And the data supporting this narrative is weak at best. Vance went from obscure venture capitalist to US senator entirely because he could sell a version of this narrative in his book Hillbilly Elegy (recently made into a Ron Howard movie starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close).īut the popularity of a narrative among the elite does not determine its truth or falsity evidence does. So have leading Democrats and many writers at America’s top journalistic outlets, including some of Brooks’s New York Times colleagues. The guy who runs the annual global elite confab at Davos - Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum - has embraced them. “We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable,” Brooks writes.īrooks’s column has been widely celebrated by American elites since its publication, reflecting the fact that - contrary to Brooks’s depiction - economic explanations for right-wing populism’s rise have long been the preferred theory of the elite. The elite’s unwillingness to face this hard truth, Brooks argues, is both a failure of introspection and a social disaster in the making. In its place, Brooks urges his readers “to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys.” In this counterstory, Trump represents a boiling up of decades of working-class frustration with an economic system rigged in favor of those with college degrees. This explanation has some truth, he concedes, but is “also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.”

In a piece titled “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?”, Brooks criticizes those that would explain Trump’s persistent political support as a product of racism and anxious attachment to hierarchy. The latest example of this phenomenon is David Brooks’s new column in the New York Times. So we get efforts to reject the evidence, often relying on long-debunked alternative arguments. It’s a subject that has been explored extensively, with the best evidence converging on the same general story: Trump is the avatar of a kind of resentful reactionary politics, one uncomfortable with a changing America, that defines the worldview of a plurality (if not a majority) of the GOP faithful.īut this answer offers few easy solutions and makes some people uncomfortable, as it feels a bit too much like a judgment of Trump supporters.

The question of why Donald Trump manages to maintain such a grip on the Republican base, to the point where he can remain a nationally viable candidate despite all of his misdeeds and legal woes, is one of the most important issues in American politics.

Its not about you david brooks appeal