Hating Trump

As is normal, yesterday’s David Brooks column is an embarrassment. Presumably, Brooks is talking his book. Speaking for the educated elite that despises Donald Trump he pretends to explain their irrational hatred. 

Throughout his column, he divides the world into uneducated rubes who support Trump and overeducated elites who know that Trump is guilty.

The trial has not yet begun in Washington, D. C., but Brooks and his ilk already know the outcome.

Brooks ignores the possibility that Trump might not be guilty of the charges that Jack Smith brought. And he does not consider that intelligent people might feel some empathy for a man who is, as Shakespeare put it, “more sinned against than sinning.”

Besides, whiners like Brooks, people who wallow in their superior capacity for empathy, have largely failed to notice that many people feel empathy for a man who has been constantly under political and judicial attack. The anti-Trump rhetoric has been so unhinged that any sensible individual will feel empathy for their target.

As usually happens, we expect something simple minded from Brooks, and in that we are not disappointed. Even so if his first observation rings true.

During the Vietnam War, the nation was divided in two. There was the group that fought the war and the group that received deferments. As it happens, Brooks ignored the simple fact that those who did not fight often signed up to diminish, demean and defame those who did fight.

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.

It must have been a slow day, because Brooks then takes out after the notion of meritocracy. Apparently, the nation does not have fair competition. It allows the children of the rich to gain advantages that the children of the middle class and the poor are not allowed.

In principle, this is gibberish. From the time they were instituted in China a millennium ago, standardized tests have been designed to allow everyone a fair chance at success and advancement. 

In truth, the children who do best on these tests are of Asian ethnicity. Many of them are not rich and do not have parents who went to Ivy League schools. The same applies to the groups that are the most successful in America.

Of course, Brooks ignores reality here:

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. 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….

Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

And Brooks ignores the role of affirmative action and diversity programs. More than a few people owe their careers to the movement against meritocracy.

Brooks is happy to belong to an intellectual elite, the kind of people who work at the New York Times and other elite media organizations. But, we must notice, the tech staff in Silicon Valley most often was educated in China. Those companies are kept afloat by people who are in the country on immigrant visas. Again, Brooks ignores reality:

Over the last decades, we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. 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. Only 0.8 percent of college students graduate from the super-elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.

Of course, journalism is not indicative of much of anything. Those who undertake careers in it are most likely the products of the indoctrination mills that are considered to be America’s best universities. They could not do math and science but had to settle for Humanities and Social Science degrees.

So, the problems are considerably more complex than an elite intellectual like David Brooks thinks.

One reason why journalists and academics today tend to suffer from groupthink is that they did not gain their positions by merit, and that, even if they did, they did not learn much of anything in America’s greatest academic institutions.

They are so insecure about their positions and their credentials that they adopt coded language that shows them to be members of an elite group. They are horrified that people will figure out that they are not as smart as they think they are. Oh, and they maintain their position by having the right feelings about certain people. Hating Trump is one of the passwords to enter their world.