David Brooks has passed on a bunch of nonsense over the years, but he nails it today:
But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
***The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.
***And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.
Read the whole thing. Should the Republicans lose in a landslide next month, it really was their own doing.
Also, Larison.
Phoenix Woman
Oh my stars and garters, David Brooks knocked that bugger over the right-field wall and through the windshield of a parked car. I’m seeing pigs in low-altitude orbit right now.
I think that most of those folks would have stuck if they’d thought that the GOP’s knuckledragging was simply a pose to bring in the marks. But when it became obvious that it wasn’t just a pose, the dam burst.
(UPDATE: O/T, but this piece by Ari Melber on Obama’s use of the web to bypass the press gatekeepers is pretty nifty. It also explains part of Dean Reynolds’ hissy fit earlier this week.)
jibeaux
Wow, a shout-out to Raleigh Durham! Represent!
That had some interesting statistics, I wonder where they’re from. I’m not saying I disbelieve them, just curious as to who compiled donations by occupation. He didn’t say. Pointy headed elites like to look into things like facts.
Axe Diesel Palin
Now watch what you say or theyll be calling you a radical, liberal, fanatical, criminal. Wont you sign up your name, wed like to feel you’re Acceptable, respecable, presentable, a vegtable!
Notorious P.A.T.
No one could have predicted that rejecting reality wholesale would alienate people who make their living in science- or math-related professions.
raff
…& it’ll look good on them. This is what happens when you play divisive identity politics. You also drive away the undecideds on the fringe.
Notorious P.A.T.
And let’s be crystal clear about one thing: the reason Republicans like Brooks are moaning and wailing about the state of their party isn’t because our country is going down the crapper; it’s because they are about to lose an election, the only thing they really care about.
If McCain were winning? I’m certain Brooks would be lambasting lawyers and doctors and tech executives in favor of pasty pickup-driving bubbas in Alabama. That’s why I won’t give much credit to Republicans who write things like this.
SGEW
Balloon Juice needs a new tag, along the lines of "Conservative States the Obvious, Slaps Forehead Until It Bleeds" for every conservative who wakes the fuck up and sees what’s been staring at them in the face for years. A John Cole tag, as it were. See, also, Kathleen Parker, George Will, etc.
Love this understatement from Brooks:
Gosh.
jibeaux
Does it not strike anyone else as profoundly weird that a voice of reason is coming from Buchanan’s magazine? I know Buchanan kind of does his own thing, but I have never known him to say "ephemeral" or quote historians of seventeenth-century Europe. Larison seems positively Buckleyan, while the National Review reads like the Republican Party platform dipped in John Birch society sauce and encrusted with little starbursts of crazy.
Comrade Jake
I just have a hard time taking Brooks seriously. This is the guy who said people feel like Obama’s not the type who knows his way around the salad bar at Applebees. He’s not a regular Joe, like John McCain.
Yes David, intellectuals have abandoned the GOP, but you abandoned your ability to think critically a long time ago. You’re part of the fucking problem. Asshole.
dslak
David Brooks helped chase some of those people away. This is the first Brooks column I’ve seen in a while that didn’t heap praise on Midwestern, salt-of-the-earth types. That kind of behavior was part and parcel of the strategy he’s now decrying, and he knows it.
John Cole
@jibeaux: No. the American Conservative is the best magazine out there for conservative thought, and has been for quite a while (at least in internet years).
The Weekly Standard is not conservative, and is only Republican in the sense that they can use the GOP to advance their national greatness nonsense. If the Democrats embraced national greatness/neocon stuff, the biggest cheerleader for gay marriage and every other Democratic issue out there would be Bill Kristol.
The National review is not conservative, it is a better funded Red State- a meeting ground for reactionary Republicans. Not conservatives. Republicans.
There is a difference.
Comrade Warren Terra
The whole point of Brooks, the reason he’s beloved of the Times, NPR, and PBS, is that he frequently alternates between disingenuous logrolling for the Republicans and sensible moderation. So his saying something that accords more with the non-Republican worldview is not a surprise.
Still, I think you will see more and more Republican pundits deciding they don’t want to play on in the band as this particular electoral Titanic goes down, and that they especially don’t want to be remrmbered for doing so. They may even form a good ol’ Circular Firing Squad. Some of us longtime Democrats could give them some tips, so that they benefit from our extensive experience in the practice.
liberatemeiexinfernis
thats rich coming from somebody who contributed overwhelmingly to the class divide. Wasnt it Brooks who specialized in creating terms like bobos and wasnt it people like him who went out of the "coastal liberal" cities to observe the salt of the earth wholesome Nascar dads and Walmart moms and wholesome Joe Sixpacks like specimens in a lab to understand their preferences and then come and report to us liberals what the commonsense folks were thinking?
btw, calling Nascar dads and Walmart moms wholesome is wrong on so many levels, but anyone shopping at Walmart regularly and buying toxic cheap crap there and then ingesting it cannot make anyone "wholesome"
scats
Gee, I wonder who’s been pushing the notion that the nation is divided on social class lines…who made his career pushing that notion…wouldn’t be anyone named David Brooks would it?
jibeaux
Oh, I know. I was just noting the irony that Buckley, for all his faults and his ideas I disagree with, was an actual conservative and by all accounts an intelligent, urbane and witty guy as well.
And his magazine now brings the crazy like nobody brings the crazy — I like better funded Red State — and Pat "culture warrior" Buchanan’s magazine is now principled, conservative, intelligent, urbane, and witty.
sparky
sorry, but Mistah Brooks, he just making his own liferaft. visualize buckley dumping his pipe from the parapet onto all that trash down below.
naturally, because it’s his liferaft, he had nothing to do with running the ship onto the rocks, nosirree!
Brooks: "me no hate teh sckience! here, lookie here at teh pretty numbahz! see! me knot like those other guys, even though they sign my paychex!"
dmsilev
Try this. The whole opensecrets.org site breaks down donations in all sorts of ways. Note, though, that this only counts donors who put in more than $200 to a campaign; below that point, campaigns don’t have to report names to the FEC.
-dms
Suicidal Zebra
Dow down 8% to below 8000.
Feck.
Comrade Darkness
As a long-time watcher of the McLaughlin Group, and a die-hard progressive, I can safely tell you that Buchanan has been sitting in the dead center of the American political landscape (admittedly the landscape has shifted) for 6 or more years now. He’s a pretty articulate man. If he avoids certain words, it’s not because he can’t use them, I expect, but because he knows what audience he is trying to reach. Maybe he’s changing audiences.
There aren’t a lot of pundit/commentators I’d like to have drinks with, but he’s on the short list. He’s a keen political observer, but off-base just often enough in his conclusions to make him interesting to listen to.
GSD
The big fraud is the notion that the media has few conservatives or Republicans.
LOL pudboy.
-GSD
jibeaux
And also.
You may be right, Darkness. I admit I haven’t followed him closely recently.
SpotWeld
I wonder what the donation ratio would be for the class of Americans defined as "people who have traveled outside the country".
Dennis - SGMM
The GOP pushed the "you’re either with us or against us" line to its limits when they were riding high in the early 2000’s. Now they’re finding that "against" is carrying the day. They created a political No Fly List so extensive that just about everyone except the 28 percenters is on it.
Bob
As a Democrat, I knew we could lose this election, but I knew that without major changes in the Republican Party, their days were numbered.
In the not so distant future, non-whites will outnumber whites in America. The Republican’s have been unable to win nationwide elections without running against a boogie man. They scared whites into voting Republican by running against blacks through the use of Willie Horton ads, or conjured up other negative stereotypes by running against “Welfare Queens”. They have run against immigration, which alienated all immigrants but especially Hispanics. They have run against gays, a group that has gained substantial acceptance in America.
Well, guess what, the “boogie-men” are about to outnumber conservative whites. Already if you add minority groups to white liberals and fair-minded independents you have a new majority in America.
John McCain could have been a new kind of Republican, who could have saved the party from itself. It was clear when he choose Sarah Palin as a running mate that the Republicans were unready, or unwilling to change.
Notorious P.A.T.
I’m sorry, but are we thinking of the same William F Buckley, and the same National Review, that published this:
vishnu schizt
Per the same column:
FAIL
David Brooks is as full of shit as Mrs. Palin, a total fraud, a hack. Nailed it? If stating the blatently obvious is nailing it. Jesus Christ has it sunk to that? This started with Lee Atwater in the fucking 70’s. If you (the repubs) keep telling anyone that had the gall to actually get an education, and use their brains that they are assholes, traitors, terrorists, DFH’s, whatever, it would seem that alienating them is the logical outcome. Oh I forgot, logic has a liberal bias, reason does to. I see how he nailed it! Jesus decided it was time to grant him the knowledge, that must be it. Excuse me while I puke.
In regard to the above quote, Palin is likable to the pack of assholes driving us into the ground. She is politically skilled yes, just like Nixon, in other words criminally insane. Smart? WTF is the definition of smart now? Yes I guess she is smart in the republican way, the Republican definition of smart means you are a fucking mindless autobot who has willing checked the ability to use reason at the door. I guess that youtube video of those ambulatory house plants on the four wheeler, who think Obama’s name is definative proof he is a terrorist is now the definition of smart.
The lot of them can wallow in this punchbowl they shit in.
jibeaux
Didn’t say he wasn’t racist, especially back in the day. Said he was a conservative, intelligent, urbane, and witty.
Although it may not have been widely published in such stark terms, that was not a terribly out of the mainstream opinion for white 1950s America. Hell, we’ve got a sitting Democratic Senator who was a member of the Klan.
being released
Let me add the scientific community to that list of professions. Scientific research should be non-partisan, but the Repubs have done a such a good job of corrupting, ignoring, twisting, and lying about science results that they’ve turned the majority of research scientists against them. I’m a planetary scientist (we’re the ones who study the solar system and analyze the data from spacecraft sent to Saturn, Mercury, comets, etc.) Except for aspects of climate change which we study, this is not a field that should have many political implications. I think the reason we’ve turned against the republicans is the pure anti-intellectualism they radiate – They aren’t specifically opposed to our science, but scientific reasoning in general.
Of course, McCain making fun of a $3 million "overhead projector" for a planetarium, just makes him look anti-science, anti-education, and anti-astronomy.
Don McArthur
The opposite of great journalism, IMHO. Brooks’ cowardice at not facing the real issue will not soon be forgotten. The GOP was hijacked by boneheaded religious fundamentalists. You cannot be a fundie nutter without a well honed contempt for critical thinking skills. Willful blindness, the embracing of the patently untrue, erodes the cognitive faculties. That’s the face of today’s GOP.
Aunt Deb
David Brooks has himself played the anti-intellectual game when it suits him. Indeed, David Brooks made sure he helped the Republican party brand Democrat candidates as pointy-heads and effete elites. But that was when David Brooks thought he was part of the ‘real’ Republican Party — you know, the part that was full of brains and was manipulating the crazy fundie masses so that the rich know-it-all guys could get their hands on all the reins of government.
David Brooks is, I’m sure, probably convinced he’s fair and balanced, but really, he is simply a self-serving moral mediocrity who is either unable or unwilling to understand his complicity in the current ugliness.
SamFromUtah
Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
Brooks does get some stuff right in that piece, but I have to take issue with this. The Republicans didn’t attack "pointy-heads" (just) because Democrats nominated them, they attacked all thinkers because smart people don’t fall for their bullshit. Not forever, anyway.
r€nato
well, I guess I am only going to echo other commenters, but David Brooks bears a significant share of the responsibility for aiding and abetting the very thing he is bemoaning in this column. For pete’s sake, he’s made money writing books which celebrate this mythical middle America prole who ain’t got too much fancy-pants book larnin’ but from whom our leaders should take their cues.
I’m not going to give Bobo much credit for this uncommonly sensical column; he’s been bitch-slapped by the Frankenstein monster he helped create.
he’s got several years of repentance ahead if he wishes to be rehabilitated.
Cris v.3.1
I also tend to consider AmConMag to be "Buchanan’s magazine," but I think real credit for the magazine’s tone goes to Scott McConnell, who is the editor-in-chief. As a former neoconservative true believer (his 90’s articles are archived on vdare, for god’s sake), his conversion to the paleo camp must have come with that same sense of betrayal of principles that people like John feel.
Jamey
Whoda thunk it, the movement that spawned BoBos in Paradise, has become a mobius strip.
Brooks, for those keeping score at home, chides arugula-eatin’ "liberals" for being out of touch with the "real" America. But when things look bad for his party, he says it’s because they’ve put too much emphasis on demonizing those who place a high value on intellect and cultural sophistication.
I’d like to see Brooks diced into cubes and served at Applebee’s salad bar.
slag
@scats: David Brooks really is a genius! I heard he figured all this out over lunch at an Applebee’s salad bar.
(Edit: Damn you Jamey!)
r€nato
I think it WAS a pose at first, but like most bullshitters they began believing their own bullshit.
r€nato
yep. This is just more of the same crap where the GOP encourages a hysterical witch-hunt against a popular Democratic president and then bemoans the politics of personal destruction, as if they had nothing to do with it.
Jamey
r€nato:
Quoting Bart Simpson, feeling shame after pranking Mrs Krabappel on Valentine’s Day (it ALWAYS comes back to Bart Simpson): "I can’t help but feel partly responsible."
r€nato
Bobo:
…not to mention from certain New York Times columnists…
those comments (closed, unfortunately) on Brooks’ article over at NYT.com are really amazing. Pretty much every single comment condemns the GOP, quite a few are self-described conservatives who feel the GOP abandoned them, and a large number of the comments are calling out Brooks’ fascination with Palin.
r€nato
from the comments at Brooks’ column:
Proof that watching Faux Noise rots your mind.
If you have the time, I encourage you to read the comments, every single one.
r€nato
another winner from the comments on Bobo’s column:
heh indeed.
Gus
Exactly. Brooks seems like a likable guy when he’s on the News Hour, but he overlooks his contributions to the very problem he details in this column. How many columns did he write decrying the pointy headed elites in the big cities while extolling the virtues of the exurban real Americans? I’ve often wondered how apparently intelligent people like George Will and Brooks can stick with their party while it attacks people like them, but I think Notorious P.A.T. nails it.
jcricket
The x-to-1 ratios are going to get worse. I work at a big law firm, and if you do an age-based-breakdown, it’s more like 10-to-1 in favor of Democrats in the under 40 age set. And don’t even get started on anyone in school or thinking about voting for the first time.
Let’s make it clear the scientific community is more than just the academics at colleges. It covers economists (witness how many economists of every "political persuasion" think Obama has the better grasp on the economy), biologists, chemists, physicists, social scientists, workers and administrations at the FDA, NASA, EPA, CDC. Anyone not employed by a right-wing think-tank or the tobacco industry.
With the exception of the libertarian impulse amongst techies, they’ve also alienated everyone I know in the software profession.
I said this in another thread here, but they are making enemies faster than they can kill them (so to speak).
Besides all the knowledge-based professions we’ve talked about, there are huge segments of the population they are alienating with their tactics – blacks, most Jews, Latinos, gays (and their parents/friends), union workers, etc. Some of these have never been that drawn to the Republican brand, but now it’s double-dog-toxic.
Add in the financial crisis, and Republicans fault/de-regulatory approach, and you’ve got middle-aged people worried about their retirement and kid’s colleges suspect of Republicans. Unless they turn "back" (which they won’t) Republicans will lose the votes of nearly everyone under 40 except the racists, sexists, xenophobic, homophobic haters.
jcricket
I saw Brooks and Beinart (seriously) debate each other once. This was in 2005. Both were bemoaning the Democratic party’s "move to the left" and "lack of centrism".
It’s hilarious to think about now.
I’ve always said Brooks never met a group of people he couldn’t divide into "salt of the earth Republican types" and "flaming freakazoid out of touch lefty liberal pinko commies" – although he comes up with catchier terms.
He could be in Morocco and probably "find" small-town-Republican-aligned light-skinned Moroccans and urbane-jet-setting-darkies-with-disdain-for-traditional-values (like female genital mutilation, which is almost quaint).
Brooks, Broder, etc. need to FOAD. I prefer Hannity, Savage, Coulter, Malkin, Limbaugh. They’re just as dishonest, but there’s no doubt where they claim to stand.
scruncher
Brooks fails to mention another reason: the Republicans embrace and/or exploitation of the religious right.
DragonScholar
I’d say Brooks got it right here – this has been building for awhile.
I once stated to a friend I had no reason to vote Republican as, simply, they appeared to decide I was the enemy. I had gay friends I supported (and thus contributed to the destruction of straight marriage, an odd statement as I am straight-married). I wouldn’t pass their religious "requirements" nor would many of my friends and family. I felt it was my priority to help develop a functional society – not give reign to the wealthy few. I was a proponent of science. I could go on.
Very simply, the Republican party (which I voted with early in my life) managed to alienate me a few years after I started voting, and only kept at it. They declared me, my friends, my family, my religious organizations, as their enemies.
So why would I ever vote for them?
Will
I’m sick of this heartland versus coasts nonsense. The South and the Great Plains are still Republican strongholds, but the Midwest (which is the real heartland, in my mind) has long been competitive for Democrats. Look at Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Michican, now even Missouri and Indiana. It’s also annoying that people talk as if the East Coast goes only from Maine to Delaware.
Beej
The whole midwestern/coastal thing never held water anyway. Does anyone really believe that there aren’t voters out here in the "midwest", wherever the hell that is supposed to be, who are educated, rational, and repelled by the direction the Repugs have taken in the last couple of decades? We do exist. I offer as evidence the fact that Obama is close enough to winning the electoral vote of Nebraska’s 2nd district (Nebraska and Maine allot electoral votes from each Congressional District separately) that Palin swooped in on her broomstick a few days ago to deny she was there because the McCain campaign was worried.
*The 2nd District is Omaha and it’s suburbs. There is an outside chance that Obama could also take the 1st District-Lincoln (University of Nebraska’s main campus is there) and the rest of the eastern 1/3 of Nebraska. No chance for the 3rd District. Right beside the definition of Republican in the encyclopedia is a map of Nebraska’s 3rd District.
Republimorons
Umm, like…what?
I was out of town for a bit, but did McCain replace Alaska Govenor Palin with another woman named Palin?
The bitch I saw on the tele in interviews, speaches and debates neither sounded smart or likable and was the furthest thing from impressive.
I was out of town last weekend, did I miss something?
tom.a
Republicans have alienated not just whole professions, but large parts of the country: east coast, west coast, north east, new orleans, inner cities and of course anywhere they grow wine or arugula. By the looks of it, come post-election, we can add in everything north of Kentucky as well.
r€nato
I think Sean over at fivethirtyeight.com wrote recently, that if McCain had to quit the ticket and the GOP replaced him with Jack Abramoff, Obama stood a good chance of getting 537 electoral votes.
Western Nebraska (the 3rd district, I assume) would be the lone holdout.
cynic
Oh, poo.
All that’s going on here is the same, dismayingly predictible, cyclical process: the Right undergoes a temporary public ascendancy, generally as a result of social/economic upheaval; its acolytes proclaim the final triumph of their weltanschauung (" … this country is going so far to the right you won’t recognize it …"); the public eventually starts paying attention and realizes it’s been had; as the ever-elusive goal of hegemony slips from their grasp, the demons emerge from the furious base; everyone gets seasick and abandons ship (including the rats like Brooks). The inevitability of right-wing excess and collapse is as certain as periodic capitalist excess and collapse. When you piss off someone as apolitical as Letterman it’s time to admit popularity isn’t your strong suit.
The great Bill Hicks on rednecks …
The Friends of David Brooks …
jenniebee
Oh fercryingoutloud. David Brooks isn’t pissed that Republicans have basically posted a "No Dogs or Coastalites under $200Kpa" sign on their door. He’s been fine with the nonsense of "coalition building" for years now – as long as the coalition is between a ruling moneyed intellectual set and a bunch of ruled-but-rowdy footsoldiers whose responses to culture-war stimuli are so predictable that the thought of getting a hold of them would make Pavlov drool.
But now along comes Sarah P. to upset the balance, and Brooks isn’t so keen on that. He’s a plutocrat to the core, and probably more upset at the idea of the people he’s been pandering to for years actually putting one of their own near the White House than he is about a Democrat getting there. For Brooks, the difference between his policy preferences and those of centrist Democrats have been largely academic, which is why he’s done so much to emphasize the differences in their cultural appeal. So now he gets the bitter pill: the people he’s been praising for so many years actually took him seriously. Luckily, they’re the only ones who ever did.
BC
Jenniebee, I think you give Brooks too much credit for finally seeing the light. I think he sees the Obama landslide coming and is getting his hiny out of the way of the debris. He’ll be back to shilling for the Republicans after Nov 4, never fear.