“The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality," wrote Brooks. "Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it.” And he then went on to declare: “I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption—something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.”
So, has Brooks joined the Left—and if so, why should we care?
I have always taken Brooks seriously, going all the way back to his years writing for The Weekly Standard, the neo-conservative magazine published by Rupert Murdoch and edited by Bill Kristol. Brooks originally caught my attention because he was posing questions about the “purpose and promise of America” that I sincerely believed needed addressing, but which my left comrades— in contrast to past progressives and radicals from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King Jr.—were failing to ask, if not outright scorning them.
For all of his talk about class inequality, and as much as he has come to see the light on what the Democrats should have been doing and, presumably, should be doing if they/we ever get it together and win back the White House and Congress, he still doesn’t really get what led us here...
At the same time, I never failed to recognize that as much as Brooks was asking the right questions—most notably in “A Return to National Greatness” (1997); “What is America For?” (2014) and “What are We Supposed to Do (about the growing class divide and the impending nomination of Trump)? (2016)—he was consistently offering the wrong answers. As I wrote in response to the second of those pieces: “(How could the conservative Brooks effectively answer that question?) How could he possibly appreciate and write informatively of America’s purpose and promise—the promise inscribed in our historical memory and imagination by Paine’s Common Sense, Jefferson’s Declaration, the Founders’ Preamble to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, FDR’s Four Freedoms, and King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech? How could he appreciate the promise that inspired not just a revolutionary war, but also generations of Americans to struggle to expand both the “We” in “We the People” and the democratic process through which “the people” can genuinely govern themselves?”
Brooks, unlike his own comrades on the right, had never been completely oblivious to questions of class. But he never wrote the kind of piece that he did on November 6 of this year—a populist class analysis and narrative that clearly holds the nation’s elites accountable for Trump’s victories in both 2016 and 2020. The very title of the column signals Brooks new sympathies. While he definitely has no affection or admiration for Trump and the MAGA crowd, he takes seriously the working-class voters who lined up with them on Election Day. Notably, he does not dismiss them as simply “deplorables,” as so many liberals have done ever since 2016. “There will be some on the left,” he writes, “who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again…. The rest of us need to look at this result with humility. American voters are not always wise, but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us.”
As Brooks tells it, the past 40 years of American history, which he dubs the “information age,” saw the emergence of a post-industrial class structure, a society divided into two classes, that is, a governing class of highly educated university graduates and a lower class of the less educated, in essence, the working class. In this order, “those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the post-industrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies [trade policy, immigration policy, education policy, environmental policy, and technology policy] to meet our needs.” And while “we” benefited, the less educated definitely did not. They have endured, he points out, not only lower incomes, less financial security, and fewer social and cultural opportunities, but also less healthy and shorter lives. Making this social order all the more oppressive, he says, the educated class has looked down upon and lorded it over those beneath them: “That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect.”
Inevitably, the “chasms” created “led to a loss of faith, a loss of trust, a sense of betrayal” on the part of the working class.
He acknowledges that the Democratic Party was not insensible to inequality. But it “focused on racial inequality, gender inequality, and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality,” not class inequality. And he states, as “the left veered toward identitarian performance art,” Donald Trump “jumped into the class war with both feet...” and put together what the “Democratic Party once tried to build – a multiracial working-class majority.”
Of course, Brooks notes that “the Biden administration tried to woo the working class with subsidies and stimulus.” But he observes: “there is no economic solution to what is primarily a crisis of respect.”
With those words Brooks himself answers the question posed at the outset: Has Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 turned the New York Times most prominent and popular conservative columnist David Brooks into a “Bernie bro?” For all of his expressed populist sympathies and sensibilities, Brooks is not one of us. Sure, respect matters—it matters deeply. But it wasn’t the lack of respect that brought about the class divide and the injustices endured by working people.
For all of his talk about class inequality, and as much as he has come to see the light on what the Democrats should have been doing and, presumably, should be doing if they/we ever get it together and win back the White House and Congress, he still doesn’t really get what led us here and what we need to do not only to begin to find our way out of the political abyss into which we have fallen, but also go on to lead Americans to truly transcend the ever intensifying crisis of democracy that we will surely continue to confront.
So, Brooks is not one of us. But neither is he the conservative he long had been...
In short, Brooks’ narrative ignores the real class war from above waged these past 50 years by corporate bosses, Republican conservatives, and yes, Democratic neoliberals—a class war against the democratic rights secured and the progressive achievements accomplished during what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called the “Long Age of Roosevelt” from the 1930s to the early 1970s. That “great sucking sound” to which Brooks refers was not simply sucking up and redistributing respect upwards to an educated class. Even more so, it was sucking up the wealth that working people were producing and redistributing it up to multimillionaires and billionaires.
Brooks says, “The Democrats obviously have to do some major rethinking.” That’s putting it mildly. To save the Democratic Party and redeem the nation from the grip of billionaires and reactionaries, and the serious threat of outright Fascism, the Democrats are going to have to not only join with the Labor Movement in favor of articulating a progressive and social-democratic vision and agenda that polls repeatedly show the great majority of Americans truly want. They will also have to stop promising to fight for the people and, by their own actions, start encouraging the fight in the people.
Okay. So, Brooks is not one of us. But neither is he the conservative he long had been (fascists can do that to you). Thus, he can be an important ally in the struggle to defend and enhance democracy. From his perch at the Times, he speaks to not only conservatives, but also to moderate Democrats, without whom we cannot transform the Democratic Party and start taking back America.
So, David, welcome to the left, sort of.
