To which every person in the know upon seeing that headline immediately shouted: YES!
After all, it was the NYT that consciously pursued the “Russiagate” investigation of the 2016 election long after it was obviously a dead end. And they did this because of all their predictions ahead of the election that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in. Their election models proved it. But then the models all turned out to be wrong. They could not admit it and so assigned dozens of reporters to vindicate the paper. They failed.
Then they experimented for a few months with running some diversity on the opinion pages until they upset a tiny and insane cohort of their readership and staff. So then they fired their op-ed page editor. The woke revolution at this page was complete by 2017, after which the entire institution became a weapon for destroying Trump and anyone who supported him, or, really, anyone who doubted the wisdom of allowing liberal globalists total hegemony over American public life.
It became pathological during these years.
It got so bad that in late February 2020, the paper threw out 100 years of public-health wisdom and decided to whip up a wild disease panic, all with the hope of destroying the Trump presidency. The idea was to create an association of Trump with a pathogen that was deeply dangerous to the body politic and therefore must be suppressed even at the cost of Constitutional rights and the lives and well-being of children.
I don’t believe for an instant that they didn’t know what they were doing. They did. They knew the astronomical costs of closing down the economy, restricting travel, masking everyone, and unleashing the shot-givers on the unwilling. They knew but they did it anyway, and why? Because their fevered imaginations believed that the Trump administration represented an existential threat to a century of liberal progress. Anything was justified toward the great goal of purging him from public office.
And by the way, I don’t like using the word liberal to describe totalitarians. Liberalism has a noble history dating back centuries. It stood against every form of authoritarianism. But in every decade of the 20th century the “liberals” in the United States got worse, starting with their war-mongering in 1915 and following, continuing through the New Deal, and getting worse each decade. But the 21st century has been next-level rotten with the liberals now unable to defend even basic free speech rights or freedoms of association. They really need to give up the name in the interest of preserving some modicum of integrity in the English language.
The worst part of contemporary liberalism is its class-based ideological isolation and snobbery. It’s been all about preserving the privileges of the few against the aspirations of the many. To achieve this, they have built huge empires of influence and control. They have done this even though they constitute a tiny cult at this point, operating not off principles but symbols of association, with an unrelenting disregard of the working classes or anyone without insider access to their kept university structures and media organs.
During the pandemic, they shamed anyone who wanted their kids educated, desired to visit ailing family members, had doubts about masking, and then resisted forced and untested medical technology. They completely threw out whatever affection they once had for naturopathic healing and embraced the biomedical security state. They rallied around lockdowns that exploited the working classes in service of the stay-at-home elites.
This is so obvious and so apparent that even they are starting to admit it. Let’s consider a few lines from Brooks’ article.
“I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys. 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.”
“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.”
“Over the last decades, we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out.”
“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.”
“Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves.”
“Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like ‘problematic,’ ‘cisgender,’ ‘Latinx’ and ‘intersectiona’ 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.”
“We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others.”
“We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?”
That’s some hard-core truth right there but it barely scratches the surface. Exclusion, snobbery, and disdain for the masses is so baked into liberal ideology at this point that the attitude is inseparable from the whole system of thought and sociology of the tribe. It is not a bad habit. It is a way of living.
You can see it all around you in every urban center. Go to any art museum and you will find yourself forced to walk through room after room of utterly insane trash to get to the paintings and sculptures that you actually want to see.
The absurdity has gotten worse with each passing decade. The other day I was at the woke section of the local museum staring at a 10x10 canvas painted solid black. We are invited to look at that and pretend that it is art. If it means anything, I don’t want to know what it is.
It’s true in every arts institution but also in academia, media, government, and most every profession. They are structured to exclude normal people with regular-person aspirations. They have set up a caste system for themselves, exactly as Brooks says, and then they dare decry anyone with doubts a fascist or deplorable or rube or Bible thumper or whatever.
I doubt that the court of Louis XIV was so uncomprehending of real life.
The pandemic response really pushed this all over the top, as all the liberal elites were happy to crush human rights and public health in the name of creating an environment of chaos and voter fraud all in the interest of driving the orange man from office. This is a very dangerous fanaticism that did appalling levels of damage not just to the county but to the entire planet. And they dared celebrate throughout.
Even now, they are redefining democracy as one-party rule.
From which I conclude that liberalism is not just anti-liberal, not just habitually mistaken, not just isolated and uncaring, as Brooks says, but fundamentally pathological. It desperately needs to be fixed lest their power and privilege drive us further and deeper into a medieval morass of lords and peasants with a digital veneer.
What will end their reign of terror? Economics is helping. Woke is going broke and colleges are not filling up as they once did. The management ranks specializing in ESG, CRT, and DEI are being purged of accounting necessity. Masses of people are now alert to the racket and are determined to stop it. Perhaps that was the purpose of Brooks’ article, simply to tell his own tribe of what is developing out there in the real world before it is too late and their entire empire crumbles to the ground.
