Maybe Bernie Sanders Is Right By New York Times Opinion columnist David Brooks

My name is David Brooks. I’m a columnist at “The New York Times.” About half the time, I write about politics, and then in the happier half of the time, I write about everything else, like culture, sociology, neuroscience, emotions. I write about politics because it really matters. But my heart’s in the culture.

I think one of the things that’s happening in our era is that politics is no longer organized rich versus poor, and ethnicity is becoming less important as a predictor of how you vote and how you think. And now, you’d have to say the chief divide in America is between those with college degrees and those with high school degrees, the diploma divide. And Donald Trump has managed to build a multiracial, working class majority around the interests of the working class and against the interests of the educated class.

Let me try to explain how we got to this point. I would say for the last 40 years, we’ve been living in the Information Age. And during that age, both Republicans and Democrats, while disagreeing with each other on many things, shared a basic understanding of what American society was about, that we were entering an age, a post-Industrial Age, we had to prepare people for jobs of the future, and that the college-educated class was really going to be in the commanding heights of society.

So we built our trade policy to ship manufacturing jobs overseas so we could focus on Information Age jobs. We had an immigration policy that gave those of us in the educated class access to cheap labor. But for those less skilled, they suddenly face new labor competition. We tried to shift to green energy, while neglecting the idea and the beliefs of people who work in manufacturing or transport or any of the other sectors that need fossil fuels.

The diploma divide doesn’t only govern our politics, indicating who somebody’s going to vote for. It governs our society. And so we have these deep social chasms between those who have college degrees and those who don’t. People with high school degrees die sooner than people with college degrees. People with high school degrees are much more likely to be obese. They’re more likely to die of opioid addictions. They’re much more likely to say they have no close personal friends.

So our society is not just divided by economics. It’s a whole series of structural things that go into the very belly of how people live. Over the last 30, 40 years, there’s just been this giant sucking sound, which has accorded respect and recognition to people who are good at academic things and has taken status and recognition away from people who are good at fixing a refrigerator, or fixing an HVAC system, or who work with their hands.

And this, really, punishment of those who are suddenly denied status, denied recognition by society, is acutely painful, and they don’t like it. And they wanted to do something about it, so they looked at Donald Trump. And now we’re entering another era, an era driven by people who are demanding recognition and respect.

I travel a lot. I probably went to maybe 30, 35 states in the maybe six months leading up to the election. And I think what I noticed was the gap between those places where college-educated and affluent people congregate and those places left behind. The storefronts are shabbier. The strip malls are often half-empty. There may be a Dollar General store or something like that.

I went to a church in Tennessee which was a Christian nationalist church. And the pastor was filled with aggression and suspicion about the Judases who are betraying us. He said he had been accused of embezzlement by somebody in the congregation.

He called Kamala Harris satanic on his Twitter feed. He called her a whore. And so you get this not only personal bitterness and retribution against people within the congregation, but also the same sense of embattlement and aggrieved aggression against, basically, the Democratic Party.

And the irony is that the Democratic Party is built for one thing. It’s to address inequality. And Democrats looked out at society and saw a lot of inequalities — racial inequality, gender inequality, discrimination against LGBTQ people.

But they missed the central inequality that really marks American society now, which is academic inequality, which merges with class inequality. And so they allowed Donald Trump, who took over the Republican Party, which we do not associate with the working class, to turn it into a multiracial, working class party.

My belief is that Trump is the wrong answer to the right question. That is to say, of all the many Trump supporters, I don’t agree with them, but I get where they’re coming from. Many of them have had bad jobs for 20 or 30 years. They might have good jobs, but they’ve seen their community go into decline. They feel themselves and their values dismissed on the national scene. And so I get where they’re coming from. I have total sympathy for Trump supporters.

Let’s face it, over the last 20 years or 30 years, when we’ve had basically a leadership class dominated by people who went to elite universities, you would think it would make society better-run. We’ve got all these smart people running things. And yet we’ve had the war in Iraq, we’ve had the financial crisis, and we’ve had seemingly one failure of leadership after another. And people just take a look and say, this is the wrong way to run a society.

If the Democrats can’t appeal to working class voters, they’re going to lose, just because there are a lot more voters without a college degree than there are voters with a college degree. And so they have to do a bunch of things.

One is stop blaming voters for their own preferences. Now, I don’t doubt that, at some level, racism and sexism and other bigotries played some role in this election. But if the Democrats decide that the reason Harris lost is because of racism and sexism, and they’re basically calling the electorate racist and sexist, I just don’t think it’s a good way to win voters.

The second thing that has to happen is that people in the educated class have to get out of the blue bubbles and actually come to understand what working class voters think like, what they are like, have to show them some understanding and respect.

But third, there has to be a shift in policy. And here, I’m a little uncomfortable. I don’t agree with what I’m about to say, but I think it may be necessary. So I’m a moderate who really did not like the policies that Bernie Sanders proposes. And yet the one thing he got right was disruption, disrupt the system. I’m arguing against my own viewpoint here.

But it could be in order to win working class votes in an era of high distrust, the Democrats have to do a lot of things that Bernie Sanders said they should do. And I certainly have several friends who were pro-Bernie and then became pro-Trump because they just wanted disruption. And so those two versions of populism, maybe it’s time they vied against each other.

The Democrats need to find someone who can appeal to working class voters. And the person who obviously leaps to mind is John Fetterman. He’s a guy who has won in Pennsylvania, the state Democrats need to win, by violating, especially recently, all sorts of progressive orthodoxies. And so he’s a guy who’s culturally and in the level of values, I think, much closer to the median voter in this country than nominating the next person from an elite school, an elite law school.

I remain pretty optimistic about America. We go through periods of turmoil. We go through periods where people get disgusted with established power, where a passionate generation comes on the scene, where groups that were marginalized demand to be included.

And this happened in the 1770s during the American Revolution. It happened in the 1830s, in the age of Andrew Jackson. It happened in the 1890s during the second Industrial Revolution. And it happened in the 1960s, with all the turmoil and assassinations and bombings of that era. And the news from history is that we get over it.

We go through these moments of turmoil in which we shake everything up. But humans are ingenious, and the culture heals. And so what happens is after a few years of this period of turmoil, the culture shifts, people’s values adapt, and we create a new consensus.

And I’m highly confident we’re going to do that now. The short-term problem is doing it while Donald Trump is in charge. And I don’t particularly worry about fascism from Donald Trump. I don’t think he’s that organized. I worry about chaos and incompetence.

As we do some fundamental rethinking, there has to be a rallying effort to preserve parts of government that work — the civil service, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve — and to preserve what’s really valuable in the American system against the chaotic wills of Donald Trump.

An article from The Washington Post - I don't agree with everything but it makes some interesting points.

Why the resistance went quiet after Trump’s victory
The fight against supposed fascism is not much of a fight, and that’s a good thing.

By Shadi Hamid
November 25, 2024, at 7:30 a.m. EST

Something odd has happened. A “fascist” has risen to power in the world’s oldest democracy. A fascist is, in fact, what Kamala Harris called Donald Trump just weeks ago. In those tense days before the election, a host of Trump critics and opponents used similarly alarmist language, such as Rep. Dan Goldman (D-New York) suggesting that Trump “is paving the way to become … an Adolf Hitler.

None of this rhetoric was new. In a major 2022 address ahead of the midterm elections, President Joe Biden warned Americans that democracy itself was “on the ballot.” The question in front of voters, he declared, was whether “democracy will long endure.”

Today, a verdict has been handed down, yet the language of autocratic doom has dissipated, a faint memory of a different era. Biden welcomed the would-be dictator to the White House and seemed in good spirits, pledging to do everything he could to make sure the president-elect was accommodated. In Harris’s concession speech, she did not seem overly troubled by the prospect — for the first time in U.S. history — of a fascist in the most powerful office in the land. Instead, she offered a succession of motivational platitudes. “To the young people who are watching,” she intoned, “it is okay to feel sad and disappointed. But please know it’s going to be okay.”

If this is what the fight against fascism looks like, it’s not much of a fight. It sounds more like a dishonorable surrender. The shift away from “existential” rhetoric is welcome: The challenge of democracy, as I have written, is one of coming to terms with frightening electoral outcomes. This sudden softening, however, raises questions about whether Democrats ever truly believed their own words — or whether they were engaging in a cynical effort to motivate and even shame Americans into voting against Trump in the absence of compelling reasons to vote for their candidate.

But it’s not just politicians who embraced hyperbole. It’s the hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens who, last time around, in 2016, quickly fashioned themselves into the “resistance” — a moniker that “unless you are burying weapons in the forests of Poland or hiding in the basements of French country houses, one has no right to assume,” as the author James Kirchick archly put it.

This time around, they appear strangely subdued, victims of the dual reality of what Sam Adler-Bell terms “pre-exhaustion” and “non-novelty.” In 2016, Trump’s win could be explained away as a fluke of the electoral college, an aberration in time’s march of progress. To resist was to pave the way for a restoration, a restoration that came with Biden’s endearingly boring bid for normalcy.

Now, though, for many Harris supporters, there is a sense of being humbled, even mugged, by reality. We thought this was our country, but we discovered that much of the country had left us behind, indifferent to our warnings. Just enough Hispanics, Black men, and Arab Americans apparently decided that (supposed) white supremacy was an acceptable price to pay to bring down a system that promised much but delivered little.

Perhaps, too, there is a bit of shame, that most paralyzing of emotions. In his bracing postmortem, Adler-Bell wrote: “One feels shame for having missed something, misapprehending political reality. … One feels shame for risking too much hope, for encouraging others to do the same. And most of all, one feels shame — humiliation, even — over feeling powerless: powerless to stop bad things from happening to people we love but also simply less powerful, ousted from the driver’s seat of history.”

Emotions of despair are different from those of hope. Hope spurs action. Despair more often leads to retreat. In this vein, a growing number of former activists are proposing rest and self-care as better, saner propositions than political action. As activist David Hogg, who survived the Parkland school shooting in Florida, reflected: “We’ve marched so much. We’re tired of doing the same thing over and over.”

There is also a sense that protests might not exactly work, that people power isn’t particularly powerful. As the political scientist Erica Chenoweth noted in a 2022 article, nonviolent campaigns are “seeing their lowest success rates in more than a century.” The reasons vary depending on whether the countries in question are democracies or dictatorships. In the United States, heightened polarization means that leaders perceive politics in zero-sum terms and more readily ignore the demands of members of the opposing party. But even sympathetic elected officials — as with the 2020 George Floyd protests — tend to respond with cosmetic reforms and symbolic statements of solidarity that don’t actually have much measurable impact, as the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has documented.

Perhaps some of this demobilization is for the best. Four more years of civil unrest would probably have little effect on someone like Trump and might even trigger him to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests, as he has already threatened to do.

It might be tantalizing to see ourselves as radicals and revolutionaries against the tide of dictatorship. But it’s presumptuous and even self-indulgent to make ourselves the center of the story. We are not revolutionaries. America, for all its flaws, is still a democracy. And in democracies, there probably shouldn’t be revolutionaries. There are citizens. And that should be enough.

Luckily, the alternative to protest is as obvious as it is urgent. We should allow Trump’s victory to chasten us, to force us to reflect on why so many of our fellow Americans cast their lot with Trump despite being well aware of his flaws. And then we must focus not on inchoate expressions of rage but on persuading voters to vote differently next time around. That’s the more difficult work, since there will be no immediate gratification to be found.

But it is also perfectly legitimate for individuals to make other, more personal calculations. As Cheri Hall, a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant who is Black, told her social media followers, now might be the time to take a “great Black step back.” This is also a time to remember that living a good life is not the same as having the right politics. If our time on Earth is finite — we have only about 4,000 weeks to live on average — then we must choose carefully how to spend it.

Despite how it might feel in this moment, there is no shame in defeat, and there should be no embarrassment in pulling back, even if temporarily. Life is too short, but it is also long.