slate - David Brooks Column About the Womens Marches Should Be Dumped in Acid and Set on Fire
by Ben Mathis-Lilley
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/01/24/david_brooks_women_s_marches_column_not_good.html
New York Times columnist David Brooks, who is to genuine intellectual inquiry as Flintstones vitamins are to the polio vaccine, filed a column Tuesday about the weekend's spectacularly well-attended anti-Trump women's marches. And there must have been some sort of mistake at Times HQ, because they put his column in the newspaper even though it belongs at the bottom of a well.
Let's go through it. This is Brooks' thesis.
These marches can never be an effective opposition to Donald Trump.
No one said they were. There are articles all over the internet written by and about progressives who acknowledge that the marches were only a first step (har) in the long process of organization required to achieve political and policy success.
We're off to a bad start. Next:
In the first place, this movement focuses on the wrong issues. Of course, many marchers came with broad anti-Trump agendas, but they were marching under the conventional structure in which the central issues were clear. As The Washington Post reported, they were reproductive rights, equal pay, affordable health care, action on climate change. These are all important matters, and they tend to be voting issues for many upper-middle-class voters in university towns and coastal cities. But this is 2017. Ethnic populism is rising around the world. The crucial problems today concern the way technology and globalization are decimating jobs and tearing the social fabric; the way migration is redefining nation-states; the way the post-World War II order is increasingly being rejected as a means to keep the peace.
When I read those paragraphs, I spit my latte all over my Volvo. In what sense are "affordable health care" and "action on climate change" not related to "technology and globalization"? Like, directly related in a manner that would be condescending to even explain out loud? Since when has "affordable health care," which in the form of Medicare is perhaps the quintessential meat-and-potatoes issue in American politics, been a pet cause of "upper-middle-class voters in university towns and coastal cities?" And could he truly be suggesting that the marches would have been more broadly popular and meaningful if organizers had announced that their primary concerns would be the redefinition of nation-states and the deterioration of the post-World War II international security regime?
snip - much more to read.
Nice take down of someone whose work I've never respected at all
dhill926
(16,355 posts)"New York Times columnist David Brooks, who is to genuine intellectual inquiry as Flintstones vitamins are to the polio vaccine"
Mercy...
NRaleighLiberal
(60,019 posts)David Brooks is an affluent East Coast white-collar professional who's made it his mission to mansplain the concerns and beliefs of Middle Americans to other East Coast white-collar professionals using the language of history and political philosophy. But David Brooks has never lived in Middle America (the University of Chicago doesn't count!) and his understanding of history, political philosophy, and American public opinion doesn't appear to have advanced since he was an undergraduate.
kimbutgar
(21,188 posts)This 60 year old woman was out in the streets for 7 hours in rainy cold weather but she knew as the other thousands knew we were out there showing chump we will not allow him to put us down.
NRaleighLiberal
(60,019 posts)And to every single person that marched everywhere that day. True heroes (to this 61 year old man!)
lefthandedskyhook
(965 posts)by one four years your junior
lefthandedskyhook
(965 posts)nt
thucythucy
(8,086 posts)"Vladimir Putin is having a good night tonight."
Even a stopped clock etc. etc.
lefthandedskyhook
(965 posts)Truly. Just a wasted brain IMO