NYT Columnist Asks, 'What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?' The Answer: Yes, You Are.

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NYT Columnist Asks, 'What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?' The Answer: Yes, You Are.


NYT Columnist Asks, 'What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?' The Answer: Yes, You Are.
Mark Lennihan
In an op-ed piece for the New York Times on Wednesday, David Brooks had the headline, “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?” In it, Brooks struggles with the question of why Trump has a commanding lead over the other GOP hopefuls and why he seems essentially tied with Joe Biden on a national basis. All of this despite the fact that Trump continues to rack up indictments like a grandma on a winning bingo streak at The Villages.


To his credit, Brooks does conduct a fairly exhaustive self-examination. In the piece, he enumerates the ways and provides examples of how America’s elites have lost touch with, well, everyone else. He reflects on how elitism extends to the workplace:

Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.

He also observes:

Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.


Brooks rightly notes that the elites have manipulated the economy and the culture for their own purposes. He concludes:

But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.

But scrolling up for a moment, one of Brooks’ more interesting comments was:

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

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