David Brooks: "Can We Please Stop Calling These People Populists?"

[Sparkly]

I've never been a fan of David Brooks, and he still gets most things wrong. For example, he starts from the premise that our division is between the "educated class" and the "working class" (as if no educated people are in the "working class" ). He then claims cause-effect with education (rather than correlation with poverty) for a range of issues, including health and single parenting. He goes back to the 1960s to 'explain' how "Bobos" or "the creative class" took over the country, with a "stifling progressive orthodoxy!" (You know, the one that stifled the 'conservative' ability to oppress other people and deny civil rights based on their own bigotry.)

Next he says that rare, brave conservative students like himself made it through liberal colleges to save the day! (This was the generation that HATED the Clintons, as the first "1960s" college-grads in Washington.)

However, like a lifelong jerk sitting by his fireside smoking his pipe yet suddenly smelling his farts, Brooks wrote the four paragraphs I chose to quote.

But here’s the problem: As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Great Gatsby,” rich people are careless. They break things. The members of the Trumpist elite think they’re going after the educated elites at U.S.A.I.D. and the N.I.H., but you know who’s really going to pay the price? It’s the woman in Namibia who is going to die of AIDS because PEPFAR has been eviscerated. It’s the child in Ohio who’s going to die of cancer because medical research was slowed. It’s the future citizens of America whose lives will be worse because their state institutions no longer function. It’s the working-class communities that will continue to languish because Trump ignores their main challenges and focuses instead on culture war distractions.

Here’s the essence of Trumpism: It’s to be blithely unconcerned that people without a college degree die about eight years sooner or that hundreds of thousands of Africans might now die of AIDS but to go into paroxysms of moral panic because of who competes in a high school girls’ swim meet.

Sure, the upper reaches of the federal work force are generally left or center left, as you’d expect from a group that possesses a plenitude of advanced degrees. But they are also mostly nonpolitical patriots who often work 60-hour weeks to keep us safe, to save lives, to make America work. This is a complexity the Trumpists seem incapable of contemplating. They are people who would destroy your home because they don’t like your lawn sign.

I’m not a fan of populism, but real populism would be better than the right-wing elite nihilists who are running the country now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/opinion/trump-populism-elites.html

[rubbersole]

1. Hey, David...

...STFU. But thank you for not apologizing for them anymore. And wait, I have something for you - 🖕

[Sparkly]

4. My sentiments exactly.

[Wicked Blue]

2. Wow. Brooks must have become possessed by a liberal demon

Great post, Sparkly. Thank you.

[Sparkly]

3. Aw thank you!!

[dalton99a]

5. Kick

[Sparkly]

7. Thank you for the honor!

[rampartd]

6. brooks is usually wrong

but there should be different terms for trump and actual populists huey long or william jennings bryan.

"a chicken in every pot" huey long

"chickens, what a beautiful word, we really love chickens don't we folks, and sleepy joe biden took all of your chickens......."

"cross of gold' bryan

""a bitcoin reserve ...."

[Sparkly]

8. Exactly - a shelf full of dictionaries.

The rightwing has a knack for appropriating and redefining terms and symbols.

[Skittles]

9. will be great if more people wake up

a bit late but, here we are

[Paladin]

10. Fuck you where you breathe, David Brooks. You're LATE.

You, your NY Times cohorts, and the rest of the mainstream media pimped trump into a second wave of destruction, while savaging Kamala Harris at every opportunity---and now you want to whine about how things are going? Not a chance.

[Sparkly]

13. We must understand poor David!

It was so hard for him to go through college as a lone "conservative" in a forest of awful free-thinking liberals!!

[Paladin]

16. "Poor David" can go blow a bulldog, as far as I'm concerned... (nt)

[somsai]

11. The way we use the word working class in the U

is formal education with a bachelors or not.
Many without a degree are highly educated, extremely successful, and work with their brain, not brawn. Still, in the way we divide people in the US a bachelors is where we draw the line, and we make the line right there because it seems to work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class_in_the_United_States

[Sparkly]

14. Collar colors are another way.

"White collar" = 'desk' employment, yet these people are 'mostly workers'. ("Pink" and "blue" collar = skilled workers, not necessarily with degrees, who often work with their hands directly in some way.)

The non-working, "investor" class are professional owners. They own money, and that money works for them, busily making them more money. They don't have to do anything, but some are power-hungry narcissists.

Those very few own most of the world's wealth. The rest of us -- whatever our degrees or jobs -- are just the "worker bees."

[valleyrogue]

12. I get tired of European labels like "working class" wrongly applied to the US.

What we have are "blue collar" and "white collar" workers. The labels have been in existence for decades, and they need to come back into general use (so-called pink collar is for traditionally female-dominated jobs which tend to be the better jobs but are denigrated because women dominate them).

"Working-class" is a meaningless term when the user really means blue collar.

[Sparkly]

15. I typed too soon!

I just replied above before I read your post.

I agree that there are very few among us who are so wealthy, their money does the work for them - and they own much of the world's fortune. The rest of us WORK.

We need better terms. Capitalism isn't far from the old idea that laborers are underpaid as much as possible in order to provide maximum profits to shareholders or owners; prices for goods and services are as high as 'the market' will bear (consumers, labor).

The fat cats need a perpetual underclass, and somehow they've become very good at hoodwinking them.