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david brooks
When David Brooks Goes 'Bernie Bro' (Sort of)
The longtime conservative NYT columnist is certainly not a member of the political left. But his recent admission still has something to offer us.
Nov 14, 2024
Has Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 turned the New York Times’ most prominent and popular conservative columnist David Brooks into a “Bernie bro?” To read his “morning-after” piece—“Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?”—might well make you think so.
Responding to the polls showing that more working-class voters in all their diversity had voted for the Trump/Vance ticket than for that of Harris/Walz, Brooks proffered nothing less than an historical class-analysis of what had led them to turn from the “Party of the People” to the party of a billionaire real-estate mogul and his Make America Great Again politics. In fact, even before Sanders himself issued a post-election attack on the Democratic Establishment stating that “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Brooks charged the Democrats with having failed to fulfill their primary political responsibility.
“The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality," wrote Brooks. "Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it.” And he then went on to declare: “I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption—something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.”
So, has Brooks joined the Left—and if so, why should we care?
I have always taken Brooks seriously, going all the way back to his years writing for The Weekly Standard, the neo-conservative magazine published by Rupert Murdoch and edited by Bill Kristol. Brooks originally caught my attention because he was posing questions about the “purpose and promise of America” that I sincerely believed needed addressing, but which my left comrades— in contrast to past progressives and radicals from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King Jr.—were failing to ask, if not outright scorning them.
For all of his talk about class inequality, and as much as he has come to see the light on what the Democrats should have been doing and, presumably, should be doing if they/we ever get it together and win back the White House and Congress, he still doesn’t really get what led us here...
At the same time, I never failed to recognize that as much as Brooks was asking the right questions—most notably in “A Return to National Greatness” (1997); “What is America For?” (2014) and “What are We Supposed to Do (about the growing class divide and the impending nomination of Trump)? (2016)—he was consistently offering the wrong answers. As I wrote in response to the second of those pieces: “(How could the conservative Brooks effectively answer that question?) How could he possibly appreciate and write informatively of America’s purpose and promise—the promise inscribed in our historical memory and imagination by Paine’s Common Sense, Jefferson’s Declaration, the Founders’ Preamble to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, FDR’s Four Freedoms, and King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech? How could he appreciate the promise that inspired not just a revolutionary war, but also generations of Americans to struggle to expand both the “We” in “We the People” and the democratic process through which “the people” can genuinely govern themselves?”
Brooks, unlike his own comrades on the right, had never been completely oblivious to questions of class. But he never wrote the kind of piece that he did on November 6 of this year—a populist class analysis and narrative that clearly holds the nation’s elites accountable for Trump’s victories in both 2016 and 2020. The very title of the column signals Brooks new sympathies. While he definitely has no affection or admiration for Trump and the MAGA crowd, he takes seriously the working-class voters who lined up with them on Election Day. Notably, he does not dismiss them as simply “deplorables,” as so many liberals have done ever since 2016. “There will be some on the left,” he writes, “who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again…. The rest of us need to look at this result with humility. American voters are not always wise, but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us.”
As Brooks tells it, the past 40 years of American history, which he dubs the “information age,” saw the emergence of a post-industrial class structure, a society divided into two classes, that is, a governing class of highly educated university graduates and a lower class of the less educated, in essence, the working class. In this order, “those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the post-industrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies [trade policy, immigration policy, education policy, environmental policy, and technology policy] to meet our needs.” And while “we” benefited, the less educated definitely did not. They have endured, he points out, not only lower incomes, less financial security, and fewer social and cultural opportunities, but also less healthy and shorter lives. Making this social order all the more oppressive, he says, the educated class has looked down upon and lorded it over those beneath them: “That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect.”
Inevitably, the “chasms” created “led to a loss of faith, a loss of trust, a sense of betrayal” on the part of the working class.
He acknowledges that the Democratic Party was not insensible to inequality. But it “focused on racial inequality, gender inequality, and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality,” not class inequality. And he states, as “the left veered toward identitarian performance art,” Donald Trump “jumped into the class war with both feet...” and put together what the “Democratic Party once tried to build – a multiracial working-class majority.”
Of course, Brooks notes that “the Biden administration tried to woo the working class with subsidies and stimulus.” But he observes: “there is no economic solution to what is primarily a crisis of respect.”
With those words Brooks himself answers the question posed at the outset: Has Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 turned the New York Times most prominent and popular conservative columnist David Brooks into a “Bernie bro?” For all of his expressed populist sympathies and sensibilities, Brooks is not one of us. Sure, respect matters—it matters deeply. But it wasn’t the lack of respect that brought about the class divide and the injustices endured by working people.
For all of his talk about class inequality, and as much as he has come to see the light on what the Democrats should have been doing and, presumably, should be doing if they/we ever get it together and win back the White House and Congress, he still doesn’t really get what led us here and what we need to do not only to begin to find our way out of the political abyss into which we have fallen, but also go on to lead Americans to truly transcend the ever intensifying crisis of democracy that we will surely continue to confront.
So, Brooks is not one of us. But neither is he the conservative he long had been...
In short, Brooks’ narrative ignores the real class war from above waged these past 50 years by corporate bosses, Republican conservatives, and yes, Democratic neoliberals—a class war against the democratic rights secured and the progressive achievements accomplished during what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called the “Long Age of Roosevelt” from the 1930s to the early 1970s. That “great sucking sound” to which Brooks refers was not simply sucking up and redistributing respect upwards to an educated class. Even more so, it was sucking up the wealth that working people were producing and redistributing it up to multimillionaires and billionaires.
Brooks says, “The Democrats obviously have to do some major rethinking.” That’s putting it mildly. To save the Democratic Party and redeem the nation from the grip of billionaires and reactionaries, and the serious threat of outright Fascism, the Democrats are going to have to not only join with the Labor Movement in favor of articulating a progressive and social-democratic vision and agenda that polls repeatedly show the great majority of Americans truly want. They will also have to stop promising to fight for the people and, by their own actions, start encouraging the fight in the people.
Okay. So, Brooks is not one of us. But neither is he the conservative he long had been (fascists can do that to you). Thus, he can be an important ally in the struggle to defend and enhance democracy. From his perch at the Times, he speaks to not only conservatives, but also to moderate Democrats, without whom we cannot transform the Democratic Party and start taking back America.
So, David, welcome to the left, sort of.
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David Brooks' Defense of Trump Defenders Disguises Where Real Power Is
Brooks and The New York Times are playing the tired role of using petty cultural politics to ignore economic reality and portray the Republicans as the voice of working America.
Aug 11, 2023
In an era of Donald Trump and a Republican Party dedicated to eradicating liberal democratic order to solidify its political hegemony, New York Times columnist David Brooks—like fellow Times columnist David French and the Atlantic‘s David Frum—appears to be a sane voice of the old-school conservative movement. In short, a Never Trumper.
It might initially come as a surprise, then, to see his response to the latest Trump indictment (New York Times, 8/2/23) drawing praise from the right-wing press for seeing the political elite from Trump supporters’ point of view. Fox News (8/3/23) said that Brooks’ column exposed the anti-Trump class as “self-dealing jerks.” Seth Mandel (Twitter, 8/2/23), executive editor of the Washington Examiner, said the piece achieved a “quality reached a few times a year by a few writers,” and with dizzying circular reasoning declared it would “be criticized angrily because it shows empathy and elite introspection, which will prove it correct.”
Brooks’ column encouraged anti-Trumpers (among whom he includes himself) to think of themselves as “the bad guys,” because while they diagnose the Republican base’s unflagging support for its leader as rooted in bigotry and resentment, it actually derives from “the class war between the professionals and the workers.” Brooks, enlightened member of the professional class that he is, understands “why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault.” He asserted, “They’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class.”
But Brooks engaged in a trick he’s used his entire career. He presents himself as an expert on salt-of-the-earth residents of the Heartland whom elites have ignored and wronged, so our critical gaze should be cast on supposedly progressive elite institutions, not bigotry and authoritarianism—or on the real causes of the economic inequality he bemoans.
‘Walking on eggshells’
The reason it comes across as plausible is that Brooks does get part of the story right. He writes that elites “marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation,” and that “members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.”
It’s true that the US ranks lower on inequality and social mobility than most other wealthy nations. But Brooks would have readers believe these problems come primarily from cultural norms, not economic policy. He offers one sentence each on “free trade” and “open immigration”—defying the evidence that immigrants don’t erode the wages of native-born workers—followed by three paragraphs on liberal cultural factors. The first deftly flips the script, making the oppressed the oppressor:
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.
In reality, it’s people who identify as Latinx, think intersectionally or who aren’t cisgender who have to “walk on eggshells”—not because of a social stigma, but because of punitive laws passed by authoritarian legislatures:
- Arkansas has banned “most state agencies from using the gender-neutral term Latinx” (AP, 1/22/23).
- “Florida has ‘effectively’ banned the Advanced Placement Psychology course from being taught in classrooms over lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation” (Daily Beast, 8/3/23).
- Sixteen states have passed laws against the use in schools of Critical Race Theory—which embraces intersectionality—with the state of North Dakota banning the idea that “that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality.”
- State-level laws against trans rights are rising at such a frightening pace, trans people are seeking refuge in some of the places Brooks frowns on as bastions of elite-driven intolerance (Teen Vogue, 8/3/23).
Who monopolizes cultural power?
Brooks might have missed that it is, in fact, the anti-trans movement that nearly monopolizes American cultural power. A conservative backlash to Bud Light’s sending a novelty beer can to a trans actress has led to a devastating loss for the beer’s parent company (CNN, 8/3/23). Yet while liberals talk about boycotting fast-food chain Chick-fil-a over its anti-gay positions (LA Times, 7/23/12; Yahoo, 7/15/21), the company is clucking along undeterred (Franchise Times, 4/6/23; USA Today, 7/27/23).
While Brooks decried that being unhip when it comes to trans terminology gets you fired, the reality is that, according to research by McKinsey, “nearly 30% of transgender people in the United States are not in the workforce and are twice as likely as the cisgender population to be unemployed.”
This led Brooks into a discussion of how, because “we” (meaning the professional class) “eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom,” having children out of wedlock has become more normal:
After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and 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, “60% of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10% to women with a university degree.” That matters, he continues, because “the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”
That’s a neat trick how the college-educated persuaded high school graduates to have children without getting married, by continuing to have children while married. (That Murphy Brown storyline must have been very persuasive!) One might more plausibly attribute changes in unwed birthrates to new reproductive technologies than to cultural messages created (but not heeded) by the professional class.
It is not social norms, though, that make single parenthood a roadblock to climbing the ladder; it is the lack of economic support and protection for people with children. If Brooks wanted parenthood to be seen as a way to thrive rather than an enormous burden, he’d be advocating for free reproductive care, subsidized daycare, more parental leave and other economic supports that exist elsewhere in the wealthy industrialized world.
‘It’s not the entrepreneurs’
Throughout the piece, Brooks conflates the college-educated with the wealthy, writing that anti-Trumpers are those with “high-paying professional jobs” who have won the “competition for income and status.” This helps him perform the sleight of hand that replaces an economic identity with a cultural one. While it’s true that voters with a college education tended to favor Biden and those without favored Trump, that difference disappears (and even slightly reverses) for non-white voters—an important point when you’re making sweeping generalizations about social class, and trying to argue this has nothing to do with bigotry.
But it’s also true that in the 2020 election, Trump lost among voters making less than $50,000 by 11 percentage points, while winning with those making more than $100,000 by 13 points. Even among white voters alone, the over-$100,000 crowd tilted toward Trump more heavily than the under-$50,000 crowd. Contrary to Brooks’ entire thesis, Trump’s base is the economically better-off, while the worse-off went for Biden—demolishing the columnists’ claim that we should sympathize with those who rally around the indicted Trump as the desperately downtrodden.
One could almost miss it, but Brooks gave away the ruse entirely when he said that Trump “understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class.” While posing as an anti-Trump conservative, Brooks supports the fiction that Trump, a billionaire, is right that the real threat to workers aren’t the bosses who move jobs overseas, bust unions or advocate against workplace safety standards, but rather some annoying grad school brat on the West Coast reading Judith Butler.
It’s easy to write this off as David Brooks being David Brooks. But this is coming out when vitriol coming from the former president and his political movement—an often violent and fascistic movement—has reached a fever pitch. Brooks and the Times are playing the tired role of using petty cultural politics to ignore economic reality and portray the Republicans as the voice of working America (FAIR.org, 10/9/15, 3/30/18, 11/13/18).
The column is yet another example of the Times, a mouthpiece for the ruling economic order, stoking a fiction about cultural divides to distract from brutal class inequality driven by politicians from both parties.
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Sing in Unison, David Brooks Tells Black Athletes
Sep 18, 2016
David Brooks is a Very Concerned Man. The majority of his New York Times columns are him feigning agreement with the aims of the subject in question, but he just has Some Concerns he'd like to go over. These Concerns are almost always aimed at silencing the left and/or people of color who are too "radical" for his taste. His latest attempt to do so is one of the more vulgar examples of this habit, and one of the more incompetently executed.
In "The Uses of Patriotism" (New York Times, 9/16/16), Brooks begins, appropriately, with rank condescension:
This column is directed at all the high school football players around the country who are pulling a Kaepernick -- kneeling during their pregame national anthems to protest systemic racism. I'm going to try to persuade you that what you're doing is extremely counterproductive.
Listen up, black kids, David Brooks is here to tell you why your choice of political activism is "counterproductive." What's strange is that Brooks never really bothers to explain why, exactly. What follows instead is a discursive white supremacist McHistory lesson about an America defined by harsh self-criticism and noble ideals:
By 1776, this fusion of radical hope and radical self-criticism had become the country's civic religion. This civic religion was based on a moral premise -- that all men are created equal -- and pointed toward a vision of a promised land -- a place where your family or country of origin would have no bearing on your opportunities.
Lofty rhetoric aside, one's "country of origin and family" had tremendous bearing on one's opportunities--or even one's right to be recognized as a human being--a legacy which still affects us today. Which is, as Brooks may know, the entire point of the protests. The American experience means different things to different populations, and this was and remains the essence of the protest--to draw attention to these diverging narratives and the inequalities they reflect. But this is never really addressed; instead, he dismisses this line of criticism, and moves on to this patently absurd claim:
Recently, the civic religion has been under assault. Many schools no longer teach American history....
Brooks offers no link or citation for this claim, and seems to be conflating the recent right-wing outrage at colleges not requiring US History with the high school students the piece is nominally aimed at. No matter, Brooks must lament the fraying of the American fabric and will fudge the facts to fit his tale of moral panic.
Brooks' main gripe is that we've become too unpatriotic, noting that the percentage of Americans who feel "extremely proud" of their country has fallen since 2003--around the time the US was invading Iraq. He pins this (as he always does) on some ineffable cultural failure rather than material reality.
The revelation that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were a lie, two never-ending wars, an economy that crashed and bailed out the richest while leaving the poor to fend for themselves, Katrina, the rise of the incarceration state, police shootings: These aren't what caused a dip in national pride. No, it must be a moral failing on the part of ungrateful Americans, namely, in this case, uppity blacks who have decided of late to not sit idly by while they're gunned down with impunity.
Brooks, with a straight face, puts more blame on Ta-Nehisi Coates for a lack of black patriotism than the reality of rising inequality and pervasive racism. One could easily call it a cynical attempt at gaslighting, if one thought for a second the actual audience were the young African-Americans the piece is ostensibly for, and not the centrist elites whose white guilt Brooks ameliorates for a living.
The rest of the piece is difficult to critique, because nothing of substance is really offered. It's a word salad of patriotic, centrist bromides in search of a point it can't seem to find:
I hear you when you say you are unhappy with the way things are going in America. But the answer to what's wrong in America is America -- the aspirations passed down generation after generation and sung in unison week by week.
We have a crisis of solidarity. That makes it hard to solve every other problem we have. When you stand and sing the national anthem, you are building a little solidarity, and you're singing a radical song about a radical place.
There's no recognition of the fact that that "radical song" celebrates the killing of freed slaves who fought against a US government that had kept them in bondage. Or, indeed, that for professional football players, the ritual of standing for the national anthem has not been "passed down generation after generation," but was instituted in 2009 around the same time that the NFL was getting a large increase in Defense Department sponsorship.
Ultimately, what Brooks is saying, or attempting to say, is that protesters need to affirmatively demonstrate their loyalty: "If these common rituals are insulted, other people won't be motivated to right your injustices because they'll be less likely to feel that you are part of their story." The implication being that if you don't adhere to "common rituals," your continued oppression is justified.
Brooks engages in that favorite white concern troll pastime: evoking Martin Luther King, who led the singing of the national anthem at the March on Washington in 1963.
The fact that MLK was negotiating an entirely different political dynamic, and was being harassed and monitored by the same US government Brooks venerates, is never really addressed: Like all "but MLK did this" criticism, it's not offered in good faith, but to muddy the waters and reduce the history of black struggle to a sanitized version of one man. Different causes and different times call for different tactics, but in the history of black activism, one can safely say that they never once called for David Brooks' opinion.
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