Tag Archives: David Brooks

A Little Humility

David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, generally liberal, asks: “What if anti-Trumpers are the bad guys?” (Published in The Seattle Times, August 6, 2023)

Obviously, as he says, he mostly identifies with the anti-Trumpers and those who fight discrimination. However, he cautions that the anti-Trumpers tend to have benefitted from privileges denied to many of those who champion Trump.

Brooks writes: “This story begins in the 1960’s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments.” He mentions continuing class shifters, like school bussing into working class neighborhoods of Boston but not into more upscale communities.

As Brooks points out, the system of meritocracy favors those whose parents can afford to send them to the best schools, who tend to marry those from the same social strata, and who tend to find well-paying professional jobs. They tend to fill “leadership positions in almost every vocation.”

The causes they support tend to be, for example, liberal immigration policies, which may impact the working classes but seldom the upper classes. “Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China,” writes Brooks.

The more educated in society upended social norms, like those supporting marriage before pregnancy. Yet, “Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do do that.” Thus, out of wedlock births most often happen to those with less resources.

Brooks concludes, not with supporting Trump’s policies, but suggesting that those who oppose them “stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.”

A Rekindling of Hope?

“. . . new coalitions are gradually forming, across many different kinds of Christians . . . who are rethinking old convictions, who are meeting, and mobilizing in the hopes of renewing the evangelical presence in America.”

So wrote David Brooks in an opinion piece for The New York Times, February 4, 2022: “The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism From Itself.”

Some would say that the nadir of American evangelicalism was on display in the support of Donald Trump for president by about eighty percent of American evangelicals in 2016. As Brooks pointed out, however, the election only displayed results of years of challenges faced by evangelicals. (Lately, some have questioned how many self-defining “evangelicals” actually are active church members.)

Brooks’ column reported on those evangelical leaders and lay people who are, in fact, appalled by the political decisions of evangelicals in 2020. It spotlighted efforts in opposite directions. “There are now many, many people who refused to be silent about abuses of power.”

This readjustment has resulted in denominational differences becoming less important. “These kinds of new connections constitute an important form of social capital that may turn out to be very powerful in the year ahead.”

American evangelicalism may owe any change in direction in some measure to its changing makeup—more “Korean, African and Hispanic” members, for example.

News stories are full of the decline of American Christianity. Stories of young people leaving the faith of their parents are legion.

But the history of two millennia of Christianity is full of dark nadirs when many calling themselves Christians failed to live up to the teachings of their founder. Yet, renewal always followed, sometimes arriving from the backwaters of civilization.

Perhaps the next renewal of Christianity may come from some combination of non-Western Christianity joining with a remnant of American evangelicals.

Worship of the Talented

“Many of the great failures of the last 50 years, from Vietnam to Watergate to the financial crisis, were caused by extremely intelligent people who didn’t care about the civic consequences of their actions.”

So writes New York Times columnist David Brooks (“The failure of the educated elite,” The Seattle Times, May 30, 2018).

The old system of power depended on who your parents were and on the hereditary passing of power. We exchanged it for a more just one based on merit.

Yet, Brooks points out, the old system had qualities that the new system lacks.

Blue bloods from the older system like George H. W. Bush “won World War II and built the American Century.”

In contrast, those put into power under the new system, based on merit and education, are passing down advantages to their children but not to the nation as a whole. Our society has become more unequal than ever, says Brooks.

What the new meritocracy lacks is “a civic consciousness, a sense that we live life embedded in community and nation, that we owe a debt to community . . . ”

The new system will work when we pass good things not just to our children, but to our neighbor’s children as well.

Hope for a New National Story?

David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, recently offered hope for a new national story.

Brooks chided himself for not listening to those outside of his own bourgeois circle. He promised to listen to those Americans who see the American dream as out of their reach and have cast their protest votes accordingly.

His message of hope emphasized the community. At this level, no matter the dysfunction on the national level, local citizens aid the homeless and the hungry, mentor high school dropouts, and work with those soon to be released from prison to integrate them into society.

Having recently attended a local meeting to update citizens on programs to help the homeless in our community, I agree with Brooks. Local groups here run a food bank (including a garden for fresh produce), hold a work day for providing minor repairs on houses of the less well-off, and contribute to a fund for medical needs, among other causes.

Brooks says: “I don’t know what the new national story will be but maybe it will be less individualistic and more redemptive. Maybe it will be a story about communities that heal those who suffer from addiction, broken homes, trauma, prison and loss, a story of those who triumph over the isolation, social instability and dislocation so common today.” (As quoted in The Seattle Times, May 1, 2016.)

Choose Politics or Dictatorship

David Brooks, columnist for The New York Times, recently wrote an article capturing our current political dysfunction. A diverse society like ours, he said, operates through either dictatorship or politics. “Our founding fathers chose politics.”

In our current political process, however, we gravitate toward a dictatorial approach. We are unwilling to settle for merely a piece of the pie. We want the whole thing. Either our side wins or we will bring down the country. Our opponents are not merely people with whom we disagree. They are traitors.

“The antipolitics people elect legislators who have no political skills or experience,” Brooks writes. “That incompetence leads to dysfunctional government, which leads to more disgust with government, which leads to a demand for even more outsiders.”

In a dictatorship, one group gets everything it wants. In politics, no group gets everything it wants. For whatever reason, too many of us today seem unable to live with this fact of democratic existence.