WELL, DAVID BROOKS. David Brooks Reproaches Elites, Recycles Cliches About the People.
To grasp the left’s rage and the right’s embitterment, it is useful to keep in mind a major asymmetry that marks the nation’s long-standing culture wars: The right tends to know the left better than the left knows the right.
Notwithstanding the occasional risible protestation, progressives dominate the mainstream media, the entertainment industry, Silicon Valley, the K-12 education establishment, and the universities. This means that progressive ideas, progressive sentiments, and progressive tastes pervade the culture. Denizens of red America need only turn on the TV, watch Hollywood movies, listen to popular music, follow major league sports, or send their kids to public schools and most any college or university in the country to encounter progressives’ flattering self-portraits and their airbrushed depictions of the progressive spirit in action. In contrast, residents of blue America generally only know of red America through the condescending lens of progressive reporting, opining, and imagining. . . .
Brooks deserves considerable credit for refining his analysis of blue America. In “How the Bobos Broke America,” posted online at The Atlantic earlier this month, he parted company with the elite media’s standard view that the country’s polarized politics is rooted primarily in red America’s implacable racism, sexism, and nativism. Rather, he explained, blue America’s conquest of the commanding heights of culture and the contempt it rains down on red America below have destabilized the nation. . . .
Despite these admirable insights into where the progressive elites — and his analysis of progressive elites — went astray, Brooks remains attached to progressives’ soothing sense of moral superiority. Although he provides no evidence, he sees “a lot of truth” in the belief that the people’s inveterate racism and aversion to change exacerbate their reaction to elite arrogance and overreach. Given his apprecation of his flawed track record over the last two decades — and his empirically backed observation that progressive elites have become among the most parochial and politically intolerant of Americans — one might have expected Brooks to examine the partisan interests served by casually accusing the non-elites of clinging to their racism.
There’s no one more racist than a progressive wokie.