Comments on David Brooks’ “The Deep Source of Trump’s Appeal”

Comments on an excerpt from  David Brooks in The New York Times: based on James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis. My comments in bold.

In public discourse, identity politics is more associated with the left. Progressivism used to be oriented around how to make capitalism just; but now in its upper-middle-class form, it’s oriented around proper esteem for and inclusion of different identity groups.

But as Hunter notes, Donald Trump practices identity politics just as much as any progressive. He tells the story of how small-town, less-educated Christians are being oppressed by elites [i.e., our elite that is substantially made up of people of Brooks’s ethnic group]. He alone is their retribution. That story resonates with a lot of people [and is basically true; and it has been true for a long time.].

[As Ben Stein wrote nearly 50 years ago:

The typical Hollywood writer . . . is of an ethnic background from a large Eastern city—usually from Brooklyn [i.e., they have a Jewish background]. He grew up being taught that people in small towns hated him, were different from him, and were out to get him [i.e., small town people are anti-Semites]. As a result, when he gets the chance, he attacks the small town on television or the movies. . . .

       The television shows and movies are not telling it “like it is”; instead they are giving us the point of view of a small and extremely powerful section of the American intellectual community—those who write for the mass visual media. . . . What is happening, as a consequence, is something unusual and remarkable. A national culture is making war upon a way of life that is still powerfully attractive and widely practiced in the same country. . . . Feelings of affection for small towns run deep in America, and small-town life is treasured by millions of people. But in the mass culture of the country, a hatred for the small town is spewed out on television screens and movie screens every day. . . . Television and the movies are America’s folk culture, and they have nothing but contempt for the way of life of a very large part of the folk. . . . People are told that their culture is, at its root, sick, violent, and depraved, and this message gives them little confidence in the future of that culture. It also leads them to feel ashamed of their country and to believe that if their society is in decline, it deserves to be. (Stein 1976, 22)

It’s still the case today.]

In the 1950s, Billy Graham assumed that his faith was central to American life. By the 2020s his son Franklin considered himself a warrior under siege in an anti-Christian culture.

The problem with this form of all-explaining identity politics is that it undermines democracy. If others are evil and out to get us, then persuasion is for suckers. If our beliefs are defined by our identities and not individual reason and personal experience, then different Americans are living in different universes and there is no point in trying to engage in deliberative democracy [agreed]. You just have to crush them. You have to grab power and control of the institutions and shove your answers down everybody else’s throats. [Exactly. And the left is far ahead in creating an authoritarian culture of the left.]

In this climate, Hunter argues, “the authoritarian impulse becomes impossible to restrain.” Authoritarianism imposes a social vision by force. If you can’t have social solidarity organically from the ground up, then you can impose it from top down using the power of the state. This is the menace of Trumpism [but not the left?? Outrageous]. If you read my recent interview with Steve Bannon, you’ll see that he talks like a character straight out of Hunter’s book. [The Bannon interview deserves separate treatment which I have been putting off. The main message is that Bannon is a true warrior willing to incur great personal sacrifice in pursuing his conservative beliefs—beliefs that are anathema to Brooks and his ilk.]

Democrats are not immune to this way of thinking. In a 2019 survey Democrats were more likely than Republicans to admit to occasionally thinking that we’d be better off as a country “if large numbers of the opposing party in the public today just died.” Democrats were more likely than Republicans to believe that their opponents were “evil” and “un-American.” [ Right. Democrats are far more likely to have authoritarian impulses and always have. Think Bolshevism which was warmly greeted by a generation of Jewish intellectuals and only abandoned when Soviet communism began to lessen Jewish power. As Norman Podhoretz noted, Jews remain the financial backbone of the left and there is no reason whatever to think that they have changed in any fundamental way. Whatever is good for the Jews.]

But in this world, in which politics is seen as a form of total war, Biden looks obsolete. In a nihilistic pseudo-authoritarian world, he’s still one of those old-fashioned liberals who reveres the Constitution and his Catholicism. [Is that a joke?? Brooks just showed that Democrats (and certainly the Biden administration) are far more likely to have authoritarian attitudes like the Biden administration’s clamping down on free speech (a major project of the ADL and hence by inference the mainstream Jewish community) and the Biden administration has openly flouted laws on immigration (aimed  at increasing Democrat votes) and the SCOTUS ruling on student loans in order to bribe the debtors to vote Democrat. And Democrats  oppose the GOP-initiated law that would attempt to ensure that only citizens can vote. Laws and honest voting are for suckers; power at all costs because “we’re the good guys.” And it’s obvious Biden is a figurehead in an administration being run by others. You can’t really blame him for anything.] The ideals that animate him and that he uses to give poetry and lift to his speeches [written by his staff] fail to inspire millions of American voters [at least partly because they are delivered by a gaffe-prone poster boy for the impairments that go along with senility whose only ability is to sometimes read a teleprompter without screwing it up]. A plurality of voters believe that Biden’s age is a bigger problem than Trump’s authoritarianism because they just don’t see the latter as that big a problem.

The core question in Hunter’s book is: Can you have an Enlightenment political system atop a post-Enlightenment culture? I’d say the answer to that question is: Over the long term, no.

The task, then, is to build a new cultural consensus that is democratic but also morally coherent. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this work of cultural repair will be done by religious progressives, by a new generation of leaders who will build a modern social gospel around love of neighbor and hospitality for the marginalized [as they happily commit racial suicide and enter into an era of ever-increasing marginalization and victimization of Whites—an outcome that absolutely resonates with Brooks].