Live from Trumpland: David Atkins: David Brooks’ Realignment Won’t Happen:
Reading David Brooks.... You can tell that unlike most of his conservative colleagues he genuinely means well... [but] a special kind of insufferable worldview that evades common sense.
Today’s column is a perfect example.... Brooks can see that the traditional left-right divides that have formed the basis of the two major parties since the mid-1970s are rapidly shifting.... But because of his detachment from the experience of regular people, and his hope for a comfortable existence for laissez-faire economics, he’s blind to what that realignment will actually look like.... A comfortable upper crust that is benefiting from automation, globalization and asset prices, and a large declining set of middle and lower castes who getting caught in the undertow... But then Brooks runs off the rails... posit[ing] a future in which the Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street professional classes unite under a Democratic Party banner, while the great faction of millennials and regular workers of all races join a changed Republican Party free of bigotry.... Brooks hasn’t spent much time talking to Trump voters or Bernie voters, nor has he actually looked at the forces roiling the European Union....
People with conservative tendencies react to economic anxiety by trying to preserve more resources for their “tribe”... racial... regional and religious.... Those with more liberal tendencies will react by trying to redress injustice and redistribute wealth that they feel (rightly, in this case) has been distributed unfairly.... Those two types will never cooperate.... There is no way to separate racism from anger over economic hardship, because conservative cultures and brains will always default to racism whenever hardship arises. Similarly, affluence hardens conservatives to the plight of the poor, while it leads liberals to feel guilt and noblesse oblige. Wealthy conservatives and wealthy liberals won’t join forces any more than the poor will.
Nonetheless... the divide between the Trump conservatives and the Romney conservatives will also grow.... The coming realignment will simply witness the end of the Romney conservatives: with the failure of supply-side economics to deliver results, the Wall Street Republican no longer has a constituency.... Meanwhile, a nationally dominant Democratic Party will spend a generation fighting an internal struggle for control, with some states leading a progressive charge against the more establishmentarian national party. That’s what is happening elsewhere in the world where these clefts are made more obvious by multi-party parliamentary systems. The American version will be similar, but most of the battles will occur within the parties themselves.
