SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
david brooks
Progressives Don’t Want David Brooks in Our Movement Anyway
The toxic attitudes of Brooks and others toward poor people are the problem. Direct cash works because it fundamentally trusts people to meet their own needs.
Oct 15, 2025
David Brooks’ recent column in the New York Times, “Why I Am Not A Liberal,” claims that giving people money has failed as an anti-poverty solution because poor people lack the right culture and character.
Here we go again. Brooks' characterization of poverty isn’t new—it’s an American tradition. It’s the same tired tropes I’ve been hearing since I was a kid and my family relied on CalFresh and MediCal to get by. We relied on government aid not because my parents were lazy, or that they didn’t want to work, but because they were working and it still wasn’t enough.
Let’s be clear: Poverty is a lack of cash, not character. It persists because policy solutions are piecemeal and exploitation is ongoing. Brooks claims that “we are pretty good at transferring money to the poor,” and then cites the increased government spending on welfare programs as proof that they haven’t worked. But according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, for every dollar budgeted for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 2020, poor families directly received an average of just 22 cents. As Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, By America, explains, “The American welfare state is a leaky bucket.”
The goal should be simple: Get more of the money we spend on fighting poverty into the hands of people who actually need it. Guaranteed income does precisely that, providing direct cash to people with minimal administrative overhead. And it works. Research from more than 20 academic studies has found that guaranteed income increases financial resilience, improves food and housing stability, and gives families more time together. Not a single pilot has shown decreased employment among recipients of guaranteed income, and the vast majority of pilots have shown increased rates of full-time employment.
If we are serious about weaving America back together, then we need policies that provide stability and dignity, not arguments that fray the fabric further.
This game of blaming poor people for their outcomes has always been rooted in racism. By Brooks’ logic, white families must have the purest culture, since they have amassed the most wealth. That claim is not just wrong—it’s absurd. He even pines for the left to embrace old neocons like Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan—the same person who released the 1965 “Moynihan Report,” under President Lyndon B. Johnson, which blamed the problems facing Black Americans as more deeply rooted in “ghetto culture” than in discrimination, exclusion, and lack of opportunity.
David Brooks calls himself a cultural determinist, suggesting that poverty persists because people lack the “traditional values” that enable success. But this view misunderstands how poverty actually works in America. For most families, poverty is not a lifelong condition—it is a temporary spell, a risk that far too many Americans face after a layoff, a medical bill, or a family crisis. To reduce this reality to some imagined permanent underclass devoid of the right culture is both inaccurate and unfair.
What’s more, it runs counter to Brooks’ own work. In 2018, he founded Weave: The Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute to rebuild trust and strengthen communities through belonging and human connection. Yet when he turns to poverty, he abandons that spirit of unity—portraying families who are struggling not as neighbors working to get back on their feet, but as deficient in values. If we are serious about weaving America back together, then we need policies that provide stability and dignity, not arguments that fray the fabric further.
The toxic attitudes of Brooks and others toward poor people are the problem. Direct cash works because it fundamentally trusts people to solve their own problems. Guaranteed income expands liberty. It is the infrastructure of freedom—a floor sturdy enough to make every other solution possible.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why Are Conservatives So Destructive? It’s Everyone Else’s Fault
Why are the rest of us supposed to respectfully indulge people who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old? Fascists are victims only of their own delusional understanding of the world, not the alleged problems a so-called "woke" culture imposes on them.
Aug 26, 2025
David Brooks, the New York Times’ philosopher in residence, has stumbled onto the astonishing fact that present-day conservatives don’t actually want to conserve anything; rather, they are nihilists who just want to destroy. He is hardly the first person to think this: I saw it coming many years ago, as have a host of others.
But it wouldn’t be a Brooks piece without a thumping non sequitur as its thesis: conservatives became nihilists, he says, because liberals drove them to it. Liberal culture and its sanctimonious hectoring literally “smother” American society, triggering a result as inevitable as combining two reactive chemicals.
He bases this conclusion on a survey of university students in two universities. If most of us think back on our college years, wasn’t it almost expected that we should be disaffected with any authority whatever, something we grow out of once the necessity of making a living stares us in the face?
On this slender evidentiary basis, Brooks concludes that conservatives are victims who can’t get a word in edgewise in woke America. This ignores the ubiquity of Fox News (a correspondent once wrote to me about being subjected to Fox News playing in a doctor’s office, as if the patients weren’t sick enough already). If you still own a device called a radio, you will notice that every commercial news-talk station is conservative.
Beyond that, have you ever been to a gun show (even in ostensibly liberal Northern Virginia where I live, there is a huge one at Chantilly)? Did you ever attend a NASCAR race, a country music concert or a megachurch, visit Branson, Missouri, or, if you’re really in the mood for amusement, tour the creation museum in Petersburg, Kentucky? None of these are exactly bastions of wokism, and somehow thrive despite the repressive atmosphere that Brooks conjures.
His victim narrative also puts conservatives in a strange ideological position that is contrary to their alleged principles. In the 1960s, as crime rates rose and inner cities smoldered with discontent, some liberals hypothesized that bad social conditions led to crime: crudely put, the slum made the criminal. Conservatives, led by William F. Buckley, Jr., their patron saint, responded vehemently: “society” bore no responsibility, it was a matter of innate character. The criminal made the slum.
Brooks has inverted this formula. As a spokesman for the erstwhile Party of Personal Responsibility, he now asserts that conservatives are persecuted victims of society. Their nihilistic rampages can be excused as acting out against cultural repression, as if they were the protagonist in Richard Wright’s Native Son, whereby the black youth commits a murder that is preordained by his upbringing in a violently segregationist society.
This is a slightly more sophisticated variant of the old chestnut that whites, particularly white males, are the most discriminated against people on earth, a trope that has been relentlessly worked over since Archie Bunker satirized it 50 years ago.
Embedded in Brooks’s complaint that the supposedly dominant liberal culture won’t listen to conservative ideas is the fallacy that all ideas, opinions, and traditions deserve equal consideration. One hopes that the vast majority of people would instantly reject the notion that slavery, ritual human sacrifice, or cannibalism are an acceptable basis for social organization. They once were, but enlightened opinion banished them.
All the supposedly vibrant ideas of present-day conservatism always reduce to a handful of notions that the Republican Party has been pushing for decades. The vision that the state can make life better for its citizens, meaning healthier, more economically secure, better educated, and with better infrastructure, is something conservatives have fought tooth and nail against since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
What they want is a weakened state that will do nothing for the citizen; instead, they want a strong state only when it comes to punishment—hence the money they throw at militarizing law enforcement and constructing a society of incarceration. Take a good look at Washington, DC—it’s coming to a city near you.
Conservatives believe in human inequality, whether in the economic, social, or racial spheres. Depending on the circumstances, they go to some lengths to conceal this belief, but the major voices of post-World War II conservatism were quite open about it. Buckley said “Unless you have the freedom to be unequal, there is no such thing as freedom.” Except that when conservatives are in power, inequality will indeed increase, but there is no corresponding increase in freedom, as anyone paying attention during the last seven months will have noticed.
Why are the rest of us supposed to respectfully indulge people who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old? Should we invite young earth creationists to rewrite geology textbooks to demonstrate how tolerant we are of their opinions? Is there really a legitimate difference of opinion on whether anthropogenic climate change exists, suggesting that scientists all over the world got it wrong and right-wing ideologues got it right? Should we thoughtfully examine the evidence that Jewish space lasers caused wildfires in California or that the Covid-19 vaccine is actually an injectable microchip just to show what good sports we are?
Beyond that, Brooks’s contention that nihilism is somehow the antithesis of conservatism is shaky. Joseph de Maistre, identified by the great historian of philosophy, Sir Isaiah Berlin, as one of the founders of Western conservatism, practically wallowed in nihilism: “The whole earth,” he wrote, “continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.”
Western religion itself, which Brooks thinks we must return to for life to have meaning, has its nihilistic element. Apparently, almost four in ten American adults believe we live in “end times,” and the behavior of much of the religious right during the Covid pandemic was that of a death cult. R.R. Reno, the editor of the religious-right publication First Things, actually wrote a paean to accepting death from Covid rather than taking precautions against it.
David Brooks spent his entire adult life pretending that modern American conservatism was about Edmund Burke and James Madison rather than an embryonic extremist movement that only needed the right leader to become a full-blown fascist party. Having finally lurched onto the unavoidable truth, he now assumes a pained expression and searches for a scapegoat.
Keep ReadingShow Less
When David Brooks Goes 'Bernie Bro' (Sort of)
The longtime conservative NYT columnist is certainly not a member of the political left. But his recent admission still has something to offer us.
Nov 14, 2024
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?” To read his “morning-after” piece—“Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?”—might well make you think so.
Responding to the polls showing that more working-class voters in all their diversity had voted for the Trump/Vance ticket than for that of Harris/Walz, Brooks proffered nothing less than an historical class-analysis of what had led them to turn from the “Party of the People” to the party of a billionaire real-estate mogul and his Make America Great Again politics. In fact, even before Sanders himself issued a post-election attack on the Democratic Establishment stating that “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Brooks charged the Democrats with having failed to fulfill their primary political responsibility.
“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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
David Brooks' Defense of Trump Defenders Disguises Where Real Power Is
Brooks and The New York Times are playing the tired role of using petty cultural politics to ignore economic reality and portray the Republicans as the voice of working America.
Aug 11, 2023
In an era of Donald Trump and a Republican Party dedicated to eradicating liberal democratic order to solidify its political hegemony, New York Times columnist David Brooks—like fellow Times columnist David French and the Atlantic‘s David Frum—appears to be a sane voice of the old-school conservative movement. In short, a Never Trumper.
It might initially come as a surprise, then, to see his response to the latest Trump indictment (New York Times, 8/2/23) drawing praise from the right-wing press for seeing the political elite from Trump supporters’ point of view. Fox News (8/3/23) said that Brooks’ column exposed the anti-Trump class as “self-dealing jerks.” Seth Mandel (Twitter, 8/2/23), executive editor of the Washington Examiner, said the piece achieved a “quality reached a few times a year by a few writers,” and with dizzying circular reasoning declared it would “be criticized angrily because it shows empathy and elite introspection, which will prove it correct.”
Brooks’ column encouraged anti-Trumpers (among whom he includes himself) to think of themselves as “the bad guys,” because while they diagnose the Republican base’s unflagging support for its leader as rooted in bigotry and resentment, it actually derives from “the class war between the professionals and the workers.” Brooks, enlightened member of the professional class that he is, understands “why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault.” He asserted, “They’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class.”
But Brooks engaged in a trick he’s used his entire career. He presents himself as an expert on salt-of-the-earth residents of the Heartland whom elites have ignored and wronged, so our critical gaze should be cast on supposedly progressive elite institutions, not bigotry and authoritarianism—or on the real causes of the economic inequality he bemoans.
‘Walking on eggshells’
The reason it comes across as plausible is that Brooks does get part of the story right. He writes that elites “marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation,” and that “members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.”
It’s true that the US ranks lower on inequality and social mobility than most other wealthy nations. But Brooks would have readers believe these problems come primarily from cultural norms, not economic policy. He offers one sentence each on “free trade” and “open immigration”—defying the evidence that immigrants don’t erode the wages of native-born workers—followed by three paragraphs on liberal cultural factors. The first deftly flips the script, making the oppressed the oppressor:
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.
In reality, it’s people who identify as Latinx, think intersectionally or who aren’t cisgender who have to “walk on eggshells”—not because of a social stigma, but because of punitive laws passed by authoritarian legislatures:
- Arkansas has banned “most state agencies from using the gender-neutral term Latinx” (AP, 1/22/23).
- “Florida has ‘effectively’ banned the Advanced Placement Psychology course from being taught in classrooms over lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation” (Daily Beast, 8/3/23).
- Sixteen states have passed laws against the use in schools of Critical Race Theory—which embraces intersectionality—with the state of North Dakota banning the idea that “that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality.”
- State-level laws against trans rights are rising at such a frightening pace, trans people are seeking refuge in some of the places Brooks frowns on as bastions of elite-driven intolerance (Teen Vogue, 8/3/23).
Who monopolizes cultural power?
Brooks might have missed that it is, in fact, the anti-trans movement that nearly monopolizes American cultural power. A conservative backlash to Bud Light’s sending a novelty beer can to a trans actress has led to a devastating loss for the beer’s parent company (CNN, 8/3/23). Yet while liberals talk about boycotting fast-food chain Chick-fil-a over its anti-gay positions (LA Times, 7/23/12; Yahoo, 7/15/21), the company is clucking along undeterred (Franchise Times, 4/6/23; USA Today, 7/27/23).
While Brooks decried that being unhip when it comes to trans terminology gets you fired, the reality is that, according to research by McKinsey, “nearly 30% of transgender people in the United States are not in the workforce and are twice as likely as the cisgender population to be unemployed.”
This led Brooks into a discussion of how, because “we” (meaning the professional class) “eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom,” having children out of wedlock has become more normal:
After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, The Aristocracy of Talent, “60% of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10% to women with a university degree.” That matters, he continues, because “the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”
That’s a neat trick how the college-educated persuaded high school graduates to have children without getting married, by continuing to have children while married. (That Murphy Brown storyline must have been very persuasive!) One might more plausibly attribute changes in unwed birthrates to new reproductive technologies than to cultural messages created (but not heeded) by the professional class.
It is not social norms, though, that make single parenthood a roadblock to climbing the ladder; it is the lack of economic support and protection for people with children. If Brooks wanted parenthood to be seen as a way to thrive rather than an enormous burden, he’d be advocating for free reproductive care, subsidized daycare, more parental leave and other economic supports that exist elsewhere in the wealthy industrialized world.
‘It’s not the entrepreneurs’
Throughout the piece, Brooks conflates the college-educated with the wealthy, writing that anti-Trumpers are those with “high-paying professional jobs” who have won the “competition for income and status.” This helps him perform the sleight of hand that replaces an economic identity with a cultural one. While it’s true that voters with a college education tended to favor Biden and those without favored Trump, that difference disappears (and even slightly reverses) for non-white voters—an important point when you’re making sweeping generalizations about social class, and trying to argue this has nothing to do with bigotry.
But it’s also true that in the 2020 election, Trump lost among voters making less than $50,000 by 11 percentage points, while winning with those making more than $100,000 by 13 points. Even among white voters alone, the over-$100,000 crowd tilted toward Trump more heavily than the under-$50,000 crowd. Contrary to Brooks’ entire thesis, Trump’s base is the economically better-off, while the worse-off went for Biden—demolishing the columnists’ claim that we should sympathize with those who rally around the indicted Trump as the desperately downtrodden.
One could almost miss it, but Brooks gave away the ruse entirely when he said that Trump “understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class.” While posing as an anti-Trump conservative, Brooks supports the fiction that Trump, a billionaire, is right that the real threat to workers aren’t the bosses who move jobs overseas, bust unions or advocate against workplace safety standards, but rather some annoying grad school brat on the West Coast reading Judith Butler.
It’s easy to write this off as David Brooks being David Brooks. But this is coming out when vitriol coming from the former president and his political movement—an often violent and fascistic movement—has reached a fever pitch. Brooks and the Times are playing the tired role of using petty cultural politics to ignore economic reality and portray the Republicans as the voice of working America (FAIR.org, 10/9/15, 3/30/18, 11/13/18).
The column is yet another example of the Times, a mouthpiece for the ruling economic order, stoking a fiction about cultural divides to distract from brutal class inequality driven by politicians from both parties.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Sing in Unison, David Brooks Tells Black Athletes
Sep 18, 2016
David Brooks is a Very Concerned Man. The majority of his New York Times columns are him feigning agreement with the aims of the subject in question, but he just has Some Concerns he'd like to go over. These Concerns are almost always aimed at silencing the left and/or people of color who are too "radical" for his taste. His latest attempt to do so is one of the more vulgar examples of this habit, and one of the more incompetently executed.
In "The Uses of Patriotism" (New York Times, 9/16/16), Brooks begins, appropriately, with rank condescension:
This column is directed at all the high school football players around the country who are pulling a Kaepernick -- kneeling during their pregame national anthems to protest systemic racism. I'm going to try to persuade you that what you're doing is extremely counterproductive.
Listen up, black kids, David Brooks is here to tell you why your choice of political activism is "counterproductive." What's strange is that Brooks never really bothers to explain why, exactly. What follows instead is a discursive white supremacist McHistory lesson about an America defined by harsh self-criticism and noble ideals:
By 1776, this fusion of radical hope and radical self-criticism had become the country's civic religion. This civic religion was based on a moral premise -- that all men are created equal -- and pointed toward a vision of a promised land -- a place where your family or country of origin would have no bearing on your opportunities.
Lofty rhetoric aside, one's "country of origin and family" had tremendous bearing on one's opportunities--or even one's right to be recognized as a human being--a legacy which still affects us today. Which is, as Brooks may know, the entire point of the protests. The American experience means different things to different populations, and this was and remains the essence of the protest--to draw attention to these diverging narratives and the inequalities they reflect. But this is never really addressed; instead, he dismisses this line of criticism, and moves on to this patently absurd claim:
Recently, the civic religion has been under assault. Many schools no longer teach American history....
Brooks offers no link or citation for this claim, and seems to be conflating the recent right-wing outrage at colleges not requiring US History with the high school students the piece is nominally aimed at. No matter, Brooks must lament the fraying of the American fabric and will fudge the facts to fit his tale of moral panic.
Brooks' main gripe is that we've become too unpatriotic, noting that the percentage of Americans who feel "extremely proud" of their country has fallen since 2003--around the time the US was invading Iraq. He pins this (as he always does) on some ineffable cultural failure rather than material reality.
The revelation that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were a lie, two never-ending wars, an economy that crashed and bailed out the richest while leaving the poor to fend for themselves, Katrina, the rise of the incarceration state, police shootings: These aren't what caused a dip in national pride. No, it must be a moral failing on the part of ungrateful Americans, namely, in this case, uppity blacks who have decided of late to not sit idly by while they're gunned down with impunity.
Brooks, with a straight face, puts more blame on Ta-Nehisi Coates for a lack of black patriotism than the reality of rising inequality and pervasive racism. One could easily call it a cynical attempt at gaslighting, if one thought for a second the actual audience were the young African-Americans the piece is ostensibly for, and not the centrist elites whose white guilt Brooks ameliorates for a living.
The rest of the piece is difficult to critique, because nothing of substance is really offered. It's a word salad of patriotic, centrist bromides in search of a point it can't seem to find:
I hear you when you say you are unhappy with the way things are going in America. But the answer to what's wrong in America is America -- the aspirations passed down generation after generation and sung in unison week by week.
We have a crisis of solidarity. That makes it hard to solve every other problem we have. When you stand and sing the national anthem, you are building a little solidarity, and you're singing a radical song about a radical place.
There's no recognition of the fact that that "radical song" celebrates the killing of freed slaves who fought against a US government that had kept them in bondage. Or, indeed, that for professional football players, the ritual of standing for the national anthem has not been "passed down generation after generation," but was instituted in 2009 around the same time that the NFL was getting a large increase in Defense Department sponsorship.
Ultimately, what Brooks is saying, or attempting to say, is that protesters need to affirmatively demonstrate their loyalty: "If these common rituals are insulted, other people won't be motivated to right your injustices because they'll be less likely to feel that you are part of their story." The implication being that if you don't adhere to "common rituals," your continued oppression is justified.
Brooks engages in that favorite white concern troll pastime: evoking Martin Luther King, who led the singing of the national anthem at the March on Washington in 1963.
The fact that MLK was negotiating an entirely different political dynamic, and was being harassed and monitored by the same US government Brooks venerates, is never really addressed: Like all "but MLK did this" criticism, it's not offered in good faith, but to muddy the waters and reduce the history of black struggle to a sanitized version of one man. Different causes and different times call for different tactics, but in the history of black activism, one can safely say that they never once called for David Brooks' opinion.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Time for Radical Action, Not National Therapy
We don't need to bridge the class divide — we need to end it.
May 03, 2016
Now that Donald Trump has all but officially won the GOP presidential nomination, New York Times columnist David Brooks asks, "What are we supposed to do?"
He isn't asking Republican leaders that question. "They seem blithely unaware that this is a Joe McCarthy moment," he writes. "Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after for the degradation of standards and the general election slaughter." Rather, Brooks is asking what all of us who are appalled by Trump's rhetoric and behavior are supposed to do about the developments that empowered his candidacy. Trump may very well destroy the Republican Party. But his ascendance, Brooks warns, is a symptom of a far more critical and pressing problem.
With the nation's deepening class divide in mind, Brooks points to "how much pain there is in this country," and describes a sense of personal and national decline and "rampant social isolation" induced in the hearts and minds of too many Americans. Observing that all of this has driven many of them to the populist campaigns of Trump and Bernie Sanders, Brooks argues that we are confronting nothing less than a national crisis of "social trust;" indeed, what author and editor R.R. Reno calls a "crisis of solidarity" that demands our urgent individual and collective action.
Although Brooks ends up proffering all the wrong answers, we should not fail to recognize the significance of what he has to say, for his lamentations and calls for action signal more than he realizes or surely intends us to hear. While his words do not speak directly to the renewal of Americans' democratic energies, the anxieties he expresses should help us see that Americans are not simply pained by the class divide, but also determined to do something about it. Time for us to act.
A class war... has placed private greed and profits before the public good and general welfare.
Brooks fails to acknowledge what or who has actually led us into a Second Gilded Age, placing the American dream out of reach for vast numbers of Americans, and fostering that crisis of solidarity. He makes absolutely no mention of the class war from above that has marked American life for the past 40 years - a class war that has placed private greed and profits before the public good and general welfare. Not only has it made the rich exceedingly richer and working people poorer, it also has raised up an oligarchy to keep our democracy in check; laid siege to the hard-won rights of workers, women and African Americans; and devastated the communities, organizations and solidarities they built to make their lives more secure.
Ignoring or avoiding all of that, Brooks fails to appreciate what it may take to redeem the nation and liberate ourselves from the fear, pain and isolation that so many of us endure. As Brooks presents it, the historic task of overcoming the class divide and transcending the crisis of solidarity is to be undertaken not in the classic American fashion of citizens joining together and struggling to enhance freedom, equality, and democracy from the bottom up, but by professional and bourgeois elites working to rebuild social trust and solidarity. He does not call for - or even consider - the possibility of popular radical-democratic action against those who insist to their own benefit that we have reached the end of history. No, he proposes a grand program of national social therapy.
Brooks calls on professional and bourgeois folks, the people with whom he confesses he spends so much of his time, to willfully step out of their comfortable surroundings and get to know those who are in pain. Doing so, he says, will enable them to better understand their fellow citizens, develop compassion for them and cultivate a new, more-inclusive story of America. Bizarrely, he suggests that we might well replace the old, no-longer compelling American story in which "the lone individual...rises from the bottom through pluck and work" with one in which "those who suffer from addiction, broken homes, trauma, prison and loss... triumph over the isolation, social instability and dislocation so common today."
Finally, citing such "national projects" as the WPA and NASA, and even hinting at a national service program, Brooks, showing some independence from the contemporary politics of conservatism, calls for launching both private and public initiatives that could serve to bind people together. And apparently eager to set a good example for his class comrades, Brooks actually promises that instead of dwelling in his column on the lives of bourgeois folk he will now "go out into the pain," and report back.
Brooks tells us we are in crisis, that the nation's deepening social divide has undone the solidarities of the past. Notably, he remains silent both as to how this happened and how those solidarities first developed. Though he cites the 1930s WPA as a program possibly worth emulating, he fails to mention how Americans fought the Great Depression by electing the progressive Democrat Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency and how that president led the fight for recovery, reconstruction, and reform both by launching public works projects to engage their labors in improving the nation, and empowering them to organize unions and collectively confront their bosses.
Growing numbers of Americans are rejecting the appeals of political establishments both right and left.
Brooks also fails to recount how in the course of those industrial struggles millions of Americans learned firsthand about solidarity and trust and not only succeeded in enhancing American democracy and securing better lives for themselves and their families, but also prepared us to beat our fascist enemies in World War II.
One cannot help but imagine that Brooks sees what we see - that growing numbers of Americans are rejecting the appeals of political establishments both right and left - and that seeing it gives him reason to be concerned, if not fearful and pained. Some Americans are angry. Some are hopeful. And yet, for all of their evident and at times antagonistic and vicious differences, the angry and the hopeful do seem to share a determination to confront the treachery of the nation's political and economic elites and bring to an end the class war from above that has denied them their nation's historic promise.
We can do so by articulating the democratic imperative and impulses Americans are beginning to feel once again, and by helping us better remember who we are and what we are capable of doing in the light of the solidarities and achievements of the past. The task for America's intellectuals ought not to be, as Brooks sees it, to work at bridging the class divide, but rather to work at ending it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
David Brooks Is Wrong Again -- Trump's Rise Is Not 'Anti-Politics' but the Cancer of Big Money
Feb 27, 2016
In his latest column, "The Governing Cancer of Our Times," New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks tries to explain Donald Trump's rise as a presidential candidate.
The cancer Brooks refers to is not Trump himself but what he calls "anti-politics." Brooks didn't invent this term but he uses it to advance ideas he's been pushing for many years, and some of those ideas have merit. Brooks observes that in a diverse society, "[t]here are essentially two ways to maintain order and get things done in such a society -- politics or some form of dictatorship. Either through compromise or brute force." Politics, he correctly points out, involves compromise among interests that respect each other's right to exist and agree to play by the same rules. It involves debate and dialogue.
Brooks laments that in American politics, we no longer seem to be able to engage in rational debate, engage in compromise, and agree to disagree by following the same rules. In frustration, Brooks notes:
We're now at a point where the Senate says it won't even hold hearings on a presidential Supreme Court nominee, in clear defiance of custom and the Constitution. We're now at a point in which politicians live in fear if they try to compromise and legislate. We're now at a point in which normal political conversation has broken down. People feel unheard, which makes them shout even louder, which further destroys conversation.
How did we get to this point? Here is Brooks' explanation:
Trump is the culmination of the trends we have been seeing for the last 30 years: the desire for outsiders; the bashing style of rhetoric that makes conversation impossible; the decline of coherent political parties; the declining importance of policy; the tendency to fight cultural battles and identity wars through political means.
Brooks is correct that Trumpism is a symptom of long-term trends, but he's identified the wrong trends.
He fails to mention that Trump's rise was preceded by decades of government-bashing by big business and the extreme right, seeking to weaken the ability of government to promote the common good and protect Americans from abusive corporations. Their key goal, as famously expressed in 2001 by corporate lobbyist and conservative ideologue Grover Norquist, was to reduce government "to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
Brooks claims that a symptom of "anti politics" is the rise of "outsider" politicians like Trump. But Trump has hardly been an "outsider" in American politics. He's a total insider, playing the game by using his money and the mainstream media to take advantage of the political system that has been rigged by decades of corporate lobbying and crony capitalism.
Brooks has nothing to say about obscene amount of money contributed to candidates by the super-rich and corporate lobby groups as our campaign finance laws have been tilted -- by business-friendly politicians and, in Citizens United and other rulings, by the Supreme Court -- to favor the wealthy. He doesn't discuss how a majority of the Supreme Court, appointed by Republican presidents, has become an arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with ruling-after-ruling that favors big business over the concerns of consumers and workers. He ignores the rise of the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and the rest of the right-wing echo chamber who have used their influence to shift our political conversation to the right and often drowned out more moderate forces within the Republican Party and among the media.
Brooks claims that a symptom of "anti politics" is the rise of "outsider" politicians like Trump. But Trump has hardly been an "outsider" in American politics. He's a total insider, playing the game by using his money and the mainstream media to take advantage of the political system that has been rigged by decades of corporate lobbying and crony capitalism.
These forces laid the foundation for Trump's emergence by moving the GOP to the extreme right, scapegoating immigrants, attacking Planned Parenthood and the gains of the women's movement, supporting mass incarceration of African Americans, and adopting laws to suppress the votes of American Americans and Latinos in order to help elect conservative, pro-business, Republican politicians.
This is not "anti" politics. This is class politics.
It was this form of class politics -- led by the class at the very top, the .01 percent -- that has led to 40 years of government-bashing and deregulation, including weakening protections for consumers, the environment and workers.
Starting in the 1970s, America's biggest corporations reorganized their political operations -- coordinating their campaign donations, lobbying, creating new think tanks, policy organizations, and front groups -- to be more effective at influencing government policy at all levels. All this is well-documented in Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's 2011 book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.
It was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and other corporate groups that led this battle. It was all done through the regular avenues of mainstream politics -- campaign contributions, lobbying, expensive litigation (leading to decisions like Citizens United), and other means. It is their political activities and the policies that resulted -- in particular their deregulation of Wall Street -- that crashed the economy in 2008 and caused so much misery and suffering. And it has been their political activities and lobbying that thwarted much of what President Obama sought to do (admittedly, often too little, too late) to address the suffering -- for example, by raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits to the long-term jobless, and providing relief to homeowners facing foreclosure.
Since the 1970s, ordinary Americans have increasingly been burdened by private debt -- mortgages, student loans, consumer borrowing -- because of stagnant wages and incomes. But the mainstream media, including Brooks' regular columns, have failed to point out the hypocrisy of allowing big corporations and the super-rich (including Donald Trump) to use bankruptcy laws to walk away from their debts, while homeowners, consumers, and college students don't get similar treatment.
Key to the success of these right-wing politics -- brought to us by the corporate establishment, not the Tea Party -- has been four decades of outrageous union-busting, that begin in the 1970s, was given credibility by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and has accelerated ever since. More than any other factor -- as reports by the Economic Policy Institute and others have documented -- this has led to three decades of declining wages and living standards for the majority of Americans.
It is this growing economic insecurity, persistent poverty, and downward mobility that has triggered much of the anger among Americans that we see expressed at Trump rallies and in his GOP primary victories so far. Much of his rhetoric involves scapegoating and racism. It is not, as Brooks argues, an increase in the number of people with "authoritarian" personalities that explains Trump's appeal. It is simply everyday people rightly angry that they are losing their homes, can't send their kids to college, don't know if their jobs will be there in a few years, can't afford to take a vacation, aren't sure that their health insurance will cover their costs if an emergency comes along, and don't know if they'll be able to retire without falling into dire poverty.
Trump's genius is to exploit these fears and frustrations rather than point the finger at the real cause, which would require him to point at himself and his fellow billionaires. If he were being honest (not one of his strongest traits), he'd acknowledge, like another billionaire plutocrat, Nick Hanauer, that Trump and his class have made out like bandits and that the best way to fix the economy and reduce all that anger is to reduce inequality and increase the pay of the majority of American workers.
He is a good example of how the super rich and corporate America have used their political influence to create the new Gilded Age of enormous wealth and income disparities that we're now experiencing, and which has led to the anger, frustration and cynicism of many American voters, reflected in the debased dialogue coming from the candidates in the Republican primaries, where even right-wingers like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich are now described as "moderates."
It is hardly surprising that Brooks doesn't even mention unions. But it was the labor movement that created the post-World War 2 middle class. It was the union movement -- which at its height in the 1960s represented about one-third of all American workers -- that pushed for government policies that improved living standards for a majority of Americans, pushed for expansion of higher education, strengthened laws protecting Americans from unsafe workplaces, and lobbied for laws to ban employer discrimination against women and minorities in hiring, pay, and promotion. And it has been the four-decade-long war on unions that has decimated the middle class. All public opinion polls show that the majority of Americans are pro-union, but our labor laws are so skewed toward business that it has become extremely difficult for workers to organize unions at work without the fear of reprisal, including firing, while extremely easy for business to break the law without significant financial penalties. Brooks mentions none of this.
According to Brooks, the blame for our political dysfunction is a bi-partisan affair. But as Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein point out in their 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, our current political stalemate in Washington isn't the result of some generic problem with Congress or the lack of civility in our political culture. It is mostly due, very specifically, to the GOP's dramatic rightward shift. In their book, these two middle-of-the-road political analysts document that the GOP has moved much further to the right than the Democrats have moved to the left.
Donald Trump's ascent as a business person, a media personality, and now a political candidate can be traced to these trends, particularly the growing influence of big money in American politics. He is a good example of how the super rich and corporate America have used their political influence to create the new Gilded Age of enormous wealth and income disparities that we're now experiencing, and which has led to the anger, frustration and cynicism of many American voters, reflected in the debased dialogue coming from the candidates in the Republican primaries, where even right-wingers like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich are now described as "moderates."
Few Americans can identify the names of the CEOs of Americans largest corporations because they rarely get the media attention that sports figures, TV and movie stars, and other celebrities get, even though their influence on American life is much greater. Until recently, the Koch brothers have hidden in the shadows. Although a vast majority of Americans think that Wall Street banks have too much political and economic influence, most can't name the head of Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase. But Trump is an exception. Like Henry Ford and Walt Disney before him, he's not only turned his business, but also his personality, into a brand.
Donald Trump inherited his fortune from his father, a racist real estate developer in New York whose business practices involved discrimination against minority tenants -- practices that his son continued. Trump also fanned the flames of racism beyond his business activities. For example, in 1989, after New York police had arrested five minority teenagers for raping a middle class white woman who was jogging in Central Park, Trump took out a full-page ad in four New York newspapers calling to "bring back the death penalty," which in that political climate was clearly an appeal to racism. Trump was using his fortune to draw attention to himself and pollute the political environment.
The five teens didn't get the death penalty, as Trump would have preferred. Instead, they were convicted and spent years in jail. But had Trump got his way, justice would hardly have been served. Eventually, someone else confessed to the crime. The so-called Central Park Five sued the city for their wrongful prosecution and got a $40 million settlement in 2014 -- $1 million for every year they wrongfully spent behind bars. How did Trump respond to this miscarriage of justice against five low-income minority men for whom the money could hardly compensate for their shattered lives? Trump published an op-ed in the New York Daily News calling the settlement "a disgrace."
Trump expanded his father's real estate empire in part -- as he readily admits -- by contributing big bucks to both Democrats and Republicans (at all levels of government) to win favors to help his business. These not only included things like building permits and casino licenses but also credibility. Trump had proudly explained: "Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding, and she came to my wedding. She had no choice because I gave to a foundation," referring to the Clinton Foundation. While she was in the U.S. Senate representing New York, Hillary Clinton attended Trump's 2005 wedding to model Melania Knauss. She and Bill Clinton attended the reception together. All this media attention not only made Trump an increasingly visible celebrity but also helped his business dealings.
Trump took full advantage of the nation's pro-business tax and bankruptcy laws to accumulate billions. To do so, he frequently shafted his business partners and his employees, and broke the law, but paid minimal fines for his law-breaking business practices. He used his money and aggressive style to first become a business "brand" (his casinos, hotels, apartment buildings, and line of clothing), then a media celebrity (whose sex life, marriages and other activities were routinely reported as though they were "news"), and then a TV host of his own, gaining even greater fame by humiliating and firing people on his televised "reality" show.
David Brooks doesn't mention any of this. Like a good conservative, Brooks puts more emphasis on the importance of "order" -- on civil discourse and compromise -- than on social justice. But in a wonderful irony, he ends his column with a quote by late British political scientist Harold Laski: "We shall make the basis of our state consent to disagreement." Brooks also doesn't mention that Laski was a democratic socialist.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy