Charlie Riedel/AP Photo
People listen while former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally, July 7, 2023, in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Some people whom I respect sent me notes suggesting that The New York Times’ reliably fatuous columnist David Brooks had written a rare thoughtful essay whose argument was worth taking seriously. Brooks fans will know that his formula is to read a book, write an essay borrowing ideas from the book, but bury the book reference well down in the column so that it seems merely incidental to his own original ideas.
This essay, which the Times gave more space than usual, was titled “What If We’re the Bad Guys Here?” Keep in mind that “we.”
Brooks begins by wondering why Trump’s poll numbers are so good. He quotes his colleague Tom Edsall making the point that racial and gender progress was necessary—what African American or LGBT person would want to go back to 1963?—and that the mainstream is paying the price. “In this story, we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment,” writes Brooks, and the Trumpers are the reactionaries.
But what if we are the bad guys, Brooks wonders. The “we” he has in mind is the meritocracy—the educated professional class—which really isn’t that much of a true meritocracy if we factor in inherited advantage. It’s the children of the already advantaged who are more likely to attend elite universities, etc.
This part of Brooks’s story is at least partly true, and it’s a well-known story. The research of Raj Chetty and colleagues (which Brooks doesn’t bother to credit) over more than a decade has documented multiple aspects of the role of inherited advantage in who gets into the most competitive colleges, and who thrives financially.
But here’s where Brooks’s sleight of hand comes in. He writes: “It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault—and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class.” So “we,” the educated class, are the culprit. We are the bad guys here.
Pop quiz: Did you notice what Brooks left out? He left out rampant, predatory, rapacious capitalism! How like a centrist Republican.
Think about it. Who destroyed the factory towns where working-class white people used to be able to make a decent living? Who decimated the labor movement? Who used globalization to ship jobs overseas? Who undermined regulation that once protected working families?
It sure as hell wasn’t English professors or lesbian activists. It was capitalists.
And despite Brooks’s effort, either sly or oblivious, to include Goldman Sachs, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Elon Musk et al. with thee and me in the same “we,” the reality is that billionaires and regular college grads, even affluent ones, dwell in different universes of power and money. Indeed, much of the educated middle class is under assault from the same class warfare from the top.
So, alas, wannabe Brooks fans need to keep waiting for that elusive thoughtful essay.
