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.”