Is there anyone more useless than David Brooks? [View all]
He wrote a horrible column a few days ago, blaming the "Elites" for Trump's popularity.
Thankfully, he gets taken to the woodshed here:
I regret to report the economic anxiety theory of Trumpism is back
The question of why Donald Trump manages to maintain such a grip on the Republican base, to the point where he can remain a nationally viable candidate despite all of his misdeeds and legal woes, is one of the most important issues in American politics. It’s a subject that has been explored extensively, with the best evidence converging on the same general story: Trump is the avatar of a kind of resentful reactionary politics, one uncomfortable with a changing America, that defines the worldview of a plurality (if not a majority) of the GOP faithful.
But this answer offers few easy solutions and makes some people uncomfortable, as it feels a bit too much like a judgment of Trump supporters. So we get efforts to reject the evidence, often relying on long-debunked alternative arguments.
The latest example of this phenomenon is David Brooks’s new column in the New York Times. In a piece titled “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?”, Brooks criticizes those that would explain Trump’s persistent political support as a product of racism and anxious attachment to hierarchy. This explanation has some truth, he concedes, but is “also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.”
In its place, Brooks urges his readers “to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys.” In this counterstory, Trump represents a boiling up of decades of working-class frustration with an economic system rigged in favor of those with college degrees. The elite’s unwillingness to face this hard truth, Brooks argues, is both a failure of introspection and a social disaster in the making.
https://www.vox.com/2023/8/4/23818817/trump-support-david-brooks-economic-anxiety
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It's the racism, stupid!
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