- A Slate writer responds to NYT’s David Brooks about how the “elites” are to blame for Trump culture;
- A David Brin post;
- Some quick links with comments…
- Phil Plait on seeing the Milky Way;
- And George Michael’s “You Have Been Loved”
Here’s another response to the David Brooks NYT piece blaming “elites” for the rise of Trump, as discussed, along with a rejoinder by Vox writer Zack Beauchamp, three days ago. My reaction to Brooks’ thesis was “Professional positions are occupied by people with educations, and the uneducated feel resentful?” and “Whats the alternative?”
Slate, Christina Cauterucci, 7 Aug 2023: Enough With the False Narrative About Trump’s Rise, subtitled “What exactly does David Brooks want ‘anti-Trumpers’ to do?”
The essay is roughly 8 screens long, and Christina Cauterucci is “a Slate senior writer.”
She begins by summarizing Brooks’ thesis.
Who is to blame for the iron grip Donald Trump retains on Republican voters? According to one New York Times opinion columnist, it’s not the GOP leaders who spent Trump’s entire presidency treating him like the second coming of Christ. It’s not the party infrastructure that has continued to support the thrice-indicted con man. It’s not the right-wing media outlets that dutifully disseminate his lies.
No, David Brooks writes—it’s us.
Addressing an audience of left-leaning, upwardly mobile college graduates, Brooks submits that American systems of meritocracy, which place a high value on academic credentials, have sapped cultural non-elites of power, consigned most of the country to a multigenerational cycle of low earnings and undereducation, and alienated those without college degrees by encouraging the use of “words like ‘problematic,’ ‘cisgender,’ ‘Latinx,’ and ‘intersectional.’ ”
All this has cultivated an emerging population of Americans who “conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural, and moral assault” and, for some reason, turn to the billionaire, politically malleable, Ivy League–educated, utterly amoral Trump to lead their counterassault against the professional class.
The writer echoes one of my reactions to the Brooks piece; what has changed?
And it is no earth-shattering revelation that the way the world has changed in recent decades—or the way (mostly white) people perceive it to be changing, thanks to a right-wing media ecosystem that subsists on panic—has predisposed voters to flock to the candidate who best stokes that resentment.
And makes this key point:
And in a truly astounding omission, Brooks ignores a fact that threatens to derail his entire thesis: Trump and the GOP are fanatically committed to sustaining the systems of economic inequality and social immobility that Brooks blames for Trump’s rise. “We anti-Trumpers” are the ones backing policies that would mitigate it.
Another hole in Brooks’ argument:
As evidence of the way economic stagnation in certain places has boosted Trump’s appeal, Brooks points out that “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.”
…
Yes, Biden won fewer counties than Trump—because the counties he won were jampacked with people. Trump’s were jampacked with empty land, which is not entitled to the franchise. It stands to reason, then, that the Biden counties have a greater economic output; they are full of people, most of whom have jobs. That’s how the economy works.
There’s a classical logical fallacy here, but also a core truth, it seems to me. The writer goes on with other examples. And then wonders, as I did three days ago:
As I read Brooks’ piece, I found myself wondering—because he stopped short of proposing any productive way forward—what does he want “we anti-Trumpers” to do? How can we right the wrongs we have perpetrated against Americans without college degrees? What possible solutions could we bring to bear on the problems he identifies?
She lists some ideas: raise the federal minimum wage; pass universal health care, paid for by higher taxes on the ultrarich; establish universal day care, make college more affordable, and so on. But what are the Trumpers doing? The opposites. I’ll quote this, with all these links, leading the article’s conclusion.
Meanwhile, what are the Trumpers doing to earn the support of their anti-elite admirers? For the most part, they are working to expand the political and economic influence of wealthy elites. With the help of Sen. Joe Manchin, Republicans allowed the expanded child tax credit to expire, pushing 3.7 million children into poverty and shoring up barriers to the social mobility of single parents. They are busting the unions that would build power for the working class (including those blue-collar workers who supposedly projectile vomit whenever they hear the word Latinx). They have blocked bills that would use tax incentives to discourage companies from sending jobs overseas, and they have passed bills that reward offshoring. They have hysterically resisted proposals to forgive student loan debt. They oppose policies that would make single parenthood more affordable, while criminalizing abortion and mounting a war on contraception such that people are more likely to have an unwanted pregnancy, be forced to bear the medical costs of pregnancy and childbirth, and raise children they may not be able to afford.
Conservatives are the ones who have created the conditions that Brooks blames for Trump’s enduring popularity. Republicans, not left-leaning elites, are responsible for the majority of contemporary economic and social forces that have given rise to a resentful, despairing, minimally educated populace eager to hand the reins of the country to a criminal strongman. No amount of liberal capitulation or self-flagellation will change that.
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Cue David Brin, who posted today a screed on Facebook on his recurrent themes, in particular the Right’s war on fact-based professions.
Facebook, David Brin: The core narrative of today’s mad right …
Sample:
MAGA folks desperately fear confronting the pure fact that almost a hundred times as many high republicans as high democrats have been indicted by diverse grand juries of random citizens (mostly white retirees) all across the nation, including in red-run states where Republicans hold every lever of power. Many of the same states that whining sore-losers claim were ‘stolen’ from Trump in 2020. Stolen by who? The states in question (like Georgia & Arizona) were ALL red-run.
…
And so, they focus on all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.
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Some quick links with comments.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 7 Aug 2023: Florida bans AP psychology classes, proving Ron DeSantis wants a return to the pre-Stonewall days, subtitled “Over 30,000 students are losing college credit-level classes, because they teach being gay is normal”
This is what they mean by MAGA.
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Salon, Kelly McClure, 5 Aug 2023: Trump says that communists and Marxists led by Biden are violating his civil rights, subtitled “During a rally in Alabama on Friday, Trump continued to blame Biden for everything that’s happening to him”
Trump’s fans, and likely Trump himself, do not know what those words means.
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CNN, 6 Aug 2023: DeSantis’ ‘anti-woke’ bills are costing Florida millions of dollars in business
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Stepping out to reality…
Scientific American, Phil Plait, 4 Aug 2023: How Seeing the Milky Way Helped Us Discover the Whole Universe, subtitled “Marvel for a moment at the Milky Way’s night-sky spectacle—and the scientific revolutions it has sparked”
The universe is filled with immense structures of mind-crushing proportions. They wield energies that dwarf our most fevered dreams.
Yet from Earth they can barely be seen at all, even when you live inside of one.
Case in point: find yourself a dark spot over the coming week or two—where you can see stars down to magnitude 4.0 or 5.0 at a time when the moon rises late—and look up. Stretching from the northern horizon to nearly directly overhead and then down again to the southern horizon, a broad whitish swath will be visible across the sky, faintly glowing like a dimly seen celestial river.
… …
So when you stand outside and take in the Milky Way over your head, remember: you live in the stellar suburbs of an enormous spiral galaxy’s dust-strewn disk, which is more than a quintillion kilometers across and stuffed full of hundreds of billions of stars and perhaps trillions of planets—and our cosmic home is but one of countless other galaxies scattered across the universe. How remarkable it is that we know all this just because curious people once looked up into the night and thought, “I wonder what that faint, fuzzy glow is?”
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And closing with a delicate, late George Michael song.
“Now I’ve no daughters, I’ve no sons, guess I’m the only one living in my life.”
