On Tuesday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Andrew Klavan Show,&#8221; the host discusses an absurd article from The New York Times, a &#8220;former newspaper,&#8221; claiming the GOP will soon face an apocalypse.
On the West Side of Manhattan &#8212; or as New Yorkers call it, the edge of the known world &#8212; there is a skyscraper that houses The New York Times, a former newspaper, and on the pages of that newspaper is an op-ed section that we like to call knucklehead row.
On that row of knuckleheads there writes a man named David Brooks, who today predicted the coming GOP apocalypse. Brooks notes that a 2002 book predicted the end of the Republicans but, in fact, that didn&#8217;t happen because older white voters and assimilated Hispanics swung to the right. That made people think twice about predicting the end of Republicans &#8212; but not our man Brooks, no sir. Brooks says this time the Republican Party is really doomed because millennials hate us.
He says, &#8220;Today&#8217;s generation gap is based on concrete lived experience that is never going to go away. Unlike the Silent Generation and the Boomers, Millennials and Gen-Z voters live with a difference every single day. Only 16% of the Silent Generation is a minority, but 44% of the Millennial generation is. If you are a millennial in California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, or New Jersey, ethnic minorities make up more than half of your age cohort. In just over two decades, America will be a majority-minority country. Young voters approve of these trends.&#8221;
You see folks, what makes the knuckleheads on knucklehead row, knuckleheads is that they never talk to anyone but other knuckleheads. Knucklehead confers with knucklehead confirming their knuckleheaded knuckleheadedness until the whole world seems to them as knuckleheaded as themselves. Brooks thinks that we Republicans who are conservatives are sitting around wondering how we can hold off the great tide of minority majorities, and since everyone they know agrees that that&#8217;s what Republicans think, they figure it must be true. They are, in short, knuckleheads. No one gives a rat&#8217;s ass about diversity.
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No one cares what color people are. No one cares about your lived experience with people of different colors. What we care about is that the values that made this country great continue to guide the changes the time, demographics, and technology are bound to bring. No one cares if you&#8217;re brown or yellow or gay or anything else. We just care that you&#8217;re educated enough, responsible enough, and self-reliant enough to be free yourself and not to endanger our freedom. Also, we want to make observations and jokes about you without getting fired or thrown off Twitter.
In short, we on the right don&#8217;t care what color you are. As long as you&#8217;re colored American. We conservatives are the people who brought you the end of the Cold War, the rollback of the &#8217;70s and &#8217;80s crime wave, the prosperity of the &#8217;80s through &#8217;90s, the return to judicial constitutionalism, a welfare reform that really worked until Obama destroyed it, and the surge that ended the Iraq War. You, leftists, are the folks who brought us crime, homelessness, widespread sexual malfeasance, disease, renewed racial animosity, the appeasement of jihadism, and the death of American education.
Maybe if you knuckleheads stop talking to one another and started talking to us, you could stop obsessing over people&#8217;s colors and micro-aggressions and other baloney and help us solve today&#8217;s problems as we did the problems of the past while you were busy screwing stuff up in the name of diversity.
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KLAVAN: David Brooks Is Wrong About The GOP Apocalypse

Andrew Klavan

Barack Obama

Conservatism

David Brooks

Democratic Party

Donald Trump

New York Times

Trump Administration

Liberal New York Times columnist David Brooks slammed the Democratic Party during an interview on &#8220;PBS NewsHour&#8221; on Friday, saying that the party is to the left of Marxist Che Guevara.
&#8220;Where do you see the Democratic field sort of shaking out in that way?&#8221; host Judy Woodruff asked. &#8220;And does it &#8212; I mean, is it shaking in a direction that helps the party, or not?&#8221;
&#8220;It&#8217;s somewhere to the left of Che Guevara,&#8221; Brooks responded.
Brooks then tore into socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez&#8217;s &#8220;Green New Deal,&#8221; saying that Democrats&#8217; embrace of far-left policies is destroying their party.
&#8220;As Donald Trump makes it extremely hard to think about supporting somebody like that, I find the Democrats have done an outstanding job of making it hard for a lot of moderates to support anything,&#8221; Brooks <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2019/02/17/pbs-david-brooks-warns-dems-somewhere-left-che-guevara">said</a>. &#8220;Personally, the idea that I could ever support a candidate who was in support of the Green New Deal, that will never happen. That could never happen.&#8221;
&#8220;The Green New Deal concentrates power in the hands of the Washington elite in a way nothing has done since World War II,&#8221; Brooks continued. &#8220;It would literally have Washington planners taking over the energy business, taking over the transportation business, so no planes are possible or necessary, taking over health care.&#8221;
&#8220;It really is a centralization of power in a way we haven&#8217;t seen and doesn&#8217;t exist in Scandinavia,&#8221; Brooks added. &#8220;It used to be Democrats wanted to shift the tax code, shift the regulations in order to steer the market in a more humane direction, and I get that. And that &#8212; being that kind of Democrat, you would be for a carbon tax in order to address global warming. This is not that.&#8221;
Brooks concluded: &#8220;This is simply the government taking control of large swaths of the American economy, something I don&#8217;t think the government is capable of doing.&#8221;
WATCH:
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
New York Times columnist David Brooks says Democrats are &#8220;somewhere to the left of Che Guevara&#8221;
Brooks blasts <a href="https://twitter.com/AOC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AOC</a>&#8216;s &#8220;Green New Deal,&#8221; says it &#8220;concentrates power in the hands of the Washington elites&#8221; and is &#8220;government taking control of large swaths of the American economy&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/d9nhvtLR0T">pic.twitter.com/d9nhvtLR0T</a>
&#8212; Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) <a href="https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1097290719939551232?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 18, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
&#8220;The proposal calls for the United States to be free of carbon emissions within 10 years without the use of nuclear power. It calls for every building in the United States to be replaced or retrofitted in green fashion,&#8221; Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43194/aocs-green-new-deal-proposal-one-stupidest-ben-shapiro">wrote</a> about the Green New Deal. &#8220;It calls for universal healthcare, free college education, the replacement of airplanes with high-speed trains, charging stations &#8216;everywhere&#8217; (this is the sort of exactness the proposal contains), replacement of &#8216;every combustion-engine vehicle,&#8217; government-provided jobs, family and medical leave, vacations, retirement security, and the abolition of &#8216;farting cows.&#8217; It also calls for total &#8216;economic security&#8217; for anyone &#8216;unable or unwilling to work.'&#8221;
Last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43403/democrats-panic-after-mcconnell-urges-green-new-ryan-saavedra">said</a>: &#8220;I&#8217;ve noted with great interest the Green New Deal. And we&#8217;re going to be voting on that in the Senate. Give everybody an opportunity to go on record and see how they feel about the Green New Deal.&#8221;
McConnell&#8217;s announcement sent Democrats into a panic, with Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) claiming that McConnell was trying to sabotage the plan by allowing a vote on it.
&#8220;Don&#8217;t let Mitch McConnell fool you: this is nothing but an attempt to sabotage the movement we are building,&#8221; Markey tweeted. &#8220;He wants to silence your voice so Republicans don&#8217;t have to explain why they are climate change deniers. McConnell wants this to be the end, this is just the beginning.&#8221;
&#8220;This isn&#8217;t a new Republican trick,&#8221; Markey continued. &#8220;By rushing a vote on the #GreenNewDeal resolution, Republicans want to avoid a true national debate &amp; kill our efforts to organize. We&#8217;re having the first national conversation on climate change in a decade. We can&#8217;t let Republicans sabotage it.&#8221;
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This isn&#8217;t a new Republican trick. By rushing a vote on the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/GreenNewDeal?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#GreenNewDeal</a> resolution, Republicans want to avoid a true national debate &amp; kill our efforts to organize. We&#8217;re having the first national conversation on climate change in a decade. We can&#8217;t let Republicans sabotage it.
&#8212; Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) <a href="https://twitter.com/SenMarkey/status/1095442948697849857?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Liberal Columnist Blasts Green New Deal: Democrats To ‘The Left Of Che Guevara’

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

On Tuesday, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/trump-republican-party-conservative.html">The New York Times&#8217; </a>David Brooks joined syndicated columnist George Will in calling for conservatives to avoid voting for the Republican Party. Will claimed that Republicans in Congress had abdicated their duty to check the executive branch, and Democrats would do a better job, ignoring that Democrats would be stymied by a Republican minority and that the Democratic agenda has swiveled to the radical Left. Brooks argues that conservatism is about protection of the order that pre-exists liberty, the maintenance of the &#8220;sacred space&#8221; necessary for liberty to thrive. He contrasts the Enlightenment mentality of reason and consent with the Burkeian notion that such concepts, unmoored from shared cultural history and institutions, runs amok. He&#8217;s not wrong about the value of order:
<blockquote>
The practical upshot is that conservatives have always placed tremendous emphasis on the sacred space where individuals are formed. This space is populated by institutions like the family, religion, the local community, the local culture, the arts, the schools, literature and the manners that govern everyday life. &#8230; Over the centuries conservatives have resisted anything that threatened this sacred space.
</blockquote>
So far, so good.
But then Brooks goes wrong: he argues that conservatives only value small government because they treasure this &#8220;sacred space,&#8221; not because they value individual liberty that can only be maintained thanks to the sacred space. His hard-line distinction between Enlightenment thinking about reason and liberty and Burkeian thinking about sacred spaces leads him astray:
<blockquote>
Conservatives fought big government not because they hated the state, per se, but because they loved the sacred space. The last attempts to build a conservatism around the sacred space were George W. Bush&#8217;s &#8220;compassionate conservatism&#8221; and, in Britain, David Cameron&#8217;s Big Society conservatism. They both fizzled because over the last 30 years the parties of the right drifted from conservatism. The Republican Party became the party of market fundamentalism. Market fundamentalism is an inhumane philosophy that makes economic growth society&#8217;s prime value and leaves people atomized and unattached. Republican voters eventually rejected market fundamentalism and went for the tribalism of Donald Trump because at least he gave them a sense of social belonging. At least he understood that there&#8217;s a social order under threat.
</blockquote>
This is a dramatic misreading of the nature of American conservatism, which has always been bound up in classical liberalism. That&#8217;s why so many conservatives disliked W&#8217;s big government brand. Drawing a hard break between Locke and Burke is foolish and wrong-headed. The founders believed in the notion of individual liberty, but believed that individual liberty could only be maintained so long as virtue was inculcated and supported by thriving social institutions. Liberty and order were two sides of the same coin. Brooks separates the two, however, and suggests that free markets are inherently non-conservative, which is wrongheaded and foolish in the extreme.
As to the notion that Americans swung to Trump because Trump was a substitute for market fundamentalism, that&#8217;s untrue as well. Most conservatives voted for Trump because he wasn&#8217;t Hillary Clinton. And while Brooks is correct that we&#8217;ve substituted tribal politics for social institutions, he&#8217;s wrong that such tribal politics are a direct response to a market breakdown rather than a direct response to the fraying of the social fabric itself. The rise of tribalism is far more connected to lack of church attendance than lower taxes.
Then Brooks jumps into his criticism of Trump. It turns out that Trump&#8217;s promises of a new social order are based on bad premises. And this means that the sacred order is most threatened by Trump:
<blockquote>
In 2018, the primary threat to the sacred order is no longer the state. It is a radical individualism that leads to vicious tribalism. The threat comes from those two main currents of the national Republican Party. At his essence Trump is an assault on the sacred order that conservatives hold dear &#8212; the habits and institutions that cultivate sympathy, honesty, faithfulness and friendship.
</blockquote>
This is an extreme statement indeed. Radical individualism is not the outgrowth of market fundamentalism, as Brooks calls it &#8212; we&#8217;re seeing the rise of radical individualism resulting in tribalism all across big government-friendly Europe. In fact, there&#8217;s a solid case to be made that the state stands behind that rise in radical individualism, supplanting the social order with the support of the government, killing social institutions in favor of governmental support.
But Brooks concludes, wrongheadedly:
<blockquote>
Today you can be a conservative or a Republican, but you can&#8217;t be both. When I look at places that are successfully nurturing beautiful communities, which seem most &#8220;conservative&#8221; in the true sense, I find great pluralism. Burlington, Vt., is doing it, and so is Salt Lake City. I find beautiful communities in places that consider themselves deep blue and places that consider themselves deep red. The next conservatism will be built on the back of these real-life communities, and the way they nurture good citizens and healthy attachments. It will be based on new alliances, which have little to do with your father&#8217;s G.O.P.
</blockquote>
It&#8217;s hilarious to see Brooks suggest that Burlington, VT and Salt Lake City represent &#8220;great pluralism&#8221;: Burlington has a total population of 42,000 people, with a median family income of $76,000 and an unemployment rate of 2.1%; 60% of Vermonters live in a married couple family. Salt Lake City is half Mormon; Utah has one of the highest marriage rates in the country, and one of the highest birth rates, and Salt Lake City has an unemployment rate of 3%. What do these places have in common? Residents generally uphold certain basic rules of social order (marriage, family, education, getting a job). Pitting the market against social order is a false construct, in other words. You can have social institutions without a free market, but you cannot truly have a free market without social institutions. Free markets don&#8217;t kill social institutions do. Lack of social connection does.
And the party that is interested in forcibly destroying social institutions is still the Democratic Party, which sees traditional social institutions as oppressive leftovers from a bigoted hierarchy. Trump may not be preserving social institutions &#8212; he may be tearing them apart. But to suggest that conservatives have any home other than the Republican Party in this political matrix isn&#8217;t just wrong, it&#8217;s stupid.

NYT’s David Brooks: ‘You Can Be A Conservative Or A Republican, But You Can’t Be Both.’ He’s Dead Wrong.

&#8220;White tribalism&#8221; is President Donald Trump&#8217;s primary political animator, said MSNBC&#8217;s/NBC&#8217;s Joy-Ann Reid on <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-october-1-2017-n806371">Sunday&#8217;s Meet the Press</a>.
All panelists &#8212; The New York Times&#8217; David Brooks, MSNBC&#8217;s Charlie Sykes, and the American Enterprise Institute&#8217;s Danielle Pletka &#8212; agreed with Reid&#8217;s assessment, including Meet the Press host Chuck Todd.
Reid accused Trump of harboring particular animus toward &#8220;women of color,&#8221; framing the president as misogynistic and bigoted against non-whites. Trump&#8217;s base of supporters, Reid added, were excited by the president&#8217;s alleged &#8220;signals&#8221; of racial and misogynistic animosity (emphases added):
<blockquote>
Yeah, but Donald Trump is just being himself, right? He&#8217;s channeling his base. He&#8217;s talking to them, but he&#8217;s also channeling them. I mean before Donald Trump started tweeting, some of the more sort of prominent members of his base were calling the mayor even worse names than that. Saying she&#8217;s a murderer, saying she belongs in jail. He&#8217;s getting these signals, and he&#8217;s giving them because he shares their view. And it is interesting that Donald Trump&#8217;s reflex is to say that a woman, a woman of color, you know, is an ingrate, or to attack, or to say the people of Puerto Rico essentially are too lazy to help themselves, want something from the federal government that they won&#8217;t provide to themselves. You know, he actually went on that tweet storm, which was the most he had talked about Puerto Rico at all, a year to the day after he attacked Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe. Donald Trump has a particular reflex to attack women, to attack women of color, and to signal boost to his base this idea that people of color are lazy and dependent and won&#8217;t do for themselves. He&#8217;s sharing that with a large portion of his base. &#8230;
He&#8217;s evincing what we eventually did see in Katrina, this idea that the people who were, you know, suffering in New Orleans were at fault, that they were people who were undeserving and unworthy. That had a racial component. This has a racial component. The difference is George W. Bush wasn&#8217;t leading the white tribalism that did eventually get turned on the people in the Katrina situation. Donald Trump is leading it.
</blockquote>
Watch a montage of Reid&#8217;s comments below.

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Both Charlie Sykes and David Brooks regularly describe themselves as &#8220;conservative.&#8221; Both agreed with and elaborated on Reid&#8217;s neo-Marxist racial narrative.
Todd presents himself as a politically objective and non-partisan news media figure. He furthered Reid&#8217;s racial agitation by describing Trump&#8217;s alleged animosity toward non-whites as &#8220;a pattern.&#8221;
NBC similarly presents itself as a politically objective and non-partisan news media outlet.

Follow Robert Kraychik on <a href="https://twitter.com/kr3ch3k">Twitter</a>.

Joy-Ann Reid Says Trump Pushes ‘White Tribalism’; Fraud ‘Conservative’ Pundits Agree!

Chuck Todd

Joy-Ann Reid

Leftism

Media

Media Bias

Meet the Press

NBC News

Reconstruction in coastal Texas in the wake of Hurricane Harvey requires abdication of enforcement of immigration law, argued The New York Times&#8217; David Brooks on Saturday&#8217;s PBS NewsHour:
<blockquote>
And they could say, hey, we can&#8217;t do the wall right now. We got to rebuild Texas. And, by the way, on the background, a lot of people are going to need a lot of construction workers in Texas. And this is a country with a construction worker shortage.
So, maybe this isn&#8217;t the time to crack down on immigration. And so I think there&#8217;s a possibility, if they want to look functional, to seize this moment, whether they will or not. But I&#8217;m going for maximal optimistic unrealism.
</blockquote>
Unity during crisis in an &#8220;ethnically diverse&#8221; city like Houston undermines concerns about social and cultural fragmentation resulting from the status quo of demographic change, said Brooks:
<blockquote>
To me, the two biggest things that happened was, first, Houston came together. And that is significant, because Houston is the most ethnically diverse city in this country. And there&#8217;s an argument that is sometimes made, oh, we will never have solidarity as a nation if we&#8217;re so ethnically diverse.
Well, Houston does it. And so if they can do it, I think that argument against making our country diverse or opening up more immigration falls down.
</blockquote>
Adjacent Mark Shields for a segment hosted by Miles O&#8217;Brien, Brooks neglected to delineate between lawful and unlawful immigration. Leftists and Democrats regularly conflate both legal and illegal immigration.
Brooks also framed political progress as predicated on the passage of legislation and expansion of state power. Republicans, he said, &#8220;have to get something done.&#8221; The GOP must not reduce spending in any other dimension via &#8220;offsets&#8221; in funding relief for persons and businesses damaged by Hurricane Harvey.
Reducing federal spending via &#8220;offsets&#8221; to mitigate financial burdens on taxpayers amounts to a &#8220;crazy [and] insane way to do government.&#8221;
Watch the segment below.
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<a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/17920/conservative-intellectual-david-brooks-tries-robert-kraychik">In June</a>, Brooks connected economic dynamism to &#8220;a lot of immigration,&#8221; neglecting to set parameters to qualify or quantify the volume or nature of immigration. Support for President Donald Trump&#8217;s immigration and refugee admission proposals, he added, was rooted in superficial and racial considerations.
Also in June, Brooks cast debates between &#8220;big government versus small government&#8221; as obsolete, implying that public consensus was reached around his view of the proper size and scope of government.
Despite operating as a de facto left-wing Democrat in his commentary and analysis, Brooks is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(cultural_commentator)">described by Wikipedia</a> as a &#8220;conservative.&#8221;

H/T Ian Schwartz at <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/09/02/david_brooks_construction_workers_needed_in_texas_not_the_time_to_crack_down_on_immigration.html">RealClearPolitics</a>.
Follow Robert Kraychik on <a href="https://twitter.com/kr3ch3k">Twitter</a>.

NYT ‘Conservative’: We Need Illegals To Rebuild Texas

Houston

Hurricane Harvey

Illegal Immigration

Immigrants

Immigration

Texas

On Tuesday, David Brooks, the faux-conservative columnist for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/how-we-are-ruining-america.html?action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;clickSource=story-heading&amp;module=opinion-c-col-left-region&amp;region=opinion-c-col-left-region&amp;WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region">The New York Times</a>, and a columnist so ensconced in wry analysis of the American upper middle class that he seems to have completely lost touch with reality, penned a rather condescending column (aren&#8217;t they all?) about how upper class Americans have created their own society. Brooks&#8217; thesis: &#8220;Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.&#8221;
This is an astonishing claim, given that income mobility in the United States has not changed since the 1970s, and that income mobility in the United States is the same as Europe&#8217;s, despite Europe&#8217;s higher levels of redistribution; virtually all differences between income mobility levels in the United States vs. Europe are attributable to dropping out of high school or having babies out of wedlock.
But according to Brooks, the new elite have chopped off the ladder behind them. Brooks blames &#8220;the pediacracy, stupid.&#8221; He cites these facts:
<blockquote>
Upper-middle-class moms have the means and the maternity leaves to breast-feed their babies at much higher rates than high school-educated moms, and for much longer periods. Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
</blockquote>
Yes, it turns out that making more money does accord your children extra benefits. But that doesn&#8217;t mean that you&#8217;re responsible for shutting off someone else&#8217;s path to success. According to Brooks, however, the upper middle class has now become exclusionary. How so? First, Brooks cites zoning laws and college admissions &#8212; fair game for talk of rules-bending in favor of the upper middle class, although it&#8217;s important to note that a vast majority of high school graduates now go to college (66% as of 2013, <a href="http://www.higheredtoday.org/2015/11/25/where-have-all-the-low-income-students-gone/">including 46%</a> of those graduates from low-income families).
But then he goes after &#8220;informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.&#8221; Here&#8217;s his best example:
<blockquote>
Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named &#8220;Padrino&#8221; and &#8220;Pomodoro&#8221; and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican. American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, &#8220;You are not welcome here.&#8221;
</blockquote>
This is idiotic.
Did Brooks seek to make his friend feel stupid? Did he mean to suggest that his friend was &#8220;not welcome&#8221;? Or did he just want a gourmet sandwich? Attributing malice to people&#8217;s preferences is as nasty as actually excluding people through selection of hoity-toity restaurants. But Brooks continues:
<blockquote>
To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you&#8217;ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality. &#8230; Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can&#8217;t name them, can&#8217;t understand them. They just know they&#8217;re there.
</blockquote>
We have not created informal social barriers to mobility. We associate with people who think like us. This is just as true for a chi chi yoga instructor moving to Lubbock as it is for a Lubbock kid moving to Hollywood. But to pretend that the habits of the upper middle class in Texas are the same as the habits of the upper middle class in Massachusetts is ignorant. Brooks&#8217; column is just another way to suggest to low-income Americans that there are insuperable barriers to success in America, and that those barriers can be found in sandwich choices, not merely the institutional obstacles we can actually tackle. In his column, Brooks&#8217; actually contributes to a far greater barrier to success in America than cultural striation: he contributes to an unearned sense of victimhood, when the best option would be to encourage people to make solid life choices rather than lamenting their ignorance about soppressata (and for the record, I have no clue what the hell soppressata is, perhaps because I keep kosher).

NYT’s Brooks Blames Upper Middle Class For Ruining Country With Fancy Sandwiches

CNN&#8217;s Fareed Zakaria invited David Brooks to explain contemporary conservatism in the era of President Donald Trump, describing the left-wing columnist for The New York Times as a &#8220;conservative intellectual.&#8221;
The debate between &#8220;big government versus small government,&#8221; said Brooks, is passé; being supplanted by a new debate: opposition versus support for globalization.

Brooks neglected to define globalization or articulate its primary effects on its detractors and/or supporters. Zakaria similarly neglected to offer any analysis of contemporary globalization.

Neither Brooks nor Zakaria spoke of cultural change wrought by the era of mass migration to America and the broader West; no commentary was offered on the natures of new cohorts of foreigners and their compatibility with the American ethos. Also ignored were contemporary policies and informal attitudes toward cultural integration of foreigners, and how they have changed over decades.

No examination was offered by either Brooks or Zakaria of contemporary conservatism&#8217;s resistance toward expanding state controls over human behavior in both the social and economic spheres. No words were spoken on the values of freedom of speech and expression; property rights; a civil society independent of government controls; growing cultural apprehension under &#8220;political correctness&#8221;; left-wing corruption of academia, the news media, and entertainment; or other conservative concerns.

Referencing the thesis of Thomas Kuhn&#8217;s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-Thomas-Kuhn/dp/0226458083">The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</a>, Brooks framed political paradigms as intermittently experiencing major shifts over time:

<blockquote>
&#8220;You get a paradigm, you get a way of looking at the world. Reaganism, that was a paradigm. It works for a little while and then slowly it detached from reality, and it&#8217;s hollow but nobody knows it. Somebody comes along, punctures it, and it collapses. And that&#8217;s what Trump did to Reaganism.&#8221;
</blockquote>
Neither Brooks nor Zakaria acknowledged an essentialist view of the human condition or of human nature, or of ideological predicates related to perceptions of the human condition or human nature. Zakaria accepted Brooks&#8217; reframing of Kuhn&#8217;s historical analysis of scientific paradigm shifts as applicable to politics.

Brooks linked economic dynamism to the status quo of mass migration, suggesting the two were somehow interconnected:

<blockquote>
&#8220;I would like an Alexander Hamilton [style of conservatism] &#8212; open trade, a lot of immigration, a lot of economic dynamism. &#8230; The Steve Bannons of the world, that&#8217;s where a lot of the people are. They&#8217;re older, they&#8217;re economically disadvantaged, and they want a national conservatism that will protect them.&#8221;
</blockquote>
Americans who support Trump do so on superficial and racial grounds, said Brooks, dismissing the political acumen of Republican voters:

<blockquote>
&#8220;A lot of suburban women in Missouri looked around and said, &#8220;Sarah Palin, she&#8217;s kinda like me.&#8221; And whether Sarah Palin believed in high tax rates or low tax rates, or health insurance markets or some other health care policy, that&#8217;s not what they were thinking about. They were thinking about, &#8220;Who&#8217;s like me?&#8221; And for a lot of people in the Republican Party, which is older, whiter, and less educated at the core, Trump was like them.&#8221;
</blockquote>
Zakaria presents himself as a politically objective and non-partisan news media figure. CNN similarly presents itself as a politically objective and non-partisan news media outlet, branding itself as &#8220;The Most Trusted Name In News.&#8221;

Follow Robert Kraychik on <a href="https://twitter.com/kr3ch3k">Twitter</a>.
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‘Conservative Intellectual’ David Brooks Tries To Explain Modern Conservatism

Fareed Zakaria

Steve Bannon

Bret Stephens of The New York Times analogized Donald Trump&#8217;s assumption of the White House to the hijacking of Flight 93 by Islamic terrorists during the 9/11 attacks.

Mocking an article from September of 2016 by Michael Anton entitled, &#8220;<a href="http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/">The Flight 93 Election</a>,&#8221; Stephens initially dismisses fears of America as a nation in crisis via the spread of leftism:

<blockquote>
To imply, as Anton did, that Barack Obama, for all his shortcomings, was Ziad Jarrah, Flight 93&#8217;s lead hijacker, is vile. To suppose that we&#8217;d all be dead if Hillary Clinton, for all her flaws, had been elected is hallucinatory. To argue that the United States, for all its problems, was the equivalent of a doomed aircraft is absurd. To suggest that Donald Trump, a man who has sacrificed nothing in his life for anyone or anything, is the worthy moral heir to the Flight 93 passengers is a travesty.
</blockquote>
Stephens concludes that perhaps it is Trump who represents the political manifestation of 9/11&#8217;s Islamic terrorists, painting Hillary Clinton&#8217;s failed presidential campaign as analogous to the failed attempt by Flight 93&#8217;s passengers to secure the cockpit:

<blockquote>
Maybe 2016 was the Flight 93 election, or something like it. Maybe the pilots are dead. Maybe the passengers failed to storm the cockpit. Maybe the hijackers reached their target by landing on the White House after all.
</blockquote>
Stephens describes himself as &#8220;proudly conservative,&#8221; and is often presented as a conservative when participating in television news media discussion panels on outlets such as CNN. 

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<a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/10233/bret-stephens-im-gonna-vote-hillary-clinton-robert-kraychik">Last October</a>, Stephens announced that he would be vote for Hillary Clinton, repeatedly describing Donald Trump as a &#8220;threat to the Republic.&#8221; In doing, he joined other self-described conservatives such as David Frum and David Brooks.

Follow Robert Kraychik on <a href="https://twitter.com/">Twitter</a>.

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NYT Conservative Columnist Compares Trump To Flight 93 Hijacker

Bret Stephens

David Frum

Hillary Clinton

Republican Party

Wall Street Journal

&#8220;Capitalism isn&#8217;t working for a lot of people,&#8221; said The New York Times&#8217;s David Brooks on MSNBC&#8217;s Meet The Press, implying that the status quo of the health insurance market was largely free prior to the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Brooks pushed the false premise of Republicans as too supportive of laissez-faire economics, framing them as trapped within a supposedly philosophical pro-market versus pro-government conundrum. Casting Republicans as anarchists by implication, he said the GOP must reconcile its supposedly Randian values with &#8220;some form&#8221; of support a state:
<blockquote>
&#8220;I would just say the Republicans are at a historical pivot where we used to have this old argument; the government versus the state, or the market versus the state. And [the argument was] was pro-government [versus] small government. Now, the social fabric is decaying. Capitalism isn&#8217;t working for a lot of people.
So if you want to be pro-market, you&#8217;ve got to people the security [sic] so they can compete in the market. And you have to use the state to give them that security. And so therefore if you want to be pro-market, you got to be pro-government at least in some form. And Republicans are caught in that historical pivot.&#8221;
</blockquote>
No Republicans openly support anarchy via abolition of the state.
Brooks chastised Republicans with class warfare rhetoric, deriding &#8220;tax cuts for the rich&#8221; while speaking nebulously of the tearing of &#8220;social fabric.&#8221; The proposed American Health Care Act (AHCA), he added, would crush lower-income people by insufficiently redistributing wealth towards the ends of economic egalitarianism. 
Republicans had to make a choice between helping their voters or remaining &#8220;the party of the rich,&#8221; said Brooks:
<blockquote>
&#8220;Yeah. No. Well, here&#8217;s what I don&#8217;t get about what&#8217;s going on this week. We just had 2016, an election about the working class&#8211;election where we learned that a lot of people are out of the job market. The social fabric is fraying. And so the lesson is pay attention and help these people.
So the Republican Party could help these people with market-based mechanisms, which I support. Do they do that? No. They have huge tax cuts for the rich. This investment income tax credit only goes to people [with annual incomes above $250K]. And that has been stable in all the plans that they&#8217;ve come up with and thrown around.
And meanwhile they&#8217;re throwing 8, 10, 15 million people off the rolls. So it&#8217;s declaring war on their own voters. And then there&#8217;s a wing of the party that&#8217;s saying, &#8216;No, that&#8217;s too much. We need to totally decimate them.&#8217; So the Republican Party has to figure out, &#8220;Are we going to help our voters? Or are we still the party that, you know, we&#8217;re still going to be the party of the rich?&#8221;
</blockquote>
At no point did Brooks acknowledge the difference between health insurance via legislation &#8211; either in the form of the the ACA or the AHCA &#8211; and actual healthcare. In so doing, he implies that governmental promises to provide health care somehow increase the volume and availability of doctors, MRI machines, ambulances, and other healthcare goods and services.
None of Meet The Press&#8216;s panelists challenged Brooks&#8217;s statements.
Brooks is a regular presence on left-wing and Democrat-aligned TV news media discussion panels. Wikipedia describes Brooks as a &#8220;conservative.&#8221;
Watch Brooks&#8217;s comments below.
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NYT’s Alleged Conservative Columnist: ‘If You Want To Be Pro-Market, You Got To Be Pro-Government’

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