WHO’S TO BLAME?

A Trump-supporting family member of mine, in a comment before the election, wrote, “If my Party’s candidate for President was in danger of losing the election to someone as flawed as Donald Trump, I might be asking myself if maybe my candidate or my Party is doing something that causes roughly half the people in the Country to support him.” David Brooks is asking the same question – post-election – in this article. In response to Brooks, one friend suggested that instead of a mea culpa, perhaps we (presumably educated Democrats) owed a WE a culpa. It’s a good question, and I appreciate the opportunity for self-interrogation and a cultural/political autopsy, but in this case I completely disagree. 

If you’ve followed my writing for a while, you know I am a strong believer in epistemological humility. For us to make progress, we have to be prepared to acknowledge how our “ways of knowing” might be flawed. But, humility does not require victimization, or submission to an untrue or unfair perspective, which is what I believe Brooks is asking for here. 

I like David Brooks. I’ve read his books and articles for years, and I usually agree with about 60-75% of what he says. But this article is an astonishing example of gaslighting and scapegoating. Brooks identifies the problem as a “crisis of respect,” caused by Democrats. It feels like he’s at the scene of a sexual assault, and after he expresses his empathy for the victim and his criticism of the assailant, pauses and asks accusingly, “Buuuut, what were you wearing?”

To justify Trump’s re-ascendance by turning the spotlight on the people who were doing mostly the right things, just maybe not in the best way, is an illustration of why we’re here. This article, and the way Big Journalism and Big Podcast have platformed a pathological liar, convicted felon, and rapist through false equivalences and bothsidesisms, manages to deflect attention (once again) from the offenses of the right and direct our eyes to the foibles of the left.

Brooks isn’t entirely wrong, Democrats could have done better. I have been troubled for years by the smugness of some liberals in academia and Hollywood. When we were on our national listening journey, I interviewed a guy in LA who said some of his writer friends in Hollywood would say privately that they have been part of the problem, dismissing people on the right as villains or buffoons. There’s no doubt intentional condescenscion to gain a siloed audience is an unethical practice, and has contributed to our divide; but, that’s different than what Brooks is saying here. 

He argues that our great political division is because we elevated college over vocational education (which was biased against male success), that we allowed(?) energy to cluster in tech center cities, the knowledge economy caused immigrants to compete with Americans for employment, that the shift from fossil fuels took jobs away from working class people, and that Democrats were responsible for these things. I’m not sure if he’s met Elon Musk, but….

Brooks says,”The great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect.” Really? The greatest disrespect came from the left? According to him, there was a great segregation, or marginalization, that happened because Trump supporters didn’t “speak in the right social justice jargon or hold the sort of luxury beliefs that are markers of public virtue.” I guess when Trump and his supporters spoke of “bitches,” “motherfuckers,” “shitholes,” “dumbasses,” and promoted the worst conspiracy theories about the inhumanity of Democrats, etc., it was just locker room talk.

Because of a visit to a church, he suggests the spectre of Christian nationalism was based on a justified anger, and the masses felt betrayed by the “politics of joy” offered by the Harris campaign. So, Democrats were culpable here, because they tried to run a positive campaign? WTAF?

He regularly invokes his hobbyhorse of “the educated class,” or “the progressive elites.” It’s as though he believes all liberals are priggish intellectuals who sit around posh faculty lounges in the Northeast, pontificating about the unwashed masses, while getting manicures and sipping Negronis. I’m sure that tracks with the privileged circles Brooks moves in, but it hardly describes the tens of millions of Democratic voters (or candidates) in this election.

He sketches a portrait of a narcissistic Democratic party that was enamored with itself and did nothing to address class inequality, which Brooks identifies as their “one job.”

He feels like the campaign became the “identitarian performance art” of the left vs. Donald Trump, the hardscrabble Champion of the People, describing Trump as a remarkable candidate who had managed to cobble together this incredible multiracial, working class majority.

He claims to be a moderate who likes Harris, but he sure as hell sounds like a Trump surrogate filtering his message through Thurston Howell’s silk pocket square. 

And after all of that, he says he likes it when Democrats run to the center, and that they did that in this campaign, but…it didn’t work. Ya think? You mean, even after they recognized many of the potential problems you mentioned, crafted a campaign to address them, it still didn’t make a damn bit of difference with a population deep in the grip of sadistic rage and institutionalized ignorance? Who’d a thunk?

Most of my research and published scholarship over the last 25 years is about apologies and the strategic rhetoric of public image repair; and it’s my professional opinion that Democrats have little to apologize for here.

David Brooks, on the other hand, could use some mortification.