- Conservative David Brooks calls for a civic uprising against the Trump administration;
- How Salon executive editor Andrew O’Hehir reacts to this;
- How psychopaths and financial services seem to go together;
- The extent to which JD Vance lies;
- Aid to foreign children has ended; many of them will die; the administration doesn’t care;
- The office on foreign disinformation has been shuttered;
- And the CDC will cease collecting consumer safety data;
- There’s a pattern here, as identified in the Brooks piece.
I neglected to note this latest David Brooks piece that appeared in Friday’s New York Times, or Thursday when it appeared online. It’s getting attention.
NY Times, David Brooks, 17 Apr 2025 online: What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.
In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must.
But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.
This fits neatly with my discussions of the institutions of society, including government and science, that the current administration wants to dismantle. They claim they want a smaller government (why? to save money? then cut the bloated military), while their motives are obviously different.
Trumpism is threatening all of that. It is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.
All their battles, against law firms, foreign aid, universities, global trade, are really just one thing.
These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back.
I will note that the current threat is not an illustration of my admittedly simplistic binary of tribalistic vs cosmopolitan thinking. It’s about something in between: call it, perhaps, the enactment of the tribalistic alpha male aggressiveness to more and more *other* tribes, including in the past century, the entire world. Even Trump: he’s trying to impose his values on the entire world through tariffs, and via threats to cancel trade agreements with other countries (like England) if they don’t cancel *their* DEI policies.
The important part here is this:
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
This is a conservative writer, conservative in the sense of his emphasis on shared cultural values and so on (one of the few “intellectual” conservatives still around), advocating resistance to the current administration.
One more bit, as he cites Jared Diamond:
In his book “Upheaval,” Jared Diamond looked at countries that endured crises and recovered. He points out that the nations that recover don’t catastrophize — they don’t say everything is screwed up and we need to burn it all down. They take a careful inventory of what is working well and what is working poorly. Leaders assume responsibility for their own share of society’s problems.
This struck me as essential advice for Americans today. We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place. They have to show that they are democratically seeking to reform their institutions. This is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.
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Here’s one reaction, from the executive editor of Salon.
Salon, Andrew O’Hehir, 20 Apr 2025: The fascist moment is here: Have mainstream liberals heard the alarm go off?, subtitled “Welcome to upside-down America: David Brooks calls for revolution while Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom grovel”
The question of who understands the nature of the moment, and who does not, has been thrown into dramatic relief over the course of the last week or so — and boy howdy, have there been some surprises. This is too much of a generalization, but it’s an irresistible one: We are seeing a truly extraordinary transformation, something like the awakening of the mainstream conservatives alongside the continuing surrender of the mainstream liberals.
Yeah, I’m talking, for instance, about New York Times columnist David Brooks calling for mass action against the Trump regime and quoting the “Communist Manifesto,” pretty much non-ironically. I don’t think anyone had that on their mainstream-media bingo card. I’m also talking about Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer literally hiding her face from photographers in the Oval Office, and about California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s dramatic heel turn, which this week included describing the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, as the “distraction of the day” compared to truly important things like whether Trump’s tariff policy is “accountable to the markets.”
And this pull-quote:
When we see Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer genuflecting before the Trump throne at exactly the wrong moment, we see people who have sucked on the crack-pipe of realpolitik for so long that, like all addicts, they have lost touch with everyday morality.
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Quickly noted links.
AlterNet, The Conservation, 19 Apr 2025: Why a psychopath wouldn’t hesitate to cause a global financial crisis — according to science
People in the financial industry are more likely to be psychopaths.
The theory won support because psychopaths are more commonly found in financial services than in other sectors. It has even been argued that up to 10% of employees in financial services could be psychopathic. That is to say they have no empathy, care for other people, conscience or regrets for any damage they do.
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NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 19 Apr 2025: This Is How Far Vance Will Go to Sell a Lie
A lie about how many immigrants Biden let into the country.
You can read the rest of Vance’s post if you’d like. It’s just more of the same: a set of distortions, falsehoods and bizarre suppositions that all depend on the lie that there has been some “invasion” of unauthorized immigrants.
(Why do they need to lie??)
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The Atlantic, Hana Kiros, 18 Apr 2025: ‘In Three Months, Half of Them Will Be Dead’, subtitled “Elon Musk promised to preserve lifesaving aid to foreign children. Then the Trump administration quietly canceled it.”
They’re foreigners, let them die, is how I suspect they think.
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Salon, Brian Karem, 27 Apr 2025: Trump’s open defiance of the law leaves no room for Republican redemption, subtitled “‘A monster’: A madman president sinks even lower, as the GOP remains silent”
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JMG, from NYT, 16 Apr 2025: Marco Rubio Shutters Office On Foreign Disinformation
Just think about this. Why would they do this? To let the disinformation flow.
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JMG, from Reuters, 17 Apr 2025: CDC To Cease Collecting Consumer Safety Data
The U.S. consumer product safety agency will stop collecting data on injuries from incidents like car accidents and adverse drug effects due to staff cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to an agency email seen by Reuters and a source familiar with the situation.
If there’s no data about the damage big business does, then they can’t be held accountable. Right? And profits won’t be affected.
