Here is The New York Times columnist:
Over the past 20 years or so many of us social observer types have been writing about the horrific chasms separating the educated class (people with college degrees) from the working class (people without).
Some of these chasms involve basic health outcomes. People without college degrees die about eight years sooner than people with four-year degrees.
Some of the chasms involve family structure. Women with only a high school degree or less are about five times as likely to have children out of wedlock as women with a college degree.
Some of the chasms are sociological. People with only high school degrees or less are much more likely to say they have no close friends. They are more likely to live in towns where social capital is collapsing and the young are fleeing.
Some of these chasms involve educational outcomes. By sixth grade, the children of poor families are performing four grade levels lower than the children of affluent families. As Daniel Markovits of Yale has pointed out, the education gap between affluent and non-affluent students today is greater than the gap between white and Black people in the era of Jim Crow.
If America elected a populist as president, you would expect him to devote his administration to addressing these inequities, to boosting the destinies of working-class Americans. But that’s not what President Trump is doing. He seems to have no plans to narrow the education chasms, no plans to narrow the health outcome chasms or the family structure chasms. He has basically no plans to revive the communities that have been decimated by postindustrialization.
Why is that? The simplest answer is that Trump really seems not to give a crap about the working class. Trump is not a populist. He campaigns as a populist, but once he has power, he is the betrayer of populism.
What’s going on here is not a working-class revolt against the elites. All I see is one section of the educated elite going after another section of the educated elite. This is like a civil war in a fancy prep school in which the sleazy kids are going after the pretentious kids.
Look at who is running this administration. The president is an Ivy League-educated real estate developer. The vice president is an Ivy League-educated former venture capitalist. Elon Musk, the emperor of DOGE, is an Ivy League-educated billionaire.
Read the rest here.
Brooks is and always has been the perfect example of a-Liberal Wolf in a Conservative Supposed Sheepskin- the perfect NYT version of weak deceptive conservative thought.
He reeks of the -Elitist none- common sense Academic Snob- who has shown from 2015 on, an aversion to anything DJT.
3 Weeks in and like other leftist fools, he is screaming, why is inflation still high and why is he destroying all the give- away programs.
Brooks did nothing to combat the almost daily leftist/socialist destruction of JB, yet immediately. attacks this administration.
Brooks makes many good points in here. In particular, the fact that Trump–like all demagogues–rides populist grievances (not all of which are unwaranted) into power but has no actual commitment to the populi or interest in resolving those complaints.
The only thing sadder than how ruthlessly he uses them is how eager they are to be used.
But an awful lot of this is just “If you people had been listening to me and doing as I said over the past x decades, we wouldn’t be in this mess!”
Which is pretty much what everyone on every side of the culture wars is saying.