I applaud people attempting to bridge divides in America, so two cheers to the New York Times’ David Brooks for taking a stab at understanding Donald Trump’s popularity from the point of view of his supporters. Why not three cheers? Read on.
Brooks writes that most people in elite circles think of themselves as the forces of “progress and enlightenment” while viewing Trump fans as “reactionary bigots and authoritarians.” But maybe we are the bad guys, Brooks muses.
In this view, the “anti-Trumpers,” through selfishness and arrogance, made Trump inevitable, first by getting college deferments from Vietnam and later by imposing busing on Boston but not Wellesley.
There’s a lot to that, though it’s worth recalling that 75% of those who served in Vietnam were volunteers. Brooks could have added that liberals favored soft-on-crime policies that hurt minorities living in cities more than those who could afford a place in Wellesley.
Brooks is on shakier ground when he assails the whole meritocracy: “We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement.” He cites a 2018 survey to the effect that more than 50% of the staff writers at his newspaper attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.
Brooks is not alone in attributing vast importance to who does and does not attend Ivy League universities, but this emphasis is itself evidence of parochialism. A 2019 Pew analysis found that among 1,364 four-year colleges they studied, only 17 could be considered highly selective, meaning they accepted fewer than 10% of applicants. The overwhelming majority of Americans attend less selective schools.
Well, says Brooks, they’re out of luck, because “elite graduates monopolize the best jobs.”
That’s debatable. Graduates of elite colleges do fine, but so do graduates of lots of other schools. This country is rich in graduates of state schools, small religious colleges and community colleges who are doing just fine, living their dreams. They’re not settling for crumbs from the Ivy League table. They are among the most successful. Only about 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs attended Ivy League colleges. Car dealers, gas station owners and building contractors make up the majority of the 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million a year. And some of those very successful businessmen put Trump flags on their boats and participate in flotillas.
Brooks, channeling Trumpites, does have a fair point when he takes progressives to task for wielding what used to be called politically correct language as a weapon and when he cites their misused cultural power.
He writes: ”We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.
”After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that.”
‘Elites made the rules’ is not an excuse
This is a point that is too often lost. Social norms like the expectation of marriage before children are more important for those at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum than for those at the upper end. Money and power can smooth over many a misstep (ahem, Hunter Biden) that would fell a poorer person. But, is it correct to argue, as Brooks (trying to channel Trump supporters) does, that this was essentially imposed upon the middle and lower class by elites? The data suggest something a little different to me. Divorce spiked in the 1970s and 1980s among all groups, but the “funny thing” that happened was that social learning took place among the better-educated third of the population.
So while divorce and single parenting continued to rise for those with less education, it plunged in the 1990s and after among the educated. Their failure, I would argue, was not so much experimenting with other lifestyles as failing to share what they had learned — that kids desperately need the stability of two parents. It’s not that elites were failing to practice what they preached; it was instead, as Charles Murray put it, their failure to preach what they practiced.
That said, it isn’t fair to hold elites entirely responsible for the life decisions of the rest of society. Average people have agency, too, and if you’ve fathered three kids out of wedlock and hardly make your child support payments, it’s no excuse to say elites made the rules.
Brooks is attempting to prod those on the left to reflect a bit more on their own role in our polarized culture. Good. But bottom line: Even if progressives were guilty as charged, it still wouldn’t justify the free choice of millions of Americans to support a mentally unstable, vicious, Constitution-shredding, would-be autocrat.
Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the “Beg to Differ” podcast.
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