Well, now we can rest easy (or maybe just easier). David Brooks, the house conservative at the New York Times, has just absolved us of racism. But this absolution didn’t come cheap, since he does convict our “populist backlash” against Obama of being “ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top….”
Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector….
What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.
“One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,” the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. “The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.”
Brooks thus divides America in three groups: rural, white America with its festering populist backlash and its counterpart in extremist overreaction, the progressive elite — both of which he condemns — and all the educated, smart people who support Obama … but not extremely.
Perhaps one day he will favor us with publication of the finely tuned scale with which he calibrates the exact importance that should be attributed to “the Van Jones and Acorn stories.”
