OUT ON A LIMB: Yes, David Brooks, You Are the “Bad Guys.”
Dear Mr. Brooks,
Your column might be the best thing written in the New York Times in the past seven years. You’ve undoubtedly been subjected to a fair amount of abuse for it. You should probably never have written it if the comments are any indication. But those are people in the bubble. They don’t represent either the majority or the future. They think they do, but they don’t.
Your question, “Are we the bad guys”? The answer is yes. You are the bad guys. You have systematically dehumanized half the country because they dared to want to be represented by someone you don’t like. You have gone along with a warped distortion of who Donald Trump actually is, and you have perpetuated that lie to your own detriment.
Oh, it’s much worse than that, Mr. Brooks. Are you sitting down? This is the moment just before the aristocracy you write so eloquently about comes crashing down around you. You might say you have just spotted the iceberg on the horizon. The water is too still. The ship is moving too fast. It can’t be turned around in time. The ship is made of iron, and it will sink.
Like so many times before, an aristocratic minority can only stave off its ultimate collapse at the hands of the discontented majority for so long. Just look around at the abandoned mansions of the Gilded Age, a world that once was. Or take a trip to France and look at the chateaus in the countryside, or you might even look around in the American South at the plantations and high society before it was all Gone with the Wind.
I’m not necessarily saying the red states are going to drag America back in time – that’s your narrative and the false opinion of the ruling class. This is about a new America waiting to be born once the establishment elite gets out of the way.
As Steve Hayward asks at Power Line: Why Are the “Baddies” So Bad?
David proves unable to break from his class. The people in his class are vicious and evil. Full stop. We can see already a critical mass of elitists who will censor and even enforce lockdowns by force if the law didn’t stand in their way even a little bit. Elite institutions are a large part of the cause of this; they deserve to be destroyed right down to their foundations. The inherent presumption of “progressivism” is that their “expertise,” based on infallible “science,” can guide us to a better future. As Oakeshott warned, “the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.” Good luck getting the Harvard faculty—or the New York Times editorial page—to ponder this problem for a nanosecond. This is why the “baddies” are so bad (hat tip to Mitchell & Webb below). Until that presumption is overturned, nothing will meaningfully change. Does Harvard realize that a majority of the nation would celebrate if the entire campus burned to the ground?
Exit quote: