Broken Opinion: It's All the Fault of Coastal Elites, Like You and Me!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
with Washington Correspondent Tess Harding

Having bored everyone last week with an endless interview with Spy Political Editor David Bloviator, we were really hoping to avoid bloviators named David this week.

But then we came across this Tweet [You mean X – Copy Ed][F*** that – Ed.]:

There are two types of Times columnists, the spectacularly ignorant and the actively malicious.

I'm not sure what the second type is. https://t.co/4rNDKHCBx1

— Edward (@Fornbirkibeinn) August 5, 2023

It turns out that Mr. Edward was referring not to the distinguished editorial page of The New York Times, but to the pages of another Rupert Murdoch disinformation volcano, doing business as The Times of London.

But the combination of spectacular ignorance and active malice so perfectly describes a half dozen of New York Times op-ed columnists that we couldn't let it pass.  The toxic stew is the favorite recipe of Pamela Pill, Bretbug, Monsignor Douthat, National Review David, and Kevin Dowd's sister Maureen, among others.

Today we turn to the other: that great public intellectual and connoisseur of fine Italian meats, Moral Mountain David Brooks. 

His topic for yesterday: who's to blame for the deep and wide loyal support of a thrice-indicted and twice-impeached corrupt subversive bigoted Russian stooge?

The question actually contains the correct answer, but that didn't stop our deep-thinking no-reporting columnist from arriving at the wrong answer.

His answer was, wait for it, 

Keep waiting.

Lie down.  Take an edible.

You are!

That's right: if you're the kind of person who shells out $1800 a year to read this codswallop every day, you're a coastal cultural elitist who has driven average Americans into the tiny orange hands of ex-President U Bum. 

Trump? it's all your fault!

Just to give you a flavor of what passes for his argument, we'll quote this much (and come back to it later when we deconstruct the sources of this drivel):

I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.

This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

We remember the history a little differently, which is to say correctly.  More on that later.  But let's just follow his causal chain to the last bite of the ciabatta sub:

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.

Speaking of “epistemic,” we'll let our friend Greg Sargent point out that the ol' Perfessor's theory is, um, falsified by those pesky facts:  (His whole thread is well worth your time, unlike Brooks's crapcan column.)

In 2020, 53% of Biden voters didn’t have a college degree, vs. 46% who did, per Pew. Yes, that's more lopsided for Trump (31-70). But the Dem anti-Trump coalition has a lot of the “less educated class” in it.

So the facts don't support the ol' Perfessor's claim that Biden v. Trump is a battle between those nasty cultural elites (like us!) and the long-suffering working class.

In fact, the real facts suggest a contrary reading of who supports ex-Pres. Tiny Toadstool and why:

So it's not that highly-educated people like Biden and everyone else likes Trump. You see that split only among white voters.  Among Black voters, amazingly enough there isn't a fear of cultural elitism of the sort that desegregated the Boston Public Schools.  And by the way almost half of those white elitists voted for...a corrupt Russian-owned sex offender.

Nowhere in his column does Soprassata Dave touch on these amazing facts, probably because they fatally undercut his bullsh*t thesis.

In fact, once you start pulling on this thread, everything unravels.  As noted, his examples of cultural elitism are also rooted in white racism.  It wasn't “authorities” that ordered the Boston Public Schools desegregated because they had been illegally and intentionally segregated by race; it was federal judge Arthur Garrity, carrying out his duty to apply Brown v. Board of Education.  And Wellesley wasn't included in the plan because no one argued that the lack of Black students in ritzy suburbs (other than the ones that districts like Wellesley took in under the voluntary METCO program) had been caused by illegal de jure segregation.

And as for the old whine about how rich college educated liberals managed to dodge the draft (while trying to end the war for everyone), it doesn't explain why uneducated whites continue to support a coward who openly boasts of dodging the draft thanks to his rich daddy.

Brooks's stories do have an origin: they are the same toxic fictions peddled by white supremacists and other divisive hatemongers like Dick Nixon and George Wallace.  We're old enough to remember Nixon's war on elite “nattering nabobs of negativism” who dared to attempt extricating those poorer Americans from the pointless charnel house of Vietnam and got Medicare for everyone over 65 (which proved to have zero electoral upside in 1966).  And we're old enough to remember how bigots blamed their centuries-old bigotry on Blacks and liberals, except back then it was called “white backlash.”

And speaking of those arrogant elites, generations of Southern segregationists cloaked their racism in supposed populism. Then as now The New York Times fell for it.  Here's a 1972 sample describing the enduring appeal of all-time champion white racist George Wallace:

 

They're not racists – they're just letting off steam, they're just responding with understandable frustration to those nasty bra-burning coastal elites, they're just livin' in a small town, they're f***-all.  For over 60 years, white racists and their defenders have tried to get us to blame someone else for their unrelenting and virulent violent racism.  We suspect that Brooks knows this, but like a half century of apologists for the Republican pro-racist “Southern Strategy,” he knows that the truth will sink his not yet lost cause.

Before we go, we can't resist deflating one last Brooksean stupidity balloon:

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” “Latinx” and “intersectional” is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

It's remarkable that he can pack so much wrong in one short paragraph.  Who is excluded by using non-pejorative terms to describe sexual identity, other than bigots?  “Latinx” gets a big response from reactionaries like Brooks, but if the reason that white people support Trump is because they prefer “Latino” to “Latinx,” then they're a lot more fragile than anyone thought.

And who is being fired for not using newly minted words? If people are being fired for how they describe others, it's because the words they are using have a long and terrible history in this country. Of course, our expert on Italian cured meats and everything else cites no examples of such injustices, because, as we once said about former Chicago Tribune publisher Col. R.R. McCormick, “he cites no authority, being it.”