Frequent breast beater and all-around intellectual marshmallow David Brooks has touched off a real foofaraw, if not an outright hullabaloo, around the internet with his recent post for the New York Times, What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?, arguing that the rule of “us”, that horde of Ivy League educated sissy britches who hold sway in both Acela Land and “the Coast,” have so abused the “real America” that, if the shirt-sleeved crowd wished even to survive, it had no choice other than to throw itself into the smarmy arms of Donald Trump. So we’re the bad guys! Trump is our fault! All our fault!
Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.
Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.
Dave has gotten some admirable pushback from—well, let’s just say their name is Legion, for they are many—but some of the most cogent have come from the always cogent Mona Charon and Cathy Young, both of whom hang their chapeaus at the Bulwark. As Mona and Cathy point out, while Dave isn’t entirely wrong, he mostly is, particularly when it comes to, you know, data, and stuff like that, which has never been a strong point with a big thinker like Dave. Beyond mere “data”, however, which after all doesn’t matter much to Dave, Cathy goes the extra mile to psychologize the psychologist and hoist Dave on his own petard, to wit:
The question is not whether this in-your-face populism exists or whether there are problems that explain it; it’s whether it’s a justifiable response to those problems. And here, I think, Brooks’s attempt to understand the mind of the Trump supporter goes too far. Near the conclusion of his column, he writes:
“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.”
Even as Brooks disavows the Trumpist framing of Donald Trump’s indictments, he also semi-validates it by stressing that his trust in the system is a function of membership in the same elites he’s just declared to be the bad guys. Brooks is, you might say, checking his privilege.
And that’s the great irony of such a plea to understand Trumpist aggrieved populism: It is, in many ways, a mirror image of the same “woke” progressivism against which Trumpism is in part a pushback, and which conservatives have decried. In both cases, the argument suggests that law is merely an instrument of the powerful, objectivity is impossible, and the “marginalized” cannot be expected to respect legal and social norms. It’s no wonder “respectability politics” is as much of a slur in MAGA world as it is among social justice activists. In both cases, the politics of grievance are based on some real grievances: meritocratic elitism, like racism or sexism, is real (though in all these instances the dynamics are far more complex and far less pervasive than is claimed). In both cases, the politics of grievance offer bad solutions.
Now, that’s a lot of Cathy, but why not, because it’s all good. But after Cathy’s gone the extra mile, I would like to go, in effect, another extra mile and point out that, in effect, Dave got it right after all. He is responsible for Trump! He is, because it was he and his Clinton hating, war mongering buddies at the Weekly Standard who labored mightily, and labored successfully, to bully, and lie, and manipulate the American people into our disastrous invasion of Iraq and our absurdly prolonged and pointless invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Without those absurd, unnecessary, and grossly counterproductive wars, there would have been no Donald Trump.
Dave sobbed mightily over the demise of the Standard a few years back:
The staff was never unanimous about anything. The many flavors of conservatism were hashed out in its pages. If it stood for anything, I would say it stood for this: that the good life consists of being an active citizen and caring passionately about politics; that it also consists of knowing something about Latin American fiction, ancient Greek culture and social impact of modern genetics; that it also consists of delighting in the latest good movies and TV shows, the best new cocktails and the casual pleasures of life.
Well, yeah, sure, but here’s the real reason Bill Kristol and his neocon pals founded the Weekly Standard: to lie to the American people unceasingly until they were convinced that nothing could “save” America from the “terror” that was Saddam Hussein except a full-scale invasion of Iraq to remove him from power, a “Gulf War II”, even though the real purpose of this “crusade” was not to save America but to save the Republican Party from that damn hippie Bill Clinton. And when the neocons’ dreams most unfortunately became “true”, became truth, became disaster, resulting in the election of yet another damn hippie, Barack Obama, the Weekly Standard crowd labored again to destroy another Democratic president and destroyed instead the Republican Party. The Weekly Standard labored hand in hand for decades with outright wreckers of political and social order like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and Robert Bartley, editor of the Wall Street Journal, all the while sipping, one presumes, the best new cocktails and, occasionally, picking up a volume of Latin American prose. The Weekly Standard gave us Donald Trump.
So, yeah, Dave you are guilty. But not of being an upper-class twit, but of being an unscrupulous war monger.
Afterwords
My own exceedingly tart take on the Standard’s demise is here. My exceedingly tart take on the whole goddamn Republican Party is here. My many comments on Dave’s illustrious career—a few of them even complimentary!— are here.
Honor—I do have some—requires me to acknowledge that both the Bulwark and its more or less sister anti-Trump conservative publication the Dispatch were both founded by members of the Weekly Standard/National Review crowd out of disgust for Trump. Both continue to support a basically neocon foreign policy, which I can take from the Bulwark (I’m a subscriber) but not the Dispatch, because the Bulwark is less strident and has generally better writers.
