Hell will freeze over before today's Republicans lower themselves to compromise on anything. In the meantime, Mueller is building his case against Trump campaign officials and Trump himself for and/or collusion with foreign government, obstruction of justice, money laundering. The latter probably is best chance to rid the Trump cancer. A second ice storm in hell will occur before sanctimonious Pence will ever win Presidential election.
46
If you read the posts by Trump supporters on various websites you will see that they are fueled by a combination of anti-liberal, pro-gun, anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-immigrant and anti-Hilary, Soros, Obama...fill in the blank. Like Beavis and Butthead they goad each other on around these various topics and woe to any reasonable person who wants to engage them in a discussion. This is not a philosophical position, it is somatic. These are knee-jerks from a disorganized mob of haters and losers, most of whom are white and middle-class. These folks do not dream, they secrete. They do not aspire, they bloviate. They do not think. They twitch.
164
David, it sounds to me like you are waiting for . . . the Democrats. Wait no longer. They are here. Just open your eyes.
55
David Brooks and Jennifer Rubin for co-president!!!!
3
David, you are mistaken. America is very much a tribal nation. Yes, our nation was founded on universal principles, the American Creed of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, with equality and justice for all. But this universal creed has always been in tension with a tribal blood-and-soil populist nationalism. The frontier, whose promise and openness you celebrate, was conquered and settled through brutal tribal warfare with the Native American Indians. The frontier may have beckoned adventurous and disciplined individuals in search of self-transformation, but it was settled by families, many of Scots-Irish origin, with a strong sense of tribal identity. The (white) American tribe on the frontier did need a strong warrior to defend it as it settled a hostile world. His name was Andrew Jackson, whose portrait now rests above Donald Trump’s desk in the Oval Office. Trumpist populist nationalism is simply the latest incarnation of Jacksonian populist nationalism, and is just as much a legacy of America’s frontier experience as the dynamic openness you focus on. Barack Obama—he who won you over with the crease in his pants leg—launched a culture war against the Jacksonian nationalist “deplorables” in the name of a progressive multicultural globalism. Donald Trump is Jacksonian America’s pushback against this progressive assault on the culture, traditions, and national identity it holds dear.
40
You! Cowboy or indian? We Trump tribe, him strong warrior, him screw aliens.
No, I's youthful frontiersman. You see personal transformation 'roun these here parts? It's as good as gold, unless you have gold. Show me your gold!
Stop talk! You say we old, settled and fearful. No, that you!
'scuse me, Tribe of the Rocketman-In-Chief, you may be against government, but my boys are against the government that enervated ambition!
Ok, ok, frontiersman and indian live in peace and be against government as brothers. And deficit reduction, stay dormant, many years, yes my brother?
Deficit reduction? Dormant as a doornail, Chief.
4
That person was President Obama, Mr. Brooks.
54
This is not a man fit to be writing for the New York Times any more. The rise of the disease called Trump deserves unfettered and passionate rebuttal at every term INCLUSIVE of a complete refutation and decimation of everything "Republicanism" supposedly stood for.
For goodness sake, David, there hasn't been a decent Republican in power since Lincoln. Its been a slow winding downward spiral culminating in the Ogre called Trump.
Republicanism needs full and total destruction. It is hellbent on killing off its "base" through awful health insurance, unfettered opiate addiction, gas-fired climate change denial, guns and ammo for all, and deregulation of corporate polluters.
The Republicans are the party of the Oligarchs, David. They are fundamentally anti-American. A new conservative party that has the interests of America at heart can ONLY rise from the right wing of the Democratic Party (AKA Hillary). Then a new Bernie wing could conceivable rise from the Democratic Left. That's it No more Republican Party. We are at war with an oligarchical monster headed by a rapist Dear Leader called Trump.
Stop apologizing for the bastards standing in a "Republicans" and help finish them off to save us all. Or leave the New York Times. You've lost your way.
67
The person that Mr. Brooks is waiting for sounds a lot like Barack Hussein Obama.
56
judging from the tax talk the republicans have just what they want. More money for their super rich donors, forced childbirth for poor women and women who need to choose,and we get "christian" mullah's to make laws for how we will live for now on. All for spending hours on facebook and believing fox fake news.
vote democratic people, even if you don't like them, until the fascist flood subsides.
29
I have no idea what Republican party Brooks is talking about. Ever since Nixon, with his Southern Strategy and his Enemies List, the Republican party has been about stoking fear of the other and sowing division in our country.
For at least 50 years, Republicans spoke in carefully coded language to keep the division going, and keep down women and brown people. Trump figured out that he could drop the dog whistle -- once he started shouting his naked hatred, he and his supporters just felt great. Yeah, things did use to be so much better, before all this politically correct BS! All we need to do is hate harder, and everything will be ok!
52
I want to believe.
3
Too bad David: the reality is that the canary in the coal mine has already appeared:the political litmus tests. And the radical extremists have not only embraced the canary, they have fed it nurtured it all after giving birth to it.This radical far right/self interest, and self righteous religious component has begun the process of destruction
The GOP is going to cannibalize itself. Let the radical right try to take over the legislative seats.The party itself is a sham. It stands for nothing more than bigotry, pure self interest with no moral component,building all sorts of walls.
We live in a country of moderation, not sexy but it has worked best with 2 bona fide. Pol parties. No more. The grand old rich white men are slaves to their financial backers, & Fox and company’ s overbearing racist shouts. Both the radical right news media the true fake news sources make so much money from keeping the country divided. The wealthy want the white middle class to pay higher taxes .
And the dinosaurs in the GOP are scared into submission....no backbone, no morals, no compulsion about saving their cushy jobs.
So goodbye GOP it,s time to take your final bow.Trump will create a party to siphon
the stupid people he claims to love but screws. They being the minority will ultimately paint themselves into the proverbial corner
The smart “ elite”will wait in the wings.this country is headed 4 destruction by “patriotic” people claiming to love America.
11
This nation was founded on religious intolerance, slavery and genocide. That's how we "git-er done." Those three legs of the git-er-done stool were shortened by laws and such, but they still prop up too many of our stools (and, yes, you CAN assign more than one meaning to "stools.")
23
Immigrant populations, coming to this country, pretty much
survived by tribal unity. The Irish in Southy, Italians in
little Italy, Chinatowns, White burbs and towns. My own
forbears on Vinal Haven, ME, stonecutters from Norway and
Finland who worked the quarries. How to expand to global
mindset? How long before the South is really educated and
congenial with Black culture, much of which is shared in food
and music? David needs to start with locales and K-12,
modernized to accept diversity. No longing to mythical
notions of frontier unity.
10
If Reince Priebus had instituted a simple party rule after the 2012 clown car, Trump could have been avoided: If you have not held elective office as governor, US senator or representative for a minimum of 8 years as a member of the party, you cannot run for president as a member of the party.
I would actually require more extensive, more detailed experience qualifications. And, it should apply to any party...and, a political party is a club which can have any rules it wants to have; anyone who can't meet the club rules is free to run as an independent and abide by the minimal qualifications in the Constitution.
16
At the moment, Trump is just Trump, neither an ideologue nor the head of a movement. Our real risk is focusing too much on the President and his tweets and not creating alternatives that will not appear to be more-of-the-same to people for whom more-of-the-same. It is not about Democrats or Republicans but about Democrats and Republicans who, collectively, are viewed as politically bankrupt. The threat is that a genuine, charismatic ideologue could come along and lead a movement currently merely incubating in Trump's shadow.
Brooks only indirectly highlights the real danger. It is not Trump, who is little other than a narcissistic entertainer with no real core of values. It is a warning that so many Americans are momentarily content with such a "leader" as an alternative to more-of-the-same, however they choose to define more-of-the-same.
12
The "stirring words" prescription isn't going to energize people whose leaders are employed by plutocrats and whose president is a billionaire grifter. It would be nice to believe there are still enough people who read and think to make a difference, but the fact is the fifty year propaganda campaign to end the New Deal and institute a plutocracy worked. The American people are going to keep voting for people who will keep putting the nation's resources into fewer and fewer hands. We have lost the ability to distinguish reality from "alternate facts" and wistful thinking by conservative pundits nostalgic for a past that never really existed isn't going to change anything.
16
Nice thinking, Mr. Brooks. A little simplistic, but quite sane in mad times.
Even so, we need, in the meantime--as in NOW--a Constitutional counter-assault on Trump's assault on American principles, the species' best interests, and the planet's survival odds.
We need Mr. Mueller to hurry up.
We need Congress to do its duty and impeach Trump, via, at least, the 25th Amendment.
We have, then, not just thoughts to think, but a process DESIGNED to save democracy from its occasionally suicidal mistake.
Please, Mr. Brooks, pound the drum here. Trump is an existential threat, and must be stopped and removed NOW.
Once he breaks the nuclear bottle because he wants it to better flatter him, it will be too late, even for thinking good thoughts.
9
I appreciated being carried away for a few minutes! Thank you for the aspirational language and vision. Republican or Democrat or Independent, I want aspirational leaders with a progressive vision.
2
The Republican Party David has in mind is not even the one that not even Ryan thinks it is. To challenge Trumpism people like David need to first challenge post-Reagan Republican establishment. Trump is symptom, not the malaise!
3
This needs an out of tune marching band, several barrels of Kentucky bourbon, seven amazing dancing ladies and a small truckload of aspirin for when all that wears off.
8
Which "original republicans" is Mr. Brooks talking about? Except for T.R., the only post-Reconstruction Republicans have been more or less, but more more than less, big business Republicans. Who's your daddy? That depended on the state. Out west it was big mining and big lumber and the big railroads that made it run, to make the mines and lumber mills profitable, not for the worker, but for "the company."
5
It's more than the Republican party. Conservatism has been usurped by far-right politics, exactly what William F Buckley warned against. It is a terrible turn for the country.
7
I am unsure if I am seeing a determined optimism, or simply delusion. This paragraph has absolutely nothing to do with anything the Republican party has advocated during my lifetime here in DC, and I am sixty years old.
The Republican party I've seen is composed of greedmonsters, bigots, and seenoevils, science deniers, second amendment pushers, corporati, hedge fund managers, and Fundamentalist Christian Theocrats who want to exert social control over women and gay people. Supposed to be? This description of the Republic Party is so unrealistic I am flabbergasted that it was even printed in the NYTimes. wow.
"The Republican Party is supposed to be the party that stokes dynamism by giving everybody the chance to venture out into the frontier of their own choosing — with education reform that encourages lifelong learning, with entitlement reform that spends less on the affluent elderly and more on the enterprising young families, with regulatory reform that breaks monopolies and rules that hamper start-ups, with tax reform that creates a fair playing field, with immigration reform that welcomes the skilled and the hungry."
9
Mr. Trump isn't so much "unhindered" as clueless and untethered and brutally and remorselessly self-interested.
He is not a populist. Populists tell the truth. The things he promised and the things he says are not the truth. He is a demagogue who whips his mob into a rage at every opportunity.
The core belief of his voters is not what David says here. Most of these things he mentions--the fortress, the tribe, the rich/poor division, etc.--are just fig leaves. These are just the things that people say when they are not at home.
Take the economic arguments for example. Trump's voters were relatively well off. Where they live they are the elite.
These philosophies all boil down to racial resentment of one kind or another. If they are a tribe, it is the white male Christian tribe. Resentment of foreigners, immigrants, Islamic radicals. Even tax cuts are justified by the notion that Trump voters don't want their taxes going to people who are not white.
Yes, the regular Republicans are in a bind. They told so many lies that now they are irrevocably tangled up in them.
The frontier is a myth. Most frontierspeople were farmers. Most did not even own a gun. On the real frontier, the role of community was almost certainly more important than the role of the individual. This is how things were when they worked.
When things didn't work you had Montana. The railroads and their corrupt officials handed out land, but drought sent almost everybody elsewhere eventually.
6
Yes, the Republican Party was once all you say it was. It was the party of Lincoln and Seward, Sherman and Grant. And when its devotion to free enterprise resulted in the excesses of the Gilded Age, Republicans like TR and Howard Taft took steps to rectify the situation. The GOP was once the national party of reason, humanism, and progress. That is, sadly, no longer the case. The party for which you hold such affection and nostalgia is now really only a memory, a dessicated husk, leeched of its spirit and virtue by the very bigots, reactionaries, and fanatics you all invited in to help win elections. I know you have always felt a distaste for the gaucheries of some of the constituent elements fo the Democratic Party, but we are now the only home for Americans of good will, guided more by reason, community, and science than selfishness, greed, and hate. Sorry, buddy.
9
"Today, the main enemy is not aliens; it’s division." So I expect Mr. Brooks and other Republicans will renounce their affiliation with the Republican party and try to join the Dems?
3
We are done. How long will it take to get these people, who accept myths that their failures and not theirs, but evil politicians paid by evil foreigners? Two days?? Tea Party trajectory?
Any Republican who says the great myth isn't true is finished.
Gorsuch and the other radical right wing justices aren't 90 years old. Citizens' United will be extended, this court will authorize legislatures to draw any districts that will help Republicans.
As the world's population continues to explode, as climate change signals our ecosystems that keep us alive are soon to be gone, there will be no American leadership or even involvement in tensions driven by population that cannot be resolved with a treaty.
I am glad I am in my 70's. This is heartbreaking.
6
David, you capture the essence of Trump's base correctly. And though others have pointed out the errors in your historical narrative it is exactly that version of the narrative that thrives within that base. Keys to this hostility of the alien and the elite follow: "The hardship of the frontier calls forth energy, youthfulness and labor... a certain sort of individual, a venturesome, hard-working, disciplined individual... who made themselves anew." This is a story of personal pride and the freedom to make personal and so national greatness (TRUMP!). It isn't the immigrant, per se, (they deny being racist) it is the parasite (generally of color) who use criminal behavior or draw down welfare/medicaid thrives on our generosity choking off national greatness. The 'turn' you propose that leaves the bulk of Trumpists and the GOP in the dust is this essential one, "Today, the main enemy is not aliens; it’s division ". Unless you convince these 'volk' that a return to the wild west will fail them you have argued well on their behalf and offered nothing convincing otherwise.
2
David, there is no more Republican Party. Only the name remains, on a fading shingle dangling from a single nail over the door to the hall that used to house a reasonably coherent group. The split between the moderate old Party and the Far Right is permanent, deep and irreparable. The same thing is happening in the Democratic Party, just not quite so noisily or rudely. We are undergoing a tectonic shift in politics that will eventually result in a total realignment, but the key factors like how soon, who will line up with whom, and where the power will ultimately reside, are still hidden from view.
Partly this is the result of the failure of government actually to govern for the past fifteen to twenty years. The country has been preoccupied with wars, political power struggles, disasters and massacres, and now the lack of leadership so painfully obvious to all. And to cap off the messy situation we live under a Constitution that is betraying its age and lack of relevance.
4
I have thought about and re read this article all day. It's a breazy little piece on the face of it. But, it asks a profound question. With so many tens of millions of Americans so disaffected, how do you give them back a sense of counting, of believing the American dream is still there. That they and their families have a valuable place in this country. As a guy who registered Republican for the first twenty years I could vote, I still get a bit of a tingle of pride when I get on the freeway or drive over a great bridge or the Hoover dam. This is all great stuff that Americans built to make America great. We did it using the power of the great Government our founding fathers handed down to us. Under both Democrats and Republicans, we invested in great infrastructure. I believe that those investments, who's value we all share in, brings us closer together. Build energy transmission lines capable of carrying electricity generated in red states like Kansas to markets on the blue coasts. Start bargaining for better drug prices and better healthcare prices overall. Investing in things, like this, that benefit regular Americans and create good paying infrastructure jobs. These should be Republican positions. Investing in America and not overpaying for what we buy. Mr. Brooks wants conservative ideas that walk away from the Trump cliff? There are a couple.
3
I don't think the answer is all that complicated or elusive.
You put issues in terms of "fairness," which Americans agree on remarkably well, even if we define it variously when pushed by certain issues and events to do so. But maximizing opportunity, helping responsible people help themselves, making sure that power isn't misused--by corporations, individuals, groups, government--and that the rich don't rig the game, etc.--these are make-able arguments.
Hell, even so grossly flawed a character as Hillary Clinton won 3,000,000 more votes than Trump did making blundering versions of this appeal to basic fairness. Had Bernie or an even abler candidate been the Dem nominee, who knows how many more than 3,000,000 would have been the probably-decisive majority.
So while Trump getting just one vote is sickening enough, all is not lost---yet. If the Dems would run a centrist-enough candidate who can believably put the argument in widely shared terms of basic fairness, and IF the human species survives Trump's reign, enough sanity may yet regain power.
4
Most commenters are highlighting that Mr. Brooks' vision of America has never actually existed, citing the genocide of native people and the oppression of women and people of color. I agree. But, that doesn't make the vision less worthy. While America has never lived up to the ideals we have set for ourselves, personally, it is all I have left to hold on to. Mr. Brooks' description is not false. It is just only true for white people. America does not need a new vision, the one we have is solid. What we need is to stop lying to ourselves and admit that we are not exceptional and that its time to get to the hard work of living up to the idea of America.
14
Name a single thing the Republican Party has ever done for the substantial benefit of the working poor and the middles class?
14
The Populist story is largely untrue. Banks with the approval of the Bush Administration nearly destroyed the global economy. Thanks to Obama and the dynamism of the American economy unemployment is near record lows along with inflation and interest rates. The majority of Americans live in areas that are booming. It is the areas that refuse to join the 21st Century that are in trouble.
8
This ideal America Brooks is so nostalgic about does not exist and never did. I've been there. What we now have for the whole world to see is that the emperor has no clothes. And we have the perfect president for this tragicomedy.
10
Yes, and there was exactly such a candidate running in 2016: Hilary Clinton. She had a vision of America as a universal nation, working together across lines of class, race, and other divisions—even encompassing the Native Americans displaced by all of us immigrants. So why did you not support her?
23
The only thing that has happened to the American Dream is that the GOP no longer pretends that the dream is for everyone who works for it. They have made it clear that the dream is not available to, but is at the expense of, anyone who is not white, wealthy and donating to their party.
8
Republicans have totally forgotten their own history. Independents and Democrats cannot rely on Moderate Republicans to curb the ignorance and hostility of Trumpism and must create a narrative that is actually the truth.
2
It is conceivable--barely--that this will happen. But if it does, it will not be a Republican who articulates the vision that Mr. Brooks yearns for. That ship has sailed, with Trump at the helm. It is never coming back, unless captained by Smee himself in the guise of Mike Pence, thus promising even more fun here in Never-Never Land. Endless fun. So tired of winning.
6
"It may be dormant, but this striving American dream is still lurking in every heart. It’s waiting for somebody who has the guts to say no to tribe, yes to universal nation, no to fences, yes to the frontier, no to closed, and yes to the open future, no to the fear-driven homogeneity of the old continent and yes to the diverse hopefulness of the new one."
Um, that sounds like Hillary Clinton. You know, stronger together. This is about nihilism, and it's about getting out the vote and restoring democracy.
11
Run over his narrative with a covered wagon? Not a chance. This is not about a story; this is about a charismatic brat who has convinced people that their resentments are "honest" and "patriotic" and he will win for them. He taps into the worst fears and insecurities in people, looses the dogs of hate, and intends to run the nation into the ground unless the elites who made him feel small tell him he is one of them. We are doomed.
4
Maybe we should have Fredrick Douglas stop by DC to tell the Republicans a thing or two? But I hear that, since he has become so popular lately, he may not have the time.
8
What we should all realize from this election debacle is the presidency wields too much power! Every utterance out of Trump's mouth sounds like a dictator's edict. Our congress is led by a corrupt and ineffective GOP leadership that seems to want to inflict harmful policies on us to benefit their donors. Every time we call them out on it they retreat. This is sheer madness. Yes, the Republican Party is the party of incompetence, racism, homophobia, and malfeasance! Any Republican with a shred of decency and integrity would jump ship. Start over. You are a mess!
7
"As a result, the Republican Party is becoming a party permanently associated with bigotry. It is becoming the party that can’t govern. And as a bonus, Trumpish recklessness could slide us into a war with North Korea that could leave millions dead."
Republican Party has been this for a long time. The sooner it is ruined as a party the better for the United States.
4
How about indicting Trump rather than defeating him philosophically? I predict it will happen. The problem with offering a competing philosophy, a new story, is the ignorance and stubbornness of the trumpsters. You can't do it with reruns of wagon train and gunsmoke. Their belief system is entrenched, and I don't see an emerging leader capable of leading them to truth. Who would that be?
3
I get so tired of hearing this false tired republican narrative. for the last 50 years republicans have given a wink and a nod to the segment of our country that is least racially enlightened to ensure their political survival. it is a deal with the devil that trump has brought home to roost.
7
Nice words, David, but we now got us a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. I fear that no rising hero with a snappy new "open" philosophy will be a match for that. Even Trumpism's tribalism as you describe it is no match for the 1%. Those tribe members will get squashed like a bug if they get in the way or become threatening. This is about money and power, not philosophy.
4
Brooks, are you kidding? This is the argument that caused Trump's base to panic and cohere into one scared angry body. Your argument requires also someone to have a normal intellectual mind that can think and reason. Good luck with that approach with Trump supporters.
2
Brooks only indirectly highlights the real danger. It is not Trump, who is little other than a narcissistic entertainer with no real core of values. Our warning is that a vast number of Americans are content with such a "leader" as an alternative to more-of-the-same, however they choose to define more-of-the-same.
At the moment, Trump is just Trump, neither an ideologue nor the head of a movement. Our real risk is focusing too much on Trump and not creating alternatives that will not simply appear to be more-of-the-same to people for whom such has no credibility. It is not about Democrats or Republicans but about Democrats and Republicans who, collectively, are viewed as politically bankrupt. The threat is that a genuine, charismatic ideologue could come along and lead a movement currently merely incubating in Trump's shadow.
3
Oddly this sentence, "First, we thrived by exploring a physical frontier during the migration west, and now we explore technological, scientific, social and human frontiers," omits a key element of the westward expansion: The conquering of the then-current residents and their forcible removal from the land. That element of the American story needs to be accounted for to understand the impulses that drive our, and everyones', politics.
7
Despite protestations to the contrary, Mr. Brooks is fundamentally right here. The Republican Party was established on the beliefs of free labor and soil. They argued that a true republic could exist only when people were free to work and had relatively easy access to land. At its founding, the Republican Party was about freedom, upward mobility and what we now call the American Dream. Sure, the party's vision changed over time but until recently these threads were readily identifiable. I disagree with Brooks that we need "somebody" to rekindle that vision. Instead, I would urge Mr. Brooks to look to the local level. There dozens of different folks are rethinking and reshaping the vision for our nation. But that, too, would be consistent with the early Republican Party.
David Brooks' Republican Party sounds like the movie version. Similar to how Birth of a Nation explained the Civil War and the KKK. His skewed view of the "good old days" of génial, open minded, egalitarian, pro working men Republicans died with Lincoln. His comments are counter productive to addressing the current party. It cannot return to what it has never been.
10
Welcome to self-serving fantasy land. Trump rules because of his ego which resonates with a large number of Americans. They are utter fools of course to respond to his rubbishy nonsense, but there it is. Protect yourself by voting Democrat all down the ticket.
9
Trump owns golf clubs. What could be more establishment Republican than that?
7
Dar Mr. Brooks, I believe you are suffering from the new ailment of your kind. Revisionist history. The Republican Party has not been what you describe in your second to last paragraph since the murder of Abraham Lincoln by a murderous trio intent on stopping the Republican Party from going any further with Lincoln's vision once he won the civil war.
2
Au Contraire Mr Brooks.....Donald Trump is the personification of the Thuggery, malice and supposed superiority of the "Manifest Destiny" crew......so malevolently voiced today as ..... "American Exceptionism"!
6
This is a preposterously whitewashed telling of the history of the GOP. The Republican party sold its soul in the disgraceful election of 1876 by agreeing to pull the U.S. military out of the South in return for the stolen Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes lost the popular vote and the Electoral vote, but the majority in the Electoral college was contested. The Compromise of 1877 gave Hayes the Presidency, and the Black folk in the South were sold out to the tender mercies of the KKK.
The sale was finalized in 1965. The Republicans absorbed the Dixiecrats after LBJ got the Voting Rights Act of that year passed. It's been downhill ever since. Watergate, Iran-Contra, fake WMDs, now Trump.
18
Trumps unending destruction of personnel around him is exhausting and chilling. He hires than "fires" them !!!
His family can survive this melee but what about our "democracy" as all his chips fall. The White House has become a casino, and dealer Trump holds the cards. Trump is not emperor yet but those gleeming green eyes of envy and venom have possessed him at our peril.
3
These Republicans the author refers to must be from a distant past. I am 45. My mother would refer to intellectual conservatism and I have vague memories of Jean Kirkpatrick and James Baker, and those of similar ilk. However, every single Republican I have ever met has been an overt or subtle racist. I know that this is smacks of simplicity and will likely get this comment erased, but I am not exaggerating. Republicanism has become a synonym for racism; a sly code. To deny this, as NYT and NPR are wont to do, might be necessary to uphold journalistic standards, but in this age of Trump it is more and more unhinged from reality. The David Brooks of the world can keep looking to the past, but I am afraid that the gig is up.
12
David is so adorable when he gets all inspirational. I could hear the violins in the background as I read this. I could also hear the record screech as this glamorously hazy idea of what Republicanism is or ever was met the light of day.
6
The Trump Republicans are textbook fascists. The USA now has a fascist government. Why is it so hard for you to state that clearly? Could it be because, over the years, your bloviating has contributed so much to the development and rise of these monsters? All of your cheerleading (from the safety of your armchair) of American interference in other countries and the USA's obsession with war-making? You've been at it since Reagan. The Republicans OWN Trump and his corrupt, reckless, lawless, racist, xenophobic, violent thugs and cronies. Deal with it. He's all YOURS.
11
Whatever the Rupublican Party is "supposed" to be, this is not where the party is. Everything in the penultimate paragraph that Republican are supposed to stand for are actually supported by the Democratic, not the Republican Party. Give up the Rs, Mr. Brooks, your party has deserted you.
3
Republican hand wringers like David Brooks have been providing sophistry and intellectual cover for years while the GOP grew rancid. Republicans built Trump, McConnell, Gorsuch, and Moore. Now that old guard Republicans have lost control of the belligerent, ignorant supporters they have cultivated, they can finally see what they have wrought on America.
6
The Republican Party is DOA and resuscitation is futile. You cannot resuscitate that which has no soul.
1
The division is not between whites and blacks; it's between Trump supporters and blacks. The division is not between educated and less educated; it's between Trump supporters and the educated. In short: the division is between the Trump supporters and everyone else. This is also a one-way battle: the Trump supporters against those who oppose Trump. Those who oppose Trump aren't against the Trump supporters-we are opposed to their ideology, little of which is rooted in fact. Try going to the comments section of Breitbart to engage someone in dialog-you are immediately branded a 'libtard', 'snowflake' or something much worse. These people aren't interested in dialog or compromise, and they aren't even really all that interested in the issues-they are angry at their diminishing power, and they want leaders that strike back at their presumed enemies, and that basically includes everyone who isn't a Trump supporter. Some of you will tell me I'm oversimplifying. I'm not. It really is that simple. Now, does anyone have a solution to this problem? I don't.
4
Trump lacks the class, grace & charm of Obama but there are plenty of African-American Trump supporters, including many "Barbara Jordan" Democrats. Who understood and foresaw the negative impact on US citizens of all stripes, including African-Americans, from globalization combined with a de facto no borders policy to welcome as many of the world's 7.2 billion to the US as can make it here.
Just as the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were passed in 1964 and 1965, LBJ and the Democrats passed 1965 Immigration Act that has provided for turbo-charged chain migration from all over the world, especially from poorer nations with less education. Although there is some evidence the Democrats did this strategically as counter-weight to demographically undermine and dilute the power of the new rights finally granted to African-Americans, there is also evidence to the contrary and it's debatable. However, whatever the motivation, by the early 1990's, the impact on African-American communities, including in the labor market, was too great to ignore and thus civil rights champion Barbara Jordan realized it was necessary to reform chain migration, cut legal immigration & end illegal immigration.
For the Barbara Jordan Democrats among the 290 million plus US citizens, be they African-American, Native American, Hispanic American or European American, Donald Trump most closely embodied the recommendations & conclusions of Ms. Jordan's leadership on immigration.
1
Hard to talk with people that know everything isn’t‘ it?
1
Mr. Brooks -
The person you describe in your last paragraph was Barak Obama.
10
Exactly!
Btw - where was your adamant and sustained denunciation of “birtherism”?
David, you missed the boat.
3
David,
I have nothing to add to today's op-ed it is as good coherent and accurate as anything you have ever wrote. All I can say is it is tough growing old but sometimes it is good when we forget where we hid the Hemlock.
1
Gosh, David!!
That sounds so amazingly great!!
Such a simple solution!!!
I assume you will be the person that will spearhead this change to the Republican Party ... as you are such a man of the republican base.
1
Please, David Brooks, use the f-word: fascism. It has been sidelined by misappropriation in political disputes about which the the "badder" party.
Fascism is real. It is happening here. The sequence of events that define it as a series of actions that appear different in their guises and clothings in different countries is now taking place.
The traditional GOP is being eviscerated from within by Bannon and Trump; the plan is to replace democratic institutions with fascist institutions by replacing them, defunding them, or replacing the personnel with those who declare loyalty/fealty to the leader who embodies "the people." It is a third way and it is happening.
For an analysis, see Robert O. Paxton and an article in the Spring 2017 journal of _Terrorism and Political Violence_. There are several very good scholars who recognize what is happening.
"Populism" is proto-fascism, and fascism is an exaggeration of what you call, euphemistically here "tribalism." Until we call it what it is, we will remain behind the curve and without a clear strategy. The key is recognition and resistance.
10
The only way to defeat Trump is to shame him an shatter his ego! All the media should shame him, refuse to cover most of his insane comments and he should be banned from twitter as a threat to national security! Come on, he is a threat to the entire world. A golf trophy for the hurricane victims!!?? This is the best he can do? Blame the people of PR for their mess??!! Exponential insanity is running the country.
3
Don’t take the bait
Don’t react to all his and the GOP’s feints
Mueller is closing in.
1
Mr. Brooks:
I, too, miss those days of American greatness. Where's Johnny Appleseed when you need him? You need to stop yearning for a time that never was and get on with reality. The republican party is wholly un-American, at least the America you are selling here. Their actions, or lack thereof, are despicable because they are despicable. How is your ulcer doing?
5
Frontier? There's no more frontier Mr. Brooks. While your analysis of the Republican establishment is accurate your analysis of "Trumpism," as you call it, misses the mark. We are Americans. We are not racists. We do not want to shrink from the world stage. And most importantly, we're not stupid. Trump took advantage of the DC and media elite that has been dishonest and manipulative toward Americans by exposing it in such ways that has scratched that long neglected itch for honesty instead of PC drivel.
1
David Brooks for president, or convince the man I hired on June 20, 1966, he tells me, my old friend Mike Bloomberg, to shed his company, delegate his foundation - and give that leadership to the nation that inspired him to publish the last sale better and faster.
Mike likes to say, 5'7", Jewish and divorced. I just laughed. Mike, who cares? You can do this nation more good than any I know, and you have what David Brooks is asking for.
Ask David to be your White House staff person with his University of Chicago education. That campus saved my life, gave me an education, did the same for my wife of 57 years, and I'd be pleased to join David if you get me back to the farm on weekends, please.
David, might you and Mike have a powwow? Tony Milbank and I spoke of things this week. He knows Michael. He loves my friend. And the nation would love him, too, if he would just relax and be his delightful, wise, intelligent, creative, courageous and witty self.
David, you have defined the problem. Might you and the man I hired give thought to the solution?
Gov. John Kasich might want to help. He gets it, for the most part. Sen. Ben Sasse, too. And there are some nifty Democrats running things here and there. We might want to opt for a new generation and a balanced game plan that would honor dialogue for a change.
Mike ran New York City well. Perfect? No... but very well. Would he need the best minds to help him? Who wouldn't?
David, Mike's our man. Let's roll..
Sandy
2
Oh sure. A philosophical argument to convince those who have absolutely no idea what a philosophical argument is.
5
What a sophomoric treatise! This GOP, the one now in the majority in Congress and controlling the White House, is owned by their wealthy donors like the Kochs and Mercers, powerful industry lobbyists including oil and healthcare, Christian evangelicals, the NRA and thanks to Trump, Vladimir Putin and the Russians. They mouth the words of inclusion and concern for those less fortunate, but their actions betray their true motives to reduce or eliminate vital government programs for the poor and disadvantaged. As long as GOP leaders remain silent in the face of Trump's racist, divisive statements, they are as wrong as he is.
4
David Brooks for president, or convince a man I hired on June 20, 1966, he tells me, my old friend Mike Bloomberg, to shed his company, delegate his foundation - and give that leadership to the nation that inspired him to publish the last sale better and faster.
Mike likes to say, 5'7", Jewish and divorced. I just laughed. Mike, who cares? You can do this nation more good than any I know, and you have what David Brooks is asking for.
Ask David to be your White House staff person with his University of Chicago education. That campus saved my life, gave me an education, did the same for my wife of 57 years, and I'd be pleased to join David if you get me back to the farm on weekend, please.
David, might you and Mike have a powwow? Tony Milbank and I spoke of many things this week. He knows Michael, too. He loves my friend. And the nation would love him, too, if he would just relax and be his delightful, wise, intelligent, creative, courageous and witty self.
David, you have defined the problem. Might your and the man I hired give some thought to the solution?
John Kasich might want to help. He gets it, for the most part. Ben Sasse, too. And there are some nifty Democrats running things here and there, we might want to opt for a new generation and a balanced game plan that would honor dialogue for a change.
Mike ran New York City very well. Perfect? No... but very well. Would he need the best minds to help him? Of course.
David, Mike's our man. Let's roll..
Sandy
2
Sorry Mr. Brooks, I don't recognize the Republican Party you describe. I am 57; over my entire adult (since Nixon's "southern strategy"), the Republican Party has stood for rewarding their rich/corporate donors with tax cuts and stoking racist and nativist bigotry to trick poor uneducated whites to vote against their economic interests. Along the way they have started unnecessary wars, been the "party of stupid" (denying climate science), worked their hardest to impede a functioning civil safety net or reproductive rights, and now they are trying to tell us yet again how lowering tax rates on the rich will create jobs. They were obstructionist when out of power and incompetent when in power.
8
God help us! Rudy Giuliani supported Trump because of his populism? And Christie? And bankers? Libertarians? Hedge fund managers? And Evangelicals who insist on Creationism? Catholics who bend the knee to Rome on abortion? And a worse assumption: the "deplorables," the white supremacists, the KKK, the racists, are susceptible to philosophy? The 78K voters who made the difference in three states, or the 1.44 million who made the difference in six states, for a bonus of 127 Electoral College states--will they be the targets of Russian-directed social media next time? Let's get the last election straight in our heads before we pontificate about the next.
2
Please David. The Republican Party stopped being the party of Lincoln by 1880 and embraced the robber barons and has held to its "philosophy" that if we just make the rich richer, it will solve all of our problems. I'm afraid your column smacks of desperation, the desperation of a man who has lost his party and is trying not to lose his soul.
JD
7
The Republican party hasn't come anywhere close to doing any of the things Mr. Brooks says in the last, oh, 50 years or more. To pretend that it has been a party of genuine reform within living memory is, to put it politely, deceptive.
9
The Republicans do have a message, contrary to Trump's populism. That message, which Trump now seems to embrace, is that tax cuts for the wealthy, and less government effort at reducing inequality, will make American lives better. Hence the 30 or 40 years of efforts to weaken and destroy unions. Hence the desperate efforts to repeal the ACA and gut Medicaid, leaving 'deficit reductions' that could be funneled into tax cuts, focused overwhelmingly on the to 1-2%. Hence the destruction of environmental, workplace, financial, and education regulations. Those who profit get more, while those who were protected by regulations are losers. Trump hates losers. Hence the current "tax reform" framework, that reads like a wealthy real estate investor's wish list. Trump talks a populist line, but like so much of Trump's talk, it is all lies. When Trump's core base catches on, they'll realize he's not on their side.
4
As poetry, this is a great column. When we start to get back to reality, I have three immediate thoughts:
1) The person you describe in this column could reasonably be said to be Bernie Sanders.
2) American history is riddled with racism, bigotry, and hate; we took this land from Native Peoples and built the country with African slaves... ignoring this is a large part of our current problem.
3) The GOP as you remember it no longer exists, and hasn't for quite some time; in a two party system, when one party goes completely off the deep end, they pull the whole country in with them.
8
This mythical overview somehow skips over the long-time Republican resistance to Civil Rights and equality, and the failure of loyal Republican newspaper columnists to fight back at any time from the 60's onwards against elitist tax policies or propaganda opposing labor unions and government regulation of unsafe or toxic business practices.
All of the above paved the way for Trump, who manages to embody the common Republican bigot and corrupt businessman and transform him into a star turn on TV. If only he were just that and not our actual President who has no way of operating without injecting his own grandiosity into every difficulty we might otherwise recognize and deal with. He, too, is a man of mythology and would no doubt nominate himself as King of the American Dreamers.
So it's sad to me but not surprising that Mr. Brooks' wants to address Trump's tissue of lies in mythological terms only, on a battlefield where no one can triumph and where fatuous oratory will usually carry the day.
3
The frontier is not the core American idea, unless you've run out of them. The frontier is no more core than immigrant New York, the dream of California, or any other set of half-articulate fantasies in our discourses and films. The core American attitude is silly optimism about the construct of the individual. If anything, it might do American hubris some good to understand what "receding greatness" means. You mix your fantasies, Brooks. Benjamin Franklin in the frontier? Are you kidding? He couldn't mount a horse. Frederick Douglass in teh frontier? Is this some kind of alt-history joke? The Republicans didn't begin championing social mobility - that wasn't even an idea at the time. You don't need further refutations. Your party created the conditions - culturally, politically, socially, institutionally - that gave Donald Trump the platform to seize power and mangle our world.
You know who's a failure, Brooks? You.
2
What's needed to defeat Trump is a heroic Republican in the House of Representatives to file impeachment papers. Where one leads, many will follow. This house of cards can be toppled.
4
This is hilarious. The GOP has been protecting bigots and prosecuting immigrants for decades. It wants to spent on enterprising young families? Those enterprising young families that say, run bodegas? I'd love to buy tickets to Brooks' fantasy or at least find out what he's taking to give himself these warm fuzzy nostalgic dreams of a party gone wrong. More likely he's been wrong on every issue for decades, realized it only recently, and has been back peddling so fast that he may have just past the founding fathers on his way to the age of enlightenment. Say hi to Voltaire there Davey.
3
At the end, when you describe what the Republican Party is "supposed" to be - well, that GOP never existed in my time, and I am well into my 60s. It's not dormant - it is as dead as a doornail. If you want a GOP as you describe, you will have to work incredibly hard to get it, because it isn't what most Republicans seem to want. They want to be and remain the rich oligarchs, hoarding every bit of wealth that's available, and the rest of us can just die off as they take away our health care. Wake up, Brooks. You're still living in your own political fantasy.
5
This is as romanticized as a bodice ripper. This is the party people tell themselves exists; they use this idealistic view to justify the inattention of conservatives to the general welfare of the people, and now the well-being of democracy.
Mr. Brooks, I'm having a hard time reading this fanciful column a week after you denigrated Taylor Swift in an inapt comparison to the humility of Chance the Rapper. I suspect you know little of either performer. Taylor Swift has been on the world's stage since age 15, and has behaved with grace and humility.
Chance the Rapper has a brand, just like TS does. Humility is one of it's features. He's a charming young man.
Swift's new album, and her success generally, has met with harsh criticism, mostly of her perceived attitude. I perceive that her biggest mistake is to be a young woman who is slaying the entertainment world.
Meanwhile, her new video, "Look What You Made Me Do," has broken viewing records on You Tube, as her videos usually do. Pop/rap are probably issues better covered by a fan. Maybe someone more familiar with what it takes to succeed in music, and how successful Swift is.
2
So your compelling response to the antiglobalist narrative is "But globalism"? In response to white, non-urban American tribalism, "But America isn't tribal?"
Way to confirm there can be no meeting of the minds. If all you have to combat their axioms are your axioms, there is no discussion, just a shouting match. Or more likely, two entirely separate conversations with fellow travelers.
You need to identify values prior to the high abstractions of liberal universalism, or (for the other side) parochial identity politics, on which you agree, to then argue that your vision for the world is more faithful to those values, or more successful in bringing about a better world.
You haven't done that. No one is doing that. And so, no one is talking.
4
Where and when will the David Brooks assault on Trumpism begin? And the foundational corruption of McConnell and Ryan? And the anemic press?
2
Whenever Brooks describes his nonexistent fantasy Republican, this imaginary being sounds a lot like Barack Obama -- a Centrist who champions rational policies that encourage a dynamic, mobile society (e.g. affordable health care). You have to go back to before Reagan to find such Republicans, such as Oregon governor Tom McCall. Maybe after 40 years it's time to give up the search and declare the species Homo Rational GOP extinct. Ain't no such Republican who believes in education, immigration and regulatory reform (as opposed to tax cuts for the rich).
3
the republicans do have a story to tell. the story they tell is about how the rich top 1 percent who own the vast majority of wealth in the country need more money. they need to pay less in taxes so that magically some of their wealth will trickle down to the rest of us and enrich our lives. this story is a complete fiction and trump is one of its most ardent purveyors. typically enriching the already wealthy is not foremost on the populist agenda. so what are the populist themes that have empowered trump. they are white nationalist supremacy and racial bigotry. the republicans have set the country up for this and they own it.
3
It takes courage to stand up to the tribalism that has taken over the GOP, just as it was difficult for Southern Democrats with a conscience to stand up to the racism that their part embraced during much of the 20th Century. It really wasn't until Democrats effectively kicked the racists out by enacting the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s that moderate Democrats of the "New South" like Terry Sanford and Jimmy Carter took their party back. The racists didn't disappear; they just joined the other party, which welcomed them with open arms. There are no progressives left in the GOP, but there remain some moderate voices, most of whom seem to be suffering from severe laryngitis. They need support from opinion leaders, maybe from Democratic colleagues, and perhaps from the Supreme Court on gerrymandering in order to stand up to the tribalists without fear of political extinction. Will they do it?
2
A lot of people are criticizing Brooks for painting too idyllic a picture of the Republican party. I think that's mostly beside the point. Brooks is proposing a kind of idealism that can be used to counter the tribalism that allowed Trump to emerge. I'd like to know what people think about that. I want to learn how best to assault Trumpism. Whether the ideas are or are not truly Republican might make an interesting footnote to the discussion. But I want to know how best to assault Trumpism.
This coming from a Republican who generally agrees with the Republican policies of the past 40 years that have brought us to this point. Typical Republican, preaching the democratic ideal while governing like an autocrat.
Give me a break.
5
Let's see: Mr Brooks wants Trump and his merry band to say No to tribes, Yes to universal nation, No to fences, No to closed, Yes to open futures. . ..Sorry even if Trump and his gang just acted as though they cared, I just don't see it.
Do you have another inspiring formula?
The reckless stonewalling of Merrick Garland and the installing of Neil Gorsuch to the highest court in the land smashed all semblance of traditional fair play.
When an institution as venerated as the Supreme Court is corrupted it sends a message to the public about behavior and what's acceptable.. I'm not sure about fish but a Nation definitely rots from the head down..
5
IN 2016 Hillary Clinton struck fear into every plausible candidate with the "guts" to declare for such a future vision. Nonetheless, one arose from nowhere and at times, despite her having locked up the nomination in advance with her superdelegates, had her on the ropes. There may be some in the democratic - or even the republican - party who can respond to this call. But unless the political parties provides for opportunities to complete we will be left more or less where we were in 2016: an unappealing democrat and a terrifying republican.
Brooks is using symbols like "Frontier" that politicians sometimes use - e.g. Clinton's "Bridge to 21st Century". Yes, the narratives built around such symbols can be important to citizens, though I'm reminded of a finding in the 1970s that 50% of people can't really think abstractly (so those of us teaching economics at the time had to consider starting over, my professor/boss said). That guesstimate goes a long way to explaining why so many Americans are taken in by the looking backwards to alleged "greatness" that Trump/GOP tapped into. I prefer Obama's symbolic comment about the GOP: they look in the rear-view mirror and think it is the windshield. More importantly, part of the 21st century narrative needs to include how we learn to live within limits, such as the ecological limits we are very rudely breaking for decades to come by increasing greenhouse gases 40% more than natural levels, plus nitrogen cycle disruption, and ocean declines and many other fronts where we are playing with fire. The economist Kenneth Boulding called out in 1966 that we still have a "cowboy" economy that ignores limits, whereas we actually need to realize we must devise a "spaceship" economy to live within limits. Until political leaders help us understand how to make this transition, long ago seen by wise people like Boulding, Herman Daly, Al Gore, et al. we are just rearranging the deck chairs of a sinking ship. It doesn't have to be painful, but if we keep delaying, it will be.
3
"The core American idea is not the fortress, it’s the frontier. First, we thrived by exploring a physical frontier during the migration west, and now we explore technological, scientific, social and human frontiers."
Exponential population growth has used up the available real estate and technological and scientific frontiers are being denigrated by the free market. Only scientific breakthroughs that generate a profit have value.
Efficiency is out of the question. Spending less on health care and getting better outcomes a pipe dream. Vehicles that go twice a far on a gallon of gas are obviously not good for Detroit or Exxon. But we can still innovate. Our latest example on display; make an assault rifle spew even more bullets.
In the end it may not be philosophy. Resources are becoming limited and no one seems to know that better than the Grand Old Privateers. who are very busy trying to funnel it to their major donors.
The problem here is not only that this is pure myth. America was never a meritocracy. We don't have nine justices all from Harvard and Yale because those are the only two law schools of merit. Trump/Pence is the first successful national ticket without someone from Harvard or Yale since Carter/Mondale. We have a very narrow, parochial ruling elite. That is not a myth, that is a reality. Until the monopoly on power of that ruling elite is broken, the real divisions of interest between people in this country will not get resolved because most people will only be parties to the discussion as pieces to be manipulated in the ruling elites internecine struggles for power.
1
Yes, David, thank you. I remember the Republican Party too, when it was known for integrity and fiscal responsibility. But I also remember the Democratic Party when it stood for working stiffs and people who were down on their luck.Today, the Democrats are still looking for a message after seven-eight years of losing in state houses all across the country. And the Republicans, with control of both houses and the WH? Harry Truman might call them the "Do Nothing Congress," but my guess is he'd use stronger words.
1
The republican party is supposed to stand for something positive but thanks to Ronnie, "Government is the problem" and Mitch, "Our number one priority is to make Obama a one term president" the only thing the GOP stands for today is devision.
United we stand, divided we fall. This is the beginning of our Fall. We read about the Fall of the Roman empire in school. Today we live the Fall of the American empire.
Thanks Mr. Brooks for your beloved GOP.
4
Our economy and technology are rapidly changing. Trump's supporters hate that change, but it is unstoppable. He lies and talks of a rollback to times that only existed on a TV where all married couples slept in twin beds. They love it.
Figure 25% are never going to stop believing that lie. Write them off. Appeal to the 70% who can understand what is happening. 25+70=95. Figure 5% will back Trump because they can make money out of his corrupt regime. Hammer them with the 70%.
1
The game of genocidal musical chairs didn't start with American pioneers. Yes, the American frontier decimated the native populations. But those existing native populations had decimated the previous native populations to succeed as well. I live in a beautiful place where the Irish kicked out and killed the Mexicans, the Mexicans kicked out and killed the Chumash, and the Chumash kicked out and killed an exogenous tribe with four phonetic names, which no doubt had done the same to the previous tribe. So what do we do, dear readers? You tell me.
The Republican Party described here has never existed in reality. The Republican Party of reality is one that is racist and sexist to its core, caring only about tax cuts for the rich and privileged.
David,
This nightmare will be over when thinking Republicans join together with the Democrats and put an end to it. You can't co-opt these nutters and getting rid of Mitch McConnell who is the lead problem when it comes to inability to compromise is the first step. It's time for all "good Republicans" to start working with the Democrats or just become Independents and work for what's best for the Republic and not what's best for an embarrassment of a party.
1
"As a result, the Republican Party is becoming a party permanently associated with bigotry. It is becoming the party that can’t govern."
-Please correct tenses: has been, has long been. -Ed.
6
"It may be dormant, but this striving American dream is still lurking in every heart. It’s waiting for somebody who has the guts to say no to tribe, yes to universal nation, no to fences, yes to the frontier, no to closed, and yes to the open future, no to the fear-driven homogeneity of the old continent and yes to the diverse hopefulness of the new one."
ummm... someone did say it in 2016: Hillary Clinton. and many (majority) or us did agree and voted for it.
1
I find great wisdom in your points and appreciate the historical foundation of your column. I agree that the we need to enable people who want to dedicate themselves, through education and discipline, to conquering new frontiers. The Republican Party has indeed undermined this spirit. But to embolden discoverers and builders, we need leadership that also respects and promotes compassion, consistency, truth, justice and equality. The GOP's politics of divide and conquer have poisoned these core values, and too many people are not performing their duties as responsible voters; too many have failed to demand truth, honesty and fair representation in government. Instead of being rational skeptics and inquiring voters, too many have accepted the ruling party's politics of manipulation and division. Send in the cavalry.
1
Interesting that the "shared biblical morality" of the Republican party is now being used by that same political entity to further the tribalism and white nationalism inherent in Trumpism. Could it be that it never was a unifying force in our country's history but, rather, just another form of insider-outsider tribalism?
2
I really enjoyed reading this column. Although you are taking some flak for viewing the past through what some might describe as rose colored glasses I think overall you are right on target about both what characterizes this great nation and the dangers of the reactionary nationalist alt right tsunami that threatens to destroy it. Thanks for putting a hopeful and positive spin on what often seems to me like an extremely bleak situation. I definitely agree that the GOP has gone into a steep nose dive that they had better pull out of soon if they want to survive as a political party in what is still nominally a democracy. (At least it still was last time I checked. In the current political climate the survival of the American Democratic Experiment is no longer something I take for granted.) Finally thank you for speaking the truth about the GOP.
"The Republican Party is becoming a party permanently associated with bigotry. It is becoming the party that can’t govern. And as a bonus, Trumpish recklessness could slide us into a war with North Korea that could leave millions dead."
Yup. So good to hear from a self identified conservative who doesn't mindlessly parrot GOP talking points, is capable of thinking independently and isn't intellectually dishonest.
2
Trump and Trumpism very much reminds me of McCarthyism. McCarthy's strategy of blaming political opponents and decent people of communist activities worked until finally Joseph Welch stood up and asked McCarthy the simple question: "At long last, have you left no sense of decency?". Who will be the Joseph Welch of our age?
2
"Trump himself is unhindered while everyone else is frozen and scared."
That is true for Republicans, I guess, but I can tell you that Democrats in my neck of the woods are energized to put forth candidates that can in 2018. Many in our growing, changing red state have had enough of the corruption and inability to govern that Republicans symbolize these days.
I have heard from scores of people over the last year that they can no longer be Republicans, even though that is their life-long affiliation. They can't tolerate the corruption, the do-nothing-ness, the refusal to pass reasonable laws they've seen the past eight years.
Some are joining Democrats to change our area, from the issues of gerrymandering to the issues of "walk-about money." Some are trying to work within their decimated Republican party.
Either way, times, they are a-changin'.
2
I find philosophical arguments a wasted effort in terms of Trump or his base. Their support for Trump does not flow from some philosophical proof. Rather, it has become a kind of axiom from which all other conclusions are drawn. Trump enjoys faith-based, not rational support. That's why Trump keeps demanding "belief" from his followers.
The solution to deal with the specific danger of Donald Trump is legal, not philosophical. It is impeachment. Anyone who knows of the impeachment of Bill Clinton and maintains that Republicans cannot justify impeaching Trump and forcing him to testify under oath about any number of things (from obstruction of justice to Russian collusion to his taxes to conflicts of interest) lacks imagination.
Put plainly, the reason Trump has not been impeached is not for lack of power, but lack of will on the part of self-described "patriots" to protect this country from an incompetent and openly malicious man. To say he was elected by will of the People is meaningless. After all, only those in office can be impeached. Trump is in office because of the election, but he REMAINS in office by the grace of the Republican Party and its pitiful political cowardice. As always, they simply do not want to have to stand behind anything they do and so they do nothing. And as always, the country pays the price.
1
Words, words and words!
Is there a selfless leader involved in real compassionate actions for common good?
David, until the tribe knows that it's allowed to walk all over anyone not a part of it, the tribe won't listen to a word you say. The tribe has never bought into the idea that all men are created equal and that everyone should have the same opportunity.
3
"It’s waiting for somebody who has the guts..." Well, there is guts out there, but is there wisdom? What kind of a person could unite the country? Obama won twice by landslides, but certainly was not able to unite the country.
Trump is dividing the country more than ever. TV popularity is not enough for the job.
I think it's going to have to be someone who can make us smile in spite of ourselves. Someone who can make us laugh at what we all know to be absurd. And do this everywhere he or she goes. And, be someone who goes everywhere: someone who stands up or sits down with people and leaves them smiling and laughing and shaking their heads.
That's right, I am talking about a philosopher.
The description of the Republican party you provide in your penultimate paragraph is foreign in my experience. When did this party exist? You certainly have more years of experience on me in this regard, but it feels odd to describe what the party is supposed to be when it's not even close for many years now. It strikes me as similar to claims that the GOP is the party of Lincoln, which may be technically historically accurate, yet is in practical terms disingenuous. Thank you for continuing to be a thoughtful voice in conservative politics, just keep in mind that at some point, if not aleeady, that phrase becomes oxymoronic.
1
Rejecting Trumpism would only partially solve the problems of today's Republican Party. There is also what I will call McConnellism - the rejection of bipartisanship in the service of ideological purity and a "my way or the highway" approach to governance, as most recently illustrated by the party's failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act by appealing exclusively to GOP legislators, with no Democratic input or participation whatsoever.
6
I haven't read through the 500-plus comments so far, but I suspect I might the one of the hundreds of people who replied to Mr. Brooks's stirring call for "somebody who has the guts to say no to tribe, yes to universal nation, no to fences, yes to frontier, no to closed, and yes to the open future, no to the fear-driven homogeneity of the old continent and yes to the diverse hopefulness of the new one" by pointing out that we had EXACTLY that in this country during the eight years of Barack Obama's presidency How could somebody write those words and not acknowledge that? What aspect of President Obama's political sensibility does not conform precisely with what Mr. Brooks is calling for? And look where we are now...
10
"This is a tribal story. The tribe needs a strong warrior in a hostile world. We need to build walls to keep out illegals, erect barriers to hold off foreign threats, wage endless war on the globalist elites.
Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story."
Pie in the sky. America has always been a refuge for tribalism, from the time of the Puritans, who came here "to worship God as they thought right and prevent others from doing the same." Ditto the colonies. The frontier represented the opportunity to be far enough away from everybody else to pursue tribalism undisturbed by diverse influences. After the frontier closed we still had rural and Southern tribalism. The problems that we are now having result from the encroachment of transportation, communication, and media on this fantasy of isolation. The "mobility" championed by traditional Republicans was in fact an expression of tribalism by means of social isolation and immobility.
The challenge for America will be to attain dynamism in the context of diversity and close quarters. Our old myths won't do.
3
"The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe. We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles..." Brooks, amazing you actually believe this. It seems that you are arguing and persuading with yourself that your nightmare will not come true.
Unfortunately for you and everyone else, history does not support your position at all. Everywhere one chooses to gaze one sees unending tribalism that transcends race.
The 1965 Immigration Act if anything made tribalism worse. It was a well-meaning attempt (maybe) and it failed in its attempt at making the US a propositional nation. Bemoaning the fact that different groups prefer their own group to others is too little and much too late. Tragically, diversity doesn't make anything more equal.
Brooks states that "we are not a tribe." I'm a Canadian and the most obvious difference between our country and the U.S is the extreme patriotism that exists below the 49th parallel. I've long believed that the U.S. had "cult-like" qualities with its citizens bound together by their flag waving, anthem honoring, military obsessed and gun-worshipping culture. Patriotism can be a positive quality. I've just always viewed the U.S. version as disturbingly over the top. As for Trump and the current environment, I'm pessimistic. I'm old enough to remember the 60's and 70's and the rise of progressive thinking and government. I've also witnessed its demise beginning in the early 80's. U.S. democracy has been irreversibly infiltrated and its politicians largely coopted by money, business and religious special interests. Individual morals, personal integrity and honesty and the instinct of people to value what's best for the community and greater good has given way to enthusiastic self-interest on the part of our consumerist citizens with their mindless worship of money, celebrity and power. Government is largely owned by special interests and our politicians are comfortably ensconced within the mindless self-serving economic-libertarian Ayn Rand/Friedman economic-social-cultural philosophy of the radical right. Alas, what Republicans do or don't do is largely irrelevant at this point. They are really not much different than Democrats. Neither are on the side of the people.
5
I agree David and for the last eight years we had a president that possesses all of the qualities you espouse. I can only imagine what Obama could have accomplished even with the GOP's lukewarm support.
3
Good analysis of present day but terrible lack of historical truth. How can you gloss over a genocide and the plunder of a landscape like this?
"First, we thrived by exploring a physical frontier during the migration west, and now we explore technological, scientific, social and human frontiers."
This land "Turtle Island", as it was known before the British and European invasions, was already occupied. Don't forget that.
It may be that the most important issue to Trump supporters is America as a fortress. If this is true, his supporters may tolerate failures in other areas as long as he appears the best defender of America as a fortress.
1
After having spent the burden of your column celebrating America’s past, your conclusion is nonsensical. You’re not actually arguing against “Trumpism”; you’re refining his paradigm. And you cannot escape the conflict between elitism and an open society.
1
"They tore down social, racial and legal barriers to give poor boys and girls an open field and a fair chance." Which prominent Republicans did this? C'mon...
3
David Brooks speaks of the Republican Party as if it were a fixable entity, when in fact, it's completely bankrupt, morally and philosophically. It's not a party that "is becoming . . .associated with bigotry", it is now the party of racism, bigotry and ignorance. In it's present state, there is no there there. The party needs to be reinvented on a platform of decency, not greed, and on fairness to all, not rewards to the !%.
4
.
DB, your ideas skate on the surface of the cultural problem. Go deeper:
1. American involvement in the Vietnam War shattered confidence in the US Government and showed this nation to be ADDICTED TO WAR – exactly what DDE warned against. The patriarchy lost the high moral ground and it will take more than a generation or two to earn it back.
2. The zeitgeist extends this idea to “ALL MEN ARE VIOLENT AND THEREFORE FLAWED and in the age of atomic weapons we cannot afford to risk the survival of the species by continuing with the status quo”.
3. Empowered by the flaws/blunders of the patriarchy as well as the freedoms gained through modern technology/medicine/invention (thank you men) American women are engaged in a power-grab. Unfortunately they appear to be scarce on big ideas, workable platforms or creative solutions to current problems – just a lot of blaming and claims of victimization. And they invite any and all beleaguered groups to join them in similar complaints against the white male and his legacy.
4. Meanwhile the younger generations are so steeped in sex, violence, misinformation and general rebellion … they cannot think straight and the very ideals the nation was founded on are forgotten. The matriarchal answer to this: dilute the curriculum by teaching social and emotional skills, K-12. (But how do you objectively grade those subjective topics?)
Welcome to the Matriarchal Shift – and all that it entails. There will be chaos.
1
Poppycock. We have never been a Universal Republic or anything like it. Mr. Brooks's vision of American history is appalling as it ignores the implications of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism on a nation of have and have not Pilgrims and immigrants. Slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow had more to do with informing our history than any Horatio Alger platitudes. I expect more from Mr Brooks, a brilliant, if conservative, mind that I generally respect.
5
The mistake is focusing efforts on Trump – he’s not about to change to satisfy anyone. What must change is the dysfunctional governance framework surrounding Trump, which is what MUST change if the price we paid for the election of Donald Trump ever will be redeemed by reforming the dysfunctional, frozen mess we created over the eight years preceding him.
David seems to realize this, as he centers most of his column on the arguments that move people, not specifically on Trump. Good: let’s talk among ourselves about those arguments.
It’s true that America is a “universal nation”, but it didn’t erupt as such full-grown from the forehead of Zeus. It took over 240 years, and it was marinating long before that, as well. Every step of the way progressive movement was countered by inertia and parochial interests and even evil, as in slavery and Jim Crow. What survived those counter-pressures made us what we are, that “universal nation”.
But every “populist” counterpoint since 2009 has been a reaction to what Republicans perceived as an excessive pace of change offered by Democrats. This is why Republicans have been credibly accused of lacking ideas: the right didn’t rise since 2009 to offer new ideas, but simply to counter what it saw as excess on the left. The current intense “populism” that Trump exploits is simply a more intense reaction to that same irritation, made more intense by the inability of elites to improve the lives of regular Americans.
3
All the good things that David extolls in the inherently Republican spirit are real and indeed still are there. But despite that, the theme that will dominate so long as the left seeks dramatic and rapid change on all fronts will be the same theme that has characterized our evolution into a “universal nation”: resistance to change that upends lives and calls for substantial sacrifice by some to empower the rise of others. What will succeed within our lifetimes will be some but not all of those efforts, just as we’ve seen throughout our history.
The trick is to reduce the number of goads to automatic resistance, allowing more of those productive elements of the Republican spirit to emerge again. That means Democrats need to pick their fights, make better arguments and demonize their natural adversaries less.
Converting tribalism into a “universal nation” isn’t easy, as we see from so many failed attempts all over the world. It’s something, when done successfully, that is done one piece at a time.
Excellent points, every one of them. Bravo!
1
Since when is the "whole point" of America that it is a "universal nation"? America's commitment to universal principles has always co-existed with the idea of America as a nation-state based on shared territory, language, religion, etc. The two concepts, creedal nation versus nation-state, have always been in conflict, but for most of our history the conflict was manageable because the religious and other differences that did exist were relatively minor compared with the immigration of the last few decades. The stresses are now so great that one or the other concept, it seems, will have to go. Brooks wants to just assume, without argument, that the creedal concept is best, and that once they are informed of this those attached to the nation-state will simply acknowledge it. It's not going to happen.
1
The GOP has become a European type political party skewed to a narrow ideology connected to winning votes even at the expense of the country as a whole.
They committed the same mistake the Weimar Republic made in 1933. The German establishment thought that by bringing Hitler into the government it would allow the mainstream politicians to control him and the country. We all know how that turned out. But the GOP did the same thing with Trump and continued to support him even after they saw he was beyond control.
The saddest part is, they continue to kowtow to him because they are afraid of their own re-election chances in primaries.
So once again, the GOP shows no profiles in courage and continues to put party over country.
5
Willie Horton,the Southern strategy,invading Iraq,and Trump's recognition of some"very fine people" among his neo Nazi supporters. Republicans focusing on athletes supposed disrespect for the flag and military rather then the reason they are protesting. The Republican party is a party dominated by old white men who use racism and bigotry. You are among the elite who have comfortably sat by and watched the Republican party use these tactics. The Republican party can only start to be rehabilitated when they abandon their base base.
2
Brooks ignores the historical fact that his party, since at least “government is the problem” Reagan, has based its entire electoral strategy and “philosophy” of governance on fomenting grievance, undermining faith in science, the press and government institutions, promoting ignorance, disenfranchising minorities, and aiding corporate criminality.
Far from being “the party of ideas,” it has instead been the party of greed, cynicism, arrogance, feigned moral piety and phony outrage .
They created the mob that now threatens to consume them. What a surprise.
But the damage being done threatens not just the Republican Party, which would
merely be justice, but the republic itself.
History should judge them very harshly. We will be generations trying to recover, if we can at all. For just as the world faces its greatest challenge in the face of global climate change, Republicans have essentially destroyed the only institutions that can effectively respond to it at a global scale.
The world’s largest economy is essentially ungovernable. Because that’s the Republican philosophy.
It’s a catastrophe.
13
Mr Brooks, your recent columns have been wonderfully grounded in realism--today you seem to be wallowing in myth. The Lincoln Republican's ideal of "free labor" was no vision of equal rights for all. Even the Radical Republicans couldn't quite let go of their concern for the property rights of the Southern planter class to follow through on any promise of "forty acres and a mule" for Freedmen and Southern yeoman farmer.
As for Westward Expansion, let's not forget massive railroad land grants and associated scandal...can you say Credit Mobilier? In the 1860s, speculators owned more Iowa farmland than "hard-working" homesteaders, and the story of the "individualistic" farmer was more often than not the story of being tied to the mortgage and saddled in debt.
Other than that brief period of TR style progressivism, what did Republicans do for the "wage slave", other than condoning the Gilded Age use of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act against labor unions rather than corporate monopoly, opposing New Deal labor reforms and introducing Taft Hartley?
Who authored the 1924 Immigration Act?
Certainly the historical record gives Democrats nothing to brag about for most of their history, but Republicanism had little or nothing to do with the tearing down of "social, racial and legal barriers to give poor boys and girls an open field and a fair chance." It still doesn't. Let's not kid ourselves-- the Republican legacy is best described by those well-known words of Mr. Coolidge.
1
Well, Mr. Brooks, your final paragraph seemingly describes our former President, Barrack Obama pretty spot-on. Why didn't that work out? The dream may still be lurking in every American heart, but to access this for too many of us you need to add "no to black, yes to white" to your list.
5
The story that David Brooks is trying to tell here is the story of liberalism. It's liberalism that values diversity, multi-culturalism, individualism, and economic mobility. Conservativism has gone back to its foundation of tribalism, racism, and authoritarianism. Liberalism is now under attack from populism of the Right and populism of the Left. The enlightenment project is a global project, not a national project. People who deny science and call for limited government in the face of higher populations, and greater urban growth and complexity are the ones going back to nationalism, fascism and tribalism. Liberalism is worth defending, it is the diversity and ethnic complexity of America that makes it great. E Pluribus Unum. The Japanese blocked immigration years ago and now they are saddled with population growth and a stagnant economy. That's what will happen to the U.S. if it goes down the Trumpian road.
7
"First, we thrived by exploring a physical frontier during the migration west, and now we explore technological, scientific, social and human frontiers."
Well, we thrived all right, but by stealing land and conducting a near-genocide on it, and getting rich off the backs of slave laborers.
2
The GOP is already dead. It just doesn't know it yet. David, all of those things you want the party to be - it's never going to happen. The patient is too far gone.
The only thing left is to let it die of natural causes. As time progresses, all of the angry white men (and women), holding onto their misshapen, false views of white/cultural persecution will finally die off. And they are not being replaced with enough of the like-minded. Thank God.
Instead, a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society is growing and will not be stopped. In 20 years, the sad Trumps, Mitch McConnells, and Jeff Sessions of this country will be dead and buried - swallowed up by the pragmatic, hard-working, realists that will re-build a more reasonable, tolerant and informed electorate.
I'll be gone, but I wish I could be there to see it.
6
The problem David, is that the GOP is "anti-philosophy". You see, they think it's SCIENCE.
1
This essay, though sincere, reminds me of the old film, "Lost Horizons". In it and in the novel on which it was based, travellers were rescued by the inhabitants of the original Shangri La. It was a beautiful place of arts and leisure. A truly paradise-like haven. EXCEPT... the entire enterprise relied on scores of silent, and often beautiful, servants who waited hand and foot on the privileged residents who were truly living the Shangri-la dream.
2
Yes, there is another philosophical basis to the. American story and that story did attract millions of young Americans, and old Americans as well. It was told by Bernie Sanders and is still told by Bernie Sanders. Let's make sure that the voting rights of all of us remain viable and that the actions of energized citizens transform ignorance into understanding.
3
Agree with the central theme in this article that division is the main enemy.But, what do you achieve by saying "Trump populists seek to widen divisions and rearrange fences?".
To only way to close those divisions is for both sides to make a sincere efforts to compromise and achieve a middle ground. Instead of bringing in party lines and taking sides, why not use the power of the pen to to make that happen?
Thank you, Mr. Brooks, for a wonderful and cogent explication of where we are now; and where we must strive to go in the future. As mistaken as you were in your previous column comparing Trump to Abbie Hoffman, I will give you great credit that a mind will evolve under criticism and scrutiny. What you put on paper in this column is what Mr. Hoffman embodied in his political philosophy that informed millions--me among them, a callow farm boy from SD, in the late 60's and early 70's. After his illegal bust for cocaine, Mr. Hoffman went underground and emerged as Barry Freed--the man who led disparate people in a movement that pushed back against the Army Corps of Engineers, and saved the pure waters of the St. Lawrence Seaway forever. Please read of his works and provide a correction to your misplaced criticism of a true patriot.
The predicted philosophy to be used against Trump, and the source from where this philosophy will emanate to have desired effect against Trump?
The source of the philosophy will be all we mean by Political Establishment. The philosophy itself is the philosophy which has been building up for years: The philosophy of Just War carrying to its logical conclusion. For decades it has been obvious to the U.S. that the most just, humane, successful way to wage a war is to contain a population, to have it controlled in action, to have it surveilled, to be able to surgically strike against aspects of it, to control communications throughout the population.
This philosophy will increasingly be implemented in the U.S. Establishment agrees far left and far right impulses are undesirable. That this or that group action is questionable. That the lone actor is a problem. And the Establishment agrees the written and spoken word must be controlled. Every day we see increased buildup of bureaucracy, pinpointing of movement of individual, knowledge of groups and individuals, increased targeting of every aspect of populace.
To join the Establishment is increasingly the only road to freedom, the road to privacy and unguarded, unwatched action. The U.S. of course has turned war into Nation Building. This same philosophy comes home. Patrol of population. Who gets chosen for Establishment and who does not. A male such as myself is a drone watched by drones and with little possibility of woman.
In the frontier days, we had lots of open, unsettled land for the taking (from First Americans) to establishing US control over the whole country (Manifest Destiny) and no welfare state. Today, land is costly and taxes for the social net are a burden to many. The lower American class is now in the same place as the First Americans were.
1
I cannot accept Brooks's portrait of the Republican Party. He tells half the picture. The other half is Russell Kirk's classic conservatism: Established hierarchy, an entrenched aristocracy, assigned roles for everyone. So the party has split, warring ideals. What else is new?
1
If Mr. Brooks is intellectually honest, then he must acknowledge that conquering the frontier meant invading and occupying lands long inhabited by Native Americans, who were subjugated in the process. That's a historical fact, which he seems to want to overlook.
4
The chatter of being "for' or "against" the 2nd Amendment is a waste of time. It is the meaning and 'ancient' context of the Amendment that should lead reasonable people to interpret it for our time. It was composed to defend against frontier enemies of its time. Its clear purpose was to enable militias to be formed and instantly armed when necessary, when those frontier enemies were threatening. raiding and war-like. A reamendment should clarify and annul the original 2nd for our time. Make that the 'battleground.'
2
They may have a story; it may even be a good story (though not really); but it is still a story built on a lie. Unfortunately, even your own story intended to replace it is built on a lie.
As with most people on the right - even those anti-trumpists such as yourself - seem unwilling to accept or admit the fact that America's core idea is not built on the ideas of a "frontier"; "exploration"; or the "migration west". Rather it was built on genocide, slavery, exploitation, grand theft on a continent wide scale, bigotry, and non-stop hate.
The time has come to stop looking backward to a time that never really existed except in our made up mythology and instead look forward to the kind of nation and people we want to be. Our Founders laid out something of a hope of what they wanted to be - as tainted as it was by their own many imperfections - but now is the time to turn that hope into a reality. It will never come from looking backward and the more our true nature is revealed by Trump and his followers - including the vast majority of Republicans quite willing to go along with it all - the more in doubt it will ever come.
That doesn't mean I have given up hope on the kind of nation I believe we can be but it does mean we have a lot of work ahead cut out for us to get there.
5
It's simply amazing that someone as intelligent as Brooks obviously is, can be so deluded. How can he make the statement, :They (Republicans) tore down social, racial, and legal barriers to give poor boys and girls a fair chance", without suffering massive cognitive dissonance? The Republicans have ALWAYS been about only one thing: erecting barriers and impediments against anything that threatens them. Brooks is proof that intelligence is not the same as being smart.
Beyond that, he is completely off in his prescription for battling Trumpism. It's not trying to sell some "vision" of what America is or could be, it's about laying out a practical philosophy that will address the very real problems that average Americans live with every day, and that they rightfully believe are being ignored by the Establishment. Most who voted for him, were actually voting AGAINST the Status Quo, represented by the Queen of Status Quo, Hilary. What these people want is for the powers that be to finally, actually work for them. Restoring jobs and wages that enable them to share in what they were told was the American Dream, but which has been co-opted by the "elites". So finally they sent a message so loud it couldn't be ignored - they elected a complete outsider. But while it was loud, the message wasn't clear. They didn't vote for Trump, they voted against the policies of the last 40 years. If you really want to stop Trumpism, undo those policies.
I do get tired of all the hatred directed willy-nilly at Republicans and Trump supporters in general.
Neurological studies consistently show that the more extreme conservative tends to think in black and white. However, the more liberal one is, the more complex one's thinking is.
So, are most of our commenters extreme conservatives?
Do you remember how, just after 9/11, many of the most liberal were saying, "We need to understand the perspective of those behind the bombings. This is not to condone their actions, but to understand what is behind their grievances."
Well, if you can suspend your anger long enough to understand terrorists, do you consider Trump supporters less than terrorists? Less worthy of your understanding?
I just read an article looking at the effects of private equity firms buying out of traditional brick and mortar companies - looking particularly at the effects on the community. The people in this small Ohio town were devastated. Many if not most of them did not have the benefits of the kind of education that people like gemli and socrates no doubt have had.
A woman in that Ohio town said, when asked about her Trump vote, "I just want it to be like it was." yes, she overlooked Trump's overwhelming flaws, but was in such pain, her capacity for empathy was diminished.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/toys-r-us-and-the-trump-voter
As Obama once said about Palestinians, "Put yourself in their shoes, see with their eyes."
1
Part of the populist story is correct. There is a snobbish elite rigging the game in its favor. Just look at the extreme lopsided distribution of wealth in this country.
1
What a fanciful, distorted record of American history. Like all fantasies, it is based on some glimpse of reality: about 30% by fast, rough estimate. May I refer conservative columnist Brooks to an Ur American source on the political economy: Richard Hofstadter's collection of illuminating biographies in his 1948 book "The American Political Tradition." Lincoln's is "A.L. and the Self-Made Myth." Hofstadter points out that Lincoln's boyhood before the Civil War did see an economic world close to that sketched out by Brooks here, but - capitalism is a dynamic system and the world of small producers and the effectiveness of their local helping networks disappeared in the Gilded Age Trusts, of democracy corrupted, with steel, railroads and banks dominating, along with Tammany like urban machines, including Republican ones in Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Readers would be better off watching "Boardwalk Empire" than Brooks' idealization, destroyed by the creative destruction of capitalism and its relentless tendency towards oligarchy and monopoly, which have not changed. Ask Piketty.
Brooks and his ilk count on the economic illiteracy, the lack of historical memory of the American people to spin his tales. It doesn't match what I read - or write. Wake up citizens. Reagan and Trump are giving you re-runs of the Gilded Age.
3
I'll say it again:
The excesses of ignorance and fear foster senseless anger, argument, anxiety and finally brutality.
3
"As a result, the Republican Party is becoming a party permanently associated with bigotry."....No, I quit the Party 40 years ago when it did that. Since Newt Gingrich the Republican Party has consistently been run by Dixiecrats who have regularly pandered to their bigot base. The Republican Party was founded on opposition to slavery and has since done a 180. In a like manner it has turned against many of its other former principles. The only thing that remains is the name and people like David Brooks keep clinging desperately to the Republican name, unable to admit it has become something they can no longer recognize and support.
7
Honestly Mr. Brooks what Republican Party are you referring to? The one you describe hasn't been seen in my adult lifetime if many decades.
Over the last quarter century I've known several people who grew up as Republicans then became independent or switched parties. All of them said, "I didn't leave the Republican Party; the Republican Party left me". I think they had concluded that the Party of Lincoln had turned into the Party of Jefferson Davis.
7
As David Brooks knows, nationalist and tribal forces are besetting not only America, but also England (Brexit), Spain (Catalonia), and other nations. Many years ago, sociologist Daniel Bell predicted that one of the central problems of governance in the 21st century would be that the nation-state is becoming too large for the individual and too small for the globe. The result would be a return to tribalism in the nation-state and an inability to form international agreements on nuclear weapons, control of the drug trade, climate change and other global problems.
Perhaps it is time for Brooks and other public intellectuals to focus on the scale and scope of the nation state and to explore whether both smaller and larger political entities might be better adapted to the technological forces that are contorting our long-standing political arrangements.
1
"Trumpist populist nationalism is still a rising force within the G.O.P., not a falling one. . . . As a result, the Republican Party is becoming a party permanently associated with bigotry."
That suggests a false choice between only two things possible, bigotry or what the DNC offered and NYT endorsed.
Populism is a rising force, but it has not always been bigotry.
An article here yesterday explained how it started in Alabama as poor farmers, black and white, against an abusive establishment that finally crushed them with overt racism and open economic sanctions via banks.
For a long time the political home of populism was with Gov., Sen., and Rep. Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, who defined LIBERAL populist.
Recently we've had Bernie Sanders, despised and ignored in the mainstream as far as they are able. That is not bigotry, but it is populism.
Populism is rising. Get on board that boat, or be left behind. Being left behind would mean leaving that boat to the bigots -- Why do that? Because the donors of the establishment just can't profit from it?
3
According the history I read, the original Populist leader was William Jennings Bryan, who denounced greedy banks, tried to give workers protection against their employers, and tried to keep the US at peace during World War I. But the only people remember now is that he was a creationist So now he is pigeonholed as a conservative, and so is the movement he led. What is "populist" about the movement that voted for Trump?
1
"The Republican Party," Brooks writes, "is supposed to be the party that stokes dynamism by giving everybody the chance to venture out into the frontier of their own choosing ... ." That reasoning suggests that the American vision today should also include universal health care because health costs stifle social mobility. That might not have been the case 100 years ago but it is certainly true today. The current system hurts small businesses and the mobile strivers Brooks cites as the foundation of America's greatness.
4
David Brooks speaks of a "shared Biblical morality" of the past. But what exactly is Biblical morality does not unite us but divides us today. Some say it is the Ten Commandments, strictures against homosexuality, does and don'ts, mostly don'ts, who is saved and who is not. Others, and I include myself here, say it is love of God and love of neighbor, inclusion, positive action to help the poor and the weak, Christian liberty from rules that hurt rather than help people. Sadly the first understanding gets the most press, but the second is alone what can heal and unite the nation.
6
Bad news for those of us who do not believe in God. Or do believe in separation of church and state. Take a look at the Middle-east today. Do you really want people who believe in God deciding how to govern you, especially if they don't follow your particular view of a hypothetical supreme being?
And I say that I am tired of being told that I have to believe in a God I don't believe in.
The commentary here is, like the inspirational "stories" it enunciates, is just a story too; full of Pinocchio checkable facts and omissions. America's history and current predicament defy summary in a few paragraphs.
The way out is not simple but it is doable. Those in the country that have decided the stupid shall inherit the earth must be superseded by the truly capable.While the insanity of this weekend's politics and Vegas were happening, the absolute brilliance of six Americans brought home Noble prizes in Medicine and Physics.
America is ready and to do what is necessary.
4
David, this is a highly skewed image of the frontier--pure Frederick Jackson Turner. It ignores that the frontier was the place for slaughtering first nations and shooting bison for sport. It is also a highly skewed version of the Republican Party's past. Yes, Republicans believed in free labor and ending the expansion of slavery. Republicans also ended Reconstruction and allowed the virtual re-enslavement of a large fraction of Southern Blacks. Not to mention the fact that they were the party i power for the long and bloody war against Philippine independence. Stay balanced. Your picture of the national past and its philosophy is too rosy here.
9
America is different from all other nations in one thing: we do not derive our identity from history but from the present.
France is all about what is french, and the same can be said about every other place but America. America is about making something for yourself, of yourself in the moment, it doesn't matter where you came from and what you are, it only matters what you do.
America is to young to have a history that defines its cultural heritage, we define our cultural heritage by living in the moment and moving onto the next, together, each with our own idea, our own vision, our own energy that adds up to who we are, one day at a time.
If you ever wanted to disrupt this thing other have called the "American Experiment," which is really just life in America, then Donald Trump is your man.
2
David,
You need a new prescription for your glasses and pass on the rose tinted lenses.
America is now a plutocracy and well on its way to a timocracy, which the Supreme Court may well sanctify in the up coming term. The decline into a banana republic status will continue unabated. The Republican Party has nothing to offer but politcal and cultural decline.
R
7
Here comes that dreary ditty that runs through Brooks' head. The squeaky, thready refrain goes like this:
Trump isn't republican. Trump's an aberration, wouldn't go anywhere. Wouldn't get nominated. Couldn't get elected. Shouldn't be able to blow up the country because the GOP Congress will do what it does best: ignore him as they do with any serious problem. Also usually of their making.
Nah, according to Brooks, Trump isn't emblematic of the GOP but only of mob that elected him and stick to him like lice no matter what. That mob which has some mythical legitimacy.
Nah, Brooks says, the country was built on better principles and values than Trump's and his mob. He trots out the old black and white, Way the West Was Won myth, spins the notion that Trump's mob has a well-articulated gripe.
But the Trumpite rabble are merely angry about and annoyed with anybody who isn't them, who's richer, more privileged, better educated, live in nicer, not flyover places, do 'elite' jobs. Women who get themselves pregnant. Born elsewhere.
The GOP spawned Trump and his bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, ultra-silly religious, easily-influenced, fake news gluttonous rabble.
Trump may be a hideous outlier, one can only hope, but he's GOP through and through, and he's a monster creating mini-monsters throughout the land. Thanks GOP. Heckuva confafe ...
17
".....who stick to him like lice." Could not have stated it better. You are correct about the Trumpists who are angry about "anybody who isn't them." I live in a Red State and I've met these people at work, in my church and elsewhere. Some are my relatives. They are kind and generous with people they know and trust. Some have college degrees. But then there is this atavistic, reactionary fear of, as you said, "anyone who isn't them." It's depressing and heartbreaking. Trying to reason with them only makes them angry and refuse to talk. I am almost 71, and can never remember anything quite this bad, even in the late 60's -early 70's, which were indeed pretty dreadful and scary.
2
What do you have to say about toleration of extremism? There's an old saying: ain't nothing in the middle of the road but dead critters. Without a culture that moderates extremism and teaches civility and respect for a public good, any group becomes dominated by extremists. History informs us that once they rise to power, they are very hard to stop. But they must be stopped. Right now, sadly, we're having a hard time recognizing them, since, as another old sayin' puts it: them is us - a big part of us, about 40% on a bad day it seems. Power and money corrupts and you can buy a lot in this country. We are only slowly learning how to better recognize lies that are a daily assault in most places online. More and more we must come to listen and view from: is that really true or is someone trying to manipulate me?
5
An appealing and reasonable sounding analysis of Americas ,current, disfunctional leadership and resulting disintegration of government function and competence.......by Mr Brooks......with the "good old philosophical ideals" of the Republican party ,like faintly blinking neon , providing the nostalgic basis and hope for political renewal.
Unfortunately the truth is outside the box of political philosophy and alarmingly simple............Today the politically entrenched,corporotocracy(the 1% wealthy elite) have "purchased" the two party political system and all its "franchises",even down to the level of small town officials,when required.......the equivalent situation to that found in pre-revolutionary America,when ruled by the 1% of the colonial British monarchy.
Of course,so many, hard fought rights,freedoms and privileges have been gained, by the American people since the Revolution of 1776,that their gradual,clandestine, erosion(by the legally institutionalized opportunistic corruption of politics) has been publicly invisible.That is, until the Russian,twitter,facebook,racist,and corporat billionaire backed Trump was "tweaked" into power.
Don the Cons blatant "trade" of the USA to Russia,to control of corporations a self serving "billionaires"....is not a philosophical problem ...it is criminal and treasonous greed,which should lead to criminal indictments,prosecution and(if there are patriots left in congress) impeachment !
2
Mr. Brooks tells us who failed to stop Trump, and how they failed. He then goes on to describe the shining story of opportunity and freedom that ought to be told to counter Trumpism.
Stop right there, David Brooks, at who tried to stop Trump and how they failed. Trump is a multiple bankruptcy law abuser. He cheats the small contractors who built his casinos. He cheats his partners in business, and very likely the US tax system. He lies endlessly, and suggests to "you 2nd amendment people" that they consider violent response to a "rigged" system.
The way to stop Trump was clear. Any woman or man of decency in the Republican party or conservative media had to speak out strongly. We know about the Wall St. editorial on Trump, and other pundits. Pfooey. You had to stop the bigot and fool and cheat and liar by calling him out for what he was. His supporters felt good voting for him, due in large part to deranged Hillary hatred. If you saw Trump clearly, you MUST have spoken out on Ms. Clinton's behalf.
The failure to call the loathsome cheat and liar a cheat and liar gave cover to voters and even politicians -yes you, Mike Pence-to vote for him and endanger every tenuous hope many of us have for the future. We'd like a clean planet that isn't broiling and flooded. We'd like fewer guns for sale to any unhinged killer. We don't think a nuclear war and a vast dust cloud is positive. Tmidity failed us, Mr. Brooks, and possibly failed the whole world.
15
Brooks makes it look like GOP was glowing with ideas before Trump. A casual reader of the National Review (so called pinnacle of conservative thought) will find how hollow these claims are.
7
The United States would not exist without the forced removal and extermination, deliberate or not, of Native Americans, nor without the forced labor of slavery. This is a blood debt that undermines all of our moral aspirations. Until we pay it, it will continue to haunt us, and make a mockery of all who strive to lift our country out of its meandering malaise of the soul.
"... this striving American dream is still lurking in every heart." Uh, no.
5
"The only way to beat Trump is to beat him philosophically."
David, lovely column, but wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to start. First, though, you really should go back and read -- or re-read -- Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"; it will clarify for you some of the misconceptions you attribute to the formation of the "American" character/spirit.
Having worked as one of the few black professional staffers in the US Senate during the late '70s, it was apparent then that a shift in Republican philosophy was underway, evidenced in Nixon's 'Southern Strategy,' with its subtle race-baiting and bigotry. Outright bigotry/race-baiting/misogyny became the Republican norm through Lee Atwater's work for Reagan and George H.W. Bush during the 1980's.
As more moderate Republicans left -- or were forced -- from the national political scene during the '80s, the vacuum created by those forces suctioned in the likes of Newt Gingrich. Gingrich's 'Contract with America' was, as Wikipedia points out, "... a political ploy and election tool designed to have broad appeal while masking the Republicans' real agenda and failing to provide real legislation or governance' and foreshadowed what is happening in the Republican Party today, emphasizing the very divisions you articulate in your piece.
The so-called 'populism' of Donald Trump is a direct result of the inbreeding Republicans continue to engage in today.
7
Republicans are not just the party of bigotry, they are the party of cruelty and indifference. As such, they need to be defeated, only not by 45 and his minions. A party that spends months trying to take away health care and follows that up by a blatant attempt to pad the coffers of the rich at the expense of everyone else deserves to go down in ignominious flames, along with its leader. Forty five may profess his love for the "little people," but the tax plan he's promoting should give opponents a powerful narrative of their own.
5
In his usual conventionality Brooks overlooks that both Dems and Reps have been fostering fear for years, to justify wars in Vietnam and the Middle East (to say nothing of the two world wars), and that we are the only nation to have used nuclear weapons in war.
The confusion among humans runs much deeper than political parties, and undiscerning columnists such as Brooks just paper over the deceits of patriotism and nationhood.
What democrat would disagree with what he says in this article?
Both parties are full of pols whose only wish is to get re-elected. This is an obvious but little-discussed fact.
The vast ignorance of the American voters is also obvious, and hardly ever mentioned unless you read the few inside stories of how newspeople and pols talk--accurately--about the ignorance of the masses.
But that's human life!
Fear and self-interest rule.
Columns of pablum do nothing.
Think for yourself?
1
Bravo Mr. Brooks for a terrific article. While I hold zero hope for republicans, I am fully on board with the philosophical platform you eloquently articulate. You describe the America I know, and missed deeply when living abroad in countries where class societies reigned, where free thinking took a back seat to bureaucracy and divisiveness. Those societies now look much rosier to me as our country, and so called leaders, fall into an abyss of hatred, greed, corruption and loathing of any neighbor outside their tribe.
Well-intentioned, but a shallow, typical, attempt to reduce your own cognitive dissonance, Mr. Brooks. The whole history of the U.S. that you extol was built upon Manifest Destiny (that is, create an empire), ignoring the rights--nay, the very humanity--of the people who were already on the land to be occupied, and a firearms-supported "me first" attitude. That sorta worked in the 19th Century because of the immense natural wealth of North America--amber waves of grain, mighty rivers, and ores to take out of the ground. But once Mother Nature came back to bite us and the populations moved from the countryside to the city, that dream became a nightmare. And while the Democratic Party has struggled with reconciling the different visions, truths, and paradoxes of the country and its population (Will Rogers was right when he quipped, "I belong to no organized political party; I'm a Democrat."), the Republicans since at least the time of Warren Harding have stood for the rich, the owning class, and the right to despoil the land, shoot (or at least disenfranchise) people one disagrees with, and keep people of color, women, those of different gender orientation, and non-Christian religions down. That's nearly a century of white supremacy, and the current party and its narcissitic, purposefully ignorant head of state are only this trend taken to its ultimate extreme.
5
I wonder if Native Americans share Brook's glowing description of the early frontier. And the glowing reference to the families and trusts that existed to "increase mobility" may rival Trumps many vacuous statements. It may be that the oft repeated claim that the USA is the best country etc., in the world, has confused some of it's citizens into thinking that there is no room for improvement. Many Canadians have the same supercilious opinion of Canada.
I think more statements and opinions expressing how the USA can be improved instead of "yapping" about Trump might serve your country well.
Ps; Canada's treatment of its' indigenous population is nothing for us to be proud about either.
You missed the part in the "frontier" fairytale about genocide, and Brown blood and sweat. Leaving that out necessarily misses part of the reason we are where we are.
2
i dunno. it seems harsh, but i think we're waiting for a certain generation to die.
2
The problem lies with carrying the same old baggage filled with the same old clothes, stacked with the same old books and devoid of any ideas as to how the world not just us must face the future.
At one point we had the opportunity to deal with the indigenous culture and negotiate, but like any colonizing horde found destruction to be the easiest path.
The same mindset which now leads our culture, as it led the European dynasties from which our forbears escaped, may drive our nation to an internal revolt.
The solutions hinted in this column required might which as every bully knows is the preferred solution. The shared biblical morality cited relies on force to extend its' domain which is then unequally divided among the leaders rather than their faithful followers.
There are no answers to our future offered in this column rather a return to the same tired solutions which have led us to this point of national dislocation.
We are now quite literally at the mercy of the court which would be fine by me if the men and women who sit on the bench, like most of those who write the columns in this venue, left their personal ideology at the door.
It is our kids who will suffer ........ all of them.
1
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, Mr. Brooks.
1
The republican party Brooks so wistfully recollects hasn't existed since the civil rights act was passed. That began the migration of bigots of all stripes to the GOP. They, their racism and their toxic faux religious righteousness were completely embraced. Meanwhile, no dirty trick too low, no lie too big as long as it got election victories and ignorant disenfranchised people to vote against their own interests. Five decades of this has finally culminated in the election of Dotard Drumpf, the embodiment of the collective id the GOP has been nurturing all these years. Keep talking about what your party should be all you want Brooks but you and people like you could have stopped it way back when and chose not to. Now we're all dealing with the consequences.
5
Somebody, please, tell me the difference between the establishment Republican and the populist Donald Trump. Here is what I see:
1)Both are again Obamacare;
2)Both are again the nuclear deal with Iran;
3)Both are again abortion and free choice;
4)Both are in favor of less taxes for the 1% and the rest of the economic elites;
5)Both are again common sense gun control;
6)Both want to limit immigration and refugees;
7)and the list goes on.
Therefore both deserve each other.
4
Thank God that the frontier advanced without nativism or racism, welcoming to Native Americans and Mexicans, Asian railroad labor and European immigrants from the Slavs to the swarthiest. Thank God Southern states adapted calmly to barriers to the extension of slaves Westward.
2
I don't know what Republican party Mr. Brook's is referring to but it isn't the one that Reagan has led into the wilderness. Since Reagan the Republican party has become a Frankenstein monster, a patch-work of dead tissue from a range of cults and special interests financed by massive wealth. The only philosophy the Republicans possess is to grab political power and hang on to by hook or by crook. The main enemy of the USA is the Republican party, you know, the party that welcomes Russian interference in our elections so, you guessed it, the Republicans win.
5
Mr. Brooks should study history. The frontier was a real place, and one where one did not have to have a job. There is no real place to go anymore. The dominant virtual frontier seems to be just that - digital and virtual, the technological revolution, that is destroying jobs, and work, and the need for human beings in the economy. Then Mr Brooks talks about the need for "someone to arise", that does not sound very American to me. How about Trump with a brain and a conscience? The Constitiution was crafted to limit the powers of the President, not to anoint him. Mr Brooks is becoming Bob's Dylans "Mr Jones", as in "you don't know what is happening here, do you, Mr Jones?"
5
Mr. Brooks has run his tricycle into a wall. Again. HIs glorious "frontier" is covered with the bodies of those whose land we brutally stole. Unfortunately, this country likes to pretend that we are not still mired in racism and hatred of "the other"; that Roy Moore is more of an American symbol than most people want to admit. The Republican party doesn't need a new "philosophy" ,for this implies some kind of thought and a search for the truth, what it needs is more than a hundred people who actually CARE about this country, instead of the bunch of cheap, money-grubbing fascists who are smugly working hard to destroy the last shreds of decency, intelligence, and fairness.
3
I think David hits the nail on the head. We are "waiting for somebody who has the guts to say no to tribe." But let's be clear where the blame lies for today's tribalism, aka "identity politics," and where change must start.
Mark Lilla says it well: Over recent decades, Democrats have convinced themselves "that the Republican right is doomed to demographic extinction in the long run — which means liberals have only to wait for the country to fall into their laps."
In a strategy for electoral advantage (mixed with some misguided idealism, to be sure), Democrats have cynically fabricated the lie that white America is racist and is the implacable enemy of the emerging majority. They have chosen to set race against race (and sex against sex) in order to position themselves as the champions of the emerging majority.
The Democrats have reaped what they have sown. Why are they surprised that what Hillary called "deplorables" -- clinging to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them, in Obama's patronizing phrase -- have revolted and cast their lot with Trump?
3
There is some truth to this. Passively waiting for demographics to give you an electoral advantage, while trying not to offend anyone by being for anything, is a profoundly bankrupt policy.
But Republicans from Fox to Ryan to Trump all spend most of their time blaming the poor and powerless for the problems they create. If you listen to Republicans, the poor stole all of the money, one sixty dollar welfare check at a time. But the poor couldn't have stolen the money because they don't have it.
The global billionaires have it. And they own Fox News who keeps calling them "job creators" while they foer everyone.
Conservatives always pick the same two things: the "deplorables" and the "clinging to religion and guns."
I am a second generation immigrant to this country whose grandparents came here dirt poor a century ago, but I got an ivy league engineering education and went on to do well in this country. I am a liberal Democrat. I expect everyone here to make the most of the advantages this country provides. But too many wrap themselves in resentment. They keep waving the confederate flag and worshiping monuments to dead generals. They cling to their past, whether that includes guns and religion or not is their personal choice, but clinging is exactly what is going on here. My grandparents were "eye-talians." They experienced plenty of resentment. It didn't stop us, yet people lucky enough to be here for generations are stopped by their own stubbornness and gullibility. Don't blame that on me and people like me. We're not waiting for you to die off; we're waiting for you to wake up.
All liberals ever do is is try to get a decent life for everyone through effective government. If those individuals are part of an "identity group," so be it. I am female, so maybe that makes me part of an identity group, but then that makes half the nation part of an identity group, don't you think?
Racists are deplorable. People do cling to their guns and religion and their confederate flags and dead generals. That's the truth, whether you want to believe it or not. Wake up already.
CF:
I tip my hat to you for what you've accomplished. No one disagrees that racists are "deplorable." But you are curiously blind to the fact that racism is a pillar of the Democratic Party's electoral strategy. It's called racial and gender pork barrel. I don't think Trump's supporters are racists, but I do believe that they are fed up with being treated as second-class citizens and smeared as racists.
Brooks writes, "The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe."
Unfortunately, that misses the point entirely. The UNITED States of America is a tribe. It is the first tribe in human history that is based on a mutual alliance in defense of freedom and liberty and not based on religion, ethnicity, or race.
If people can unite in the promotion of human rights and fundamental liberty, there is hope for our planet. America is the most multi-ethnic, multi-racial, religiously diverse democratic nation in the world. AND it has been moving toward greater freedom and equality for all - it's most basic founding principle - since its inception as a slaving nation. This is simply unprecedented in all of human history.
But make no mistake about it: Humans are tribal animals. To the extent that we can form a united tribe around truly lofty principles - instead of forming divisive tribal identifications around class, religion, or race - to that extent we are "a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere" as Ronald Reagan called us.
Humanity either learns to share "Spaceship Earth," as Buckminster Fuller called our home, or we go down in endless, crazy intergroup violence with our expanding arsenal of WMDs.
For more on this, see http://www.yoism.org/?q=node/396
1
Exactly right!
Best comment this week!
1
Geeze David, your party has not been what you describe since Reagan and the dems have moved to the right since Clinton.
We have corporatists, conglomerates, monopolies of power hungry mostly white men wanting more power and more money. Yes, there are a few power hungry women like DeVos that wants to destroy education in this country.
Edward Bernaise said back in early eighties that the Christian Right wanted everyone to vote but he said we don't want everyone to vote, we would loose to paraphrase him.
The problem with David's column is that he over looks the fact that over the course of our history immigrants have always been subjected to prejudice and discrimination by the white majority in this country. Even white immigrants (like the Irish) faced still discrimination when they arrived. Non white people faced even more resentment and prejudiced. So the current xenophobia and racism that Trump and his populist tribe espouse is nothing new. Trump has become the voice of the resentful and racist white people in Republican party.
1
Where's Frederick Jackson Turner when we need him?
This is your fantasy of your party, David. It hasn't been thus for nearly (over?) a century. It has been the, "pull the ladder up behind us" party for quite some time, and most especially since Saint Ronnie made it fashionable to make it all about "me". It's not a coincidence that the rise of Trump, the divider in chief, began during Reagan's rule. The sooner you and the other members of your party who choose to delude themselves with fantasy realize this fundamental truth about your party, and the sooner you all leave this despicable party and its snake oil salespeople behind, the better off this nation will be. Simple as that.
4
"....the Republican Party is becoming a party permanently associated with bigotry." It seems David Brooks has just awakened from a very long sleep.
Donald Trump is the logical outcome of several decades of increasingly deceitful, cynical, racist, anti-democratic GOP behavior. The GOP is simply no longer interested in anything that benefits everyday working Americans.
3
One of the frontiers striving Americans can open up is the replacement of the unjust, unsustainable and, therefore, unstable international monetary system with a carbon-based international monetary system where its monetary standard would be a specific tonnage of CO2e per person. The conceptual, institutional, ethical and strategic dimensions of such system that could resolve the looming climate catastrophe are updated at www.timun.net.
An outstanding global warming specialist had this to say about the monetary frontier: “The further into the global warming area we go, the more physics and politics narrows our possible paths of action. Here’s a very cogent and well-argued account of one of the remaining possibilities.” Bill McKibben, May 17, 2011
The right to pollute as currency sounds very inflationary, and backward looking.
The differences all spawn from income and wealth inequality, which is a different conversation than rich and poor per se, which is too simplistic. It is about the fact that the labor force in America is vastly underpaid, and we are talking about 50% of wage earners, relative to living expenses. It is about the lack of security and the increased risk that has been placed on wage earners over the decades. It is also about urban-rural divides and the fact that we have allowed market forces to wither our small towns away at the vine, and that we have failed to promote sufficient economic development of non-urban regions in our nation.
1
And those that have most of the wealth use the media and politicians they own to divide the rest of us so we can't use democracy in our own best interest.
"The Republican Party is supposed to be the party that stokes dynamism by giving everybody the chance to venture out into the frontier of their own choosing...." David, you're living in a fantasy of the past. It has been decades since the GOP turned from representing individual freedom and initiative and became the party of the rich, devoted only and exclusively to increasing the wealth of the powerful. Where were you when this was happening? Where were you when they started spouting the nonsense of "trickle down" economics? Where were you when they dismantled the progressive tax system and ensured that middle-class incomes would be flat for 25 years, while the 1% raked in all the growth from the economy? Where were you when Wall Street and the big housing lenders and the banks were deregulated to "let business free" and the ensuing bubbles were expanding?
Taking the blinders off after decades is commendable, I suppose, but some of us saw it decades ago.
4
Well said!
I love reading Mr. Brooks' American history story. It just skips over the transformation from Eisenhower's Republican party, that embraced the responsibility to build an American future as central to their philosophy, to Nixon's Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's "Welfare Queen" world where "Government is the problem." Until David Brooks begins including this half century Republican campaign to separate Americans into tribes, his attempts at describing the way back will fall short. He is going to have to renounce that tragic turn by the party. This would mean renouncing Reagan, Donald Trump's true progenitor.
8
All we regular folks (in the trenches) really need to know is that the GOP has utterly failed to protect this country from its own worst aspects.
That the GOP -- by which I mean the whole party (leaders, rank and file) tolerates a President who openly advocates striking first with nuclear weapons, and who has no penchant or talent whatsoever for any aspect of politics except grandstanding and lying, is ALL WE NEED TO KNOW.
4
Trump pretended to be a populist to get elected. Now that he is in office, he is doing favors for all of the billionaires, so they will owe him in the future. Trump is doing exactly what the Republican Party has been trying to do for decades, destroy the government, because the government is how democracy actually gets things done, according to the U.S. Constitution, and democracy that is not under their thumb makes life inconvenient for the super rich.
While the two parties pretend to fight over social issues (never resolving any of them), the Democrats always supply just enough votes for the Republicans to get the billionaire agenda passed: Taxcuts, wars (like Iraq), bailouts for global banks including bonuses (not the People), Quantitative Easing (the Fed printing trillions of dollars for global banks), etc. Even Obama Care was deisigned by the Heritage Foundation, and he did not even entertain the idea of a public option.
Polls show that this is the opposite of what the people want, but they do it anyway. That is why the establishment is unpopular.
3
I agree with the reader who pointed out that Establishment Republicans, dismayed as they may be, helped pave the way for Donald Trump. From what I've seen even the most reasonable, moderate and intelligent Republicans and conservatives are trapped in a seductive mindset that is dangerous for both party and country.
Pride is a unique word that can mean either virtue or vice depending on its use. Pride the virtue is like the Greek Arete - excellence - the commitment to doing one's best, to following the highest standards. Pride the gravest of sins is demeaning and abusing others to inflate one's ego and sense of entitlement. Pride the sin or vice is both immensely, addictively pleasurable and insidiously destructive. It leads to a kind of Manichean thinking that obscures truth and destroys nations.
Republicans and conservatives from the most moderate to the most extreme are trapped in this destructive mindset. Take someone as brilliant, thoughtful and moderate as moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. After describing the different kinds of moral standards he declares conservatives the moral winners because they focus on a bigger number. Liberals focus on harm and fairness - whatever is broken and needs repair or improvement.
If America were a factory conservatives would be in charge of maintenance and liberals would be in charge of repair and upgrades. Those who maintain are generalists. Those who repair and upgrade focus.
Conservative Manicheanism obscures this.
1
If you don't see clearly why both Trump and Bernie were more popular than any of the establishment centrists; then you will not understand how we got to where we are.
The key is that the global billionaire class has bought up all of the mass media, and though they hire Democratic voting talking heads, they retain veto power over content, so they can call themselves "liberal media," even as they push supply side economics and Investor Dispute Resolution Agreements disguised as Trade Bills. They also give 95% of the donations to politicians, who spend literally 50% of their waking hours begging billionaires for money. On top of this most paid economist (except at colleges, which is why they are derided as "elites") work for them. The most expensive lawyers work for them, and they have teams of lobbyists hounding elected officials and administrators.
(The global billionaire class includes Trump who has business all over the world, but by attacking the establishment center, he has been able to inoculate himself from being associated with it.)
with Fox News in the lead, they have created a fictional account of how the world works and sell it as the 'center" halfway between (R) and (D) which are both subsidiaries of the global rich.
They do not do what the People want. They do what the donors want.
It may be true that automation is taking jobs now, but it is also true that the (D)s and (R)s let China steal our market share, putting our workers in competition with the 3rd world.
2
America was founded and built on European colonial values that both created and exploited permanent divisions in our society. We were never a nation that viewed itself as universal, and we spend way too much time reading the first few lines of the Declaration of independence, and ignore the bulk of the document's complaints at the end to our peril. Blacks and Native Americans were never to be considered part of our nation, and neither were women or people without property. Frontier America was always about capitalists in partnership with the government expropriating land from native inhabitants, and importing slaves or other exploitable peoples to extract the wealth of cash crops and minerals from the land. The middle class of artisans and paid workers was a necessary evil to design and operate the machines needed to make and sell the finished goods on world markets. In the light of our history, one might say that the modern Republican party most accurately represents the founding values of our nation.
3
I would ask you to re-read your second-to-the-last paragraph, David, and ask you to name one single elected Republican official who personifies the value system that you claim Republicans are "supposed" to personify. There are none presently. They represent a species that has gone extinct over the last four decades, if, in fact, they ever existed. I cannot think of a single piece of Republican sponsored legislation that made even the slightest attempt to realize the goals you've enumerated. Maybe you can help me out there, too.
What's more, the value system one sees in "mainstream" Republicans---Ryan, McConnell, Cruz, Bush, Sessions, Carson, etc.---is not all that different from Trump's. All of them seek to further enrich the wealthy and to further empower the powerful. They all agree on the ends. They disagree only on the best means to achieve those ends.
4
While I agree with much of Brooks's critique of the Republican Party, I have to point out that by Brooks's own account, he's wrong to blame Donald Trump. Brooks says that "Trump populist nationalism" is making the Republican Party "the party that can't govern."
But Brooks has - quite correctly, in my view - been saying for years that the GOP is unfit to govern. The first time I remember him saying that was in a Times column published on June 3, 2008: Brooks said that "McCain’s problem is that his party is unfit to govern."
Brooks has repeated the "unfit to govern" accusation several times since then, although the formulation has varied. For instance, in a column published on July 4, 2011, Brooks said the GOP is not "a normal party," but is "more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative." He concluded that column with a prediction that voters would find the Republican Party to be "not fit to govern," and he added his opinion that voters would be right.
It is understandable that a conservative in 2017 seeks to blame Trump for perverting Republican conservatism into the party of tribalism. But Trump is more the result than the cause of that problem. Mainstream Republican ideology has been headed down this road at least since 1968, when Richard Nixon was elected on a "southern strategy," an appeal to "the silent majority" of voters - those who are white, Christian and American-born.
politicsbyeccehomo.wordpress.com
3
The Republican Party is almost the exact opposite of what Brooks describes in the penultimate paragraph. If Republicans were what they claim to be the country would be in a much better situation no matter if Democrats or Republicans held power in Washington.
I think the Republican Party is oversold in this column. The party was never as generous and inclusive as the writer states. The more well off white males were the beneficiaries of the party's economic and social policies. Others may have benefitted but only by chance. The current party seems to be idea-less partly because for eight years it had one goal: oppose whatever President Obama favored. The current party also bought in to Trumpism because of the golden opportunity to control Congress and roll back civil rights gains for non whites and non males, environmental protections, trade and commerce laws that favor consumers, impose religious tests on citizens, office holders, small businesses and corporations and to back away from global leadership.
2
A "frontier" attitude, David? Really, that's what going to save the GOP and turn it back into a party that can be entrusted with the keys to the Republic?
It may be an oversight, but the expansion West was actually a succession of treaty breaches in which solemnly signed documents were cast aside at the first hurdle and where the forces of the US Government were deployed to assist the treaty-breakers. The expansion West was a slow, but pitiless and strenuously maintained genocide, ending only when the last tribe of Native Americans admitted defeat and its members either moved into reservations or into Canada.
I would argue that it is a surfeit of "frontier-attitude" that energizes Trump's most dangerous supporters. What you are proposing would then mean that the GOP should become MORE like Trump...
2
I know it's repetitive and we all know the republican party has thrived on racist undertones and favoring of the wealthy at the expense of average Americans. Racism gave the republicans a "firewall" in the old confederate states and it was a reliable shell game to keep those in its base harmed by tax cuts for the richest on board. All the republicans needed to do was scream about "big government" and "giveaways" (a code for the non-Medicare, Social Security safety net) and their base fell in line in spite of the favoring of the economic elite.
These facts have been posted in these comments many times. And the fact that trump unmasked the shell game and dropped the code words and hints and made nativism and racism a centerpiece of his "philosophy" has been pointed out many times. The narrative trump is selling is simple and compelling to his followers. The philosophy Mr. Brooks is proposing is barely comprehensible, really there is no narrative there, more in the line of a Clintonian "stronger together" catch phrase. Sorry this won't work.
Roy Moore demonstrates that neither establishment Republicans nor Trump himself can manage the forces the GOP has unleashed through decades of fear-mongering, race-baiting, and purposeful misinformation.
2
Maybe we need to recognize we live in two very polarized ideas of what America is and nothing is going to change these intractable divisions. For example, I really don't want to live in Hannity's America, or Bannon's America and I'm pretty sure they don't want to live in mine. Why can't we balkanize? Divide and group states into smaller areas based on common interests? Maybe thinking "tribally" is actually healthier?
The greatest push in this negative direction that the Republican Party is taking us came from their idol Ronald Reagan who said "the biggest problem is government." We have been losing pride in our leaders ever since and his example didn't help. Pride in country is pride in government and visa versa.
2
Where is that "somebody who has the guts to say ..."? We are waiting for that someone on the national stage. In the meantime we all need to speak up, loudly and clearly, with the message in this column. We all need to be that "somebody."
1
I especially like one phrase in this column: "economic diversity". Gee, that explains the necessity for poor people, struggling people, marginalized people, and the vanishing middle class in this country. Let these folks have the freedom to aspire, the freedom to pursue wealth and dignity, etc.
Gotta have diversity one way or another, even the enervating kind.
I feel liek the success of the United States has been the ability to actually maintain a general unity (tribe) when sending individuals venturing into the frontier threatens the greater good. We've able to identify when things have gone wrong, admit mistakes and try to realign goals for the future whether it be religious persecution, slavery, native genocide, child labor exploitation, gender and race inequality, .
We have been lucky that due to our abundance of natural resources in our country we have been able to try to make amends with relatively litte strife. Unfortunately, there are those within the Republican Party who continue to stoke life as a zero-sum game. I think we will look back and realize that we have based social mobility in these times on the exploitation of the disadvantaged (poor, disabled, socially alienated).
There is potentially enough food and shelter for us all as long as there is equal self-reflection and forgiveness. We are one tribe, one country, one humanity. We have not survived as individuals, but as a whole.
Sorry, David but you are completely missing the point. The upsurge of anger and desperation that elected Trump (or more specifically, said no to Hillary Clinton) is not based on tribalism or bigotry. It is simple economic desperation. Look at any indicator...like counties where incomes and lifespans are decreasing, drug use and suicide going up...those are the places that nominated Trump, turned three states that had gone for Obama to Trump, and who are sticking with him for lack of any alternative change agent. Immigration is actually a minor issue for these people, though it is undeniable that low-skilled immigrants cost working class Americans jobs (and highly skilled ones on H1B visas cost middle class workers jobs and income). They are not nationalist in the sense of war lovers. They did not vote for Trump because of his mangled personality. Until the Democrats come back to their working class base, it is doubtful they can win. The abandonment started with the Clintons. To call this "populist nationalism" is wrong (in part because there is no such thing in American history). If we don't wise up and look at the economic misery of the working class and lower middle class, we will continue to throw around our useless labels and the revolt will grow, with no one but a flawed narcissist to lead it.
Does it include healthcare for all Americans?
Does it include a tax system that is simple to use, and pays our bills?
Does it include putting some priority on dealing with climate change which effects everyone?
Does it include every America facing prosecution for a crime having the same probability of based on race of the prosecution, and an equality in punishment?
Do banks, and their leadership,that steal from millions of Americans get prosecuted?
Does it really include equal rights to marry and go to the bathroom?
Does it include limiting inequality in economic gain so that all Americans not just the richest get a share?
Mr Brooks offers platitudes, but does not understand their implications. He does not offer a program of policy, because he knows that it has no connection to today's Republican Party. The party of his lifetime is Trumpism, just not dog whistles.
If you want his platitudes, the Democratic Party is far closer to his ideal, but he has spent a lifetime against it.
1
Taking the frontier fantasy to heart, I often imagine a completely divided America, with the maligned intellectual elites setting up their own country, and the frightened anti-intellectual birthers doing likewise. I have no doubt which would prosper and which would decline into oblivion.
Physical labor so valued over intellectual endeavors by the frightened "working class" is a straw man strength. It is easy to master by anyone. (I am a 65 year old woman who regularly uses a chain saw, and changes my own oil. Hello! It's not hard!)
I'd throw my lot in with the intellectual elites. That's the true frontier. And honestly, also the primary driver of our past success. The common man is just that;common. They need to find another avenue for self esteem.
1
In my opinion, Obama was exactly the kind of politician Mr. Brooks describes in his last paragraph; yet he was torn down and smeared by partisan politics.
If a person as charismatic and intelligent and Barack Obama can't be a transformative figure, I don't know who can be.
1
David Brooks has focused on the essential qualities that inspired this nation to become the bedrock of democracy around the world. What has happened with Populism is that is builds a fence around trying to stop this great democratic experiment and close if off from the dynamic strength openness imparts to this great nation. The bigotry and attempt to marginalize non white people will drive this country into just another failed and flawed democracy. There needs to be men of courage to stand up in our Congress and get us moving again toward a more inclusive and united country.
The GOP is the party wrapped in moth balls.
It's time for renewal, modernization, social accomplishments and elimination of bigotry.
3
“What must change is the dysfunctional governance framework surrounding Trump, which is what MUST change if the price we paid for the election of Donald Trump ever will be redeemed by reforming the dysfunctional, frozen mess we created over the eight years preceding him.”
This is only true if the collective Richie Rich employs is a descriptor of his own Republican Party, sworn to intransigent opposition on day one of the Obama Administration.
Two examples, in 2010, the $enate passed bipartisan immigration reform by a vote of 98-0, yet John Boehner refused to bring it to a vote in the Hou$e, citing a fictitious “Hastert Rule.” It would have passed with at least 300 votes, but Boner got his marching orders to scuttle it. Similarly, Boner negotiated a “Grand Bargain” with Obama, only to backpedal and renege.
“We” broke politics? What you mean by “we,” Kimosabbee?
3
If elected officials would stop worrying about the next election and concentrate on the serious matters at hand, we might get somewhere. The idea of public service seems to have eluded them. It's not about them it's about "We, the people . . ." Are there any statesmen out there?
2
Today, the main enemy is not aliens or division. It is Republicans, who play on our divisions like Jimi Hendrix played on his guitar.
5
If the opening two paragraphs of Mr. Brooks's column chronicling the attempts of a laundry list of legaxy Republicans to neuter Precedent Rump remind you of a classic English alphabet rhyme - "A was an apple pie, B bit it, C cut it, D dealt it, E eat it", &c. - you will be forgiven should you change a later line to one that suggests a blending with what might before long become our new national fruit, one that, to borrow the previous Republican president's metaphor for a growing economy, "make[s]' the pie higher": "I *impeached* it." The current version, though, does retain an admitted charm, what with its apparent prophesying of Robert Mueller: "I inspected it."
2
Philosopher kings and poet warriors, saviors and messiahs, is that all you got? What drivel. Throw in a Huck Finn and a Dave Crockett or two while you're at it. And don't forget John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. Philosophy? Romantic amnesia more like.
7
“.. the Republican Party is becoming a party permanently associated with bigotry.” Becoming? Where have you been the last fifty years?
19
I am going to withhold judgment on Mr. Brooks's opinion and consider this to be Part 1 of a two point articulation. When he explains in his Part 2 what is the "new frontier" that is the unifying core of America in 2017 then we can have a serious discussion of his thoughts.
3
Who said that America is "a universal nation, founded on universal principles?"
Seriously. Who, exactly, said that? The Founding Fathers said nothing of the sort! They considered themselves to be Englishmen, and their revolution to be a defense of English liberties. They were highly ambivalent about immigration. They wanted population increase, but they were concerned about attracting the wrong sort of people. They were tribal. The constitution was established by "We the people" in order to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." The framing of America as a "universal nation" came later, and to a large degree it was the product of sentimental journalists like David Brooks, who never miss an opportunity to explain to Americans who they really are.
The reason the populist story has been so compelling is that is is basically true. Our elites, both Left and Right, are post-American. They have their own agendas, and, for different reasons, do not believe in putting America first. There are a lot of Americans, both left and right, who do not like this! The Democrats and Republicans should both be down on their knees thanking God that Trump is such an idiot, because otherwise, running on the theme of "America First," he would have won the election in a landslide, and would today be remaking American politics.
I think both the Left and the Right need to take a lesson from this. If you want to win, "America First" is the way to go.
2
You make some good points, but by not making any ethnic or religious test for public office, but instead saying all men are created equal and using the ideals of democracy and the principles and institutions of the Republic the glue that holds the country together, I believe the founding fathers we're designing a country that would accept anyone who agreed to those principles.
I agree that the establishment center is not loyal to the American People. I think they are instead loyal to their global billionaire donors, who profited greatly by moving American industry to lie wage countries.
Hogwash. The populist story has been compelling because people don't think anymore; they just go with their gut, no matter how foolish. What a misreading of history. Ever read the Declaration of Independence? The reference to the "Laws of Nature" and of "Nature's God"?? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...." If those aren't universal principles, then there are none.
David, you forgot to mention how Christianity feeds the underlying self-righteousness, pseudo-piousness, and 'us vs them' jingoism that is the Republican ethos. The collective religious delusion provides complete cover for people who hate and fear everybody else. It's the logical conclusion that they flock to a narcissist-demagogue, somebody who thinks at a 10th grade level and, like them, believes he has all the answers. Oh, and guns...lots of guns.
6
You are wrong about Chritianity, but you are certainly right about guns!!!
1
We had that person! His name is Barak Obama. People were thrilled, inspired and convinced.Then the Republicans emasculated him with every vote they could muster.
12
Many were frustrated that he was just another corporate hack unable to fight for the real needs of people.
What Mr. Brooks neglects to mention here is the 6th way that Republicans have run for president since 1968: Nixon's Southern Strategy, where Republicans encouraged racist Southerners, led by S. Carolina's Strom Thurmond, to join their ranks. That has been the ticket for Republicans ever since then, and now the former dog whistle is explicit: Mexicans are rapists, Puerto Ricans aren't full Americans, and, of course, Blacks are lazy and violent.
America isn't the land of the frontier. Rather America is the land of the Enlightenment: as Peter Gay wrote in his magisterial treatment of the subject the application of the science of freedom. We need a rededication to those values of tolerance of speech and conduct, abolition of discrimination, and justice as a reduced system of law's crimes and their concomitant punishments
That is the values that all Americans can rally around against the bigotry of Trump.
5
Are you kidding? Can't you see, THEY are not listening to you. Your story does not resonate.
The modern Republican Party is the home of Nixon and Kissinger conspiring to extend a war fought by other people's children. It is the Party of white supremacists, scared of bright Blacks and Muslims who might compete with them. It is the Party of tax breaks for the wealthy, and health care for the well-off. It is the Party of Bush's Katrina and Trump's Puerto Rico. It is the Party of Ted Cruz and Louis Buller Gohmert Jr. It is the Party of Dick Cheney and Tom Price. It is the Party of toxic waste and deregulation.
The answer to Trumpism is simple. Vote for Democrats and then work to get them to make the hard choices and follow-through -- with research, transparency, legislation, reforms, and more of al of these.
Let Ryan, McConnell, Trump, go the way of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich -- off to the looney corners of our world to dance together in an intoxicated whirl of irrelevancies.
10
Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton stood on the Democratic debate stage and said, "I admire Henry Kissinger and took his advice as Secretary of State." Henry Kissinger is one of the main architects of the race to the bottom globalization that has destroyed the American middle class.
The Republicans do all of the things you accuse them of, while the Clinton's keep saying, we can't beat them do we might as well join them.
The truth is, the left as the promoters of democracy and policies that help the workers and the poor, should be getting 80% of the vote, compared to the 01% and those they pay to support them.
How is it the Republicans can get more workers organized to fight for the interests of global billionaires then the Democrats can get to fight for their own self interest?
Because the Clintons and their allies keep saying, don't try, surrender.
Thank you David Brooks, just thank you. You give me hope each time I read you
2
The only way to beat Trump is in a court of law.
David, perhaps you should expand your horizons, and include those outside your lovely vision.....African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans for example, even children, many of whose are hungry in the USA and cannot 'eat' your frontier concepts....furthermore soon if not already they will be the majority in the USA. You paint a lovely picture that is sixty years too late.....while the earth is burning to death. Fiddling while Rome burns is the polite version of this fairy tale. Good luck to us all.
5
Where was all of this when Trump was running for the nomination?
The entire GOP embraced this nut job, just because they wanted to undo everything President Obama accomplished in 8 years.
They never had a vision.
7
Yes, where? How long, I ask, when we get back on track? By human nature, things have to change, but when? No one seems to be able to make the Trump followers understand what happens during a nuclear war. That millions will die who have nothing to do with this school yard bullying between two so-called leaders.
They don't want to undo Obama, they want to undo the constitution. And the Democrats want to compromise with that.
The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.” - - P.J. O'Rourke
13
Paul Ryan’s main argument to repeal O care was that it will bring “ more freedom”. Arguments that try and evade and deceive are all the Rs have.I don’t remember a single word from McConnel about why O care should be replaced. And it was his biggest goal in as leader. There are good arguments for replacing it but the Rs never made any. The congressional Republican establishment is made up of spineless dimwits who are never going to come up with a story to counter Dumpism. It’s easier for people of such like them to just go along.
4
We have already had the champion of hope and change you seek: Barack Obama. "We want Obama to fail" Republicans starting with Mitch McConnell used the racism and xenophobia of Trump's "Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim" lie to ride to power and now it is coming back to bite them. Racism is the rotten core of the Republican Party and it is now destroying the liberal world order we originally stood for with the tantrums of a literal enfant terrible.
10
No. Obama had a huge mandate to make change, coming out of a War in Iraq based on lies that killed or wounded 45,000 American Service People, a Great Depression that threw hundreds of thousands out of work and transfered 40% of the wealth oh the 99% to the 1% (according to Treasury), including the stealing of millions of homes.
He should have come in, arrested fraudulent bankers, broke up global banks, bailed out the people (who would have been able to pay the banks what they owed, saving banks in the process), and used his bully pulpit to explain (as Bernie does) how the global billionaires have stolen our democracy. The original Tea Parties would have even supported that, as well as many Trump voters.
Instead he disbanded his grassroots movement, sided with the billionaires and their corporations, bailed them out, with their bonuses, passed a corporate healthcare plan written by the Heritage Foundation, and pretended he was powerless for the next eight years.
Notice no one in the Republican Party or global media thinks that the Republicans can't get anything done because the Republicans don't have sixty votes. All the talk is about how we need to be reasonable and get things done, like massive tax cuts for the rich, I mean "tax reform."
Bill Clinton was the first uncle Tom president and Obama was the second uncle Tom president.
1
David, what Republican party are you describing. Since Reagan, the GOP has walked towards and now is in a full gallop towards Trump's brand of nationalism and nativism. From the composition of local/state governments, this form of tribalism is working quite well. Add in the election of an African-American president and you come full circle to Trumpism. Of course what is missing from this full circle is a center---a governing philosophy. What we democrats and some Republicans are watching from the sidelines is the endless turning of this circle---now at high speeds---but, still no governing center---just a lot of spinning.
5
The mission of the Republicans is to slash taxes on the rich to zero, cut regulations to zero, and cut government services for the people to zero.
The mission of the left is to expand democracy, and tax the rich to invest in humans.
The mission of the Democratic Centrists is to attack the left and compromise with the Republicans.
Trump's mission is to become emperor, which fires perfectly with the Republican mission, and that's why democratic centrists keep saying we should work with Trump.
How come they would rather work with Trump than Bernie?
And if you don't think Trump can declare war, declare martial law, and cancel elections, then you know nothing about the history of the world over the last 100 years. Hitler was elected. Mubarak was elected. Mugabe was elected. Marcos was elected.
According to USA today, 52% of Republicans support postponing the 2020 election. If they are the Republicans in the military, police, and judiciary, what is to stop them?
Superb satire, David! Dynamism, mobility and the frontier indeed.
Wait--you're serious?!! What we're being assaulted by IS tribal Republicanism, from Russia to Charlottesville, from Puerto Rico to Las Vegas, all leading to Trump. You broke it, how about taking "responsibility", that favorite word among your tribe?
7
Republicans started a War in Iraq based on lies, and caused the Great Recession, while they had total control of the presidency and congress, but blamed the Democrats, who of course accepted the blame.
You do understand that those people in the covered wagons are committing genocide at that frontier, right? So what you say about America and expansion is true, but perhaps not so great a thing to keep repeating.
5
David Brooks, when I read pieces such as this one, I think of one word: enablers...and one phrase: you built this.
You and your fellow-conservatives are the enablers...and "you built this", where the 'this' is the monstrosity in the White House and the pair of enabling monsters in the Senate (McConnell) and House (Ryan).
And now many of you seem surprised...that you don't like the view!
10
The enablers include the Democratic centrists who treat the Republicans as if they are not trying to undo the constitution, but relentlessly attack their own base.
Is it just me, or do the words "philosophical assault on Trump" resound with forlorn irony? Donald Trump is a feral id, as detached from the concept of philosophy as a weasel in a hen house. His base responds to rhetoric of fear, hatred and violence. Furthermore, they needn't ever expose themselves to Brooks' American philosophy because they reject everything emanating from sources they are unendingly assured, and wholeheartedly believe, are "fake news".
The ONLY way the Trump base will be won over by an appeal to the American Philosophy as described by Mr. Brooks is if Trump pitches it. Good luck with that.
2
The trump base is doomed to wallow in their hatred, unless his betrayals make them see the light. We can do nothing for them.
But the swing voters that wanted Bernie, but we're offered a choice between the status quo and a (fake) populist, are reachable, if you stop trying to convince then the establishment center is on their side. That ship has sailed.
Yet another attempt by a conservative to distance himself from his creature. At points in his column David sounds delusional. The republican party has, since the implementation of Nixon's southern strategy, hung its hat on racism. Trump is the quintessential republican since the 1960's, only differing from some of his brethren in his inability to keep his mouth shut.
PROSECUTE RUSSIAGATE!
4
Mr. Brooks' Republican party has been dead since 1992. He just doesn't want to acknowledge it.
1
That's a lot of blather. Philosophical answer to Trump indeed. Rather than going out with a whimper and nuclear war, we had better have a bang of action and organizing or we'll storm the Bastille.
Nobody has even been commenting here because this column is so philosophically louche.
1
As for the threat of "millions" killed in a renewed Korean war, make that a minimum of tens of millions, if not many more than that. The first day alone would easily get to the ten million mark.
Yet here in the Oval Office we have a Commander in Chief indulging his bully-boy rhetorical fantasy, hurling puerile ad-hominem insults in a sterile game that holds human life hostage.
The president sends his hapless Secretary of State on an Asian problem solving tour only to undermine him in a public humiliation. Either the two of them simply don't talk, or they are deliberately playing good cop-bad cop, or the president has taken his pruning shears to the secretary’s grapevine.
None of these options should spur encouragement for a reasonable, peaceful resolution of a brewing conflict that nobody wants to escalate into a hot war. Nobody, that is, except for a mentally unstable president who appears to be mindless of the consequences of his obtuse childishness.
3
Yes an attack I North Korea by the US is an attack on China. That's WWWIII.
Most people have assumed for seventy years that WWIII includes global thermal nuclear war.
Make that billions killed on the first day.
The "somebody" that would say "yes to the diverse hopefulness" sounds a lot like Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton. Why can't Mr. Brooks hear it from either of them? Does it have to be a male somebody from the white tribe? Does it have to be a Republican?
2
David, reread your second-to-last paragraph. That is the Democratic Party.
1
unfortunately historical perspective re the republican party and all of the antics attempted to control trump are irrelevant.
trump has no historical perspective (he not read a single history book or presidential biography) and he has not party loyalty or personal ideology.
he wakes up in the morning and uses his unfiltered stream of consciousness to navigate his day. fact-challenged for the entire journey. he'sa combination of am kid in a candy store and a bull in a china shop. this will not change.
every rude and insensitive and uninformed comment is coated with teflon because we have such a low bar for him and accept this as the new normal. we allow his supporters on tv and his official and unofficial spokespeople to simply lie - period. we should not accept this. the press and commentators should top them in their tracks and tell them to shut up (somewhat politely) until they tell the truth. do not allow them to spew lies and falsehoods - stop them in their tracks. stop his press secretary in mid-sentence and do not allow her to lie. DO NOT ALLOW PIVOTS OR ANY FORM OF CHANGING THE SUBJECT. insist on answers backed by facts. do not give airtime to liars.
1
Mr Brooks either views the world through very rosy colored glasses, or has written a brilliant piece of satire.
1
Donald Trump is a metaphorical political bone the Republican Party decided to chew on. Now that allegorical bone is stuck in the party's throat, and it threatens to choke the Republican party to death. David Brooks warms up historian Frederick Jackson Turner's 19th century theory on the effects of the "frontier" on American character, and then proceeds to ignore the sordid historical reality of the "original" Republican Party. From the end of the Civil War to the assassination of William McKinley, the " Gilded Age" Republican Party filled the pockets of the corrupt "Robber Barons", controlled the Congress, and elected a series of impotent party hacks to the presidency. Republican politicians condoned the Native American genocide, and the brutal exploitation of immigrant labor. They authored the squalid political compromise of 1877 that led to the KKK terror, and the imposition of Jim Crow in the American South. Exclusion has always been endemic to the formerly "Grand Old Party".
1
There have been no signs of this early and idealistic Republican party Mr. Brooks describes since the days of Dewey and Eisenhower.
Their most daring adventure during my lifetime has been to steal practically all the bigots and haters from the old Democrats.
Confederate and Neo-Nazi flag wavers have found a home. They don't have to hide in the woods anymore. Republicans need their votes to stay in power.
There have been lots of pivotal moments in modern history when America could have been great again. The latest was 2008 when an intelligent, honest black man was elected President. Republicans tried everything short of lynching to oust him. Obama was our last proud moment.
We should never forgive Republicans for Trump. He's all theirs, they deserve him. The rest of us don't.
3
Mr. Brooks, did the Republican Party die with Lincoln, or when the Republican Party did not celebrate what Lincoln had started when a Black man was elected President?
Rather than celebrating, the Republican Party tried to delegitimize him, render him politically impotent and encouraged the worst impulses of the American "spirit" to blossom.
The "Party of Lincoln" now has elected a man with no qualifications, little intellect, little appreciation of the history of this country, and who embodies everything that President Obama was not.
I doubt that you can save your party. Perhaps you should join Governor Kasich and create a new one.
Mr. Brooks lays out his vision of the kind of leader the U.S. needs. Sounds like Hillary Clinton to me!
3
Sorry, Mr. Brooks, you are wrong. You were wrong to criticize HRC in such a superficial manner, and you are wrong about this. The history of the US has always had an element of white supremacy, and the genius (if you can call it that) of Trump and Bannon was to unite them into a tribe. ...and now that the genie is out of the bottle, it ain't going back
The conquering of the west meant the genocide of the native americans. They could only wish that they would have been able to control immigration.
So two things : One, can you translate this into twitter bytes or memes for Trumpers on social media, and do you want to further point out that the GOP sold them the story that mislead them into believing minorities are to blame? Two, GOP leadership benefits from the perverse narrative of blame and grievance, so how will YOU recuperate the ethically and morally bankrupt political company you keep? ,
Those here who suggest the Democratic Party is the Party for which Brooks pines, are sooooooooo wrong. After all, it was Joey what's her name on Sunday who stated the Democratic Party ought to ignore White men, and be instead a party devoted only to those of color. Talk of tribalism
1
"It’s waiting for somebody"
Who? Mr Brooks seems unable to venture a single name.
For eight years, the Republican Party allowed and encouraged the twin slimes of Trumpism and right-wing wealth to seep into its veins while conservative intellectuals looked the other way. The GOP is hooked on them now and needs the political equivalent of detox and rehab, not a new philosophy to pollute.
Republicans have become a Party that is all about the win, at any cost. They have thrown their own identity under the bus just to be able to say we won. They are a soulless Party with know ideals on which to stand. This leaves them little on which to actually govern. I believe in a good two party system that truly wants the American people as a whole to succeed. We no longer have that. We have been gerrymandered and fear mongered into a country with a bunch of wimpy white people who seem to be afraid to get out and actually compete. Baby boomers started out with such hope and have some how become huddled masses yearning to be protected from everything and everyone else. I am just stunned by all this.
When I read David Brooks, I wonder just what it is he's looking at and reading.
So if you're down on your luck
And you can't harmonize
Find David Brooks and his far away eyes
And if you're downright disgusted
And life ain't worth a dime
Get David Brooks and his far away eyes
(apologies to the Rolling Stones)
1
Your hope is Trumped by Gerrymandering which empowers a minority that is extreme. That extreme further engages in voter suppression, suppression of education, health and suppression of truth about guns, the climate and of truth itself leaving a dumb, scarred base that perpetuates their masters. The nation has AIDS sir, this virus, unleashed by the GOP has attacked and is destroying our national immune system. We are in dire shape sir, worse than you imagine.
Where is Bannon in all of this? Brooks mentions philosophy and Bannon is
the court philosopher (now from afar) of this Republican/Trump administration.
It's Bannon Brooks has to argue with---the racism of Bannon, especially.
The frontier analogy is apt because it demonstrates the exact blindness that has girded America's energy and choices. America slaughters the Native American tribe for its own Anglo tribal gain. Here here for Capitalism! America has always been racist. Take the blinders off. We can't fix this problem if we don't acknowledge it. Lets move out of delusion.
Frederick Jackson Turner rides again.
So Brooks who championed the republican power position every step while republicans gained federal government power with white racism, the southern strategy for those still in denial, is upset.
His method of being influential and having federal,power for his gang has backfired.
So while Trump is loved by about the thirty percent republicans who are about seventy percent white racists fake Christian fascists who feed on lies about Obama and Hiklary etc etc etc,
Brooks decides a philosophy lesson will restore his inept mandarin republicans to power by controlling the thirty percent. They are your fascists Brooks. If you had stood up against, oh, a multi trillion dollar on war on false pretenses, for example, we wouldn't be here. Pick your own example. There are so many. Fascists and their enablers.
He crazy. But it is his career m.o.
Goodness. That was a hard slog here at 3AM. Are there ANY cliches that you DIDN'T use?
Now, let me tell you this, David: No one is coming to our rescue, not even us.
You keep talking 'structural functionalism', some ladderistic claptrap that if we just follow our glorious leaders and do as we are told (which is the opposite of 'rugged individualism') then all will be well, the world will love us.
Well, frankly, David, the world has had it up to here with our happy claptrap.
It remembers when we were paranoid jingoists in Vietnam.
It remembers Iran-Contra.
It remembers when we pranced around thumping our Moral Majority bibles.
It remembers when we 'fixed welfare' - but we didn't 'fix poverty'.
For 15 years they've watched us blow our bucks on "Wars of Choice".
(A war of choice, it turns out, is defined as, "they have something, we want it, don't get in our way, you stupid world or we'll sic Eric Prince on you".)
David, the cavalry isn't coming.
Now that we have reduced ourselves to banksters, fraudsters, women-hating thugs that will allow ANY destruction to the Constitution, especially the "Emoluments Clause", then the world is staying away from this mad dog. They are not going to save us and we no longer care about saving ourselves.
To save ourselves, we would have to take on the utterly stupid, the vacuous mean, the locked and loaded bible-thumpers.
Well, that's not going to happen.
I don't care what the R-Party started as: But it is now Roy Moore.
You fix it.
1
Trumpism, mass killings, and the power of the NRA are only symptoms of the real, underlying problem - the human belief system. I realize that people want to focus on the immediate causes and effects of a mass shooting, and that's natural, but someday we must confront the root cause of all unnecessary death and suffering.
See: RevolutionOfReason.com
TheRogueRevolutionist.com
1
We had such a leader for 8 years Brooks where were you. His name was Obama. Instead you were hiding in the bushes along with your republican buddies looking for every opportunity to jump him. Your tribe was on the war path because it wanted omnipotent power. Republicans have no ideas, they were too busy waging war. They won and now our nation is the big loser stuck with a feeble would be king and his incompetent court, great job Republicans.
Obviously many Republicans in high places have known from the beginning that Trump is both an ignorant buffoon and a sociopath. Having abandoned all ethics and fundamental principles of governance, the Party was helpless to stop him. Since the election, however, Trump's gross unfitness for office has been fully displayed, and understood by all save the members of his cult. Yet the Party has done nothing to proceed with what is transparently required: his legal removal from office. Many Democrats have also failed in this responsibility.
If this all ends in irremediable disaster, nuclear or otherwise, these officials will not be forgiven by our children and grandchildren.
What claptrap, sir. Many have the guts and have been standing up and declaring the ideals you attribute to a fantasy Republican Party that only you imagine. They are almost al called Democrats. But in their conscienceless lust for power Republicans have cheated and gerrymandered and corrupted the electoral system so as to prevent the actual majority of Americans from having a Congress that enacts the ideals you so naively list.
So your appeal to that fantasy Republican Party which is "supposed to be" falls not on deaf ears but on no ears at all -- that Party doesn't exist in the real world, merely in your abstractions. That you continue to pretend otherwise is pathetic.
There is no doubt that Trump is unfit to br a President. The only success he has had in life was a very bad TV program.
However the real problem is the Republican party, Mitch MacConnell is a racist who has spent the last 8 years working to ensure that a black president would not succeed. Paul Ryan a fast talking liar, who would not recognize the truth if he tripped over it.
The sad part of all this is the huge number of Americans who support their efforts.
Perhaps you missed the shark-jumping this land has undergone? Academic liberals, their hedonist bedfellows and their co-conspirators among the wealthy of all stripes succeeded in turning one nation under God into an unreconcilable collections of tribes, each indifferent, at best, to the others. Papers like this have spent decades tearing at the always frail fabric of union. So be it. You all wanted it "your way or the highway", so now, welcome to the highway. None of you are going to recognize the final destination. Witness the doings in Spain; they are coming to a region near you.
Thanks for bringing us here, David. It's been your life's work.
When you say no to the tribe you are immediately accused of being against multiculturalism and soon after, a racist. This is unfair and a problem for many.
1
Let's talk about what conservative philosophy and government would look like if the Southern Strategy and "Government is the problem." were abandoned. First we want a model. The Eisenhower presidency is as good as we're going to get. This was a Republican Party that resisted their far right fringe, calling for the end to Social Security and, instead, invested a fortune in several different ways. Millions of Americans were sent to college whiteout saddling them with huge debts. Millions of Americans were allowed to borrow money and buy homes with government backing. We started building the freeways, which led to more jobs, both in the building, but much more importantly in the effect the freeways had on the economy. We also invested in our allies and former enemies to stabilize their countries and help with rebuilding. We did all of this while deeply in debt because of WW11 spending. The Wealthiest Americans were paying far more in taxes but the middle class was thriving. We were beginning to confront civil rights. How should Conservatives gone forward from that point? This is the question Mr. Brooks needs to address if he hopes to find a conservative answer to a Donald Trump future.
1
So Frederick Jackson Turner was right? Closing of the frontier meant end of democracy in America?
Having watched the Vietnam series, two thoughts stand out. Johnson's support of civil rights cost not only the Democratic Party but the country a great deal, even though he was right. And we are still living with the fracturing consequences of Vietnam. Forty plus years is one long healing period, and it is not over.
1
"Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story."
Mr. Brooks, that "somebody" must be YOU. You are the man with the conservative perspective and the NY Times platform. You are the one who seemed to believe that Trumpism had valid points and that the man himself could become a successful leader despite his flaws. You must use your influence to fight against this man and his lies and his flimsy and failed efforts at making policy. You must do this with every column you write and speech or panel discussion you do.
1
The GOP has been the party of bigotry since it took in the Dixiecrats in 1964. Trump is merely the logical conclusion to all of this. A frontier mentality when it's not called for is ridiculous. So are the politics and statements being made by the GOP and Trump. Instead of dividing us they should be focusing on helping all of us to be productive citizens. Their preference however is for Pottervilles, speeches that reek of Soviet style propaganda, and outright lies and attacks on anyone who contradicts them.
America is not the home of the free and the brave. Not when we have popinjays like Trump as president and incompetents like McConnell and Ryan running Congress for their party's enrichment. There has been nothing done for working Americans since Trump took office. No improvements to the ACA, no money allocated to improve or fix our infrastructure, and now with the disasters of hurricanes hitting Texas, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands only a stunning lack of results for the latter two. The "warm condolences" to the families of those murdered in Las Vegas is a cruel joke. The GOP is the party of cowards and scoundrels. There is no reason to expect anything better from this administration than lies, hypocrisy, and extreme incompetence.
24
For the last 20 years the Democratic Party has increasingly advocated tribalism for groups perceived as victims. Trump is above all a salesman and he sees non victim tribalism as the next big thing. Unfortunately, his salesman instinct seems correct.
We are, at a national level, engaged in political trench warfare. If Americans actually want to solve problems, instead of digging deeper trenches, seeing people as people and problems as problems, is a place to start. But that will be difficult if both parties see the political advantage of tribalism.
6
Brooks focuses on distinguishes between establishment Republicans and trumpism. But face it, much as they try to distance themselves from trump, as if embarrassed by his repulsive personality, they paved the way for him. They were trumpists before trump even came along.
22
So what does an "American dream", frontier framework look like for Republicans? It would use the government to help build an open future - through basic research funding, infrastructure rebuilding, tax reform that promoted greater equality and supported small business, an affordable care act of their own that enabled every American to get health insurance and thus concentrate on building wealth and taking risks, promotion of unions, a decent minimum wage for all, support for a strong public education system (K-16) to promote equal opportunity, a carbon tax model for environmental protection, and on and on. The problem is that the Republican party is so beholden to wealthy individuals (like the Koch brothers) who believe that all government is bad and the wealthy deserve even more wealth, and to a base that's basically afraid of change, that a philosophical approach and policy framework like this seems impossible to imagine.
14
It's all well and good to promote the qualities we should aspire to, but the Republican party of the twenty-first century exists on a base of low-information, very conservative voters who aren't intelligent enough to grasp the concepts you remind us of. They pretend their country is being taken from them when in reality they are the problem, with their racism, intolerance, xenophobia and pointless religious dogma.
The real problem is with those intelligent enough to comprehend the issues but apathetic about politics and voting. Those who want to fix the cancer of Trumpism have to vote. There's no other route to fixing what is wrong. While these citizen failures do nothing, the committed know-nothings on the far right vote. Real Republicans...moderate and intelligent...are outnumbered by the nitwit zealots who live for being on team Trump. And they vote.
Eclectic Pragmatism — http://eclectic-pragmatist.tumblr.com/
Eclectic Pragmatist — https://medium.com/eclectic-pragmatism
18
Another soaring column by Father Brooks brought crashing down to earth by historic realities, e.g. the core racism of Nixon's election & governing strategies and Reagan's simultaneous embrace of a vengeful christianity and anti-intellectualism, where to be an "expert" is to be nothing more than an oppressive snob, aka a "liberal."
Brooks has spent his life flogging for men who are as dumb and mean as he is smart and principled. David, enough already. Your party died decades ago, like when Strom came on board and reshaped your "big tent" into a "white hood."
25
For whom does Brooks spin this facile myth of Republicanism? The people who need to hear it are over at Breitbart, FOX, Washington Times, and Sputnik. The people here (at NYT) no doubt recognize it as pathetic pablum... a happy rationalization for cowardly RINOs who enabled Trumpism, a salve for their wounded souls.
14
Please!!!! More drivel from David Brooks. Philosophy can assault Trumpism!,,, Click your heels together and wish it so! Ridiculous!!!
Trumpism is the logical and predictable result of Nixon's Southern Strategy's intersection with a black president. It has ripped the scab off of America's original sin, slavery. One need look no further than the fury of the fans at the NFL the last two weekends.
Republicanism, not Trumpism, has resulted in and will accelerate into a descent into mediocrity of a once great nation, which has abandoned its soul.
It has just begun..and we ain't seen nothing yet.
61
Someone like Barack Obama.
15
Yeah, I think I heard all this at the Democratic Convention.
1
We, the People, are being "Led" by a Closed Mind, a "President", in chronic
Process of, 24/7, Presenting Himself as the Abiding Answer to questions
He Presents. Meanwhile, We, the People, are being Unserved by One who
Neither cares enough to Know...nor knows enough to Care. We, the People, are in a SOCIOPATHetic Qandry.
3
Why whine now, David? You had years to talk about this and you did nothing.“Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge, say no more, say no more, eh?” like in Monty Python. So long as the GOP was in power, right?
Your party gave us buffoons and moral compasses like Newt. And now we have that Randian pretty boy writing up genius budgets that have more holes than an average colander.
Thats on you and your buddies. You were their mouthpiece. For decades.
And so, you dont get to whine now.
29
The party of bigotry - Republicans. You said it, David Brooks. The party of reckless demented Trump supporters, heading like lemmings over cliffs. Perhaps manifest destiny means Trump goading Kim Jong-un into a nuclear Armageddon that will put paid to life as we`ve known it on Earth.
6
Stiring article by this writer. But I have to ask: where is David Brooks?... and WHAT have you done with him?!?!
Only when the mainstay of the Republican Party, my age cohort of elderly, white, well-off, frightened, resentful, "Baby Boomers" passes from the scene will America have a chance to recover from it's mental and spiritual sclerosis, and become great again.
11
If only that were true. The angry white men who marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville were mostly young.
Sorry, Phil. I thought the same thing during the Civil Rights--Viet Nam War eras: When all these bigoted, right-wing, war-loving, right-wing nuts die off, the rest of us will embrace change and walk hand-in-hand into a new, loving, diverse, peaceful age. Wrong. Those above-mentioned people had children, many of whom carried those time-honored traditions forward. So, here we are, with Trump as their embodiment.
Shorter Brooks: Popular propagandists and Republican myth-creators like me are complete failures. We need better lies. Like Reagan (who thought he fought WW2 overseas, etc.)
10
Facile but largely fanciful, and in some respects false, Mr Brooks. I am sure that your vision of the Republican myth is what the party would want promulgated, but that vision, if it was ever real, has been co-opted and corrupted beyond redemption. You need a new paradigm for republicanism...and I think it's name is Trumpism!
10
You're right, David. And that party America is waiting for to do all these wonder ful things? That would be the Democrats.
24
Given the sweep of current events, the Republican party leadership is also complicit in yesterday's mass shootings in Las Vegas: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2016/11/the-nra-placed-big-bets-on-the-... AND http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/05/among-gun-owners-nra-mem... .
We may, as a nation, turn out to be a hapless in the face of the rise of the man in the White House as we've been in getting the violent and lethal NRA under control. As a nation, when we criticize others, we are poor models in our own times. We should do so much better.
11
"The whole point of America is we are not a tribe." When will the left realize that tribalism is un-American and a losing strategy for Democrats?
4
Forgive me, David, but it seems like your description of the past Republican party describes the current Democratic party.
13
You make a strong philosophical appeal, David, one well grounded in the history of the Republican Party and in the history of America itself. But it is an appeal to change minds, and to mine at least, the fundamental problem we are facing is that of changing hearts.
Donald Trump has tapped into a white Christian tribalism that I had thought was limited and hoped was dying--but that the last two years has shown was merely underground, held back by "political correctness" our president has now unleashed, "telling it like it is." I am not just talking about the neo-Nazi-types who marched in Charlottesville (although they are part of it). Even more so, I am speaking of the "respectable folk" who would vociferously deny their bigotry, but who nonetheless see "their" country as white and culturally (though not necessarily theocratically) Christian, and whose prestige is fundamentally threatened by its increasing diversity. These are hearts that cannot be changed.
What is even more disheartening is that not only are the white Christian tribalists more widespread than I would have dreamed, their voices are magnified by both our electoral system and the gerrymandering that now locks in a disproportionate number of congressional districts as Republican. As our president increasingly fans his tribalists into a frenzy, I fear the election of more Ray Moores. And that that bellwether is immune to philosophical appeal.
177
Steel Magnolia has captured the essence of the problem. This is the reality. The real core of Americanism--religious freedom--has perversely become our undoing. The chains of delusional belief-based thinking pervade every aspect of what's insidiously destroying a nation meant to elevate, not suppress the human spirit. An uber-narcissist demagogue--Trump--is the logical ascendent of delusional, Christian culture. Apocalypse...now.
1
White "Christian tribalists" seem enamored of their president Trump and some long for a theocracy. Then they may define who is a proper Christian/American, to the detriment of justice, intellectual inquiry, compassion, and civil discourse. Of course they already wish to marginalize anyone who is not their type of Christian, as well as demonize anyone one of another faith or secular group. Currently black, brown and Asian citizens, yes citizens, are being assaulted by our president, cabinet and administration. Sad in the extreme.
Well said, Steel Magnolia.
No, the way to defeat Trump is to impeach him. Now or 2019.
7
Not to worry, the Republicans are still a "free labor" party. They want to party while you provide free labor and take care of them. Trump and his ilk are after every dollar they can take from us so their party will never end.
9
This viewpoint ignores the history of "Establishment Republicans" intentionally playing up tribalism to garner and turn out their base.
Trump did not create "the Southern Strategy". Willie Horton and "welfare queens" predated bad hombres and trump's rants about the inner city. The "axis of evil" was declared before Trump too.
Less regulations on corporations and lower margin tax rates for the rich were never a rallying cry. For 50 years the Republican party has consistently used tribalism and xenophobia as its public platform, even if Republican politicians governed more towards Mr. Brook's priorities once they were in office.
But voters have now caught onto the con, and the Republicans getting elected are now the Republicans who actually embody the Republican platform.
Maybe Brooks should just admit that he's a Bloomberg Democrat after all.
16
Thanks, David, for describing President Obama. Too bad third terms aren't possible.
5
"Americans heavily invested in schools"
Mr. Brooks may be unaware that the Land Grant University Act and the Homestead Act were made possibly by the absence of the seceding southern States in Congress at the start o the Civil war. Those States were adamantly opposed to both Acts. Not only did they want to keep their slaves, they also wanted to keep poor Whites poor and uneducated. This anti intellectual streak in "Red" States continues to this day.
20
Since Trump has no operative substantive socioeconomic political educational historical philosophy he can not be refuted nor repelled into retreat by any counter reasonable nor rational thoughtful philosophy.
In the hearts and minds of the American Founding Fathers neither Natives nor Africans were immigrants nor persons nor laborers nor mobile in America. Neither Natives nor Africans were divinely naturally created equal with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Trump is the triumph of Reagan without any of the governing, political and acting experience or talent. Trump is Reagan without the rhetorical gift for white supremacist xenophobic bigoted euphemism and the stoking of colored aka race divisive fear with a soft tone shrug and graceful smile..
See "The Invasion of America: Invasion, Colonialism and The Cant of Conquest" Francis Jennings and "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" Dee Brown
See "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism" Edward Baptist and "Dog-Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class" Ian Haney Lopez
9
David, the party created an ideal environment for chickens to come home to roost. You and the party are enablers.
6
Sorry David, but this is the train you helped build. And now it has left the station without you.
5
Agree--there is no place left in the Republican party for articulate, thoughtful, rational people like David Brooks.
Brooks' second to the last paragraph is laughable. Republicans for education reform? Regulatory reform that breaks monopolies? Tax reform that creates a fair playing field?
Sorry Brooks, you may wish your delusion is so, but that doesn't make it reality.
4
Re Republicans, Brooks writes, "It is becoming the party that can't govern." What about the Supreme Court? Oops!
2
This saccharine telling of American history does violence to reality. The frontier was a place of ethnic cleansing, white supremacy and partial genocide. A place where sectional tensions between free soil and slavery stoked the civil war. A place where railroads received massive subsidies and were looted by insiders before declaring bankruptcy. A place where charlatans proclaimed the rain would follow the plough only to see hundreds of thousands of industrious Americans lose everything on homesteads too parched to farm. A place where majestic herds of bison were hunted to the brink of extinction and left to rot.
The frontier is not a template for the America I want to create.
4
Awesome Article, Mr. Brooks. I think you've hit the right chords this time.
...:
Republicans dont amount to much. Never have. The Republican Party since the founding days of the New Deal, has been little more than a stabilizing second column opposite the staid, never changing Democrat Party. the so-called Republican Party only steps into the breech, when the existing Status Quo has become undeniably malfunctional.
the Gears of a Successful System clanked and lugged in 1860, as the Slave/cotton System become obsolete and free labor was more exploitable....enter the Repubs to force change.
The Industrial/Laissez Faire System charged ahead on steel rails for another 70 years until it crashed into a wall...enter the Repub in Democrat clothes...FDR...to the manor born, yet fighting the Tammany Hall Democrat Tactics from the inside.....largely taking advantage of his position inside the Party to abscond a New Deal system once promoted by Repubs!!
anyway....a Force for change, regardless of party affiliation.
...
But that "change" is now the "status quo"....we have lived in the Democrat Party inspired Orwellian Universe in which we are told..."the only constant..is change"... Bureaucratic Doublespeak and rightthink... And its worked very well for America....until now. We are at a crisis stage once again....
Enter Trump into the Breech.
We entered the Age of the Internet about ten-fifteen years ago. The New Deal is dead. Nothing will revive it.
Sorry, David. You did not convince me of the nobility of the Republican Party.
3
Philosophical opposition to, or even an assault on Trumpism is not really possible, as it has no philosophy or belief system to oppose. There is no thought involved, only knee-jerk reaction. You may as well express your philosophical opposition to vultures pecking at the sinews of a carcass.
5
"Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story". We had this "somebody": Barack Obama. The Republican party took power by cynically manipulating racist resentment against him. It's time to state the obvious: they are morally bankrupt. Any Republican who has a conscience and loves her country has only one choice: become a Democrat.
6
You ignore a large portion of American history. Westward expansion was accomplished by genocide. Outright massacres, smallpox tainted blankets, elimination of food sources, poisoning wells all occurred.
You ignore the fortress America tried to erect on the borders. You might not remember the "No Irish Need Apply" signs. What about the "Gentlemen's Agreement" that restricted Asian immigration? Chinese laborers died in droves building those railroads you admire. Italian immigration was controlled through increasingly arduous requirements.
You blame Trumpism for the now permanent association of the Republican Party with White Supremacy. Richard Nixon went after the racist vote with his "Southern Strategy," ask Kevin Phillips, its architect. When the Democrats chose civil rights they offended millions of Southerners who voted Democrat as a religion. The Democrats removed the demon of Reconstruction from the necks of the whites. Then they turned their backs on them. Nixon collected the Electoral College votes of the racists after Johnson passed civil rights and voting laws.
The Republican Party has ridden the racist reaction to the civil rights movement since the 70's. Trump doesn't deserve credit for bring the racists into the tent, just for making it obvious.
Government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" doesn't include 3/5 people in the definition of people. At least for Republicans.
5
"....becoming a party permanently associated with bigotry." Seriously? The Southern Strategy concocted by the Republican party decades ago, has become part of its DNA and its culture. I love Mr. Brooks's nostalgic views. They always make me feel good about America. But that feel-good-feeling is often untethered from reality.
Sorry, David, none of this happened overnight. Richard Nixon's lawless presidency broke ground for the road that lead us to this sorry, embarrassing, and very dangerous state of affairs. That road became a super highway that smashed into a wall called Donald Trump. Talk about a wall!
None of this is new. It has simply become blindingly obvious, impossible to ignore. The Republican party is a failed organization bereft of a creative and forward thinking vision.
Richard III: "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" And we all know how that one turned out.
6
This column is all about stories. The problem is not stories. It's reality.
This is a description of an idealized, let's be honest, a fantastical version of the Republican party of 100 years ago, maybe 50 at best. But back then the world was very different, no worries about women's rights, gay rights, minority rights, globalization. The GOP most of us know is the party of white people taking advantage of a temporary historical window during which America could control the mineral wealth of the planet and throw everyone else under the bus.
Trump taints the GOP as the party that can't govern? Wrong, the GOP does that to themselves. Who ran on replacing Obama-care and yet couldn't even pass it through their own membership? Whose policy consists of NOTHING more than tax cuts which by now have been dis-proven over and over as an economic driver. Talk about tribalism. Many people, this columnist evidently included, are so emotionally attached to the GOP tribe that they still even now wouldn't choose Clinton over Trump, Kerry over Bush.
You say as a practicing Republican for many years you never heard any racism. That's the problem. You never heard it. The party was declaring it in so many ways through policy and philosophy, but you never heard it. Look at how much else you never heard, how much you're not seeing now, and the logical dissonance of a fantasy version of the GOP versus today's realty, and look carefully at the political choices you're making
7
While I agree with Mr. Brooks in spirit (a rarity) on this, I find his depiction of the progress of our society to be naive in only the way a white Republican can be.
The fact that we have become as divided and dysfunction as we have in a matter of mere years and due to an economic recession and simple demographic changes speaks volumes about how flawed this "great and noble society" Mr. Brooks believes in has been all along.
Clearly not everyone shared in or prospered from the forward progress and robust expansion Mr. Brooks waxes poetic about. Native Americans, African slaves and their descendants, Chinese and Central American immigrants had, at various times, a very different vision of what this country is.
4
"They want to turn us into an old, settled and fearful nation." Perhaps countries go through different phases and we are in a different phase, one in which there is a desire to feel more settled and secure. The proportion of foreign born people living in America is at it's highest level since 1910 right before a major immigration restriction act was passed, that seems to suggest we've faced this sentiment before and it passed as people assimilated. To me it seems we are at that point again, not everybody wants to live in a frontier.
3
That Republican candidate Mr. Brooks is longing for sounds a lot like Barack Obama, doesn't he? But if I recall correctly, when we had Obama in office, it was the mainstream Republican Party that thwarted him at every turn. The problem with Brooks' analysis is that the Republican Party became the party of bigotry and division long before 45 came along. He is the culmination of the party's evolution, not a perversion of it. The candidate Brooks describes would be great for America, but she would have to be a Democrat, and would have to have long enough coattails to sweep a Democratic Congress in along with her.
5
"Today, the main enemy is not aliens; it’s division — between rich and poor, white and black, educated and less educated, right and left."
Left unmentioned here is the very real threat from a Russian government bent on widening these already existing divisions in our society, thereby undermining our nation's cohesiveness and strength as a potential force for good in the world. This has implications extending far beyond our internal partisan politics.
4
I hear a lot of Trump supporters say that the President is giving voice to what they are thinking. How does Mr. Brooks reconcile that sentiment with his claim that "this striving American dream is still lurking in every heart?" It is abundantly clear that the hearts of many Trump supporters are filled with racial hatred.
4
The Republican the Republican Party described by Mr. Brooks is the one I used to and would once again support. However, the current version thereof, the one that elects the likes of Moore, is one I am compelled to oppose.
2
Well, we did have such a person to counter Trumpist populism. Her name was Hillary Clinton.
1
The missing ingredients for a healthy society need to be added back into American CHILDHOOD. We cannon resuscitate our old national dreams until we provide the same kind of stability and hope to kids that older generations were raised on.
Kids become confident and productive people-- dreamers-- via early secure attachments and a lot of encouragement.
Daycare for infants has been very costly to our society. We must change early childhood, if we want securely attached citizens who push towards frontiers instead of miserable disaffected people who cast blame on scapegoats.
Attachment injuries/ early childhood traumas lead to drug abuse, depression, obesity, and anxiety -- all at epidemic levels in our society. This is the trigger-warning, cutter generation.
If we want adults capable of carrying our national dreams forward we need to build them from babyhood.
1
Yeah, Trumpism is bad, but I've become convinced (in spite of the racist-tinged tendency of Trumpism), that conventional "conservatism" as it exists now, is even worse.
Trumpists don't want to cut taxes for the wealthy and raise them on the poor and middle class - "conservatives" do. Trumpists don't want to completely stave and neuter the government - "conservatives" do. Trumpists do not have a desire to end all regulation (environmental, health & safety, etc.) that protects Americans - "conservatives" do.
As misguided as the Trumpists are, I don't think they are the problem - they are just the reaction to the problem. The problem is our respectable, stately, well-mannered "conservative" politicians that will smile kindly at us while they strangle us to death.
4
Your column isn't 'philosophy', Brooks, it's unmitigated gung-ho American triumphalism. Part of the problem, and none of the solution. You refer to 'hope' - and what's being done to the hope of the 'Dreamers'? It's being betrayed by Great and Glorious Leader.
What is being done to the hopes for life of the children no no longer covered by the Child Health Insurance Plan? To the Puerto Ricans, now pitched back to third-world status? And so on and on.
You miss the mark utterly when you speak of the need for a 'philosophy'.
What we need is the basic kindness and affection which any three-year old recognizes - and protests the absence of.
Where has that gone, and why? what will it take to bring it back?
these are urgent, not rhetorical, questions.
4
Philosophy is fine, and makes for great mental exercise. However, blind devotion that unleashes unreasonable rage diminishes any value that reason or rational thought can provide. Charlie Manson had devotees, too. They didn't know why he had a hold over them, he just did. I doubt that most Trumpeteers know what it is about Trump that holds them in thrall, except that he seems to break the rules of decency and gets away with it. The majority of them are shooting themselves in the foot as they give him their blind support for actions he proposes that actually work against them. It is easier to accept what he says....he is making America GREAT again! than to take the time and effort to find out what is actually happening. America isn't philosophically on a frontier. America is lazy, greedy and ignorant and has lost its way in the wilderness.
4
Four questions for David Brooks:
1. Is it not true that "Regular Americans are being oppressed by a snobbish elite that rigs the game in its favor"?
2. Is it not true that both Republican and Democrat elites in Washington DC have colluded for decades to rig the game in favor of their campaign contributors?
3. Is it not true that the Supreme Court, appointed solely by Republican and Democratic elites, has legalized the rigging of the game?
4. Is it not true that you, David Brooks, earning millions as author of best-selling books, are a card-carrying member of this Washington DC elite?
5
Do you honestly think that story is not being voiced? It is being told in many ways, every day. Your party - the republican party you champion - has conditioned millions of Americans to distrust the media, to distrust institutions, to distrust the voices of the educated and responsible voices telling those stories. You and establishment republicans own what you have lost, what you in so many recent columns mourn. You lost many of us in your embrace of Reagan and the religious right. You lost more of us with the Bushes and the embrace of war in the Mideast. You lost the rest of us in your refusal to stand up for Obama against the onslaught of slights and lies tacitly endorsed by your party. Don’t reach out to us. Reach out to the leaders of your party who stand idly by while our country’s stature is further diminished every day by republicans like you.
5
Brilliant and keenly insightful piece written by David Brooks.
The Republican Party has become a party of Repugnant ideas and beliefs lead by a modern day Robber Baron. Donald Trump aka Drumpf is the embodiment of the proverbial " Ugly American". He appeals to the basest thoughts of his obeisant MAGA RED soldiers.
The mesmerized MAGA REDS who swoon at every Drumpf utterance are devoid of the ability to discern reality for Trump's administration is dismantling the protections and safety apparatuses that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal put into place to safeguard the average American.
Trump "Drumpf" is a manicured and pedicured coiffed hair Sandy rich boy who is delivering gifts to his fellow oligarchs and plutocrats at the expense of the forgotten American middle and lower income Americans.
4
People like Bannon and Putin need the hollow man Trump to advance their agendas. And Trump, all fragile ego and no conscience, is the perfect vehicle. Like an outsider on the playground, the bullies see a perfect foil to do their work for approval and adulation. The Republicans thought they could use Trump too, but at cross purposes with the stronger force controlling Trump, they now realize that plan won't work. In the meantime, the whole of what America stands for is being shredded and we are at the mercy of our own mad Ubu Roi. A shallow, greedy, uneducated, infantile man who has stirred the dangerous embers in a segment of the population who shares his feelings of being an outsider and who speaks to that daily.
5
This is a brilliant, pithy rejoinder.
This was an interesting article until this quote: "The regular Republicans have no story, no conviction and no argument. They just hem and haw and get run over."
"Regular" people heard the Billy Bean audio. Regular people saw and heard the derogatory comments about the disabled. Regular people heard the derogatory comments about immigrants. None of those regular people voted for this sham of a "leader" but 60 million people did. There is no such thing as a "regular Republican".
3
You never had the guts to face the truth, Brooks. This column is drenched in sophistical attempts to reframe the business mentality as key to all social benefits, which is absolutely all--apart from the class=conscious snobbery of the prosperous--the Republicans have ever been committed to. You're as guilty as Trump in riding that wave of contempt for the poor into your prosperity while mansplaining it away as noble achievement. Just quit.
1
Dude, my eyes glazed over about half way through your column.
The only way to defeat Trump, my friend, is for him to be removed by the 25th Amendment or impeachment.
That's it. That's all we've got.
As for the rural voters who were duped by this guy...education is the only thing that will save us from them. Make the rural schools in America just as effective and resource rich as they are in Orange County, Bucks County, Westchester and Fairfield counties.
Above all, the Republican party has become the icon of ignorance, racism and ineptitude. Donald Trump is their perfect figurehead.
Hey Dave, start a new party, my brother. That's your only hope.
2
Oh, well, so the pioneering days were nothing but energy, youthfulness and labor? Really? What about the PEOPLE who lived here before and were "in their way"? They don't count? Oh, they were not "dynamic immigrants", no, they just happened to live here resourcefully for thousands of years before the "pioneers" came to end up their way of life entirely! Thanksgiving myth aside, there was genocide here. Don't forget to acknowledge. Mr. Brooks. This land was stolen and conquered!
Secondly, American wealth was built on the backs of slaves, indentured servants, colonies (to be discarded, like Puerto Rico right now, when their usefuleness is coming to doubt) and outrageous exploitation of land, resources of this land and the world in general and its people. This idealism of the frontier should be put in this perspective. The obsence wealth of individuals here leads to this bored spoilt mass shooter and this spoilt arrogant president.
Nobody who was exploited by the "dynamic spirit" had survived it well, the Native Americans live in reservations running casinos, lost most of their spirit. Go see for yourselves. And the blacks are sitting in jail or "killing each other", but who cares...
Additionally, the universalist utopia is simply not here yet. The world at large is not quite ready to shed borders and let everybody in. Nor should the United States. Entry should be regulated according to agreed rules.
2
"It’s waiting for somebody who has the guts to say no to tribe, yes to universal nation, no to fences, yes to the frontier, no to closed, and yes to the open future, no to the fear-driven homogeneity of the old continent and yes to the diverse hopefulness of the new one."
We had a guy who said all those things--and Mitch McConnell made it his life's work to make that guy a one-term president. Turns out that it's true--you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. Faux News did everything they could to defeat this person seeking to take us into a future not dominated by old fat white male lechers, and sadly, many folks believed their swill. Facebook and it's fake news is just a new variation of Fox. So David, I like your idea, but how do you propose to stop the Republicans and their official network from killing off any chance we may have of a future that remembers what made us great in the past?
3
What a romantic view of past Republicans and of the country.
5
The Republican Party has become a source of most of the ills plaguing our society, be it its global warming stand, economic- reverse Robin Hood- model, systematic opposition to ACA, or staunch support of NRA to name just a few.
Essays written by people like you help, but sometimes actions of people like you speak louder than their words. George Will, citing disapproval of Trump, left the Republican Party. Why, with your views and systematic criticism of what it is now, are you still its member?
3
David Brooks writes about what the Republicans are today, and what he imagines they used to be, and has nothing to say whatsoever about how the one became the other, a process for which deserves more than a little blame himself.
I am getting tired of seeing him, Erick Erickson, and Ross Douthat pound the earth and rend their garments on a weekly basis in these pages as if the Republican Party turned into an incompetent and racist morass when they turned their back for a moment, and not gradually, at their urging and to their cheers, for decades.
3
Good luck with that one, David. You're gonna sell philosophy to people who've become suspicious of elites? Really? You're trying to paint inclusiveness, diversity, globalism and aspiring to multi-culturalism with the same brush that romanticized the frontierism of manifest destiny? No kidding? You're trying to awaken the spirits the founders dreamt of in the minds of Trump's horde of accolytes? Yeah, that'll be the day. Let us know how it works out.
3
This column is unintentionally hilarious. Trump isn’t some isolated phenomenon. Trump is the natural evolution of the radicalization of the GOP, and it’s dumbing down by Fox “News”, talk radio, and other propaganda organs of the right spewing out hatred. Reading Burke and Jefferson’s works and opining on philosophy won’t fix the GOP. What needs to occur is defeat and exile from government. That is the only thing that would teach the Republicans a lesson. Will that happen?
2
David, you greatly misread history. As usual you gravitate toward myth rather than reality. America was ALWAYS tribal. The tribe was the dominant force in the development of America. And while there were different tribes, the overwhelmingly dominant tribe was Northern European white. All other tribes were subservient to, and exploited by that tribe. Yes the frontier narrative played a dominant role in America’s development, but frontier development was always driven by tribal affiliation. Whites marched into the frontier and obliterated any tribe that was not theirs. With the help of their white government they obliterated Native Americans, Mexicans – anyone who got in their way. Capitalism built the American economy on the backs of other tribes, black slaves and then the Chinese who built the railroads. The American Dream was a reserved for whites until it became so corrupted that we have today’s conundrum: a white plutocracy (the dominant tribe) taking most of the American pie, and a vast swath of poorer whites who are angry because they are being left out. Their anger stems from tribal affiliation. By virtue of their whiteness they feel entitled to share in the riches. This is an emotional issue, not a philosophical one. The disenfranchised whites stick together and support Trump even though it is not in their best interest. They do so because they find comfort in their tribe. They may go bankrupt, be addicted to opioids, be uneducated, but by god they are white.
3
The platform you aspire to sounds a whole lot like what I heard when I watched the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
1
We are not "waiting for somebody who has the guts to say no to tribe, yes to universal nation, blah, blah, blah...".
Mr. Brooks, did you listen to Hillary Clinton's campaign speeches or follow her political career? She was this candidate. We are waiting for our leaders to acknowledge and remedy a thoroughly corrupted political system that has allowed the likes of Trump to get elected with the illicit help of a foreign foe, the use of gerrymandering, suppressing the vote, etc.
How would we ever elect the candidate described in this perverse environment?
2
The best evidence points to the fact that Trump is all hat and no cattle. But can his tribe see that? Looks like they've all got smoke in their eyes.
1
Not sure the majority of Americans want this idealic vision anymore. Cling to their gadgets; befriend herds of people whom they have never met. Live in an empty, artificial reality and haven't the personal muscle to decipher who or what they are. Don't understand what they've lost. Indoctrinated. This is how civilizations fall into decline and eventually disappear. They seldom know what happened because their zest for substantial knowledge evaporates. Sleep walking. So it goes, an old story with a refreshed script for the times.
2
Trump won due to a heavily flawed Constitution that substitutes a silly algorithm called Electoral votes for the choice of the majority. The problem is that Trump's opponents are afraid of admitting that the Constitution has problems and needs repair, because they rely on the Constitution to protect some of their own unpopular policies, like abortion-on-demand and gay marriage.
The Republicans need to purge their "wink - wink" boys - the Newt Gingrichs, Frank Luntzs, Karl Roves, Dick Cheneys, Sean Hannitys, etc. - the boys who want to frame their fantasy of power and not what is truly healthy for our democracy/republic. Sure, Dems have their own issues but the GOP is 100% responsible for this president and his unfitness for office.
4
Maybe we need to allow presidents to run for a third term?
Mr. Brooks calls Mr. Trump "populist". Whatever else Donald Trump is, he is not a populist.
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/opinion/springtime-for-scammers.html
I'm a social democrat. I live by Paul Krugman, EJ Dionne, Tom Edsall, Tim Egan, Maureen Dowd, Ezra Klein. But any progressive policy maker would be a fool not to want David Brooks or someone like him in the room when discussing how to approach a problem.
3
I recently read that whites under 30 voted for Trump by a +5 margin. Out of all the disheartening statistics since last November this may be the worst. Bannon and his type may be the only ones who understand what is really going on. The liberal echo chamber and conservatives such as Mr. Brooks are lost at sea. Well written columns like this don't speak to the masses. Remember every newspaper in America endorsed Hillary.
5
The GOP was hijacked by a demagogue and his populist supporters. A GOP civil war is inevitable: conservatism at is core is founded on an instinct to preserve and protect what is good about our society, government a democratic institutions; populism is driven by a desire to destroy (e.g., "drain the swamp"). That's why these irreconcilable philosophies cant travel for too long in the same cart....
The real shame is that the opinion leaders who could have lead the conservative faction in this fight have largely left the party with #NeverTrump (i.e., Rubin, Krauthammer, Will, Samuelson, Gerson, etc.), compromised themselves by blind loyalty to their party leadership (i.e., most Hill Republicans), or are battered by too many battles already (i.e., John McCain, Jeff Flake, Lindsay Graham)....
2
America didn't begin by seeking a frontier. The first colonists in Virginia came to make money from tobacco; the more famous Pilgrims came to find refuge from a too diverse England. Much that Brooks cites of U.S. history isn't wrong, but it's only the positive side. It ignores the problematic roots that continue to bedevil us.
4
Brooks often slips in the GOP bromides expecting the reader to subconsciously stipulate so that he may proceed with his pseudo-philosophical argument. For example when speaking of his brethren, the old-style Republicans:
" . . . they were against government that enervated ambition . . ." There has never been evidence that government programs designed to help people enervate ambition. It is an old saw used to cut the safety net, over and over again.
I might also suggest an edit, to " . . . fear-driven homogeneity of the old continent . . " Simply change "continent" to "incontinent" and you have a more accurate assessment.
1
We forget that the key voting event isn't the general election anymore, it's the primaries. This low turnout event is tailor made for motivated extremists. They're disciplined, motivated, they vote in a block and most important - they VOTE! We, the rest of us, stay home, watch TV or meander around the internet. We let about 10% of the population decide who will be our leaders. We get what we get because we simply let it happen. When candidates were chosen in the legendary "smoke filled room", party leaders decided who would run, when we went to primaries we effectively delegated that to motivated extremists. It's not working out so well.
5
This rosy editorial, gushing with all the right American Symbols and playing on the very best of the American Mythos, very conveniently forgets one simple fact: "Donald Trump WON."
I repeat: "Donald Trump WON."
It has apparently not yet occurred to the present political leadership that a sea-change has occurred in this country, and that, as subsequent elections come up over the next six years, quite probably every single one of them will lose their seats. When Donald Trump completes his second term in the White House – as he surely will – he will preside over a very, very different Congress.
Furthermore, neither Democrat nor Republican will be spared, because neither party anymore represents the people of the country. They are leaders steeped in corruption, who eagerly embraced a decision (by an equally-corrupt Supreme Court) that bribery, far from being the "high crime" that the Constitution declares it to be, is in fact "free speech" by a "form of citizen" that neither Constitution nor Law considers to be so.
Intrinsic in all of these people's arguments is that their own hold upon power cannot be swayed. Yet, one by one, finger by finger, it will be wrested from their grasp. Forever.
1
If things turn out as described above, Donald Trump will have a Congress that will agree with him that he deserves a 3rd term and then a 4th term (just like Putin has done) and when Mr. Trump's life ends of natural causes...Donald Jr. will take his place. May God Save the United States of America.
David, haven’t you seen the people at Trump’s rallies? You think they can be converted to your kind of Republican? Neither do I. Just face it, they ARE the Republican party now. This process stated over 30 years ago and you should have see it coming like the rest of us did. You want to stop Trump, consider voting for Democrats. Your vision for what America is comes closer to their values than the current Republican party.
5
Oh please.
The Republican Party is the party that purposely courted the Strom Thurmond and George Wallace voters.
The Republican Party is the party that for a third time tried to pass a tax cut for the wealthy in the name of healthcare and that would take away healthcare from 20 million because their donors have been threatening them.
4
I kept thinking of President Obama and his unifying words and actions. But it takes two to make a handshake work.
1
David, when you tick off the litany of those who tried to defeat Trump, and the areas that he has succeeded have you ever asked yourself why?
I am no Trump lover, but feel that the liberal press helps him daily.
They do so, for instance when they condemn him for his position on standing for the Star Spangled Banner, or not getting help to Puerto Rico in 48 hours.
The American people may not like Trump, but they dislike the way the media treats him more.
No even handidness just vitrol.
3
All America has ever been is a giant land grab. Manifest Destiny: Western Civilization and White Anglo Saxon Dominance. Then we had WWII and the advantage of being left unscathed after the destruction of a large portion of the industrialized world. Lucky us.
The Republican Party died the day they made minimizing the federal government by lowering the tax burden on rich people their primary goal. How did they get their voters on board? Deride and demonize Democrats and particularly liberals. Deride and demonize the federal government's "overreach regulations."
Well, today western Lake Erie has turned green. The mayor of Toledo (Didn't Ohio go for Trump?) is imploring Trump to declare Lake Erie "impaired," thereby invoking the Clean Water Act to limit nutrient flows into the lake. Wouldn't you call the Clean Water Act one of those government regulations? Oh, dear. How's that for hypocrisy? Businesses based on lakeside recreation will suffer now, and I don't particularly care. It's not in my backyard. Isn't that how it works? Like the Texas bumper stickers--Drive 90 and Freeze a Yankee--from the 70's? It doesn't affect me so why should I care?
There's no more land to grab, except our protected national lands, and the Republicans will let those go up for grabs next, I'm sure. Since Reagan, the Republican Party has had no policy except letting the rich exploit this land of ours until we become a feudal society. Asking it to change now is hopeless.
6
It is not "deeply wrong" that "Regular Americans are being oppressed by a snobbish elite that rigs the game in its favor." A bit hyperbolic, for the sake of the argument perhaps, but not "deeply wrong."
We have a congress that works for those who provide the money to ensure that those who are doing well continue to do so.
We have Supreme Court that thinks corporations are individuals and deserving of all the rights their money can buy.
Our "core American" values are reflected in how we use our wealth:
Obscene amounts of money are made by those who handle it.
Obscene amounts of money are spent on the military.
...As old people increasingly are unable to retire, health care and housing costs spiral out of control, and college requires going into debt.
I used to think that Trump was the product of an educational system that failed to produce voters capable of sustaining liberal democracy; now I see him more as the product of a failed democracy.
The hero we await will have to address the issue of wealth inequality with enough populist fervor to open the eyes of those who still prosper to the real possibility of civil unrest.
The "philosophical assault" needs to be directed against the structural failures of our current political system.
1
David Brooks is a decent man, and that enhances everything he writes. In this case, he's trying to keep his improved idea of government within the Republican party. I'm not going to change that, and I doubt if anyone else can, even if someone turns up who's smarter than Mr Brooks. But the ideals he espouses are closer to Democratic practice than Republican. Just take the question of civil rights — of the idea of equality, as Whitehead might say, becoming a reality. The Solid South used to be Democrats; now it's Republicans. Which party is more likely to "[welcome] the skilled and the hungry"? Mr Brooks's column is about swaying the Trump Republicans, so what he says makes sense. They're not going to be swayed by Democrats. But putting aside political strategy, and just thinking of philosophy, Mr Brooks is a better Democrat than Republican.
2
I'm noting that when I open this NYT article to read it, there are 53 trackers collecting my information. We are not watching the ascent of populism; we are watching the ascent of of a wealthy ruling class that has taken control of parties, media and that fears informed citizens enough to track everything they read, say and do. Nice distraction, David.
3
The Republican Party has changed a lot since honest Abe and I expect it will keep changing in the direction it is now headed.
The problem with what Mr. Brooks is describing is that it requires logic, reasoning, and facts in order to make those arguments. The establishment Republicans have long since repudiated reality-based governing.
2
Sounds like Angus Maddison, which is fine. But this is also a little light on rule of law without which you get what we've got. An autocratic leader making his own rules and a corrupt extended family. What's really needed an embrace of the next K-wave in which we trade capital efficiency, which has gone on too long at this point, for expansion and an inflating economy. The inflation is central to the demand for education and opening of a new frontier.
1
Like so many conservative anthems, this one starts out with patriotic music and poetic words that are impossible to argue with, and a beautiful dream. It's not until the last couple of paragraphs (the small print, if you will) that the disclosure comes that this wonderful utopia will be accomplished by slashing the social safety net, eliminating regulation of business (oh, but just to break up monopolies!), cutting medicare and Social Security benefits for the old, cutting taxes for the rich, and opening the immigration doors: the same-old, same-old line of elitist snake-oil. I await the day that all our citizens can see through this con job.
2
Somebody with the qualities you would like did run in the last Presidential election. The way to beat such a person is what happened, by lies and relentless character attacks to appeal to the tribalism of the other side, to define the good candidate as herself the alien. What will prevent that from working next time? What are the qualities of character needed to defeat the tribalism, and who has them?
Interesting philosophical ideas, but historically I think you have confused the Republican Party with the Democrats.
Mr. Brooks seems to want to make the RICO-publican party great again. Remember back in the 1920s when it was the party of graft and corruption? Who doesn't have fond, fuzzy memories of the Nixon era? Maybe the party of Gingrich is more worthy of rapturous recollections. Why should a political party incite such nostalgia in him? Political parties have become too much of a core part of people's identities in the US, and perhaps such myth making as Mr. Brooks has engaged in contributes to this problem.
3
"Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story."
If I'm not mistaken, we had a guy who tried just that. I think his name was Obama.
2
The title of mr brooks piece is incorrect because today’s GOP has no “philosophy “ other than to stay in power in order to enrich the rich. In fact there is obvious doubt if the GOP even knows what Philosophy is. They allowed Trump to get in the White House and it is obvious what his “philosophy “ is- himself.
1
Keep talking, David. Yours is the type of voice I heard as a child and thus wholearned to believe in the values of America, a democratic republic. Yours are the kinds of thoughts I read as a young adult and learned of the yearnings of so many others in the world who longed to have the freedoms we had in America. Your words now bring me the comfort of knowing there are still those out here in America who do not lie to us, who do not try to fill us with fake news day after day and who still cherish the same ideals I have loved for over 80 years. I fear that, once people who speak the truth as you do, are gone that we will be bereft as a nation of anything of goodness and truth,
Trumpism, what brooks and others in the centrist GOP camp, is not a aberration of the party - it is the culmination of its reach for power.
Starting with Reagan - who declared "Government is the Problem" to Sarah Palin being the mainstream candidates ( McCain ) choice - this IS the face of the Republican Party. This is who you guys have been for decades - a party build on denying things to people ( except rich people, corporations and gun owners).
A party of exclusion ( always some group is being excluded in their philosophy ) rather than inclusion.
Its a repulsive party , and now it has a face to match.
1
The problem in getting your message across is that no one who supports Trump will read it. The real story is that each American election is a backlash against the previous one. I truly believe we will see a backlash against Trump in 2020 if not 2018
Well, David... a good try. I am an avid consumer of your views.
But it would seem to me that you are trying too hard. There is no philosophical asault to be made because there is no philosophy to be assaulted. Trumpism isn't an intellectual brand-- it is simple demagoguery.
The die-hard core of his supporters (38% +/-) is not enough to re-elect this man. His failures will bring him down as the mass of voters turn in disgust to someone and something new.
But the neo-liberal elite bear large responsibility for this as well by producing a candidate so reviled as to be not elected. This election should indeed have been a slam dunk for a Democrat... but not THAT one.
Many of us think that things are going to get so bad under the Donald that next time Bernie or someone like him will get elected.
1
This column is all about stories. The problem is not stories. It's reality.
This description of the history of an idealized, let's be honest, a fantastical version of the Republican party of 100 years ago, maybe 50 at best. But back then the world was very different, no worries about women's rights, gay rights, minority rights, globalization. The GOP most of us know is the party of white people taking advantage of a temporary historical window during which America could control the mineral wealth of the planet and throw everyone else under the bus.
Trump taints the GOP as the party that can't govern? Wrong, the GOP does that to themselves. Who ran on replacing Obama-care and yet couldn't even pass it through their own membership? Whose policy consists of NOTHING more than tax cuts which by now have been dis-proven over and over as an economic driver. Talk about tribalism. Many people, this columnist evidently included, are so emotionally attached to the GOP tribe that they still even now wouldn't choose Clinton over Trump, Kerry over Bush.
You say as a practicing Republican for many years you never heard any racism. That's the problem. You never heard it. The party was declaring it in so many ways through policy and philosophy, but you never heard it. Look at how much else you never heard, how much you're not seeing now, and the logical dissonance of a fantasy version of the GOP versus today's realty, and look carefully at the political choices you're making
Education is essential for more Americans to grasp the ideals of a universal nation with an open future. Belief in the possible requires a detailed understanding of how our beautiful complex system can lift all Americans to a better future. A kid who doesn't understand the basic principals of science can easily dismiss climate change. A kid who can't break down the statistics behind gun deaths and compare the U.S. to other nations won't have the intellectual ammunition to make an informed choice.
Kids (and adults) need the tools to understand our increasingly complicated systems and role in the world in order to make informed choices -- whatever they may be. I'd totally espect someone who opposes gun control so long as they had all the facts and information and made reasonable inferences.
David's shiny future isn't possible without funding better education for our kids.
3
The Populists themselves are not philosophers. Some of them are good, honest, hard working people who would give their all to help those in need. Many of them are not. They are bigots; they are ignorant; or they simply cannot adjust to the requisites of a changing world: Nature that must be preserved and restored; equal rights for all; education and skill acquisition that is demanding and goes beyond muscle work during the week and football and beer and party at the week-ends; the requirements of contemporary production and the resulting job market; the fact of an expanding international economy which we can opt out of only at our peril. It would be helpful if people who know better would refrain from thinking they cannot manipulate the Populists by pandering to them. Environmental imperatives are not going to go away because Populists don't want to believe them nor address them, neither are the imperatives of contemporary production, nor the reality of having to assimilate illegal aliens that are here while creating a just and enforceable immigration system. Maybe, a romanticized past is not the best resource available for coping with today's demands; maybe, scientific inquiry and education and a will to explore are.
1
So much of what you say here, Mr. Brooks, is correct and well-articulated. The problem is your own denial of the Republican history and responsibility for moving away from your preferred (and I hope) more accurate story of what the United States is and has been. Your preferred story, as opposed to the "populist" Trump story, might have been a story Abraham Lincoln would have told, but it is definitively not the story of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, which is why Trump ran as a Republican and could only have won as a Republican. The Republican story of the past 50 years has been: " (white people) fear your neighbors" who do not look like you (black people, asians, native Americans). Trump only added fuel to the fire your party has fomented for decades. He simply turned the emphasis toward aliens and immigrants, while retaining the old Republican fears of people of color (recall his "law and order" speech at the Republican convention) and his oft-repeated descriptions of war-zone like tropes about "inner-city (black people) neighborhoods." If Republicans (or whatever they decide to call themselves when their party is destroyed by their own selfishness) want to really do some soul searching, stop looking at Trump as something different than they are. He is not. He is the golem they created. Unfortunately, after Trump, it isn't clear what, exactly, Republicans stand for at all (outside of the populist story) told by Mr. Brooks and attributed to Trump and his supporters.
322
Oh it seems pretty clear to me what they stand: for money for them! More imposition of Bible-based enforcement.
1
I was going to comment, but your articulate words said it for me- Thank you!
Right on!
Trump's German grandfather fled to America to avoid criminal prosecution for dodging the Bavarian German military draft.
While Trump does not consider either his ethnic Slavic communist atheist Czech or Slovenian model 1st and 3rd wives to be fearsome "alien" immigrants.
1
Don't you feel sometimes that there are so many versions of Republicanism in the existing GOP that you are really the interloper? Like it or not, your brand of idealized Republicanism only exists in your own mind, Mr Brooks.
Former House Speaker John Boehner once quipped that Trump is barely a Republican. He may be right - and probably you might want to concur - but Trump belongs to the current makeup. The tea partiers, the reverse-NIMBY (Hurricane Sandy v. Hurricane Irma)... So on and so forth. Ironically, they all have one thing in common, they are coward in touching to NRA 3rd rail.
Before the election, anyone with a sense of history if not philosophy has warned about Trump's heritage and baggage, a la Roy Cohn. Wielding power no matter the cost is the only thing. Philosophically, it is anti-Hobbesian. But no one listened. Not even the Democrats. Granted that there was the Russian subterfuge, but if the Dems were less selfish and more united, they could have won. Too late now.
Here lies the remedy. Philosophy might provide the soul but it is unity that can overcome Trumpism, or any ism. Unity means compromise. In a way, the Republicans making compromise a dirty word during President Obama's tenure has worked too well, they disrupted not only their opponents but also themselves
100
David articulates the status quo very well but his aspirations will be hard to realize since he ignores critical factors at play.First, the deeply embedded culture of entitlement and infantilism where blame replaces personal accountability and expectations about what it takes to be successful are way out of fate.Second, and related, the failure to recognize that with today's Class system, hard work and perseverance are no longer sufficient for success which now depends on relevant skills, which in turn depend on a good education, not just "college"or dexterity.Finally, and most importantly, competition for resources is now global ,so that US culture needs to evolve to take education more seriously and focus less on "age is just a number",fun and team sports.The American Dream will not re-materialize unless we face up to the fact that increasingly our infantile culture is getting in the way.
5
Education will not save you from a future in which robotic software runs the world for the benefits of capitalists. Many of the jobs that currently require high levels of education are the easiest to computerize.
Many of the activities, not jobs, can be computerized.Discovery in the legal profession and the reporting of imaging studies by radiologists are examples.They augment the profession, releasing time for more value added activities, not eliminating the jobs
This essay should be required reading for all high school students before graduation. I have admired Mr. Brooks' thoughts for years. This is one of his very best. We must define ourselves in terms of all our possibilities and not by limitations or fears.
5
If only platitudes made it so. David, as always, is well-meaning, but so off track. The country is in the grips of an anti-democratic movement that is counter to all values Americans (supposedly) espouse: truth, equality, freedom, belief in a separation of church and state.
The Republican party is reaping what it has sown over the past 30-40 years. They created and fed and then unleashed this monster upon the land. If there's any silver lining to this crisis we're in, it's that the Republican party, the part of Reagan and Rove, is dead.
16
Required two-year universal service for every 18 year-old will: (a) build positive relationships across a diverse population; (b) will get need work done at low cost; and (c) will have a positive effect on the labor market.
This is a practical and virtually guaranteed action to address the cultural schism we are experiencing.
15
The America that Trump would return us to is one filed with division, segregation, bigotry, and hatred. Wealthy whites may look upon returning to some magical period in the past with enthusiasm, but those unfortunate enough to be born without wealth and not white, there is no "great" America to return to. Perhaps Trump's slogan should have been simply, "Make America Great."
4
David Brooks overlooks here the fact that the Republican Party has been depending on the racist vote ever since the Nixon administration. It has become the party of ignorance as well as the party of random violence and indiscriminate warfare. The civic values Brooks attributes to the Republican party are more likely to find assent in the ranks of Democrats. He really should just become a Democrat.
12
Don't romanticize pioneers. The westward expansion was just as much a story about bigotry, religious intolerance, racism, economic opportunism, imperialism and state sanctioned genocide. This version is what they tell 3rd graders on Pioneer Day as parades march down ill begotten streets. The personal experience is sometimes honorable or at least impressive. As a philosophy though, pioneering is not something we should desire to emulate.
I feel the same way about the proud Republican honorifics outlined here. There's more left out of the story than there is included. The Republican party is already permanently associated with bigotry. The Democrats are too. It's simply a question of timing and degree. We're supposed to quietly ignore the bad history. Instead, we're told to aspire to some noble past that never existed. This to justify the same policy outline we've been hearing since Reagan. No thanks. I think I'll walk my own way.
8
Brooks claims that " the Republican Party is becoming a party permanently associated with bigotry" The fact is that the Republican Party has been permanently associated with bigotry since the days of Richard Nixon and his "Southern Strategy" of pandering to Southern whites who were disaffected with the Democratic Party's embrace of the Civil Rights Movement.
Brooks has refused to admit this for years and years -- it's about time he opened his eyes and recognized the truth about his colleagues on the Right.
8
While it is partially true that the Republican Party was founded as a "free labor" party, let's not forget that even at its origin the rationale for freelabor was unfair competition from salve labor. There was little "morbid sympathy" for the plight of the slave, except from a handful of abolitionists who were attracted to this new political movement. Joining them were the nativists from the Know--Nothing Party, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, anti-other. So there have been multiple strains of thought inside the GOP from inception, and the Trumpian strand is growing still because it expresses consistent themes with the DNA of the party.
4
It's too late. Hate anger and fear have won. The Republican party has used that trio for years to win elections and appears to have a permanent grip on government. They have been greatly aided by relentless right wing propaganda paid for by the Kochs, Murdochs and Mercers of the world.
Donald Trump is president, Roy Moore will be a US Senator. Mass killings go on unabated and unaddressed by our government. We are living in a slowly evolving dystopia. I am hoping for another Great Depression to change the dynamic because surely we are on the road to perdition.
2
It started as a "bring out the base" option. The reason for the original GOP disinformation system (the alternative media led by Fox News and talk radio) was to convince Republican voters, many of whom have very different views about religion, economics, patriotism, that they were under attack. The inevitable result, the same as in 20s Russia, and the 30s in Germany/Italy, and others throughout history, was turning inward and blaming "the outsiders", as threats are constantly uncovered increasing the fear and anger. Although the GOP's objective was to increase the likelihood that their supporters would vote, during the last ten years they discovered that mainstream candidates for local and national races were no longer acceptable to Republican voters. Assisted by Vladimir Putin who knows good propaganda when he sees it, in 2016 the already fairly extreme GOP presidential candidates were easily usurped by the strongman, the universal answer to the resulting fear, anger and blame. As the GOP must now realize, the solution was much worse than the problem. It's time for any remaining Republicans to admit their complicity and leave the party.
3
What is missing from this intelligent column is the phony religious stances taken by this president to satisfy his deplorable base exemplified by the doctrinaire Christian personalities of Pence, Gorsuch and de Vos, not to speak of the silence of the judiciary and the Republicans over the misreadings of the second amendment (the impotent Congress's big idea has been easing the acquisition of gun silencers). And let us not talk about these people's inhumane and cruel moves in health care which the citizens universally reject - or the attempts to suppress voting rights. The mercurial opportunistic president has survived by constantly shifting his opinions. Lastly what is missing from this column is the admission that racism is this country's original sin which the unrepentant South keeps alive. In some years the dominance of the white men will be replaced by a multiethnic majority which hopefully will have a larger international vision about the Idea of America.
7
Another thing. You seem to have forgotten, Mr. Brooks, that most Americans didn't vote for the nightmare this country has become.
And the MAJORITY of Americans don't have to wait "for somebody who has the guts to say no to tribe, yes to universal nation, no to fences, yes to frontier, no to closed, and yes to open future" -- the majority of Americans have the guts, and they are that somebody.
They are also the ones who are resisting this administration, and every hateful thing it has come to represent and stand for.
They are the true patriots.
We are the true patriots.
Look around.
4
Trump's supporters don't seem to realize that the "snobbish elite oppressing ordinary Americans" is Trump and his Cabinet of Wall Street billionaires who fly around on private jets paid for with taxpayers' dollars catering to multinational corporations and the top 1% at the expense or the poor and the shrinking middle class. In Trump's America, you not only get what you pay for, you pay for what you get.
5
There are two great and dangerous populists on the scene today.
Populists thrive when the people are disaffected, and along comes a pol who says "it's not your fault - i know who's responsible for your problems". They offer scapegoats.
With Trump, the blame is put on "aliens".
With Sanders, it's put on "the rich", who "rig the system".
Shame on anyone falling prey to anyone who falls for either one.
3
CONCLUSION: Newt's colonization of Mars is our only fore if forging selfishness is to provide our survival's only forgiveness.
There is no philosophical assault to be made on Trumpism, because Trumpism is not a philosophy, it is a cult.
Trump has trained his believers to accept without question anything he says, and to vehemently defend any statement he makes or position he takes, without regard to any previous statement or position.
Trump aside, both political parties have gotten in the bad habit (reinforced by voters) of spending more time pointing out the faults of the other side, rather than focusing on their own positive perspective and agenda.
Until an electoral majority of voters reject the pugilistic but content-free style of Trump, and until they insist on getting positive policy prescriptions from the major parties, we will end up right where we are today.
People can (and will) complain about the system and the candidates and the government, but if they don't change their voting behavior, nothing the commentariat or pundits or spin doctors can say will change anything.
2
I want to love this column. I agree with much of it. It should be inspiring. But there's a part of this story that Brooks is glossing over.`
We thrived by "exploring" a physical frontier during the migration west, Brooks writes. Yet in the process we managed to destroy the communities of people who lived there. Native Americans did not thrive, to put it mildly.
Yes, this is a nation of immigrants. Part of our strength is that we have a richness of cultures that we all benefit from. We can be proud of where we came from and yet feel totally American.
But our agricultural success depended on slavery, and the railroads were built by immigrants who lived lives of serfdom and abuse. I'm not trying to tear America down. We can focus on what's good about this country and be honest at the same time.
We can love America without subscribing to the fantasy that we succeeded by dint of sheer talent, boldness, and hard work. By ignoring the darker parts of our history, we ignore the history that contributed to our current divisions, to the panic of white Christian people who feel their world is slipping away; the alienation of African Americans whose history of slavery and institutionalized racism is discounted. ("Free labor" indeed.)
What is missing from the defining traits Brooks lists here is honesty. In this era of division, fake news, blatant lying by our leaders, it is crucial to privilege honesty. Otherwise this lovely vision of America rings false.
15
I don't disagree with Mr. Brooks analysis, but the problem is in the first paragraph. Some of those who COULD have made this American Dream argument were shouted down by the "Trump base". Anyone who wants to make the non-extremist argument for the future of the GOP will have to bypass or ignore or shout down that base. That may or may not be doable within the confines of the current Republican party.
1
" It may be dormant, but this striving American dream is still lurking in every heart. It’s waiting for somebody who has the guts to say no to tribe, yes to universal nation, no to fences, yes to the frontier, no to closed, and yes to the open future, no to the fear-driven homogeneity of the old continent and yes to the diverse hopefulness of the new one."
Not likely since it requires voters to be informed. What was dormant was the racism in our hearts which has continued to fuel support for Trump. People believe him because they want to believe him and no amount of facts will change that mind set. The "5th Avenue Principle" is alive and well in Trumpworld.
3
You lost me when you started to define the Republican party. You give a litany of values that most of us could accept as policy and then say that is how the Republican party distinguishes itself. But no, positive apple pie policies are things we have all, Democrats and Republicans robustly negotiated and annealed into our lives while we move on to new problems to solve. If there is a philosophy in the background, it is about consensus not separated values. Our different political parties, unlike those is Spain end up agreeing on what works and we absorb that into our fabric. We are not (as Republicans seem to be) in a philosophical "us vs them" battle but in a great conversation about who we are and how we make our country better. Trump has co opted the values we all share, not just Republicans. He wants to single handedly destroy what we all, not just Republicans, have built over the last century. Fighting "liberals" to win some "conservative" battle, using demagogic rhetoric, preppy "dirty tricks" and a dollar driven media undermines both your and all our American philosophy. The Republican party is mainly responsible. We developed ACA (based on Republican philosophy) and it worked; the idea of using it as a way to win votes instead of improveing it for all, undermines the philosophy you describe. Trump is so divisive, rude and destructive that, since he is uncontrollable, removing him ASAP should be the priority of any thoughtful American.
2
Mr. Brooks says, "The original Republicans were not for or against government ..." This is not exactly the case. They thought government should solve problems. A more accurate description of Republicans, and all Americans, is we are not for small government or big government, we are for good government. We wanted the government's power divided, we wanted ultimate power given to the people, however we decide to define them, and we want the government to solve problems that individuals, or states, cannot adequately address. The current Republican ideal is quite the opposite. The Republican Party seeks to control every aspect of our lives, from who we sleep with to what our doctors can say to us, while allowing the aristocracy shrink our "government down to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub."
We are allowing the utterly crazy fringe to shape our future.
3
Fun Fact : More than half of all IBM employees are now in India.
This is not because IBM has increased its work force. It is because they have decimated their US workers.
The "feeling" that globalism is destroying the US middle class is simply true. Trump is an monster, but some of this issues that raised him up are real.
2
The elephant in the room that everyone is ignoring is the fact that "ALL" these problems can be solved reasonably soon with IT we have or soon will have.
The issues are the administration of it. There are "sacred cows" that have to be respected even if they're lost their relevance and usefulness. Until we reach that epiphany we're condemned to being fed a consistent diet of fear and anger.
1
"These Americans heavily invested in schools at a time when other nations were investing heavily in welfare states."
Right. And now repubs want to drain money from the public schools that at least potentially foster unity among ethnically, economically, and religiously diverse students by teaching them common civic values and how to get along together, and funnel it instead to private and religious schools promoting tribalism on all those counts. It's perverse (not to mention unconstitutional with respect to religious schools, our current supremes notwithstanding).
5
The two notions of frontier have practically nothing in common. Participating in the exploration of the physical frontier was mostly a matter of volition. Today's frontier is only available to people who happen to be smarty pants types, which is not a simple matter of choice. It's an unfair reality that calls for nanny state institutions coupled with civic indoctrination.
1
No, Mr. Brooks, the main enemy is not division; that's a symptom. The main enemy is absolutism: the absolutism pronounced when faux leaders like McConnell and Ryan falsely and pompously pretend to speak for "the American people;" the smug certainty of self-gratifying religious leaders who create an artificial and unnecessary we-they construct and who tell us that we need not be concerned with climate change or, essentially, anything else because prayer is all we need; the maniacal fervor of Second Amendment absolutists; the hateful rants and actions of bigots who will never acknowledge our common humanity and equality; and the repressive and rapacious capitalists who wish to be absolutely unconstrained by common-sense regulations and are unconcerned with anything and anyone not dear to them.
Our Constitution reflects balance and creates a system that protects the interests of minorities. It was not intended to protect an unforeseen need to protect majorities from the malign actions of a minority. Yet, that's where we are. We are ruled, not governed, by a deaf and malevolent minority that uses a warped version of our system of checks and balances to further cement their own absolute power. Absolutism was the very evil our forefathers warned against. Now, cleverly wrapped in legislative maneuvers and smartly rationalized by politicized judges, absolutism is an immediate and real threat.
4
Aside from the simplistic and dualistic reading of history, Brooks makes the mistake of ignoring the conditions the populist nationalists are reacting to, blaming the problem on the divisions he sees in society. But those divisions arose for a reason and unless those reasons are addressed there is no solution. Yes, he speaks about certain reforms that he thinks will heal those divisions, but there is no evidence that if the Republicans enacted them the divisions would begin to heal. How do we know this? Because the Democrats have tried and are trying to enact the kind of programs that Brooks exhorts his fellow Republicans to undertake and it has been rejected. Clearly the problems go deeper than any philosophical divide and until the Republicans are willing to enact programs that address the underlying economic disparity in this country - which has given rise to all the other divisions, e.g. ethnic and racial divides - until they are willing to call Trump out on his deceptive and cynical approach to politics, philosophical exhortations amount to more acrid air in the already acidic atmosphere.
1
People, please do not fixate on Brooks' frontier metaphor. Yes, it is a myth that denies the horrible treatment of Native Americans. But he is talking about the inherent decency in most Americans that is under siege.
Yes, he gets so much wrong. He is trying to be inspirational at a time when that is needed. Is he naive? I pray that he is not.
Remember, Trump lost the popular vote.
Good luck with that, David. You're not going to find an intellectual argument to defeat a movement predicated largely on anti-intellectualism.
Instead, why not simply admit the self-evident truth: The American experiment has failed, or at least run its course. It was a shotgun wedding from the start, and we've basically been fighting the Civil War (either literally or by various forms of proxy) almost from day one. The tribal differences are now too stark to paper over.
Let's admit to ourselves that this chapter in history is over and split into two (or more) nations. Let the South have the 19th-century theocracy it so obviously wants; let the Mountain West have the land-based libertarian free-for-all it so obviously wants; let the Northeast have the modern European-style welfare state it so obviously wants; and so on.
Everyone would be much happier, and we've be rid of the myth that what unites us is stronger than what divides us. That's a comforting fable, but it's time to acknowledge reality.
5
Sounds like wishful thinking courtesy of Vlad the prevaricator.
Joseph Campbell said it best when he said that we need a new myth, a new story. The old one isn't working anymore. Camus was on to something when he said "Life is absurd." Confucius thought all answers could be found in the past, in history. All of these answers hold some truth. Discomfort and absurdity are at the root of change. Like any addict we are suffering the pain of change. I think this change will be as large as the Axial Age or the Renaissance. David, write about Capitalism and Consumerism. All our values are tied up in those illusions. They have run their cycle.
1
Since most so-called "establishment" Republicans AGREE with Trump, Brooks' premise is absurd. There has been no serious attack.
The Obamacare repeal effort is exhibit one. The GOP voted in lockstep with a few exceptions.
1
The problem, Mr Brooks, is that the Republican party refuses to tell a TRUE story to counter Trump's. The true story is that the division of wealth in this country is at the root of all the problems we face. It stifles growth, and divides us socially. It allows the rich to spend massive amounts to warp the political arena. Trump cannot be countered with a watered down version of Trumpism, which is what the GOP has been offering for a quarter of a century.
3
"The core American idea is not the fortress, it’s the frontier."
Or "home", when stated from the POV of those who lived on the "frontier" for millennia.
And this is the core paradox, hypocrisy and violence that lies at the center of the American experiment. It cannot be papered over with more hypocrisy, violence and paradox.
1
This is a wildly inaccurate reading of history. Of course we have always been tribal, every human society is. But in the earliest days of the republic cultural and economic equality made us more or less a single tribe (but only until the common enemy - England - was driven out, after which we rapidly split into the WASP slave-holding tribe and the WASP mercantile tribe).
Now we are dividing into what looks to most of the country like one tribe (represented by both political parties) cobbled together out of a coalition of the financial and commercial elite and their upper middle class clients (along with the Republicans' tea partiers and the Democrats' minorities), and one formed by all the abandoned remnants of the working and lower middle classes.
This second tribe has tried to take over the Democratic party and so far failed, but has disrupted the Republicans enough to place someone who at least pays them lip service (but no more) at their head.
Mr. Brooks, the problem isn't that we have divided into tribes over philosophical differences. The problem is that inequality has divided us in real, concrete ways.
2
The frontier spirit is long gone. Trumpism is merely an honest version of GOP and the rise of trumpism is inevitable. We are actually lucky! Instead of dealing with crooked GOP politicians, Mr. Trump is at least transparent. Seriously, how could any country lock in the frontier mode forever? "Rich families will not last more than three generations". Complecency is human nature. Disruptions are going to happen sooner or later. I am very concerned!
Recently a Trumpette on FB listed the goals of a tax reform plan he would prefer. I suggested he read the tax reform goals out lined in the 2016 Democrat platform. His were identical to it's. The alternative vision Mr. Brooks seeks in his last paragraph can be found in the same place. Republicans who care less about winning and more about thier country are what we need to move forward.
Over years the republicans have become the party of fear and acquiescence to "leaders" who "know better".
Fear of everything without thinking about it is a difficult pattern to break, particularly as their policies make the world less hospitable.
I am confounded by David Brooks' last sentence. He yearns for "somebody" who has the courage to stand for openness, diversity, tolerance, education, sensible compromise, and so forth. That "somebody" already exists. Isn't that what the Democratic Party has, for the most part, been championing since the New Deal? Apparently, however, switching political parties when your old one has gone off the rails is not an option for Mr. Brooks. Sounds like just another form of tribalism to me.
1
The problem with embracing a frontier ideology instead of Trump is that the frontier was a bloody wave of advancing genocide.
I would rather counter Trump with the philosophy that all are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights.
3
Mr. Brooks is right. Trump want to turn this country into Hotel America, an insipid, artificial, and nominally safe shell of its former self.
In such a place, you notice hints of opulence and ease, but the fixtures are all in bad taste, and you're not allowed to change them. After all, you don't really own any of it. The ease of living there gradually reveals itself to be a prison of enforced torpor.
The moment that we all give in, and accept this mediocre, emasculated version of our country as our new home, the whole dingy edifice is going to collapse down a hill into the ocean.
A nation like that doesn't stand a chance in the real world, where other nations still seek real accomplishments, and where the earth itself is rearing up to kick us off.
Excellent Point. How does one heal the divide? I am strongly reminded of the Titanic. Nothing can go wrong. The ship is unsinkable. As they say, amateurs built the Noah's Ark. Quite frankly, the only thing Trump is doing is saving up the life boats for the rich.
Can’t argue with Brooks over the inadequacy of the “Trump philosophy” that “they” are taking away “ours”. However, the solution is not to reinvigorate the “can do” of the frontier. Because there is a problem to address that isn’t one of mental attitude. It is that change is empowering a few to make a ton of money while ignoring the many problems facing the Country. And the government has been co-opted by these billionaires to do their bidding instead of addressing the County’s problems.
"It’s waiting for somebody who has the guts to say no to tribe, yes to universal nation, no to fences, yes to the frontier, no to closed, and yes to the open future, no to the fear-driven homogeneity of the old continent and yes to the diverse hopefulness of the new one."
In other words, Barack Obama.
The Movement West was not just cowboys and Indians. It is actually a part of our intellectual history, this does not mean watching movies, you have to actually read some books. Guns were also rare on the front, only about 1 household in 10 had one until after the Civil War. After that war gun manufacturers who had geared up for the Army and had to sell them somewhere.
"It’s waiting for somebody who has the guts to say no to tribe, yes to universal nation, no to fences, yes to the frontier, no to closed, and yes to the open future, no to the fear-driven homogeneity of the old continent and yes to the diverse hopefulness of the new one." You seem to be describing Barack Obama.
"The American idea is not the fortress, it's the frontier." Absolutely correct. I was two when my parents left their war ravaged country and came to Canada to start a new life. We did the whole frontier thing, and I adopted that rugged individualism as my mantra for my whole life.
But its easy to be a frontiersman when you have no other choice. What happens when things get easier, when it's not whether you can survive the coming winter, but whether you have that new car or that bigger house? You get soft and lose that edge that makes life worth living.
And then there's people, the other side of the spectrum, who now have to work two jobs to eke out a living, go into debt because they can't keep up, and cannot see their way out. There is no frontier for them either.
But it's there for the taking. All it takes is a little courage to step outside of the norms. Absent that, which I've discovered most people have no stomach for, there is always that cataclysm that forces people into it. Most, then, will rise to the challenges and reap the rewards of that fine place. But before?
I doubt it. It may lie dormant in all of us, but it's moribund.
5
At last, the inspiration I need as I yearn for a civilized and inclusive way to counter the divisive message of Trumpism. Thank you.
10
That frontier myth was nurtured by a century of cowboy fiction (dime novels, radio plays, and especially film and TV). It conveniently ignored or denigrated the people who were already present on the land. It's as pernicious as the myth of the Lost Cause in the U.S. South.
Note also that the U.S. version of the frontier myth prominently featured firearms.
291
Oh, thank you so much for pointing that out- it had been a few hours since I heard that platitude. Are you really arguing that the U.S. hasn't led the way in many, world-shaping capacities (frontier exploration)? The role America has on the world stage is not a product of fiction.
I agree with Brooks here, but I think he left out one element from his analysis of our current problems: anti-intellectualism. Until people like you can read this op-ed without babbling about something completely unrelated, we won't be able to solve our problems as a unified society. You are part of the problem; just like the Trump tribalists.
1
The cowboys were not on the frontier. They were Johnny-cone-latelies usually working for large international investors exploiting land opened up by others. Before the real pioneers, before the mountain men, were the French Couer-de-bois living with and trading with the natives in peace. Because they were not English speaking and miscegenated with the natives without the virulent racism of the Anglo-Americans, they were not real people and didn't count in the American myth making. The idea of universalism has always been the bright star in the American story. But an Anglo-Saxon tribal story of conquest and racial mythology is just as American as that brighter ideal.
This is who we are. We are Andrew Jackson AND John Quincy Adams. We are the Lincoln of emancipation AND the Lincoln of white supremacy. We are the ML King of color blind equality AND the racial identity politics of Jesse Jackson. We can argue about what story should go into our myths, but can not honestly argue about the facts.
2
Note also that the U.S. version of the frontier myth prominently featured firearms.
Also note the myth fails to mention genocide! Opps, forgot about that. But it doesn't matter anyway, just a bunch of Redskins.
1
There was an old tale about a tiger who roams in a village wearing a loud bell at night and frieghten and annoyed everyone. No one dares to untie the bell, so they ask a Bhudist master what to do. He said "To find the best person to untie the bell, look for person who tied it"
The Republicans and Fox news are the ones who created Trump, however unintensionally, not the progressives! They are the best ones to solve the problem - if they believe in the America Mr. Brooks believes in.
98
What David Brooks and other progressives do not want to see is President Trump is President Obama's legacy....his multiple failures, inability to make decisions, leading from behind and racial tensions created the anger and change in many Americans to reject another Obama Presidency in Clinton
. Not a television show.
The Republican establishment fought Trump tooth and nail. No, it was reaction to Obama, who I supported, that created Trump.
Maybe the bell was tied on when the tiger was a cub. Things change. Should have thought of that.
This is an old Chinese story? The European one is the 'Who will bell the cat?' version, which is the same, but different.
We don't need smart, wise, moderate voices to refute the populist view. We need those people to recognize what's right about it, to distinguish it from simplistic bigotry. What should the wise have learned from populism? That no matter how valuable immigration may be, there are limits that should be enforced. That assimilation matters. Ask the successful immigrants in the suburbs. That it is not bigotry to regard modern Islamic fascism as a threat to civility in the world. That when racism is "unconscious", "institutional" and "privilege", that is needing definition by academics, maybe everyone who thinks racism is overrated as a problem are not by definition racists. This is the "philosophy" moderates need to consider. Without it we have a leadership vacuum than can be filled by demagogues.
9
Mighty white of you, my good man!
For the umpteenth column, Brooks treats Trump as if he were an aberration within the Republican Party, when in fact his rise has been powered by the very themes, such as racial resentment and xenophobia, that have been exploited for decades by Republicans. Certainly Brooks must know that this has been pointed out by Ornstein, Dionne, and Mann in their book reviewed in last Sunday's Times. It's one thing to be in denial about an unpleasant truth; it's quite another to document your denial for a newspaper audience.
126
To the degree that whites in America have abandoned universalism for a tribal identity, they are only capitulating to the identity group politics that Democrats have been selling for generations, just not to them for the last 50 years. It is no accident that like Trump himself, Trumpism is largely composed of people whose roots are in the Democratic Party.
10
Their roots were in the Dixiecrat version of the Democratic party. Southern Republicans tend to share those same roots.
To the extent that white Americans haven't abandoned universalism they are Democrats. The Democratic Party, its faults not withstanding, is inclusionary of all so-called identity groups. It is inherently not tribal, but essentially all-American in its inclusiveness.
The Republican Party IS the party of white tribal identity. The party has, for years, inflamed tribal identity among the poor whites its plutocrat coddling policies have decimated. Faux rage is the only solace it offers to its victims.
As the old saying goes, even Ray Charles could see the difference between the two parties.
Louisiana. Ya right all democrats fault? Have you had a look around your state with the poorest education, poorest folks and the meanest republicans.
The republicans should have all taken a knee when Trump showed up at the scene of their primaries in 2016. It is no surprise to anyone that this administration turns out the way it has. Plenty of responsible journalists wrote about the madness long before it became a clear and present danger.
The fact that the republicans allowed this madness to take over their party is a sure sign that none of them have any moral spine at all. None, nada, zilch, zero, the null set.
I want to scream in ALL CAPS, the whole scene of daily events is making me physically sick as I watch my children's future disappear before my eyes.
PLEASE MAKE IT STOP ! ! !
43
Well David you're not wrong about the Republican party being known as the party of racism. But I have bad news for you, right now the Republican party is also known as the party who allows Americans to be killed by guns, steals elections, wants to take affordable healthcare away & give tax breaks to the wealthy, & thinks no is the appropriate response from government on everything that might make our lives better.
If you want Americans to believe in the Republican party so that the crazies stop being elected things must change. Healthcare is unaffordable, fix it. Infrastructure is failing, rebuild it. Education is too expensive, fix it. Our public schools don't teach students enough to thrive in this country, reinvest in it. The gig economy & h1b visa program are exploitive & put Americans out of work or sentence them to low wage jobs, fix it.
I can't think of a single thing that Republicans have done to make my life better since the recession. Why would I want to vote for the party who allowed my prerecession employer to close almost all of their American call centers & move them offshore during the recession to save them money. During the Obama years I watched Republicans block legislation that would have created jobs & I watched them shut down the government.
I could care less about what Republicans used to stand for. All that matters is now and now isn't very flattering. People only get tribal when they have no hope for a better life.
170
@Ami
I agree 100%.
And yet, people keep voting for Republicans.
And some of the people who get hurt the most by Republican tax cuts for the wealthy keep voting for Republicans.
One thing Brooks got right is those are the group identity, fear motivated voters Brooks describes.
Brooks neglects the Republican Party's 50 year evolution to what we have today and his own part for so many years supporting and justifying that party.
1
Why does Mr Brooks insist on generalizing an American history that never existed. this country was built with strife as a constant background. The American Revolution was a civil war. The Civil War killed more than a half million Americans. The labor movement, which at long last gave some political power to the average worker was soaked in blood.
The collapse of the industrial system exposed the weaknesses of the bizarre idea that somehow free markets will cure all ills. The response to the Republican favored economic system failing millions has ben the almost predictable rise of white identity and Christo-fascist voters. The Republicans groomed these voters with billions being spent by crazy billionaires on right wing media selling the infamous Southern Strategy. The Republicans unleashed the Dragon's Breath and now they can't control it.
This IS Republican America. You need to face it's failure Mr. Brooks.
279
And he sowed the seeds of division.
All his wealthy buddies said "Me too!" and jumped up to help.
The Earth groaned, shook, and failed to sustain life.
The End.
15
That the "American dream is waiting for somebody who has the guts to say no............." already occurred in Bernie Sanders. If Democrats could have known the future Hillary would not have won the nomination. Bernie Sanders a sensible populist has the guts to take down the fake tribal leader, Trump. Let's hope Sanders' health and enthusiasm is sustained for the next election.
7
You forget that Clinton actually won the popular vote.
Besides, Sanders isn't even a Democrat -- and he didn't get the Black and Latino vote. That says a lot right there.
So many writers assert the un-Americanness of tribalism/hatred/racism. Willful denial. Until we acknowledge that these forces have been with us since the beginning of the so-called American experiment, we have no hope of changing those who adhere to them. And the first deep and genuine acknowledgements should probably focus on slavery and the massacres of Native Americans, closely followed by reactions to waves of immigrants over our history.
10
Mr. Brooks might also want to mention how fossilism is an entrenchment of old ideas...and how the Republican Party should embrace the race to full societal sustainability as a huge unexplored economic frontier.
4
The American dream was always a dream. We all love unicorns until they come to life and we discover that they have a long lovely horn to gore their rivals to death. America was built on a promise of open arms and equal opportunity that was never put into practice. If, as a nation, we can accept that we are not any more exceptional than anyone else, we might be able to get somewhere. 250 years of telling ourselves how special we are has naturally led to our most special leader.
13
The only way we as a country are exceptional is how much we believe we are.
Once again, a most enlightening column. It takes a few tweets and a few really bad press conferences to set a presidency and a nation off in the wrong direction. It takes years to correct the vector of that direction on to the moral path and the optimistic and good path and I am not sure that we as a nation have that insight anymore. We are too angry, suspicious and foolhardy.
4
President Obama was not a perfect resident, he made his missteps as all do, but the main message and objectivity of his presidency was "Yes we can". From day one of his administration the Republican mission and message was "No you can't". So after eight plus years of our downward spiral into the abyss we are more divided than anytime since the Civil War. Neighbors, families and co-workers can no longer discuss anything without divisive dialogue further widening the chasm between us individually and collectively.
The current president shows no interest in attempting to bring the nation together to resolve those issues and concerns that effect us all, instead he concentrates his efforts solely to maintain his base of supporters., the rest of the country and world be dammed.
The Republicans allow a senator who would leave no man behind be slandered by a coward who chose to play sports instead of serving.
The question for us all is, where is the leader who will put America back on track to fulfill the principles on which this nation was founded? I think most of us are exhausted with how the country is being lead and how much longer will we wait?
10
Brooks is just selling more Paul Bunyan tall tales. That is exactly what Trump did with his make America great again.
The country will only lift itself out of this tragic spiral if we realize that the future is progress, not a descent into the abyss.
Keep with the universal principles that are imbedded in the Constitution though view them through the prism of the present.
What Brooks seemed to ignore was what the Republicans did to government. Gov't has to be open. Debate has to be possible. All parts of the country have to join in and not be fed a steady diet of lies about how the rest feels about them. The media exacerbates the divide through its lazy way of categorizing the segments into separate statistical groups.
The worst thing the country can do is get back in those wagons and strike out for some metaphorical wild west where justice was a lynch mob.
13
Fully concur.
This fanciful populism forces a vote on the right answer.
And we're getting it wrong.
David imagines a call to optimism in an age of pessimism.
"They want to turn us into an old, settled and fearful nation."
Leave it to Brooks to consider "settled" to be a vice.
3
In terms of national destiny, "settled" is always a vice. A country that isn't moving forward is doomed to decline.
"Growth for its own sake is the ideology of a cancer cell."- Edward Abbey.
1
Agree with you, elvisd. We don't have Manifest Destiny to use as a defense for plundering other people's lands anymore. We have our lands now, no matter how brutal we were in attaining them. That's the past. Now, we move forward and fix up our homestead.
But he's right about the "fearful." The Trumpists are, indeed, putting up fences and getting their guns at the ready to fight the hordes of over-educated liberals. That's a big mistake. We have to take on this brave new world of globalization, and that world is not going away if we retreat into ourselves. There are seven billion of them and 340 million of us. How do you think that will work out in the end?
The thought process of Republicans in Congress during the 2016 election cycle seems to have been something like this:" Let's support the candidacy of an obviously deranged and unfit man to be President. What could go wrong? "
11
For the vast majority of Americans, this American dream you speak of is over. The low-information voters prefer the dystopian nightmare scenario they stoke. Most Americans I know have no interest in 'seeking new frontiers.' They just want to plop down in front of a couch to glare at a gladiatorial Netflix production or to hunch over their cellphones after a long day at a job they hate.
5
David, you are perpetuating a myth that resulted in the death and oppression of millions of people of color. Settler colonialism, the legacy of the "United States", is based on Euro-white supremacy. Returning to a republicanism that you describe will not deal with the deep-rooted white-male supremacy that must change if we want to progress as a nation.
15
We DO need a philosophical assault on Trumpism. That's the first time I have heard it phrased that way and it clicks and I never click with Mr. Brooks. However, I would argue that it's no longer left v right, educated v less so, etc., the battle now is at good vs evil proportions, highlighted by Las Vegas. The fact is the Republican party has been taken over by creepy retrogrades, funded by the Mercers, Kochs, Adelsons of the world. (I can't believe I am lamenting the fact that Mr. Corker, right winger though he is, is walking away.) The blames lies at McConnell's and Ryan's feet, as they are the leaders where this came to fruition by their lies. (Roots go way back, of course.) So where do we go from here? If David can figure a way to save that party, good luck with that, but I think decent people must come together as a bloc and educate those who are not getting what's happening, one by one.
10
Problem remains: How you define good and evil may differ from how I define good and evil.
I will not accept any good vs evil philosophical argument that circumvents my rights that are protected by the U.S. Constitution.
What we need to is a unified assault on the anti-intellectuals who are determined to legislate their version of morality on the rest of us, and their puppet masters who see an economic advantage to it.
It is pointless to try and forbid people to form tribes. A family, its neighbors, the town, a group of people who speak the same language, share the same values, whose ancestors came to the same place at the same time will spontaneously form a tribe after a few generations. Tribes are too useful and too natural to be forbidden by self-serving self-appointed "elite" people.
The first Saxons who crossed the British Channel and settled in Gaulic territory and pushed the Gauls back to the hinterlands also thought Britannia was a land of opportunity where anybody with the guts and muscles and discipline and vision could settle and build whatever kind of society they wanted. A few hundred years later, guess what? A British nation, loyal to Britain, guarded borders.
America has no more frontiers. America has been settled and the people who settled it know who they are and who isn't one of them.
And another thing: people provide for the members of their tribe but nobody gives money on hostile invaders. If you want single-payer health insurance program or free college tuition, you have to allow Americans to become a tribe. If you want a multi-kulti every-mand-for-himself frontier where nobody can even understand his neighbor's language and half of them are trying to mug the other half, stop demanding they act like a tribe. It's one or the other. You can't have both.
2
Mr. Brooks, the country does not need a person to save it. It needs a Republican party that has the courage to kick Trump and his followers out and reclaim its identity. Let them leave and form their own No Nothing party. Tell your traditional GOP friends that they have every right to do this and to do it quickly before this cancerous group completely overruns and destroys the Republican party and takes many innocent victims along the way.
3
Neil Irwin wrote an article for the NY Times on September 3, 2017 "To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now". Gail Evans, in the early 1980's was a janitor with benefits, annual bonus, vacation/sick time, and tuition reimbursement. In other words she was recognized as a value to her company, rewarded with stability and took advantage of opportunities. Marta Ramos, today, is a janitor with no benefits, period. She can't take vacation, she can't afford job training, her life isn't stable and she lives from day to day.
People are angry for a reason. And the Republicans want us to believe that if they give tax cuts one more time to corporations and wealthy Americans that we will be better. As long as the people getting up every morning, keeping this economy going, are not offered stability, respected for their contribution, and see opportunity - people will be angry. The Republican party alone is responsible for the utter disregard for all the people who get up every morning and go to work. They have killed unions, benefits, labor laws, and representation. And they smile while they tell us all about it - expecting us to believe everything they say...
11
Lovely column, but the truth is that for those Americans who drink from the well of ignorance there is only rage. On every topic: a discussion with a fellow at a wedding in Ohio about how single payer is a better healthcare system sees him go into a fit over how expensive it is and how he doesn't have to pay for "those people" (he was white, upper middle class and ironically Jewish).
There are no moderate Republicans; the radical fringe, backed by ultra-right wing billionaires and the propaganda rage machine are the party. If these forces are not defeated, and soon, America is over.
608
From this side of the Atlantic the so called health care debate in America has always looked deeply racist. It is essentially about rich white Americans literally hating the idea that their taxes (or God forbid increased taxes) be spent on health care for black people. Poor whites who are deprived of health care as a result of revoking Obamacare are just seen as collateral damage, and anyway, they hate poor white folk too.
Unfortunately the same can be said of the Dems. I am a republican that believes that single payer is a viable option for healthcare. I don't believe it will work because it will be too expensive. Three states have seriously considered the idea but dropped it when they looked at the costs, but it is still an option that we should consider. However, the Repubs recently offered up a worthy idea of funding the same amount of healthcare as we are currently spending in form of block grants to the states. If it was passed we would 50 different experiments as to how best handle healthcare. Some states would no doubt implement a single payer system others would have tried a high deductible plan with HSAs. In a few years we would have real data about what works best. But the liberal media and Dems would have none of it. Not one of the Dems would even consider the idea.
We are living in an age that believes if one side has 51% majority that it can force the other 49% do its bidding. Unfortunately both sides are guilty.
Angry working class Trump supporters are totally ignorant and motivated only by rage. And we know this because we chatted with an upper class opponent of single payer at a social event. Great reasoning, and all too common. We impute what we have not studied empirical and thus can't know. Who are the unreasoning rage-filled people here?
While I appreciate your obvious and entirely justified alarm over the state of today's Republican Party, at age 67 I do not recall its halcyon days as you do here. Maybe Ike, but I was too young to remember that era. This dire situation seems the inevitable culmination of an increasingly Machiavellian political strategy, one aimed almost exclusively at attaining and maintaining power so as to enhance the position of the wealthy. As I have commented many times, I cannot name the last national program emanating from the GOP that was clearly intended to improve the lot of the average citizen. Not that governing today's fractious, tribal US is easy - in fact, a strong case can be made that we've become essentially ungovernable. I think that reflects the increasingly obvious fact that we are essentially two tribes now. I seriously doubt that anyone can possibly reunite us, and I do think it likely that discussions of peaceful disunion will inevitably ensue. Otherwise, we appear headed for civil war, hopefully without bloodshed.
Meanwhile, the wealthy are engaged in wholesale looting of the country. It's as if they recognize that this situation, one almost entirely of their making, is unsustainable, and they are out to rake in as much as they can before they depart. The only question is, where are they going to go? I am sure that's keeping many of them up at night. If not, they're not quite as elite, at least in terms of intellect, as they like to think.
295
I agree - I see a rural, white dominated middle America that is completely different in culture, values and prosperity from a coastal America.
I cannot get otherwise reasonable people to even agree on facts - I can't imagine what will ever reconcile the two.
Perhaps it's time for a reorganization of America into three nations - America East, America Center and America West with the federal government becoming an EU-like entity with limited powers of enforcement (relatively)
1
I agree with you, Michael, and have expressed the same sentiments myself in this forum: we are too divided now, and a peaceful means of separation should be pursued. Those of us who believe in the benefits of a strong federal government should get together and ask the rest of the states, "are you in or out?" I'm tired of even the supposedly moderate David Brookses of the world refusing to understand that "welfare" is not a dirty word. The Scandinavian countries, which are socialist nations, provide excellent educational and medical benefits to all citizens which, by most standards, outmatch ours. To David, those are "welfare states," something to be denigrated.
I also object to the rosy glasses view of the frontier. We took the land from others. We just took it. This should not be romanticized. We should, in fact, be teaching our children that there is no more land on this planet that can be just taken over and built upon. Those days are over. The super rich, with no new lands to plunder, are just feeding off the rest of us. We will have fewer and fewer "entitlements," another dirty word, as we descend into fiefdoms.
And, Ruchir, yes, we can't even agree on facts anymore. That's what ended all hope for this country for me. Your idea of an American EU, is appealing. I wonder if people are secretly working on this. They should be; we may need a plan before the inevitable violence erupts.
Nixon started the EPA, didn't he? At least before Trump appointed Pruitt to kill it, and pervert it, the EPA was a force for the common citizenry.
What Mr. Brooks describes is not a philosophy but rather a series of inferences from a philosophy. Philosophy, loosely used, is that set of first principles from which we deduce or derive our course of action. The American philosophy, in this sense, is the acceptance as self-evident, i.e., undeniable, that every human being has inalienable rights. Our actions, then, are to be based on care and concern for others. What has happened is the abandonment of that philosophy, by both Democrat and Republican, for a philosophy of self-interest. I fear that only catastrophe will bring us back from that.
5
"The original Republicans were not for or against government"
This is a patently false statement. The Republicans in power in the 1860s enacted the greatest expansion of federal power since the country's founding and maybe ever. And it was less about mobility and more about racial equality. True, some of this expansion came about during the war, but much came in the immediate aftermath. Think 13th, 14th, 15th amendments and the legislation to enforce them. Under the Enforcement Acts, President Grant sent troops to round up and root out Klan activity to protect Black lives.
This President equivocates even to talk about hate groups, let alone do something about them, and disparages anyone who stands up for Black lives.
The mantle of the party of Lincoln (let alone the Radical Republicans) was ceded long ago. This is the party radical inequality: racial and economic.
24
Your description of Trumpism as Tribalism is fairly accurate.
Interesting to me is that your phrase "We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles, attracting talented people from across the globe, active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity." is a good description of "Obama-ism.
46
Wake up, David. People calling themselves Republicans care about only one thing, tax cuts for the rich. Stoking racial divisions has not been something they are concerned about for a long time, Trump is just a bit more blunt.
And your idea of the world as you wish it were doesn't interest them. They know conquering the frontier was nothing else but the brutal genocide of Native Americans. They don't just assert this truth. They assert their right to continue taking whatever they want and deny everyone else a chance to be anything but their servants.
19
Defeat Trump? The Republicans could try by just following the law but people like Rand Paul say things like
"I just don't think it's useful to be doing investigation after investigation,
particularly of your own party. We'll never even get started with doing the
things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we're spending our
whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans. I think it makes
no sense."
So they can't govern and they won't investigate whether the president is breaking the law. They could take care of this problem, but they don't have the courage or moral sense to do that either.
10
Amazing how much time and money that had to investigate Benghazi but aren't worried about the cost of Trump's weekends away, his constant traveling to every rally and his numerous offspring traveling the globe. Don Jr. may have given up his secret service protection but one wonders what he needs that extra privacy for. I wonder who he went bow hunting with up in the Yukon Territory. Not far from Russia, eh?
The surest way that non-Trumpist Republicans can get their party back is to join in a nonpartisan effort to undo the gerrymandering they created over a decade ago. I don't think they are going to change any hearts and minds of people on the extremes. But they could make it so people who have some sense of balance about the issues this country faces could have votes that count. Who knows? We might even be able to pass some sensible gun legislation.
14
This piece is whistling in the wind. The Republican party sold its soul when it let Trump be its standard bearer adn lined up Congress behind him. Its current action bear no relation to its history. The party, through its affiliation with the NRA, is a party to the murder in Las Vegas. Tens of millions of people are slipping deeper into poverty because of the wealth the party is shifting to the rich. Boy Scout oaths of aspiration won't change this.
Let's hope that enough American's still share the dream of a place of opportunity that when the right leader or people come along, they will put their support behind them. There is almost no chance this new leadership will come from the Republican party, which, for the next ten years, will be so busy defending itself that it will not be able to look to the future. Change comes not from lofty aspirations but from leadership in the moment, dealing with crisis. FDR came to power that way, and it was his on-the-fly solutions to unemployment, bank closings, farm failures and other catastrophes of the Great Depression that led to a new role for government. His uncle, Teddy Roosevelt, had proposed many of these solutions before, but the need had not been great enough to try them. No, the Democratic Party had not put out a lot of white papers and re-branded itself. This was simply the right man at the right moment proposing a way out of misery. Hopefully our misery or crisis will be, hopefully not nuclear disaster.
6
What has happened is that most Americans now believe that we live in a "zero-sum" world. Every dollar given to the poor, every new immigrant, every social program not only for "my group" is taking from my tribe, and, this is now an existential struggle for survival.
It is hard for anyone who has lost a job, lost a pension, and lost a community to see beyond the here and now. That is especially true where it seems that the "establishment" wings of both parties are beholden to the 1% plutocracy and/or are playing identity politics with social issues.
The past 30 years has seen the middle class hollowed out, and the transfer of wealth has been upward, not downward. But those who have been injured are looking at those below them - the poor, the minorities, the immigrants, the "others" - for relief.
Bernie and Donald understood what was wrong. The other 15 GOP candidates, and Hillary, did not.
5
Congress's approval rating is at 10 or 15%. Would it not be more effective to vote out the incumbents and keep voting them out until they get the message? Instead people took a shortcut and voted Trump into office thinking this would do the same thing. Our democracy was not designed to work this way and it won't. Instead maybe political Darwinism will determine our experiment in democracy will be replaced by a Trumpocracy. Hold on it is going to be a very bumpy devolution.
2
David, I wish I could share your optimism. Until the last presidential election , I would have agreed that the true American spirit would not allow fascism to triumph to the extent it has. But now I am disheartened to realize that the majority of white America is motivated by a self destructive impulse for superiority no matter the cost. This realization has motivated me, in turn, to become more active in my community in an attempt to stem this rising tide of ignorance and bigotry. So, I guess I haven't abandoned hope just yet. However, I have abandoned the idea of the inevitable success of the American experiment as embodied by the Statue of Liberty. We are facing a generations long slog against a powerful, well financed, clever opponent and the end result. if there is one, remains in doubt.
4
The core of the republican party is unquestioning support for 20th century corporate capitalism. Corporate capitalism is the root of all the problems Brooks writes about and that have given rise to Trump. How any party or politician can respond to the problems in the country while remaining bound to support for corporate capitalism is a circle that can not be squared. The democrats at least think regulation, antitrust laws, and corporate taxes are policies to be considered, not socialism. When you get past the cliches in Brooks column and start to consider actual republican polices like their tax "reform", the logical incoherence of Brooks in particular and the republicans in general becomes apparent.
4
Republicans no longer have a moral compass which in any good political party is absolutely necessary
And it goes without saying that Trump and his Cabinet lack one. And I don't know any elderly who are Affluent. Most pick between medication and food as they were not lucky enough to have good paying jobs when they were younger or able to afford a college education. The Affluent elderly must be part of Mr. Brooks crowd
Until the normal Republican voter insists their Representatives in Congress and the Senate start behaving as if they have hearts and brains, we are condemned to be ruled by greedy, power crazed people
7
"The original Republicans were not for or against government, they were for government that sparked mobility; they were against government that enervated ambition."
The original Republicans were the party of the "radical" abolitionists, so what they were is the opposite of what they are now, which is a party created out of the resentment of the federal annihilation of Jim Crow. .
As far as supporting mobility, the Republican elite supports the exact opposite, including banning the estate tax, our most effective tool for maintaining some semblance of meritocracy and ultimately, upward mobility.
Equally damaging to mobility (and average Americans), the current GOP elite supports allowing corporations the ability to create monopolies and the control of the federal government through virtually unlimited bribery of elected officials disguised as campaign contributions used either for or against all politicians wishing to remain in office.
The populist rampage in the Republican party is only the product of tactics by the elite that have gone awry. The Tea Party movement is arguably the creation of Murdoch and the Koch Bros who nurtured it at first. Now it is their Frankenstein's monster.
4
Doff those rose tinted glasses and look at what the Republican Party has become. The Republican Party has become the party dominated by the conservative movement. It has become the party of the grifters and flimflam artists. Without those rose tinted glasses, you'll see the ugly face of the Republican Party that the rest of us see every day.
The Dreamers are children grown up American, born Mexican. They are by anyone's definition exemplars of the American Dream. The Republican Party is bent on deporting them. The GOP has thwarted legislation to support the Dreamers for over 15 years. Where do you see a GOP that champions the American Dream of social mobility?
Yes, the Eisenhower administration built the Interstate Highways. That truly was an achievement. The GOP has not supported any large infrastructure project since the 50's. Let's not even talk about the GOP's track record on repairing and replacing the roads and bridges that support the American economy.
David Brooks, you have met the enemy and he is your fellow Republicans.
7
Agree with your thesis about a different story. I even like many of the tenants that you put forward as part of the story. However, the Republican Party you describe is no the one that I have known in my 60+ years.
1
The center in the U.S. (and Europe) has collapsed because the majority see that the "snobbish elite" (a.k.a "establishment") really have rigged things to entrench their own privileges and pass them along to their own offspring. The statistics prove growing inequality since the 1980s. White working class kids rant about affirmative action in the elite schools but ignore the "legacy preferences" that still benefit mostly white elite families. The weakness of the estate tax allows them to develop into dynasties. It's possible that Hillary Clinton was more despised for being another Clinton than for being a woman running for POTUS.
The polarization has swelled into two angry humps on the political spectrum and the "median voter" hypothesis is failing. The right, in particular, freaks out at any proposal from the left, e.g. On heath care or immigration reform or gun control. The white working class responds to populist appeals that the success of Trump and his cronies is a win for the tribe. They reject policy reforms that might curb inequality and provide new opportunities, because it might benefit "them."
The situation is extremely dangerous, and we need someone like a Roosevelt (ironically from an earlier dynasty) to force reforms that require sacrifice from the elites.
1
Judge a Party not by what it advertises but what it does. Brooks' party has been the party of bigotry since Nixon and his Southern Strategy, a reaction to FDR/Kennedy/Johnson civil rights and entitlement programs. Were he not trying to be ideologically pure and nostalgic for his college fawning for Buckley and other conservatives, Brooks would have jumped ship long ago instead of pleading for restoration of faith within his dear Party. It is no coincidence that economic inequality has mirrored social inequality and that the racial and economic divisions define US.
2
Brooks is dead wrong, and Trump, at least in his rhetoric, is absolutely right about one thing, the game is increasingly rigged in favor of the very well to do. Saunders, for all his faults, said the same thing and tapped into the same sentiment. Unlike Trump, he actually meant it and had policies to address it. Trump is simply a conman who correctly tapped into a very real and recognizable fear and is exploiting it for his own, and other wealthy folks, benefit.
But massive income inequality and access to and direction of policy by the uber wealthy for their own benefit is a very real phenomenon. It has nothing to do with tribalism and everything to do with greed. It is a problem that neither party is prepared to address lest their main benefactors pull the financial plug.
6
The aspirational, uplifting story of America is embraced by most of Mr Trumps supporters and they see and fear it being hollowed out leaving in place a nationalism that serves an administrative state which answers only to a globalist elite. These are not baseless fears. De Tocqueville marveled at Americans joining together to voluntarily associate for leisure, interest, and to do good, while Europeans left these mostly to the state. Free associations are tribal and when local, bind together communities and when under an umbrella of a government that allows them to flourish, binds us all under a common banner. Decades of ever increasing administrative rule have flipped our federalist system. Progressives led this transformation and lead it now, knowing that shifting money and power to DC will leave them in control. Trumps supporters get this and don't want it. It's portrayed as bigotry and ignorance by the permanent ruling class to maintain their positions but to those who cling to a version of America Mr Brooks describes but only wants if he's in charge, it's a last ditch effort to preserve the America that was bequeathed them by their forebears. Progressives see the constitution as a malleable document that mostly impedes their efforts, not a document that protects our rights and liberties and binds our tribalism ventures together as Americans. When progressives win, this America loses.
1
Once again, Mr. Brooks write about a supposed disconnect between Trumpism and Republican Party ideals - utterly ignoring the fact that the racism, religious bigotry, xenophobia, and economic class discontent which brought Trump to the White House is not a phenomenon of his own invention, but has been the core philosophy of the Republican Party's strategy since Nixon started using the Southern Strategy and Reagan perfected the techniques to draw in the religious right.
These problems go to the very core of the Republican Party which Mr. Brooks and so many other writers and pundits helped establish over many, many years - they are not some sudden departure from the Party of Lincoln and the Teddy Roosevelt / Eisenhower but a long-term divisive and destructive force which has been sowing dissent and discord for decades.
Unless and until Mr. Brooks and all the others who brought this organization the power it has now figure out a way to counter their past embrace of the politics of tribalism, we will all continue to suffer as the Republican Party continues its headlong drive off the cliffs, dragging the nation with them.
6
Part of the problem is a learning support system that reinforces the notion of limits and puts people in boxes using crude instruments touted to reflect talent. Our current system creates a hugely conforming, rigid structure that kills the intrinsic learning drive in far too many of our youth before the have the chance to know who they can be. It kills for far too many the frontiers of creativity, imagination, and a vast array of learning experiences limiting the frontiers of too many individual promising learners. One way to reignite the American frontier is with a learning support system the helps each person find that frontier within. We can all be pioneers if only given the chance.
1
Sorry, Mr. Brooks. But let's face it. Donald Trump is the bete-noir of the Republicans, establishment or otherwise.
They were the ones who created it by giving rise to it; and it wasn't accidental.
They knew what they were doing.
They had only one "philosophy" -- and that was to win.
Had they known any better, they would have known there's no way to control someone as out of control as Trump is.
They would've known as they saw him rise, and saw their stock drop with each fake promise, and each screaming rally.
They would've recognized the danger in having someone like Steve Bannon in the mix -- they didn't.
Too late now.
Now we're all left with his tweets, and his bigotry, and his hate, and his non-stop assaults that could easily propel us into the next World War.
He's already alienated this country's allies, as well as its own peoples -- and so far, many, too many Americans have bought into it.
It doesn't help looking at what the Republican Party once was or what it was supposed to be -- only what it is, and what it has allowed itself to become.
6
Today, the main enemy is not aliens; it’s division
You are correct about the core problem, division. However you fail to define the reason for it. In its most basic form, it has become accepted wisdom that everyone and anyone can have everything they want without consequences for the negative effect it will have on others, GREED. The idea that talent, opportunity, and luck, can provide wealth beyond imagination without the deleterious affects it has on the rest rest is a moral rot that has infected our national body. Until we begin to focus on the common good as the goal of our endeavors, heap scorn on the amassing of personal wealth, uphold the value of a modest lifestyle, we will decline as a nation.
4
But there are no Republican "leaders" with guts, so what is the point of this op-ed with wagon trains moving west and rugged individualism? Dream on Brooks; the only thing for this Republican Party is total death, and Trump is working to make that happen. When Ryan, McConnell, and the rest of the GOP sycophants are gone a new Republican Party may rise up. But do not expect leadership to accomplish that goal. There is no GOP leadership.
2
Mr Brooks misses the commonality between establishment Republicans and Trumpist Republicans. Enabling Wall Street, lower taxes for the wealthy, removal of the rights of labor, and fewer benefits for those in need.
Look at the current government,without mainstream GOP support, DT cannot destroy us, with that support we the people have lost.
4
I absolutely agree with your description of the populist nationalism. It is not simply Republicans that have no story to tell; but, the Democrats as well. Thus, Donald Trump.
However, America’s core idea is not the frontier. America’s frontier simply provided the space past generations of Americans used to practice their core ideals.
People - but for America’s slave class - came to America because they didn’t want other people telling them what to think or do. This idea has been inculcated into our culture over many generations; and, continues to be the biggest impediment to America resolving the important issues we face as a society. In the face of our eroding sense of community - accelerated by Donald the Great Divider - it becomes more critical.
Americans are not going to easily give up their self-absorption. So, regardless of party, the political story board needs to address that idea. Pick your poison…speak to community, speak to fairness, or speak to the idea that doing what one wants is okay until you hurt others. For America’s sake, make central to the conversation the idea (and present corresponding policies) that we are community and that it is no longer okay for individuals or narrow classes of citizens to place the rest of us in harms way as an expression of their "doing what they want to do".
2
Nobel words and I agree with most. The problem is it's waiting for a miracle - "someone" to ride to our rescue and save us from deepening divisions. This seems to much like a fantasy, given the existing politics. Both Democrates and Republicans are being pulled ever further to their extremes where any compromise on any issue is anathema. With the existing media (24 hour TV news, internet sites focused on narrow views), and a political climate favoring the two main parties, why would anyone expect anything but things getting worse. Despite arguments that additional parties bring major governing complications (see Europe), isn't that a rational considerations? A split within the democrats into the progressives and those willing to compromise? A split within the Republicans into the extreme right and those willing to compromise?
Trump is the logical result of "establishment Republicanism," which ultimately is a philosophy of selfishness dressed up to appear to be for the public good. Holding up "regular Republicans" as some platonic ideal fails any degree of scrutiny. At least from Reagan on, Republicans have pushed for lower taxes since Reagan. This selfish policy enriches the rich and decimates the social fabric: environment, infrastructure, wages. At least from Reagan on, Republicans are the anti-environment party, pushing an assault on the environment, and opposing necessary regulation and enforcement, that has brought us to today's climate catastrophe (and other environmental catastrophes). At least from Reagan on, Republicans are the anti-worker party, opposing workers' rights and unions and suppressing wages. Today, many people work at least full-time jobs and cannot make ends meet. The cost of low wages is foisted onto the taxpayer (not to be confused with the wealthy) in the form of food stamps and other benefits. Republicans want to cut taxes and then point to deficits to argue that we cannot afford programs that benefit the non-rich. Hence our failing infrastructure and social fabric. Trump, the ultimate selfish human being, is the natural result of Republican policies.
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These are reasonable ideas that won't fly, because Americans are now beyond reason. Trumpism is rage against a system that is so manifestly unfair that it should have died during the last election. Our leadership legislates on behalf of a tiny fraction of the population--those capable of unlimited political donations. Democracy in the US is also failing, due to gerrymandering and constant propaganda. Our leaders lie to us constantly, hoping to mollify the rage and maintain an uneasy status quo.
Trump is clearly not the solution, but there is hope that his impact will crack the walls that have been building in our system of governance, and perhaps (unlikely) result in a more fair rational politics. I'm not holding my breath.
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"The regular Republicans have no story, no conviction and no argument."
Yes, indeed. But you need to realize that this has been true since Reagan. The Republican philosophy since at least Reagan has been simply "Greed is good." Or "I've got mine, too bad about you." This is all there is at the core, and some of us have seen it for decades. It leads to such "principles" as that rich people won't work unless you give them more money, and poor people won't work unless you give them money. These ideas won't get votes, so for decades they have been linked to anti-abortionism and guns in order to get the votes to afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable. This leads to such contradictory thoughts as that the gunman in Las Vegas had the right to 23 firearms and thousands of bullets, but health care for his victims is a privilege. It has led to phony baloney like trickle-down economics, which won't die because it is all they have. It has led to the disaster in Kansas (in contrast to the success in California) which is all explained away somehow. It has led to the Speaker of the House living in an Ayn Rand fantasy. It has led to pandering to the anti-intellectuals, the anti-evolutionists, the birthers and the climate-hoaxers. Trump is not an aberration. He's just a logical extension of the "philosophy" of the Republicans. Glad you see it with Trump, Mr. Brooks. Welcome to the club, even if 30 years late.
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Mr. Brooks, the problem isn't Republicans, Democrats, the NRA, elites, working class, region, black, white, Hispanic, etc.. The problem remains that our politicians can't honestly solve problems and implement solutions when they are held captive to enormous sums of campaign money. You keep insisting the impact is neutralized with money from both sides. Special interests' needs are addressed first and nothing is left of the pie for American citizens. It is political suicide to go against the interest of $100,000 donations or secret money. All of the noise just keeps us fighting without fixing our infrastructure, health care, schools, immigration, etc.. Problems don't go away until you address the root causes.
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In order to gain control of government, Trump & the Republicans have lied to the public. They have made promises that they can't keep. They have told the working class that tax cuts will generate economic growth that will make them more affluent, that Obamacare repeal will offer them something better, that environmental rules ruin their economic prospects, that free trade will create jobs for them. Trump has repudiated some of those lies with some of his own. They both play the race card. The Republicans then used their advantage to gerrymander the voting districts in at least 20 states to cement their position in congress.
But the clock is ticking for the Republican Party. The time has come for them to demonstrate that their ideas will work and the outlook doesn't look good. Their health care proposals have been a disaster, their tax plan is a just gift to the billionaires. They need to deliver benefits to the American people instead of promises and they can't do it.
At some point, even Republican voters will have had enough. There is hope, but it may take a while.
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