Ho-hum… early KKK-affiliated Koch-financed Ronald Reagan ran GOP ideology off the road into the rightwing ditch 50-60 years ago, sycophant followers have been spinning their rhetorical wheels there ever since, digging deeper into the amoral abyss, spewing mendacious mud in all directions… and D. Brooks who observed, aided and abetted this debasement is still cranking out these pale screeds against the commonwealth of the USA. This would seem merely a routine and utterly predictable waste of time and all related resources were it not another clear demonstration of a soul complicit in its own moral degradation.
Sad, just sad. – as what's-his-farce would say.
23
The funny part here is how many liberals claim they haven't changed their minds at all. Ever. Yet Brooks mentions half a dozen polls proving that white liberal have changed their minds dramatically on immigration and race issues since the 1990s and even since the Obama administration.
The cognitive dissonance is really something to behold.
16
it's because public discourse has been pulled to the extreme right by the Republicans and the Fox news propaganda machine. ideas that are now labeled liberal are mainstream equitable. those with a sense have stood with compassion have stood in the same place. shame on David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and the NYT for relentlessly pursuing the demonization of the left and undercovering the real extremist shift -- that of the Republicans and the right.
27
There's a piece in today's Times, "The Case for Keeping San Francisco's Disputed George Washington Murals," that really underscores how obsessed liberals in certain places are with all things racial. Read it.
14
It’s the only ethnic group (the only!) that according to resent research prefers another ethnicity to their own.
“We are horrible” - it’s a mantra of white liberals. Muslims had slaves long after 1865. All big empires had an existential need to consume or destroy smaller kingdoms. Race and religions never mattered to much. But for them (for the white liberals) white people are the worst what they openly say. Now, how confused inside should you be..
19
Pharma money is spread around both side of the isle, unfortunately, but at least Trump is trying to do something about it. Obama got into bed with the industry and the doctors, to limit competition and keep high costs in order to win backing to the ACA. He sold out the American people for his stupid vanity program. Americans have been funding R&D for the world.
I am sorry and just don’t get the whole liberal Democrat thing as if it was something righteous. We have just come of 8 years of a black president and many blacks in very senior positions of government. Barack said it was a good time to be an African American and to just get out there. Where I worked for 40 years we actively worked to hire people of color. Black unemployment is at historic lows. Sooo, I submit that all this talk of race problems is just the playing of the race card by the elite liberals when they don’t have an answer to their losing of power. Wake up America to how we are being manipulated by the left just so they can gain power!
16
One of the ironies about White Democrats is that opinion polls show that they are more likely than Black Democrats to believe that racism is a barrier to black advancement.
That's what happens when you get an arms' race to signal your virtue. The loonier the idea, the more credit you get for ideological purity, and the more you show you are a true believer.
Beware the fate of the Gadarene swine.
10
Whatever the follies of left-drifting Democrats, one would think that David Brooks, of all people, would be willing to acknowledge that their folly is dwarfed by the waltz surviving Republicans have made into the arms of the vile, narcissistic, racist and criminally unstable idiot in the White House.
16
As a NYT subscriber I am less than thrilled that every time I turn on my iPad I have another article about race thrown up by an opinion columnist. I think publications like the NYT and others are using this topic to ignite the democratic base for 2020. Please stop! We are a little more evolved than this and see the propaganda being pushed.
Race politics do not win the White House; the economy, employment, national defense and medical care arguments win elections. Again, please stop baiting us.
23
It's increasingly obvious that this paper's management finds white voters to be the only ones that matter, and the only ones in play. Especially those alleged massive numbers of moderate ones out there. It's a betrayal of the Times' progressive legacy.
3
As a lifelong liberal I will never be able to fathom how any of my ideological brothers and sisters can support the regime in Palestine or Gaza between boths sponsorship of terrorism, supression of free speech, rejection of democracy, subjugation of the LGBTQ community, support for honor killings, cartoonish anti-Semitism and clear disinterest in ever forging any manor of peace with Israel under any circumstances. To say nothing of airplane hijackings, murdering Olympic athletes and assassinating RFK.
13
Let’s talk identity politics. I just parked at the grocery store. The man walked up ‘to his truck next to mine, looked at my bumper sticker (the Democrat for Congress from 2018). He slammed his door, pulled out and pulled up next me, shouting “go back to where you came from” and then loudly peeled away.
Do you think liberals talking about racism caused this?
21
That's really funny because I'm a Democrat voter my whole life and these last two years of Liberal blaming of white men for every evil known to man have pushed me me into becoming a conservative.
23
The ugly truth is that the Democratic Party has become the party of far left socialism and racist (just a horse of a different color). Ironic, that in order to achieve so called racial justice, they have become exactly the same monster.
I know many liberals who don’t resemble anything like the liberal left of today.
16
Those who view all things through a racial lense are the true racists.
18
Highly educated whites work in multi-racial offices. Everyone is on an equal footing and you tend to not dislike what you know.
Uneducated whites work in multi-racial offices too. They see people of other races getting ahead through affirmative action.
It is how you look at it I suppose or "who's" propaganda you listen too.
8
I bet the people of Hong Kong are longing for a little white colonialism right about now.
7
Here's why white democrats moved left over the last 20 years: There are more educated people now and that's why Republicans are against education. There are more whites in interracial marriages now (perhaps understanding their white privileges) and that's why most Republicans want to make America white again. There are more people traveling to other countries now and seeing how brown people are just like them. There are more whites working alongside educated and smart minorities in IT, Biotech, Financial and other industries with global reach. These factors are very visible and you don't have to be an insightful social commentator or politician to see them. That's why the Republicans continue to use drastic and illegal methods to keep their share of the electorate.
17
"For me, it’s a good idea to assume that people adopt their positions for honest, well-intentioned reasons."
I'm afraid the author's naivety is on full display here. Maybe I'm just a cynical person, but I've found that often people virtue signal the loudest when they have the least at stake. And I'm certainly not the least bit surprised that whites are in fact further to the left than racial minorities on many issues pertaining to immigration and race. After all, many blacks and Hispanics are the ones who suffer the most from the impact of things such as crime and lax borders.
White progressives of course pine the loudest for immigration and diversity and compassion when they personally have nothing at stake, but as evidenced by the recent GoFundMe campaign against a proposed homeless shelter in the Embarcadero in SF, suddenly come to their senses when their own quality of life is threatened. The phrase "skin in the game" immediately comes to mind and it seems like perhaps we need to ensure that more people are held to account for their loftily espoused standards. Virtue signaling should come at a price.
Indeed, this is the real irony. The actual white privilege which exists is by and large embodied by the fact that many whites can afford to virtue signal about race and immigration when larger numbers of blacks and Hispanics have to focus on the bread and butter issues out of sheer necessity.
11
Dear Mr. Brooks,
A very well written, thought out and researched article. But it isn't the Democratic shift to the left that is triggering the hate and xenophobia in the USA today, it is the Republicans led by Trump and his ilk which are fanning the flames and even throwing oil into the fires.
Perhaps you could delve into this artifact of the current US political situation? You have touched upon this before and have left me intrigued. You have a profoundly incisive view of the US today and many of your readers would appreciate such a study.
Everyone on this planet are now wondering what is next? And most of us are very concerned for the future.
8
Canada’s colonial whites built a great country on the backs of our First Nations, first by stealing their land. We did that. We recently offered a sincere apology for those past sins. We are doing a few things to right the dehumanizing robbery of culture, our effort to take the Indian out of the Indian in church run residential schools, our segregating and dismissing them. We stole or used chicanery to take their land, and dumped them on small pods. Our white educated are realizing that apologizing, or “understanding “, empathizing with what happened in the 19 th and 20 th century is not enough. We damaged them, stunted their human potential. That’s us. Many of us are seeing what needs doing. Return some of the land taken. Make reparations. Cede decision making on many issues.
Your story, your greatness owes a lot to slavery and dispossession of the Indian.
North American history can look forward to combining Indian, African American, and white colonials in one script, I hope
3
Nowadays, if you refrain from yelling insults at anyone who isn’t white, you are an open-borders liberal. The real drift has been in the Republican Party. Lincoln didn’t tell minorities to go back where they came from. Even Nixon had more class than that.
Anyway, this is getting old. Let’s hear about the great new health care system Trump says he’ll unveil after the election.
6
I can't see if anyone has yet discussed Dems that are moving to the right/center because they don't believe what the left is "requiring" them to believe anymore. The left used to be the party that said intelligent things, with hard facts and good critical thinking. I have watched that evaporate over the last 2 years in some sort of knee jerk reaction to Trump.
The left should be very worried about this...
7
I don’t believe this. We Democrats are not looking at this with a racial lens. We’re looking at it clearly. Trump’s animus towards immigrants is obviously colored by his racism, unlike, say, George W. Bush. Mr. Brooks’ and Bret Stephens always want to ensure that their criticism of Trump does not result in agreeing with Democrats.
7
Why is "racial equity" a concept of the left? It's part of our Constitution, embodied in the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection regardless of race, and in the 15th Amendment, which guarantees that race shall not be a basis to deprive a person of the right to vote. It's the product of the the GOP, the Party of Lincoln. Fifty years ago members of the GOP, including Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, and Senator Hugh Scott, of Pennsylvania, mustered GOP votes to defeat the filibusters of Southern Democrats. to ensure passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. Those laws were paid for with blood: the blood of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, of Viola Liuzzo and Rev. James Reeb, and countless others, victims of Klan terror and official indifference, if not complicity. It's the GOP that has transformed itself into the contemporary Dixiecrat Party, to the Party of vote suppression, from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of the racial pandering of Ronald Reagan, Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, and the new star: Donald Trump. Why have you not rejected that party, Mr. Brooks? You cannot sanitize the GOP by pointing the flaws and divisions among Democrats.
15
It was Dubya. Intellectuals could not stomach that such a person could be President of the United States. All Republicans after that are paying the price of that choice. Of course, that primed the pump for Trump hatred.
4
I went from Reagan Bush Republican to Bernie Sanders Modern Socialist. Capitalism is killing my children. Unaccountable capitalism has to be stopped. Half the country is struggling, and my kids are facing an ever tougher world where NO benefits, NO healthcare, NO pensions, NOTHING, but handouts for the rich by the government. Study the Scott Walker tax payer giveaway. He paid $1.3 million per job for people to assemble LCD panels. My God. And at the expense of middle class benefits to pay for it.
12
"...86 percent of progressive activists said that people’s life outcomes are outside their individual control." That about says it all, and is quite depressing. If you fail to see how your own effort and ambition can improve your lot in life, then I suppose you expect the government to do it for you.
1
This piece is dishonest.
Strictly speaking, white educated Democrats haven't moved left: everyone else has moved far to the right. Positions that were centrist twenty, thirty years ago are now considered 'left'. Like choice. Like employment law. Like environmental regulation.
11
The author is out of touch with reality and he is a perfect example of what is wrong with conservatives. The left is moving forward with time, with progress, with evolution, with this human race. Nobody has ever been here before, so mistakes will be made. The right is simply stuck in the past and afraid of every tomorrow.
10
Excellent laying out of the scene before us. I would add that there is a religion like aspect to people who are most deeply attached to ideology both on the left and right, the ideology must survive at all costs no matter how badly it fares in empirical studies.
To the defeee that white elites have broken more forcefully to left and right I would say fear guilt and resentment are the drivers in both cases.
1
Great analysis, very insightful.
1
I think the answer to why highly educated whites align with a party well-heeled in multi-culturalism is as it has always been - they simply have a conscience. If the Republican Party was not chalk full of hypocrites, the only demographic that should feel welcome in its tent are affluent white males void of a conscience. Anyone other that the affluent white male without a conscience should deem the GOP as a slow moving ship headed to the past without a moral compass to guide it. Women, minorities and the non-affluent, regardless of education levels, should be voting straight-ticket Democrat with extreme prejudice.
3
David, would you please write a column on why the vast majority of Republicans blame most of America's problems on people of color?
10
The only reason these elite-wanna-bes moved to the Left is that 95% of them were stuck in progressive political training camps in college.
There aren't enough patriotic, religious America-lovers on many prominent campus faculties to make four for bridge.
Either they mimicked the anti-American babbling their teacher exposed them to or they failed courses. My bet is that these people will not stay socialist, however.
Have people here read of developments at extremely P/C Colorado State, trying to be known as our most anti-American campus?
2
On another planet of Fox News few voices a.k.a Shepard Smith, Chris Wallace, who are trying to present honest analysis of this worthless presidency, but they're hidden among the rest of a barking loyalists on prime time.
I guess not all of them are zombies, in a times like that we should be grateful for their effort to raise people awareness.
2
Why have well-educated, white Democrats moved left? Because whiteness and a college degree no longer guarantee economic security or notable social status in 21st century America.
6
When you study American history, as educated people do, and you study it through an honest lens, you can help but see it through the racial lens. Our country was founded on white male supremacy. For hundreds of years blacks were considered farm animals, to be bought and sold like cattle. Even after emancipation, Black Codes kept black people in de facto slavery, and then we have the KKK and Jim Crow. Many of us educated white people watched our communities and our televisions and saw this racial inequity continue straight up into our adulthoods. And now, since Republican racism has taken root and grown, we have come to see how racial injustice pervades our society - and we don't like it one bit. We have non-white friends now. We TALK to them and sometimes, when they come to believe we actually give a dam, they tell us what their lives are like. Getting pulled over for DWB. Getting questioned when they're visiting us in white neighborhoods. We even see that ourselves, for once. As we become educated, we begin to get it. And now we have an openly racist man as our president, with openly racist followers. Our nonwhite friends are scared, and we don't like it one bit. The injustice continues. We believe it's way past time for it to stop.
6
Because some people lost their mind due to their life with no real world problems.
1
We have racial equality. We had an African American President for 8 years. We have affirmative action, we are talking reparations. I have a hard time understanding this incessant talk of racism and white privilege.
142
@DJ Maybe you have a hard time understanding the ongoing conversation about racism because you haven't actually experienced it yourself - and that's your privilege talking.
Your claim that electing a black President means we now have racial equality is ludicrous on so many levels that it defies belief. Racial inequality did not stop on January 20, 2009.
There are still structural components of our society that make it more likely that minorities will not achieve the same level of success as their white peers. The impacts of redlining mean that black families are still struggling to grow wealth when they were denied the ability to buy property in a location that would let them build equity - something that is nearly considered a right by most Americans.
DOJ data shows that minorities are charged and convicted at a higher rate that whites - which severely limits their ability to progress in a chosen career field.
School boundaries, drawn to keep minority neighborhoods in a separate district, continue to be an example of racial inequality. The schools in the minority district are by and large poorly funded, which results in poor performance as compared to the well-funded, majority white school districts just up the road.
94
@DJ Really? You must live in quite a bubble. I have an African American friend, a lawyer in his early 60's, who was stopped for a minor traffic infraction recently. The officer ordered him out of his car, checked his identification repeatedly, asked him "where he got the car", and finally let him go after checking the internet and seeing that he really was a partner at a major Denver law firm. I was surprised at this, my black friends were not. It happens all the time to them.
83
@DJ Try a little harder.
If you think about the numbers, you'll realize that the number of openings for African American presidents is limited compared to the number of potentially qualified candidates. That's true even if you expand "president" to include CEOs of successful corporations.
We now live in a country where some black people are privileged, just as some white people are privileged. a black person can genuinely aspire to become President. That's a good thing, but it's largely symbolic. We live in a country where most black fathers have to have "the talk" with their sons about how to survive an encounter with the police. This is not a safe or a just country for black people, and in many ways it's not even a free one.
55
I am a first generation "elite", whose roots are deeply Republican. I am not and have never been a Democrat BUT I might as well be. The Republican Party has lost my allegiance. I have moved left because the current president offends my values at every turn, Mitch McConnell's sanctimony and strategies assault my sense of fairness and I have simply moved leftward on almost every issue. Why? I have decided that limited government and minimal taxation, while desirable, are simply less important to me than a host of other issues. Protecting the environment. Support for our allies and scrutiny of bad actors like Putin, Saudi Prince MBS, and goof friend in North Korea. Action to avoid foreign interference with the election process. Gerrymandering run amok. Citizen's United. The fact that I pay more in taxes than either Trump or Amazon. Etc Etc Etc. You won't find me marking a ballot for any Republican in the foreseeable future. Sanity must be restored. Republican leaders have strayed from the values that, in my view, truly make America great---ironic given the president's campaign mantra. No, I am DONE. I have moved leftward and wonder why I did not do so years ago. How could I have drunk the koolaid ofr so long?
11
The most important election in my lifetime was Reagan’s. It’s been downhill, especially for the Republican Party, since then. The left stayed put, the right drifted away.
11
@Peter
I don't believe that's true. The left drifted right as well. You'll see that in the NY Times opinion pieces and the many comments on them that mirror Republican talking points.
Old-fashioned FDR Democrats are now considered pie-in-the-sky socialists by mainstream Democrats... because the mainstream is so far right of where it used to be.
4
Maybe you are the one that's changed, Mr. Brooks, hand you thought of that?
As so many others here have said, I do not feel like I've changed in my opinions and beliefs, and I have been a Democrat for 40 years . Though I will admit to having mellowed a bit as I've aged.
I believe I am now more compassionate and have more empathy. But I think, in part, that is because of the sheer cruelty of the Republicans these days. Their policies and politics have highlighted and brought home to me the sad plight of so many folks of color. And I cry when I see the babies and children at the border being separated from their parents. So say I've gone too far to the left - but I am proud to be there.
9
Racial equity has become the defining issue for Democrats moving left? I'm not sure. I'd vote for SURVIVAL. Survival of our fragile democracy under threat from those who would ignore laws. Survival of our Supreme Court's reputation. Survival of humanity before our earth and environment become uninhabitable. Survival of the many life forms that are part of an ecosystem unable to handle the abuse our current lifestyles
require. We must face facts, not fantasy.
5
As many here have already said, it's not that Democrats have moved so far left, as that the Republicans have moved so far to the right.
David, you're like the little boy raised from birth on a great ocean liner moored to the dock of a city, never having been able to set foot on land, nor even see the entirety of the ship he's on. In fact, to him, the ship isn't separate from the city. But then one day the lines are cast off and the great liner slowly moves away from shore. Our little boy exclaims" "Why is the city moving away from us?" Of course it's he that's moving away.
You've lost perspective David.
Why should Democrats, Independents, and other non-Republicans simply continue to get dragged rightward? Can you not see the damage already done by years of this shift to the right? Of course you can't because you insist that the "reality" is that you're on firm ground and everyone else is moving. Here's a suggestion: If you want to maintain your moral compass bearings, abandon ship.
10
As a white Democrat who got my graduate degree in 1994, this article resonated with me.
Though I'd never vote for Trump or most Republicans, I'm increasingly alienated by my own party. Bill Clinton was the first president I voted for, back in 1992, and he was a pocketbook Democrat. He was for free trade, welfare reform, balancing the budget, tough laws on crime, and a lot of other moderate stances that appealed to me.
Obama was less moderate but still spoke out for free trade and tried to urge fiscal responsibility. Both Obama and Clinton were firm in their support of Israel, and tough on illegal immigration. They didn't talk about fantasies like free college education and government checks for everyone.
Looking at most of the Democrats running for president now, I'm having a lot of trouble as a middle-aged moderate Democrat finding one who supports the principles that I liked Obama and Clinton for. Maybe Biden. After that, it's shaky.
8
I believe that racial and gender discrimination is a major issue in the United States, but I have become more libertarian as I have realized that most discrimination is perpetrated by government programs. Prejudice is bad for business in a competitive free market.
2
As other posters have noted, way more people ponder why educated Democrats have moved left than wonder why Republicans--both highly educated and not--have moved so far right. And why it is that so many people identify with a party that clearly sees threats from anyone who isn't white and Christian.
Since Reagan, Republicans have been way better at framing issues and scaring people than their counterparts in the Democratic party. But, in reality, Republicans win many elections because they make it difficult for people to vote. They move polling places, give out wrong information, "lose" ballots, etc., etc. They scare people with the notion that "others" are coming to take over their schools and cities. Democrats win when everyone gets to vote. And when people like Jill Stein don't take away votes. Trump won because of Stein. If she had not been on the ballot, Clinton would be sitting in the oval office. We'd still have problems, but not a looming disaster.
10
The clear framing has been very strong for Republicans. How you change it isn’t by everyone’s cause has to be supported by Dems rather than done underlying themes. Equality is vague, how to you measure. Perfect equality is meaningless and sounds like Communism. How do we let the Republicans own the pro-life mantle?. Why do we let them get away with croci zing legislating from the bench when they are so more activist? Why do we propose policies that will look like reactionary tax and spend policies. Why do we show our ignorance of the Constitution and focus on the wrong and impossible elimination of the Electoral College? Why do we tolerate antisemitism which is so self destructive and not discuss what we need to do to deal with China? Why do we demand a high minimum wage when it’s so simplistic and the wrong way to increase purchasing power? Why do we self destruct on the backward looking reparations when looking not to the chains of the past than the meals of tomorrow? Why do we talk about Medicare for all that makes us look like we have a trillion dollar per word slogan? Why can’t we recognize how we can lower tax rates and close all the loopholes and spread the tax base. “Lower tax rates, wider tax base”. Why not call ourselves the”pro-mother and decrease abortion party” which Dem administrations did. Why not “the financial hope and security” party informing jobs and futures for young adults, Med insurance’s primary role, immigration policies. Undermine all Reps attacks
@kathleen cairns Written by a person of Democrat political orientation, from a state that has refined the practice of "ballot harvesting". Section 3017 of the California Election Code. (Amended in 2016)
Social equality can only be attained by taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots. It's pretty easy to get everyone down to a low-set bar and practically impossible to get everyone up to a bar set high. Problem is, people are essentially penalized for having "too much" good stuff, individual motivation nosedives, progress and evolution grind to a halt, and everyone ends up worse off. The whole pie shrinks, so while the have-nots may get a "bigger" slice, they are getting less pie.
1
No, social equality comes from the equal sharing of risk, which isn’t happening today. The risk is being borne by a disproportionate share of the populous, and they don’t understand that. The federal reserve, in its relentless quest to pop up an unsustainable credit bubble by keeping rates too low is subsidizing the wealth effect of a small few. Monetary policy is the problem.
3
The Pew Research Center did not call me. I am a white college educated woman who has always believed in the American dream. As a nation of immigrants, the only original Americans are the Native Americans.
Growing up in the fifties and going to college in the sixties, I experienced the optimism of the post World War II generation. We would be upwardly mobile, any one who worked hard would succeed, and our country would be a beacon to the world of goodness and democracy. The Christian and Judaic religions promoted "do unto others as they would do unto you". We would take care of our fellow man. Now, Evangelical religions support the Republican agenda of cutting aid to the poor, detention facilities for immigrants, and I ask, "What would Jesus say?" The ten commandments as a foundation for morality seems to be forgotten.
Am I an old liberal? Maybe, but not a socialist. I still think starving Americans need food stamps. social security helps to protect the elderly, having health insurance is needed by everyone, and a good public education for all should be supported. Call me a wild lefty!
12
As a highly educated white orginally from Virginia and now living in the Bay Area, throughout multiple graduate and post -graduate trainings in medicine and psychotherapy, I've been both surrounded and touched by peers from all over the planet. Patients and clients also reflect an extraordinarily diverse group racially, ethnically, and geographically. As one is intimately exposed to their stories and memories, told with undeniable candor and vulnerability, this drift left is simply the effect of hearing folks' personal truth, told over and over. Many inflections of the same themes. Some can't seem to push through explicitly and implicitly oppressive systems, some transcend. Either way, the burden of ignorance and prejudice they face and report is frequently considerable. I've sensed an unmistakable and admirable softening and opening in Mr. Brook's views too, by the way, over time.
2
Like many readers, I don't think we've moved farther left. And I would agreee that the right has moved further right. FDR's idea was that every American has the right to a job, an adequate wage and decent living, a decent home, medical care, economic protection during sickness, accident, old age or unemployment and a good education. Basic. Is that further left?
9
Well, I don't know, Mr. Brooks. Perhaps because I still believe in the words etched, powerfully and beautifully, on the walls of Lincoln's memorial. Perhaps because I still believe in my Sunday childhood recitation (give or take a touch of the pagan), "In the love of truth and the spirit of Jesus, we unite for the worship of God and service to man.". Perhaps because I was filled with pride when Dad voiced outspoken insistence that a girlfriend's Jewish family be admitted to the local boat club. Perhaps I haven't moved further left. Perhaps Progressives are just staying true to what we learned about what our nation's values really mean and stand for.
9
Mr Brooks,
President Kennedy went on national television to issue the simple statement that “Race has no place in American life or law.” Its shocking and disappointing that you appear to suggest that, generations later, others from backgrounds of ‘privilege’ like his are unfit to say the same. If our nations leaders and elite won’t stand up to make that statement, then who among us will? Asking for basic equality is hardly ‘far left’; were John Adams alive today he’d probably say the same thing. Let’s face it, we face a sad outcome from the hangover of the Bush housing bubble and still unnaturally low interest rates. Over intellectualizing basic race baiting is just a distraction from the fact that there is still way too much leverage, too much debt in the financial system, which is causing massive middle class anxiety, along with the spillover effects from taxes and tariffs. It will end badly again, and then who will the populists blame? Too many people still own homes they can’t afford if they lose their jobs. That’s the problem, and everyone knows it. Speaking up against racism isn’t the new problem. An overvalued credit bubble is still the same problem.
5
No, David, racial equity is not the defining issue for Democrats. But Republicans certainly want Americans to believe that, and I'm disappointed to see you adding on.
Democrats won back the House of Representative in 2018 by focusing on healthcare, jobs, education, and a healthy environment for everyone. And in 2020 the Democrats will win back the Senate and the White House by focusing on the same issues that affect everyone.
It is always the GOP that is looking for a wedge issue, whether it be race, religion, national origin, or women's health and reproductive rights.
Yes, there are identity politics on the left, but they do not begin to match the identity politics on the right. Trump has brought the white nationalist identity movement out of the shadows and into broad daylight. The GOP establishment, terrified of being primaried from the right, acquiesces like a frightened puppy to the hateful rants of Donald Trump, who throws red meat tweets to his 33% voter base on a daily regularity.
At every turn, Trump is taunting the Democrats and trying to start a street fight. But the Democrats are maintaining their own discipline, thanks to the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, and do not take the bait.
Trump is begging to be impeached (because he knows he can rely on Mitch McConnell to quash it in the Senate), and we can expect Trump to make his rants more excessive as the year goes on.
Because, after he loses in 2020, he will be wearing an orange jumpsuit. To match his hair.
11
Because David, as you mentioned in the first few sentences, we are educated. We must forever dispense with the myth of the modern "conservative intellectual." It is clear to any functioning and educated mind that the finite resources available to the ever-growing world population must be managed and that any cogent conception of justice demands that equity should be THE guiding principle.
9
We have a group of maybe 20% of Americans who are racists.
Another 20% are racist but most of that racism is due to a lack of exposure.
I think that partially explains why educated whites are less racist. Through education and privilege (e.g. the ability to travel and have a diverse range of experiences and friendships) they actually get out and meet people from different walks of life.
For many people that triggers the breakthrough - they see that while there are cultural differences etc. fundamentally people are the same: they want to have good schools for their kids, they want safe streets, good jobs, etc.
I would add that I much less convinced that liberal Americans have shifted that much on Israel. The undisputed fact is that under the leadership of Netanyahu, Israel has changed. It has abandoned many of its founding principles. In turn right wing America is following some bizarre Revelations-Based political strategy that demands abject fealty to the cause of Israel.
We used to have fair and thoughtful policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. We understood that Israel was our most important ally in the Middle East for many very good reasons. At the same time, there was an awareness that we had to serve as fair arbiter in negotiating a sustainable peace. The has been abandoned.
6
The economic royalists and super wealthy benefit when the public dialogue is focused primarily on race.
While the majority of Americans are getting their pockets picked, and the plutocracy that is the US post-Citizens United piles on more and more to the monied interests and economic elites, the masses are talking about confederate flags, reparations, and women soccer players being underpaid. While these may be legitimate issues, the extent to which they are the focus of attention is completely out of proportion to how they affect most people's lives.
This public discourse permits large corporations to find a successful person or people of color to place on their boards and they're supporting equity and diversity. Apple, Amazon, and others that purchase our elected "leaders" pay little to no taxes, hide their profits in off-shore tax havens, and the rest of us pay for the roads, courts, schools, police, fire, and the rest of the increasingly crumbling public infrastructure that permits these monied interests to exist and profit.
The Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and Steve Wynn couldn't be happier when those getting the shaft are focused myopically on race, while they're busy purchasing more and more power, and extracting more and more wealth from the system.
3
I grew up as that since-vanished species: a liberal Republican, and have been a registered Independent for most of my life. (Recently registered as a Democrat so that I could vote in primaries.)
I don’t think that my views have changed significantly over my lifetime. What has happened is that the Republicans no longer have a liberal wing and the GOP has moved sharply to the right.
In addition, I have seen in real time that trickle-down economics don’t work. Cutting taxes for the wealthy doesn’t create jobs or increase business investment— it just increases income inequality.
12
Moderate and liberal Democrats and many Independents make common cause in supporting job creation, fair wages, a more progressive tax system and racial equality.
That is a strong national platform.
Not impressed with David Brooks’s efforts to drive wedges among Democrats.
8
An assumption - at the end - that destroys the entire argument: "For me, it’s a good idea to assume that people adopt their positions for honest, well-intentioned reasons. " NOT.
People don't 'intentionally' 'adopt' positions, they acquire them like they acquire an opportunistic virus that unbeknownst to the host (until it is too late to do anything about) is looking for an environment to thrive in.
1
I think some of this shift is a result of media showing us the graphic reality of racism in everyday life. Growing up in the 60s, we saw film footage of civil rights protesters beaten, hosed, savaged by dogs, gassed, etc. and then read reports of the missing and murdered. Today, there seems to be an exponentially greater impact from social media feeds showing individuals who are harassed for the most mundane tasks of just trying to have a life. Were it not for a brave bystander who decided to video a police encounter in South Carolina, Walter Scott would just be another dead black man. So, when I think about the totality of these events over the course of my life, a life where I had no need for "the talk" or how to handle other racially charged incidents, I realize that I have only witnessed a very small part of a pervasive experience. I think racial equity is probably more of a defining moment in American history today than it was 40 years ago because while some of the most egregious symbols are gone but the institutional bias is very much alive. And that gives some folks the fig leaf they need for the prejudice they always harbored but could not say or act on.
8
But isn't it uniquely American that those who are the most privileged seek to make the country and the world better for all. Isn't this fundamental reason why many of the founding fathers were against inherited wealth?
6
It's about better understandings of structural benefits bestowed and withheld (e.g., housing, voting rights). It's also a response to the cynicism of the right - their ideas are unlikely to bring them power at this moment. Thus, they've moved toward extremes.
1
David, you need to recalibrate your political compass.
"The left" has not actually shifted that much. The right has fallen so far off the edge of extremism that it makes centrism look left-wing.
Mainstream Republicans used to believe in science, birth control, civil rights, secular government, and a regulated free market. Toda 's Republicans make Eisenhower look like a raging Commie pinko.
19
racial equity is a long haul with a much-beleaguered history in this country....yet one can be for same w/o subscribing to some of the new nonsense being peddled with it.
1
Racism is a taught thought process that begins at the kitchen table. We all forget that any race can be racist. Unfortunately it is the Whites who are most known for this. With good reason.
That said, I do not believe that Well-educated whites want open borders.
What I do believe is that most people want Immigration to be legal. They want border control. They want Immigration reform to include humane treatment of illegal Immigrants when they are detained. They want more ports of entry to alleviate the overcrowding of detention centers.
As as been pointed out many times, we are a Country that was founded on Immigration. Unfortunately almost every group, English, Irish, Italians, Polish, Dutch, etc. has come here, settled in and have consistently picked on the next group after them, tried to close the door on them, made them feel inhuman and stupid. And this is what s going on now. It is the mentality of Nimbyism.
We all should be making sure that Congress figures out a fair system to accommodate those who come here to make a better life for themselves and their families. We are a huge Country and have room. Immigrants have been enriching our Cultural life, our food culture, our Art, our Music, our Education systems and our Politics, when we let them in.
After all, our Ancestors fled here for the very reasons that today's Immigrants flee here.
You do not have to be a White, wealthy and Highly Educated to understand that.
8
The entire GOP has gone completely berserk, embracing an ignorant malignant narcissistic psychopath as President, but buck all means Brooks, lets talk about how the Liberals talk too much about racism and abortion.
11
As a highly educated white person (who worked hard for everything attained- no upper class DNA) I am in the group of politically homeless. Never could I be a Republican but the Democrats wearing the bias of wokeness has left me behind. I am no resigned to four more years of Trumpiness as the party who could beat him are looking like a bunch of disorganized, self dealing idiots not aligned with any voter but with polls and data.
12
@Maureen politically homeless is great language and nails my pov exactly. As a highly educated dem, I don't recognize the usefulness of many platforms being proposed other than to give free stuff for votes. Very disheartened.
4
Brooks conflates educated whites with wealthy educated whites. Landmark esearch conducted by political scientist Robert Putnam led many to study a term he offered: "post bourgeois values" or "post materialism." Once we pass the Maslow needs test--food and shelter--we move on to more community-oriented values including justice, the environment, and freedom. Essentially, these were children of the 60s, a political generation of its own. Putnam has continued his research over the years. He found that the 60s generation who possessed these values, whether rich or poor, never lost those values. (Their kids did, but not their grandkids.)
5
Brooks has dropped all pretense of being anything other than a GOP enabler of Trump despite his many words to the contrary.
The Republican Party, as an institution, is a danger to the rule of law and the integrity of our democracy.
The problem is not just Donald Trump; it’s Republicans who are collaborating with him.
11
I guess I fall inline with the statistics; I subjected myself to more years of higher education than anyone deserves to suffer (okay, I actually enjoyed it) and I'm very progressive. Somewhere to the left of AOC, in fact.
That said, I despise identity politics. I always have. Identifying and selecting groups for special consideration, no matter how deserving it may be, was all but destined to bring us to our present place in history.
Much of my thinking on this issue was informed by spending significant parts of my life in poorer urban communities and in poor rural communities. The commonalities are absolutely striking. Why can't we develop policies that emphasize common challenges and problems, rather that pit one group against another?
Sometimes I think it's just a feel-good for guilt-ridden well-to-do urban liberals (which, alas, includes me), most of whom don't actually want diversity, they just want people who look different but think the same.
C
5
David -=- Nonsense. To take one paragraph:
"To say that white educated Democrats have moved left is true, but it’s not the essential truth." The truth is that D's have moved right, but not as far or as fast as the R's have moved right.
"The bigger truth is that this segment is now more likely to see politics through a racial lens." We are likely to see fellow citizens being oppressed economically, socially and even legally, and that addressing these oppressions will lead to a more perfect union, justice, domestic tranquillity, and all that.
"Racial equity has become the prism through which many in this group see a range of other issues." Huh?
One more thing; the issues you cite were all (or almost all) Republican issues designed to demonize the D's.. They are not official or usual Democrat beliefs.
9
Thank you for your article, and particular one of your last thoughts: "it’s a good idea to assume that people adopt their positions for honest, well-intentioned reasons." I am a (reluctant) Trump supporter (and a moderate on social issues), and in my own mind I support most of his positions not because of some "ism" but because of variety of logical, thought-out reasons. And I can tell you one thing: while a similar logical, thought-out argument from the left might change my mind on an issue, being screamed at, called vile names, and being labeled every -ism and -ist in the book will NOT - it will actually harden my position. After all, if you are going to assume the worst about me, why should I bother listen to you characterize me of being a horrible person?
6
It may appear to be "racial lens" to you, Mr. Brooks. It has always been "class lens". The right has used race to to cloud the class lens. Lower income and less educated whites are manipulated towards anti-black and anti-immigrant views.
Divide and conquer.
9
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When Reagan raised the military budget and put intermediate nuclear missiles in Europe, the nuclear freeze movement was born. When Trump called immigrants rapists and vowed to build a wall, liberals began advocating more for illegal immigrants.
I wish more people of all political stripes would think carefully about how their own views are formed, and act more from their own sense of morality rather than an unconscious desire to conform to the ideals of a group. The desire to fit in is a strong one, especially in these days of social media when a contrary view is immediately ostracized.
2
Could it be that we’ve developed a conscious? A soul perhaps?
Or how about this:
We’ve seen the devolution of the party of Lincoln to the party of Limbaugh, the puppet master. And the phrase of the 50,60,70s, “ Better dead then red”, now has a different meaning.
2
David Brooks asks "why" because he is blind. Republicans/Conservatives such as Brooks are still living in the fifties. Their code of values and social/political outlook has not kept up with the time. Their mantra remains less government and lower taxes which are their beacons in dealing with a world that has moved beyond that. I cannot explain it in a few words in a column like this. All I can say is David, you just don't get it.
4
By taking over many long held Democratic Party positions like absolute protection of Medicare and Social Security, controlled immigration to protect American jobs, restrictions on globalization impact on US jobs, resistance to programs like NAFTA, focus on blue collar jobs and support for blue collar concerns like the drug catastrophe, even corporate tax reform to make American companies more competitive, he basically forced Democrats to the left. They were racing away from him, and there was nit much choice where to go.
Trump has always been a Democrat with an extreme racist streak. He took on the pro life banner for political rather than philosophical reasons, forced there to legitimize him as a Republican. Anything to get elected
He knows that if he can drive democrats further left his victory is assured. Brilliant. Clearly working
2
Progressives did not move left. The conservatives moved quite far to the right, though, even in comparison to Europe’s current wave of rightwing activism.
10
I don't think so many of us old-time democrats have moved left. I think the political landscape beneath our feet has moved radically right.
17
I'm more interested in why white Republicans have moved so far to the right.
248
@Joseph Morgan They haven't.
But patriotism, the Judeo-Christian ethic, and an appreciation of capitalism are so rare among the millennials of today that it seems they moved when, in fact, they are exactly where most Democrats were two generations ago.
This is like that scene in one movie per decade where the commanding officer asks for volunteers and everyone BUT the hero takes a step back.
2
@Joseph Morgan -- I would guess that they were already there, and that Trump's rhetoric, with the supporting cast of elected Republicans and those in his Cabinet, who have chosen to champion Trump's policies in their "America-last" quest for power and control, have been given tacit permission to let their "inner extremist" out.
Hatred, racism, sexism, homophobia are as deeply felt by these people as any fervent religious belief. Many in this group do have college degrees, but they've "worked around" critical thinking on these issues and stuck with their ingrained beliefs.
The elected Republicans are who astonish me. It's given that they can spin a molehill into a mountain, PR-wise, and that their agenda has always been far narrower than that of the Dems, because the Dems strive to include everyone. The Republicans prefer wealthy donors, wealth in general, guarding their revenue at the expense of those in need.
But they used to engage in bi-partisan negotiations, discuss bills, not sit on them à la Mitch McConnell. They did not have no much animus against women, people of color, the poor and working classes, Social Security, Medicare and the environment.
Under Trump, perhaps their inner extremists have come out, too. The Senate does not do its job, letting Trump do everything Constitutionally allotted to them. They focus on re-election, and satisfying a gullible base, driven by hatreds, not reason. They have completely abrogated their oaths of office.
11
@Joseph Morgan They haven't.
But patriotism, the Judeo-Christian ethic, and an appreciation of capitalism are so rare among the millennials of today that it seems they moved when, in fact, they are exactly where most Democrats were two generations ago.
This is like that scene in one movie per decade where the commanding officer asks for volunteers and everyone BUT the hero takes a step back.
1
The real reason that Right Wingers think the Dems have “moved” left is that The average republican is now so far to the fringe ultra right wing that they cannot even see the center anymore. From that perspective EVERYONE is “left.” Apparently Brooks has fallen into this group as well. In actuality the Dems are the most representative party of the normal people in the center who are flabbergasted that the Republicans have, for the last forty years, gone on an ultra right wing tear that has left the country astounded at the naked corruption, racism and cruelty of the Republican party. No normal person would support any republican.
15
Why is "liberal" a pejorative for some when all we want is equality for all?
13
@Julie
Everyone supports equal opportunity for all. "Liberal" became a pejorative when y'all started blaming all instances of inequality of outcome on racism.
2
@Julie
The Terror, the Gulag, the Cambodian Killing fields, the Cultural Revolution. That is all the Jacobins, the Soviets, the Khemer Rouge, and the Maoists wanted. Judged by results, the wish for equality is the root of evil.
Not all of us are on the left.
I oppose racial discrimination. I also oppose “racial equity,” ie We want our share. Success and prosperity are achieved by individuals, not by groups.
The United States has the right to decide who enters it and who may become citizens. Its citizens have the right to maintain some sort of cultural integrity, and, in that regard, even to be ethnocentric. It is not inevitable that the United States resemble a third world country, and there are no Constitutional rights that accrue to those who would immigrate to the United States. Muslims can be barred from entry—no more Omar’s—as can unskilled peasants from Central America or from Africa. For that matter, so can anyone else.
The left’s pseudo-utopian ideas have been far more disturbing than any utterances or actions by President Trump.
13
@J.Jones
"The left’s pseudo-utopian ideas have been far more disturbing than any utterances or actions by President Trump."
To me, this is pretty much the definition of disturbing.
1
In watching the PBS news hour, i heard David Brooks say that having Trump as President was almost as ridiculous as having someone like Ann Coulter be a commentator on PBS news.
Well, i stopped giving to PBS for those very reasons. Much as I love many of their shows, they have turned their news broadcasts into a bull horn for the left - pretty much shutting out the views of the middle and the right for certain.
That smug attitude of which Brooks and Shields for that matter are perfect examples is the trouble with our ever so entitled super generous lefty elite.
But here is the thing , if you are really down and out and need a friend i'd take a Christina or Jewish conservative anytime over the professed noble overlords.
11
Oddly enough, there are white people who are throughly disgusted by what the GOP and the Right have shown themselves to be.
Repelled by what they are seeing from the right, like the operation of a magnetic field, they are thrown in the opposite direction, the Left.
3
Progressives have developed the art of manipulation to move people onto their side. No caring, educated, intelligent person wants to bear the stigma of being labelled a racist, or misogynist, etc. So they are vulnerable to implications that would cast them as racist should they question, or G-d forbid, disagree with a canon from the sjw's.
6
This column is so offensive on so many levels.
David Brooks hates being alive in 2019 because white people are getting wise to how poorly minorities and women have been treated since the founding of the Republic, and that's apparently a bad thing?
But yes, the problem is clearly 'wokeness.' Spot on Mr. Brooks, you've done it again!
6
So educated white Democrats have moved left since 1994, and become more cognizant of racism in our society and our politics.
Gee, I wonder what has happened in the past 25 years to induce that shift?
7
In describing his decision to become a Republican, Ronald Reagan said of the Democrats "I did not move away from the party. The party moved away from me."
Many of us today feel very much that way about how the Republican party has been trending. As they have shifted from a party with an established intelligentsia to a Fox-baited, fact-denying cadre, it is hard to see how that means many of us have 'moved left'. Perhaps we have given fresh looks at old ideas with new brands: isn't Socialistized Medicine just a pejorative way of saying Medicare for All?
Those of us who have moved away from the Trump-McConnell-Fox axis have not moved nearly as far left as they have swung right.
8
I'm a white Democrat.
If I've moved left, it's because Republicans have moved so far to the right.
I want a stable Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. Republicans threaten these things.
I want a gimlet eye on Vlad. Republicans get in bed with Vlad.
I want the EPA to do its job. Republicans want it dismantled.
I want decency at our borders. Republicans want a gulag.
I want a strong and independent Federal Reserve. Republicans want to destroy it and re-introduce the gold standard.
And I want the tax rates of the 1950s. Republicans want to bankrupt America.
If this makes me some sort of far-left voter, so be it.
20
The best can be the enemy of the good, but sometimes settling for the good becomes a sell out.
I'm a child of the Great Depression who came of age in segregated North Florida, a good place for a white kid like me. For a black one, not so much. The only black my age I got to talk with was a guy I worked with side by side shucking feed corn in gondola cars headed north on the GS&F. He was headed to a historically black college. Hope things went well but he was of an age to be killed in Korea.
Two years before, in the early fall I saw my (ugh!) Congressman, dressed entirely in white, except for an alcohol reddened nose, unsuccessfully defend his seat in the town square by promising to protect the honor of Southern womanhood, an ancient racist trope, of a vintage with "Go back to Africa." He railed against Truman's desegregation of the military, the first big step towards Brown v. Board of Education.
I think race must be addressed. The President, who has managed to convert Latinos into a race in Trump world, reminds me, in his showmanship, of my old Congressional District's Barnum of Bigotry. Except Trump's better at it and has just about succeeded inmaking the party of Lincoln into a modern version of the Southern Democrats.
Gerrymandering, as its proponents admit, diminishes the weight of black and Latino votes in national and state elections.
7
“For me, it’s a good idea to assume that people adopt their positions for honest, well-intentioned reasons.”
The truth is that people adopt their positions for self-serving ego-enhancing reasons. Facing the truth is always a good idea.
That is as true for the “woke” anti-racist as it is for the white supremacist. Both are ideologies rooted in everything except the external facts of existence, but rather in internal needs for ideological defense of ego, self-esteem, identity, power, and group acceptance as well as other motivations.
A fundamental fact of existence is that, except for the common ultimate fate of return to the void, there is no equality in nature. The entire concept is purely an artificial intellectual abstraction.
3
I was the child of US Air Force parents (Dad in the AF, mom making it possible for him to do that). We were in the lower middle class by birth. My Dad was raised in Oklahoma. His mother was violently racist, especially against Native Americans. For some reason, my Dad saw the humanity in the Native Americans in his area. He saw it in blacks and women. My mom was raised by the child of slave owners. She grew to see the humanity in the blacks we lived with in Air Force housing. I briefly had a black boyfriend in grade school. Then we moved. Proximity as equals in that situation was helpful to me with respect to racism. I went to University in the heyday of affordable higher education in the early 70s and was exposed to classes on racism and sexism. Those helped me see myself as a person among equals, but my society did not see things that way. I have been fighting that battle since my 20s. I am now 63. We aren't doing well progressing to seeing the humanity in all persons. Nevertheless, I will persist.
11
I used to read Brooks often, but since the election of our current president, I find it painful how many articles he writes trying to urge the Democratic party into being the party he would like, significantly right of center. I'm sorry you've lost your partisan home, David, but don't ask us to mold ourselves to your image.
I think you're right that many Democrats have moved somewhat left, though very much in line with the underlying values that have been part of the party conversation for decades. This is in response to the fact that Republicans have very successfully moved the center point for "moderation" further right. My instinct is moderation, but in the face of a climate crisis, a massive and growing gap between the haves and have-nots, and dawning understanding of the depth of systemic inequality (based on skin color, culture, gender, or economic status), my moral compass tells me I have to fight for a better world for my children. David Brooks, I wonder if your own moral compass is having a hard time finding it's true north?
7
The first 4 out of 6 U.S. presidents owned Black people. Owned Black people.
Hundreds of them. Both Washington and Jefferson did. So necessarily, the lens of race is always an American one and vice-versa. We don't get to choose when, where and how it is most appropriate to discuss race because it's in the strands that make up our DNA--culturally, politically, socially, economically and spiritually.
Those who are educated know better. We all need to get learned. Racism won't go away just because we choose to pretend it's not as important as it really is.
5
I live in a very liberal, mostly white, high educated community. The obsession with racial equality leads many to advocate for positions (marijuana legalization, increased immigration, opposition to school choice) that many minorities don't agree will benefit them. The condescension that we upscale whites know better is bizarre.
14
It seems that Mr. Brooks thinks only "highly educated white progressives" have recognized that America is a land of "systematic racism." Since he is a "highly educated white conservative," he appears to be implying that, in fact, systematic racism in America is not a reality. If this is the case, I wonder about his powers of observation or, more concerning, his willingness to recognize and admit the key role that white conservatives have played in creating and maintaining this systematic racism.
4
I think Mr. Brooks misses the point. If I can step into the shoes of a 'woke' progressive, for just a moment, wherever I stand on the reasons WHY privileged white liberals have suddenly taken it upon themselves to start saber rattling on the behalf of non-whites (or in my case, mixed race), the WHY is immaterial to doctrinaire progressives.
Running down a litany of debunked progressive grievances, from sentencing reform, incarceration rates, proportional representation of race representation at firms and universities, and the US's supposedly racist immigration policies--to name just a few having to do with race--racial disproportions (like white progressive blocs leading the agenda of the Democratic Party), however natural (as we learn in statistics classes) are mala in se, that is, evil in and of themselves, and the reasons for perceived imbalances do not enter into the picture.
If I have to hear over and over again that among the leadership/membership of the Republican Party, the Republican caucuses in both houses of Congress, and the federal judiciary--among many other institutions cited by the left as requiring serious racial rejiggering--that white men are the problem, Democrats need to own that their party, supposedly a haven for nonwhites is led around by pasty white shotcallers.
2
In David's analysis there is a statement "This is, after all, the nation that elected Donald Trump". This is true in the legal sense but not in the popular sense. Further the quantitative effect of Russian meddling is unknown. People also did not know exactly what TRUMP would do. They wanted to gamble and see what would happen like the Britt's are doing now. That the Democrats regained the house says that many a gambling guy was bitten by the horrible things that happened and this includes the new reinstatement of the death penalty. These are the very guys who thought abortion after two weeks was sin.
2
David makes a simplistic arguement that promotes intolerance. In my lifetime we’ve brought women into the workplace and recognized gay rights among other positive changes. However, we used to have a peace movement and an environmental movement. Cultural evolution is obviously complex and not always forward as we are currently experiencing.
3
I was born to white, rural, working class parents with high school educations. I went to college, got an advanced degree and am now upper middle class. I believe in helping others have the same opportunities I had. I don't fear that other people will take away what I have achieved.
In addition, the Republican party has also moved to the far right. Given a choice between a backward-looking, fearful, mean-spirited far right and an inclusive far left that is sometimes too "woke," I'll go with the left.
3
I dont think that the Democrats have moved left. To me, it appears that the center has moved dramatically to the right.
11
I haven’t moved left at all. After all the middle-of-the-road shenanigans of DC, the same energy that embraced and elected Trump on the right, combined with the heartbreaking failure of the flawed candidate Hillary Clinton, I’ve embraced the idea that drastic change is necessary if democracy —my idea of democracy— is to survive, and flourish, that we need to step to the left of “what’s probably best” and go for it. I’ve embraced...political power. That’s not moving left. It’s seizing the moment.
8
@Pietro Allar
Sorry. But now just like in 2016, the only "flawed" candidate I saw is the one currently sitting in the White House.
4
@Pietro Allar Stop with this "flawed" business. Hillary Clinton was only flawed in the sense that all candidates, indeed all of us humans, are flawed. So please put it to rest.
1
The term liberal itself has changed.
A large percentage of this demographic was always left-leaning. They just did not call themselves liberal. A lot of what we call "progressive left" policies and ideology are actually highly illiberal.
I consider myself liberal, and there is nothing liberal about half of the candidates in the Democratic primary now - it really is an argument between liberals and non-liberal lefties.
4
Is Wanting America to live up to the standards detailed in the Constitution is a Leftie push? Is Equal RIghts for All Citizens such a progressive radical stance? No. It is thinking that when all people feel they are being fairly treated, it Is a more perfect union.
4
Mr. Brooks,
I'm glad to see you recognize that so many highly educated whites are now progressives. I'm white and and a solid lefty since my days at UC Berkely in the late 60's, and it's great to see so many higly educated younger white people declaring solidarity with immigrants and minority people. Call it woke or call it having a social conscience. However, most minority people are powerfully progressive with their own histories helping form those opinions. Trying to keep minority members of the House from "stirring things up" seems to now be a major goal of Nancy Pelosi and the DNC.
2
I'm a white, highly-educated coastal progressive who has moved quite left on this issue, as Brooks illuminates. The main motivator for this shift started from my lifelong belief that America was not fundamentally racist; that we'd moved beyond our shameful history of slavery. The election (and then re-election) of Obama as President supported my fundamental belief in our national enlightenment around race. However, my nation view changed abruptly with the blatant, flagrant racism that emerged front and center during the 2016 election cycle, and which has further crystalized over the months and years of Trumpism and the daily assaults on ideals I'd believed most Americans' held dear. This country no longer feels like "my" country of merit and ideals, of principals and values. Maybe it never was that country, but I'm not willing to accept that this is our new American ideal.
7
Race clearly plays a part, though I would submit this “shift” is a direct reaction to the Trumpified GOP. For me, the shift to the left was driven by decades of Reaganomics, and the resulting decimation of the middle class. Suspect I’m not alone - it certainly appears that support for Elizabeth Warren correlates well to the highly educated.
4
Coming from a small town, my family was Republican. My parents called black people with N words. Jews were disparaged. I was the only one in my college English class supporting Nixon and the Vietnam war. I was a Reagan/Adam Smith true believer. Then slowly, things changed. I found a Jewish best friend, visited his home. I worked at a factory, and had a black supervisor. I worked at a hotel and met an African-America older man and his family. I worked restaurants with Hispanics and Asians. I worked in a recording studio and met musicians from all over the world. I worked with persons with mental illness. I worked with plumbers, electricians, and day laborers. I went to graduate school and met Muslims and Indians all working hard. And along the way, I became a Democrat. But those who stayed in my small town, or did not have my experience, remain Republican. I understand them. Many of us who moved away and became Democrats have similar stories, but we cannot forget those who chose to stay home.
222
@Karen Exactly why so many white Americans do not understand white Southerners. We were raised with African Americans and went to integrated schools.
2
@Karen
Similar to my experience, I grew up in a small town in Indiana--very Republican. My education took me to IU, Europe, NYC and Portland, among other places. I have found that most racist whites don't know any people of color, most anti-Semites don't know any Jews, most homophobes don't know any LGBT people, and so on. People would benefit by moving out of their bubble (left or right-leaning) and recognizing a different world, but to suggest as much is taken as a negative criticism of their village, and too few care to see another side.
5
@Karen
I am an 83-yr-old-Indian American, a liberal Democrat who admired George McGovern & Bill Clinton.
The majority of white middle class, church-going, reasonably conscientious white folks I have come across during the past 48 yrs have been Republicans. Perhaps, you are one such person. And your still Republican associates also may well be sufficiently decent at least, similar to you.
I am reminded of a posting online about a 30-something white man who after participating at a Trump-victory rally sporting a MAGA hat, in Jan 2017 was impressed by the friendly treatment he received from a young black waitress and gave her $450 tip after eating at the diner she worked. He wrote a note on the bill also, paraphrasing "if we can get along like you & I, the world will be a much better place."
2
Besides the great points that others have mentioned, I think that - thanks to ubiquity of cell phone videos - we have seen person after person after person of color treated worse than street dogs in this country. A black teenager is gunned down while going to the store to buy skittles. An unarmed black man is shot a dozen times in the back by a policeman as if it were target practice. Another black man pleads for his life - "I can't breathe!" - before his life is snuffed out. A white person calls the police on a black man "entering his own apartment while black".
How many of these incidents does it take before a white person says, "Hmmm, maybe my country doesn't treat all people equally?"
7
I'm white and kinda, sorta highly educated. I don't feel like I've shifted but I'm certainly more aware of racial issues since Trump has emboldened truly racist people to come out of hiding. I'm more aware of racial issues because I'm more aware how many racists there are in my neighborhood, my state, our country. I thought we were farther along than this.
6
The anti-intellectualism that is happening in the United States is very dangerous.
Spoiled students without any notion of life, with no respect for the past, for the history nor the truth, are the ones judging historical events from their simplistic point of views? Give me a break.
3
The racial lens is never the right one to use. It just divides people against each other, and foments more hate and racism.
This is what makes Trump's tawdry and hateful strategy so brilliant: with his racist tweets, he's pushing well-intentioned but not-very-thoughtful people to react with more racism to oppose the first, which causes a counter-reaction etc. and just makes more hate, which is what will re-elect Trump.
How do we get out of this mess? Stop categorizing people by skin color, as individuals or as groups. (Unless you sell cosmetics; in that case, skin color is significant.) The only reason to do such a thing is to serve racist interests (which do exist, and not just in the Republican Party).
Dividing people into nonsensical categories like "white" or "black" just divides them up for no good reason. We can talk about ancestry, e.g., European-American or African-American, and that is measurable, even though it's a mouthful.
6
Three students at the University of Mississippi were suspended by their fraternity on Wednesday after an Instagram photo surfaced of them brandishing guns in front of a bullet-riddled memorial sign for Emmett Till, whose brutal murder in 1955 served as a catalyst for the civil rights movement.
And you ask, sir, why race is still an issue for thoughtful Americans?
Astounding.
4
And proud of it.
Mr. Brooks leaves out a third reason, ignorance or ideology ahead of intellect. In the case of Israel, to see it as a white bastion is mathematically in error: the plurality of Israelis today are not of European origin. Rather, they are the nearly one milliion refugees who had been living in Arab and Islamic countries from North Africa to Iran, in communities dating back as much as 2,500 years, who were stripped of their citizenship, money, and property and tossed out -between 1948 and 1967- and their children and grandchildren. As for this country, we have a very long history of xenophopia when it comes to immigrants of any color. As former NYT public editor Daniel Okrent points out in his new book ("The Guarded Gate"), the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 was written specifically to exclude Italians, Jews, Greeks, and many other Southern and Eastern Europeans from immigrating to the USA.
4
I can not say about whole region, but there is about 8K Jews in Iran. they are officially considered to be minority, and have representation in Iranian Parliament. They have their own newspaper and even Jewish hospital. True, in 2000 there were 60-85K Jews, and most immigrated in Israel, but it was due to economic conditions rather than persecution.
Or maybe the US center really moved right?
6
I’m usually a fan, Mr. Brooks, but this article reads like one of those Glenn Beck, everything-is connected rants. A few disputes. Maybe progressives speak out against Israel because of the scorched earth tactics against the Palestinians to drive them into the desert and illegally annex their land that has accelerated since the late 90’s and is not race related. Maybe those social scientists took advantage of new data analytics and saw the least access to opportunity for African Americans in the US map today still strangely resembles the map where the most slaves were held in 1861 and most social problems still cleve along racial lines including redlining, education and pollution exposure. Maybe they were the same people who scratched their heads when republicans, “like goldfish in a bowl, congratulating themselves on their perceived self sufficiency” held their 2012 convention with the i-built-that! theme, which took deep offense at the Obama espoused notion that we are all connected, and individual prosperity is not attained in a vacuum. Maybe they realize the need to make the case before inspiring to act, albeit one that I hope in the future is made with fewer knee-jerk accusations of racism, but this clumsiness still does not absolve the underlying prevalence of white privelidge.
4
Climate change. Identified as a risk 123 years ago Arrhenius. LBJ was told it was a danger in 1965. Since then, 54 years of fiddling. Now moderates promise more of the same, a regime where “nothing would fundamentally change”. Eppur si muove.
2
Identity politics is neoliberalism's answer to racism.
It's a rich person's politics.
5
I don't think I've moved Left at all. In fact, I may have moved a bit Right. Not because I like those ideas but reality tells me some things just can't be accomplished right now. And by being too Left people who might typically go along are being shut out.
In my ideal world everyone would be equal. We'd all have healthcare. We'd protect the planet. We'd be free from religion if we wanted to be and all wealth would be equally distributed and would not matter because we all would have enough.
Meanwhile back in the real world, the democratic candidates better start telling the people in the middle of the country what they are going to do for them or Trump is going to win again. Yes we should support minority equality, but there are an awful lot of white people who just won't show up if we keep ignoring them. Every minority in the country can vote and it won't be enough to win...
Let's keep our eye on the prize which is getting rid of Trump. After than we can start choosing the drapes and carpet.
89
Why in the world would a white voter show up for a Democratic candidate when the party has labeled them all racist by default. Why?
13
@JAC
Because he cares about racism and the future of his country and the world, for instance?
13
@JAC
I'm a white Democrat and no one has "labeled me a racist. ". Systemic racism is not a personal beef with individuals.
I saw for myself that racism is still pervasive and malignant, and recognize that I was born into a system where people with my skin color have an automatic advantage over darker people in every area of life, and don't even realize it.
That doesn't make me racist. It obligates me to try fixing the systemic inequities around me.
13
In some aspect you have to credit Trump when it is due. In last 4 years America's GDP has increased by 4 trillion dollars while last 5 years of Obama it increased by 2 trillion dollars. Wealth generation is an important aspect of a state. If you cannot generate wealth, while too much left orientation would loose all has been preserved or generated and you end up with dollops only.
1
Hmmm...yet trump has been “president” for only two years, so he only gets to claim half of that increase. And actually the first year is really just a continuation of Obama’s economy, so really trump only gets credit for one year of that. So, not much credit given to trump!
1
@Dr Partha Pratim Sengupta
generated wealth that mostly goes to the top one percent makes a weaker society/country.
It is not a matter of growing the pie larger. Resources are finite and the planet is small, and, perhaps, fragile.
IF you care about a better country, a more thriving society, and following that, a more thriving economy...
the existing pie needs to be used differently,
investing in parental leave, free/affordable quality child care, free quality early childhood education, quality k-12 education for all, tuition free public continuing education...
Oh, better use some resources for seriously addressing climate change, or all your wealth may not matter much.
Its not about wealth, it is about the country and its people
1
And deficits don't matter :-)
1
When I was in college in the 1960's, their was an organization on campus, The Young American's for Freedom, that was very active. As near as I could tell, they practiced scorched earth politics-morality was a game for fools. Anything was acceptable as long as you won and did not compromise. At the time, these views were on the fringe of the Republican Party. By the 1990's Newt Gingrich who had been active in YAF, was a partisan and polarizing Speaker of the House.
Thanks to Mr. Gingrich, the Republican Party has adapted the YAF philosophy. In 2016, Mitch McConnel refused to follow over 200 years of tradition in the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland. Currently Senator McConnel is doing his best to prevent an honest election in 2020 and so far he has been quite successful.
Over the last 50 years, parts of the Democratic Party have moved to the left. But the Republican Party of today cares only for money, victory and the wishes of the 1%.
4
You are incorrect regarding Judge Garland, who was a pawn and President Obama knew it. A lame duck president’s last year Supreme Court nomination has not been considered in over 130 years.
As for YAF, I regret never having joined it, and that it is not around today.
1
An increase to 58% in 2016? Well, I'd say Trump accounts for that more than any other factor. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I didn't know how much of an issue racial equity still was in our country until Trump enabled it to come fully back into the light. I count myself among this group of progressives newly awakened to the issue (and it's brutal insidious history right up to the present) and see it as critical to us evolving as a civilized nation.
2
I lived in Marin County for 20 years. I loved it because it was beautiful, had great schools, very little crime and very low density. It also had almost no diversity which was caused by very limited housing choices. This made it unaffordable to most working-class people. Marin is one of the most progressive counties in the country. Senator Barbara Boxer hails from there. However, this progressive bastion votes down almost every bill that would increase any housing, especially multilevel housing in order to keep the area pristine. Educated liberals may be moving left in the pols your citing, but they sure don't vote for things that would affect them directly. At least that is my experience.
13
@Robert
I know what you mean...
So how to keep pristine and have multi story housing?
and the additional traffic that comes with more housing.
@Lucy Cooke. That’s why I moved down to Monterey peninsula
I also just read reports of the students showing up at the Emmett Till memorial with guns and how others shoot at the memorial from time to time. Tell me again why you think Democrats are moving to the left?
7
@Disillusioned
Agree. And is it any surprise why so many Americans want Donald Trump out of the White House??
After all, people in that report are "his people".
3
Why have people moved left?
Maybe it's because the right has produced nothing resembling sensible policy for dealing with anything for thirty or forty years.
What has it produced?
Tax cuts for the wealthiest, and threats to cut SS and Medicare because of the fiscal problems those cuts create.
Environmental policies based on ignorance and climate change denialism, and designed to benefit fossil fuel companies and other polluters at the expense of everyone else.
Determined, racist, attacks on voting rights, running all the way from the Supreme Court to the state legislatures.
Immigration policies that exhibit wanton cruelty, and are steeped in anti-Hispanic bigotry.
A catastrophic and baseless war in Iraq, justified by neo-conservative lies.
A refusal to accept a wholly sensible reform of our health insurance system.
The election of Trump.
Any sensible person seeing that on the right will surely run to the left.
And let me suggest, Mr. Brooks, that you are from blameless in the above. When you puzzle over why people like me have moved leftward you might ask yourself whether the groups and publications you have been associated with are a big part of the answer.
9
Educated whites vote democratic while uneducated whites vote GOP. People with education are thought to think and usually vote for a better future as opposed to uneducated ones, especially uneducated whites who vote for a fictitious past.
Educated people know that the top 10 global economies of the world all are socialist , except America and yet their citizens are happier than us. They also realize that the half a century GOP con job of trickle-down economics, tax cuts, deficit expanding, corporate welfare, environment pilliging while spending almost trillion dollars a year in the military made us poorer and less safe. They realize that the system is rigged and probably vote for Elizabeth Warren or Bernie.
Uneducated whites see their future is mortgaged mostly yet continue to vote against their own economic benefits and vote GOP. To maintain their voters, the GOP nominate hucksters, carnival barkers, facisists, bigots who blame others for their voters economic demise. For people who are mentally challenged it is far easier to blame others for their demise instead of looking inward. The GOP also created a multi-billion misinformation industry in Murdoch's faux or many other right-wing hucksters to keep their deplorable voters inline. This is why the still love their facist fraud president, despite his treason, fraud and other crimes.
The political movement of educated people to the left is a backlash to the decades old conjob the GOP has committed on America.
4
@beachboy If you really think the UK, France, Germany, Norway and Sweden are socialist: I.e. having the state ownership of the means of production, you are a living refutation of your own words about educated people voting Democrat.
As is normal, David Brooks' lens isn't working. Democrats have NOT moved to the left since the 1990's. The middle or better, the perception of where the middle lies, has shifted.
So many examples of issues that have seen Democrats' position hold to a fundamental solid truth while its perception has mashed up in the Republican lies. Democrats do not want open borders. They think the border services have done a bad job managing the influx of asylum seekers.
Democrats do not see more issues through a racial lens; Republicans have made more issues racial -- witness the President.
And a ban on Muslim immigrants IS racist. Only a twit could miss the thoroughly racist intent on wanting Norwegian immigrants over ithole countries (read: countries whose residents have non-white skin).
3
It is always amusing to read the ideas of a life long conservative like Mr. Brooks as he attempts to understand the mind of liberals whom he has never understood in the past. He again embarrasses himself with another of his unfortunate but polite screeds. He should just stop. Please stop.
As part of the New York Times opinion chorus he has no sympathy for any liberal cause and in fact he cannot even label the rough outlines of liberalism correctly. He talks about a shift in outlook that is appearing in the polls without taking into consideration the confusion in poll takers questions about liberal vs conservative leanings since 2016. To not put too fine a point on it, the pundits were horribly wrong in 2016 and they seem to have only gotten worse. Mr. Brooks bases this last column on the changes detected around the word "liberal" without defining what that word means today. He is not alone among the right in using the word liberal as a short hand epithet (like "socialism')indicating all that they think is wrong in the thinking of outsiders.
The truth is that the desire for economic justice and legal fairness for all is still the unchanging bedrock of liberalism, just as it always has been and those that believe in these issues are exactly where they have always been. Its the scale that conservatives use that is changing as they drift right in their loyal (if embarrassed) lockstep with Trump and the indefensible Republican party. Wake up Mr. Brooks.
4
Just days ago, a lifelong Republican former FBI Director lays out conclusions that the President was aided by Russia, and encouraged that aid, in the previous election and that these efforts to undermine our democracy are ongoing.
What happened? The Republican trashing of Director Mueller continued. Republican senators refuse to consider funding greater security for our voting machinery.
And somehow Mr. Brooks thinks that the new big idea worth writing about is that the Democratic party has moved sharply to the left? compared to what? The now openly fascistic, racist GOP?
6
What's considered right or left is a moving target. Since Reagan, the right wing has gone so far off the deep end that to say that you share some right-wing views is tantamount to admitting that you are sometimes irrational.
White liberals who are consistent in their opinions would be viewed as farther to the left than they once were--not because they have changed but because definitions have changed.
4
David Brooks lives in a bubble and his thoughts reflect that.
Senator Bernie Sanders, considered the most left among the candidates, has the highest favorables, polling three points higher than Biden. https://news.gallup.com/poll/260801/biden-sanders-best-images-among-democrats.aspx This 7/19/19 Gallop Poll has gotten very little coverage. In 4/17 Sanders was viewed favorably viewed favorably by 73 percent of black registered voters, with Hispanics at 68 percent favorable, Asian-Americans, at 62 percent favorable, and whites, at 52 percent favorable. From Vox, "An analysis of recent polls from November of 2018 to March 2019 shows Sanders is more popular with people of color than white people, and women like Sanders as much as men do, if not more. He leads every other possible 2020 contender with Latino voters and lags behind only Joe Biden... with African-American voters." https://www.vox.com/2019/3/7/18216899/bernie-sanders-bro-base-polling-2020-president.
The Democratic Left is more complex than Brooks can fathom.
3
@Lucy Cooke
If Sanders was as "popular" with African-Americans as you seem to think he is, he wouldn't have been voted out of South Carolina in 2016.
2
@N. Smith
That was then.
The Clinton machine owned South Carolina.
Remember, Bill was the "first black" president.
Older Blacks feel loyal and safe, only dancing with the one who brought them to the party, the old school Bill and Hillary and Joe Biden style Democrats. Younger blacks see that the party was never meant for them. They see the hugely higher incarceration rates, worse schools, income/wealth inequality chasm and no chance at the American dream.
Racism is a huge factor as to why so many of us have moved "left". Let us not forget the total lack of integrety and willingness to sell our government to the highest bidder. The R's have dropped all pretense and you should as well David. That you still see anything worth supporting in the current "conservative" movement tells me that you have not yet been willing to listen to your inner truth teller that guides your beliefs. I will always have a certain level of mistrust in your interpretations of anything either side does do to this.
Wake up and join the rest of us who want our government back and civil servants who understand their Oath so solemnly sworn when they enter office.
3
The most disheartening point in this article: "86 percent of progressive activists said that people’s life outcomes are outside their individual control." First, because it's a self fulfilling prophecy for those who believe it. Second, because it's as much fake news as anything that comes out of Trump's mouth.
2
Contra David Brooks, I think it’s usually a safe bet to assume that people take political positions based on their self-interest as they perceive it.
Why do white liberals focus on race? Because they can do so with minimal costs to their own economic self-interest.
Why do white liberals support increased immigration. and think about the issue in racial terms? Because unlike their poorer working class fellow citizens, they tend to benefit from cheap labor.
As a savvy woman recently said, “it’s all about the Benjamins.”
5
So border walls are now "structures of oppression"? ... Silly me, I thought they were structures of self-defense. Here's a crazy idea -- if you don't want to be oppressed by the evil people living inside walled compounds, you should run away from said compounds, not struggle desperately to get IN.
4
It is interesting that racial inequity has produced opposing reactions: the Republican center has shifted to the right in part, at least, out of fear of loss of white privilege thereby deepening the racial rift while the Democratic center has shifted to the left out of concern and anger about consequential issues such as climate change which requires the combined efforts of the human species as a whole, regardless of racial differences, to come together to deal with it.
It is not that white democrats have shifted to the left. It’s that the rest of our politics have shifted so far to the right. That makes today’s moderate left wingers seem like radicals, when they are in fact only espousing centrist views of the past.
5
Donald Trump came to power in part because Americans overestimated our political system's immunity to his brand of populism and demagoguery. Since his election, it's become increasingly clear that the vulnerability isn't confined to America's political right.
1
"Now, more than 50 percent of white progressives want to see higher immigration levels." Of course. Nice, handy lever of power. Careful, though - all the new arrivals might not vote the way you think.
7
"People are always changing their minds, day to day. But over the past 20-odd years one group has shifted to an astounding degree: highly educated white Democrats. I’m not sure I understand why this group has undergone such a transformation . . ."
I read an article this morning saying that 40% of Americans believe in creationism, that humans were created as we now are in the last 10,000 years.
David Brooks wonders why some educated white Democrats continue to (learn, evolve and) shift their views? My question is, why hasn't everyone?
5
This reads more like Brooks, or a source, chose to view the shift through a racial lens and then hammered the rest to fit. I'm 51, white, and while I don't have a degree, I move within that tribe (I've written for major publications, my wife works in academia, etc.) and experienced a shock of recognition in the data Brooks put forward. I sometimes voted for Republicans in the 1990s, but not since the new millennium. The reasons had nothing to do with race. I felt our Enlightenment values were betrayed by a party that denies science, seeds and then feeds on intolerance, rigs elections as never before (redistricting, a partisan Supreme Court decision in Bush v Gore, etc.) tailors campaigns to the Electoral College as a principle strategy, lies to enter wars, and conducts foreign policy based on transient narrow (often corrupt) interests and not American values (making us unreliable to our natural allies).
Race comes into it only because the rhetoric and platforms of the Republican Party in recent years has been racially tinged and sometimes outright racist. So yes, now I must devote some more brain space to opposing that.
If you persist in believing that race and race consciousness or race guilt (the language of the Brooks piece provides fodder for those who'd term me a "race traitor"), the burden is not on liberals who ought to ease up on "woke" signalling. It's on Republicans to stand against racism in their ranks.
6
Actually I think the white Democrats are just moving back to where they once were a force for good as opposed to the "Republican Lite" they became after Reagan. Remember FDR, Hubert Humphrey's civil rights challenge at the 1948 convention, Truman's efforts for National Healthcare, RFK , LBJ's Great Society, George McGovern, etc. All of this was for both economic pocketbook issues AND racial equality. Unfortunately LBJ threw a bomb with Vietnam (God knows what he was thinking) and the Riots after RFK's & MLK's murders produced a severe white backlash. The party lost its soul. Republicans have sold the lie that Universal Healthcare will raise costs but the party is slowly moving back to where it belongs. It is battling the SCOTUS ruling that bribery is free speech so long as there is not a written contract of tit for tat and I am somewhat hopeful & pulling for the squad's efforts. Hopefully the white working class will discover that Trump & McConnell have no interest in their problems except as the easiest group to scam.
4
I do not want to be the bearer of conflicting news, but I am a white liberal - always have been, and am not for open borders and never have been.
I see the planet filling up - and I am protective of open space, clear skies, and less people. Why are we not talking about over-population?
7
@Jackie: yes, I remember in college we read a book called The Population Bomb or some such title about the over population of our planet and what it could do to our limited resources. Yrs, population control such as birth control is such an answer to this quandry but we need to get the poor nations educated. In their own poor and backward nations, this isn't working. Somehow we need to help these people by either going there to help them or letting them into our borders to work and become better educated. It's a win win situation if handled properly. Out population on the United States I'd declining with couples having 2 children or less or never marrying. Which also translates into less Social Security to support my the older generation.
"For me, it’s a good idea to assume that people adopt their positions for honest, well-intentioned reasons. The crucial question then becomes: When is the racial lens (with its implied charge of racism against those who disagree) the right lens to use and when is it not? When does it illuminate an issue and when does it conceal?"
Motivation doesn't matter here!
What matters is that some people are kind and progressive and eager to address the inequities of ill fortune and intolerance.
Such humanistic flourishing is what seperates us from the red claw jungle of trumpism and it's predecesors throughout human history.
David,
Is it "leftist" to believe that a multi racial society that treats non whites, women and gays as absolutely equal human beings is consistent with the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment? If so, then God bless the leftists.
Respectfully, I think you know what drives white Democrats to increasingly embrace full equality under the law. It is a matter of conscience.
5
One of the basic answers to David Brooks questions was given right here in the times months ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunday/republican-platform-far-right.html
To summarize that op-ed piece, based on a plethora of facts and statistics: it isn't that liberals, especially white educated ones, have moved so far to the left has moved so much as conservatives have moved so much farther to the right.
Educated whites are by definition - educated and, in todays world especially, more aware. They're paying more attention.
When you couple that with the decidedly rightward drift of the Republican party (especially by its fringe elements) the increasing disparity between the haves and have nots, two Republicans winning the presidency despite losing the popular vote, and the extraordinarily divisive race, national and class wedged politics of Trump (and his newly converted sycophants in the Republican party), is it really any wonder why more and more educated whites want to compensate for these reactionary politics?
Sure, there are some fringe liberals, but they're vastly outnumbered by so many conservatives that have moved so far to the right, I'm not sure they can even be called conservatives anymore.
The Republican party is at the apex of its power. In the ways that matter most, it's using and abusing that power for all the wrong reasons.
More and more, educated whites are turning away from it.
5
I don't think Trump can win in 2020 without significantly more help from the Russians than he received in 2016, which Brooks' party will no doubt welcome and encourage. Republicans can no longer depend solely on voter suppression, gerrymandering, their robber baron financiers, and fanning the flames of white hatred of "the other" to win elections.
4
@Cowboy Marine: BINGO
I suppose, David; if finding ways to protect Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, support access to reasonably affordable healthcare and prescriptions, getting an education without bankruptcy, wages high enough to avoid taxpayer subsidies for some of the aforementioned makes me “Far Left,” so be it. Clearly an artifact created by Nationalist Republicanism’s current agenda.
5
More US citizens (of all races and religions) are moving left because more of us travel outside the US and have family and friends in other countries. I personally see the impact of universal healthcare, universal higher education, easy voting (held on weekends), investments in infrastructure, including excellent public transportation and environmental protections, fair taxation, strict gun control, guaranteed paid family leave and vacation, protection of worker rights, including through strong unions, public-funded media that is better at holding govt accountable, etc. on the well-being of family and friends in other countries based on policies that our corporate media has told us is left wing. Americans who know how well others are living in countries where capitalism is properly regulated with a social safety net paid for through fair individual and corporate taxes, realize that what is called left in the US is just normal in other industrialized countries. Imagine the even greater potential of this country if we diverted funds going to military contractors and unnecessary tax cuts to corporations to investing in our people.
7
By today's political reality, left of center is really center right from bygone days. And what the Republicans jeer as extreme left, is really centrist with a slight left bias. AOC is really center left, with a strong moral compass. There are no extreme left wing players with a major voice. Bernie Sanders is left of center. Ralph Nader? He's really center left and mute. Nancy Pelosi is a center right corporatist. The Republicans are far right to fascist, with extinct moderates with a voice. And Donald Trump is in his own category: pure immoral corruption.
4
You say that white educated people have moved to the left and seem surprised that they do so in a system that favors them. I say that they have done so because they see the inherent flaws in the current system.
Also Democrats have not moved to the left as much as Republicans have moved to the right.
4
We do not need to change the Republican mindset. We need to re-work the spinelessness of the Democratic Party. Their cowardice relative to fighting back against GOP bullying is a flaw that must be put aside. Can they do it? Maybe. It seems unlikely. The GOP is patriarchal. The Democrats are matriarchal. Do you suppose these four rookie House members known as the “Group” would exist in the GOP? Nope.
1
I contend educated white people have shifted left because of reality. Climate change, worldwide ecological collapse, a dysfunctional healthcare system and police brutality toward blacks has forced the issues to become priorities for people who are cognizant of current events.
6
Imagine such a thing, a party where members actually vote in favor of the interests of people besides themselves.
Actually, Mr Brooks, that’s not a “paradox.” It’s called not being selfish.
7
Could it be that the right's increasing conservatism since Reagan has been a significant factor in the white educated left becoming more critical of its own race and appearing to move further left itself?
4
"In this take, if you’re a rich white child of privilege you have to go to extraordinary lengths to prove you’re one of the good children of privilege and not one of the bad ones. In this take, white progressives don noble clothing to make themselves feel good without really dismantling the structures that keep them in lifestyle bubbles, and on top."
Marx talks about the 'socialist bourgeoisie', who are members of the bourgeoisie but give lip service to socialism in order to maintain the existing class and power structures in society. They, however, still benefit from the exploitation of the working class.
1
George Washington believed that ownership of property is the most critical step in becoming free and equal. Equality is an ideal in progress. It cannot be mandated or forced by the government. It’s like government trying to change the weather. It had to be freely negotiable commodity like as a market force. A persons’ desirability, skills, worth, utility, quality, ability, personality and even individuality play a critical role. Then, his or her group’s collective identify and all other representations, tangible or not determines a person’s status among his or her peers. Although in the abstract, blanket-equality exists in the law-books─ yet, you cannot just claim it ─as if you’re entitled to the equal status, without being equal in “real life” in ability and value. It's like you cannot give something you don't have. Even esthetics plays a role. The best way to be equal is to go beyond equlity. And become even better than your fellow-peers.
3
If there is anything we can thank Trump for it’s for catapulting race in America to the top of the list. For the first time, Americans are forced to look in the mirror and ask “Is this who I really am?”
3
I love reading the comments. It makes me feel like I'm surrounded by thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate friends, and that (possibly) our planet isn't doomed.
8
I am in my 60s, left-of-center, and have always voted Democratic. But today's leftists go too far for me. It isn't that their goals aren't just; it's that they ignore the costs they will impose on others and the possibility of unintended consequences distorting their proposed large-scale social experiments. I favor moving in the direction of more highly subsidized college, increased government support for health insurance costs, increased low-cost housing, and increased clean energy and carbon recapature to combat climate change, as well as higher taxes on the rich. But I don't think we need to completely change our economy with costly, abrupt shocks. The best policies are phased in slowly, mindful of unintended consequences, monitoring for outcomes.
9
Mr. Brooks, this is all a red herring. I thought you had soured on Trump, but you're letting him steer the conversation to a favorite divisive topic, amplifying it, and finger-pointing at liberals for being out of touch. When will people like you stop treating liberals as the enemy and start looking at policy critically? Sure, there are those who would rather not think about criminal and economic justice for African Americans, global warming, Israeli settlements, and destabilized third-world countries. But among those of us who do, we can also have concerns about wage stagnation, income inequality, tax cuts, mass shootings, protecting our democracy, I could go on.
If you want to argue that some people are clueless about what it would really look like to abolish ICE and open the borders, that I could support. But that's not what you did. This article was about keeping the spotlight on race and alienating "liberals." You can do better.
4
Have white Democrats moved left? Fine, but I'd love to see and equal and fair analysis of white Democrats' and Republicans' move to the right - the defining and dominant trend in our political history since Nixon. Centrist Democrats have consistently ceded ground - sometimes tactically (to win elections), sometimes out of conviction. I think it is relevant to note here that the average Trump voter's income was higher than the national average and that 'he' (because most of them were he's) lived in zip codes where median income was lower than the national average.
1
Mr. Brooks describes a 25 year trend in political thinking by the white electorate. While the article points to some explanations that are surely true, the issue of the continuing decline of American public education is also a contributing factor. A “recent study” confirmed that less informed people tend to have greater confidence in their own intellectual skills and also have a greater tendency to “share” opinions.
To me, this "racial lens" is a simplification of some really broad structural problems in our society. Most of the well-educated people who subscribe to this viewpoint hopefully understand the dynamics at play.
Perhaps the left has finally taken a page out of the right's play book and this dynamic is the result of the realization that people are not generally animated by lofty and complex ideals or goals. Though this group has arguably taken this concept to a whole new level with the complete social and economic ostracization of those who visibly fail to subscribe.
2
Educated whites have moved left because the true nature and consequences of Republican policies, including economic policies, have become clearer and clearer as the years have worn on. It's that simple. I'm one of them, and I do NOT see everything through a prism of race.
5
If you are a modern day liberal you see everything through the prism of race.
It is not just that educated white liberals have for some unknown or magical reason been awakened to the racism inherent in American society. It has a lot to do with the fact that racism has, in many respects, become all the more prevalent, especially with Trump in the White House. You would have to be blind, deaf, & dumb not to be aware of how pernicious racism is in this country.
10
@me
"How has racism become more prevalent?"
If you were a person of color, you would already know the answer to that question.
But since you're not -- I suggest you read the news.
Maybe start with the story of the 3 Ole Miss students posing with guns in front of the sign where Emmett Till was murdered.
There are 2 things, that have pushed me he left.
The first is, a Study from Chicago shows, a corralation that the more racially homogines a sociaty is, the better the Social Safty Net. In other words, we are not going to get free collage or univrsal heathcare unill we stop being racist.
The second thing was how the Reps in Congress treated Obama. Swearing, that nothing lasting would come out of his presidency was racist and ignored the will of the voters.
4
So, I thought I'd give Brooks another shot after not reading his op-eds for over a year.
This is where I stopped reading today:
"White liberals have warmer attitudes toward other races than they do toward their own."
A sentence more appropriate for 'The Daily Stormer' than the pages of the NYT, imo.
7
@me
? and ? again.
My whiteness right or alt-right do you mean?
Or when facts persuade, race is blind?
Tell Mr. Brooks if the latter. On second thought, invite him to a desert mountaintop with O'Bannon and that crowd for a fun night of moon howling.
I feel like the left is obsessed with race in an unhealthy way. They have strayed far away from the "content of their character" that Martin Luther King, Jr., aspired to. Nothing matters to the left but skin color.
The conservatives I know don't care about anyone's race. They care about preserving individual liberty and equal opportunity for everyone.
This is just getting silly at this point and the politics of the left is destructively dividing our country between groups of people that really have no animus towards each other. Why else would there be so many hate crimes that turn out to be hoaxes?
12
I'm a liberal, but my views on racial equality, civil rights, abortion, etc. haven't changed.
What has changed is the Right consistently shifting the Overton window to the right with Christian Sharia Laws limiting the rights of women and minorities, to say nothing of the daily cruelties and hate being spewed by the racist-in-chief.
No, this is a case of relativity. We're standing still but the country's on a moving sidewalk going right. From that perspective, I'm sure it does look like the Left is moving left.
Just check your own footing before you start calling me out on mine.
12
A mind, filled with candy clouds and rainbow cake over fields of unicorns lounging beneath purple and orange feathered trees, is surely no highly educated elite. It ain't woke either.
4
@Kevin
I wouldn’t be so tough on Mr Brooks.
1
No wonder most Republicans denigrate the idea of more people going to college and continue to fight against any federal programs making college more affordable.
Like fair elections protected from the cyber attacks of hostile foreign nations, a more educated citizenry clearly reduces their odds of winning future elections.
7
In an age of incipient ecological collapse with all of its attendant side-effects, the traditional left-right paradigm is less and less relevant. An alternative perspective worth considering is the one articulated by Pete Buttigieg when he says, "I think people are way over-estimating how much [the 2020 election cycle] is a left-center-right fight, versus a forward versus back fight." In that context, we see Trump and his cultists, who handle climate change by pretending it doesn't exist, against young people who will be suffering the direct consequences of today's inaction, allied with parents and grandparents intent on leaving behind a viable planet for their children. Issue after issue, from guns to race to Israel-Palestine to immigration, can be reframed in this way. Mayor Pete is the one who does it, and that's why his events are filled to overflowing wherever he goes.
4
@Luke
Sorry Luke - but I am a scientist.
The real threat to the globe is overpopulation.
Wouldn't make much difference if you converted all cars to electric and harnessed the full power of the sun - it is just too many people.
At most the planet can handle a billion and we are over 7 billion.
Climate change isn't; responsible for clearing forests, and other habitat. Clearing forests contributes to climate change.
Climate change isn't respsonbile for slaughtering to the point of extinction almost every living thing on the planet.
Obviously you don't have much interest in biology or nature and I bet you never owned a dog. Because if you did you would know other living things know pain and fear and love, and have a right to it - and not to be dismissed and treated as objects for pruning.
I’d be tempted to call myself “an ever-more leftwards-leaning Libertarian.” But I’m convinced that these terms “right” and “left” have become increasingly misleading. The Republican party was once that of fiscal probity; the Democratic party, that of easy credit. Now, the guy in the white house seems ready to bankrupt the country if he could get more power in the process. The Republicans are indeed pandering to the racists; the Democrats at least broach the issue: How to invest in enriching our public goods equally available to all, starting with education?
5
to understand this apparent shift, look at a generational change in the category.
1
I can't tell if I'm one of the people being described. I don't subscribe to many of the slightly exaggerated views ascribed to educated white liberals, but I certainly see the immigration debate as being centered on race. That is because GOP has implemented an unconstitutional Muslim ban, and the rest of their rhetoric is based on insulting and lying about people from Mexico and other 'Mexican countries' and Africa. Although to be fair GOP leaders aren't sure if Norway is a predominantly white country.
To talk about this issue without considering the possibility that the shift left is a reaction to GOP extremism and open racism marks this piece as fundamentally non-serious, David.
2
This article provokes a variety of thoughts. Here are three:
[1]. The percentage of highly *credentialed* (college- and graduate-degreed) Americans expanded considerably since Mr. Brooks’s baseline era of the 1960s. Comparisons therefore must be made with care.
[2]. Beginning in the late 1960s, the “left” and “working class” began to cleave, provoked in large part by “working class” support of the Vietnam War and “left” opposition to the War. The “left” began to exclude working class people from its conceptual roster of underprivileged and oppressed groups, focusing increasing attention on African-Americans and women. Unions became cast as part of the ‘establishment’ (union contributions to African-American welfare were increasingly ignored). This was a major contributor to the well-known bifurcation between credentialed and less-credentialed Americans, and has been part of the ”left’s” broadening of its definition of oppressed classes.
[3]. As ‘liberalism’ began to morph into ‘progressivism’, the “left” has became more judgmental and less tolerant of shades of view (political correctness, e.g.), narrowing the size and reach of its alleged ‘base’. For example, a recent Gallup poll showed that, whereas Democrats were clearly the majority party during the 1960s, they now command the allegiance of only about *one-quarter* of the electorate – approximately ten percent less than even the Republicans! Mr. Brooks may be describing the sloughing off of members of the “left”.
3
"Second, two of the great marks of privilege in our society are skin color and education levels, and yet in the Democratic Party it’s the highly educated whites who express the greatest alienation with the system that benefits them so directly."
You are suggesting that it is natural to support that which most benefits you. Are you speaking for yourself, or for the American people in general? Both, I fear. What happened to the principle of disinterest?
Makes you wonder why white people would have objected to slavery. Or did they?
2
A significant number of Democrats are "walking away." Calling themselves "politically homeless." I recently re-registered as an independent and if the Dems don't cut the identity politics I'm not voting for anybody.
"White privilege" is white supremacy. What a terrible, backhanded insult it is. I cannot participate in such a self-serving, repugnant exercise in saying, basically, that the color of my skin will always be better than yours. Please be reminded that the very persons promoting this religious nonsense very likely haven't participated in anything remotely racist. They hire, fire, live in predominantly white neighborhoods, with little access to the "underprivileged" whom they claim to champion.
In an increasingly secular culture, "woke" replaces religion. If you aren't open to worshiping POC's, then you're of the "wrong" religion.
There are reasons, based in fact, that there is a 'gap.' But it is sacrilege to speak of it.
The anti-white "colonialism" narrative must bite the dust. Not only is it intellectually dishonest, it's stoking a racial divide. Confession: I find myself actually thinking I don't want anything to do with POC's for fear of offending one. The other day I overheard a black woman holding a conference on 'teaching white people to respect POC's." Who DOESN'T? This in one of the most progressive square miles of Manhattan. To wit, I have never witnessed any such disrespect in decades of working in diverse situations. Can't win.
16
Read "The Dispossessed," by Lizzie Presser in the July 22 New Yorker and you'll understand the depths to which American Justice remains sunk. Then, Mr Brooks, you'll begin to understand why intelligent, educated, well-read people of all shades are moving left. Instead of reporting on the lives of despair, you have been pounding out weekly essays from your gut, revealing nothing!
3
Mr. Brooks, why do you always soft-peddle this nation’s abhorrent history of racism and subtly implying that we progressives are intellectually fraudulent, and all-around whiners by pointing it out by writing such things as “Many progressives see barriers to immigration as akin to unjust racial barriers.” We see it that way because of its history is racist.
First, there is U.S. CONST., Art I, § 9 that addresses the forced migration of Africans as slaves. Its racism is blatant and obvious. Next, in 1875, the Page Act created categories of exclusion for "any subject of China, Japan, or any Oriental Country." Followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act, in 1882, that put a ten-year moratorium on Chinese immigration, and excluded "skilled and unskilled laborers.” Congress extended that moratorium another ten years in 1892 and made it indefinite in 1902. Then in 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act instituted quotas for immigrants at two percent of the number of people from any given country living in the U.S. as of 1890, a time when Northern and Western Europeans dominated immigration. That racism continued until 1965 when Congress enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act, which held out the promise that our immigration policies would be more egalitarian.
Given that history, there is ample cause for our suspicions, and I suspect that if that history applied to corporate income tax, you would be the one raising alarms.
3
I ran across this quote from "Othello" that is pertinent to the Right Wing's to keep the immigration issue burning: "T'is a pageant/To keep us in false gaze."
1
I haven't read beyond the first paragraph yet, but Mr. Brooks ponders why the shift in highly educated whites.
Two words. Global. Warming.
2
David - spot on.
That said, I would say the "more cynical" Door No. 2 really explains the move towards progressivism among educated whites. Witness the political influence/pressure of faculty on campus, and you're halfway there.
Knee-jerk identity politics, race shaming, virtue signaling, deplatforming, etc. etc. are de rigueur among educated whites. Just like beards, kale, avocado toast. All you need to do is peel the layers in a conversation with them to see that it's fashion, more form over substance.
8
Exactly what I have been thinking. In a news cycle when Trump is accused of rape, colluding with the Russians and it was released that the deficit is exploding and Trump's budget includes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, we are spending weeks talking about nothing but whether or not Trump's tweets were racist.
3
You say that "Many progressives see barriers to immigration as akin to unjust racial barriers", and that "Many want to dismantle the border enforcement agencies and eliminate criminal sanctions...". But these statements, which you build your opinion on, are over simplified at best (and perhaps distorted reality).
Liberals see the existing barriers to immigration as an "unjust racial barriers" because the President and the conservative party have deliberately made the issue about race. Trump has said he wants more people from Norway and less from Mexico, among other nasty remarks about non-white people. How could anyone see the President's policies as not a racial issue? You do not need a lens to see our immigration policy as a racial issue... you need a lens to "not" see it as a racial issue.
Furthermore, I am fairly confident that most liberals do not want to eliminate border enforcement. Most of us just want it done in a way that is smart, effective and eliminates excessive cruelty and racism. I think we are justified in believing our current immigration policies are cruel and ineffective.
With respect, I think your editorial is based on over-simplified representations of complex issues and a misunderstanding/misrepresentation of what liberals believe and care about.
4
It’s not race for heavens sake. It’s a belief that the poor and middle class deserves something other than a life of deprivation and penury. It would be nice to have work, a secure home, food, healthcare, education for your children, water you can drink, air you can breathe - you know all those unreasonable things we socialists complain of irrationally and interminably. If race, whatever that is, affects people’s life chances negatively then I guess it looks like race is the concern.
3
Really, the most left is mostly white? That is an insult to all the activism by people of color in this country. Trump's attacks on the so called squad is all about an anti racist left revisioning of the meaning and future of this country. It is the moderate left that is majority white, which is why the constant discussion about the moderates is implicitly an appeal to those whites who had trouble telling the difference between Trump and HC.
2
Oligarchs control the media and their propaganda can sway elections. They oppose democracy, fatal for their wealth, so they oppose union rights, social programs like health care or sensible policy for people’s welfare, or even human rights. They ignore nuclear proliferation or climate change, even if it is predictably fatal for the planet. Money rules, so Government does not respond to the people. A government that serves the people is considered left-wing.
The GOP desire for security leads to gross militarization, racist immigration policy ignores human rights, border walls. Expensive militarization prices out civilization: the social safety net shreds, people are stripped of their wealth and burdened with debt, student loans become oppressive, unions break, the middle class sinks, infrastructure unaffordable to maintain becomes increasingly unsafe, but the wealthy get tax breaks.
Police are militarized, walled fortifications spring up around the wealthy. That's right or 'conservative'.
When unfairness is undeniable, the unlikely prospect of reform leads to unrest and ultimately violence. The elite build fortifications, implement mass surveillance, impose secrecy in government, and militarize for their own security. Sound familiar ?
http://gopiswrong.net/
1
Framing this discussion in racial terms is inflammatory and disingenuous. David Brooks seems to think everyone should put blinders on and make decisions based on their pocketbooks. It's a lot more complicated, David, and as an educated person yourself, you know that.
1
Does the poll you cite support your argument? Is there a leftward drift among Democrats during the past 20 years? I don't think so. As President Harry Truman attempted nationalized health insurance. That attempt failed. Roe v. Wade, the decision that many Democrats are fighting to preserve, was handed down in 1973. Concern about carbon emissions into the atmosphere began to be expressed by scientists in the 1970s. Race has been a persistent issue in the U.S. since before its founding, and at least one political party that claims to represent U.S. voters should take it into consideration, eh? As the Republican Party becomes the Klan lite, it figures you write a column such as this one.
4
As a moderate Clinton supporting Democrat vehemently against Sanders, I saw us moderates as concerned with racism. sexism and other isms in 2016 and Sanders more leftist supporters focused on last Century socialist economic ideas. I saw Sanders supporters continued assaults against Clinton after the nomination as sexist and contributing to the win of racist Donald Trump. Only recently when four of Sanders supporters of non-white ethnicity have been racially attacked has racism become an issue of the far left.
Also my moderate Republican high school and college classmates as FB friends are concerned about racism as my Democrat and Sanders supporter FB friends.
2
Interesting. So support for civil rights, gender equity, freedom of choice and the environment and opposition to the demonization of immigrants constitute moving left? These concerns all seem pretty mainstream progressive to me. What is apparently too far left at this point in history for the relatively small number of of white swing voters who will decide this election is Medicare for all, abolition of ICE and open borders. Strategically, the Democratic candidates are making a mistake in voicing their support for these last three. I don't say they are wrong; just mistaken as a matter of strategy.
As for race; this country has been all about race since its inception. And with a racist president backed by an army of racist followers, it is of course front and center. But while Trump is an ignorant bigot, he knows how to excite his base. And he also knows that the so-called swing voters are uncomfortable talking about race and would rather focus on what is best for their narrow interests.
Conclusion: Focus on what matters to the 5% of voters who will actually pick the president in 2020. So far, that has not happened. To Trump's benefit.
2
The left's focus on racial equality seems to be a reaction to the right's successful efforts to divide members of the same socioeconomic class who look different from one another or come from different ethnic or racial backgrounds.
4
Highly educated white progressives are not voting for Bernie Sanders or the equivalent. They may tell their white progressive friends they are. But that's why we have a secret ballot. Can you say third party?
@Erik
Speak for yourself.
I think this transformation has happened in part because decades of conservative policies, from trickle-down economics to deregulation of Wall Street to union busting to multiple ill-advised wars, have left the country worse off. The policies are dumb, immoral, and harmful. It's also just impossible to ignore the racism that still infects this country. It's in virtually every statistic--family wealth, health outcomes, prison demographics. However, I've never understood viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a racial lens. Jewish Israelis are not a monolithic "white" or European group; in fact, they are split between people of European ancestry and "brown" people whose ancestors lived in the Middle East and North Africa for centuries (like my own family). The ignorance of Americans on this point is astonishing to me.
1
Once again Paul you should not be telling liberals what they believe and why they believe it. I am one of those highly educated white liberals, but I did not come from a wealthy background like you. I worked my way through college and graduate school. I was, to use a somewhat silly term, woke decades ago. I supported some form of reparations since the 1970s because the difference in capital accumulation made it obvious if you want full integrate African Americans you had to close that gap.
I don't particularly like the term white privilege, but I understand what it means and I understand rich whites have a lot more of it than poor whites. So when you think of white privilege think of how rich white people are treated and then realize that there is an even bigger gap between white people and people of color. And it is not about liking people of color more than my own white people it is liking everyone equally.
As liberal who once was a strong supporter of Israel and in favor of a two state solution, I became more skeptical of Israel when I saw a map of the settlement on the West Bank and realized they weren't looking for peace but to take over the whole area.
So Paul ,there are facts and reason that this white liberal moved left so you should concern yourself with these and not on social theories that have never been more than hogwash.
4
Dude, this is really simple. The Republican Party, once "the party of Lincoln", has gradually become more and more overtly racist, to the point of now celebrating the Confederacy. White educated Americans (e.g., yours truly) have had the rose-colored glasses taken off our eyes. Slavery is the defining fact of American history and that fact is still with us, every day in every way. The Republican Party overtly seeks a return to Jim Crow. White Democrats' values have not changed. What has changed is their understanding of Republicans.
5
@XXX And if I might add to my own comment, not only our understanding of the Republicans, but also our understanding of how our institutions really operate; the real current systemic and legacy disadvantages that black people operate under; our own historic blindness is not seeing, until now, the full extent of how it has continued even in the post-civil rights era; and the degree to which the crazy (by modern standards) allocation of power in the Senate and the Electoral College, and the lack of Congressional voting rights for the District of Columbia, disempower even those non-whites whose voting is not willfully obstructed.
“The most moderate faction is the most nonwhite and focuses on pocketbook issues like jobs and taxes. The most left-wing…focuses on issues like…race and gender equity.”
Yes, but you can’t address race equity issues without addressing pocketbook issues. It doesn’t do any good for whites to blithely tell people of color, “Hey, great news, I now consider you to be my equal!” This is because people of color are NOT equal if they live in poverty and are struggling to feed their kids and pay the rent.
And we can’t make the kind of progress we need to make if we have a guy like Trump as President, plus McConnell and their minions. But to get rid of these guys we need 51% of our voters to vote them out. And that will take the help of a lot of both black and white voters who are concerned about how they have slid downhill economically and who may choose to vote primarily on this issue. That might even mean they vote for Trump as they did in 2016 if he cons them with fantasies like “I’ll rebuild the steel mills in Pittsburgh.”
So for our ultra-liberals to pollute this water by talking about thing like how this is a wonderful time for us to switch to socialism is insanity. Why can’t we be both “liberal” and also talk about how we can truly “make American great again” by regaining our manufacturing and technology leadership,” including in ways that will provide viable solutions for managing climate change?
The crucial question is whether it's possible to attest to historical patterns of racial inequality WITHOUT implicitly saying that those who disagree are racist. In my experience, no matter how the reproduction of racial inequality is explained, in non-accusatory terms, some White listeners think you're calling them racist. This is a measure of White fragility, not a measure of social science accuracy.
1
Mr. Brooks:
In a country with a two party political system could it be that this leftist shift could be a reaction to oppressive right wing politics? You know... the kind of politics the Republican party
has been pushing since Reagan? Duh!
2
Americans should want racial equality and an end to institutional racism not only on ethical grounds but out of self-interest. In 35 years, non-Latino whites will be less than 50% of the population and their average age will be higher than the average age of the rest of the population. The country will need non-White doctors and nurses to care for old white people and a well educated non-White workforce to run a prosperous economy. That non-White workforce won't magically appear when the non-Latino whites become less than 50%.
1
There are definitely racial issues that have to be addressed but by Kamala Harris and Corey Booker making Biden the villain they are practicing identity politics which
Is a sure bet for a Trump 2020 victory. The latest polls show that this is not a winning strategy within the African American voting community
2
Brooks mentions that this rapidly growing consciousness of racism among "white liberals" is seen by some "cynics" as largely limited to the "super prestigious" colleges located on the coasts.
Yet he also writes "As Goldberg points out, in 1996 and 2010 about a quarter of white liberals thought racial discrimination was a very serious problem. By 2016, 58 percent did."
Depending on one's definition, only about 2 percent of college graduates attended a "super prestigious" post-secondary institution. If 58 percent of white liberals share these political and ideological leanings then clearly such beliefs must be far more widespread.
You don't have to be an Amherst, Dartmouth or Stanford alum to understand why racism is a plague within our society and why its elimination is imperative for a "more perfect union."
I strongly suspect that Brooks---with his University of Chicago degree---already knows this. But hey, why forego the opportunity to slip in a derogatory stereotype when it might buttress your (dubious) argument?
1
@Ana Luisa: <>
Nancy Pelosi's comments regarding four representatives (who happened to be women of color) were not racist and AOC's characterization of these comments as such was off the mark -- Nancy Pelosi is not a racist and she is entitled to disagree on substantive matters with people of color.
As Maureen Dowd wrote on these very pages, "A.O.C. should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her color.” Replace "A.O.C." in Dowd's sentence above with with "Progressive Democrats" and I think Brooks' point is made.
3
“Let’s focus on kitchen table issues!!!” we are told.
Fair enough.
I seem to remember something about a kitchen counter in a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, South Carolina....
5
The center right, what a useless, vapid joke. They sit scratching their heads as whatever they supposedly stand for disappears before their eyes, and are left standing for nothing beyond some abstract morality (along with the old warhorse myths of meritocracy, small government, and trickle down). At least the alt right/mainstream republicans stand for something real! Even if it’s bigotry and xenophobia.
2
Is it moving left or just expressing revulsion for Trump's painful right agenda?
3
You ever notice how conservatives love to criticize “The Left” for its alleged “moral relativism” — except when it comes to fighting racism, in which case all of a sudden “The Left” is to be criticized for its zealous moral absolutism?
6
My husband and I were brought up in Republican homes. He is college educated, and has morphed into a Liberal! We voted for George W Bush in 2000, and when the SCOTUS decided that election we started a shift to the Left. Both of us, a registered Democrats.
The Republicans offer nothing to America, nothing. Now that we are retired, young Baby Boomers, we see the GOP for what it is, a party of crooks, liars and cheats!
Proud to be Liberals!
6
Mr. Brooks is correct that many white democrats have been galvanized to respond in a deeper way to the undeniable racism not just of this President and his administration, but of the policies of the Republican party and the abhorrent actions of Trump supporters who are overwhelmingly white. When Nazis March openly in our streets, Members of Congress are told they don't belong in the U.S. and we open Concentration Camps filled exclusively with brown people, patriots who love our constitution and ideals are called to a higher accounting. Sadly, the country I love is built on white privilege, which unfairly benefits me daily to the detriment of my fellow Americans. Just as I expect sexism will end only when men demand equality for women and renounce their privilege. Racism must be addressed and dismantled by whites who benefit. I am proud to be a member of a party that is interested in the long arm of justice.
This is no more a college fad than global warming. It is a fact based movement. Oh, and just because white democrats are increasingly pushing an equity agenda, that doesn't mean we don't also strongly support bread and butter issues like wages. That's the benefit of a party that embraces diversity. We don't have to think alike to be on the same team. E Pluribus Unam.
3
I am a left-of-center Democrat. I’m proud to be one.
In the 1960s, I attended the super-prestigious University of Montana. I studied English literature. I saw what happened to the American soul as napalm rained down over the jungles of Vietnam. I watched Walter Cronkite announce the murders of King, Evers, RFK. I read Norman Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night.”
I'm now old. I have health problems. I worry. Will the billionaires, to make filthy dollars, take my health insurance? Some friends suffer, some die, because a $30,000 a year job doesn’t pay for insurance. The pharmaceutical companies, with support from brand name pharmacies, sold “legal narcotics” to tens of thousands of Americans and watched as many of them died.
The air of my city is “still” polluted, often unbreathable. The earth warms. A UN report says millions of species are about to go extinct.
A Christian religion dominates the State Legislature. Christians like Falwell have direct channels to the President of the United States.
There’s more: dirty water in Flint, a livable wage, basic human rights, a Congress whose urgent work is to make the rich richer.
There's the coal miner’s pensions.
There’s Trump. There’s Trump and his ilk, the ones who gleefully chant, as if at a basketball game, “Send her back. Send her back.”
The Left—ah, the Democratic Left, a group that quaintly believes in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all.
I wonder, David Brooks, why you haven’t turned left!
597
@Dave Thomas
Nailed it, Dave!
Thank you....
48
@Dave Thomas
I enjoyed this quite a bit Dave, especially your concluding quip.
You wield the shiv rather deftly.
Air pollution? Is it from all the wildfires?
I had long envisioned Montana as a pristine unpopulated wilderness.
15
@Dave Thomas Montana seems like a great state to lead the nation. Your current governor, for example, would be a great president. Yes, Montana as a whole has always voted Republican in presidential elections, but perhaps that could also change. On the "Christian religion" still dominating the State Legislature, I'm not surprised. It reminds me of the time about 20 years ago when a very intelligent lawyer working for me, who was raised in a Christian evangelical family in Montana, told me about her growing up and being discouraged from making friends with kids from other religions. I asked her if this meant Jewish kids. She said yes, but that in any case there weren't that many Jews living in her area. The punch line, however, was when I asked about Catholic kids (my own religion, by the way). Without a pause, she said, "Oh, but they're not Christian." In another second she realized what she had just said and we had a tremendous laugh at the absurdity.
40
Of course the liberal end of the Democratic Party skews towards white people. It's because Republicans have become the party of white racists, and have driven non-white conservatives towards the Democrats.
And of course white Democrats are more likely to see race as a problem after witnessing the majority of white people getting behind Trump.
1
Horrors, people are concerned with racial equity. What terrors await? A free press? Voting rights? Tips included in restaurant checks?
1
It's Republicans who are obsessed with race. That's their whole election strategy.
7
Wrong once again.
White Democrats have definitely moved to the center, not the left.
All Democrats have moved to the center.
2018 Democratic primary and general election victories in the House were virtually all in the center, not the left.
Strength of Biden is a rejection of the Democratic left in 2019.
Polls for AOC and Omar, Congresswomen of the left,
extremely clearly indicate that they have lost support even in their own Congressional Districts.
AOC is polling now at 20% and Omar even worse at 9%.
David Brooks need to do some more serious research.
He is profoundly wrong.
1
I think the current trend of extremism on both ends of the political spectrum stems from the fact that we live in a world that is dominated by entertainment and stripped of complex thought processes that are geared toward the betterment of society as a whole. We are taught that everything must be extreme, competitive and individual. Debates are nothing but literal or figurative shouting matches. Insults have taken the place of well-reasoned speech. And everyone feels the need to emerge a "winner." Therefore, if you're liberal and woke, I need to claim that I am even more woke than you in order to feel superior. Racial morality is simply repackaged religion. In my youth, people would compete to prove how holy they were. Now they compete to prove how woke they are. Same old same old.
4
As documented in 'Who Stole the American Dream?', and as I've seen with my own eyes, the country has been moved far to the right by right-wingers and their propaganda over the last 40 years. If someone is to the left of Newt Gingrich, they are not necessarily left-wing. Racism is a tool used by EVERY race at one time or another to manipulate others. It is not the 'main event'. Class warfare/oligarchy is. Global warming is. Health care costs are.
6
Is it possible that white, educated people stayed where they were, and the Republican party made a sharp right turn? I think it's fair to say that Joe Biden is a center-right candidate, and he still has the highest poll numbers of the potential presidential candidates.
2
As a highly educated male I have certainly benefited from white privilege. I am as progressive as anyone for one reason - inequality. When the government taxes the rich (of which I am one) to provide affordable college, pay for a national healthcare system, protect the environment, etc its about reducing the systemic inequities that have grown dramatically worse in my life time.
2
Dear David Brooks,
You want to know why we move left?
Read stuff like today's news about how Lamar Johnson spent 25 years in prison after being framed by the St. Louis police and prosecutors.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/26/st-louis-lamar-johnson-conviction-police-scandal/?utm_term=.d95fcb708b5f
2
I would like to think that the "how" of the move left on racism (and other topics) by the "highly educated" is because if one is truly educated, one knows how to learn. In the time periods mentioned, there has been a lot of research on racism, and books, articles, movies and television shows that bring the issues home. If one can learn, one should have learned a lot. And it should have moved one.
2
Racial equity is not the defining issue of the moment. I am a white democrat, and all I care about is my girlfriend, my dog, my job and money, lots of money. These are the defining issues of the moment.
5
This all seems so retro. The flavor of the month/year/day still being the "R" word, and its finger-pointing usage in no matter what relevance, now that it's out of "closeted minds," is to the point of silliness. In celebrating the death/murder of Mr. E. Till yesterday, and realizing that over decades even that atrocity didn't change many minds, it is time now, no matter into what 'group' one is 'placed,' for all in one huge chorus to utter: "They were wrong then and nothings going to change the toxicity of what the so-called White-Boy Founders started,"so long ago.
"So live that when... "
1
I take it, Mr. Brooks, that you do not see the right as looking at anything much at all through the lens of skin color.
Tired of the false divide between the coasts and the midwest., between public and private bureaucracy and management. Same people. I'm a public schoolteacher— thirty years in Connecticut and thirty in Los Angeles; same problems as people in Port Huron, MI, St. Louis, MO and Hosington, KN, and Mobridge, SD.
Those problems? A Pentagon spending two trillion on useless war for fossil fuels destroying the planet, rather than provide a decent infrastructure or humane services. A refusal to deal with overpopulation and birth control, instead using enhanced posters of bloody fetuses for political gain. Vulture capitalism draining wealth to one percent of the population while trying to scheme a way to drain all equity from my home and buy my life insurance so my child has nothing but the student loans this country is balancing its budget on. A justice system where an essential traitor's lawyers can argue that a financial criminal wouldn't ordinarily be investigated except for political gain. That's a real defense, Mr. Brooks? The fact that the last three acting AGs lied under oath, and the executive committed crimes—that these people go free because of a weaponized court system, yet feel free to reinstitute the death penalty for the poor overwhelmingly POC death rows?
Why is no one mentioning Lee Atwater's obviously racist Southern strategy these days.
9
In seeking to explain the jump in white progressivism, John McWhorter's analogy of anti-racism to religion fits the bill. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a corresponding decline in engagement in other kinds of spiritual seeking as white elites seek meaning in the pessimistic religion of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Christianity is bad. Meditation, too hard and possibly culturally appropriative. Where else to turn for that fix of Puritan self-flagellation that has long motivated American elites?
6
we in the coast see and interact with more imagrints in our daily work and see family life they are welcome here.
Mr. Brooks, I am not convinced that younger and educated white Americans are entirely free of racial animus towards Black Americans. To wit, the recent incident involving U of Mississippi students saddens and worries me. And similar nonsense perpetrated by young people happens at colleges all over the U.S.
2
Meanwhile, back in the real world and in real time, our most formidable sworn enemies are well on their way to once again fraudulently corrupt our elections, children are living in filthy cages on our borders, separated perhaps forever, from their families and the leader of the free world has lied more than 10,000 times in 3 years as well as committed high crimes and misdemeanors, yet is not held responsible because he is above the law due to the complacency and complicity
of his party. In the midst of the above, and much, much more, we're being asked how many angels dance on the head of pin?
3
This is just another version of the "White Man's Burden" -
Liberal whites consider themselves so smart, so educated, so elite (and so smug) that they should decide how the rest of (American) civilization should live.
Their sense of fairness is what should govern.
If that includes labeling their political opponents "racists", so be it.
11
@G
the whole 'elites' thing is silly propaganda. Make a real argument.
“They always call the other side ‘the elite’. Why are they elite? I have a much better apartment than they do,” the US president said. “I’m smarter than they are. I’m richer than they are."
1
Sitting out an election is absurd. I have felt conned every time I have stepped into a voting booth, and I have voted in every election since I was 18 years old. I have nothing but disgust for the politicians in this country, but I have voted. Insofar as determining wether a “racial lens” is correct or not do not analyze, or sample white people in this country. That in itself is racist. Talk to people of color. There was once a book entitled “Black Like Me”. It was made into a movie as well. Take a little trip like the author of that book did after darkening his skin to try on a pair of correct “racial lenses”.
1
Well you may be correct out there in Punditville, Mr. Brooks, but out here in the wasteland we notice your use of the term "woke" as a pejorative. Your lead in was actually quite clumsy:
"The most direct theory is that America is a land of systemic racism. Highly educated white progressives have woken up to this fact" closely followed by "creed of wokeness". Tsk, tsk, your elitist, east coast Republican petty coat is showing.
But seriously, racism is learned, not bred. It is a bad calculation performed by intellects seeking an easy solution to their own feelings of inadequacy. It is thoroughly useless as a lens and correctly recognized as an example of defective thinking.
Very good article that expresses not only an American problem, but a wide world problem in western democracies. Who are and how a new class of 'progressive people' operate. The best educated, arrogant elitist, working hard but remunerative well to do people( not millionares) are becoming the liberal defenders of an open global society. They love multiculturalism, defend minority rights, despise nationalism, and sometimes they even are tolerant towards intolerant minorities.
Understanding this it is not quite difficult to understand the backlash of the 'left behind' people.
More dramatic: Those left behind hardly hate 'multi millionaries' . The later in many cases know how to speak 'their language' . However, 'left behinds' hate precisely this 'new class' of socioeconomic self righteous elites.
Who is going to win? That is the question. The clash is unavoidable and the gap is unbridgeable.
End of liberalism? ?????? Maybe
5
Without a doubt, this country has an abundance of highly educated, White liberals. And, I assume, in their view, they have done a lot of good things and want to do more. Why doesn't anyone ever thank them?
Take Man Made Global Climate Change, (MMGCC), or whatever it it's called. WL and 23 And Me, should be living the example of a reduced carbon footprint. Tom Styer, billionaire, should be walking around in bamboo clothes. That he made himself. NY14, sometimes called AOC, has pointed out, with certitude, the planet or mankind or somebody will cease to exist in 12 years. Why doesn't she show how SHE reduces her carbon footprint, voluntarily. Since carbon legislation can't pass with so many Trump voters on the loose, just show us, how YOU do it.
Spoiler alert. They couldn't show us if they wanted to. Furthermore, they are too important to step back from their sacrificial duties to this country, to walk any where. Or pay an extra $7 a gallon for gas.
Remember those riots in France, last year? One of the protesters said the politicians were worried about the end of the world. He was worried about making ends meet, at the end of the month.
OK, they don't have to sacrifice. That was just so mean of me. Maybe, at the next town hall, they can explain to the single mom with 4 kids, how much she can contribute to the planet, if she would only use public transit.
White Liberal Democrats. Why?
2
The well-educated, well-off white liberal’s obsession with white racism is just another form of white privilege. These things are abstractions to them, ideological playthings. They do not send their children to already overcrowded schools further burdened by illegal immigrants. Their children are not undermined by their crippling insistence that race determines one’s fate in the United States. To them immigration, illegal or otherwise, means that fun new food truck serving kimchee tacos.
Their showy outrage at racism and whiteness is as much of a social marker as driving a high-end hybrid with an Ivy League bumper sticker, shopping at Whole Foods, or subscribing to the NYT. It’s not merely virtue signaling, but a kind of lifestyle marker.
In the end, they have created an environment where not to engage in showy outrage about racial inequities makes a person suspect on the issue, one misunderstanding away from being destroyed as a “racist.” So they also must double-down on their grandstanding as a way to inoculate themselves from the charge.
Enter Trump.
7
David you were doing pretty well until the last paragraphs, then you went off the deep end...
I have been a PROUD LIBERAL DEMOCRAT my whole life and for most of that time I have held my nose every time I had to vote for a middle-of-the-road small d Democrat in hopes that those representing me will move the country forward toward a more inclusive and equal union, which is what our Founding Fathers promised all Americans. I am still waiting!!
I am a white college-educated man who worked in the most depressed areas of New York City for nearly 30 years serving the poor and assisting those in need. Stop with the self-centered Liberal White Woke stuff. I and many other whites walked the walk to help those in need to rise above poverty and racism in America even though we were white and privileged.
Actions speak louder than words, David. What actions have you performed as a conservative Republican? Have you renounced the racists and fascists within your party? Have you renounced your party and its policies and become an independent ? Have you renounced your President Donald J. Trump? When and until you do any one of these things I will remain doubtful of you being anywhere near Woke.
2
@Rjnick
The problem is that the Liberal White Woke stuff has become the first thing anyone thinks of when they hear the words "liberal" or "Democrat." It's the albatross around the Democrats' neck, the reason they continually struggle to gain national dominance even though they offer solutions far, far superior to anything the GOP would ever offer.
It is not merely obnoxious, it is poisonous. It is ruinous to a nation as genuinely diverse and complicated as ours, and undermines our ability to discuss basic policy, since most every policy can touch on race or other aspects of identity.
No conversation or serious debate can occur with the implicit or explicit threat of "disagree with me and you prove you're a racist devil." Let us not pretend that this is a new phenomenon on the left since Trump.
And yes, Brooks has regularly denounced the racists and fascists in his party.
2
They haven’t moved left, their (stated) opinions have.
1
Hominids in rich cultures want to buy the unattainable (after they have basic life support out of the way). Some want satisfaction via newer and better toys (the 1%). Some want perfect security (Republicans). Some want a stairway to heaven ("woke" liberals). They will all be disappointed.
Racism and sexism aren't our biggest problems but they provide a good excuse to avoid focusing on the important stuff.
Good luck America.
3
Q.“Why have white progressives moved so far so fast?”
A. They haven’t. Today’s “wokeness” is just a latter day upwelling of the same spirit that characterized the Freedom Summer on the eve of Civil Rights and desegregation. The college kids back then trained in Ohio and deployed to Mississippi; they were just as “woke” as the woke folks of today, black, brown and white. W.J. Cash defined The Mind of the South, and instead of that mind being neutralized by time, and homogenized into the mind of a nation, the opposite has happened. The nation will never be of one mind; such a mind lacks clear identity by definition. Now, without need of Southern birth, a plurality in the U.S. (Southern and non-Southern) has chosen, of their own volition, Cash’s mind. As that extreme end of the dumbbell has gained mass, the “progressive” end has bulked up in response...every force elicits an equal and opposite reaction, right? The middle, joining them, is stretched to near breaking. If Yeats proves a prophet, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
1
Shifting left has gone on since 1948, in the US, France , Britain, Click here to see the data
https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/wp-content/uploads/sites/49/2018/09/Piketty2018BrahminLeft-768x543.jpg
Figure caption
"Voting for left wing & democratic parties, in France, Britain US, 1948-2017: From The Worker Party to the High-Education party."
See how linearly the shift is ? And that it is the same in Britain and France (where race is not a dominant factor as in the US) and the US
1
Here's one white Dem who "moved" right, in context, thanks to the left truly shifting gears, moving uber left. No thanks.
5
Your column is right on. If I choose white rice over brown rice I’m accused of being a racist. The lens has become ridiculously exhausting and off putting. The moderate position is being silenced by all the shouting and theatrics from the guilt ridden far left. What a turn off.
6
Yes, there is a vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. It's made up mostly of people who read books.
3
I am white and am by no means a member of the wealthy liberal elite. I am lower middle class and am in a better place now than I was for most of my adult life. In my 20's I was dependent on social services and sliding scale public health clinics because I didn't have a job that gave me health insurance. Especially with health care, I was in direct competition for services with illegal immigrants and I often lost because there are so many of them and the services are geared toward them because they are run by white liberals whose whole ego goal is to help minorities. They saw me as an inferior version of themselves and the saviors for the minority population. I had to go to community clinics and wait all day to see if I could get an appointment while they saw illegals. The Democrats want to have open borders and give free health care to illegals because this wealthy white base wants them to. The real irony here is that the Democratic party is supposed to be the one for the people and it is being controlled by the most privileged and sheltered population in the United States.
7
@HeatherD
Do you support Senator Bernie Sanders for President?
All his life he has worked to make life better for ALL working people.
1
@HeatherD I worked in free lance low paid theater and art jobs in my 20's and like you also having no health insurance used Medicaid for a period and sliding scale clinics etc. I never experienced anything remotely like what you describe. And none of your accusations about Democrats are based in any facts I am aware of, but only on something perhaps repeated by Fox News or Rush Limbaugh.
Not credible at all.
1
NT Times commenters scare this moderate. Since I live in CA, my vote is irrelevant. So irrelevant that without CA in 2016, HRC lost the popular vote too, by 1 million. Not really a close national race. And Dems keep ignoring the 7 million Obama voters who voted for Trump, along with other factors like the 75000 in MI who voted down ticket but left POTUS spot blank. Not even going to talk about the flaws of the “my turn” candidate, HRC, a person so arrogant and entitled that she and her husband (like the Obamas now, unlike the Carters) saw their years of public served as a right to make many, many millions and hang with the rich and famous. And let’s not forget his she called millions of her fellow citizens deplorable for their points of view.
My Dem party insists on purity. Booker and Harris will destroy Biden even if that means Trump wins.
The sooner we realize that a majority of the electorate is moderate, the more likely Dems will win. If you’re an extremist on either side, you should vote for the lesser of evils.
A 7-2 conservative SCOTUS and the undoing of decades of incremental positive change await us all.
5
“For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required,"
1
As a former registered Republican, perhaps, David, the simplest explanation is that white, highly educated people are so appalled by the anti-science, anti-human, pro-corporate, anti-intellectual, anti-women, white nationalist / supremacist, and corrupt republican party that they are fleeing in droves and listening to those who oppose the current retched republican party.
4
America is one of the few countries in the world that has depended heavily on "the kindness of strangers" to advance. In the beginning whites in powdered wigs put blacks on slave ships and built a successful economy on slave labor. Then came the starving Irish and Italians, the dispossessed Jews. Then the 1920's. Full top. Then the cream of the fascist crop came over in the thirties. Without their help, who knows? A brief pause, then thanks to the Korean war, the Koreans. Ditto for the Vietnam debacle and the Vietnamese. Thanks to Castro and corrupt Mexican and South American politics Hispanics arrived. After Mao, the Chinese flooded and still flood our graduate schools. So we went from Englishmen in powdered whigs to a rainbow of human colors, from "no-entangling alliances" to the leader of the "free" world. Now Trump and Putin are trying to impose a course correction. They will not succeed as time, demography and the variegations of human color are not on their side. By 2050 the minorities will become the majority and the chalk white Republicans will fade even farther. That is, if we reach 2050 intact.
2
It would be interesting to see the demographic makeup of the schools and neighborhoods of all these white progressives. I bet a dollar it will be inconsistent to the racial responses they give to pollsters.
3
David Brooks wrote the wrong column. Here's the column he should have written:
How White Republicans Moved Right
At least there's something nice to say about people who've "moved left."
4
What is this, David? A dare to us Democrats to move more to the right because your own Republican party is in such a shambles? Well, we're not going to take you up on it.
5
David, what is with your obsession with the Democrats? How about you reflect on the fact that YOUR party, the Republicans, sold this country to the Russians and are destroying it from within a little bit more every day?
7
Great piece... until wimp out fizzle ending. I also believe people usually have what they believe are honest motives. But that doesn't prevent me from also believing guilt ridden white elites can't simultaneously believe they are noble while in word and deed they are not. When elite whites are way more enraged by "racism" and hostile to other whites then typical brown and black people, to me it's clear the white people are corrupt and corrosive, no matter their ostensibly clear consciences.
This contributed mightily to Clinton's loss and Trump's win, and will perhaps be a major factor in Trump's bigger win in 2020
1
I think the stress of trying to salvage his ideology in the face of what American conservatism has revealed itself to be is causing the neurons in the logic centers of Brooks' brain to misfire. His columns have been getting steadily loonier the last few months. The other week he tried to argue America and Scandinavia have the basically same healthcare systems. Here he fails to provide any insight into what progressives, educated Americans or "kids these days" care about, and thoroughly obfuscates the issues. And then at the end there, with his "crucial question," it sounds like he's trying to claim the left's extremist "wokeness" is to blame for "send her back." Next week he'll be arguing that the teaching of cosmopolitan liberal values in universities is putting kids in cages, and CBP agents are just committed civil servants who merely make the trains run on time.
Read Ihlan Omar's column printed today instead. She understands what the right's obsession with racism is really about.
2
all polling suffers from being designed to look at the preconceived ideas of the designers of the poll. or what thesis they want to test (biased).
i follow polls on the online polling site, truepublic. what strikes me is how many of the daily polls are distinguished by age grouping with the Boomers being almost always more if not the most conservative (my generation) regardless of many of the traditional breakdowns.
age group will certainly correlate to many of the political, social and many of the typical polling categories.
however the lessons of how to appeal to the diverse political and social groups may be significantly wrong if not viewed first from the perspective of "generation". hence how to approach nearly every aspect of campaigning may be ineffective.
Once again David Brooks has a solid insight. As an environmentalist I don't share the shift to the left on immigration; just the opposite - if we want to preserve our environment in the U.S., we need to bring down our human population. Most - 90% or more - of population growth comes from immigration. All the recycling, city planning, etc., will just dent the impact of the population on other living things in our country - the only real, sustainable way to do it is through cutting our population (on top of other sustainable practices of course.) We have a choice - immigration, or a healthy environment. We DO NOT get both.
2
There is another issue here which Brooks does not seem to be aware of, namely that we are developing labor shortages. The 'Baby Boom' generation is retiring with large numbers. At the same time, the birth rates are low and are remaining so (in spite of the Hispanic population and, yes, the Evangelical population which have historically had higher birth rates). So, while the economy continues to expand, more and more employers are reporting shortages of jobs at all skill levels (e.g., lack of agricultural workers and construction workers not to mention a lack of skilled computer programmers).
So, if our economy is to continue to function at its highest capacity, we are going to need more workers. And where are those going to come from? From outside the country (i.e., through immigration)! Thus, the White 'liberals' (as Brooks calls them) who have become more open to more immigration are really just educated people who understand that we need more workers, and that this need will get more acute over the next 20-30 years.
1
So, more white liberals more racially sensitive than non-white racial equity
Immigration is race
Not bigots legal or institutional...it’s us!
Israel great example. Petrie lens. Power as Jewish pop from underdog vs underlying problems, or Israel more reason to fear the Arab pop...not intern. Not emigrating. Business. Education
Can actually oppose our laws. Sanctuary.
And we dismiss our unjustified, racist view that our homeboy racially defend a single set of criteria, but that it should be destructed to give way to
Dismantle ourselves. Elitism
@Alberto Abrizzi I would appreciate it if anyone can explain what any of that is supposed to mean.
2
We could drop the "white Democrats" and go with, " educated people are progressive", meaning smart people of good will work for the betterment of humankind.
9
Your headline should read Thank God for Educated mostly White "Left"-leaning Democrats!
Until we got Reagan, the country was call it left leaning if you like, more in step with the rest of the civilized world. Even the heads of corporations who included workers in their profits -- " A rising tide lifts all ships -- unfortunately reworded as trickle-down. the we got Milton Friedman --money, money, money and then Bill Clinton pretending to be a Democrat but basically a Repug -- lock em up, cut welfare, free Wall Street, NAFTA (move jobs out), GWBush with a Congress supported (another shadow puppet but real enemy) war, Obama (talked liberal, acted pretty Repug -- ACA =Romneycare, protected CERTAIN banks, and now this. (Hillary did win but IMO should not have run. We had already had a Bush dynasty!)
I have no idea on what poll of how many people, we get this current iteration of nonsense with its shameful assertions and headlines. So if the non-white blacks (tautology intentional) only vote on taxes... I am to conclude??
#Help Trump win the election
1
you are sharing this space with an oped by rep Omar. Read hers, read yours, do it over, and over again. Then ask yourself, why are we here, as a country? I think the conclusion will be obvious. Then, hang your head down in shame, go talk to a priest, or whatever else does it for you, and get serious. Get serious, or just hang it all up.
3
What white people is David Brooks getting his info from? Whites don't like to tell you how racist they are, neither do blacks. We should stop all this racism discussion and concentrate on how Trump's Fascism is going to be our most important problem.
2
David, the solution is integration. But white America is too racist to make it happen. But integration of schools and housing is the only way achieve equity and justice in the United States. The only way.
1
Maybe it is the Real Christians vs the Fake Christians.
2
Educated or not the fact is, college educated democrats have become brainwashed by their colleges to become far left while ignoring obvious facts and statistics that fly in the face of truth.
Males competing with females in high schools across the country because they are trans gender, dominating their sports while legitimate biological girls despair at not being able to compete or air their grievance. Concerned with global warming.......but will never consider nuclear energy that would likely solve the problem. All whites are racist by default. The list is endless.
It's the truth that eludes so called educated liberals.
2
It's easy and tempting to be completely dismissive of your litany of right-wing rants. However, I'll just deal with your ludicrous claim that colleges "brainwash" students.
Virtually anyone who ever attended college will tell you that the exact opposite is true; College is where you learn to think for yourself and acquire the tools, skills and knowledge to develop your own insights and opinions and come to your own conclusions.
Nationwide, college graduates are roughly split down the middle between those who vote Republican and those who vote Democratic. And until the most recent presidential election, the majority of college graduates consistently voted Republican every four years.
Sometimes it's more revealing to look in the mirror before accusing others of being "brainwashed."
1
Seems like David Brooks has also moved to the left since the days when he thought the invasion of Iraq was the correct thing to do. Look, it’s not that radical or pie in the sky. Trump is a horrible president. Even if you agree with the message that white people are being steamrolled out of their whatever, it’s the messenger that is the problem. There are not enough superlatives to use so new ones need inventing just to express the outrage at the whole of the Republican Party. They have embraced this moron like it’s the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Only it ain’t. It’s a wholesale packing of the courts by avowed racism and regressive strong arm politics the likes of which have not been seen since the civil war era. It should come at no surprise that the reaction to a strong stench is move quickly in the opposite direction. What’s worse is that the upcoming election may get stolen outright by manipulation from Putin and McConnell. And republicans seem just fine with that.
4
The Trump Party IS the party of white supremacy and most other lesser racists. That’s it’s not so secret sauce, and the main reason for existence. Let’s get real. Please.
3
The article says "White progressives are much more critical of Israel than ever before." Unfortunately, this is true but it means that white progressives no longer understand (or do not care) that the existence of a Jewish state is what stands between the Jewish people and another holocaust. I, for one, am certain that, if there had been a Jewish state when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, there would not have been a holocaust. For that very reason, if the democratic candidate for president in 2020 is less supportive of Israel than President Trump is, then I will vote for Mr. Trump. Without the solid support of the Jewish community of South Florida, it is almost impossible for a democrat to win Florida's electoral votes and there are very few paths to 270 for a democrat that do not go through Florida.
4
I agree with much of what you have said but I think it's imperative to draw a distinction between support for the state of Israel and the policies of the current government of Israel.
Have any prominent Democrats argued that the state of Israel should no longer exist or have they simply argued that the current Israeli government and its treatment of Palestinians needs to improve?
Finally, I'm incredulous that anyone supportive of Israel---Jew or gentile---would even consider voting for Donald Trump, who after watching a mob of anti-Semites and white supremacists marching with flaming torches while chanting "JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US!", said that there were "good people on all sides."
1
@Steve
While it is true that no Democrat has argued that Israel should not exist and it is equally true that Israel's treatment of Palestinians should improve, neither of those facts changes the overriding fact that any reduction in United States support is a threat to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
As for President Trump's badly phrased remarks, they did not really mean that the President thinks that there are good people who are white supremacists. I am sure that what he really meant is that there are good people who want to keep their public confederate statues because those statues are part of their heritage. There is something to be said for that; after all we keep the Washington Monument and the Jefferson memorial even though both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave masters.
2
And how many of them marry black or brown people?
1
@Jimmy lovejoy, it’s the other way around.
The word Racism is ugly. It is hurtful. And it is a weapon.
It is pointed at anyone that disagrees with the White elites, politically, economically, or any pending issue such as immigration. Earlier this month, the Squad accused The Speaker of being a racist, more than once.
The only thing worst than calling a Conservative a racist, is a Liberal calling another Liberal a racist. Hold hands people, the circle is complete
2
White educated Democrats see politics through a racial lens because somehow through the media or liberal professors they have bern convinced that they do not deserve whatever privileges they hold in society. Instead of giving away their material wealth and entitlements, these leftist Democrats live in all white enclaves and virtue signal. It is that simple. These people are so spoiled and isolated from the working classes that they pontificate about policies that would lead to their own demise, increase open borders, eliminate ICE, or promote more affirmative action. As can be seen, when these policies affect their privilege, it is no longer popular. I go with the feel good theory re why this is happening.
3
Very simple explanation- when they empty the NY State prisons the ex-inmates aren't moving to Chappaqua or the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
5
I am an independent but have great interest in government actions (laws signed into law) and then researching the long term impact of the most sweeping.
The interesting dichotomy of the new Democratic party is that the most educated seem to not grasp the correlation between a position like open borders and the reality of the potential threat it would pose.
If it is correct that perhaps the shift is due to the physiological need to reconcile privilege with opening our country totally. I would propose that perhaps there is no historical experience in the mix.
Over a 30 year period the country wrestled with this issue including the death of thousands of Americans on one sunny day in September.
Open borders assumes wrongly that all new entrants think highly of the United States.
1
White Democrats have moved "left" on cultural issues primarily because middle-class and working-class whites with their material concerns have left/been run out of the party. And there is the fad David mentions. These upper-class "liberals" are not economic liberals. They'll wear the white garment of nobility to make them feel good and to move the focus of the party away from economic issues, where they are quite conservative and have always been. They're fundamentally detached from FDR's legacy of worker empowerment because most of them used to be Republicans and still are at heart, even if their party no longer wants them around.
3
The article didn't have anything about age groups so I'd bet that young liberals are skewing the results compared to the older ones.
Most of the older liberals I know have not changed very much and are actually appalled at some of the younger liberals views.
One thing I would like to add is that there are a lot of older liberals who are for lower immigration rates because they are hardcore environmentalist. They remember reading the Population Bomb when they were in high school so it's nothing to do with race.
Gaylord Nelson the founder of Earth Day said "In this country, it's phony to say "I'm for the environment but not for limiting immigration."
3
@William
That makes no sense. Immigrants are already living people. They will have an impact on the environment no matter what side of a border they're on, as will you and I.
The only way it makes sense is if the environmentalist argument is that the environmental toll of a growing human population doesn't matter unless it's within the US borders, which is just not the case.
Really serious environmentalists should consider adopting instead of having children instead, perhaps.
I do not think most scientists, at least the ones I know, have turned so deeply left. It leaves me to wonder if there needs to be more logic and critical thinking hurdles for admission to grad school. Too many people are not thinking of the many implications of what they are proposing, but leading with their hearts and their righteousness. Unfortunately, it is highly off-putting for people like me who assess people in a pretty much color and gender blind manner.
1
I suppose the easiest answer to why educated whites are more "left" today than 20 years ago is that an entire generation has died and a new generation reached its majority. So the question really becomes, why are the highly educated young more "left".
2
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
1
This is a very shallow column. Could it be that the world has changed, and that is why white educated Democrats have become more progressive? Could it be that the key word here is not white, but "educated" and education helps people see injustice more clearly?
Educated people tend to have more understanding of things on an abstract level - history, science, politics, economics, geography, the arts. Less educated people may have other kinds of valuable knowledge, but they tend to not see the systemic big picture of environmental, social and economic forces.
Obviously, these are gross generalizations with exceptions, but it is noteworthy that progressive, educated people tend to understand that we're all in this together and don't want to have advantages over others based on race. Sadly, too many under-educated people do not understand our interdependence, have a "them against us" mentality, and vote against their own best interests out of ignorance.
5
The biggest change in national politics has been the movement of "white middle class men" to the Republican Party. The only movement to the Democratic Party lately has been "upscale white women".
4
My gosh, I pay forward all I have and can do. I don’t hoard anything I achieve or am given. This is how to live, by caring for others, not keeping it and being defined by it. I am 60 years old and more liberal than ever.
5
Trump's most ingenious move may be pushing Democrats to embrace increasingly liberal stances towards immigration as a reaction against his unmitigated and vile racism. I fear that this will cost Dems the election.
College educated liberals (my people) need to look at immigration as an economic issue, not one of racial or social justice. Yes, Trump wants to keep immigrants out because they're brown. We need reject his premise and define the real debate: what are the consequences of admitting xxx number of immigrants and from which countries? Do the benefits outweigh the negatives? Automation is going to obliterate countless jobs over the next 10+ years. When Dems talk about increasing numbers of new arrivals it terrifies those who are already here, who face uncertain futures, and who are afraid of additional competition.
2
Raised in a evangelical non-union community I always wondered about the ideological discrepancies of our Republican city. As I aged and read, I found more truth in "the Left" than the manipulations of the the right. The symbiotic relationship of church elders (ie. business men) to keep my wage low and my attitude grateful in keeping with the rapacious overlords. Faith uses all the language of servitude and rights of kings to "keep them down on the farm". So I moved left, still independent, but with jaunted eyes toward both parties. Now with the blatant, harsh demeanor of this administration, the cloak was removed to see the naked "wicked?" capitalism in bed with a Republican Party.
2
Brooks' edited hypothesis is confirmed by my own experience: .... wokeness is mostly centered on prestigious universities and then their indoctrinated students who go on to teach receptive students . "As a white child of privilege you have to go to extraordinary lengths to prove you’re one of the good children of privilege and not one of the bad ones."
The extraordinary lengths include excoriating anyone who breaches the linguistic rules, IE "people of color" is fine yet to use of"colored people" is a sign of racial hatred with a penalty of ostracism from the movement. That a message or term is benign is immaterial, and if fact the more extensive the explanation, the more hatred is heaped on the miscreant- now indelibly labeled as "racist."
The same dynamics hold for "sexism" or "misogyny" For a clear example catch the recent article in the New Yorker "The Case of Al Franken" showing how this main is living with profound depression for the crime of having been a cutting edge comedian.
The metaphor of "witch hunt" --now one of the many abused by our President, is actually an accurate description of the hatred of those whose in-depth analysis of these trends transcend accepted identity words. Knowing this first hand as I have is something I wouldn't wish on anyone.
Sadly, this very newspaper is a leader in this dissent into calumny. I had written many examples before I gave up on the effort,still on my website AlRodbell.com
1
David Brooks, as he often does, confuses cause with effect. As one of the white educated liberals that David is commenting about, I can assure him that the racial lens does not drive my views on immigration and social justice. I've become more aware of the racial divide in this country because of the massive rightward shift of the Republican party that seems to be increasingly openly racist. Now under Trump, Republicans have dropped dog whistles to openly bigoted and racist positions, particularly on things like immigration. It is hard not to see the racism of Trump and his policies. The fact that he has a solid base of support and all Republicans are locked step with him is the shocker.
My positions have not shifted more liberal. I feel that same about immigration, healthcare, the environment, income inequality. etc. The Republican party has shifted dramatically to the right and it is not hard to see that shift is driven by racial animosity, particularly when you see how immigrants are viewed. My views, by contrast, seem dramatically more liberal but they are very close to people that were viewed by mainstream Republicans just 20 years ago. Obamacare, for instance, was a Republican idea after all.
8
I couldn't agree more. Context is everything. David Brooks seems to have ignored the Republicans' massive shift to the right. The Democratic Party in the US endorses policies embraced by the conservative parties in Europe; the Republican party embraces the policies of far right parties As far as the Democratic Party now representing three parties, that's nothing new. As Will Rogers said, "I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat."
Confusing cause and effect is basically conservatism
1
“For me, it’s a good idea to assume that people adopt their positions for honest, well-intentioned reasons.” For me, I realize during election cycles individuals adopt positions that at the moment, seem virtuous and politically advantageous. It is a tendency to find, foster, and further any political stance that mars or discredits the opposing party. Although that individual may have, likely in a non-verbal manner, exhibited practices that supported or enabled the opposite party's position. After the election cycle, these individuals quite often revert to behaviors similar to those they opposed during the election cycle. For example, racial and social inequality will never be a non-issue. Too many on the left use it effectively as a tool to artificially inflate their virtues over their opponent. After the election cycle, this tool is no longer useful. They pat themselves on the back for creating an awareness of the issues, but no measurable difference transpires. Many on the left return to practices, behaviors, or a state of apathy that enables racism, social injustice to continue, if not escalate.
2
I found it interesting reading the many comments of people obviously upset that Brooks won't join their side, or as one said it: "see the light." This speaks to the high degree of ideological bent, not just on the progressive left, which has overtaken these conversations.
This is an issue because conversations like the ones Brooks is attempting to start need all sides coming at this argument openly.
To make a bit of a leap, I wonder if ideology has supplanted religion in parts of civil society, rending them indignant to a roundtable of ideas?
2
Republicans have moved steadily to the right, substituting ideology and propaganda for pragmatism and facts. They embrace voodoo economics, hate deficits when Democrats are in power and run them when they are in power, play the race card in deniable fashion, and abandon science when it comes to the climate. And Republicans who know better do not object, as is shown most clearly with Trump, who could thus shoot someone on Fifth Avenue . . .
Democrats want basically to finish the New Deal and fulfill its promises (FDR's Four Freedoms), although they betrayed this goal with triangulation when St. Ronnie achieved widespread popularity. But now they are going back to what they were under FDR (except in race, where they are going back to LBJ).
Republicans used to have a Rockefeller-Goldwater split and a lively debate on how big government should be. Now Goldwater has won, but his naive but principled stand against civil rights has become the latest rise of the Confederacy, utterly betraying and purging the last vestiges of Lincoln.
3
It’s pretty simple actually, the left is seeking to promote a progressive and multiracial future turning toward hope and inclusion while the right represents (white) despair, selfishness and hypocrisy which inherently turns away from diversity, modernity and the future. This is a stark contrast not some subtle difference that should be confusing so many pundits.
3
Racism is in the same category as pornography. You know it when you see it, hear it or feel it. Racism used to be overt, now the GOP have morphed it into dog whistles. The educated whites see it in its naked fashion now. Trump has made it into an art form.
4
Why do young Democrats support the Palestinians? Because nowadays young Democrats are likely to be Marxists. Marxists and radical Muslims have formed a union to fight Israel and the United States. Islam is the most rightist philosophy on earth. Marxist is number 2 on the list. Marxists oppose freedom of speech and democracy in general.
In the United States there is the top 1 %. They are followed the second percentile--also quite rich. Each percentile is different.
What is the country in which the bottom 99% are all equally poor? North Korea.
3
You have forgotten another issue which has driven many Democrats to the Left: the radicalization of the Republican party. Over the past 30 years, and especially under Trump, the GOP has forsaken its core beliefs and its role as a reasonable (and necessary) counterbalance to the Democratic Party. As Republican leaders and their base have become ever more radical in their beliefs, shrill in their tone, and destructive of our institutions, there has been a countervailing thrust from many of the rest of us. Thank heavens.
6
tiny typo near end: "or" should be "of" in the parenthetical clause "(with its implied charge or racism against those who disagree)"
OK, I'm one of those educated white liberals. I'm pushing 80. My wife is also an educated white liberal, and she's pushing 80. Our daughter is is also an educated white liberal, and she's pushing 30. Why are we shoving the Democratic party to the left? For economic justice, that's why.
Issues like abortion, global warming, immigration and race and gender equity are important, but they pale in contrast to the shocking levels of economic injustice that have been visited upon us by successive Republican (and Republican Lite Democrats) administrations since the 60s. The effectively now-regressive income tax, the vitiation of the protective measures of Glass-Steagall, the export of jobs and manufacturing are what we stand against, and what we insist the Democratic party stand against as well.
Carville had it right (though Clinton failed to understand it: It's the economy, stupid!
9
Yes to all this. Something else to note about race in this country and that is that the class of people whom the white liberal left abhors the most, is most intimately involved with people of color. That is, they tend to have close relationships with Hispanics and African Americans and have children with them. They live in the same neighborhoods as minorities, yet the leftists of the left label them "racist" and "unwoke". When this sector of the left start to live among the people and climb down from their ivory towers they might have a clue about what the rest of America is like and start being less shocked about the way they vote. Wake up Democrats! I don't want to live under Trump for another minute.
4
@Silvana
More generalizing helps no one. I am solidly progressive, very middle class. Don't even live near an ivory tower. Don't you see this as it's own type of identity politics?
4
@Silvana
100% wrong. Studies show that animus towards immigrants and minorities is strongest in those communities where they are least present. You won't find nearly as many Republicans in dense, diverse cities. The democratic party still contains many working class whites.
3
Welcome back Mt. Brooks. This is the opinion writer I know and intensely dislike. For a brief moment I thought you had gone a bit soft but no, you have returned to your traditionalist roots. No diversity of opinion for you, not even in the service of policy development. You have called it out for being the sort of irresponsible behaviour that poses a threat to a congress created corporate and plutocratic world that has, over the last 40 years, become a traditionalist's dream but the bane for those left behind.
4
Educated Democrats just look far left by comparison to the current members of the GOP. There used to be compassionate, rational republicans, but they've now become christian trumpist, right wing bigots.
5
David Brooks, a simple question for you: When will you learn to distinguish “race” from “racism”?
Here is what you write about the group that includes me, born in 1932 with a birth certificate that says color – white (not “race”):
“The bigger truth is that this segment is now more likely to see politics through a racial lens. Racial equity has become the prism through which many in this group see a range of other issues.”
You are so ill informed about human difference that you could follow that sentence with this one, even more absurd:
“The racial lens also affects views on foreign policy topics. For most of the 20th century, for example, white liberals consistently sympathized with Israel more than with the Palestinians.”
Israelis are not a “race” even in USCB racist terminology, and neither are Palestinians. I see the Israel – Palestine dilemma through an historical, not “racial lens”.
More nonsense from you: “For example, immigration is now seen through the lens of race, in a way that simply wasn’t true two decades ago.”
President X issued Executive Order 13769 in 2017 to ban people from Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from coming to the USA. I think we can be sure that he was targeting people on the basis of religion, not “race”.
We who opposed that ban knew that “race” had nothing to do with it, so why do you write “lens of race”.
You insult me with your assertions.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
2
Why isn't it the defining issue for the GOP, David?
Gosh, you're just as good at gaslighting as most any other GOP-Trumper.
Just stop.
6
What you describe as left and far left in our American political society is a slow, move of allowing progress, change and adapting to an ever evolving world that Americans fear and become paralyzed . Americans only move at lightening speed if a quick and easy means to capitalistic greed presents itself. For a country that is supposed to be the wealthiest, included in countries ranked in the industrialized world, America lacks in educating its citizens, providing affordable comprehensive healthcare and in accepting the environmental and climate issues and the responsibility that comes with addressing these. Europe and other countries have acknowledged and managed these issues in their societies for over 20 years. So in essence, America is not the least progressive in its contemporary ideas, but retarded and out of step with the rest of industrialized nations. It is not a conservative or progressive issue as you would like to make it, but a dysfunctional issue of societal retardation. A society that can not educate its citizens at a level of high school and at least community college, with the ability for rational analysis to function in today's world to deal with the legal, financial, political, parenting and employment issues they face, is a failed one. Independent, new, different and creative thinking is impossible and radical, bringing national anxiety and fear. Fear breeds stagnation and delusion-- believing lies and only the old must be new. This is destructive.
2
White progressives are, for the most part, hypocrites. They’ll chant and rally against “oppression,” but ask them to include more low-income kids in their elitist schools and what happens? They pitch a fit. In 2018 when wealthy white parents in New York’s Upper West Side learned that the city planned to bring more lower income black children into the local very well funded public schools, they tried to block the project fearing their kids’ education would be affected. Did I mention these elitists are all progressive liberals?
16
Unfortunately, their shift left has led to greater intolerance. If you deny your racism (based on their definition), you're a racist. If you disagree on affirmative action, you're a racist. If you believe we should be color blind, you're a racist. Essentially, if you don't hold their exact views, you're a racist.
They have also added their own enforcement mechanism, by what has become known as "the identity police", who now coerce anyone not in compliance to follow their rules. Or else? You guessed it. You're a racist.
9
So here we are and have always been, Mr. Brooks, sincere white educated liberals. But I respectfully ask you, Where have you been?
3
Can you please now address what has happened on the right with the drift to insanity divorced from any rationality—conspiracy theories, science deniers, climate deniers, open bigotry and racism, the list goes on, Fox News, Info Wars, Rush Lumbaugh, What Aboutism in relation to actual Nazis, let's not forget about a rising breed of right wing mass shooters targeting black churches, synagogs, gay clubs, women. Andy you have a problem with progressives embracing RACIAL EQUALITY? That is a good thing. Good lord.
4
Even if you assume that every human being is born equal-- yet it's our thoughts, and actions --naturally make each one of us superior or inferior to each other. No government can fix that. It had been tried before with tragic results. V. I. Lenin's Bolshevik Soviet Union, paid the same salary to a street sweeper and medical doctor. Lenin and Stalin obsessed with equality and creation of "new equal man" exterminated millions and millions. Mao's China too hand to slaughter millions and millions, at least to get some semblance of equality. Hitler's Nazi Germany was also obsessed with equality: saw of Jews as a privileged class to be eliminated. Obsession with equality is at the very core of all authoritarian systems of brutal slaughter and oppression.
1
Define "white." White people see it as a set of physical traits. The rest of us see it as an annoying attitude.
2
And of those who marched with torches?
1
Racial equity was achieved with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That struggle was won 55 years ago.
What we have now are demands for racial patronage. It is inciting racial hatred and destroying our society. When black identity is promoted (it's become the official ideology of most of the Democratic party, and of the NYT), white identity follows close behind. Is that what they want?
5
"But over the past 20-odd years one group has shifted to an astounding degree: highly educated white Democrats. I’m not sure I understand why "
My guess is that they wanted to get as far as possible from the Republican Party, which values stupidity.
5
Words from the wordsmith. David, what do you mean by liberal? I am religiously liberal. Conservatism is the enemy of life. Life's desire is proliferation with constant change.
You don't understand the "lurch" to the Left? I assume you are talking about RACE, because the economic "lurch to the Left" is nothing more than a RETURN to FDR, perhaps our greatest president.
It baffles me that you do not understand. Just lately the U.S. has killed millions of poor colored people from S.E. Asia to the Middle East for, oops!, no discernable good reason. And our Christians have been pushing from behind, like Judas servants of Satan.
But there are the enlightened, the emancipated - mostly by education - certainly not any institutional religion. Exposed to education you learn to read and rationalise - with tests. You might discover, at university, that there is a colored kid who can beat you on every test, and is a nice guy.
With your skills of logic, rationality and maybe a little math, you discover that rich white folk have been ripping you off the same as they are ripping off everyone in the ghetto. That they are using our sick democracy for their own purposes.
In short, David, it's what everyone should know by now. The super wealthy are the only true constituency of the GOP. Period. Christians, to the extent they support the GOP are acting like idolaters.
1
This is an interesting question. One thing to note is that if everything is the fault of racism, then blacks will never be able to advance no matter how hard they try. In fact, they would be foolish to try, since the way to solve their problems is to eliminate racism.
Now 'racism' has been defined in such a way that it can never be eliminated. Anything any white person does is by definition racist. Any problem any black has is due to racism.
Therefore, white people will continue to rule and dominate society, specifically white people with elite Ivy-league educations.
Maybe these white liberals are not as dumb as they seem?
5
"White liberals have warmer attitudes toward other races than they do toward their own."
Other races didn't give the world Donald Trump.
3
Perhaps if enough Germans had invested themselves in a fight for racial equality in the late 1930's, the world would not have had to bleed itself dry to defeat one of the world's most terrible racist regimes. I'm not saying that we are close to what the Nazi party accomplished in Germany, but some fights have to be fought and won, and it should be done early enough to stave off something far worse. Still, in Trump's rants one hears very much the same thing as a German would have heard had the early Hitler had a twitter account.
2
The 20% of Uber racial lens only white people are the racists. As though racism only exists in USA? In South Africa, moderate black candidates are accused of privilege. I find myself running away from my DFL party in MN-Looking for a rational party, at least one inclusive Of white people. Or are white people to be expunged?
2
Perhaps Mr. Brooks, but you need to be ready to acknowledge that our "Left" is still more towards the middle than what's considered left by most of our European peers.
It's all relative and America on the whole has gone pretty far right.
2
Racial justice is important, but our crazy-quilt health care system and climate change have had even more impact on Democrats moving leftward.
Also, Republicans have consistently moved rightward, and Trump's outrageous statements and actions such as child separation are pushing us to push back.
1
Equity is a word I understand better over time. It's something we talk about a lot at our community college. What I've come to understand is that I become a more effective instructor and our institution becomes better if we find ways to remove obstacles. Student success goes up.
I view obstacles to success principally along income, race, religious, mental health, and gender lines. I consider your focus on "racial" equity simplistic and exclusionary.
There is no level playing field. Obstacles pertaining to the factors I listed above hinder student success. Most of our students don't get a degree. Without enough income and a good support network, a sick child or parent may keep a student out of class -or if they can pick up an extra shift and pay the rent now, they may choose to do that. If the car breaks down or a medical expense comes up, they may drop out, needing to pay back student loans while trying to keep the debt collector at bay. If being black increases the risk of being pulled over and given a ticket (or getting injured or killed), if addiction to opioids affects a student or loved one, it can be tough to finish courses and get a degree.
Empathy, education about obstacles, seeing my students' struggles... let's focus on equity and strive, as a nation, to remove obstacles, whatever the source. For me, income is the biggest obstacle. It varies hugely by sex, race, immigration status, whether anyone in a student's family has been to college.
This article is little more than another fairly well reasoned elucidation of the guilt that educated, globally experienced whites feel when they try to balance upsides/downsides of the development models they have imposed on the world for so long. As one of those guilty whites who has worked extensively throughout the English speaking world as a resident of England, Australia, NZ and the US, I have seen firsthand the inequalities in those countries. As an international civil servant for a decade, I have tried to alleviate associated inequalities in many other countries too. David Brooks knows well the shortcomings of our current systems, social, commercial, judicial, governmental. He is much less erudite on what needs to be done to correct them.
How can whites NOT have known of racial bias? I grew up in
Palos Verdes Estates, in So. Cal, my parents moved there
in 1935--the deed restrictions at that time were so set
in granite that Nat King Cole could not buy a home. Palos
Verdes also sent all the Japanese landowning farmers
from there to "detention camps" and took their land
which they didn't get back. Perhaps whites are "simply"
willing now to see what's been in place forever?
My puritan ancestors, arriving in 1634, were happy to declare Eden for themselves, and oh, by the way, those "Indians" were in the way.
4
Only a tiny sliver of any group, coastal white liberals or otherwise, attended "super-prestigious universities."
5
Wow. Ignored by Mr. Brooks is the most likely reasons for the shift. It's a natural reaction to the Republican policies that increase not only racial inequality but economic inequality. Also, we only seem more liberal because the Democratic party moved rightward in the '90's.
3
One explanation in shift in prioritizing issues such as racial equity among Democrats is the trend of more and more younger voters leaning Democratic, while the Republican party is dominated by older voters. Younger people overall have more progressive views on race, and they make these views more dominant in the party as they contribute more of a voice in it. A majority of young people (ages 18-29) agree with statements such as "Racial discrimination is the main reason many blacks can't get ahead." Meanwhile, among those 50 and over, the majority of those surveyed agreed with the counterpoint statement, "Blacks who can't get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition." https://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/4-race-immigration-and-discrimination/
Younger voters have grown up in a different world, and younger Democratic voters in particular are no doubt inspired by the African-American leader they grew up with, Barack Obama. They have seen him directly attacked by our current president, particularly in the way he led the relentless Birther attacks that questioned his citizenship. No wonder they feel motivated to challenge the status quo with regards to how people of color are treated. Even in our country's highest office, Obama was still subject to the scourge of racism.
2
I absolutely prefer outspoken allies to feckless moderates, but one challenging point of interest for me as a black male is that my well-meaning white liberal allies will often be the first to aggressively throw rhetorical bombs at the other side, but those same allies are also generally the last to feel the policy effects of their rhetoric.
I try to draw from Dr. King. He showed that one must say what one means unflinchingly, but one must also be willing to deal with the other side, agree to often-unsatisfying compromises, and sometimes take the L in the short term to keep moving the ball forward in the long term. The Civil Rights movement was not one leap but rather many unsatisfying baby steps. When well-meaning folks (who have the luxury of not living with the policy consequences of political failure) engage in rhetorical bomb-throwing, purity tests, and the like, I fear they fail to realize the box they are putting folks like me in.
If you vilify everyone who doesn't agree with you today as the devil, then there's no moral countenance for compromise or consensus tomorrow. Without consensus or compromise, no changes that would make my life better can become law and no politicians who might actually help me can get elected, because they've been "sullied" by the appearance of being too cozy with the devils. Without said laws and said politicians, the very conditions the "woke" are fighting, the very conditions that oppress me, are destined to remain the status quo.
7
@Michael Way
Hi Michael,
Thank you for writing this. I am one of those rhetorical-bomb-throwing white leftists. Are you certain that vilification is not the way out, here? In my eyes, the American Constitution is so stacked against the majority that this type of rhetoric may be needed.
We all live within our own time, and it is very difficult to see the big picture until after the fact. Could it not be the case that "Come Together" is the wrong message for today?
I tend to think that we need to elect more uncompromising "woke leftists," not less. Poppa Mitch isn't willing to compromise; why give the barn away?
1
@BB
Hi BB,
Your concerns are well -stated and not at all unfounded. You are right that it is very difficult to see the big picture until after the facts. That's as true for me as it is for you, and remembering said truth will hopefully keep us all intellectually humble.
I think often of the founding of this nation, noting that the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights could never have come to pass without a message of "come together". That said, there is of course room for differing voices in our national dialogue. Those on the extremes serve as moral compasses for our dueling ideologies, while those in the middle smooth the rough edges of our dissent in ways that allow us to coexist.
The danger of electing more "woke leftists" is that it removes people who enable coexistence-in-dissent and thus provokes more extremism out of the other side. If we want more Mitch McConnells we can run more extreme leftists. If we want fewer Mitch McConnells we may want to run more people who can win in the states that give Mitch McConnell his majority, and thus his power.
Once we lay down the electoral precedent that McConnell's style is a fruitless electoral loser and our style does not mean the end of all things for our non-extreme opponents, I suspect an admittedly soft majority based on consensus can prove a rather hard wall against those who would oppress our citizens or otherwise degrade our institutions. That more than anything will help people like me.
Gosh David, maybe because people, not just Democrats, believe in issue solutions that affect them. Is Health Insurance a left issue? Is Immigration reform a left issue(the Senate passed a bipartisan bill overwhelmingly)? Are community policing, housing, and proper schooling concerns subjects that belong to one party? There has to be some realization that some problems do not just belong to one party.
Through his clever (yes) rhetoric Trump is effectively pushing the social left farther left, and the economic left farther left. Race is increasingly used because it is an emotionally charged stance. Logically, is immigration good or bath for the US? Is illegal immigration good or bad for the US? Is a higher minimum wage good or bad? The answer, I feel, is it depends. It depends doesn’t win votes. Democrats are likely donning race and cultural issues, because their socioeconomic platforms, virtuous and good as they may be, take a few election cycles to properly assess their full effect. This is not an election about policy. Our dear and beloved POTUS may not be a Rhodes Scholar, but underestimate him at your peril.
1
This is not complicated. Your piece implicitly assumes, more or less, that highly-educated Democrats have moved to the left while everything else has remained constant. What a puzzle that is, you say, how can we explain it? The reality, however, is that LOTS has changed and the most highly-educated are, understandably, the segment of the population most likely to see and grasp that. They read! They think critically! They observe the changes happening around them! Their reaction is not unbidden movement to the left, it’s a sophisticated, intelligent response to changes they see as unjust or wrong-headed. Education enables them to see and understand those changes and then fashion a thoughtful, evidence-based response to them. Not complicated!
7
It's not all that mysterious. As the right has started to flirt with fascism, the left has pulled a bit in the other direction. Although, per a chart published recently in this very paper, the left is still closer to the center than the right is.
As for your final questions, an awareness of how race may affect policy decisions is always essential. It's the only way to ensure that our government works for the benefit of the greatest number of its citizens.
3
During and after the Civil RIghts Movement, racial equity meant equal opportunity for everyone. To today's left, it means equality of outcomes, regardless of ability or effort, and all the intransigent achievement gaps can only be ascribed to racism. It would thus seem that those darn Asians are even more racist than whites.
7
When rich white people immerse themselves in lower class environments, where I live, it's usually "slumming".
Just sayin'
2
In my High School years I spent some vacations in Germany. I developed a great affection for the Germans. And I admired the picture-postcard perfect little villages of Bavaria and Swabia. Naturally in the back of my mind was always the question of how Nazism could take root in such an idyllic setting.
So this for me this is deja vu all over again. I know many white liberals and have the warmest affection for them. But there are some topics that I never discuss with them because doing so would expose a side of them that I really don't want to know. They become completely irrational and say monstrously stupid things. Worse, they adopt a tone of smug moral superiority. The rule seems to be that the more ridiculous the belief they espouse, the greater their virtue.
Just to take one of countless examples. White liberals have convinced themselves of the lie that black boys in elementary and high school are disciplined at a higher rate than whites or Asians because of teachers' racism. That is, they believe that TEACHERS -- the profession in the country that is most steeped in this sort of nonsense -- are racists when the step into the classroom!
In an instant, a crowd of decent human beings can become a vicious mob. The despair of many white liberals over the slow social advancement of blacks has led to hysterical charges about a systemic white racism. Partly this is to protect black neighbors' feelings. But true friendship has to rest on the truth.
9
The paragraph beginning "the more cynical take" is the critical one here. We used to call it the guilt of the limousine liberals. No interest by these folks in any program that would reduce their privilege. Silly talk about free college for all. How about free rides to Ivy League colleges for all students with 30 ACT's and above in Hillbilly Elegy areas? Nah. I suppose they're smart enough. But I bet they aren't woke. And .. did you ever hear a term more arrogant than WOKE. Instead of debating the issues rationally, I just say you're asleep if you don't accept my ideology -- not arguments!
3
I just want to make a comment that will get me the most recommended votes. Then I will feel accepted and cool. Then go out and take some selfies and post it on facebook so I can get some likes and then I will feel good about myself because everyone likes me. What a doomed society. How about some personal responsibility. If you go into a public library and learn everything in there about any topic you want from Anatomy to south Asian botany at least you maybe come competitive in the labor market. Spend your days with your friends hanging out, marching at Union Square and then need money for rent with no marketable skill.....lets blame others like the librarian wouldn't let me in because I was.....I mean he/she was not woke.
4
"What had once been seen as an intractable regional conflict between a democracy and a series of authoritarian regimes trying to destroy it is now seen as a conflict between a white colonialist power and the brown people it oppresses"
The irony of this viewpoint is that about half of Israeli Jews are themselves brown. They are the descendants of the 750,000 refugees from neighboring Arab countries who fled the anti Jewish programs that engulfed the Arab world after Israel won it's War of Independence.
4
Mr. Brooks, a dependable defender of vulture capitalism, is upset because in his view white Democrats have moved left. Yet he takes no note of the fact that Republicans have moved so far right Mussolini could sneeze on them.
2
‘White liberals have warmer attitudes towards other races than they do their own’ - David Brooks. What else is there to really say?
3
David my credentials:
1932 birth certificate shows Color – white
I have a Ph. D. and am professor emeritus.
Vote straight Democratic Party.
You say I therefore very likely “see politics through a RACIAL LENS” a lens you fail to describe. Instead you write:
“The racial lens also affects views on foreign policy topics. For most of the 20th century, for example, white liberals consistently sympathized with Israel more than with the Palestinians.”
No racial lens there since there are no Israeli or Palestinian “races”.
Another example of your puzzling approach to “race”: “What had once been seen as an intractable regional conflict…is now seen as a conflict between a white colonialist power and the brown people it oppresses.”
If you are referring to Palestinians as a “brown people” race, then you are in error. The US Census Bureau classifies all whose lines of descent go back to the Middle East as white.
I do want my country of birth to offer more equitable approaches to all my fellow citizens who do not get the Universal Health Care (UHC) that they would be given if they lived here in Sweden.
SE UHC provides Public Health Equity wherever you may have been born, whatever your religion, whatever your SES level. That is the equity my fellow liberals desire. WE are already members of the only race, the human, genetically fundamentally equal.
I look forward to your clarifications.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
1
@Larry Lundgren
Oh please Professor Lundgren this doesn´t make sense today.
Nobody knows what "left" should mean here, many readers think the understanding might have shifted or conditions might have changed but there is no idea how it had before and how it is right now. The Op-Ed says something about the views of political scientists who each of them have a view of their own but despite everyone has a different one they all are using the same terms. "Race" is conflated with "left" and "right"most of the time whatever "left" is here - it´s definitely not the European-international understanding you and I know, it must be something else but don´t ask me what it is - and you are right, the last sentences op this Op ed you have quoted openly don´t fit to the article.
I´m still puzzling what this piece is all about but thankfully I´m not the only one here because the overwhelming majority of American commenters have already said they don´t understand what this should say either - so it seems to be not on me luckily - therefore all commenters are writing their comments at cross purposes, nobody is able to say something about the subject of this article so there is no hope that anybody could get wiser at the end.
Believe me there is no use for your attempt of clarification on this base so let me suggest you should wait for the next article to discuss your issue - like I do also.
P.S. It´s not nice to offer a really "left" topic to Americans on the quiet like you did...
It is white virtue signaling to block getting cancelled for a socially unpopular opinion like maybe countries need to enforce their borders, the American military is an actual force for good in the world, higher black incarceration rates have to do with higher crime rates, or quality standards actually matter.
4
David, You are a bright man and enjoy your show on PBS with Mark Shields, but at some time you too will realize that you can't be a Republican anymore. Your conservative party was hijacked by Fox, Rush and God knows how many radio talk shows. Perhaps you will just have to be an Independent, waiting out the many years in the wilderness until "The Party of Lincoln" wanders back to sanity.
2
"I’m not sure I understand why this group has undergone such a transformation, but it has, and the effects are reshaping our politics".
Maybe because these white people (who seem to be the only people you consider) don't hate gay people, or Latinos, or African-Americans, even though yoir Republican party instructs them to?
Maybe people are waking up yp the the garbage you've been peddling for years, David. I don't think history will be looking kindly upon you, David.
3
This didn't happen in a vacuum. Israel is getting far more ruthless under Bibi, crossing lines human rights lines that Israel had not crossed previously. Immigration was made a racial topic by Trump.
The rise of tea party populism, racial attacks on Obama, etc etc.
2
The media is partly at fault for fomenting racial division.
We have all heard the names of various young black kids killed by police officers around the country. It makes national headline.
Or when a group of white kids seemingly taunt a Native American. Again, national headlines.
Or a white person calls the cops on a group of black people in some park in some random locality. Again, national headlines.
Why is this national news? It really is a key question to understanding bias in the media today.
Obviously racial agitation sells papers. Just like Drudge Report links to videos on weekly basis of young blacks committing assault or fighting in the street.
And because there is a narrative of oppression adopted by left leaning reporters and editors.
When of course sober analysis reveals that police shootings are not racially biased (as reported in this very paper--albeit buried and not even covered by an actual NYT reporter):
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2019/07/22/us/22reuters-usa-police-race.html
Why is this not more prominent news than some one-off anecdotal report?
3
If you've spent much time with the (real) Chinese in the world, you will find they think this whole equality and minority rights stuff is a defense strategy invented by white people to prevent "Asians" (i.e., the "real" Chinese) from taking the rightful place in the world as warranted by their superior numbers. Seen in this way, the move to the left makes complete sense if you're a white person about to be demographically displaced. The minority you are protecting is you.
1
From my experience as a legal brown immigrant to this country I have consistently found that black people are far more racist than whites. What really needs to happen is that the demonocrats need to stop pandering to illegal immigrants and minorities and focus on making everybody's lives better
3
So many Brooks columns read like he had a thought and then wrote a whole column to indirectly lay the groundwork for that thought because he knows the thought itself is not palatable to the readership.
In this case the thought was "I want to say some things some people will probably say are racist".
1
Rather I would ask how is it that someone as intelligent and well-educated as you has not moved to the left? We have all been living through the same disturbing events. I see you perpetrating the myth that liberals want open borders with Mexico when what people are saying is that if you want to protect the border from people who cross illegally then you must create a set of immigration procedures that work. I see you questioning white people who fight for racial equality. Why have we finally confessed to the sins of thinking we are superior because of the color of our skin? Why have we admitted that red-lining in real estate created economic stagnation or worse for Americans of African Descent? My question is, why have we waited this long?
1
David, one fundamental fact that you fail to mention at all is that the entire country has been moving steadly towards the right for nearly 40 years. In that context, white liberals appear super-lefty, when in fact they are just hoping for what we thought (erroneously) we had achieved 50 years ago.
3
Mr. Brooks: I’m not sure why being woke to reality is so confusing to you. Why is an awareness of racism, or gender issues, or the immediate threat of climate change so perplexing? Would you rather we return to a time when we swept those issues under the rug? Are you clueless about the privilege your whiteness has afforded you in your lifetime? Do you think we should just whistle past the graveyard on climate change?
The only answer I can come up with is that for a conservative, time is supposed to stand still; the past is the present and ever will be.
But, in your confusion you have painted the Left with a reductionist brush. Yes, the Left has awakened to see the world through a broader lens, but it has not lost sight of what it has always been concerned with – economic justice and issues like jobs and taxes. Remember, the middle class used to be the Democratic base until the party abandoned them. The Left (not necessarily the Democratic Party) is very concerned with economic justice and the damage that economic inequality does to the social fabric. It is concerned with labor and unions. It is very concerned that unfettered capitalism – your capitalism – is like a vampire sucking the life-blood out of the working class, and that it is waging class genocide with globalization and automation.
So, you can stand on the sidelines and scratch your head – or you can join the progressives and wake up.
5
"How White Republicans Moved Right." There, fixed it.
2
You’re starting to sound like a member of the intellectual dark web David.
2
That’s because rich white people like in a fantasy bubble - the reality they exist in is like an SNL skit
1
The first Dem to promise free pistachio ice cream on Tuesdays has my vote.
2
Yeah, they moved so far left they elected Trump!
“Democrats often give you what Republicans promise.”
- Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Trump might be a racist, but our government has been over many decades!
As long as you intentionally divide the people along the racial lines, you are a racist.
As long as you collect the race-based statistics, you are a racist.
If you believe that a color of a skin determines yours or somebody else’s destiny, you are a racist.
If you separate the people based on a quantity of skin pigments, you are a racist.
If you care more about one group of people just because of their skin while completely ignoring their moral, ethic or character traits, you are a racist.
Forget Trump!
The question is whether you are a racist!
By the way, any column singling out the people just because they are white, black or brown is per definition a racist one.
1
The triangulated irony here is Biden’s popping off about the “Faustian Bargain” Christians made with Trump...
First, Joe – the whole point of haggling with Faust is to gain unlimited knowledge and access to worldly pleasures...
(at least that’s what Wikipedia says)
Sounds more like you’d want to catch a flight with Jeffrey, than be cramped in a middle seat on AF1 with only Fox News available on the seat-back monitor – and no mute button...
Second, this “racial lens” is nothing more than the usual socialist come-on to whom they perceive as the underdog in the mix...
And with whom they can form an ephemeral majority coalition, for a day in November...
You know – all those people hanging around, waiting for free stuff...
But – going beyond race, to the next glorious people’s challenge to be resolved by tossing money into a fan...
A most recent plan – by a candidate polling at the 1% level – is a ten-trillion dollar plan to fight climate change...
It’d cost less than 0.05% of that to buy every person in France a 5000 BTU AC...
They have all the juice they’d need – if they'd just turn the nuclear reactors back on...
'Moved Left' ????
Is this some kind of a dog whistle ??
Can we focus on policies ?
Is racism good ?? Can we agree it's not ??
2
While commenting on US policy toward Israel, Mr. Brooks concealed from readers that his son was a member of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces - the primary organization in Israel that enforces a brutal and illegal military occupation of Palestine. Mr. Brooks is not credible.
2
White, black, or brown, we are all losing ground and you are not going to divide us.
I am very surprised that no commentor has picked up on this sentence in Brook's essay:
"White liberals have warmer attitudes toward other races than they do toward their own."
This is loaded, and sounds straight from Fox News at best.
Talk about identity politics!
Stop trying to pretend that you are a moderate David. It's not working.
And please do not give any more advice to Democrats about how to moderate to get your vote. Fix your own party.
5
If I may , MR Brooks I do have a logical if not obvious reason as to why white educated Liberals have moved to the left. A knee jerk reaction to the the Republican Party extreme Right ward turn, and I am not just talking Trump.
This way preceded him, looking back as far as Reagan and The Moral Majority, there you will find the reason that liberals are so pro abortion rights.
Moving on to G W Bush and his associates like Cheney and the Neo Cons, there you will find the reason behind white liberals turn against the Right Wing Israeli Government , ' not Israel or its people' . Also to understand our skeptic attitude toward war look no further than Iraq.
Lastly we should look at Trump and his racism, his equating Neo Nazi's with those that oppose them, his attempt at a Muslim ban, his downgrading of Mexicans, his assertion that Africa is ' well we know what he said about Africa'. Furthermore Trumps denial of Climate Change and science in general.
Mr Brooks all of the above have made this white liberal more left wing and as long as the Republican Party remains with their collective heads buried in the sand,I too will in all probability continue left ward.
In terms of my whiteness and my apparent need to constantly be aware of the privilege that has brought me ,that comes from what my parents and grand parents taught me about race,and poverty, and how they are intertwined. In addition to my simply 'being awake ' and not living my life wearing blinders.
3
It seems obvious that Trump's ever more strident advocacy of white supremacy explains why liberal whites increasingly advocate for racial justice- How else to resist his crusade to Make America White Again.?
2
"I’m not sure I understand why this group has undergone such a transformation".
David, I am a former Republican, one like you, who believed all that guff Ronald Reagan was lying about like: "Cut Spending", "break up the Unions", "support firing everyone at GE so Jack Welch can get a big bonus",
and, of course, Ronnie's incessant, but, quiet, drumbeat against affirmative action.
It is the latter issue that truly converted me to a liberal. Here is how.
I was sitting across from a white male friend at Eastman Kodak in 1995. Kodak had never really hired any African Americans, except, to do the dirtiest jobs in manufacturing, and, then only starting that hiring in the late 80's.
My friend, at that lunch, described how he barely graduated from college his grades were so bad, and, he got hired at Kodak because his Dad was an HR manager.
I remember thinking, wow, I worked like crazy to get a 3.9 GPA in college, and, Kodak hired me because I was qualified. I have a minority last name.
At any rate, eventually Kodak hired another 3.9 GPA person, who was African American, into my white male friend's group.
My friend went berserk. "Affirmative Action" is getting all these blacks into Kodak!! He was outraged.
It dawned on me that the recipient of real affirmative action was my white friend. The black guy was just a qualified employee.
I have been a flaming liberal ever since. I see clearly now.
508
@Michael Thank you Michael! I have been saying this for years. Affirmative action was invented by white males for their benefit only. If you were white and male you could apply for jobs, apply for promotions, get credit at a bank, buy a house, get scholarships for higher education. None of that was available to women and minorities until 'affirmative action' laws came into being and now what we hear from those white males and plenty of white women too is just how unfair it all is. They didn't seem to think so when the identity politics they were playing were white and male. Now the focus is rightly on other identities and look which groups continually throws a fit.
39
@Michael
Conflicted as you probably were, I supported Trump over Clinton. However, Trump's latest comments regarding the 'squad' and how they should go back home, makes it imposible to vote for him again.
I still disagree with most of the white liberal left wing agenda (open borders, reparations) and their obsessive accusations of racism, misogyny, homophobia and labeling people they disagree with as Nazis.
I think sitting out next election is my only option.
50
@EDC Spot on! We've all known such college graduates, who thought their skin color was a sinecure. I'm reminded of all the well-heeled students I encountered who avowed, "It's not what you know, but who you know, that counts."
"Who you know" is another facet of "race."
21
I have my own two theories, one benevolent and one more sinister.
The first is that increased education exposes one to broad perspectives. Repeated practice in putting oneself in other's shoes, and learning how drastically cultures vary, has the obvious effect of making one more relativist, and seeing how arbitrary and often unfair existing power structures and personal circumstances can be. It directly undermines religious beliefs and all other beliefs that tend to support existing hierarchies without basis in fact. This is all inherently liberalizing.
The more malevolent explanation is that wokeness provides an easy way to feel morally righteous and display virtue, without requiring any actual sacrifice. Enhancing opportunity for illegal immigrants or racial and sexual minorities does not pose any threat or require any sacrifice by the educated professional class. They are not the ones who will face increased competition. It is the construction workers and landscapers and restaurant workers who face increased competition and actual economic threat. The educated class merely gets an increasing pool of low-cost labor to provide services for them, and increasing property values.
I know many people who strictly adhere to speech codes to portray moral correctness, but would not be caught dead in a Walmart or Applebees. They rarely champion economic policies that uplift the lower classes, but impose actual economic costs on them, with the same fervor they do to wokeness.
4
@kryptogal
Dunno about Applebees, have not been near one when hungry.
Walmart is a different story. Walmart imports cheap stuff from China, so produces no manufacturing jobs here.
Walmart, by selling cheap, destroys local businesses.
Walmart does not pay a living wage. They supply forms to their employees to apply for food stamps.
@Tom, SFBA
All true, yet many have no issue shopping at Target or Amazon, when those companies have exactly the same draconian labor practices and detrimental impact on local businesses (Walmart pays more than Target actually). Which leads me to believe that it's more about not liking to be around or associated with Walmart shoppers.
1
@kryptogal. Could be. Went into a Wallmart once on a road trip. Was met at the door by a group of friendly greeters who helped direct us. No personal complaints. Point taken on Amazon.
1
Please tell me what issue is not illuminated through the lens of human equality. I can't think of one. Maybe because I'm an American dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal. "Racism" is just a subset of the rejection of that proposition made by our president and his party.
1
Okay, I'll bite.
I grew up in a lower middle class evangelical Christian conservative single parent household. My widowed mother, a saint btw, valued compassion, mercy, love, truth, faithfullness...the Christian fruits of the spirit. She also valued education and knowledge and busted her tail first to homeschool me while subsisting on veteran's survivor benefits and then to send me to a prestigious New England prep school.
Over the course of my education, through prep school into college, graduate school, law school I moved away from the conservatism of my youth and became what many would consider extremely liberal.
I have given this transformation a great deal of thought. How did it happen? Why did I change? My conclusion is that I did not change, that the morals and tenets under which I was raised informed my present political thinking. How can an informed, engaged, compassionate Christian exposed to many worldviews and people of different cultures and walks of life not be liberal?
My origins are not privileged. As I said, my youth was one of subsistence only. But I had education. And education is the enemy of ignorance, breadth of experience the enemy of intolerance, compassion the enemy of greed and self-service.
I am a highly educated, very liberal white Democrat. But I didn't start out that way.
7
@Wagnus DL
If your surviving parent didn't have to worry about making the rent or you'd be homeless, sorry you were not "subsistence" poor.
Even back then, people who could afford (socially and financially) to send their children to prep school were considered at minimum "not poor".
The fact that you view your childhood in such romantic terms, and claim with a straight face that you haven't changed shows how blind you really are.
1
@Viv
That is a fair point though rather harshly made.
I won't stoop to comprehensively establish my poverty bona fides. But did you read the part where I said that our only support was veteran's survivor benefits? Look it up for the 80s. It's not a lot.
1
@Viv
It would seem that Wagnus DL grew up with genuine Christian values. Which have become rather hard to find, what with all those "Christians" who love Trump so much.
1
Mr. Brooks, first, you assume that whiteness, elitism, and higher education are one and the same. But not all highly educated people are white, and not all education comes through elite universities. I would suggest that perhaps most people who have access to information about the history and present of racial inequality, and who are aware of multiple ways of analyzing that history and present, tend to come to the conclusion that systemic racism exists - and that they should take action to challenge it. Yes, even - especially - if they have personally benefited from that racism. That sounds like an excellent social change to be taking place. It also makes sense in an era in which we are experiencing dramatic climate change and recognizing that future generations will need to "have less" (of privilege, wealth, and material consumption) rather than "have more."
The problem isn't that people with access to knowledge have moved to the left, but that institutions of higher education continue to exclude students who are not wealth and white (see Georgetown University's report "Separate and Unequal"), and that public schools rarely teach the critical media literacy and love of knowledge that support self-education. The fields of what I'll broadly call ethnic studies, and critical theories of race, have been developed over centuries by SCHOLARS OF COLOR! who happened to gain access to higher education. Yet these scholars are not part of public school curricula. THAT's the problem.
I don't think it is a matter of some voters moving left but more that the scale we seem to measure by has shifted to the right. In the 60's Medicare was not radically left but today extending it to more is? Civil rights was improved but not considered radically left and now voting rights are being curtailed?
2
Dear Mr Brooks
I grew up in Youngstown Ohio. A lot of my classmates were Democrats that worked at Lordstown. They're now Trump supporting Republicans. Party allegiance is fleeting. Do you recall Dr Seuss's book "The Sneetches"? The liberal Democrats you are referring to are the old school Rockefeller Republicans, i.e. Arlen Spector. Also H. W. Bush is reported to have voted for Hillary Clinton, as well as Jeff Flake. As for coastal liberal states, remember that Ronald Reagan and Mitt Romney were governors of two of the blues states in the union. Then again, they were common sense conservatives. Their type are persona no-grata in today's Republican party.
1
Why not examine why the GOP has swung so far to the right? It’s hard not to be more aware of injustice, racial and otherwise, when you have as your president Mr. Donald J Trump. It isn’t so subtle these days, and the GOP seems to be largely just fine with it.
1
Since when is racial equity a sign of moving "left"? Racial equity is a defining American value, not a leftist value. Just because the right wing has gone full blown racist, does not equate to making opposition to racism a belief of the left. It merely means that the right has moved further toward white nationalism than it was in the past. Opposition to racism is still a centrist position no matter how far right the GOP goes.
4
Brooks propably had no one to run his thesis by, but if he had, particularly were it a person of color, they might have pointed out that his point of reference is that "conservative" whiteness is the norm, and everything else falls within a range of abnormal. If equity is a political argument based on race, gender, religion or or any other external factor, then the ideal that "all men are created equal" really is what critics have said all along: "men" meant and still means only white, land-owning males.
He seems to be saying that there's something artificial or unnatural about whites seeing racial injustice.
2
Watch "The Great Hack", the Netflix expose of Cambridge Analytica and the main driver for movement to extremes in both parties is clear: we have all been manipulated; pushed and pulled from moderate to extreme positions on almost every subject. Wholesale harvesting and sale of data from social media and other online sources, that reveal individual personality traits, preferences, fears, aspirations--indeed, data that catalog the full range of human thought and emotion--and the weaponization of this data in the pursuit of political power through targeted campaigns of disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda, has brought the electorate and nearly the whole of civil society to the current polarized state described by Brooks in this piece. Candidates have learned that it is easier to win elections by driving large numbers of the electorate to extreme positions, and then taking leadership of those positions, than to take moderate positions in the hope of appealing to broad swaths of voters. Given that social media is unlikely to go away, and Government is unlikely to be able to curtail the weaponization of social media data, one potential remedy might be to move to ranked choice voting for all elections. Such a voting system would have the effect of driving candidates to adopt more centerist positions to appeal to greater numbers of voters. (See https://ballotpedia.org/Ranked-choice_voting_(RCV).
1
My biggest concern is that, with the focus on race, we lose focus on inequality and infrastructure. Simply being not racist (which should be a baseline expectation) shouldn't be enough to be called progressive.
4
I think a simpler explanation why white Democrats have moved left is self-interest. A traditional definition of "leftist" policy is more government assistance. For example, forgiveness of college debt, more housing assistance, more healthcare assistance, more retirement assistance, and more education assistance.
So part of the reason for the leftward drift is some of these program disproportionately benefit whites. In particular, college debt forgiveness only benefits those who attended college, which tend to be more white than the general population. Housing assistance like mortgage deduction only benefits homeonwers, which tend to be more white. And retirement assistance tends to benefit whites more because they have longer life expectancy.
Another reason is that white Democrats tend to live in cities with high cost of living. For example, the typical white Democrat living in coastal California does not feel rich by local standards. But is in fact rich by national standards. So they think of themselves as the "struggling middle class" when in fact they are not.
1
"The truth has a known liberal bias". Perhaps as polarization via the NRA, FOX and the GOP has been exacerbated, those with critical thinking skills have responded to the hate with a drift to the left. I believe the larger factor is the extreme movement to the right by conservatives and the bilious racism, nationalism and anti-tax rhetoric spread by the Mercer's, Koch's and Murdoch's that is so widely accepted by a plurality of the voters.
1
Help me understand what your saying here, David:
"The most direct theory is that America is a land of systemic racism. Highly educated white progressives have woken up to this fact and are out in front of other groups."
In the first sentence you suggest systemic racism in America is a theory; in the next you suggest it's a fact.
You are highly educated. I don't think you identify as a progressive but do you think systemic racism is a fact or is this comment for the sake of the argument you want your readers to consider?
I think it's a fact. I think justice is the foundation of a decent society. It must be the key principle of every public policy we undertake. Whether that policy concerns immigration, environment, international relations, public education, economics, health, crime and punishment, or anything else. Without justice no one is free.
Like you, I think it's a good idea to think people assume their positions for honest well-intentioned reasons. There are few, very few, Republicans in Congress who are doing that, though. You've seen them. Don't you agree? They use sophistry to get what they want. Getting what they want is more important to them than justice. Who among them puts the good of the country first?
I am a retired white man in my sixties with a bachelor's degree in the liberal arts. I am not a Democrat. I vote for Democrats because they are not Republicans. In today's America these ideas make me a radical. And that makes me sad.
4
I disagree with your assumption that it's only highly educated,white Democrats who've moved to the left.I live in a rural area and have noted over the past several years that with the possible exception of guns,young whites with no college have also moved strongly to the left.They favor universal healthcare,either they or a close relative is in a culturally mixed marriage,they have no problem with LBGTQ persons,they support legalized marijuana and they realize that immigrants(here it's Hispanics and Asians)are not at all the way Trump describes them.The change has much more to do with age than with previous political orientation or formal education.These young people have learned "on the ground" not up in the highly educated air and...by the way,I, am "highly educated."
3
The issues you identify as the “most left-wing segment” of the Democratic party are “abortion, global warming, immigration and race and gender equity.” Other than immigration, a clear majority of people in this country agree that women should have the right to an abortion, climate change is a problem (if not an existential one), and there should be race and gender equality. The major reason we still have any divide on these issues is because the right has used its money (and thus power) to distort the debate on these and pocketbook issues to fool the working class and team up with hypocritical Evangelicals to rule as a tyrannical minority.
But none of this could have happened without the GOP of the past 60 years, aided by right-wing pundits such as yourself that failed to explicate or, more likely, even understand the issues. Wrong about Vietnam. Wrong about Iraq. Wrong about the need for bloated defense budgets. Wrong about the pitfalls of unregulated capitalism (see climate catastrophe and massive inequality).
There are not 2 sides to every issue. As much as it may pain you to hear this, the “most left-wing segment” is simply right about most of the critical issues of our time.
4
"But over the past 20-odd years one group has shifted to an astounding degree: highly educated white Democrats. I’m not sure I understand why this group has undergone such a transformation, but it has, and the effects are reshaping our politics."
Simple...White Guilt.
If they were genuine to their talk, they would walk to life of poverty and give their possessions to the poor brown victims but...they are vacuous hypocrites and want other people to pay for their guilt trips.
7
@scythians
They don't need to give up their possessions. But it would be nice if they changed employment policies that are so clearly bigoted and biased against the poor for the crime of being poor.
When the MTA starts handing out flyers to advertise the cost of prosecuting fare evasion is higher than just simply giving those people a free ride, you know you have a problem.
This clearly explains why Harvard has embraced and codified racist discrimination against Asians.
Please the highly educated will throw other highly educated white and children of every color under the bus in a NY minute unless they pay for that access or privilege.
3
"The easiest way to describe the shift is to say that educated Democrats have moved steadily to the left."
And the principal reason, drum roll, please: Our post-Modern Maoist reeducation camps and their equally well-educated fellows in our Sovietized mass-media have been stomping it into the brains of "educated Democrats" for decades.
Of course, they don't have a clue what that means. We've spent billions on "racial equity" via these "educational" institutions, suffered through eight years of Obama cultural Marxism, and still these Democrats are not satisfied.
That being the case, it seems, that the real solution to this "equity" problem is for them to stop pushing off their self-indulgent social pathology on their fellow citizens, quit their jobs so others might have them, move out of their houses to improve "equity" living conditions and then hand over their key-fobs and 401s to their "social justice police" and be on their way back to wherever it was their American immigrant lineage came from.
It seems that is the only thing that will truly satisfy these "educated Democrats", other than, of course, use the means and wealth of their fellow citizens to satisfy their lust for social "equity".
2
"In 1994, only about a sixth of Democrats who had gone to graduate school said they were consistently liberal. In 2015, more than 50 percent did."
Hmm, I wonder what happened in 1995 to make Democrats decide they were liberal - do you have no thoughts on that, Mr. Brooks?
Warning: spoiler alert coming up!! Newt Gingrich became the Speaker of the House in 1995. No, it's not his cheating on his wives. You know exactly what he did with the Republican party, so why are you being so falsely naive?
5
I'm in the cynical camp, because I know these people, am one of them really, and I know what is said when people are unguarded and totally honest.
Our parents had the Civil Rights, our grandparents WW2. We have climate change, I suppose, but it is going nowhere and isn't controversial unless you're a nutbar. Race, though? That's perfect. It is the perfect way to demonstrate your virtue, and the more extreme you go with it, the more you stand out in a crowded field. When you live in a comfortable enclave, having personal adornments you can point to is important. As for the consequence of it, or how to go about it, or if a lot of it even makes sense? Much less important.
In a way, it is the utmost sign of class privilege to be able to harp on about racial privilege. And, when your other needs are met, everyone wants to feel good and noble and superior about themselves. Religion used to help I guess. Notsomuch these days. This is the modern digital flagellation, done with words on the internet instead of analog-style whips on your back. It works alright.
5
"I’m not sure I understand why this group has undergone such a transformation"
Oy...
If you can look past the labels, you might notice that Republicans have become downright lunatic and ignoring of reality. Blatant and silly racism, ignoring of climate change, utter fiscal irresponsibility, middle-class people unable to afford medical insurance...
Yeah, that just might be some stuff to move away from.
2
And why have uneducated white voters moved so far right and against racial equality?
1
White elites people have always had a superiority complex, from centuries of missionary work telling brown people their white morality and beliefs were superior to them, to jim crow laws, to just thirty years ago when white people just had to demonstrate to you the three words they could speak in your language to the "Well Traveled" badge of honor that somehow meant that you were smarter because you stepped off a plane at many international airports, and to this latest iteration of wokeness. White elites have always been in competition with each other to demonstrate their superiority. Its simply pride and hubris. Always has been. I'm white, and white elites drive me nuts with how shallow they can be.
3
So the Democrats have moved left on race as the Republican Party has been reduced to a protection racket for a criminal enterprise operating in its name. When will conservative journalists begin to write about the real story?
1
David look around you. Uprising in Puerto Rico. Uprising in Hong Kong. It’s not just white people who are discontent with status quo.
1
It's option 1! My god. You're talking about this like you're spicing up a dinner party, but we are indeed putting brown children in cages—and shooting them in the streets. Before that we enslaved them by the hundreds of thousands and slaughtered whole generations to turn their forests and grasslands into profit machines. Yep, I benefited from that which ironically paid for my ability to travel, learn history, and develop a curiosity for how I have been so lucky.
It is because they are not and will not be affected by the policies they support.I am a working class white guy who does not have a racist bone in his body as my girlfriend will attest.
I always voted democratic because that is where my economic interest lies not because of abortion,guns etc.But I feel that the unequivocal support for open borders by the left Democrats goes too far for my taste.It is just Economics 101.The more people the higher the rent.I already shed half of my take home paycheck for a small one bedroom apartment which allows me to live a dignified(meaning no roommates)life.The undocumented immigrants(and I mean all of them not just the ones from Latin America)are willingly becoming the modern slave class as they live 10 in an apartment.That is their prerogative but I do not think that I should endure the consequences of their transgressions.The rich Democratic professional class does not have to suffer.But we do
6
White progressives are not moving left, they are becoming more outspoken. What progressives have always been is "left" on social issues, which is what you are talking about. We (yes, I am one of them) are tired of the ineffective social policies the more conservative and right-wing wack jobs have supported in this country. And see where it got the country? To a "president" who is more and more racist, misogynist, homophobic, etc. than any in recent history and he is giving the populace permission to be the same. It is time to take a stand against all this and do what is right, not what might get you reelected.
1
Anyone who's ever been involved in a civil rights organization can tell you that white guilt is one of the strongest weapons they have. Once targeted at those from the south, this phenomenon is now national in scope.
This article fails to take account of evidence flashing in front of our faces. I was less inclined to see the system biased against minorities before I saw Eric Gardner struggle to breathe, Michael Brown get shot in the street or a black man get shot in the back by a police officer. Sandra Brown did nothing wrong. So, Mr. Brooks, when new facts come to light, I change my mind. I am not virtue signaling. I am trying to live in a just society. I worry that you and your Republican cohort have closed your eyes.
4
Another article written by an "intellectually conservative" GOP apologist trying to analyze the politics of the left. Why do educated Democratic whites move left? Because uneducated whites have moved the Republican party so far to the authoritarian fascist right that normal people have to race to the left just to stay in the middle. When the right becomes so racist as to separate brown children from their parents, and to echo racist chants along with their racist president, educated people begin to see how wrong, unnecessary, and self-destructive racism is for the country. Educated Democrats can see that closing our borders is a dead end, a biting off of our nose to spite our face; they realize illegal immigration is not even on the top ten list of problems facing America today. Your party had an "autopsy" a few years ago which said essentially that they'd need to bury their racism to survive. Intelligent, educated, thinking, empathetic whites heeded that sage advice and moved left. Whites of the opposite bent, the GOP base, doubled down until they found their boy Trump to mirror their ignorance, fear, irrationality and hatred. If there is an "intellectual conservative" left anywhere you'd think he'd be trying to figure out how come the party of Lincoln is now the party of Jefferson Davis.
4
White democrats haven't "moved" left. The right has gone to extremes, has embraced racism and has embraced Russian interference. The white democrat hasn't moved the needle at all. The white democrat has watched the republican party dissolve into a subservient, enabling cult allowing a criminal to roam free in the white house. That is hardly moving to the left.
2
Is David Brooks really this naive? Change the headline to "How Republicans Embraced Racism and Moved Far Right." And there you have the answer to something Brooks apparently finds mysterious. Educated people find what the Republican Party has become to be hideous.
3
We elected a center left democrat, a talented guy with a graduate degree, to be President because we thought he was one of us and a stellar politician. Then the republicans lost their minds because he was black. We thought we were driving another stake in the heart of racism but, like a classic horror movie, the racist monster roared back to life with a vengeance and is presently terrorizing the country.
Now David asks, why are we all a bit on edge about this racism thing?
5
Addressing climate change is not “leftist”. It’s not elitist. Time is running out for preventing a catastrophe. Please, please stop talking about left and right, red and blue, DJT and AOC_ Time’s up. It’s time to get real.
2
Mr. Brooks, you opine on these issues without a single mention of domestic issues like police shootings, drug arrest inequities and the likes, or of the positions the Republican Party has adopted (at least since the implementation of the “southern strategy” during the 1968 election). This is sloppy journalism which pronounces specious arguments in the cause of undermining civic engagement around serious public concerns.
2
“I’m not sure I understand why this group has undergone such a transformation, but it has, ”
Are you completely and utterly out of touch? The past two decades have seen Republicans fully embrace deficits, abandoning pretenders about balanced budgets, except when they use those pretended to hurt America because a black man is president
They have fully embraced racism, with years of hate directed against Barack Obama, smears, lies, birtherism, McConnell filibustering his own bill once Obama supported it.
They have fully embraced a war on the poor, which seemed like a joke when 30 rock said it. They designed a health care plan that Obama put through, and every one of them then called it socialist.
They have lied about the climate for decades, and not have started censoring research, restricting speech about climate, publishing lies under America’s imprint. They do this, killing the children of today, while laughing and rolling coal.
They have sunk even lower, incredibly, under President Trump, facilitating attacks on America and hacks into our election systems by Russia, blocking any defense.
There is nowhere else to go. No honorable man or patriotic American can support the Republican party by now.
And you write this? When will you dump this professional, detached schtick and look at yourself? You are a Republican, providing cover and supporting outright racism, destruction of our fiscal stability, destruction of our environment, attacks on our country.
5
This is a ridiculous column, Mr Brooks. Using “wokeness” in such a pejorative sense is offensive, when you are talking about awareness of decency and deploring the continuing/increasing existence of injustice, especially as brought about in the last two and a half years by the worst and most hateful administration we’ve ever had, enabled by the power-mongering Republican-Nationalist Party. The earlier comments also explain how that right-shifting has forced ordinary smart white Democrats to appear super-left.
Why do you keep writing about the Dems when your own glasshouse is in shards? And you're wrong--as always. You're mind-boggling in your cultural blindness and adherence to a way that never was. Your tiny worldview cannot be the basis of critiques. Progressives generally and certainly not native (not just Native) American minorities seek more immigration. Progressives are fine with considered limits on immigration. It's just that very, generally speaking, progressives are not hostile to refugees and oppose inhumane treatment. Maybe, that's what you are sensing, Brooks, and find so unrecognizable as a Republican.
For most progressives, immigration probably had not been one of their top 10 issues before Trump headed down the escalator to demean
Mexicans and, for others of us, before, under George W. We were triggered by the harsh rhetoric and draconian enforcement policies, directed at Mexican Americans and undocumented persons from Latin America alike. In fact, Republicans are and historically have been as open--if not more open--to immigration than many segments of the Democratic Party base who can suffer economically from an influx. Trump is not opposed to all immigration. He would gladly accept immigrants from Scandinavia. And during the Reagan era, when Latin immigrants were reliably conservative and Republican, Republicans embraced immigration.
1
Facts have a well known liberal bias. Since educated people tend to appreciate facts, it's not surprising that they lean left. Really, white liberals are just paying attention.
Actually you’re showing the improvement in education over the years, so they make better choices. That’s why republicans hate education.
These left leaning liberals Brooks identifies are those that have come to identify the re-constituted Democratic Party over the last 40 some years. They're the population that has bought into the Democrats identity politics banner which has served to sideline the "pocketbook" concerns, the quality of life issues that were the focus of the traditional Democratic Party. As Thomas Frank has described this trajectory of re-alignment, the Democrats have become the Party of a specific demographic. Liberals of the affluent professional and business class. They have status and a comfortable lifestyle. For them the bread and butter issues that consume the American worker/wage earner have minimal, if any, relevance.
"In my imagination, a group I'm making up did this. In my imagination, here is why they did that. I don't really have any examples, but I'm David Brooks. I'm going to say African-Americans and Latinx (a term I'd never use) communities are farther right than white Democrats, completely ignoring the fact that it's true for social issues like abortion but definitely not for issues of race. That would ruin my article, and I'm in Aspen and I don't want to work right now. In conclusion, I'm David Brooks."
I strongly disagree with Mr. Brooks’s claims that white highly educated progressives are moving left because of race. Since Saint Reagan, the country has consistently moved right. This move was not started by educated white progressives but by educated white conservatives and the corporations they control.
Their goal has always been very focused. To minimize their tax and shift the burden of funding government to everyone else but them. That the Democratic leadership during that time went along with the charade of trickle down economics amplified and accelerated this trend, leading to Trump and the most unequal society we have had since the early twenties. Highly educated whites progressives (of which I am one, with graduate and post graduate degrees from a top ten university) have nowhere to go but left.
The fact that the policies we embrasse - from a more equitable tax system, a strong safety net, an end to equating money with speech, robust environmental policies, and yes, an immigration policy that reflects the values that our country was born and blessed with - will benefit minorities maybe even more than it will benefit us, educated whites, is a welcome by-product of these policies, not its driving force.
2
Isn't everyone except the cult to the left of Trump? If it's David's observation that people are moving even more to the left it's because King Maga and minions are assailing and upending things that up to now were more less understood to be self evidently American. Just because Trump and the spineless GOP choose to frame every iota of opposition to this historic disgrace as "extreme" or "socialist" doesn't make it so.
Why does Trump, even now, while standing in a smoldering crater of his own ruin (race, division, Iran, white nationalism ascendant, Epstein, etc.) dictating headlines and framing? Protecting something that has never been attacked before might appear extreme but the country, no matter which party happened to be leading it at the time, has also never indulged someone like Stephen Miller before, or put levers of power and influence in the hands of justly exiled fringe dwellers like Bolton, Bannon, Gorka and the rest before.
Not wanting to be denied or going bankrupt when getting needing health care, or being opposed to medieval deterrents like orphaning children didn't used to be extreme positions. Who exactly is moving to the fringe faster and with more purpose?
I am a white college educated Democrat, I take umbrage with your piece as conjecture. I was a Republican from the day I turned 18, until the day George W. Bush put his hat in the ring. I knew him well in the 1980's when I lived in Dallas. When it became obvious he was going to be the presumptive nominee, I changed parties. I was all for the Reagan big tent and I for George Bush the elder, but I knew George and like him, but knew he was not up to the job. I couldn't remain in a party that would accept him as their nominee. As religion began to dominate the party agenda and judicial picks, I could not remain in that party. I'm as still conservative today as I was the party left me and I know endless folks just like myself who are either Democrats, or Independents who walked away from the party, but are not more liberal than they already were. I believe in fiscal responsibility in government, but I believe women should have a right to choose, LBGTQ should be left in peace and allowed to marry. I believe it is your right to believe in religion, or not. I believe we have to have a governmental safety net for those who cannot fend for themselves, as the people in this Country will not give enough to sustain them. That's not moving more to the left, it is common sense. The college educated folks who are still far left are the youth and as they age most tend to move to the middle. It has not changed.
1
I think Mr Brooks ignores the fact that allegiance to issues change as well. Climate change was once a Republican, conservative issue. Now it is liberal.
The parties themselves have changed. Conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans are either lying low or changed parties.
Demographic groups change over time... not just because their positions shift, but because new members with different backgrounds join.
The terms 'right' and 'left', 'liberal' and 'conservative', and Republican and Democrat have lost meaning for me.
We are a nation of Red and Blue. We stake out positions at random and justify them with meaningless terms.
Brooks' column is a case in point of how hard it is for people to face reality: first we react with our guts, and then pick facts that support our gut reaction. Jonathan Haidt writes of this in THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: WHY GOOD PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED BY POLITICS AND RELIGION. It is not relevant that the right has moved rightward. Instead, Brooks cited stat after stat to show that white folks have indeed moved to the left in recent years. The issue is why. As usual, the answer is multivariate. One factor is the decline of religion. As people decide God is not transcendent, they find something else to take its place. Leftist politics is historically an attractive substitute. Another factor is education. American education is dominated by the left, from children's books ("A" IS FOR ACTIVIST, JEREMIAH JUSTICE SAVES THE DAY) to the social Marxist-dominated social sciences and humanities. A third factor is cancel culture and social media. Being called a white supremacist or racist is the worst thing in the world now for a white educated person who wants to advance in many left-leaning professions and social circles. Voila the shift.
1
What Mr Brooks is also missing is that we are in a recalibration from the Democratic Party's unfortunate move to the right during the Clinton years when big business and money became more important than ethics.
2
Yes, the terrifying far left of..... global warming.
2
Well. Speaking as a member - according to Brooks definition - of this group, I fall into his first section: someone increasingly woke to the systematic, pervasive racism in our society, the exploding income and wealth inequality and so forth.
I have been a strong liberal since my college days in the 1960s, when I formed my opinions on so many issues. Over the decades since, these have only gotten stronger and more set.
I like to ask “Whatever happened to the Age of Aquarius?”
Coming after the turbulence that brought new civil rights laws and ended the Vietnam War, plus creating the modern environmental movement, I thought that justice was on the upswing across a broad front both here in America and around the world.
I was wrong. Very, very wrong.
It was inevitable that someday the stars would align (in opposition to Aquarius) in such a way that reactionary conservatives would control all the reins of power.
The horror I experienced on election night in November, 2016 was more than well justified. We see the rotten fruits of it on a daily basis.
Yes, I am privileged. I do not have to struggle to make ends meet, but rather have the luxury of studying the broad issues facing us, analyzing them, and advocating for just solutions.
As I tell friends, I never thought my latter years would be spent fighting a return to fascism. But here we are, and here am I.
4
Dear David,
Here’s an alternative title for your piece: “How White Democrats Sought More Justice”
Better?
3
I am so, so sick and tired of hearing about race and racism, and these people calling everyone who disagrees with their radical views a racist.
I am also sick and tired of people telling me I am "privileged". And, do you want to know something? So are many people like me in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. And this, Mr. Brooks, is why Donald Trump will be re-elected -- "bigly" -- next year.
3
I don't think you even understand the left-right spectrum, Brooks
3
The racial lens is best used when it is the only one that explains the preponderance of some variation among ethnic groups. For example, did you know that there is no “black crime” problem? When you account for income, you can see that crime is more a function of poverty than race. If at night a woman is more likely to deliberately cross the street to avoid a young black man than a young white man (or a woman or an old person), is she racist (and sexist and agist) or simply using an empirically sound heuristic? How much different are the educational attainment levels of children of poor white single mothers than poor black single mothers? If most of a disparity can be explained socioeconomically, don’t focus on the residual 10% and scream “racism”! We’re never going to get beyond race by talking more and more about race.
1
Racial inequality starts with a fact that liberals refuse to acknowledge: teen pregnancy!
There are very few teenagers that can raise a child in the best of circumstances. Put that child in the inner city environment of Baltimore, Or Detroit, or Chicago and he/she does not stand a chance! We all know it, but if we say it the. We are labeled as a racist.
The real racism is ignoring this fact; that insures generation after generation of poverty, violence, and poor education.
Is there a single Black candidate willing to address this?
Mr Brooks, what is the third Democratic Party? I read through twice and couldn’t find a mention of it. Freshman comp mistake.
1
This trend will be reversed when white liberals realize that the left has become anti-white. Joe Biden is already discovering that he's being attacked on the basis of his race, and so is Nancy Pelosi. So this trend will soon be eclipsed by its opposite.
1
"highly educated white Democrats"...having lived here for 10 years, 'highly credentialed" would be a better description.
1
David, David, David...so it's white guilt that explains the movement left?
How about the disconnect between the myth of American Exceptionalism and reality? How about the opposite of anything the Liar-in-Chief says? In my own experience (raised in a Rockefeller Republican family - now a Democrat) The love-it-or-leave-it refusal to acknowledge any criticism of our history and culture has driven me further and further to see the victims' side of this dynamic: blacks, women, LGBT, Palestinians, Iran, etc., etc. The more Americans think we have the god given answers to all the world's problems and demand compliance with our choices...the further away (left) I get.
2
Brooks likes to analyze Democrats because he can’t bear to look at his own party.
3
Liberal whites distance themselves from poor whites. What Hilary Clinton says on them clearly shows the liberal’s feelings and thoughts on those discarded by their own race. What does matter in this country is actually class problem which deceptively covered with fake racial problem. Wealthy class uses divide-and-conquer tactics against poor whites and poor blacks-and-browns. To put it simply, they want to kill populous and so stronger poor whites first by uniting with poor non-whites. Even though Trump is vulgar and mean, he is on the right path to make this country more equal because the current liberal elites are actually fronts of the rich and they are smearing the true nature of the problems in the society so they should be destroyed, while preserving the precious engines of the economy. We might have to wait for some time to see the appearance of true liberals who would replace the current ones and help the poor be united regardless of their races and confront the rich fairly and effectively.
This column, again, displays David’s misunderstanding of issues, and more importantly, the moral corruption of the country, I think.
To see the racial injustice in the country is not “left” or “right.”
I wonder how David would feel, as a Jew, if advocacy for lesser anti-semitism was described as “left” or “right” or whatever the political labels are?
Imagine an article where white people in country X are described by a writer as more to the “left” or “right” because they increasingly recognize that there’s great antisemitism in the country and it needs to change.
I would say it’s not “left” or “right” or “north” or whatever to be concerned about racism in the US given it’s history.
It’s simply the RIGHT or MORAL thing to do, and I think there are people who consider themselves “conservative” who also believe racism is a big problem, and there’s white people who think racism is a great injustice and are not necessarily “left.”
I fail to understand why David thinks that being concerned about racism is “left.”
Why isn’t it just the descent or right or sensible thing to do?
If some white people are concerned about racism, perhaps, it’s because they’ve come to understand something essential about the country?
Why is it “left?” And, so, what makes David think racism is “right?”
People concerned about racism, I think, are not being “left” or “right,” they’re simply doing what they believe is right.
3
I think missing from this analysis is that many of the progressive positions highlighted here can also be explained as push back against the modern GOP and its hostility to things like immigration, race, the environment and abortion.
The GOP’s hostility to the above naturally begats “extreme” positions to counteract them. If the debate was between Jack Kemp’s conservatism and Barack Obama’s progressivism we would be making progress on all fronts and these extremes of the Left and Right would be negated.
White liberal elites, as Brooks says, are generally highly educated and well off. The elites perhaps are too well insulated from everyday reality, hence jobs and other tough aspects of everyday life that plague those of fewer means are not on their radar while intellectual constructs like gender identity and global warming (climate change, while a real problem, is to most an intellectual construct) rise to the top. Others are "baskets of deplorables". But if you are a single mom or a two income family struggling to make ends meet, global warming is a distant problem while paying the bills is today's challenge; a poor white family in the hills of W. Virginia doesn't take kindly to being lectured on its vaunted white privilege. You lost them to Trump's phony populism.
I've been a registered (D) since I first registered at 18, back in the pre-Anthropocene. I'm a little tired of being lectured by my more leftward Democrats about white privilege and wokeness. Having lived in Hawai'i and New Mexico, multiculturalism is a fact of life, not a lecture. Its getting to the point where moderade (D)s are not welcome in the party any more if we dare open our mouths. That doesn't bode well for 2020.
4
Once again Brooks stuns me with his “confusion” about things. He show absolutely zero empathy for the plight of others. He looks at the educated liberals and their desire for a more just and equitable world and simply shrugs his shoulders and goes “what’s up with that? They benefit the most from the unjust, inequitable status quo and yet they want to change it?” That, everyone, is what separates Republicans from Democrats.
3
Is it leftist to believe in science and to be concerned about climate change? Is it leftist to hold to the Declaration of Independence and believe that everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law? Is it leftist to acknowledge the fact that our healthcare system is broken and that every country with a single payer system gets better healthcare at a lower cost? Is it leftist to believe that narcissism in the White House is disgusting and dangerous? Ok, then I have become a leftist. If on the other hand it is merely intelligent, then I am still where I have always been.
4
Brooks is right on the two explanations. I think we passed the systemic racism explanation about five years ago, and now we're in mass psychosis / purity test phase. The pendulum will swing back when Trump wins the election by winning over all of the Democrats who aren't interested in abolishing ICE.
1
Hey Brooks...I seriously wonder why concerns regarding global warming, immigration and race and gender equity are considered moving left?
Aren’t these values we all should have?
4
One of the key factors is indeed “wokeness” to the depth of present systemic racism and both guilt and sorrow about the impact of white privilege on the lives of people of color. The strategy that this guilt often gives rise to might be called “sitting on the other end of the teeter totter.”
This I believe to be the source of the the negativity of many educated whites towards their own race today. This will fail. It is misguided altruism at its best.
Only a mindset that is truly open to and committed to the inherent worth and dignity of all people, and seeks to create social and civic structures that reflect the profound truth that all people really are created equal, and that values all of us right here right now, will work.
I believe white self-hatred to be a deeply damaging, profoundly counterproductive psychological construct that is actually playing into the hands of racists who point to it and say, see liberals really do only care about people of color. If the Democratic Party goes in this direction in the 2020 election, it will overshoot the mark and lose.
4
The question why highly educated white Democrats have moved to the left is not difficult to explain: the Republican party supports the grotesque level of income inequality we are experiencing. Educated Democrats, those of the proper sensibilities, see signs of this everywhere and oppose it. Exploitation of minorities is only part of it; a minimum wage of only $7.50 is part of it; the disgrace of 40 million Americans living in poverty is part of it.
1
I am white middle class and I can say that my racial lens has changed little in more than 50 years. my dad was the first realtor to sell a house to a black family in our white, champaign IL neighborhood. we received angry phone calls in the middle of the night and shortly after the sale a cross was burned on the black family's front yard. I "woke" then.
what has changed is my understanding of economic inequality which seems to affect people of color disproportionately. current conservative thought and policies are designed to punish the less fortunate. this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. perhaps there is another reason that educated people of all colors are "moving left". conservatism is designed for the ignorant.
1
Think of being Superior. It's lot better than being Equal.
David, I'm 77 years old and am well-educated. I remember clearly the civil rights movement. I also remember clearly Strom Thurman and Robert Byrd. I'm also a Democrat. Perhaps the white Dems have finally become more enlightened about race, but the Dems are still "bigots". And that bigotry will lead them, again, down the path of failure. Perhaps you should write about that, and how that is destroying my party. Here is the definition of a bigot: a person who is intolerant toward those holding different opinions.
1
Could we please stop using terms like “pocketbook issues” with the assumption that everyone agrees on what that means? Who decided that immigration is not a pocketbook issue? Probably not a person trying to come to this country because they lack economic opportunities where they live. Who says abortion is not a pocketbook issue? Probably not a woman who needs one and can’t afford to travel out of state to the nearest facility allowed to stay open. What about climate change? Is that a pocketbook issue if you lose your home and community to a hurricane or wildfire? All these things affect people of every background, but, yes, it’s a fact that people of color have and continue to be disproportionately impacted because of a history of racist policy and culture.
Maybe the shift you describe is not race- or identity-based politics or what is cynically described as “wokeness,” but just empathy – that and the recognition that enhancing the welfare of others usually ends up benefitting society as a whole. The question should not be why has this or that group seemed to develop concerns outside its own immediate self-interest. Instead, we should ask of people who fail to do this: what is holding you back?
4
Mr. Brooks I usually read your columns with much fanfare but you have missed a huge reason why White Democrats have moved to the left, HUBRIS!
What is it with White Democrats (insert age, gender and education level here) that insist on telling others what is right and wrong. Perhaps we should leave well enough alone and stop trying to "save" everybody and everything.
By appealing to the racist tendencies of Trump's supporters, the Republicans can gain what they really want-no social programs that benefit the old and poor, no regulations that hinder rich polluters, no standards that require financial firms to put the customer first, and no requirement to treat minorities with any sense of fairness. In the Republican view, the government should only provide military, fire, and police protection. Anything else is taking the money from those who have earned it.
Academics, relying on theories rooted in Marxism, taught liberal arts students that the root of all evil was a class struggle between plutocrats and the proletariat. This conflict would end in armed struggle with the proletariat emerging victorious to put in place a new socialist state with the means of production securely in state hands.
Being a Marxist started to become pretty embarrassing as the legacy of Stalin and Mao was revealed, as the USSR fell, and as China brought a billion people out of poverty by abandoning Marxist ideology. The academic left had to keep their heads down and regroup in the 80s and 90s.
The solution to the death of Marxism was to rework the class struggle into a race struggle (and to a lesser extent a struggle for sexual identity). The leaders to be overthrown were still plutocratic capitalists, but their chief sins, and the sins of society in general, were racism, misogyny, and homophobia (transphobia came later as a bonus). The academic left has now re-established their anti-establishment credentials; they have regained their mojo. If you're wondering why tuition rates keep skyrocketing, ask if your local university had added staff to monitor and encourage diversity and counsel those with sexual identity issues (they have).
Russia and China had to fail to prove to us that Marxism was a failed ideology. I suspect that the US will have to fail to demonstrate the folly of organizing politics on the basis of racism and sexism.
3
Not exactly new
Brooks is re-discovering Thomas Piketty (author of capital in the 21th Century) From 2018
"“Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict," (MIT Lecture, based on Piketty's seminal paper Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict .Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017)
Piketty pointed out that from 1956 to 2017, the educated vote moved dramatically from right to left. Today, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to vote for a liberal political party — in France, Britain, or the United States.
I.e. it is NOT confined to the US, but evident in France and Britain as well, and hence less linked to race (that does not play as great a role in France or Britain) and more to increasing inequality in the wake of globalization
As Piketty noted
"Unequal globalization is a choice. Free-trade treaties could be accompanied by redistributive taxation, but that hasn’t been happening."
====
BC Austin, 599 votes, NYT pick is on the right track: Rising inequality has now split the educated from the truly rich that dominate the economy
1
White people, like others, are competitive with each other. This new desire to be me more 'woke' than your neighbor is a disease dependent on that mechanism. The road from the being race-blind to being hyper-sensitive to race, but aggressively pro-minority, has been paved with the impulase for superiority. It is particularly disagreeable when the accusation of 'racism' is expanded to cover merely being less pro-minority than the accuser.
If you don't think 'undocumented' immigrants should receive free medical care at the border, you're racist.
If you don't agree America's current prosperity is entirely due to the free labor of slaves, you're racist.
If you mention that Turkey's slave markets were in full swing as late as 1908, yet were followed by complete economic collapse, as a counter-argument, you're racist.
If you point out that (East) Indian Americans are the highest-earning ethnic group in the US, earning almost 1/3 more than whites and twice as much as blacks, you're racist.
These neo-racisms, expanded charges of racism that go far beyond actual discrimination, are an affront to logic and an attack on free reason, let alone free speech. The fact that there is in the White House a president who is either racist or happy to provide aid and comfort to racists wherever expedient, does not change the result, and should not provide cover for playing a game of inventing new neo- and/or micro-racisms, a game that can be career-ending for the victim.
4
Meh.
I don't see all social issues through a racial lens. I recognize race issues where they are evident. For example, I don't think Trump tariffs are racial in any way. They're bad ideas all on their own.
I have a handful of degrees with fancy fonts and signatures from real world accredited schools. None of those are signs of privilege, much less white privilege. I earned them and paid for them with my own money.
I see racism and sexism in the world and know it's influence in my life. I fight against all such tropes and familiar stereotypes as needed. I have never and will never vote into public office anyone who is even a small fraction as racist and sexist as Trump. That doesn't mean I see all candidates through a lens of racism. It just means I have my own litmus test. Racism and sexism are caustic to democracy and eat at the rule of law.
1
the article ends with the question: "when is the racial lens the right lens?" that should have been the point of departure, because racism is the lens used throughout the article.
what is racism? can anybody define it as it is now hurled about -- part whine, part accusation? i'm not talking about the racial lens but the animus used to grind it. it seems to be less a sociological principle or cultural fact than a hotpot where you can stew up all kinds of vaguely defined recriminations.
brooks would do well to learn the distinction between racism and nativism. true, there are white nationalist hangers on and free riders on the trump bandwagon, and trump never swears himself off any sucker group; but the typical trump voter isn't a racist -- he or she is a nativist.
it's simple, really. nativists want to keep people out; racists want to keep people down. nativists want to build walls against the outside, racists want to build segregation, the walls inside.
is it progress that brooks actually writes the words "climate change" (although in the mouth of his hypothetical liberal voter category)? no, the "defining issue of our time" is racism.
i'm sure people 100 years from now will look at our era differently -- "then it was 'racism', the virtue signaling meme of a population destroying its own planet."
reader, examine movement nativism in 19th century america, and see how many parallels you can find with the current situation. nativism, not racism, is the key.
It’s easy to be liberal about immigration when the only way that affects you is who mows your lawn or cleans your house. When you finally get that factory job that pays $25 per hour you worry about competing with someone who would gladly do it for $10. The more insulated from the struggles of daily life people are, the more they can afford to be liberals.
3
Those of us who are white, well-educated and well-off can afford to be sympathetic to people of color, whether Americans or immigrants. We know in our hearts that they are treated unfairly. They do not threaten us and helping them causes us no harm.
Those who merely are white cannot afford sympathy and do feel threatened. They, therefore, are susceptible to exploitation. Trump, of all people, sensed the disparity early on and continues to exploit it. The white underclasses are grateful for the attention.
1
Once again, Brooks struggles to grasp the obvious. College-educated democratic voters haven't moved left, US politics has moved right.
2
We haven't moved left.. the pundits like you have become more like WWF announcers than serious critics.
1
According to Mr. Brooks just talking the talk is no better than being an unapologetic bigot. He needs to realize that the first step to change is to see there is an issue, and only then can one see the structures that need dismantling and start the "walk".
I don't feel that that white Democrats have moved left but rather they have finally come to understand the racially motivated policies of the right. Is it surprising that white Democrats, especially highly educated ones, have become more sensitive to issues of race? Not really. It appeared that racism was on the decline and we were even able to elect Obama. His election did not prove that we were a nation that had transcended racism but rather that it was just being kept hidden. Trump's campaign and election pulled back that curtain.
I am white middle class and I can say that my racial lens has changed little in more than 50 years. my dad was the first realtor to sell a house to a black family in our white, champaign IL neighborhood. we received angry phone calls in the middle of the night and shortly after the sale a cross was burned on the black family's front yard. I "woke" then.
what has changed is my understanding of economic inequality which seems to affect people of color disproportionately. current conservative thought and policies are designed to punish the less fortunate. this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. perhaps there is another reason that educated people of all colors are "moving left". conservatism is designed for the ignorant.
2
Why is this a big surprise? Education enlightens. During the Age of Enlightenment, “Enlightenment thinkers endeavored to be ruled by reason, not prejudice.”
This piece does not make clear how many white Democrats consider themselves progressives, those who may align themselves with "The Squad."
The terms can be misleading. Some may consider themselves liberal if they are simply Democrats, no matter how where they are on the "left" spectrum. I believe there are many, a majority, of white Democrats like myself, who are Democrats but are not aligned with the progressive, "woke", politically correct culture that, in my view, weakens the Democratic cause and fires up the right to the point they are willing to back an abhorrent human being like Trump.
Like many others I have been critical that David isn’t liberal enough but all that changed when I started reading a book David mentioned in another column. “A Thousand Small Things” by Adam Gopnick finally gave me a good reason for my own more conservative leanings. Adam makes a distinction between liberals and those on the left. Liberals appreciate and respect cultural evolution and are suspicious of “those who know they know” as Oliver Wendell Holmes used to say.
David has definitely evolved as we all have been forced to do, in the age of Trump.
It is pretty straightforward David. They see people in power exercising it in myriad ways that discriminate and exploit people of color. Now we have a president that overtly uses race to advance the divisions in this country. What did you expect? That people would turn to the party of white power?
We highly educated white liberals only have credibility if we take our talk to the next level of walk. Do we live in integrated neighborhoods? With whom do we socialize? Do we send our children to private schools to control their contacts? Do we support minority businesses or go out of our way to make sure that we really educate ourselves about minority culture/life through shared life activities? We lead by example and not by proclaiming our intellectual and moral superiority.
1
The More words spilled about how the Democrats have moved 'so far left' provide more of a smoke screen for the authoritarian lunacy of the Republican Party.
Strange priorities.
Climate change is still seen as a fringe left issue when the world is literally burning up around us.
It boggles the mind.
Maybe it's the Republicans who have moved so far right that educated people are disgusted by racism, corruption, oppression, exploitation, fundamentalism, violence, authoritarianism, and misogyny.
Most professors and PhDs have been liberals since the enlightenment 300 years ago. and the USA was founded as a liberal democracy.
But how do we reconcile this info with a column from Mr. Edsall a few weeks ago on attitude differences in the two white working classes? In that piece, he showed that white Democrats who were working class or didn't have a college degree believe as strongly as the general membership of the Democratic party that minorities do face challenges today.
1
Your own publication gave a pretty good answer to the question you pose, Mr. Brooks, about a month ago, plotting the Republican Party on a political spectrum of Western Democracies. Not that race does not play a role, it does, but I think you are missing a very big piece of the puzzle to put it all on Democrats.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunday/republican-platform-far-right.html
Mr. Brooks does not understand the move left? Perhaps he should look in the mirror or to the congressional contingent of the party he supported for so long.
Mr Brooks makes the only coherent statement he has made in years in the first paragraph of this yet again post hoc ergo Procter hoc article. “I am not sure that I understand why”. Indeed. The educated whites did not move, the Republican Party decided to sell hate and fear, as well as trickledown knowing full well that far too many Americans have short political attention spans.
Becoming a colorblind society was once considered a very admirable and desirable goal. As long as ‘progressives’ find systematic racism in every and any circumstance, we will never become that society.
2
For me (a Democratic African American), the white liberal "woke" movement is the direct corollary to the rise of explicit, toxic, conservative racism and white nationalism which is clearly the antecedent for the liberal shift. As long as there was some element of plausible deniability, and internal consistency, Republican positions that favored whites at the expense of minorities were not necessarily a demon in need of slaying; merely a political disagreement with negative implication for certain cohorts of the democratic coalition. For most white Democrats, Republican policies were not perceived as being as malicious as they actually always were.
However, the venomous Republican response to the election of Barack "Hussein" Obama put to bed any myth that conservative thought was anything other than naked self-serving race based policy masquerading as principled opposition. While I think most minorities already pretty clearly understood the nature of the Republican/conservative messaging since Nixon, most white liberals, I believe, were willing to give conservatives the benefit of the doubt. No longer. Because of Donald Trump, political identity has become a zero sum game. The Republicans figuratively bombed pearl harbor. There isn't middle ground to be had. White liberals aren't going to send a peace envoy to argue that Republicans are really just misunderstood. They are mad at what the rise of this group says about our country.
The period of this shift notably overlaps precisely with white "conservatives" becoming progressively more loathsome to the point of Trump. Perhaps it is reverse magnetism.
To those affected, it seems white progressives are moving less horizontally than vertically - below or above the problem[s] - making this statement both true and untrue; “white progressives are now farther left on immigration and race and diversity issues than the typical Hispanic or African-American voter.” Gentrification is not integration, and gentrification can’t happen without mass incarceration, and immigration is inseparably a race issue.
I moved further left not because of racial equity, as it has been a constant in my 57 years on Earth and a continual platform of the Democratic party. I moved further left because only the most liberal candidates have included climate mitigation in their plans.
The frightening fact is, if we don't address the climate nothing else will matter.
1
What so many of these comments are missing is the ability to deal with two realities:
1) That the movement towards moderation is being driving by minorities and working to middle class voters. Why is that? Have any of the White Saviors with Graduate Degrees asked themselves this? And if so, could they possibly come up with a better answer than "well, that is just because those people don't know better"?
2) Studies have shown the well educated liberals have the most distorted view of people who disagree with them politically and tend to live in the most homogenous bubbles politically. As a matter of fact, the level of education INCREASES the inaccuracy of the perception that a liberal will have of other people.
Could it possibly be that with education also comes a kind of snobbery that breeds hubris? That people who sit around talking about how "open minded" they are are possibly using that as a shield to keep themselves from actually being open minded when it might make them uncomfortable? That someone who has traveled superficially to sight see in Prague or Paris but never lived among the people in Peoria might have a more limited worldview than they think they do?
Just some things to consider.
FWIW, I am a graduated degreed, formerly NYC dwelling, registered Democrat that grew up in "flyover country."
2
Republicans have been using racial politics as a strategy starting with Richard Nixon and the Southern Strategy, and increasingly as a recruiting tool for the disenchanted white working class. Given it’s success, it is no surprise that they persist with racial politics as a means of division and diversion. Given that Republicans have exploited racial division as the lowest common denominator, it is not surprising that educated whites would become increasingly aware of those strategies and react accordingly.
Here’s a story that runs counter to this article.
The summer of 2016 I visited relatives in Eastern Washington state. To clarify, I’m white as are my relatives. With the upcoming election, of course Trump and Hillary were a main topic of conversation. My family members, all life long Democrats, expressed that they couldn’t stand Trump but didn’t care for Hillary either. They also told me they felt that the Democratic Party had pretty much abandoned the white middle class working class, like they are. As a Democrat living in the liberal bubble of San Francisco, this was quite enlightening for me to hear.
I believe that my relatives expressed what many people in the country were/are feeling, which is how Trump got elected.
If Trump is to be defeated in 2020 the Democrats need to put forth a candidate that speaks not only to those on the far left but those middle Americans that, right or wrong, feel forgotten.
An explanation that Brooks seems to have missed is that the definition of "conservative" has moved much farther to the right than in the past few decades.
The territory covered by "liberal" is a lot bigger now than it used to be.
Okay but can we talk about how supposedly super liberal topics like "abortion, global warming, immigration and race and gender equity" are in fact irrevocably tied to "pocketbook issues" like "jobs and taxes"?
Whether a woman is allowed to have an abortion affects whether she can have jobs. Whether there is race and gender equity affects whether POC, women and especially WOC have the same job and pay opportunities as white people, especially white men. Whether global warming is addressed affects the most marginalized, often POC communities in the world. And you can bet that some of the "moderate, most nonwhite" faction has relatives in those areas.
"Jobs and taxes" are fully intersectional issues. If Edsall's quoted figures are truly reflective of nonwhite Democrats, then I hope my fellow POC can soon realize that the demographics they consider so liberal are really fighting in the same corner.
2
I think the drift of both tribes is directly proportional to the drift of the other tribe...the center is not holding for either tribe. As each tribe views the other as more and more ridiculous, they retreat to the edges. It is no more complicated than that. The real and more pertinent questions is "what has happened to the center?"
Foremost is having an income tax that taxes the super rich so that all the eggs don’t end up in one basket. The color of the basket does not matter. We all contribute to our country, and a living wage, educational opportunity and healthcare should be civil rights.
I agree with Mr. Brooks "that people adopt their positions for honest, well-intentioned reasons." Educated white Democrats are moving left quite simply because media, the Supreme Court, economic policy and nearly all parts of our government have moved sharply right for decades. Educated people know we must re-balance the scales of justice and fairness in this country, as the divisive forces of big money and consolidated power on the right are leading us off the cliff toward economic feudalism, an irreversibly destroyed environment and social collapse. We need less greed, less hate and more democratic socialism where decisions are made for the common good. Educated people are simply trying to push us back to some semblance of fairness and sanity.
2
I am 72. I am a highly educated white American. For most of my adult life I have been politically liberal. Am I more liberal now than I have ever been? Yes, I am, and I can tell you that it has to do with living into a deeper understanding of what people who do not have white skin and sufficient money have experienced and do experience in the US. It has to do with living in a body that no longer automatically does everything I want it to do and at some point is going to fail me. It has to do with seeing my own parents become dependent on the compassion and generosity of state and federal governments in their failing years. It has to do with passionately wanting the beautiful, amazing world we have been given to go on being a recognizable and livable world for people who come after me. It has to do with having lived through a long, not particularly distinguished career in corporate America and realizing that the only things of real value I ever got from it was a bi-weekly paycheck, some 401k savings, and a number of wonderful friendships. I also got a lot of stress, a lot of long hours, having my contributions ignored and co-opted, and being made subordinate time and time again to younger, self-promoting, male colleagues. I’ve also watched what has happened in government and criminal “justice” for many years as well. Most recently I watched how a respectable, hardworking man, Barack Obama, was treated by an entire major political party.
Indeed, I am now even more liberal.
7
Central to the work of minority communities (people of color, LGBTQ, immigrants, etc) is to educate the public about systemic inequities so that legislators pass more just policies and the public is won over by hearts and minds. It makes sense that educated whites would feel differently about all of these issues after 20 years of advocacy by minority groups. It means activists are doing our jobs well. Yes, some white people overcompensate. But I'd rather have that than the Neanderthals that make up Trump's base who reject science, higher education, and just about anyone who doesn't look like them.
2
David,
You miss one very important aspect of what you are describing.
Privileged, educated whites have in many cases, maybe even in the majority, evolved so far past racism that their families are now of mixed races, colors, religions and political beliefs.
Jewish people are marrying Palestinians, or Hispanic Americans, or Black Americans, or Asian Americans, without regard for any of the barriers that former generations — even your own — put up against it, explicitly or implicitly. The same is true for other religious denominations of whites, from Catholic to Protestant to Muslim to Atheist (religion among us means little, too).
We are the future, and we know it, and are proud of it. Our life choices are based on joy and freedom, not paranoia and guilt, as you would have it.
You get it wrong, once again. Nothing personal. You grew up in a world, as liberal as it seemed to you, blinkered by pretty strict prejudices and a vast array of implicitly, if not explicitly, racist assumptions.
Time to come on board. It’s not that far a leap, really, and the view from over here is rich, and glorious beyond belief.
2
Personally I've always embraced the ideals of justice and fairness. Before BLM on YouTube and AGW science the GOP did too. Perhaps what you call "moving left" is simply acknowledging evidence of injustice and "moving right" is willfully looking away.
We should look at how media outlets enforce the packaging of a set of beliefs as related and inseparable. Happens on the right and left both. The Times included, e.g. with non-stop articles about Trump racism, seemingly more one trying to out-extreme the next. Very little counterbalance.
1
The key way the person who has lost all connection with his humanity, a/k/a Donald Trump, sews division is by stoking racism. That makes it imperative to look at everything through the lens of race. As a working class white person and by my observations particularly of middle class whites, I can say we are extremely vulnerable to being manipulated by the resentments stoked up by the people who are owning class, who have everything to benefit from everyone believing that there are some people more deserving than others. The fact that the masses of people only have access to a tiny sliver of the wealth that is produced by the masses of people is hidden by this central confusion. We are supposed to accept that we get a tiny sliver of the pie and that some are more deserving than others while the owning class accumulates obscenely massive wealth and cause death and destruction on a national and global scale.
So David, my question for you is when is race not relevant? Can you demonstrate that racism is not the single most prominent "ism" that keeps us from challenging that a larger portion, if not all, of the wealth created by humans should be available to lift the lives of all humans? And that there is enough wealth and science for everyone on the face of the earth to have a good life?
1
Or is it the definition of "left" that has shifted?
1
@andrew yavelow
I would like to get any definition. "Before" or "after" doesn´t matter so much.
What we always get are "connotations" by political scientists whereby everyone seems to have a different one.
Mr Brooks, I will respond to your column by quoting your column from one week ago:
"In Trump’s version, “American” is defined by three propositions. First, to be American is to be xenophobic. The basic narrative he tells is that the good people of the heartland are under assault from aliens, elitists and outsiders. Second, to be American is to be nostalgic. America’s values were better during some golden past. Third, a true American is white. White Protestants created this country; everybody else is here on their sufferance.
When you look at Trump’s American idea you realize that it contradicts the traditional American idea in every particular. In fact, Trump’s national story is much closer to the Russian national story than it is toward our own. It’s an alien ideology he’s trying to plant on our soil.
Trump’s vision is radically anti-American."
You seem to be having an argument with yourself.
310
@Justine So what we REALLY have is a trend for less educated conservatives to move to the right on the basis of race. Mr. Brooks wouldn't say that because he thinks of himself as conservative.
38
@Justine The leftward movement on race issues among Democrats started in 2013 and 2014, before Trump. Trump if anything is a reaction to it.
7
@Justine Mr. Brooks must speak for more than himself. He is a spokesperson for a diverse group of often non-complementary interests.
He is not a free man. He is not liberal.
6
David is suffering from a bad case Two Trains Sitting Next to Each Other Optical Illusion Syndrome, as are most of the people in his party. it's our train that is sitting still David, and yours that is moving, not the other way round. Richard Nixon supportedlegal abortion, for example (at least publicly). The hijacking of the Republican party by fundamentalists who decided to leave Jesus and his teachings behind in favor of competing with Caesar to win his office, coupled with the realization that unbridled capitalism could do as much for elected officials as the oligarchs who support them, drove Republicans not just further right every election cycle, but also took them into the territory where dwell greedy, compassion-free, altogether self-serving, xenophobic, borderline fascists.
If you want to save your party, you might try realizing which train is (rapidly) leaving the station.
5
"When is the racial lens (with its implied charge of racism against those who disagree) the right lens to use and when is it not? When does it illuminate an issue and when does it conceal?"
Ok. Great. Start answering, please.
What a strange article. To note a so-called shift on the left, Brooks points out that, “For example, immigration is now seen through the lens of race, in a way that simply wasn’t true two decades ago.” But, we have a president who has said he wants more white, northern European immigrants, while trapping brown, Latino immigrants in horrifying detention camps on the border.
As smart as he is, it is quite strange Brooks cannot figure out the genesis of the shift to viewing immigration through a racial lens. Or, to use Brooks’s own phrase, “the more cynical take starts with the observation” that Brooks has an agenda and is distorting the facts to fit.
3
David Brooks fails to understand that “white democracy” is really “white racism.” It is not actually "democracy." I was born before WWII and grew up in a part of Texas that would not permit people of color to spend the night there much less take up residence. My family and our school system taught that "all men are created equal," and I thought it really applied to "all men." But because there were no people of color there was no way to actually see equality in action. As I grew up and graduated from Baylor University, I realized that my part of Texas was, and remains, as racist as the old, tyrannical, South. To Brooks, and my lifelong racist friends, it appears that whites like me have moved to more liberal positions, but their bias is showing. We “liberals” have always been here and we are now more open about it. We haven't moved, we still hold the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but most of the people I grew up with have moved ever more to the right, they are sullen, angry, and greatly disappointed that Trump did not rejuvenate the antebellum South. Their flag is the "stars and bars" rather than the "stars and stripes." They still long for the world of moonlight and magnolias created in the false story of "Gone with the Wind." In an adjacent county there is an annual celebration in which citizens dress up like cotton planters and parade around the square with its statue of a confederate soldier. As in the days of the cotton planter, hatred is everywhere.
6
Apparently, I'm the educated white person woke by systemic racism of which Mr. Brooks refers to as moving to the "left". I suggest that acknowledging systematic racism and implicit bias is driven by new and revealing insights offered through advances in social science analytics. In addition, the plethora of video evidence exposed over the last couple decades makes it difficult to ignore such issues. Implying that racial justice is a leftist issue is an insult to those who think that justice for all is an American value. One's concern with equality under the law should not be discounted as an extreme view. I for one relish the days when moderate republicans and democrats had a place at the political table where facts and science mattered.
3
I have two reactions. One is that the definition of "liberal" changed, maybe dramatically, between 1994 and 2019. (This is one of the great triumphs of the right wing, with assistance from the media, over the past two decades.) That needs to be accounted for.
Also, Brooks acts as though the issues themselves are static. Could it be that immigration, for example, isn't just more often treated as a racial issue, but has become more of a racial issue? Could it be that the reason we're more likely to see some of these issues through a racial lens is because the racial dimension of each has become more salient? Or, more generally, because the kinds of racial crimes/tensions that just a decade ago would have been buried now, thanks to smartphones etc., end up on the nightly news?
2
I’m an FDR Democrat. But the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to want my vote. They want Wall Street.
1
@Zejee
A. Are you sure you know what FDR did?
B. Democrats don't want Wall Street. They do want smart regulations that don't destroy the economy and the little guy.
I live in the heartland of white privilege wokeness. In Washington, we are overwhelmingly white and navy blue. And I can tell you it’s a lot of white noise. A simple compelling example: Washington retains its constitutional ban on income tax, relying on a state (consumption) sales tax, which makes it by some accounts the most regressive tax system in the country. There is no real movement to change this. On weekends the freeways are more choked with traffic than on weekdays. My rich white friends have not curtailed international travel, while making their political correctness crystal clear on facebook. Talk is cheap, but there is no inclination to discuss pragmatic solutions to climate change like nuclear power. Seattle has a tormented history with school desegregation through busing, and I can tell you that hardly anyone on Bainbridge Island wants their children ferried and bussed to Kent schools. But I must give credit where credit is due. Teslas are very popular out here.
Mr. Brooks, clearly your second explanation is the right one (and I think you know that).
7
You imply that political radicalization leads to increased partisanship. But what if it's the other way around? I'm a white person with a PhD, not *as* far left as several of the current crop of Dem presidential candidates, but still consistently liberal. And I think partly what I'm seeing in liberals I'm close to who are even more extremely to the left is just that they're reacting to 'Pubs. The 'Pubs seem to make the first move--e.g., Trump's immigration crackdown--and then the Dems (i.e., the "other team") in reaction stake out an exactly contrary position. In other words, partisanship is driving political radicalization.
2
I think there's a simpler theory. The current generation of educated white folks grew up with immigrants, went to school with them, maybe even married them. As a result, they think of immigrants and their friends and part of their society. The previous generation did not have this bonding with immigrants that began in childhood.
4
This article is misleading, because white Democrats (and Democrats of all races) have moved to the left on economic issues, as well.
Since Occupy Wall Street, terms like "the one percent," issues like Medicare for All and breaking up Silicon Valley, and Piketty-style wealth taxes are just as common in left-liberal discourse as microaggressions and implicit bias.
And it is among African-American and Latinix youth that Bernie Sanders is the most popular candidate for the Democratic nomination.
Education and race is an important metric, but so is age. Young people like me are for Bernie.
5
I'm looking forward to more heartfelt discussions about racism, identity politics, and immigration....while the planet cooks, species die-off accelerates, potable water becomes a rare commodity, erosion of topsoil degrades land once viable for agricultural purposes, storms intensify, seas rise, and heat death becomes more of an everyday occurrence.
So--by all means--bring on the deep analyses of dangerous liberal drift. I'm still waiting for Brooks to offer us one column--just one! which mentions climate change. Alas--the GOP, FOX News, and our beloved leader have issued a blanket ban on deranged, unhinged, socialist phrases such as "climate change" or "global warming". As a faithful acolyte, Brooks obeys.
3
True true true!
Human Equity, not financial, is what supposedly the U S is about? Aspiration-ally.
I see several comments from people in my age group tell you plainly that their leftiness hasn’t changed. Their commitment to equity and common sense, an understanding that we all sick or swim together.
Actually what’s happened sir, is you and the republicans ate the rancid meat of triumphalism, walked over the planet with militarism and financialized economies while singing Onward Christian soldiers as justification for leading the despoliation of the planet.
Happy now!
5