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Dear Trumpists, David Brooks has your back or is it your back bacon [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-08-03
David Brooks asks “When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?” Because it’s non-Trumpists who are to blame for Trumpism. Brooks thinks that rather than individual accountability and self-reliance, the elite mean girls should stop trolling those Trumper not-bad guys with priggish language-police memes and mockery. People who are better-read should feel sorry for the ignorance of those siloed by their RWNJ media, because they are happy being lied to. Our epistemic regime supposedly rules over stupid people Brooks says, but Greg Sargent suggests that their insecurity is their own fault. Brooks imagines an intellectually oppressed Trumpist class befuddled by the number of syllables in “intersectional” used by a college-educated straw person:
Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No. Most of us are earnest, kind and public-spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. 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. 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. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on. www.nytimes.com/...
Greg Sargent addresses Brooks’s claim that “people in less-educated classes" feel under cultural “assault” from elites and see Trump as "their warrior against the educated class.” Trump is our fault, rather than Mark Burnett’s choice of a game-show host.
What is most important is that every American read the latest Trump Indictment, regardless of the Brooks imaginary class boundary. There is an entire subpopulation obsessed with status symbols imagined by David Brooks rather than some degree of cultural literacy and comity. If you’ve talked to enough people, you realize that possession of a academic credential is not identical to saying that calling someone “doctor” does not ensure that a leg could be set.
The forty-five page indictment charges the 45th president with three conspiracies, arising from his efforts to defraud the United States, obstruct the certification of the Electoral College vote, and deprive the American people of their civil right to have their votes counted and honored. The indictment is a “speaking indictment” that describes the multiple strategies deployed by Trump and six unnamed co-conspirators to overturn the election results that predated the brutal physical violence that occurred during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The efforts ranged from trying to use the Justice Department to sow doubt about election integrity, pressuring then-Vice President Mike Pence to stop the Electoral College certification process, and plotting in seven battleground states to submit fake elector’s ballots for Trump even though he had lost those states. Although the six co-conspirators are unnamed, there is a consensus among the many excellent reporters covering the investigation about their identity: #1 Rudy Giuliani, #2 John Eastman, #3 Sydney Powell, #4 Jeffrey Clark, and #5 Kenneth Chesboro. There is not yet a consensus on who is co-conspirator #6. The fact that all of the first five are lawyers resonates with the legalistic nature of Trump’s multiple actions. www.thedailybeast.com/...
x Brief response to the @nytdavidbrooks column people are dunking on. His device (imagining the view from those at the bottom of the social order) is fine. Egalitarian liberals agree meritocracy is corrupted/distorted. But his core argument about the Trump indictments is flawed. 1/ — Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) August 3, 2023
This formulation erases the non-white working class from the equation. 2/ There's a lot in the column, but I want to focus on the claim that “people in less-educated classes" feel under cultural “assault” from elites and see Trump as "their warrior against the educated class.”This formulation erases the non-white working class from the equation. 2/
The two coalitions don’t look that different in this regard. 3/ In 2020, 53% of Biden voters didn’t have a college degree, vs. 46% who did, per Pew. Yes, that's more lopsided for Trump (31-70). But the Dem anti-Trump coalition has a *lot* of the “less educated class” in it.The two coalitions don’t look that different in this regard. 3/
Even if you grant there’s been some erosion among the nonwhite working class, the clear pattern is still that the anti-MAGA coalition has *tons* of “less educated” (nonwhite) voters in it. 4/ Notably, Biden won a huge majority of *nonwhite* voters without a college degree.Even if you grant there’s been some erosion among the nonwhite working class, the clear pattern is still that the anti-MAGA coalition has *tons* of “less educated” (nonwhite) voters in it. 4/ Also, as @NGrossman81 points out, income breakdowns of the voting also tell a very different story than the one Brooks is telling. 5/ Unroll available on Thread Reader Brooks applies this frame to the Trump indictments: Those prone to “distrustful populism” see them as “another skirmish in the class war between professionals and workers.” He fudges on whether he’s talking about Trump supporters, so let’s assume he really means “workers.” 6/ But there's a problem with Brooks' formulation: In the new NYT/Siena poll, a plurality of no-college voters overall thinks Trump committed serious federal crimes, 43-39. Yes, white no-college voters think he didn’t. But nonwhite no-college voters think he did by 53-25. 7/ And a bare plurality of non-college voters overall — 46-45 — say Trump threatened democracy in the lead up to 1/6. Yes, white no-college voters say he was just exercising his right to contest the outcome. But nonwhite no-college voters say he threatened democracy by 57-29. 8/ 9/9
https://t.co/7nm3vVN0KM
As I’ve argued (h/t @yeselson @erikloomis), simplified depictions of elite/no-college cultural schisms are totally divorced from today's realities. *This* merits more elite punditry!
https://t.co/7nm3vVN0KM washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… • • •
Yes, pork butts are not real butts...
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/3/2185069/-Dear-Trumpists-David-Brooks-has-your-back-or-is-it-your-rear-end
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