Shift Change at the Wheel Reinvention Factory
Even David Brooks is welcome in our movement.
David Brooks is a writer who purports to explain America even though he spends one hundred percent of his time shuttling between the New York Times building and the Aspen Ideas Festival. You can see how this might leave a gap in his knowledge. He fills this gap with endless amounts of pop psychology, always ready to latch onto a new sociological theory to explain why poor people don’t understand fancy sandwiches. Brooks is the most prominent example of the “guy you made an excuse to walk away from at the party because every time you said something he replied, ‘you know, I read an interesting theory about that.’” Had he not landed at the Times, he could have had a more appropriate career as a bad personal therapist. There, he could have only misled one person at a time, whereas journalism gives him the opportunity to mislead millions.
Though Brooks’ original position was as the Times’ in-house conservative, you need only spend one second gazing at him giving a TED Talk in a quarter-zip fleece to know that the Republicans left him behind long ago. This leaves him in the odd position of being a man who gives advice for a living while having no idea what just happened to his own party. Needless to say, this has not stopped him from writing things. He engages in self-reflection the same way that a newscaster on live TV picks his nose: quickly, leaving no evidence that it ever happened.
Now, Brooks is alarmed for our country. He is able to see that Trumpism is destroying our country, but his own intellectual toolbox, stuffed with Steven Pinker books and course catalogs from Yale, is comically unsuited to deal this this moment in history. His response is to write a long article in The Atlantic titled “America Needs a Mass Movement—Now.”
If you’re thinking to yourself, “David Brooks calling for a mass movement in the pages of The Atlantic is like me calling for a parade of supermodels to come date me as I sit in my cousin Roy’s garage surrounded by half-eaten chicken wings,” well—yes. Yes, this is accurate. It is a measure of the depth of our national crisis that I am going to try to offer a good faith critique of Brooks’ arguments here, rather than just trying to point and laugh and mutter about how mind-blowing it is that he still has a job. No! No I won’t! Because surviving this descent into fascism will require, ugh, unity, and that will require all of us to accept bizarre new allies, with grace. Or with some measure of grace. Our derision must be leavened with grace, at least.
Watching Brooks waste many thousands of words trying to explain the rise of a racist reality show host who has never read a book as a product of “the writings of people such as Albert Jay Nock, James Burnham, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Christopher Lasch” is amusing and all, sure. But the broader flailings of Brooks do, I think, have a real value. His sense of being overwhelmed by the daily onslaught of outrages from the Trump administration prompts him to desperately try to construct coherent explanations in line with his existing worldview—something many of us have done! And his sense of dread in the face of onrushing fascism pushes him to the conclusion that, as our institutions fail, only a mass movement will be capable of saving us—something many of us have concluded! In this sense, Brooks is an unlikely everyman in this moment; just another alarmed American frantically yelling, “Why don’t people do something???”
The sentiment is understandable. Even laudable. The specifics of Brooks’ ideas, though, are pretty dumb. Steeped as he is in the world of elite punditry, he sees the problem before us not as one of changing the material conditions of the world, but rather as one of constructing “a more accurate and compelling narrative” that will convince all of the dazzled Regular Folks that they were wrong to follow this fella. This tendency, endemic among pundits, to see changes in society as nothing more than the outcome of a battle between competing thinkpieces leads Brooks to waste much space filtering his desire for a movement through the lens of messaging, as if the key to bringing millions of people into the streets is striking the exact right tone. This allows him the intellectual security blanket of imagining that our uncertain future can be tamed by using just the right Richard Hofstadter quote, and that we can spin up an an “anti-populist social movement” by creating “a competing cascade of mini-dramas.” The solution to fascism, you see, lies in winning the news cycle.
As a writer, I sympathize with this fantasy. What America needs is a better narrative, and who can create it? Heroes like me! This fantasy is shared by millions of relatively educated liberals who cling to the belief that Trump can be defeated if only the wishy-washy media would finally publish the perfect, cutting headline about how This Guy Is Bad. Ah, what a sweet world it would be if it were that simple. In truth, we are in much deeper shit than that. Saving our democracy—and building our mass movement—is going to be much harder than that, and much more disappointingly prosaic.
In the same way that we on the left must gracefully accept our new allies in the fight against fascism, people like David Brooks must also have the grace to be quiet when they find themselves out of their depth. You want a movement? Brother, there are people who have been neck-deep in social and political movements for their whole lives, right here in America. Ask them what to do! They know! One of the reasons why it is hard to build and sustain movements is that it is more fun to be “a wealthy pundit basking in praise for your brilliant insights” than it is to be “one of a million anonymous people acting in solidarity with a million more.” David Brooks does not need to give us any more social theories. The best thing that he, and others like him, can do right now is to learn how to follow, not lead.
The final three sentences of Brooks’ piece are revealing. “Cultural and intellectual change comes first—a new vision,” he writes. “Social movements come second. Political change comes last.” Note that this formulation places visionary intellectuals such as David Brooks as the protagonists of all occurrences. This is false. Note also that the only sorts of change mentioned are “cultural and intellectual”—the things that David Brooks likes to focus on—and not, for example, “economic.” This inescapable urge to place himself at the very center of the world is why people like David Brooks are not incisive political thinkers. And why they are a real pain in the ass in union meetings.
Union meetings! Heard of that? Union meetings happen in unions. Unions are things that once covered a full third of working Americans. Now they cover less than a tenth. That decline, and the accompanying decline of power for the working class and rise in economic and political power of the rich, does more to explain how we got here than all of the books that David Brooks has ever written. Happily, it offers a hint that America has done this before. And we can do it again.
Unions are part of the labor movement. Movement! There’s that word. The labor movement rose from the awful conditions of industrial capitalism and fought decades worth of bloody battles in the streets in order to reach the point that it could fight its battles in the halls of Congress instead. The labor movement used the simple concept of worker solidarity to painstakingly build real power for people who were treated as if they had none. The power of the labor movement grew strong enough to create America’s golden age of shared prosperity, and has since been ground down by the forces of investor capitalism to such a degree that we find ourselves once again plunged into a morass of plutocracy. But we know how to get out. It ain’t a mystery, brother.
America does need a mass movement now, David Brooks. You’re right about that. Once you realize that, the most productive thing to do is not to write ponderous Atlantic essays implying that you alone can guide us, but rather to join a movement. Join a union and become a part of the labor movement. Join DSA and become a part of the movement for social democracy. Or join one of the many fine activist groups in this country and become a part of the movement for civil rights or reproductive justice or environmentalism or one of the other worthy causes. Movements have been around forever. All of these movements, joining together, unifying in the shared cause of Not Being Fascist, will be the real base of the mass movement that will—in time, we trust—form as the wall that prevents the bad people from dragging us into the bad place.
Mass movements sound dramatic. But they are not built dramatically. They are built through many, many mundane actions. Talking to people. Making a list. Knocking on doors. Planning a meeting. Going to the meeting. Setting up for the meeting. Participating in the meeting. Cleaning up after the meeting. Planning the next meeting. On and on. You get to go hurl rocks at the barricades sometimes, yes, but you can’t just do that part, and not do the meetings. This is why the real heroes of mass movements are… the masses. Not the guy who gets in the spotlight to announce his unique plan to save us all—all the people who actually do all the stuff.
We need someone to take notes at the meeting. David? Welcome to the group. Can you take notes for us today? Thank you for participating. We’re glad to have you here. Truly.
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Related reading: Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation; Talking Our Way Forward; There’s No Justice Without Power; The More You Have, the Less You Fight.
I wrote a book about the labor movement, and how it can in fact be the mass movement we need right about now. You can order a copy wherever books are sold, but if you are David Brooks, I will be happy to send you a free copy. Email me brother!
If you want to organize your workplace, contact EWOC. If you want to get out in the streets and yell, go to one of the many protests happening nationwide this Saturday. After that, organize your workplace.
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"David, why are the meeting notes mostly your internal narrative and a ham-handed attempt to tie everything to a half-remembered Victor David Hanson book? You didn't even take the roll"
America's present is the sum of all the David Brookses of the past.