High minded blather impersonating Deep Thought

David Brooks retires the award for sanctimony

I’ve been in Europe for a little more than a week, where it’s relatively easy to escape the New York Times. But vacations don’t last forever, and my catch-up reading includes this doozy from David Brooks.

I guess Brooks is trying to outdo Donald Trump for grating, blustering and counter-productive overstatement. If so, he has succeeded.

Right off the bat, so Mr. Brooks would have it, we need to understand that, because of Trump, the future of civilized life is on the line right now:

[O]ver the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.

Trumpism is threatening all of that.

Where to start? Take your pick. Constitutions were written in large measure as the edifice of democratic rule, i.e., to insure to the extent feasible that the winner of a free election takes the reins of defined power (something that, to say the least, Brooks and his pals reminded us at three zillion decibels after the 2020 election). But when Brooks et al. lost last year’s election, did they then and do they now respect the results, as they so furiously demanded of their opponents last time around?

To ask the question is to answer it. Brooks wants to present himself as The Guardian of Constitutional Government, but if he had either enough insight or enough honesty, he’d quit the hyperbolic pouting and at least try to understand how much he looks like little more than a sore loser, albeit with a (never-forgotten) Yale degree.

(That would be the same Yale that only yesterday tolerated, to use the polite word, a bunch of warmed-over Brownshirts blocking and physically intimidating Jewish students. Not that Yale is alone in the Ivy League in this sort of behavior).

But I digress. This is not real hard. What Brooks and the Left can’t get over is that Trump won. For them, respecting the results of a free election is all of a sudden soooooooooo yesterday.

Particularly comic in Brooks’ first paragraph is the angst about Trump’s alleged threats to “news outlets to advance public understanding…and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life.”

This gushing embrace might have made sense 70 years ago or something like that, but trust in institutions, including and particularly the press and academia, has been cascading downhill for roughly three generations — well before DJT — for a reason: Both have become biased, partisan bullhorns for people like………..well………..David Brooks. They’ve lost trust because they’ve become untrustworthy. As Paul has pointed out many times, universities in particular not only fail to “transmit and advance the glories of our way of life” but instead trash them without relent (and frequently without truth). Trump’s efforts to counteract this, some worthwhile, some bullying, and some dangerous (as Brooks might coherently argue if he could calm down) don’t so much alarm the Left as infuriate it.

Trumpism [by contrast] is primarily about the acquisition of power...

It’s all true. Elections are about the acquisition of power. Brooks obviously took good notes in his PoliSci class.

It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.

Ahhh yes, the “human spirit” et. al. Now I only went to UNC, a good school but not one of The Elite, so maybe I got it wrong when the lesson in English composition was that hyperbole weakens your case. Still, I got that same lesson in law school and in my years as a litigator at the Justice Department.

I get it that the Left has gone over the edge about Trump. In truth, there are reasons for this, some of them serious and quite worrisome. Paul and I have not been shy about discussing them and we will not be shy about discussing them in the future. But that the editors at the once-august New York Times allow Brooks’ brand of eighth grade “civilization-is-at-stake” emoting into print is, if nothing else, depressing (not to mention one more reason that respect for journalism has cratered).

So far, we have treated the various assaults of President Trump and the acolytes in his administration as a series of different attacks. In one lane they are going after law firms. In another they savaged U.S.A.I.D. In another they’re attacking our universities. On yet another front they’re undermining NATO and on another they’re upending global trade.

But that’s the wrong way to think about it. These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back.

It might have taken, for example, putting up a candidate against Trump who had more to offer than three months of word salads and “vibes.” It would also have helped if the Democrats hadn’t spent at least a year before then relentlessly and indignantly lying about Joe Biden’s mental fitness, only to be exposed in their deceit by Biden’s catastrophic debate performance. And then hurriedly to replace him with the prop most readily at hand (and, critically in the Democratic Party, least suspicious to the Diversity Police).

The hazards of re-electing Trump were well known. That he bullies and blusters was obvious from, at a minimum, his first term, as was his love affair with tariffs and his aggressive stance toward illegal (and perhaps legal) immigration. His advanced age was (and increasingly is) no bargain either. Still, the country at base got what it voted for — if nothing else, Trump has largely set in motion, although often recklessly and sometimes lawlessly, what he campaigned on.

Do Brooks and his panties-in-a-knot, one-time Republicans dislike it? Let me ask that another way: Did they do anything beyond a murmur, if even that, to persuade the opposition to nominate a serious candidate?

But their prior sometimes silent and sometimes swooning embrace of Kamala Harris — or any recognition that we had an election at all, less than six months ago if I remember correctly — is a by-gone not to be mentioned. Instead:

Slowly, many of us are realizing that we need to band together….So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this, too, is an ineffective way to respond to Trump…

We should be grateful, I guess, that Brooks is willing to speak the names of his new comrades. To give him credit, this is more honest than we’ve seen from quite a few of those now caterwauling about Trump. They’re in bed with socialism, racial preference, anti-Semitism, national weakness, energy dependence, trans-mania and lots more and they know it, but they’re not about to breathe a word about it much less admit it.

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

Isn’t an election featuring a broad-based electorate the lawful essence of mass power? And did I mention all that stuff from the last few years about the constitutional imperative of respecting the election’s results? Well, hey, look, as Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say……………………………………never mind.

UPDATE: I now discover that Mr. Brooks is not a graduate of Yale but of the also highly prestigious University of Chicago.