New York Times columnist David Brooks, known for his anti-Trump stance, surprised political commentators on Twitter when he acknowledged that he and the so-called “elite” have employed self-serving tactics to preserve their power and a sense of moral superiority over the Trump supporters they abhor.
“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,” Brooks wrote in the column, which was published on Wednesday.
“Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out,” he said of the liberal elitists in the country. He went on to detail how the “educated class” imagine themselves as the “forces of progress and enlightenment” in order to assuage their own egos, going on to portray them as imminently enlightened while portraying supporters of the former president as little more than fools and bigots.
Brooks noted that major newsrooms once were once filled with working-class people, but Ivy League and other elite-level college graduates have increasingly dominated them.
“When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession,” he wrote.
He went on to note that liberal elitists “also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on.”
The “educated class'” dominance, he said, also extends to politics on a national level: “Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves.”
“We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation,” he noted.
Brooks went on to say that liberal elitists also use buzz-worthy language and fabricated words like “problematic,” “cisgender,” and Latinx” — all of which alienate less-educated people and further divide the country.
Brooks, despite being a fierce opponent of Trump and advocating for his imprisonment, acknowledged that it is understandable why working-class Americans would gravitate towards a candidate like him, who has waged a war against the self-serving establishment. He also described Trump as a “monster,” and claimed that the elites had accurately recognized him as such.
“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 wrote.
In response, several elitists blasted Brooks for his honesty. But others praised him.
“Surveying modern America. One does not get the impression of elite institutions ruthlessly focused on competence and bottom-line outcomes. Not sure what David Brooks is smoking,” Economic Progress senior fellow Russ Greene tweeted, according to Fox News.
“I give David Brooks a lot of credit here. There is self-awareness here, and a willingness to admit that perhaps his position in life wasn’t entirely due to his talent and intellect. He’s so close,” longtime radio journalist Celeste Headlee said.
“Holy cow this David Brooks column is a barn-burner!” National Pulse junior editor Will Upton wrote on the platform. “I mean… he’s finally figured it out!”
He also shared screenshots of Brooks’ claims that “Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in” the eyes of the liberal elite “on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.”
