David Brooks has an essay worth reading at The Atlantic, I Should Have Seen This Coming, wherein he talks about long-standing tension in the rightward coalition in American politics. He basically describes a more intellectual conservatism and a reactionary anti-left faction. I think he oversimplifies, but the basic contours of his description are close enough for the basis of a conversation.
The pathetic thing is that I didn’t see this coming even though I’ve been living around these people my whole adult life. I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, when I worked in turn at National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative—they were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference.
Again, this over-simplifies, but it does have the basis of the start of a conversation about where the so-called conservative movement went wrong, if anything, because it is intellectually impossible to call Trumpism “conservative” in any meaningful sense. But I would hasten to add that a lot of self-styled conservatives are directly responsible for putting the reactionary on the throne.
But this post is not about his central argument, although, again, I recommend it.
I really want to focus on one passage. In reading the piece, a singular paragraph drove me a bit crazy for a number of reasons and led to this post.
First, the full paragraph.
Of course, the left made it easy for them. The left really did purge conservatives from universities and other cultural power centers. The left really did valorize a “meritocratic” caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class. The left really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything from gender to the environment. The left really did create a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent. If you tell half the country that their voices don’t matter, then the voiceless are going to flip over the table.
Next, a general observation. I find most attempts to talk about “the left” and “the right” as if they are two monoliths as analytically lazy and generally intellectually annoying. I try not to do it, although I am sure I fall prey to the easy language of it all from time to time. But in a piece in which Brooks is talking about at least two major camps on the right (and even that is simplistic), you would think he would be cognizant of not conflating anything not of the right into one blob.
I would further note something I will continue to hammer because it is so important. We are so conditioned by a rigid two-party system that we mistake consistent voting for ideological coherence. We all (or, at least, somewhere around 95%+ of us) force all of our hopes and beliefs into one of two boxes. We have no other effective choice. As such, it is then a huge mistake to think we understand a pure “left” and “right” as a result.
But allow me to go line by line for a moment.
Of course, the left made it easy for them.
As a general matter, I am increasingly tired of victim blaming. If the reactionary wing of the American right has taken over, then maybe the fault lies with both the reactionaries themselves and others affiliated with them who didn’t try and stop them when they had the chance. I am looking at you, Mitch McConnell.
The left really did purge conservatives from universities and other cultural power centers
First, “purge”? What purge? Second, I simply don’t accept the premise. I am not surprised that artists and intellectuals might be more prone to more progressive and, hence, liberal or even leftist views. A core tenet of progressive thinking is, in a general sense, that applied knowledge can make the world a better place. Burkean conservatism suggests that we should cleave first to the established, the tried and true, with change coming only slowly and gradually,
Which vision of the way the world works is more likely to appeal to someone willing to dedicate their lives to study?
Universities are more likely to draw more liberally minded people.
But there are more conservative-minded people, as well as people who probably don’t think that much about politics on our campuses, than the “purge” narrative would suggest. There are plenty of libertarian minded types, if not conservatives, in your typical Economics Department or School of Business.
(This is a topic I need to take up separately at some point).
In regard to “cultural power centers,” I am not sure what this means. The most prominent cultural power center I can think of is Hollywood (meaning film and TV production). Again, this is a huge topic in and of itself. And while there are clear cases and example of the film an television industry being liberal, if not even leftist, it also true that the dominant message of most shows about law enforcement, as well as super-hero movies as a class, are power fantasies about how easy it is to use force to identify and round up the bad guys. That is far more a right-wing than a left-wing message.
On balance, I often find protestations about how liberals dominate universities and the culture to be less about the full dominance of the left, but rather the incomplete dominance of the right in these spheres.
I continue to marvel at the notion that liberal professors are actively “indoctrinating” their students. As my professorial colleagues will readily joke, we can’t get them to read the damn syllabus, let alone bend their minds to our collective wills. Moreover, if universities, especially the elite ones, are dominated by the left, where are all of these extremely conservative attorneys who get elected to Congress or placed on the bench coming from? If universities are indoctrination factories, can someone please explain J.D. Vance? Tom Cotton? Josh Hawley? Kevin Roberts? Russ Vought? I could make a longer list, but the point should be clear.
Indeed, Brooks himself makes a similar case later in the piece.
But although Trump may have campaigned as a MAGA populist, leveraging this working-class resentment to gain power, he governs as a Palm Beach elitist. Trump and Elon Musk are billionaires who went to the University of Pennsylvania. J. D. Vance went to Yale Law School. Pete Hegseth went to Princeton and Harvard. Vivek Ramaswamy went to Yale and Harvard. Stephen Miller went to Duke. Ted Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard. Many of Musk’s DOGE workers, according to The New York Times, come from elite institutions—Harvard, Princeton, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey, Wharton. These are the Vineyard Vines nihilists, the spiritual descendants of the elite bad boys at the Dartmouth Review. This political moment isn’t populists versus elitists; it is, as I’ve written before, like a civil war in a prep school where the sleazy rich kids are taking on the pretentious rich kids.
Back to the pieces of the paragraph from above.
The left really did valorize a “meritocratic” caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class.
I think that the upper class, both left and right, played this game. And the broadly defined left was at least interested in affirmative action, which the right effectively destroyed.
The left really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything from gender to the environment.
Everyone who thinks they are right pontificates in the direction of those they believe to be incorrect. This is not a trait solely of the left.
Indeed, Brooks has made a career of it himself.
Yes, the leftward side of the ledger has been more concerned about the environment and gender equality and that tends to lead to some moralizing on those topics. Does anyone think that a book called The Road to Character does not make some moral arguments?
The left really did create a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent.
Does it? The whole left?
Some leftists, yes.
But also, lots of other people of varying ideological stripes.
If you tell half the country that their voices don’t matter, then the voiceless are going to flip over the table.
This is where he utterly falls into the trap of rigid bipartism and conflates it with the whole of American politics. There is no unified “left” that its telling “the right” that their voice doesn’t matter. Worse, the reality is that the right (if we mean the electoral right as represented by the Republican Party) has all the advantages in the Senate, and in the Electoral College. Again, the last time a Republican president won the absolute majority of the vote, the best metric for truly measuring support, was George W. Bush in 2004. And that was in his second term, and even then he won 50.7%. The last time a Republican presidential candidate won the majority of the vote in their first term was Bush’s father in 1988. And the last time a Republican won the majority of the vote when it was the party out of power was 1980. And, of course, the GOP won the presidency in 2000 and 2016 without winning the popular vote.
The notion that it is the “left” (again, here defined as Democratic voters) who are telling “the right” that their voice doesn’t matter is more than a little problematic.
Perhaps it is the zenith of “bothesiderism,” but the notion that we can’t just say that the Trumpest reactionaries are bad without first blaming the left feels a lot like a version of “but did you see what she was wearing!”
And quite frankly, I don’t think that the main flaw in American politics is that there are ways to critique the left. The problem is, as I have argued at this site for many, many years, the fact that our institutions are not adequately representative, nor are they responsive. Our politicians do not have to truly compete for power in many cases, or if they do, they are incentivized to cleave to extremes, not to a broader public interest. The incentives are askew, and if we don’t fix them, we are going to remain in this mess.
Indeed, to bring it back to the content of Brooks’ essay: the reason that the Burkean right and the reactionary right were in the exact same political space is because of our rigid two-party system, which is the direct result of our electoral rules. If we had a version of proportional representation, the reactionary right would have been off on their own, and unlikely to take over the whole of government with their 25%-30% of the vote.
