WARNING! David Brooks has admitted that he lives in a wealthy bubble and to rectify that he plans to break out of his New York Times cocoon and travel down the Heart of Darkness to mix with the hoi polloi.
What caused Brooks to issue his bubble admission was the rise of Donald Trump whom he had previously discounted. So before getting down from his high horse to possibly mix with the peasants at your neighborhood sports bar Brooks, with a massive chip on his shoulder, declares his moral superiority:
Donald Trump now looks set to be the Republican presidential nominee. So for those of us appalled by this prospect — what are we supposed to do?
Well, not what the leaders of the Republican Party are doing. They’re going down meekly and hoping for a quiet convention. They seem blithely unaware that this is a Joe McCarthy moment. People will be judged by where they stood at this time. Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after for the degradation of standards and the general election slaughter.
Whew! I am almost surprised that Brooks did not invoke the tired "on the side of history" cliché. Count this as Brooks' "I'm morally superior" moment. And before Saint David begins his accession into heaven, he lets us mere mortals know that even he suffers from a (gasp!) character flaw:
According to a Pew Research poll, 75 percent of Trump voters say that life has gotten worse for people like them over the last half century. This declinism intertwines with other horrible social statistics. The suicide rate has surged to a 30-year high — a sure sign of rampant social isolation. A record number of Americans believe the American dream is out of reach. And for millennials, social trust is at historic lows.
Trump’s success grew out of that pain, but he is not the right response to it. The job for the rest of us is to figure out the right response.
That means first it’s necessary to go out into the pain. I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own. It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable. But this column is going to try to do that over the next months and years. We all have some responsibility to do one activity that leaps across the chasms of segmentation that afflict this country.
See, all of you are destined to become potential test subjects for David Brooks' breaking out of the wealthy bubble experiment. But first... Brooks lets loose with the most intensive set of psychobabble bloviations since the long-winded rantings of one William Rivers Pitt:
I don’t know what the new national story will be, but maybe it will be less individualistic and more redemptive. Maybe it will be a story about communities that heal those who suffer from addiction, broken homes, trauma, prison and loss, a story of those who triumph over the isolation, social instability and dislocation so common today.
We’ll probably need a new definition of masculinity, too. There are many groups in society who have lost an empire but not yet found a role. Men are the largest of those groups. The traditional masculine ideal isn’t working anymore. It leads to high dropout rates, high incarceration rates, low labor force participation rates. This is an economy that rewards emotional connection and verbal expressiveness. Everywhere you see men imprisoned by the old reticent, stoical ideal.
Yeah, I can just imagine Brooks during his wealthy bubble breakout shtick walking into a redneck bar in, say, Yazoo Mississippi and pontificate to the patrons about the need for a new definition of masculinity. Which would happen first? Him getting tossed out or laughed out of the bar?
The most painful thing for Brooks during his "Sullivan's Travels" among the unwashed masses will probably be the necessity of putting off slumming through Europe with his wealthy pals to follow Bruce Springsteen concerts on that continent as he described in 2012:
They say you’ve never really seen a Bruce Springsteen concert until you’ve seen one in Europe, so some friends and I threw financial sanity to the winds and went to follow him around Spain and France. In Madrid, for example, we were rewarded with a show that lasted 3 hours and 48 minutes, possibly the longest Springsteen concert on record and one of the best. But what really fascinated me were the crowds.
...How was it that so many people in such a faraway place can be so personally committed to the deindustrializing landscape from New Jersey to Nebraska, the world Springsteen sings about? How is it they can be so enraptured at the mere mention of the Meadowlands or the Stone Pony, an Asbury Park, N.J., nightclub?
My best theory is this: When we are children, we invent these detailed imaginary worlds that the child psychologists call “paracosms.” These landscapes, sometimes complete with imaginary beasts, heroes and laws, help us orient ourselves in reality. They are structured mental communities that help us understand the wider world.
So when Brooks ultimately grows weary of mixing with the great unwashed during his bubble breakout phase, he can return to joining his fellow wealthy bobos in believing they are so very avant garde by following Springsteen concerts in Europe while washing down their societal structure psychobabble with fine wine.
