David Brooks: Gee, I Guess Me and My Fellow Well-Heeled Establisment Swells Kind of Didn't Listen to the Voters for Years, Huh?

This never could have happened with David Brooks and the rest of them serving as the midwives for the disastrous birth.

The question is: Should deference be paid to this victor [Trump and Trumpism]? Should we bow down to the judgment of these voters?

Well, some respect is in order. Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it's a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I'm going to report accurately on this country.

Why don't you just admit you expected Your Lessers to obey your pronouncements because of your self-evident superiority? *

And perhaps contemplate that it is precisely this attitude -- the sneering contempt for anyone outside your small, unimaginative, well-educated-but-unimaginative drone class -- is precisely what has caused this class to lose all of its (unearned) authority?

From Instapundit, who finds this very early stage of self-examination wholly inadequate. He notes that the Tea Party sounded the alarm bells -- and the establishment hit the snooze button for six years.

Don't take this as any kind of endorsement of Trump from me -- Trump will lead us to an electoral disaster the very dimensions of which will perversely serve as a validation of the Establishment who actually caused the disaster.

That is, when Trump loses everything -- and all indications are that he will lose everything for us, the presidency, the Senate, the courts-- the well-read-but-stupid seneschals of the Establishment will rise back to prominence.

There's an old saying: If you take a shot at the king, you'd best not miss.

The current trajectory we're on -- taking a shot at the Establishment princelimgs with Trump, then getting blown out in the general and thereby confirming the alleged wisdom of the Capital Class -- would be a case of assassin's aiming at the king, but then all of their guns exploding in their own faces.

* BTW, asshole, you don't have to "socially mingle" with anybody. People do not need to "socially mingle" with other people to know what the news is. They just have to buy a newspaper.

Who the hell has time to "socially mingle" even with one's friends enough, let alone strangers, for purely interview/focus group purposes?

What you assholes need to do is let your intellects occasionally wander off the well-worn paths you've been treading down for 60 years. You just need to read someone who disagrees with you occasionally.

These fools live in a bubble completely insulated from popular thought but then presume to tell the nation what it really thinks.

Note that even David Brooks' pronouncement that he needs to "socially mingle" with his lessers is just a regurgitation of another old idea he had -- that the someone should set up programs to let The Elite go on camping trips with those of the lower orders, to facilitate such "social mingling."

Or, as I like to say: David Brooks demands that a government program be set up which can introduce him to his doorman.

I'm sure, after a period of "social mingling" David Brooks will deem himself now up-to-speed and Ready to Rule once again. That old post brought me to this old David Brooks quote, asserting, for the hundredth time, his unshakable belief that we need a Leadership Class to lead the uneducated and declasse:

This leadership crisis is eminently solvable. First, we need to get over the childish notion that we don’t need a responsible leadership class, that power can be wielded directly by the people. America was governed best when it was governed by a porous, self-conscious and responsible elite -- during the American revolution, for example, or during and after World War II. Karl Marx and Ted Cruz may believe that power can be wielded directly by the masses, but this has almost never happened historically.

It has happened briefly after periods of revolution against out-of-touch entitled faux elites, David.

Which is not to say it's ever gone well.

But perhaps you should take some time to read up on the various political classes which became so inbred, insular, and disconnected from reality they provoked their own destruction.

David Brooks Has Confessed Failure. Anyone Think He'll Pay Any Price for His Failure? The interesting thing about the Capital Class is that it's insular and maintains that no one else in America is capable of doing the cognitive work they do -- ergo, you can't really be fired from your job. You can only be moved from position to position. They can't fire you, because there's literally no one else in America capable of rising up to take their place (in their belief, at least).

That makes this class completely unlike most others in America. There aren't too many professions in which you can fail catastrophically and then get a book deal to explain your errors (with lots of self-justification along the way) and have it become a mid-list bestseller.

Maybe it's time to bring some real accountability to the Capital Class. The policy of Too Prig to Fail is causing them, like Lehman Brothers, to make disastrous bets with other people's money.

posted by Ace at 03:01 PM

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