“History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.”Unearned caste privileges are a good way to get the guillotines to be rolled out.
"Are we the baddies?"
Periodically I watch this classic skit.
David Brooks is channeling the skit today in "What If We're the Bad Guys Here?" He gently chides his posh NYT readership with lots of chummy assumptions about "our" elite status, but points out that those smelly Trump supporters do have just a bit of a point about how the smug illuminati are making out like bandits at the expense of their pathetic protegees.Not that he doesn't pull himself back from the brink; he knows he can't completely lose his audience. "Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not." Heavens to Betsy, no, we're not that wrong.To give him credit, though, he closes on a good thought:
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He stopped writing most of his columns years ago - his GF-later wife did them at first - and now it is a youngish woman who is an assistant. At least, that was the case five years ago. He signs off on them.
Brooks is channeling the skit today in "What If We're the Bad Guys Here?"
Which reminds me of the observation- from Krauthammer?- that conservatives view liberals as ill-informed, while liberals view conservatives as evil. That apparently is also the implicit view of David Brooks.
AVI- where did you get that information?
I've always thought it was nice of the newspapers to let us know which of their columnists were 'conservative'. Because, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell, otherwise.
I believe this is the original Krauthammer line:
Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer072902.asp
It's worth reading. It's possible that when Krauthammer wrote this 21 years ago, he was right about liberals "suffer[ing] from naivete, the stupidity of the good heart." I believed that myself for a long time. I no longer believe it. (Which creates some confusion for me with regard to a dear friend who is a genuinely good person and a man of the Left.)
As for the Brooks column itself, I finally found a way to read it and it's a lot better than I expected given what I'd read about it:
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2023/08/04/brooks-what-if-the-people-opposing-trump-are-really-the-bad-guys/
He thinks Trump is evil but he doesn't think those who support Trump are evil. They are, in fact, acting from exactly the same king of self-interest Brooks is able to see in "his" people. He is hedging, as Tex says, and he's a snob but he's being a lot more direct than I thought he would be.
Oops! "Kind" of self-interest, not "king".
Yes, I was surprised by the directness of the criticism, too.
Last year, Brooks wrote something about the "nihilistic violence" that "lay at the heart of Trumpian populism". It struck me then as a bizarre comment, and still does.
He also referred to ‘populist authoritarianism’...there is apparently a style guide somewhere telling media people that the two words need to always be coupled.
Here's the response I wrote last year:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/68629.html
David Brooks is a bedwetter and nothing he writes will change that fact. He is living proof that a blind pig sometimes finds a puny acorn.
https://dad29.blogspot.com/2015/10/bedwetter-brooks-v-real-conservatism.html
-Greg
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