Time was, David Brooks brought a social scientist's insight to journalism. Then he became anti-Trump, all the time, and was therefore unreadable to those of us who saw Trump was speaking to and for a large segment of the populace.
He still doesn't like Trump, but in a current NY Times article echoed at the DNYUZ site, Brooks tries to make sense of why Trump is popular with so many. He asks, "What if We're the Bad Guys Here?"
Brooks concludes that an inbred, self-perpetuating elite class (of which he is a member) is monopolizing the control of nearly everything of importance in our country. And that Trump gets it and speaks to and for the rest of us.
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.
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.
Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.
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.
I spent my career teaching non-elite nice kids at an undistinguished state university. They mostly went on to decent lives, but they didn't end up running the nation or any significant segment thereof. And they had no such expectations either.
