David Brooks, His Eyes Uncovered!
Bill Kristol, too!
Somebody must have snuck into David Brooks’s home and left Tracy Chapman’s first album on autorepeat, because three months of Donald Trump’s second term have that icon of staid, muddleheaded center-right “moderation” Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution.
In his New York Times column yesterday (gift link … Or Temba, his arms wide link), Brooks makes the case that Trump and Trumpism threaten all the good things that civilization has to offer: rule of law, international order, science and medicine, education, the free press, charitable organizations, even businesses that “build wealth and spread prosperity.” All these institutions, he says, “make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.”
Trump’s pursuit of power for power’s sake, to advance the interests of his billionaire pals and nihilistic burn-it-all-down hooligans, are a moral affront to Brooks, like even worse than pretentious exotic sandwich ingredients or overpriced airport burgers double scotches. Brooks, an upright, mildly Puritan-and-proud believer in not overdoing it, sees Trumpism not merely as a threat to democracy, but as a dangerous eruption of Monsters from the Id:
Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.
Welcome to the Resistance, Mr. Brooks, however you got here. We need everyone if we’re to stop Trump from grabbing people off the streets and sending them to foreign prisons, maybe forever. That’s pretty averse to humanity.
Bill Kristol, who used to be reliably rightwing and almost flawlessly wrong in every prediction he made, got this observation on the New Tyranny completely right earlier this week:
Brooks notes that while Trump may appear to be attacking a whole bunch of disparate targets — law firms whose attorneys offended him, colleges, immigrants, USAID, NATO, and so on — the attacks are anything but random, but part of a “single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power.”
In the face of those assaults, Brooks says, it’s time for a unified opposition that isn’t simply a matter of letting the universities fight attacks on them, or the legal profession stand up for itself. Rather, since the threat Trump poses is far from normal, Brooks says, the opposition to him has to go beyond the usual politics, too:
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
Well hell yeah. General strike, unified opposition, a united front to defeat Trumpism and save democracy. We’re there on the barricades, Citizen Brooks!
David Brooks being David Brooks, he does of course caution against fighting Trumpian nihilism with any revolutionary equivalent, since calls to burn everything down end up with ashes either way.
We can agree with well over half of what Brooks says here, which is pretty good in politics:
[A] civic uprising has to have a short-term vision and a long-term vision. Short term: Stop Trump. Foil his efforts. Pile on the lawsuits. Turn some of his followers against him. The second is a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism — one that offers a positive vision. Whether it’s the universities, the immigration system or the global economy, we can’t go back to the status quo that prevailed when Trump first rode down the escalator.
We’ll almost certainly disagree with what exact shape that second half takes. David Brooks being David Brooks, he would very much like a post-Trump destination that David Brooks can get behind.
But heck, we don’t necessarily have to share that particular goal. We need to put out the fire first, free the hostages, restore PEPFAR’s international HIV/AIDS treatment, too. Then we’ll have that orderly discussion about what reestablishing democracy and fairness looks like. And we must make sure that everyone has a voice, not just those with the most money or guns.
The rest, we’ll argue over, as Americans are very good at. We’ll disagree with David Brooks and others once more, in the spirit of the old hymn by Molly Ivins:
So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.
We’ll see you all — even David Brooks — at Indivisible’s NO KINGS! protests on Saturday.
[NYT (gift link) / Indivisible]
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Gift link note updated to "Temba, his arms wide link"
Brooksa, with his eyes uncovered!