David Brooks impersonates a Trump supporter

The wandering mind of David Brooks crosses into enemy territory in this attempt to explain, in non-demonic terms, the thinking of Donald Trump’s core supporters. We saw pieces like this right after the 2016 election when the liberal commentariat was still stunned. But, it quickly rallied the troops, defaulted back to the “deplorables” explanation, and turned its attention to the alleged Russia collusion thing.

Thus, Brooks’ analysis, coming at this time from a Trump-hating liberal, seems fresh.

Brooks asks his fellow Trump haters to consider that they may be the “bad guys” in our politics. Why? Because ever since the 1960s, “the ideal that we’re all in this together [has been] replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there.”

This sinister feat was accomplished thanks to America’s “meritocracy.” Brooks writes:

We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

The elites impose policies that benefit themselves and hurt the less educated:

Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.

At the cultural level:

We change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside 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.

After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, he continues, because “the rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”

Therefore:

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. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.

Brooks gets a lot right in his column, but I think he misses some key points. In the end, moreover, he, like Trump, patronizes what he calls the “less-educated classes” by over-emphasizing their victimization and downplaying their agency.

One important point that Brooks understates, nearly to the point of discounting, is the degree to which the resentment of Trump supporters is rooted in cultural issues — the product of the “educated class” trying to shove its non-traditional values down their throats. Upper class kids have always had the advantage when it comes to admission to top colleges (more so before the 1960s than since). I doubt this has ever fueled much resentment.

What fuels resentment is having one’s religion and one’s values mocked and over-ridden. This, the modern professional class does with a vengeance.

Brooks also over-emphasizes the significance of elite dominance of certain professions. He focuses primarily on his profession, journalism, pointing to a 2018 study that found more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.

Again, I doubt that the educational backgrounds of reporters at the Times and the Journal matter at all to under-educated American males. I suspect the jobs they worry about most are the manufacturing ones their fathers made a decent living performing but that are no longer available to them. They don’t want to work for the New York Times, but might like to work a high-paying assembly line job — or at least a job in which they can earn as much as their wife or girlfriend.

Brooks is aware of this, and he addresses it when he mentions trade policy. He’s on target here. Free trade policies, pushed by elites, have meant that fewer manufacturing jobs are available to Americans.

But this isn’t the only shrinking sector of the job market. Jobs for journalists are disappearing, too. Even op-ed writers should worry. Artificial intelligence can already produce columns equal in quality to those written by many op-ed writers, though not yet by Brooks.

The point is that time marches on. There is no God-given right to work at a newspaper just because you got good grades at one of America’s 29 most elite universities. Nor is there a God-given right to work on an assembly line like your father did.

“Under educated” Americans need to adapt, either by learning new skills or becoming better educated. Many are learning new skills, but these folks tend to be women — which is one reason why men often don’t earn as much as their wives and girlfriends. Some on the right mock the saying “learn to code,” but coding is one of the skills displaced workers should be learning if they want to work at an okay paying job.

Most of the lost manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back — not even in another Trump presidency.

Trump’s message that the elites have wrought an “American carnage” that “only I can fix “is one, simultaneously, of despair and false promise. If the deck is stacked and middle America has been hollowed out, why not just hang out on the street corner (or whatever the 2020s equivalent is) and get high.

Trump’s message is not a recipe for making America great again. America won’t regain greatness if a large chunk of its population concludes that, as Brooks phrases it, they have been “forced into a world down there” to the point that that their only hope is an Orange Knight.

Brooks also overstates the degree to which the deck is stacked against less-educated Americans who want to become better educated. Of course, these groups are at a disadvantage compared to the sons and daughters of the elites.

But that’s always been the case. And the educational disadvantages faced by the offspring of less-educated Americans these days is no greater than that encountered (and overcome) by the sons and daughters of poor immigrants over the many decades (and, indeed, today).

Nor is meritocracy to blame. I doubt there’s ever been a more merit-based education system in the U.S. than the New York City public schools and free colleges of yesteryear. But a great many sons and daughters of impoverished immigrants become well educated through that system, with many going on to highly-successful and rewarding careers, even though the Ivy League colleges of the time discriminated against many of them.

What’s needed to overcome the comparative disadvantage faced by the sons and daughters of the less educated is straightforward: parental guidance (or at least something resembling a functional family structure) and individual drive and determination. If these elements are present, even kids of average intelligence can usually get enough education to get decent-paying work. Those at the higher end will even have a shot at journalism — if that’s the poison they pick.

Brooks has an answer to this argument. He says the deck is stacked against the sons and daughters of the less educated because their parents’ status militates strongly against the kind of parenting needed (in many cases) for them to succeed. (Recall his stat: Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.)

Brooks has a point. But social pathologies have always been much more prevalent among the lower classes.

Moreover, whatever the statistics show, “women with only a high school certificate” are still free agents. The decision whether to have a birth out of wedlock is still theirs to make. So is the decision whether to take school seriously; the decision whether to learn a skill with value in the contemporary job market; and the decision whether to abstain from drugs that take away one’s drive and threaten one’s life.

Conservatives often make “personal responsibility” arguments like this when discussing black America. The arguments should not be off-limits when discussing the portion of Trump’s base that Brooks has in mind.

I don’t want to commit a fallacy parallel to Trump’s (and Brooks’). I don’t want to deny that policies imposed by our elites are hurting less-educated Americans. I don’t want to absolve these policies from their deleterious effects or argue against modifying some of them.

A great many manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back here no matter what, but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be more protective of American jobs. Displaced workers should make more effort to learn new skills, but this doesn’t mean our trade policies should be oblivious to their concerns.

But it’s fallacious and self-counterproductive (unless you’re a demagogue) to treat under-educated Americans as helpless victims of a rigged system designed to perpetuate privilege. It’s also demeaning to these Americans.

It assumes less-educated Americans lack what it takes to overcome their disadvantages without a savior. This seems like a case of what George W. Bush’s speechwriters called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

I think it’s also a manifestation of elitist contempt for an entire class of Americans. Remember, both Donald Trump and David Brooks are members of the American elite.