Bobo in Paradise

I realize this already has been covered by Paul below, but I could not let this pass without adding my own comments.

David Brooks’ new article in The Atlantic is just a hodgepodge of disingenuous assertions, lies and straw men.

I’ll save you a read: He tries to make the argument that liberals are to blame for our current moment of discord because we think we’re smart and we’re all NIMBYS.

I suppose this argument would have more pull if 74 million people hadn’t voted for a dumb fascist, the Senate weren’t evenly divided, there weren’t a billionaire class trying to crush democracy, and there weren’t an entire news network working overtime to do the same thing.

There is no blame for the Cletus safaris and how there has never been a class of people–the Trumpist class– more coddled and studied and kowtowed to in history. Instead, he blames upper-middle-class liberals (everyone from doctors to artists, which he shoehorns into “the creative class”)…as if this were something new or novel. Liberals have been blamed by everyone for all the ills of the world for as long as I’ve been following politics. Brooks’ observations are banal.

I know I don’t need to remind you all that many Trump supporters are wealthy and upper-middle-class, and that the word “elite” has at this point in time lost all meaning. Not when we’re exclusively using it to describe academics who make $100, 000 a year.

In what meaningful way have the Trumpers been left out and left behind? If having to bake gay cakes is what we’ve decided is the world’s greatest psychic injury than “left behind” is another term that no longer means anything. Of course, I think–in the long–run I think discourse like this exists to rob words and phrases of real meaning.