The Conscience of An Elite

Revolutionary Brooks (graphic by Kat Garcia

 New York Times columnist David Brooks peered into his magic mirror recently and had a Eureka! moment. Could it possibly be that he and his righteous bipartisan group of anti-Trump resistance fighters themselves could have had a role in the rise and continuing popularity of Donald Trump?

 Brooks, who has made a whole career out of demonizing the poor in his biweekly columns, has belatedly come to the realization that the disdain that his elite class harbors toward the "lesser people" is what contributed to mass resentment and the American turn to right-wing populism.

"What if we're the bad guys here? Brooks disingenuously mused, much to the chagrin of more than 4,000 responding Times subscribers - whom the Times has relentlessly indoctrinated over the last six years that the only thing they ever have to hate and fear is Trump himself, as well as his hordes of fascist Trumpies. The only thing that has sustained the liberals of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) since Hillary Clinton was trounced in 2016 are the fumes of their own moral rectitude, which is all the justification they need for the financial gains they've accrued at the expense of the have-nots. It was not neoliberal austerity policies and the offshoring of jobs that created Trump supporters, they insist. It is their incipient racism and deplorable stupidity they display in voting against their own economic interests. And besides, many Trump voters, if not wealthy elites themselves, are tacky uneducated small-business owners, like the used car salesman who rips off other uneducated people for a living.

Wealthy Democrats themselves cannot possibly be racist, because not only did they vote for Barack Obama, they still revere him. Since Obama and other Black people are now more often elevated to positions of power, it makes it so much easier for "woke" elites to ignore the worsening structural racism and class inequality that directly supports their own lives and lifestyles. Their self-declared wokeness enables them to become the same kind of censorious, reactionary authoritarians they accuse the more extreme Republicans of being. Brooks sounds like a born-again woke liberal himself when he writes:

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.

Brooks counted more than 900 times that Obama used the word "smart" to describe his policy decisions, ascribing its use as a way of dissing non-educated people. (I have a different interpretation, included in my published comment to his opinion piece, reposted below).

Brooks goes on, accurately enough:

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.

The big tell that Brooks is blowing so much hot air is that he offers no policy solutions in the way of wealth redistribution, higher taxes on the rich, a debt-free college education and affordable housing, guaranteed single payer health care, and increased Social Security and disability payments to begin to stem the resentments that have given rise to Trump. Instead, he merely aims to "raise awareness" among the self-satisfied and comfortable liberal class. As long they merely acknowledge their privilege and they tone down the scolding just a tad, the have-not crowd will shut up and magically fall into line.

Brooks is an even worse phony that he was before anti[Trumpism bit him in the ass, when he openly but so delicately and obliquely blamed the poor for their own plights. It's just as bad to concern-troll as it is to scold while annoyingly continuing to praise one's own inherent goodness In fact, it's even worse.

Here's how I responded to Brooks' straining effort at constipated wokeness:

 Brooks, falsely correlating higher socioeconomic status with higher intelligence, completely ignores the plight of college-educated debtors. They were fed the line that "smart" people were destined for success. And the exact opposite has turned out to be true.

 Politicians like Obama were wont to use the word "smart" in conjunction with cuts to the social safety net. Another neoliberal buzzword I've come to loathe is "common sense." Translation: if you don't believe in austerity, you just are not getting with the program. You aren't a credentialed expert. Another similar catchphrase is "sharing the sacrifice" which posits that taxing rich people at slightly higher rates would balance out gratuitous cuts to food stamps and Medicaid.

Sure, we're all in this together, even as the richest billionaires at least doubled their wealth since the economic collapse of 2008 and the Covid pandemic.

Trump is very much the creation of the neoliberal thought collective. Anti-Trumpers can roll out any number of indicted hideous Trump-heads on their shiny golden legal platters, but most people, too worried about their next rent payment or the next unexpected health crisis, could not care less at this point.

Thank goodness for the (brilliant but starving) writers' strike, and for Cornel West being one of the few remaining voices of moral rectitude.