What If We're the Bad Guys Here?

[KansasTiger 3,280]

New York Times

What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?

David Brooks

August 2, 2023

Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.

 

What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?

 

We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas B. Edsall recently: “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”

 

In this story we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.

 

I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.

 

So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.

 

This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

 

The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

 

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

 

Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

 

The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.

 

Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.

 

Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”

 

Or, as Markovits puts it, “Elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”

 

Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.

 

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.

 

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.

 

We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside of marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.

 

After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then 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,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, Wooldridge continues, because “The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”

 

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. Trump 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 road in on.

 

If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem as just another skirmish on the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months.

 

Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.

 

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.

 

The post What if We’re the Bad Guys Here? appeared first on New York Times.

https://dnyuz.com/2023/08/02/what-if-were-the-bad-guys-here/

Edited August 4, 2023 by KansasTiger

[CoffeeTiger 5,967]

This was an interesting read. 

 I found this counter article from Vox where a writer disagrees with this column from David Brooks and explains why. 

https://www.vox.com/2023/8/4/23818817/trump-support-david-brooks-economic-anxiety

The article argues that while Brooks makes some good points about inequality in America, that this article doesn't do anything to show a connection between these economic challenges Brooks points out and the rise of Trump. He postulates that these economic and societal differences between the elites and regular/lower classes gave rise to Trumpian populism, but he doesn't actually show how or show any evidence that that is the case....he just suggests it is. 

 

The Vox writer thinks the cultural divide is much more likely to be responsible for the rise of Trump than the economic theory is: 

 

Quote

 

The overwhelming evidence for a cultural explanation

Let me propose an alternative theory — one that aligns much better with the available evidence than the economic anxiety idea.

This story starts with the late 20th-century revolution in social values: the end of segregation, mass nonwhite immigration, feminist challenges to patriarchy, a decline in traditional Christianity, and the rise of the LGBTQ movement. This revolution has transformed America at fundamental levels: the kinds of people who hold positions of power, the ideas that command cultural respect, and even the kinds of food Americans eat and languages they speak in public.

For millions of Americans, these changes made them feel unmoored from their country— “strangers in their own land,” as the sociologist Arlie Hochschild put it. Whether because of pure bigotry or a more diffuse sense of cultural alienation from the mainstream, a large number of Americans came to believe that they are losing America. For historical reasons owing largely to the legacy of the civil rights movement, these voters became concentrated in the Republican party — forming at least a plurality of its primary electorate. The election of Barack Obama, a self-described “Black man with a funny name,” pushed their sense of social alienation to the breaking point.

This cultural anxiety created room for Trump, who rode this group’s collective resentments to control of the Republican party. It is not the only reason he won the presidency — in a close election like 2016, a million different things likely made the difference — but it is the most important reason why he has maintained a lock on the Republican party for the better part of a decade.

We know this, primarily, because social scientists have been testing the theory since 2016 — and comparing it with Brooks’s preferred explanations rooted in resentment at a rigged economic game. Again and again, the cultural theory has won out.

For example, in 2018, a trio of scholars used survey data to compare explanations of Trump support based on racism, sexism, and a sense of economic alienation. The former two are far more powerful predictors than the latter, almost entirely explaining Trump’s surge in support among white non-college voters. “Controlling for racism and sexism effectively restores the education gap among whites to what it had been in every election since 2000,” they write.

A 2018 report from the Voter Study Group, authored by pollster Robert Griffin and political scientist John Sides, tested what they called the “prevailing narrative” of the 2016 election that “focused heavily on the economic concerns of [the white working class].” They found that typical methods of measuring economic distress were flawed and that more precise measurements show little effect on the 2016 outcome. “Instead,” they write, “attitudes about race and ethnicity were more strongly related to how people voted.”

A 2018 paper by Alan Abramowitz and Jennifer McCoy, two leading political scientists, tested correlations between white voters’ favorable views of Hillary Clinton and Trump and a battery of different variables. What they found, at this point, shouldn’t surprise you.

“After party identification, racial/ethnic resentment was by far the strongest predictor of relative ratings of Trump and Clinton — the higher the score on the racial/ethnic resentment scale, the more favorably white voters rated Trump relative to Clinton,” they write. “The impact of the racial/ethnic resentment scale was much stronger than that of any of the economic variables included in the analysis, including opinions about free trade deals and economic mobility.”

These are three studies from a single year. There are dozens of other papers, reports, and even entire books coming to similar conclusions. These studies don’t explain everything about Trump or Republican support — such as the party’s recent gains among Black and especially Latino voters — but they do an excellent job answering the question that Brooks poses in his column: Why does Trump maintain such a hard core of support despite everything that he’s done?

There’s also vital global context.

The United States is not the only country to be experiencing a rise in far-right populism. Countries that have very different economic trajectories — like Israel, Brazil, and India — have all seen the rise of Trump-style politics. That alone should raise questions about a narrative focusing on the specific economic problems of the United States, especially since those countries are wracked by significant cleavages surrounding ethnicity, race, religion, and gender.

Western European countries which have seen the rise of far-right parties are also a useful comparison. Like the US, those countries have experienced rising inequality — albeit to a lesser degree. But they’ve also experienced the same cultural convulsions in the second half of the 20th century alongside mass nonwhite migration that fundamentally challenged white Europeans’ sense of place and self.

And there’s a reason that immigration has been the number one most important issue for European far-right parties. Rigorous statistical studies of these peer countries, such as the conservative scholar Eric Kaufmann’s book Whiteshift, suggest cultural anxiety about Europe’s changing demographic makeup, rather than any fears about wage competition or economic inequality more broadly, is the key issue for those parties’ supporters.

“A comprehensive review of the academic literature on immigration attitudes in the West ... found that personal income and economic circumstances explained little,” Kaufmann writes. “Cultural attitudes emerged as the most consistent predictor of anti-immigration attitudes. Survey experiments can prove causation rather than mere correlation.”

So, on the one hand, there is Brooks’s largely unevidenced theory — and, on the other, an absolute mountain of social scientific research.

 

 

 

[AU9377 6,116]

55 minutes ago, KansasTiger said:

New York Times

What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?

David Brooks

August 2, 2023

Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.

 

What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?

 

We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. It was encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas B. Edsall recently: “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”

 

In this story we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.

 

I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.

 

So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.

 

This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

 

The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

 

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

 

Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

 

The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.

 

Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.

 

Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”

 

Or, as Markovits puts it, “Elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”

 

Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.

 

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.

 

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.

 

We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside of marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.

 

After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then 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,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, Wooldridge continues, because “The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”

 

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. Trump 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 road in on.

 

If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem as just another skirmish on the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months.

 

Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.

 

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.

 

The post What if We’re the Bad Guys Here? appeared first on New York Times.

https://dnyuz.com/2023/08/02/what-if-were-the-bad-guys-here/

There is a lot of truth to that.  However, Trump is taking advantage of that in the same way that Hitler took advantage of the economic struggles and lack of upward mobility in Germany in the decades leading up to the second world war.  I'm not equating the two men from a character standpoint.  I actually don't believe that Donald Trump is some radical bigot any more than I believe that he is pro life.  I believe that he is an opportunist.  I am drawing a distinct parallel between the two to illustrate how otherwise good people can be galvanized into following a self serving narcissistic personality. 

The worst thing that people can do is to stand by and say nothing.

[auburnatl1 6,300]

[KansasTiger 3,280]

3 minutes ago, auburnatl1 said:

What beast are you referring to?

[TexasTiger 14,526]

I think there’s a huge problem with reliance on the “elite” universities. I agree that media are has lost its working class element. I think politicians should avoid elite schools when hiring advisors if they want to connect with the masses. But while I believe all of those things, none of it explains the unyielding devotion to Trump. He went to U Penn. He never had a real job. Never had an economic worry, until he blew the wealth his daddy left him. He’s boorish, rude, self entitled and never earned a thing. Joe Rohan’s appeal is better explained by all this, and he’s not a Trump fan.

[Mikey 16,781]

13 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

I think there’s a huge problem with reliance on the “elite” universities. I agree that media are has lost its working class element. I think politicians should avoid elite schools when hiring advisors if they want to connect with the masses. But while I believe all of those things, none of it explains the unyielding devotion to Trump. He went to U Penn. He never had a real job. Never had an economic worry, until he blew the wealth his daddy left him. He’s boorish, rude, self entitled and never earned a thing. Joe Rohan’s appeal is better explained by all this, and he’s not a Trump fan.

In spite of all that, many of us who don't like Trump will vote for him again if the Democrats can't nominate anybody better than  Biden/Harris. As bad as Trump is, this pair is worse.

[TexasTiger 14,526]

1 minute ago, Mikey said:

In spite of all that, many of us who don't like Trump will vote for him again if the Democrats can't nominate anybody better than  Biden/Harris. As bad as Trump is, this pair is worse.

Trump is a singularly destructive figure. Anyone who can’t see that at this point has some strange devotion to the guy regardless of what they claim.

[Mikey 16,781]

1 minute ago, TexasTiger said:

Trump is a singularly destructive figure. Anyone who can’t see that at this point has some strange devotion to the guy regardless of what they claim.

Trump's policies were very good. Energy, the border, overall economy, pulling back an overbearing federal government, I could go on. When compared to some vague "destructive figure" statement, I'll take solid accomplishments every time.

Trump has solid, measurable accomplishments. Biden has a failed border policy (No policy), failed Bidenomics, failure in Afghanistan, in China's pocket, over spent until the USA's credit rating has been downgraded....Again, I could go on.

Mean tweets, while unfortunate, are vastly preferable to disastrous policies.

[I_M4_AU 9,058]

4 minutes ago, TexasTiger said:

Trump is a singularly destructive figure. Anyone who can’t see that at this point has some strange devotion to the guy regardless of what they claim.

The problem isn’t classes (the Marxist viewpoint) it is the difference in values.  A low income person in California will see things differently than a low income person in Kansas.  Biden has fallen victim to social pressure to please his radically liberal friends and individualism by buying votes with college loan debt relief and his LGBTQaaijd stance that value based people disagree with.

Trump has his faults which nobody denies, but Biden has us headed in the wrong direction.  As he likes to say; “it’s not who we are as a nation”.  I don’t want to see another 4 years of his vision for America

[TexasTiger 14,526]

3 minutes ago, Mikey said:

Trump's policies were very good. Energy, the border, overall economy, pulling back an overbearing federal government, I could go on. When compared to some vague "destructive figure" statement, I'll take solid accomplishments every time.

Trump has solid, measurable accomplishments. Biden has a failed border policy (No policy), failed Bidenomics, failure in Afghanistan, in China's pocket, over spent until the USA's credit rating has been downgraded....Again, I could go on.

Mean tweets, while unfortunate, are vastly preferable to disastrous policies.

You like autocrats. Trump juiced the economy with overspending. Trump set the stage for Afghanistan. The fact that the country wasn’t more damaged in 4 years of Trump and a largely dysfunctional congress just shows how resilient America - he did not change the trajectory of the economy, he just didn’t reverse it — until Covid. Trump wasn’t governing. Anyone who thinks he’s a manager is clueless. But he also engaged in serious unAmerican criminality to reverse an election at the end. Anyone who can’t see that as disqualifying is unAmerican, autocratic, and is somewhere on the Trump Cult spectrum.

[auburnatl1 6,300]

52 minutes ago, Mikey said:

Trump's policies were very good. Energy, the border, overall economy, pulling back an overbearing federal government, I could go on. When compared to some vague "destructive figure" statement, I'll take solid accomplishments every time.

Trump has solid, measurable accomplishments. Biden has a failed border policy (No policy), failed Bidenomics, failure in Afghanistan, in China's pocket, over spent until the USA's credit rating has been downgraded....Again, I could go on.

Mean tweets, while unfortunate, are vastly preferable to disastrous policies.

But virtually any Republican supports exactly the same policies. Without the 3rd world chaos and craziness. I’ve heard the policy voice of reason before -  it’s way more than just that.

Edited August 5, 2023 by auburnatl1

[Mikey 16,781]

1 minute ago, auburnatl1 said:

But virtually any Republican supports exactly the same policies. Without the 3rd world chaos and craziness. I’ve head the policy voice of reason before -  it’s way more than just that.

Agree, but the hypothetical choice is not virtually any Republican. We're talking Trump vs. Biden. An unfortunate situation, but in that context, Trump gets the vote of many of us. Hopefully someone other than Trump will win the nomination and this question becomes moot.

[Mikey 16,781]

7 minutes ago, TexasTiger said:

You like autocrats. Trump juiced the economy with overspending. Trump set the stage for Afghanistan. The fact that the country wasn’t more damaged in 4 years of Trump and a largely dysfunctional congress just shows how resilient America - he did not change the trajectory of the economy, he just didn’t reverse it — until Covid. Trump wasn’t governing. Anyone who thinks he’s a manager is clueless. But he also engaged in serious unAmerican criminality to reverse an election at the end. Anyone who can’t see that as disqualifying is unAmerican, autocratic, and is somewhere on the Trump Cult spectrum.

Yes, according the the Bungler in Chief, and you swallow his BS, everything that goes bad is Trump's fault. The downgrading of the USA's credit rating is Trump's fault. The rising national debt is Trump's fault (apparently, Trump had to approve the six trillion $ in irresponsible spending by Biden). Inflation going from 1.4% to 16.9% over the past 30 months is Trump's fault. Crippling interest rates over the past two & 1/2 years are Trump's fault. Biden's mis-handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal is Trump's fault. It's like Biden isn't even in charge, Trump is still running the country if the Dems are to be believed.

[auburnatl1 6,300]

8 minutes ago, Mikey said:

Agree, but the hypothetical choice is not virtually any Republican. We're talking Trump vs. Biden. An unfortunate situation, but in that context, Trump gets the vote of many of us. Hopefully someone other than Trump will win the nomination and this question becomes moot.

Hypothetical? Trump has been the progressives best friend. AOC must friggin love him. He lost Republicans ground in 3 straight election cycles in a row.  In ga - a Republican gov wins easily but both maga senators lose to hyper liberal democrats. Again, in Georgia. He’ll face the same never-trump vote yet again (many of whom are republicans) - polling shows it - and further damage the Republican Party long term. Imo self destructive la la land 

[TexasTiger 14,526]

24 minutes ago, Mikey said:

Yes, according the the Bungler in Chief, and you swallow his BS, everything that goes bad is Trump's fault. The downgrading of the USA's credit rating is Trump's fault. The rising national debt is Trump's fault (apparently, Trump had to approve the six trillion $ in irresponsible spending by Biden). Inflation going from 1.4% to 16.9% over the past 30 months is Trump's fault. Crippling interest rates over the past two & 1/2 years are Trump's fault. Biden's mis-handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal is Trump's fault. It's like Biden isn't even in charge, Trump is still running the country if the Dems are to be believed.

If you weren’t such a cultist, you’d be able to admit Trump had huge deficits that greatly added to the debt. He’s responsible for his 4 budgets. You’d also realize he negotiated the Afghanistan timeline. Given your age, you should understand that what you call “crippling interest rates” are still low by historical standards. In fact, they were never this low under Reagan .

https://www.macrotrends.net/2015/fed-funds-rate-historical-chart

And the “crippling interest rates” have not crippled the economy. Still growing faster than our Allies.

The Fed juiced the economy too long— Trump threatened them to keep rates low which ultimately leads to inflation. And for whatever complaints people want to make about our economy, we have the lowest inflation and the strongest growth among G7 countries.

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-economy-doing-way-better-than-rest-of-rich-world-2023-7?amp

But those are just facts. You Prefer your feelings about things.

[Mikey 16,781]

6 hours ago, auburnatl1 said:

Hypothetical? Trump has been the progressives best friend. AOC must friggin love him. He lost Republicans ground in 3 straight election cycles in a row.  In ga - a Republican gov wins easily but both maga senators lose to hyper liberal democrats. Again, in Georgia. He’ll face the same never-trump vote yet again (many of whom are republicans) - polling shows it - and further damage the Republican Party long term. Imo self destructive la la land 

Yes hypothetical. Any discussion of Trump Vs. Biden in 2024 is purely hypothetical and that's what was being discussed. It's quite likely that neither will be on the ballot in November of '24. If you are wanting to talk about '22 Georgia you should start your own thread.

[Mikey 16,781]

5 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

But those are just facts. You Prefer your feelings about things.

The cherry picked "facts" in your other post on Bidenomics are even funnier than these.

Trump's Afghanistan timeline had conditions attached. Biden ditched the conditions, turned tail and ran. In doing this he got 13 American service members killed and abandoned many hundreds of Afghans who helped us to the mercy of their enemies.

Why does Biden think it's ok to let untold numbers of illegals cross the border and disappear into our country unvetted, while he makes our Afghan friends wait to be vetted? Seems senile to me.

Recovering better than other nations? Certainly we are. The USA is a more capable nation than the Europeans. We've been proving this for over 250 years and in spite of all his efforts, the Bungler in Chief hasn't managed to pull us down to their level.

[aubiefifty 18,446]

8 hours ago, Mikey said:

In spite of all that, many of us who don't like Trump will vote for him again if the Democrats can't nominate anybody better than  Biden/Harris. As bad as Trump is, this pair is worse.

 

[Mikey 16,781]

4 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

 

With each succeeding silly, groundless indictment there is another certain percent of the country that comes to believe that Trump is a victim of political persecution and will thus give him a sympathy vote. As a mindless Trump hater you should cringe every time some random Democrat pulls another of these bogus charges out of his/her uuun, hat. They are only helping Trump. I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump camp isn't paying the Dems to file these groundless charges.

[aubiefifty 18,446]

8 hours ago, Mikey said:

With each succeeding silly, groundless indictment there is another certain percent of the country that comes to believe that Trump is a victim of political persecution and will thus give him a sympathy vote. As a mindless Trump hater you should cringe every time some random Democrat pulls another of these bogus charges out of his/her uuun, hat. They are only helping Trump. I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump camp isn't paying the Dems to file these groundless charges.

groundless my ass. you keep saying that if it makes you feel better............

[DKW 86 7,946]

On 8/4/2023 at 4:25 PM, CoffeeTiger said:

This was an interesting read. 

 I found this counter article from Vox where a writer disagrees with this column from David Brooks and explains why. 

https://www.vox.com/2023/8/4/23818817/trump-support-david-brooks-economic-anxiety

The article argues that while Brooks makes some good points about inequality in America, that this article doesn't do anything to show a connection between these economic challenges Brooks points out and the rise of Trump. He postulates that these economic and societal differences between the elites and regular/lower classes gave rise to Trumpian populism, but he doesn't actually show how or show any evidence that that is the case....he just suggests it is. 

 

The Vox writer thinks the cultural divide is much more likely to be responsible for the rise of Trump than the economic theory is: 

 

 

 

As much as I hate to be dismissive, I think that the author got just as much wrong in his analysis. IE: if you want to declare that Western Europe AND the Sub Continent of India are all influenced by White Racism well, I think your theory is way too simplistic. trump was for most of his life, the darling of the Elites. He gave strongly to Democrat causes and candidates, particularly the Clintons. He was at Chelsea's wedding. he was beloved of the View and most of the mind-numbed celebrity-worshipping culture in Hollyweird, NYC, and elsewhere. For decades he was a darling of the elites that put him in movies, TV shows, etc. He didn't do that in a vacuum.

I have always seen thru trump. He had a couple of books ghost-written for him. He never had the brains to write anything. He is a 6X business failure. He has always been obnoxious misogynistic and leaning to racism. He has zero redeeming value, like most of the elites in America. He is a flaming narcissist, like most of the elites in America. He is about making money off of the lower and middle classes, like most of the elites in America. He is about gaining more and more power and $$$ for him and his family, like most of the elites in America. 

I will add on to Brooks. In DC, for decades, we have had Congressional and WH internships that were for SEVERAL reasons all given to the 29 elitist schools serving the very families that Brooks is calling out. That led, for decades, to those power-building jobs in DC going almost exclusively to grads of those same elite schools that had children of former graduates of those same elite schools. Just think of it as Carlinism, he named this phenomenon perfectly. 

trump, in 2015 saw an opportunity to exploit the lower and middle class in America and he left the elites and WHOA that was a betrayal that pissed off the other elites. How dare he betray us, the chosen political leaders, academic leaders, and cultural leaders. For 28 years or more, trump was the elite. He got away with grabbing them by the *****, just like the elites do every day in America.

See Epstein, Any Kennedy, even trump himself. If you are in the club, you can get away with almost anything. more later.

Edited August 6, 2023 by DKW 86

[DKW 86 7,946]

Yes, David Brooks, You Are the "Bad Guys"

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/yes-david-brooks-you-are-the-bad#details

Dear Mr. Brooks,

Your column might be the best thing written in the New York Times in the past seven years. You’ve undoubtedly been subjected to a fair amount of abuse for it. You should probably never have written it if the comments are any indication. But those are people in the bubble. They don’t represent either the majority or the future. They think they do, but they don’t.

 

 

Your question, “Are we the bad guys”? The answer is yes. You are the bad guys. You have systematically dehumanized half the country because they dared to want to be represented by someone you don’t like. You have gone along with a warped distortion of who Donald Trump actually is, and you have perpetuated that lie to your own detriment.

Oh, it’s much worse than that, Mr. Brooks. Are you sitting down? This is the moment just before the aristocracy you write so eloquently about comes crashing down around you. You might say you have just spotted the iceberg on the horizon. The water is too still. The ship is moving too fast. It can’t be turned around in time. The ship is made of iron, and it will sink.

Like so many times before, an aristocratic minority can only stave off its ultimate collapse at the hands of the discontented majority for so long. Just look around at the abandoned mansions of the Gilded Age, a world that once was. Or take a trip to France and look at the chateaus in the countryside, or you might even look around in the American South at the plantations and high society before it was all Gone with the Wind.

I’m not necessarily saying the red states are going to drag America back in time - that’s your narrative and the false opinion of the ruling class. This is about a new America waiting to be born once the establishment elite gets out of the way.

You do get points for noticing, Mr. Brooks, even if it is too little, too late. You write:

Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.

Neutral arbiters of justice? Did you really just write that with a straight face, Mr. Brooks? Do you really believe that? Yet here we have proof enough that you can’t be the good guys if you can’t even see that these investigations and indictments are designed only to stop Trump. Biden has said as much.

No news on Joe Biden’s blatant corruption with his son, potentially protecting oligarchs from sanctions, influence peddling? And a DOJ that pivots to another Trump indictment every time there is bad news for Biden? Neutral? I don’t think so.

Surely you’re not suggesting that, because you believe Trump is a “monster” that he deserves to “go to prison” without any trial? Is that what we call innocent until proven guilty, Mr. Brooks? Or is that what we call trial by mob? Tell me, what books have you read that paint yourselves as the good guys? Trump was never revealed to be the “monster” you promised. In fact, quite the opposite.

He could have, as a fascist, shot protesters on the street in the Summer of 2020 oh wait, Biden did that when the Capitol police shot Ashli Babbitt. He could have jailed protesters, throwing them in solitary without a trial, convicting them in the court of public opinion as “white supremacists,” oh wait, Biden did that too.

Censor social media outlets (oh, oops, Biden too), weaponize the DOJ (oh, darn it, Biden again), edge us closer to Nuclear war (D’OH also Biden), and attempt to jail his political opponents to hold onto power for the foreseeable future (YA, that’s actually Biden). Darnit. Will the real fascist please stand up?

Trump might aspire to be an authoritarian but never had the necessary institutional support. He had just the opposite - every institution was at war with Trump every day of his presidency. I expect you’re educated enough to know that fascists require an alignment of power across all corporate, cultural, and political life — kind of like the Democrats, Mr. Brooks. Are you sure you have the right fascist? Or Tyrant or authoritarian or monster?

For those who now say, “he led an armed insurrection to overthrow the US Government and install a white supremacist army to kill all the Black and Brown people,” or anything related to January 6th, I call bull****. The Trump emergency happened long before 2020, as any honest person knows.

Steve Bannon accurately predicted in 2017 that the Democrats would take the House in 2018 and immediately impeach Trump. It didn’t even matter what it was for. Everything our FBI and the Democrats, along with you Never Trump Republicans, did to reject the duly elected President of the United States was unprecedented and evidence of an elite ruling class that does not want to give up its power to the people.

I could spend a few paragraphs on January 6th, as I bore witness to a fake media narrative blooming out of the events that day, just as I could spend an equal amount of time talking about the violent protests in the Summer of 2020 that the media all but ignored, but instead, let’s stay focused on the task at hand - are you the good guys or are you the bad guys?

I know you are a Never Trumper, who has counted on the ratf*ckers like Rick Wilson and the Lincoln Project, or the high-minded intellectuals at the Bulwark, or the pretentious ramblings of a Joe Scarborough — it feels so good, doesn’t it, to have the affections of high society finally? To be let into the club and on the A-list now? Yeah, I bet it does. To quote Bob Dylan, I used to be among the crowd you’re in with.

I’ve only recently gotten to know the Conservatives such as yourself. I am a lifelong Democrat who voted for every Democrat that ever ran for president starting in the 1980s. I was a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter. I marched, I protested, and I wrote op-eds. I said Me Too. I supported and voted for Joe Biden. And yes, I wrote about race and gender for years on my website. Yeah, I was that guy (girl).

It would take me a while to realize you were all wrong about Trump. First, I had to find out all of these years later that your paper of record was not telling me the truth, which I did in June of 2020 when the New York Times upended itself over the Tom Cotton essay, then threw two of its editors under the bus.

 

 

That moment was, for me, like the lantern dropping out of the sky in The Truman Show.

My whole world changed. But it was hard to explain it to my friends and family. I would say things to them like, “I can’t explain it to you because you’re in the bubble.” And they would look at me like I was insane.

All that really meant is that they still trusted the New York Times. They still trusted you, Mr. Brooks. But little by little, people like me are escaping the bubble and discovering a whole wide world of freedom outside of it - freedom of the mind, most especially. Imagine, not having to fret every word that comes out of your mouth. Imagine people seeing each other as people and not as partisans in an imaginary war, not as “white supremacists” or divided by race or gender.

If the Tom Cotton debacle wasn’t bad enough, the Times sunk itself even further into the morass when it demonized and chased out respectable COVID reporter Donald McNeil after some entitled brat tattled on him that he’d used the “n-word” on a field trip. Oh, he must be a RACIST, concluded the gaggle of gossips and pearl-clutching wokesters in the newsroom.

 

 

Are you the good guys, or are you the bad guys for allowing lunatics to take over the asylum? For bringing on board uptight thought police to bully your journalists for trying to tell the truth. Most of that is not your fault, but since you stay at the paper and say nothing, you are complicit. You’re building a rat ship, as Al Pacino once opined in Scent of a Woman.

I like to think I would have resigned in protest and in support of James Bennett, Bari Weiss, and Donald McNeil. But I know it’s hard out there for a propaganda pusher, I mean a journalist, so I don’t blame you for keeping your job and staying quiet.

That intense focus on race and racism pushed and adopted by the Times, has had a catastrophic effect on the news business and American culture writ large, but especially so in the Trump era. A revolution of devout woketopians crashing up against Trump, a guy who will say anything he feels like saying, did this to the NY Times:

 

 

This is the ticket to ride at the Times now, Mr. Brooks. You are trapped in a hell of your own making by now. Look at the “Reader’s Picks” comments. It is hard to resist a comment that has 7,000 plus upvotes telling you to abandon your humanity and continue the ongoing dehumanization of half the country.

 

 

Why can’t they, or you, trust the voters? Why can’t you find better candidates and better policies? Why can’t you allow an outsider to shake things up in a people-run government? Moreover, who gave you permission to claim this country for yourselves and decide for American voters what they should want? That is not how things are supposed to work in this country.

You’ve all been treating Trump like an elusive mob boss who engaged in dirty dealings, drug smuggling, prostitution, bribery, and even murder, which justified taking extraordinary measures against him to put him in prison finally. But the evidence at hand does not bear this out. He’s a rule-breaker by nature, he always has been. He likes to upset people. He likes to antagonize, tease, and sometimes bully, but we can’t even get to Turmp’s real problems because of your tsunami of hyperbole.

The so-called charges against Trump will look ridiculous in time, just like the perjury charge against Bill Clinton does. By now, you all should be sued for wasting our time and money policing a president who had the nerve to win an election and offend the ruling elite. And then had the nerve to protest the most corrupt election in my lifetime. But again, we won’t go into that.

These charges show pencil-pusher detailing that doesn’t amount to anything serious enough to meddle in yet another election, and nothing more serious than what Joe Biden is alleged to have done — no one at your paper would put together the billions being sent to Ukraine with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s payoffs, just like you’ll never tell the truth about the FBI’s involvement in January 6th, but sooner or later, someone will.

I know you probably don’t really care what the majority of Republicans think of you. But still, it has to be a bit of a drag that the “paper of record” is now on par with MSNBC in the minds of the public, per this poll:

 

 

 

 

 

When I headed over to Trump World and watched his rallies, I did not see a racist or a bigot. I didn’t see a frothing-at-the-mouth Hitler-esque tyrant. And I couldn’t lie about that anymore.

This isn’t about telling you to support Trump or that I will even vote for him. It’s hard to talk about anything else because of YOUR obsession, not ours. He has to dominate the news because it drives traffic on your site and ratings on cable news and because God forbid any of you will actually report on the Biden administration’s obvious failings.

Some people got it long before I ever did, like David Horowitz, a former lefty, who wrote a brilliant book on the 2020 election and January 6th called Final Battle. His introduction goes like this:

“Trump’s final seventeen hours of campaigning had included more than 3,000 miles of flights and motorcades, 367 minutes of rallies, and—in the words of one Wall Street Journal reporter, “five awkward and hilarious stage dances to [the popular song] ‘YMCA.’”A Trump rally was always an entertainment.”

At one point in the evening, the crowd became so ardent—as similar rallies had before—that it began to chant “We love you!” and did so over and over, until Trump responded: “Thank you. Don’t say that. I’ll start to cry and that wouldn’t be good for my image.” It was an uncharacteristically emotional moment, displaying a self-awareness and even self-deprecation, that went generally unacknowledged by Trump’s legion of haters.”

The same rally was referenced by Tucker Carlson, who has now been fired by Fox News to protect the delicate ruling elites from hard truths they studiously avoid. Carlson wrote this before the 2020 election.

And that was really it for me. The journalists, so many people I knew and in the highest reaches of culture and power, had the story completely wrong. They didn’t know Trump at all and had no clue why so many people supported him. All they could do was spin around, wondering how could anyone like and vote for a MONSTER like Trump?

Calling them all racists led to real-world violence, as in this rarely covered event from back in 2015:

But Trump makes them feel seen, in the parlance of the Left. The people most of you through away like human garbage had one guy with balls of steel taking on the entire machine. If you don’t think most people are rooting for Trump to skate these charges, then you aren’t paying attention.

Oh sure, the Beckys and the Karens are waiting for their money shot, but most people can’t help but root for the underdog. Sorry, folks. You’ll have to confront the lies you’ve been selling for years because the people are way ahead of you.

Lastly, you write:

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?

The answer, Mr. Brooks, is never. As with most aristocracies, power must be taken from you. No, not with a violent revolution, but when the American people realize what I finally did — that they can no longer trust the media, and that the media have become the bad guys. When that happens, it’s all over but the shouting.

[Mikey 16,781]

28 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

Yes, David Brooks, You Are the "Bad Guys"

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/yes-david-brooks-you-are-the-bad#details

Dear Mr. Brooks,

Your column might be the best thing written in the New York Times in the past seven years. You’ve undoubtedly been subjected to a fair amount of abuse for it. You should probably never have written it if the comments are any indication. But those are people in the bubble. They don’t represent either the majority or the future. They think they do, but they don’t.

 

 

Your question, “Are we the bad guys”? The answer is yes. You are the bad guys. You have systematically dehumanized half the country because they dared to want to be represented by someone you don’t like. You have gone along with a warped distortion of who Donald Trump actually is, and you have perpetuated that lie to your own detriment.

Oh, it’s much worse than that, Mr. Brooks. Are you sitting down? This is the moment just before the aristocracy you write so eloquently about comes crashing down around you. You might say you have just spotted the iceberg on the horizon. The water is too still. The ship is moving too fast. It can’t be turned around in time. The ship is made of iron, and it will sink.

Like so many times before, an aristocratic minority can only stave off its ultimate collapse at the hands of the discontented majority for so long. Just look around at the abandoned mansions of the Gilded Age, a world that once was. Or take a trip to France and look at the chateaus in the countryside, or you might even look around in the American South at the plantations and high society before it was all Gone with the Wind.

I’m not necessarily saying the red states are going to drag America back in time - that’s your narrative and the false opinion of the ruling class. This is about a new America waiting to be born once the establishment elite gets out of the way.

You do get points for noticing, Mr. Brooks, even if it is too little, too late. You write:

Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.

Neutral arbiters of justice? Did you really just write that with a straight face, Mr. Brooks? Do you really believe that? Yet here we have proof enough that you can’t be the good guys if you can’t even see that these investigations and indictments are designed only to stop Trump. Biden has said as much.

No news on Joe Biden’s blatant corruption with his son, potentially protecting oligarchs from sanctions, influence peddling? And a DOJ that pivots to another Trump indictment every time there is bad news for Biden? Neutral? I don’t think so.

Surely you’re not suggesting that, because you believe Trump is a “monster” that he deserves to “go to prison” without any trial? Is that what we call innocent until proven guilty, Mr. Brooks? Or is that what we call trial by mob? Tell me, what books have you read that paint yourselves as the good guys? Trump was never revealed to be the “monster” you promised. In fact, quite the opposite.

He could have, as a fascist, shot protesters on the street in the Summer of 2020 oh wait, Biden did that when the Capitol police shot Ashli Babbitt. He could have jailed protesters, throwing them in solitary without a trial, convicting them in the court of public opinion as “white supremacists,” oh wait, Biden did that too.

Censor social media outlets (oh, oops, Biden too), weaponize the DOJ (oh, darn it, Biden again), edge us closer to Nuclear war (D’OH also Biden), and attempt to jail his political opponents to hold onto power for the foreseeable future (YA, that’s actually Biden). Darnit. Will the real fascist please stand up?

Trump might aspire to be an authoritarian but never had the necessary institutional support. He had just the opposite - every institution was at war with Trump every day of his presidency. I expect you’re educated enough to know that fascists require an alignment of power across all corporate, cultural, and political life — kind of like the Democrats, Mr. Brooks. Are you sure you have the right fascist? Or Tyrant or authoritarian or monster?

For those who now say, “he led an armed insurrection to overthrow the US Government and install a white supremacist army to kill all the Black and Brown people,” or anything related to January 6th, I call bull****. The Trump emergency happened long before 2020, as any honest person knows.

Steve Bannon accurately predicted in 2017 that the Democrats would take the House in 2018 and immediately impeach Trump. It didn’t even matter what it was for. Everything our FBI and the Democrats, along with you Never Trump Republicans, did to reject the duly elected President of the United States was unprecedented and evidence of an elite ruling class that does not want to give up its power to the people.

I could spend a few paragraphs on January 6th, as I bore witness to a fake media narrative blooming out of the events that day, just as I could spend an equal amount of time talking about the violent protests in the Summer of 2020 that the media all but ignored, but instead, let’s stay focused on the task at hand - are you the good guys or are you the bad guys?

I know you are a Never Trumper, who has counted on the ratf*ckers like Rick Wilson and the Lincoln Project, or the high-minded intellectuals at the Bulwark, or the pretentious ramblings of a Joe Scarborough — it feels so good, doesn’t it, to have the affections of high society finally? To be let into the club and on the A-list now? Yeah, I bet it does. To quote Bob Dylan, I used to be among the crowd you’re in with.

I’ve only recently gotten to know the Conservatives such as yourself. I am a lifelong Democrat who voted for every Democrat that ever ran for president starting in the 1980s. I was a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter. I marched, I protested, and I wrote op-eds. I said Me Too. I supported and voted for Joe Biden. And yes, I wrote about race and gender for years on my website. Yeah, I was that guy (girl).

It would take me a while to realize you were all wrong about Trump. First, I had to find out all of these years later that your paper of record was not telling me the truth, which I did in June of 2020 when the New York Times upended itself over the Tom Cotton essay, then threw two of its editors under the bus.

 

 

That moment was, for me, like the lantern dropping out of the sky in The Truman Show.

My whole world changed. But it was hard to explain it to my friends and family. I would say things to them like, “I can’t explain it to you because you’re in the bubble.” And they would look at me like I was insane.

All that really meant is that they still trusted the New York Times. They still trusted you, Mr. Brooks. But little by little, people like me are escaping the bubble and discovering a whole wide world of freedom outside of it - freedom of the mind, most especially. Imagine, not having to fret every word that comes out of your mouth. Imagine people seeing each other as people and not as partisans in an imaginary war, not as “white supremacists” or divided by race or gender.

If the Tom Cotton debacle wasn’t bad enough, the Times sunk itself even further into the morass when it demonized and chased out respectable COVID reporter Donald McNeil after some entitled brat tattled on him that he’d used the “n-word” on a field trip. Oh, he must be a RACIST, concluded the gaggle of gossips and pearl-clutching wokesters in the newsroom.

 

 

Are you the good guys, or are you the bad guys for allowing lunatics to take over the asylum? For bringing on board uptight thought police to bully your journalists for trying to tell the truth. Most of that is not your fault, but since you stay at the paper and say nothing, you are complicit. You’re building a rat ship, as Al Pacino once opined in Scent of a Woman.

I like to think I would have resigned in protest and in support of James Bennett, Bari Weiss, and Donald McNeil. But I know it’s hard out there for a propaganda pusher, I mean a journalist, so I don’t blame you for keeping your job and staying quiet.

That intense focus on race and racism pushed and adopted by the Times, has had a catastrophic effect on the news business and American culture writ large, but especially so in the Trump era. A revolution of devout woketopians crashing up against Trump, a guy who will say anything he feels like saying, did this to the NY Times:

 

 

This is the ticket to ride at the Times now, Mr. Brooks. You are trapped in a hell of your own making by now. Look at the “Reader’s Picks” comments. It is hard to resist a comment that has 7,000 plus upvotes telling you to abandon your humanity and continue the ongoing dehumanization of half the country.

 

 

Why can’t they, or you, trust the voters? Why can’t you find better candidates and better policies? Why can’t you allow an outsider to shake things up in a people-run government? Moreover, who gave you permission to claim this country for yourselves and decide for American voters what they should want? That is not how things are supposed to work in this country.

You’ve all been treating Trump like an elusive mob boss who engaged in dirty dealings, drug smuggling, prostitution, bribery, and even murder, which justified taking extraordinary measures against him to put him in prison finally. But the evidence at hand does not bear this out. He’s a rule-breaker by nature, he always has been. He likes to upset people. He likes to antagonize, tease, and sometimes bully, but we can’t even get to Turmp’s real problems because of your tsunami of hyperbole.

The so-called charges against Trump will look ridiculous in time, just like the perjury charge against Bill Clinton does. By now, you all should be sued for wasting our time and money policing a president who had the nerve to win an election and offend the ruling elite. And then had the nerve to protest the most corrupt election in my lifetime. But again, we won’t go into that.

These charges show pencil-pusher detailing that doesn’t amount to anything serious enough to meddle in yet another election, and nothing more serious than what Joe Biden is alleged to have done — no one at your paper would put together the billions being sent to Ukraine with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s payoffs, just like you’ll never tell the truth about the FBI’s involvement in January 6th, but sooner or later, someone will.

I know you probably don’t really care what the majority of Republicans think of you. But still, it has to be a bit of a drag that the “paper of record” is now on par with MSNBC in the minds of the public, per this poll:

 

 

 

 

 

When I headed over to Trump World and watched his rallies, I did not see a racist or a bigot. I didn’t see a frothing-at-the-mouth Hitler-esque tyrant. And I couldn’t lie about that anymore.

This isn’t about telling you to support Trump or that I will even vote for him. It’s hard to talk about anything else because of YOUR obsession, not ours. He has to dominate the news because it drives traffic on your site and ratings on cable news and because God forbid any of you will actually report on the Biden administration’s obvious failings.

Some people got it long before I ever did, like David Horowitz, a former lefty, who wrote a brilliant book on the 2020 election and January 6th called Final Battle. His introduction goes like this:

“Trump’s final seventeen hours of campaigning had included more than 3,000 miles of flights and motorcades, 367 minutes of rallies, and—in the words of one Wall Street Journal reporter, “five awkward and hilarious stage dances to [the popular song] ‘YMCA.’”A Trump rally was always an entertainment.”

At one point in the evening, the crowd became so ardent—as similar rallies had before—that it began to chant “We love you!” and did so over and over, until Trump responded: “Thank you. Don’t say that. I’ll start to cry and that wouldn’t be good for my image.” It was an uncharacteristically emotional moment, displaying a self-awareness and even self-deprecation, that went generally unacknowledged by Trump’s legion of haters.”

The same rally was referenced by Tucker Carlson, who has now been fired by Fox News to protect the delicate ruling elites from hard truths they studiously avoid. Carlson wrote this before the 2020 election.

And that was really it for me. The journalists, so many people I knew and in the highest reaches of culture and power, had the story completely wrong. They didn’t know Trump at all and had no clue why so many people supported him. All they could do was spin around, wondering how could anyone like and vote for a MONSTER like Trump?

Calling them all racists led to real-world violence, as in this rarely covered event from back in 2015:

But Trump makes them feel seen, in the parlance of the Left. The people most of you through away like human garbage had one guy with balls of steel taking on the entire machine. If you don’t think most people are rooting for Trump to skate these charges, then you aren’t paying attention.

Oh sure, the Beckys and the Karens are waiting for their money shot, but most people can’t help but root for the underdog. Sorry, folks. You’ll have to confront the lies you’ve been selling for years because the people are way ahead of you.

Lastly, you write:

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?

The answer, Mr. Brooks, is never. As with most aristocracies, power must be taken from you. No, not with a violent revolution, but when the American people realize what I finally did — that they can no longer trust the media, and that the media have become the bad guys. When that happens, it’s all over but the shouting.

That's one helluvan article! Kudos for finding it.

[DKW 86 7,946]

45 minutes ago, Mikey said:

That's one helluvan article! Kudos for finding it.

Its just on the RCP this AM.

Edited August 6, 2023 by DKW 86