New York Times NeverTrumper columnist David Brooks published a rare, self-reflective column this week asserting that he and our America’s political, corporate, and media elite may in fact actually be the “Bad Guys.”
Brooks’s column is served up with his usual overbearing degree of pseudo-moralistic handwringing, lamenting the overlooked virtues of the American elite and the dangers of Donald Trump. But buried in its verbosity is a recognition that the U.S. elite have enriched themselves at the expense of Americans middle and working classes:
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.
The column goes on to point out that the elites’ social libertinism has resulted in the breakdown of the American family with an increased rate of divorce and out-of-wedlock births among the non-elite classes. It should be noted that in 2013, David Brooks divorced his wife of twenty-seven years, Jane ‘Sarah’ Hughes. In 2017 David Brooks married his research assistant Anne Snyder. She was 32 at the time, Brooks was 55.
The reaction to Brooks’s column has varied on social media. The neoliberal Tax Foundation’s Alan Cole, a self-described neoliberal, perhaps unintentionally re-enforced the thrust of the columns complaint in a thread on X (formerly Twitter): “Mentioning Trump support invites a comparison that makes it easy to diminish the examples raised. Lots of readers will say “sure, some of these things are bad, but Trump is far worse.”
Glenn Greenwald noted that Brooks is correct that the elite media focus on cultural and ethnic newsroom diversity has come at the expense of economic diversity in the newsroom, making our media blind to the experience of the American working class. And perhaps as expected, famed American writer and unhinged social media liberal Joyce Carol Oates posted: “[T]hat David Brooks column in which a handwringing pretend-liberal blames liberal “elites” like himself for the racism, misogyny, anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-education bigotry of T***p followers like a mugging victim blaming himself for being mugged.”
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