CRAZY DREAMS: "And now the heart is filled with gold..."

THURSDAY, AUGUST 10, 2023

David Brooks' crazy points: Way back in 1962, the extremely young Bob Dylan had been having a crazy dream.

Tomorrow, we'll consider the offer Dylan eventually made in his song about that dream. But by 1967, that same Bob Dylan was married with children—and he seemed to have encountered a different troubling dream.

The fruit of that dream appears on page 1A of this morning's New York Times. (Robbie Robertson has died at age 80. The Times has his death on page one.)

In 1968. The Band chose to open its very first album with Dylan's Tears of Rage. The song addressed the era's "generation gap" with lyrics such as these:

And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse.
But oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse?

It was something resembling that kind of love which David Brooks spoke of last Friday. Giving voice to his own crazy dream, Brooks seemed to say that our own blue tribe has helped enable the rise of Trump and Trumpism.

Could Donald J. Trump get elected again? You can bet your sweet bippy he could! When Brooks sought to explain our blue tribe's role in that phenomenon, he started by saying this:

BROOKS (8/4/23): This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

Brooks' dream begins in the late 1960s, when our own tribe's "heart was filled with gold as if it was a purse." We mandated public school busing in working-class areas, but assigned no such tasks to ourselves!

At that point, Brooks got just a bit rough as he described our blue tribe. "Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized," he claimed, "but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves."

This doesn't make us bad people, Brooks said. Here is the passage in question:

BROOKS: Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No. Most of us are earnest, kind and public-spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.

According to Brooks, most of us anti-Trumpers are kind and public-spirited. But uh-oh:

According to Brooks, we also "want to feel good about [our]selves as [we] take part in systems that exclude and reject" those who don't belong to our class or our tribe. 

Putting it a slightly different way:

And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse...

More than five decades have passed since our "educated" class enjoyed those draft deferments and mandated busing in Boston. During that period, in what ways have we possibly fueled the anger which is now fueling the Trumpism of our neighbors and friends? 

How might we have fueled Trumpism? As he continued from the first passage we posted, Brooks offered this painful suggestion:

BROOKS: ...Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.

Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

[...]

Over the last decades, we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out...

Have our blue elites created a world in which the merely middle-class tend to be locked out? Sometimes, in our own crazy dreams, we think we see one such world when we watch blue tribe "cable news." 

Borrowing from one of the younger Dylan's angrier phases, our cable hosts all went to "the finest schools." It frequently seems that they may not hugely care about those people who didn't and won't. 

This phenomenon extends beyond mere cable, Brooks says. He also offers this:

BROOKS: 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 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.

Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”

Or, as Markovits puts it, “elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”

In the present day, our journalists all went to "the finest schools," Brooks is almost saying. And let's be honest:

Over the past six years, when those journalists have dared to venture into the wild to speak to Those Trump Voters, we regular members of our tribe have routinely screamed in protest.

Don't ask Those People what they're thinking, we've repeatedly said. Don't ask them why they're voting for Trump.

In truth, we blues have done this again and again. Routinely, we've otherized The Others. They're racists and sexists and manifest transphobes, we've screamed from our gated, small gardens:

BROOKS: Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on...Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” the 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.

Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.

None of this makes us bad people, Brooks says. To return to the language we've often used, it does make us people people. It means that, like so many before us, we're inclined to revert to pure tribe.

We aren't bad people, David Brooks says. But he also says this in his column:

"It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault—and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class."

It's easy to understand that, Brooks says—unless you're demonizing and name-calling the Others. Unless you're perpetually insisting that they simply have to be racists. Unless you're embellishing every point of disagreement, no matter how tiny and small.

Example:

Just within the past month, our blue tribe tribunes—almost all of them went to the finest schools—have been brainwashing us, their customers, with screams of dismay about an utterly tiny point in Florida's new public school curriculum.

That said, you've never seen a single one of these corporate stars say a single word about the alleged recent success in the low-income schools of Mississippi. Simple story:

They don't actually seem to care about the kids in those low-income schools! To the extent that they might care, their bosses won't let them depart from the cable news product which sells—Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail Jail Jail Jail Jail Jail.

They aren't allowed to talk about Mississippi's schools! They know how quickly we'd turn off our sets if they decided to do so!

Have we blue tribals played a role in the rise of Trumpism? Does our role in that phenomenon date all the way back to those draft deferments and to that mandated busing—to the anger which started back then?

In our view, we plainly have, and it plainly does, and we're still enabling Trump in much that we say and do. Tomorrow, we'll recommend a way out of this mess, even though it's much too late to affect next year's campaign.

This will take us back to the offer the extremely young Dylan made way back in May 1962. 

The young Dylan reported a "crazy dream," then made a beautifully written offer. His suggestion still sounds good to us.

Tomorrow: Bill Clinton [HEART] Pentecostals