It probably won't go beyond just "asking questions" and "what if" discussions, but even so. From 2015 to 2023, just talking about class in any way was considered 'racist and sexist' in lib circles. I guess they want to shift their rhetoric closer to the left for the 2024 elections, but not proposing any policies that this rhetoric would logically imply. Look, you stupid leftists, we are talking the same way that Bernie did in 2016/2020, you should support Joe 2024!
It probably won't go beyond just "asking questions" and "what if" discussions, but even so.
It's gonna argue that Democrats need to become even more right wing like every other David Brooks column.
As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice.
Lmao
And the answer of anyone who has read/been in contact with any marxist/leftist idea is: no shit.
I just read it and there is already a good excuse to support building The Wall™ in his column: "Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages."
The same way that "the greenest building is one that's already been built", the best wall is one that already exists. Improvise, adapt, overcome.
Of course the braindead vulgar economists come out the woodwork to take credit for a realization the libs actaully haven't had
David Brooks doesn't give a fuck about racism Detty you dumbass, he's pulling a "we've gone too far left" and trying to launder Bidens right wing policy failures as being the fault of leftists
Dems don't just have contempt for the white poor, they have contempt for all poor, Biden doubling Trumps deportations, the record funding of racist police department, wow dems sure are anti-white
It's so ironic how the motherfuckers who whine the most about identity politics end up committing all the sins they accuse their opponents of making
Yes dude your crusade against anti-white racism is definitely grounded in material analysis and not just another expression of online middle class suburban grievance
David Brooks realized he wasn't relevant anymore and started looking to the "dirtbag" left for notes. You're not watching a big shift, you're watching a professional take haver who's out of ideas copy our homework.
It's always interesting when some NYT lib writes "oh maybe they hate me because of this complicated thing I am always doing to fuck them over", and it's true, you should stop that. But the truth is actually chuds hate you because they're racist or homophobic or whatever. The system is so complex and people are so kept in the dark about it, and conservative media fills their heads with conspiracy theories and lies about places they've never been to. They think big cities are blighted crime zones full of "urban" thugs and drug addicts. The kind of complicated analysis in the article is the kind of thinking they reject as liberal bullshit.
How many Vietnamese children did your country burn to death with napalm, David?
I once saw an interview with David Brooks where I didn’t know who he was, and I couldn’t believe how stupid he was. Then I saw that it was David Brooks, and I was like, oh yeah, of course. He was talking with fucking Aaron Sorkin and would not shut the fuck up about how he and his children went to the most elite schools. He also asked Sorkin if he drank when he wrote and Sorkin looked at him like, is this a trick question? But Brooks legitimately did not know that a bag of cocaine had essentially written The West Wing.
I read the article and thought it was basically a liberal struggling to do class analysis without Marxism. The educated elites in this country are the labor aristocracy, who overwhelmingly support the democrats, while the petite bourgeoisie overwhelmingly supports Trump. But because liberals don’t know that class is determined by your relationship to the means of production, they think that income determines class (labor aristocrats can make more money than the petite bourgeoisie), and that Trump supporters are workers. (Some are—highly educated tech bros or aging white male union workers can indeed support Trump. Small business owners can also support Biden.) The result here is just a worthless mess, with Brooks humblebragging about an elite pedigree that only proves that an ivy league education is no guarantee of even minimal intelligence.
I remember Chapo doing a reading series on some profile of Brooks. In it, he had this big revelation (at like age 55), that other people are also individuals like him and also have their lives and thoughts. Something basic like that. You can see why it was easy for him to support the Iraq war, because he had the most basic humanist realization at 55, whereas most people have it at like 12.
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.
Some of what he says right at the start actually makes sense, but this sort of stuff is so annoying. Bringing "cancel culture" into this, as if normal people are not getting crushed by capitalism, but instead by cancel culture. The people at Amazon care about your hourly quota, you don't even get a chance to use "latinx".
For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside of marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.
Oh fuck me.
Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that
They are less able to do that because they have less money and more debt.
The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.
Yes, but there aren't more single parents because of "social norms", asshole.
No, most of us are earnest, kind and public spirited.
Brooks is an Iraq war supporter, by the way
Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.
Again showing how the word "progressive" doesn't mean anything, he is just describing basic US liberalism. But at least he said a true thing here.
Trump understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class.
How are entrepreneurs different than the professional classes?
Anyway, the title looks fine, the content is quite mediocre. I could see libs doing something with this as a starting point, or just ignore it and/or go in a new weird direction that still supports the status quo.
This could easily lead the libs to want to "build the wall", but now in the name of progressivism: "Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages."
Nah, he's white, his whole thing is being a militant centrist (but guess what he's just a conservative with manners, who'daguessed?)
