I miss my dad when I read a particularly interesting article, story, or essay and my immediate impulse, six years after his death, is still to send it to him so we can talk about it.
I know it's a joke, but I disagree. I think David Brooks is very smart and often misguided, which provides an important exercise for me: to think through why I disagree with someone whose intelligence I respect. We should all do more of this, IMHO.
Chris, First of all, I appreciate you and enjoy listening to many of your conversations with the incredible humans you connect with. I had a whole screed about David Brooks but I think this is a “we will have to agree to disagree” moment. IMHO, David has proven over and over that he doesn’t deserve the consideration he continues to be given.
educated-class progressivism - is just liberal progressivism
working-class progressivism - is about class consciousness, changing who owns the means of production.
“This also explains, I think, the leftward drift of the haute bourgeoisie. As the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi puts it in his forthcoming book, “We Have Never Been Woke”: “After 2011, there were dramatic changes in how highly educated white liberals answered questions related to race and ethnicity. These shifts were not matched among non-liberal or non-Democrat whites, nor among nonwhites of any political or ideological persuasion. By 2020, highly educated white liberals tended to provide more ‘woke’ responses to racial questions than the average Black or Hispanic person.”
^This paragraph is what needs to be focused on. Liberal progressivism does everything in its power to avoid talking about class. The socialist class analysis is what will wake people up to the unjust economic structure of our society. They(liberals) will discuss race, trans rights, pronouns, birth control, more black CEOS, JK Rolling and a variety of niche issues (that I don’t deny are important but not as important as the class issue) but nothing that will radically change who owns the means of production or society for the betterment of all or nothing that will threaten the power of the capitalist class.
“A lot of us in the center left or the center right don’t want to live amid this much conformity.”
^this statement is hilarious to me when what is centrism but not wanting to see any kind of radical change happen in society. Centrism is just conforming to the status quo.
“stretching back to W.E.B. Du Bois — who argue that white liberals use social justice issues to build status and make themselves feel good while ultimately offering up “little more than symbolic gestures and platitudes to redress the material harms they decry (and often exacerbate).”
^fully agree with this but if you have a pathetic left wing movement like you do in the states than even just bringing attention to an issue can get the ball rolling in hearts and minds of people who are not left-wing. So the protests at universities are good they must be working if you have those in power willing to deploy police to stop them. Those in power are willing to ban Tiktok cause thats where the young are learning about the Gaza. So those protests are effective. I’m not sure who it was who said it( I think it was the ADL leader) but the ideological war does matter. It matters because you won’t be able to deploy US troops in a conflict if the soldiers genuiely think they are bad guys or fighting a senseless war. Soldiers have refused to fight before and will desert if they think the fighting is stupid.
“Al-Gharbi notes that Black people made most of their progress between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, before the rise of the educated class in the late 1960s, and that the educated class may have derailed that progress. He notes that gaps in wealth and homeownership between white and Black Americans have grown larger since 1968.”
^ronald reagan’s neoliberalism is more responsible for this than the so-called educated class. He stripped the american government of all its social programs and stopped making education free because of the vietnam war protests.
“Educated class” it feels like he’s just repurposing marxist analysis for his own liberal purposes.
I find this article highly flawed. I don't have time to go through it point-by-point but here's a question. Let's say, through no fault of your own, you were born into white privilege . But you see the injustices in the world and how the capitalistic system in our country perpetuates those privileges. You recognize that you are the beneficiary of those systems yet you disagree with them. You want them dismantled even if it means you and your children will lead a middle class life and not an upper class life like you grew up in. You've thought this through and it is the world you want. You got into an elite university but instead of majoring in finance you decided to get a degree in English Lit and after graduating, travel the world (because you discovered the Tangentially Speaking podcast). While at elite institution, since you are a good writer you get on the staff of the school newspaper. You write editorials advocating for changes in our systems that will help the disadvantaged. You decry the wealth disparities and advocate for changes in tax laws, regulations, and even legacy admissions to your school. You join protests to support marginalized people around the world. Is this hypothetical young person in the wrong here? Realistically, what would Brooks have them do? Do you really believe that most of these young people are insincere and are just virtue signaling? Some are for sure, but the injustices in our system are so obvious that I think most of them (who are highly educated and understand true history) are authentic.
My guess is the poorer kids who go to state schools are grateful that these privileged elites are protesting on their behalf. After all, the privileged have protection from consequences that they do not have.
Brooks concludes, "The lesson for those of us in the educated class is to seriously reform the system we have created or be prepared to be run over." I believe this is what most of these privileged college elites are trying to do. I'm old. This same sort of criticism was leveled against college kids in the '60s who protested the Vietnam War. I thought they were wrong then but it was I who was wrong.
I think you make good points, and I'm not sure how Brooks would respond to them, but I suspect he'd point out that he isn't really focusing on whether those people are right or wrong (I think it's clear that he thinks they're basically right in terms of what they're protesting, but maybe overdoing it in terms of how they're protesting). I read his piece as an attempt to explain the seemingly strange vehemence with which Harvard students DEMAND justice for Palestine. The psychological double-bind of believing in something that your very existence obstructs is an interesting one that doesn't get as much attention as it deserves, I think. Perhaps it's the same source of passionate denunciations of homosexuality by closeted homosexuals? They think it's very, very wrong, but something inside them knows that it's a big part of their identity.
So in your examples, I'd guess Brooks would say the protests make sense, but the shrieking certainty doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Good points. I suspect some of what Brooks hypothesizes is going on but regarding the finding that elite university student newspapers have become 2 and a half times more progressive since 2001 - what's happened since then that might alarm young people? For starters, 20+ years of worsening climate news with almost no action, the war in Iraq with its black sites and new American policy of torture, the housing crisis that enriched the already rich and devastated the middle class (and for which no one went to jail for clearly criminal activity), the continued national movement rightward (which dwarfs any leftward movement), the election of Donald Trump, more tax cuts for the rich, the assault on democracy (and the Capitol), a corrupt Supreme Court and now - in their view - American bombs raining down on Palestinian women and children. I think these developments are the reason for the vehemence of the protests and student newspaper opinion pieces. In my view, the students are doing what we all should be doing. Under the circumstances, "shrieking" makes some sense to me. It would be interesting to poll the editors of these newspapers 10 years from now and see how many regret what they wrote or said. My guess is not many. Maybe someone could go back to 2001 and ask the editors from then if they wish they had written more forceful editorials.
Don't get me wrong, this is a provocative column worth discussing. I appreciate you posting it.
I'm with you. Ofc the New York Times would criticize kids protesting genocide. Typical liberal corporate news publication. When you scratch a liberal a fascist bleeds. They were wrong about Vietnam and they are wrong about this. Didn't Reagan stop making education free after those protests? Look at what that did for America. People are trapped in student loans, universities operating like businesses, the disappearance of the middle class. All of it is just to suppress working-class people with a conscious. As we begin to see American capitalism decay into fascism, we now see all these liberal news publications begin their rightward shift into defending Capital no matter what horrific atrocities they continue to perpetuate in the world. Remember Biden said Israel is the greatest 3 billion dollar investment America has ever made. "Were there not an Israel, the United States of America
would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests."
I haven't spent much time in elite circles, but some friends of friends were raised in wealthy private Catholic schools and elite colleges with family trips all around the world, etc.
I've noticed they dress really weird (like ankle-length pioneer woman skirts and black combat boots) and strange haircuts, they shave off their eyebrows. It's like they know they're privileged and the world is their oyster, so they actively do things to make themselves less attractive. And I'm only 30 and they're like 25 so I'm not a boomer that just doesn't understand today's fashion. I even heard one of them claim to be bisexual, but that they'd never have sex with someone of the same sex. What?! I know they spend lots of time in therapy as well. And I wonder if it has to do with guilt of believing certain things about privilege, yet not being willing to give up their positions of privilege. They're confessing in order to relieve themselves of their guilt (should've just stayed Catholic). But in the same breath that they denounce privilege, they'll brag about their high-paying jobs at Fortune 500 companies. Money is one hell of a drug!
I've noticed that particularly in my social circle. Any attempt to inject a fresh voice into the conversation, or new ideas that might be outside the bounds of bog standard progressivism, is seem as anathema - even if the person posting is not endorsing or agreeing with thr author. I've come to believe that intellectual honesty in America is nearly impossible, because there is no unified culture in the way most countries have one. Political correctness is a necessary evil to maintain an illusion of social harmony, even if the results are a continuation or even accentuation of existing inequalities. That is the religion of the elite overproduced: compete to the death for status, while conveniently ignoring that your status is the main impediment to any possibility of true egalitarianism.
Another factor to throw into the mix is that 100 years ago the elite universities themselves lacked diversity, both in student body, faculty, and content - with zero awareness that maybe that was a problem. Not only are there scholarships now so that poor kids gain access to what they teach there, but you're getting the mixing of class, race, gender, etc there that is uncomfortably more recent than we care to acknowledge. You see which groups have what and their attitudes and extensive knowledge of history and you're in a place with tons of international students. Experience really defies what the news tells you to think and so it makes sense that these kids want to change the narrative based on the very different exposure they're getting on these campuses.
I read a comment on the Easily Distracted blog that seems applicable here:
“Friends don’t let friends read David Brooks.”
Give David a bottle of overpriced bourbon and a seat next to Joe Rogan on Elon’s spaceship to Mars. We would all be better off.
I know it's a joke, but I disagree. I think David Brooks is very smart and often misguided, which provides an important exercise for me: to think through why I disagree with someone whose intelligence I respect. We should all do more of this, IMHO.
Chris, First of all, I appreciate you and enjoy listening to many of your conversations with the incredible humans you connect with. I had a whole screed about David Brooks but I think this is a “we will have to agree to disagree” moment. IMHO, David has proven over and over that he doesn’t deserve the consideration he continues to be given.
Again, thanks for the work.
fOR DECADES i HAVE TOLD STUDENTS TURNED DOWN BY ELITE SCHOOLS THAT THIS MAY HAVE BEEN A BLESSING IN DISGUISE. THIS ARTICLE UNDERSCORES MY OPINION.
My notes on the david brook's article:
educated-class progressivism - is just liberal progressivism
working-class progressivism - is about class consciousness, changing who owns the means of production.
“This also explains, I think, the leftward drift of the haute bourgeoisie. As the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi puts it in his forthcoming book, “We Have Never Been Woke”: “After 2011, there were dramatic changes in how highly educated white liberals answered questions related to race and ethnicity. These shifts were not matched among non-liberal or non-Democrat whites, nor among nonwhites of any political or ideological persuasion. By 2020, highly educated white liberals tended to provide more ‘woke’ responses to racial questions than the average Black or Hispanic person.”
^This paragraph is what needs to be focused on. Liberal progressivism does everything in its power to avoid talking about class. The socialist class analysis is what will wake people up to the unjust economic structure of our society. They(liberals) will discuss race, trans rights, pronouns, birth control, more black CEOS, JK Rolling and a variety of niche issues (that I don’t deny are important but not as important as the class issue) but nothing that will radically change who owns the means of production or society for the betterment of all or nothing that will threaten the power of the capitalist class.
“A lot of us in the center left or the center right don’t want to live amid this much conformity.”
^this statement is hilarious to me when what is centrism but not wanting to see any kind of radical change happen in society. Centrism is just conforming to the status quo.
“stretching back to W.E.B. Du Bois — who argue that white liberals use social justice issues to build status and make themselves feel good while ultimately offering up “little more than symbolic gestures and platitudes to redress the material harms they decry (and often exacerbate).”
^fully agree with this but if you have a pathetic left wing movement like you do in the states than even just bringing attention to an issue can get the ball rolling in hearts and minds of people who are not left-wing. So the protests at universities are good they must be working if you have those in power willing to deploy police to stop them. Those in power are willing to ban Tiktok cause thats where the young are learning about the Gaza. So those protests are effective. I’m not sure who it was who said it( I think it was the ADL leader) but the ideological war does matter. It matters because you won’t be able to deploy US troops in a conflict if the soldiers genuiely think they are bad guys or fighting a senseless war. Soldiers have refused to fight before and will desert if they think the fighting is stupid.
“Al-Gharbi notes that Black people made most of their progress between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, before the rise of the educated class in the late 1960s, and that the educated class may have derailed that progress. He notes that gaps in wealth and homeownership between white and Black Americans have grown larger since 1968.”
^ronald reagan’s neoliberalism is more responsible for this than the so-called educated class. He stripped the american government of all its social programs and stopped making education free because of the vietnam war protests.
“Educated class” it feels like he’s just repurposing marxist analysis for his own liberal purposes.
I find this article highly flawed. I don't have time to go through it point-by-point but here's a question. Let's say, through no fault of your own, you were born into white privilege . But you see the injustices in the world and how the capitalistic system in our country perpetuates those privileges. You recognize that you are the beneficiary of those systems yet you disagree with them. You want them dismantled even if it means you and your children will lead a middle class life and not an upper class life like you grew up in. You've thought this through and it is the world you want. You got into an elite university but instead of majoring in finance you decided to get a degree in English Lit and after graduating, travel the world (because you discovered the Tangentially Speaking podcast). While at elite institution, since you are a good writer you get on the staff of the school newspaper. You write editorials advocating for changes in our systems that will help the disadvantaged. You decry the wealth disparities and advocate for changes in tax laws, regulations, and even legacy admissions to your school. You join protests to support marginalized people around the world. Is this hypothetical young person in the wrong here? Realistically, what would Brooks have them do? Do you really believe that most of these young people are insincere and are just virtue signaling? Some are for sure, but the injustices in our system are so obvious that I think most of them (who are highly educated and understand true history) are authentic.
My guess is the poorer kids who go to state schools are grateful that these privileged elites are protesting on their behalf. After all, the privileged have protection from consequences that they do not have.
Brooks concludes, "The lesson for those of us in the educated class is to seriously reform the system we have created or be prepared to be run over." I believe this is what most of these privileged college elites are trying to do. I'm old. This same sort of criticism was leveled against college kids in the '60s who protested the Vietnam War. I thought they were wrong then but it was I who was wrong.
I think you make good points, and I'm not sure how Brooks would respond to them, but I suspect he'd point out that he isn't really focusing on whether those people are right or wrong (I think it's clear that he thinks they're basically right in terms of what they're protesting, but maybe overdoing it in terms of how they're protesting). I read his piece as an attempt to explain the seemingly strange vehemence with which Harvard students DEMAND justice for Palestine. The psychological double-bind of believing in something that your very existence obstructs is an interesting one that doesn't get as much attention as it deserves, I think. Perhaps it's the same source of passionate denunciations of homosexuality by closeted homosexuals? They think it's very, very wrong, but something inside them knows that it's a big part of their identity.
So in your examples, I'd guess Brooks would say the protests make sense, but the shrieking certainty doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Good points. I suspect some of what Brooks hypothesizes is going on but regarding the finding that elite university student newspapers have become 2 and a half times more progressive since 2001 - what's happened since then that might alarm young people? For starters, 20+ years of worsening climate news with almost no action, the war in Iraq with its black sites and new American policy of torture, the housing crisis that enriched the already rich and devastated the middle class (and for which no one went to jail for clearly criminal activity), the continued national movement rightward (which dwarfs any leftward movement), the election of Donald Trump, more tax cuts for the rich, the assault on democracy (and the Capitol), a corrupt Supreme Court and now - in their view - American bombs raining down on Palestinian women and children. I think these developments are the reason for the vehemence of the protests and student newspaper opinion pieces. In my view, the students are doing what we all should be doing. Under the circumstances, "shrieking" makes some sense to me. It would be interesting to poll the editors of these newspapers 10 years from now and see how many regret what they wrote or said. My guess is not many. Maybe someone could go back to 2001 and ask the editors from then if they wish they had written more forceful editorials.
Don't get me wrong, this is a provocative column worth discussing. I appreciate you posting it.
I'm with you. Ofc the New York Times would criticize kids protesting genocide. Typical liberal corporate news publication. When you scratch a liberal a fascist bleeds. They were wrong about Vietnam and they are wrong about this. Didn't Reagan stop making education free after those protests? Look at what that did for America. People are trapped in student loans, universities operating like businesses, the disappearance of the middle class. All of it is just to suppress working-class people with a conscious. As we begin to see American capitalism decay into fascism, we now see all these liberal news publications begin their rightward shift into defending Capital no matter what horrific atrocities they continue to perpetuate in the world. Remember Biden said Israel is the greatest 3 billion dollar investment America has ever made. "Were there not an Israel, the United States of America
would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests."
https://youtu.be/86Nrv5izaTs?si=kGq0DefZVvRs0EXu
What interest are those? The interest of profit berfore everything else, before humanity, nature, the entire world.
Just a reminder of how coporate news will support fascists where ever they appear.
This is Historian Micahel Parenti from his book Blackshirts and Reds.
Kudos for Adolph and Benito
Italian fascism and German Nazism had their admirers within the
U.S. business community and the corporate-owned press. Bankers,
publishers, and industrialists, including the likes of Henry Ford,
traveled to Rome and Berlin to pay homage, receive medals, and
strike profitable deals. Many did their utmost to advance the Nazi
war effort, sharing military-industrial secrets and engaging in secret
transactions with the Nazi government, even after the United States
entered the war. During the 1920s and early 1930s, major publications
like Fortune, the Wallstreet Journal Saturday Evening Post, New
York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor hailed
Mussolini as the man who rescued Italy from anarchy and radicalism.
They spun rhapsodic fantasies of a resurrected Italy where
poverty and exploitation had suddenly disappeared, where Reds had
been vanquished, harmony reigned, and Blackshirts protected a
"new democracy."
The Italian-language press in the United States eagerly joined the
chorus. The two most influential newspapers, Vltalia of San
Francisco, financed largely by A.R Giannini s Bank of America, and
Il Progresso of New York, owned by multimillionaire Generoso Pope,
looked favorably on the fascist regime and suggested that the United
States could benefit from a similar social order.
https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/
I haven't spent much time in elite circles, but some friends of friends were raised in wealthy private Catholic schools and elite colleges with family trips all around the world, etc.
I've noticed they dress really weird (like ankle-length pioneer woman skirts and black combat boots) and strange haircuts, they shave off their eyebrows. It's like they know they're privileged and the world is their oyster, so they actively do things to make themselves less attractive. And I'm only 30 and they're like 25 so I'm not a boomer that just doesn't understand today's fashion. I even heard one of them claim to be bisexual, but that they'd never have sex with someone of the same sex. What?! I know they spend lots of time in therapy as well. And I wonder if it has to do with guilt of believing certain things about privilege, yet not being willing to give up their positions of privilege. They're confessing in order to relieve themselves of their guilt (should've just stayed Catholic). But in the same breath that they denounce privilege, they'll brag about their high-paying jobs at Fortune 500 companies. Money is one hell of a drug!
I've noticed that particularly in my social circle. Any attempt to inject a fresh voice into the conversation, or new ideas that might be outside the bounds of bog standard progressivism, is seem as anathema - even if the person posting is not endorsing or agreeing with thr author. I've come to believe that intellectual honesty in America is nearly impossible, because there is no unified culture in the way most countries have one. Political correctness is a necessary evil to maintain an illusion of social harmony, even if the results are a continuation or even accentuation of existing inequalities. That is the religion of the elite overproduced: compete to the death for status, while conveniently ignoring that your status is the main impediment to any possibility of true egalitarianism.
Another factor to throw into the mix is that 100 years ago the elite universities themselves lacked diversity, both in student body, faculty, and content - with zero awareness that maybe that was a problem. Not only are there scholarships now so that poor kids gain access to what they teach there, but you're getting the mixing of class, race, gender, etc there that is uncomfortably more recent than we care to acknowledge. You see which groups have what and their attitudes and extensive knowledge of history and you're in a place with tons of international students. Experience really defies what the news tells you to think and so it makes sense that these kids want to change the narrative based on the very different exposure they're getting on these campuses.