self-refuting. But it should worry those of us who still cling to hope that the reigning tyranny can be defeated.
To continue, they consist of a cult. Just look at the fury with which heretics are destroyed.
Yes, we know how they think. We know about their belief in their moral superiority and entitlement to rule. You can read it daily.
Yesterday, the official Missouri Democrat Party social media joked about burning down the house of a Trump supporter. Easy for them to do when they genuinely believe that anyone who disagrees with them is evil. That belief, is itself, evil.
We know how they think. We know what they believe. And we know how they treat heretics who deign to stray from the orthodoxy of their catechism.
mcnamara’s part in the edsel design, would suggest not, brooks venomous reaction to palin, was emblematic, she was earnest to a fault, did she have flaws, who doesn’t but she was prophetic on the need for energy independence, she even name checked abquaiq, that the iranians targeted in 2019, she warned about putin’s advances including an invasion of ukraine, that was nearly 15 years ago,
she sneered at community organizing, but she understood it wasn’t a proper profession, the reaction that a vocal element of the gay community, had toward an opinion she had about prop 8, in california, prefigured the erasure of biological woman today,
Six years ago 8/03/17, pollster Stuart Rothenberg wrote about a Trump rally in WVa:
“Lots of people in West Virginia can’t support themselves or speak English … they are close-minded, provincial, angry and easily misled.”
See also Obama and bitter clingers. The hate is real. The hubris is real. The sneers on their faces are barely hidden and always ready to emerge.
We know what and how they think. They show us all the time.
“Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison. ”
Several decades ago I was travelling across northern Tanzania in a 4×4 on my way back to Moshi (little town near Kilimanjaro). Had spent about 4 weeks following the epic wildebeest migration across the Serengeti, and we were now a long way from towns, roads, etc. (yep, BFE).
Once we travelled from true African savanna wilderness, we followed dirt roads that had no signage , infrastructure, maintenance or “boundaries”. They offered more of a general direction; as well as, a previously identified path though or around some of the more difficult challenges (e.g., water, ravines). I’ll add that “road” was often times a very generous description, and axel breaking ruts and massive 4-8 ft deep potholes were the norm.
Like most roads they periodically crossed another road, and some of the intersections functioned as improvised petrol, transportation, and food hubs. There was no infrastructure – buildings, electricity, water, etc. – everything was open air and makeshift. The fuel was in various portable plastic/ metal containers (yep, stayed clear). You asked around to see if anyone was offering rides to your destination. And the food was sold off of makeshift tables.
I spotted one table with the handwritten sign: Cooked Chicken Legs. And noticed that the legs were huge. There was no way that those came off of chickens. So, I asked Wazuri – my guide/ driver – What kind of meat is that? He laughed, and asked me if I noticed any stray dogs around. Damn.
Then I asked him: Does it bother people to know that they are eating dog legs? He shrugged his shoulders and said: No, they were told they are chicken legs.
Brooks has a BA from the University of Chicago. A top-ranked research university, but not an Ivy and lacking in that (meretricious) cachet. UChicago used to have a rep for being a school for fun-averse swots. Don’t know if it still does. Having grown up in a university town in New England with a cow college at one end and a Little-Ivy feeder college for the elite at the other, I stopped putting stock in academic reputation and academic snobbery a long time ago. One of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with–and one of the best writers–grew up poor in rural Alabama and is a proud graduate of Chattahoochee Valley Community College.
Brooks talks about the meritocracy, but there is no longer a meritocracy among the political elites, if there ever was one. There is definitely a “credentialocracy”. With all the talk about Harvard’s admission policies in the news, we are reminded that a significant fraction of their students are legacies, where true merit has little or no significance. And we’ve all seen how the much credentials like the lauded Harvard degree, even membership in Law Review, produces such mediocre results as Barack Obama and most of the really awful people we decry on a daily basis for steering our country into a ditch.
And as we are well aware, attendance and receiving credentials from the formerly universally acclaimed institutions like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc., now predict within 6 sigma of significance the political leanings, persuasions and ideology of the graduates, and they’re all to one side.
This is the “meritocracy” Brooks still naively believes in (or pretends to believe in, since I find it hard to believe he can unironically make this statement), much the same as he purports to believe our courts and the Department of Justice apply the law “neutrally”. It’s an ideal that used to be (and should always be) pretty universal among Americans, and even practiced with some consistency once, but those days are long gone. As our country approaches Banana Republic levels of politics, making such claims now is idiotic and insulting.
I read this piece yesterday as linked from a Reddit post, and my comment was something to the effect that Brooks had a “Hans, are we the baddies?” moment… seems to answer yes, but then concludes that it’s really not a problem, especially where Trump is involved.
Like Neo said, he sets up a pretty effective indictment, but then backpedals fiercely at the end. He still wants to get invited to all the cocktail parties.
its a kakistocracy, the greeks had away with words, dana milbank is properly credentialed but an idiot, well thats unfair to idiots, david frum is the other darrell,
who failed upwards from the bush administration and proffers more of that idiocy,
I am another one of those multiple degree Trump voters. In 2016 I thought he was a clown but I voted for him as a brick thrown through the window of the ruling class. I was surprised and pleased to see how he governed in spite of all the theater around him. I was sure the Russia hoax was a hoax. Some of those people pushing it should have gone to jail. Hillary committed multiple felonies but is immune as are many of her associates. Biden is a great example. He had to give up his ambitions in 1987 because the country at that time was still sane. I am convinced that 2020 was a stolen election. We had a rerun in 2022 in Arizona.
I have 5 kids. Two are leftists and two are conservative. One is a reasonable liberal. I cannot talk to the two lefties. Both, of course, are lawyers. Their brother can ‘t talk to them either. We just avoid politics. I have never heard a reasoned explanation of why they are on the left.
Stan wrote: “In a room of fifty of David Brooks’ elites, you will find, on average, zero original thoughts. Anyone who has ever paid attention will notice that the unanimity of opinion on the key political issues of the day is alarming and disturbing. It’s creepy.”
That’s certainly something lots of Substackers I follow have been grappling with. My husband’s family has a lot of doctors, and previously they would share non-politicized medical opinions. No more. My sibling is the head of a county planning and development department. Once upon a time you could ask her about planning issues — I remember discussing LEED certification with her, and having her dismiss it as garbage: putting up a “Let’s Save Energy Together!” poster would get you points to being a “green” building. She now just repeats mantras, visibly annoyed by any question.
I remember being struck that the Obama people were very much “A” students, with very little real world experience, but skilled in giving the “right” answer. That these “right” answers, via social media, can so easily flood the field, is certainly a part of problem. And that social media can punish so widely if a “wrong” answer is given is also part of it.
There’s a good interview with Walter Kirn about this phenomenon:
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/07/25/walter-kirn-on-how-america-lost-the-plot/
Lorenzo Warby’s series on Helen Dale’s substack explores it (at length):
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/worshipping-the-future
I’m in the middle of reading N. S. Lyons:
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-china-convergence
And back to Brooks. Anyone remember (I think it was discussed here?) Brooks taking his “friend” “without only a high school degree” (cleaning lady?) to a upscale sandwich shop where he inadvertently “shamed” her (he thought) because she didn’t know a panini from a ciabatta?
But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.
Insightful comment. Baltzell was right about history’s aristocracies — and right about the WASP Establishment that he came from and chronicled. What he missed is the way in which “leadership” (power) and class privileges have been linked in the years since he wrote his book in the Sixties.
I suspect John Kennedy was Baltzell’s ideal and idol. They were born in the same year and fought in the same war. Both had a preppy background, and there must have been quite a crease in JFK’s pants. Kennedy’s call to leadership inspired Baltzell, but that call resulted in the building up of the federal bureaucracy and the rise of the new meritocratic or managerial or credentialocractic elite under LBJ and other presidents in subsequent decades.
It was a good thing that Baltzell’s dream of high positions being opened up to people from outside the WASP mainstream became true, but Baltzell wasn’t able to see outside his New Frontier bubble enough to see that the new power structure replaced the old caste-ridden elite wasn’t any less able to build up privileges and abuse its power.
I give Brooks credit for seeing that he lives in a bubble, and credit for half-seeing that the policies the elite favor have been responsible for the rise of Donald Trump, but Brooks isn’t able to get fully outside the bubble. Most people aren’t able to do so either.
> its a kakistocracy, the greeks had away with words,
Thanks, Miguel. That will definitely become part of my lexicon (another great Greek word!)
your welcome,
I think it’s important to make a distinction between Dem leftists and Dem liberals. The leftists are destructive and driven by a need for power and they gin up support from many aggrieved leftist useful idiots that are perfectly willing to burn, loot and murder. We are not going to be changing their minds.
But the Dem liberals are the key and the mystery. They are reasonable people. I know many of them. But they can’t vote any other way but Democrat. They just won’t change their minds even after seeing the destruction of modern society and the havoc wrought by the leftists. That is the mystery. What value do they see in the modern Democrat party? And many of them are fairly conservative. But we can’t give up on them because they are the key to conservative electoral success.
Maybe they’re all like Garrison Keillor. They support Dems because they want to perceived as “nice”.
}}} Intelligent but not wise
This is, as I have noted many times, possibly THE defining element of many of the “decent, earnest” Democrats**.
As I have commented, if there was a “WQ” test to match the IQ test, then self-identified “Democrats” would consistently rank in the bottom 1/3rd of the resulting bell curve.
This probably ties into a mildly whimsical-but-real idea I’ve described, also, the
Liberal Midnight Reset Button™
— a nominal component of their internal programming that rejects processing any new data that conflicts with
Officially Accepted Liberal Dogma® as they go to sleep at night, and start processing “things learned” from short-term memory to long-term memory.
The latter makes them unable to learn anything new, which means they are like little children, who have no institutional constructs that they have developed with maturity and experience… which is pretty much the definition of “Wisdom”.
This also explains many of their behaviors, which closely resemble little children, who think that they should be able to stomp their feet to get what they want, or close their eyes to something to reject its existence or veracity (“Peekaboo!!”)
=========
** As opposed to another common, much more verminous form, the Power Democrat, the ones who, as Harry S Truman put it, “Would double cross their own mothers to get it [power] or keep it.”
Yeah. The Lincoln Brown piece at pjmedia is worth your time.
Unlike Neo, he closes with a sound rebuke.
It made me chuckle.
I would really like to know how to actually talk to the leftists/Ds I know in a way that penetrates their mental wall, and have them respond by not resorting to name calling and their usual frothing at the mouth rage.
physicsguy:
I appreciate your concern and wish to forward discussion. I’m an ex-leftist and I can’t tell you much.
The leftist system is well sealed-off from two-way debate at the best of times. These days it’s like an agitated hornet nest and the hornets are in attack mode. For my own safety I don’t talk politics with leftists anymore.
I do talk to leftists, Dems and the Woke about other things. I aim towards having a decent interaction. They eventually figure out I’m conservative. I try to represent my side as a calm, rational, open-minded person. I leave it to them to make what sense of that as they will.
I’m reminded of a saying attributed to St. Francis, though who knows:
_________________________
Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary, use words.
Stereotypes happen for a reason: It’s the way to bet, and you’ll be right more than not. If there’s a fault, it’s among the stereotyped. Don’t want to look like that, don’t look like that. Your call.
It’s possible to infer intent from results, or likely results from proposed action. This is more true as the following accumulate:
*Last time, it didn’t work out as you said it would. Nor the time before that.
*It was obviously going to be a catastrophe, not what you were selling.
*We have records of people telling you it would be a catastrophe and you blew them off.
*The actual result is a catastrophe which benefits you/your side/your class.
*You take no responsibility for it.
You see enough of that and you begin to get a clue, which is to say, a stereotype emerges.
As to the internal mental workings, that’s another question. You say, mentally clenching your teeth (if that’s a thing), “Nobody can be that stupid! Nobody.”
Therefore, they have to know better and are lying. But they seem so honestly sincere in blowing off reality that…..
I have relations who honestly think that having a weather event run on closed loop every half hour for a week on CNN erases NASA’s records of, say, heat in the Thirties. You’d have to be determinedly ignorant–possibly the midnight reset button referred to above–to keep insisting we’re about to boil over in our unprecedented heating, “unprecedented” being the operative word here.
But the mental gymnastics to keep doing that seem a whole lot more involved than simply lying in pursuit of climatista control.
When you get the same response to some version of,” Hey, buddy. I watched the hearings. You want to start over?” forever….
}}} I would really like to know how to actually talk to the leftists/Ds I know in a way that penetrates their mental wall, and have them respond by not resorting to name calling and their usual frothing at the mouth rage.
The error here is presuming that they CAN be capable of true dialogue.
They are pure Zen people and you’re asking them to be Motorcycle Mechanics.
Historically, such peeps would have been forced by surroundings to make them compromise, and learn a bit of MM. They wouldn’t LIKE it, but they could be cajoled into it.
That quality disappeared with the Boomers in charge.