Counterpoint: Blaming the educated class for Trumpism is absurd

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David Brooks' effort to juggle his status as Never Trumper and reasonable conservative has been instructive for readers who worry about our democracy. He's often been a deeply thoughtful middle-roader in both condemning and trying to understand an increasingly dangerous right-wing faction that now dominates the Republican Party.

That said, Brooks deeply overthought himself into absurdity with "How the educated elite created Trumpism" (StarTribune.com, Aug. 4), arguing that educated elites and especially those with progressive values are "the bad guys" primarily responsible for the rise of Trump and Trumpism.

Brooks tortures himself trying to have it both ways, agreeing that Donald Trump is a monster, while offering condescending sympathy to Trumpists who have somehow been radicalized by all those successful people with four-year degrees. Throughout the column, Brooks deals in generalities and cultural stereotypes, and more than a little self-serving self-flagellation. He fails to explain exactly how our educated status (I'm a first-generation college grad, not terribly successful) has created this.

Brooks throws up some truly off-the-wall evidence for his case, theorizing that President Barack Obama's frequent use of the word "smart" was intended to imply that conservatives without degrees were stupid. And he bounces around, assuring us at the end that he and most of us pointy-headed college grads are "earnest, kind and public-spirited" even while we are primarily responsible for creating the monster and his minions.

What Brooks misses is that Trumpism's worst features — white rage, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, contempt for academic expertise and opposition to federal racial justice policy — have been a work in progress for a long time. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, it was George Wallace and Ronald Reagan (both college graduates) who began exploiting and inciting white backlash to civil rights enforcement, helping spread it from the South to northern white ethnics and union members.

Brooks gets it right that economic inequality has worsened over the last 50 years and that education is increasingly a determinant of success on many levels, from income to health to family stability. But educated center-left liberals and progressives have been loudly protesting this inequality trend and are at the forefront of efforts to reverse it. As traitors to their class, they have fought to raise taxes on the wealthy, improve economic security and health care for workers, and make higher education more affordable or even free for everyone, including red-state conservative families.

Meanwhile, it's conservative Republicans, almost all of them also highly educated and many from elite liberal arts colleges, who have been opposed to almost every equalizing public policy. This includes minimum-wage increases, union organizing rights and more progressive financing and expansion of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid benefits.

A related fallacy that Brooks and others across the spectrum have fallen prey to is the notion that the political alignment has shifted along economic lines and that Trumpist Republicans have become the party of the underclass and middle class, while liberals and Democrats are supported only by wealthy urban elites.

All the exit polls from the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections show the same thing as CNN's 2020 post-election survey. Trump carried those making more than $100,000 by 54% to 42%. Biden won among those making less than $100,000, 56% to 43%. Because there are three times as many of the latter, Biden won by more than 7 million votes.

Brooks and other analysts make this mistake by focusing too much on cultural differences between white voters only and ignoring the fact that 40% of our population and a bigger percentage of our lower-income workers are people of color. These analysts also miss the fact that white rural voters and workers are actually better off than urban voters and workers of color. Many people of color with higher-education credentials, who would be part of that urban elite, have less income and wealth than whites with less education. And finally, workers of color without college degrees vote against Trump by large margins.

The latest Brooks column actually is a regurgitation of a theme Brooks has been obsessed with since 2000, when he hit the big time with the book "Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There." The foibles and hypocrisy of trendy limousine liberals who have more money than they need is good fun and fair game. But Brooks has been knocked down a peg in the past when he gets carried away with Bobos — bohemian values, bourgeois lives — as bad guys.

Author and columnist Jill Filipovic took Brooks to task when he wrote a similar lament in 2017. She traced the hostility and self-loathing by Brooks and others to the educated class as a "kind of anti-intellectualism [that] portrays the values of a small group of people (working class white men) as more authentic and admirable than the diversity of interests embraced by others across the rest of the country."

Blaming the educated as "inherently flawed and inauthentic" is wrong-headed, Filipovic added, and instead we should ask: "How can we give every person in this country greater access to education and the information, critical thinking skills, social mobility and higher paying jobs that come with it?"

Dane Smith is a former journalist and former president of a progressive think tank, and a graduate of Inver Hills Community College and the University of St. Thomas.