"Why isn't she running away with it?" David Brooks asks. Turns out, it's because of woke! It's also because Democrats insist on hating oil, and generally catering only to the most extreme of the extreme left--if only she would pivot to the center! Some of the most distilled, unfiltered bullshit I've ever seen, even considering the source.
Wow, he almost gets it, but in the policy example he gives he turns around and gives examples of policy that has been under assault from right wing propaganda. Liberal "priests" as he puts it support things that Americans don't care about.
Like affirmative action isn't popular, but lets ignore years of propaganda that has lead people to believe that unqualified POC are getting jobs over white people. Shifting to renewable energy isn't popular, but lets ignore years of propaganda that tells you that if you move away from fossil fuels you'll be putting thousands of industry workers out of a job and affecting millions who depend on them for their transportation. Immigration policy that doesn't treat migrants like criminals isn't popular, lets ignore the years of propaganda that tell you that only gangs, murderers, and removeds are coming through the borders.
Its such an incredibly stupid way of looking at the issues facing American politics in general. The reality is that the parties are religious in nature because their most ardent supporters, especially the Democrat Party, truly believe that their party actually cares about them and the things they believe in. So no matter what they do materially (increase funding for the police, fund wars and genocide, cut social safety net programs, privatize services, etc) they continue to believe that they actually represent what they believe in. Even when they start to realize that they don't they still come up with ways to justify that suppport (no one is perfect, lesser of two evils).
Honestly I wouldn't expect any better from this out of touch shithead though.
For Brooks, culture is something that's out there, and which arises, fully formed, from some kind of pervasive but nebulous ether. Politics (and economics) is fully downstream of that, and is completely parasitic on this ex nihilo culture. This is pretty much a paradigm case of your brain on idealism
: it's the ideas--in the form of culture--that shape our political economy on this view, but not the other way around; politics and power never "act back" on culture, but are forever subservient to ideology. This gets the arrow of causal influence almost perfectly backward. As you say, the predominant beliefs of most Americans are shaped by decades of material conditions--propaganda, immiseration, austerity, and political capture by the richest of the rich. Even if we grant that he's right in describing the views of most Americans (which I think is actually pretty suspect too), Brooks never thinks to interrogate why and how people come to have the views that he attributes to them; we just think what we think, and then shape our world in response to that bundle of ideas that God has placed into our minds. Politicians, on this view, are merely weathervanes whose job it is to act based on the ideological winds, forever hostage to their vagaries and totally unable to shift their direction.