Okay, Which Of You Educated Elites F*cked David Brooks’s Wife

Crom help us, New York Times columnist David Brooks has committed another think piece. The fucker is probably already planning to turn it into a book, too.

His latest jeremiad is a 2,600 word rehash of ideas he just never seems able to stop gnawing on, like Ugolino, condemned to eternally chew the noggin of his archenemy Ruggieri, and there, I’ve thrown in a classical reference to establish my academic cred (Ed Abbey did it better in an essay when he talked about chowing down on a head of iceberg lettuce during a river trip).

So what has Brooks so worked up this time? Educated elites, again.

Let us summarize: Brooks doesn’t like how top-ranked universities keep churning out woke leftists who aren’t good for much of anything. They’re full of rich kids and professors who adopt a guise of radical progressivism to convince themselves they aren’t actually as privileged as they are. Graduates of elite universities go on to run institutions like the government, education, and the media, which have themselves become stew pots of bubbling leftism and groupthink, more focused on promoting far-left woke agendas than actually solving problems.

That’s why ordinary Americans are so disgusted with said institutions that they have turned away from the Expert Class, who sound crazy to them, and have flocked to populist jerks like Donald Trump, who share their disgust at the elites but whose simplistic solutions will only make things worse (and empty followers’ bank accounts), but that’s what happens when elites are so out of touch.

There’s probably something in there about fussy exotic foreign sandwich names, too.

To be fair, I’m paraphrasing a lot here, but we have wasted a perfectly good guest link on Brooks’s column so you can be astonished yourselves. Brooks really does construct an argument here, very tediously, but like so much of Brooks’s tendentious twaddle, it’s grounded in so many generalizations about the supposed ideological rigidity of students at elite schools that it’s hard to take seriously.

Then again, I’m just an elitist-lite who went to state schools and wrote a dissertation about how we learn about the world from Bugs Bunny cartoons. David Brooks is far more familiar with academic elite circles than most of his readers, but the people he says dwell in those institutions sound a lot more like two-dimensional caricatures than anything the animators at Warner Bros ever came up with.

By contrast, Brooks, who acknowledges he went to an elite university long ago and flirted with good old working-class progressivism before progressivism moved from the union hall to the elite campuses, explains that sensible centrists are nothing like those awful progressive elites, who sound kind of robotic:

A lot of us in the center left or the center right don’t want to live amid this much conformity. We don’t see history as a zero-sum war between oppressor and oppressed. We still believe in a positive-sum society where all people can see their lives improve together.

I have met very few people who see history that way! Certainly not any historians on the Left. Heck, a goal of a “positive-sum society where all people can see their lives improve together” sounds like the vision of government and society those crazed leftists at the American Prospect are always calling for.

Perhaps the most irritating of many irritating features of Brooks’s column is his alleged solution to the problems that all these straw elitists have caused. In Brooks’s imagined reckoning with harsh truths,

[We] would face up to the fact that all societies have been led by this or that elite group and that in the information age those who have a lot of education have immense access to political, cultural and economic power. We would be honest about our role in widening inequalities.

Oh, so far, so good! It almost sounds like what some lefties would describe as checking one’s privilege, although Brooks might shudder at the phrase. OK, do go on:

We would abhor cultural insularity and go out of our way to engage with people across ideology and class. We would live up to our responsibilities as elites and care for the whole country, not just ourselves.

Oh dear, now we’re back to educated elites as a monolith, which is some bullshit, particularly when the Supreme Court — and Brooks’s fellows at the genteel New York Times — keep shitting uponeth any attempt to broaden the class of people who get into these elite schools. And has David Brooks never heard of service learning, which is all about getting out of the ivory tower and engaging with people where they are? It’s a big thing in universities of all stripes.

Most important, we would dismantle the arrangements that enable people in our class to pass down our educational privileges to our children, generation after generation, while locking out most everyone else.

Tax increases? Yes! Redistribution of wealth! Eat the Rich, but not at a pricey airport restaurant with multiple double whiskeys. Or did Brooks just call for an end to legacy admissions? Well, kind of!

That would mean changing the current college admissions criteria, so they no longer massively favor affluent young kids whose parents invest in them from birth.

That’s literally what all the “woke” college administrators and “woke” students have been trying to do. And then they’re accused of woke, or worse, DEI, and David Brooks yells at them a lot for scaring off the normies. Then come the lawsuits from rightwing assholes who can’t stand the idea that any reasonably bright (but not stellar) white kid might be left behind.

Or how about we tax the rich and use the funds to pay in-state tuition for any public college or university, like we used to until Ronald Reagan set California’s university system on fire? That doesn’t sound like too airy an ivory-tower leftist idea, does it? Maybe ban students taking that deal from majoring in “gender studies,” though, since we hear that’s another source of all of America’s problems.

In conclusion, remind me to punch myself in the face the next time I think it might be “fun” to write about a David Brooks column.

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