Some good self-criticism

[Cornflake]

David Brooks has a column today in which he's critical of people like, well, me and many others here. I think a lot of the criticism is very accurate. (You may get paywalled. If I knew how to share a free read I would.)

I know this is the kind of subject that may spark arguments but we can't throw each other softballs forever.

www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/opinion/trump-meritocracy-educated.html

[Cosmic Wonder]

Can’t read it.

David Brooks? Meh.

Mike

[Shannon]

I managed to read it on a site other than the NYT.

I think he has interesting observations. As a conservative never-Trumper myself, I'll need to give them some thought.

[Marshall]

Here are some tasty quotes:

In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent.

One thing that gets me about that is the 2,500 counties depend on the 500 counties for their livelihood more than they realize.

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.

It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class.

Amen !

If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem as just another skirmish on the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them.

Yes. It bothers the hell out of me that all I hear on CNN and NPR is about the indictments 24/7/365. Sure it was bad stuff. But there's so much else of importance in the world that I don't need to hear/see talking heads blabbing on, and on, and on about this shit.

“History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable."

And so we're stuck with another Trump/Biden choice. My God ! It's time for new generations to take over. "Don't have a stroke, Gramps !"

[Marshall]

Another thing that bothers me about the whole situation is the stick-your-head-in-the-sand world view of Trump that encourages Autocrats like Putin and Xi and MBS. Maybe that's another elitist view. But then mankind is heading in another confrontational direction.

[Russell Letson]

And I ask David (Brooks), "What the fuck you mean 'we'?" Our little household of two Pd.D.s came from blue-collar families (one of them a refugee blue-collar family). I went to a private college thanks to a state scholarship program. Most of my high-school classmates went to nearly-free New York State colleges (including the excellent ag and home-ec divisions at Cornell).

Brooks' "elite" seems to be a creature of statistics, created our of selective examination of the working world, abetted by an avoidance of some of the forces that have little to do with cultural elites and a lot to do with raw economic power (e.g., vulture capitalism, multinational corporate structures, and the finance-world environment generally), along with a generous dose of bourgeois guilt. And a good bit of the cultural insuarity and hostility he portrays has always been around--and is pretty well spread around. (A decade spent in deepest southern Illinois exposed me to a kind of yahooism that had little to do with dominance of coastal elites and a lot to do with deep-rooted good-ol'-boy bigotry.)

Every time Brooks wrote "we," I wanted to cuff him.

[Cornflake]

Any generalization will rope in some people who don't belong, Russell. My upbringing was anything but privileged. But I find to my discomfort that I've absorbed more of the worldview he describes than I would like.

[Russell Letson]

I could go chapter-and-verse on Brooks' analyses, but a selection will have to do:

1) His opening assertion is that the class responsible for much of the problem is "the educated class," which seems to include everybody from state-teacher's-college grads to Ivy Leaguers (especially Ivy League law grads). This ropes in a range of the "educated" so large and various as to be meaningless. This "educated" class would include K-12 public-school teachers, CPAs, small-business owners (like the guy who owned our local Bo Diddley's delis for 35 years and the coffee bean roaster who will lead Monday Night Jazz for tips tonight), and most of the members of the Soundhole (doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, and miscellaneous working stiffs). I note among my acquaintances in the aforementioned categories a range of political-cultural opinions and tastes that are hard to corral under one set of labels. In fact, we are often at each other's rhetorical throats.

2) The Trumpians Brooks seems to represent as economically and culturally downtrodden are often neither--especially the small-city/exurban types with $60K trucks and/or the wherewithal to travel to DC on Jan. 6, festooned with tactical gear and fetishwear. Are the Trumpist retirees in sunny climes in as bad shape as, say, the un/underemployed in the opioid territories?

I do understand that plenty of people with "conservative" or "traditional" value systems and worldviews can feel left out or even betrayed by the world that has grown up since Vietnam and the civil rights movement and various enlightenments and woke moments. But as my (refugee-camp-born, ex-Goldwater Republican) wife sometimes says, "Toughen up, Buttercup." I wish the population at large had more respect for literature, historical research, and Thelonious Monk, but I'm not going to go looking for a t-shirt to advertise my discontent. "The world is so full of a number of things,/I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

3) I'm not about to feel guilty for thinking I'm right. Or about not being poor. (We came by our comfort as honestly as is possible in a fallen world, and purity is a delusion.)

[Cornflake]

I can't argue with any of that. I still thought his comments had value.

[aquaduct]

As the last of my kind still here, I'd say the dude's about 7 years too late. Thanks for nothing, Dave.

[John B]

Aug 3, 2023 21:08:34 GMT -5 aquaduct said:

As the last of my kind still here, I'd say the dude's about 7 years too late. Thanks for nothing, Dave.

Even as the son of teachers with a couple of midwestern state college degrees, there is more of me in that article than I would like to admit. And I absolutely love this song.

[millring]

Aug 3, 2023 9:56:07 GMT -5 Marshall said:

Another thing that bothers me about the whole situation is the stick-your-head-in-the-sand world view of Trump that encourages Autocrats like Putin and Xi and MBS. Maybe that's another elitist view. But then mankind is heading in another confrontational direction.

Some things never change.

[John B]

Aug 4, 2023 5:50:45 GMT -5 millring said:

Aug 3, 2023 9:56:07 GMT -5 Marshall said:

Another thing that bothers me about the whole situation is the stick-your-head-in-the-sand world view of Trump that encourages Autocrats like Putin and Xi and MBS. Maybe that's another elitist view. But then mankind is heading in another confrontational direction.

Some things never change.

Speaking of "Daisy," a group supporting Biden just released this ad. I think it's a little over the top.

[millring]

From my perspective, I'm truly encouraged that Cornflake can read this and see himself in it. It gives me a glimmer of hope. There's a beautiful humility exhibited there. JohnB demonstrates such humility quite often and that, too, gives me hope.

There's so much to be despondent about (we've had at least two threads recently -- started by folks who lean quite to the left -- that are as apocalyptic as any fundamentalist preacher I ever sat under in my youth). I suspect there is something afoot that is greater than a simple, common generational shift.

[millring]

I would question the divide being described as educated vs. uneducated. I suspect that that misdirection exacerbates the problem. Those institutionally bound comfort themselves in the worldview that they are educated and those who disagree with them are not.

A good example of that phenomenon might be the whole "banning of books" discussion wherein parents are characterized as uneducated and school teachers and librarians are characterized as educated. That's not the divide at all. And that's just one example.

[AlanC]

We have a tendency to over complicate things.

[Marshall]

Aug 3, 2023 15:35:09 GMT -5 Russell Letson said:

And I ask David (Brooks), "What the fuck you mean 'we'?" Our little household of two Pd.D.s came from blue-collar families (one of them a refugee blue-collar family). I went to a private college thanks to a state scholarship program. Most of my high-school classmates went to nearly-free New York State colleges (including the excellent ag and home-ec divisions at Cornell).

Brooks' "elite" seems to be a creature of statistics, created our of selective examination of the working world, abetted by an avoidance of some of the forces that have little to do with cultural elites and a lot to do with raw economic power (e.g., vulture capitalism, multinational corporate structures, and the finance-world environment generally), along with a generous dose of bourgeois guilt. And a good bit of the cultural insuarity and hostility he portrays has always been around--and is pretty well spread around. (A decade spent in deepest southern Illinois exposed me to a kind of yahooism that had little to do with dominance of coastal elites and a lot to do with deep-rooted good-ol'-boy bigotry.)

Every time Brooks wrote "we," I wanted to cuff him.

Perception is everything.

There is a divide between the educated (elite?) and the less educated working class. And it's more arbitrary than real. I remember talking to construction workers; trades people. And they thought of themselves as working class and disrespected by the powers that be. Yet many of these guys live in great houses in the country and have trucks, fancy motorcycles, 4-wheelers, jet skis, motor boats, multiple hunting rifles, and every toy imaginable. They feel looked down upon by the professional engineers, architects, and managers.

And I remember at my first job working for a Design-Build firm, Austin Company. The Structural Engineer on a project visited a job site and was talking to the field accountant. And the accountant showed him a payroll list for the job site. And the retarded guy who was a laborer whose job was to clean out the trailer was making more than the the engineer.

MY dad was miffed when I graduated from college and got my first job in an architectural office. I was making $4/hr. My dad was a union ornamental iron worker. He never realized how low the college educated got paid.

Yet the perception is bigger than the reality.

[james]

Small point. "Retarded" is not a word that sits well with a lot of people these days.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retard_(pejorative)

[millring]

Aug 4, 2023 10:41:39 GMT -5 james said:

Small point. "Retarded" is not a word that sits well with a lot of people these days.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retard_(pejorative)

Exhibit A

[Marshall]

Aug 4, 2023 10:41:39 GMT -5 james said:

Small point. "Retarded" is not a word that sits well with a lot of people these days.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retard_(pejorative)

Yeah, but 50 years ago it was.