David Brooks, resident conservative(ish) editorialist for
the New York Times, used his
column a few weeks ago to take Never Trumpers and “The Resistance,” groups
with which he associates, to task in the aftermath of the Soleimani killing.
Donald Trump is impulse-driven, ignorant, narcissistic and intellectually dishonest. So you’d think that those of us in the anti-Trump camp would go out of our way to show we’re not like him — that we are judicious, informed, mature and reasonable…. But the events of the past week have shown that the anti-Trump echo chamber is becoming a mirror image of Trump himself — overwrought, uncalibrated and incapable of having an intelligent conversation about any complex policy problem.
Brooks gets a lot right, and an honest self-assessment by
those both Right and Left who place themselves athwart the president would be
as illuminating for them as it is unlikely.
But he misses one key point in his argument – a
misunderstanding that prevents him or anyone in his intended audience from
actually getting to – and fixing – the root of the problem. The mistake is in the title of the column
itself, “Trump is Making Us Stupid.”
American democracy is a consumer-side, not supply-side,
industry. As Jonah Goldberg writes,
“Bad followership yields bad leadership, because in a market-based democracy,
the customer is always right.” If the one nationally-elected leader we have is
“impulse-driven, ignorant, narcissistic and intellectually dishonest,” it is
because that is what we the American consumer demands – through our votes, our cable-news
viewership, our social-media followership, and our own behavior.
America today is a place where the feelings that comfort us
the most are of hatred and outrage; a time of “negative
polarization” when the height of the love we feel towards each other is
determined in inverse by the depth of the hatred others feel towards others
that we hate too.
Brooks speaks of the “echo chamber” that reflexively erupted
at news of Soleimani’s death, and this is because we have self-Balkanized
ourselves into echo chambers that confirm what we already believe. Far from bridging geographic, religious, and
social divides, the advent of the internet and cable news has made it far
easier for us to isolate ourselves from those who are different than ever
before. We can watch entire networks that tell us exactly what we want to hear
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. So too can we friend and follow
those who are just like us to the point that those who aren’t are not real
people at all, but caricatures and boogeymen constructed from our own worst
prejudices.
From this, loathing and outrage become natural and affirming
and, since we associate with those who feel exactly like we do, social capital
and social cohesion are built through immediate, unthinking expressions of
loathing and outrage to greater and greater levels towards those who don’t –
expressions which we like and retweet and comment on in like manner. It’s a mutually-reinforcing and -escalating
vortex of sound and fury.
Decades from now historians will puzzle over how a society
who lived at literally the best
time to be a human being ever could be so discontented and acrimonious with
each other that advice
columns were needed for family members of different political beliefs to peacefully
sit at the same table together on holidays.
As much as we might comfort ourselves otherwise, Donald
Trump did not cause this phenomenon – he is the logical result of it.
For years now, one half of America has increasingly despised
the other half and the other half has requited: the Progressive Left viewing
people on the Conservative Right, in the words of Barack Obama, as so “bitter” and “frustrated” that they can
only “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them.” The
Conservative Right, in turn, after years
of feeling like their way of life has been dumped upon by cultural elites
on the Progressive Left, has been waiting for someone who treats everybody on
the Left (and Right) who disagrees with him the same way the Left has treated
them.
Our contempt both drives us apart and brings us together. No longer can we listen and think beyond what
we already know, because to do so might be to admit that those we’ve
conditioned ourselves to disdain might actually come from a valid place, or,
God forbid, be right about something.
All that was left then was for Donald Trump – a reality tv
star who views all attention, good or bad, as good attention; who thrives in
controversy and uproar – to walk in a wide-open door at a time when both sides were
looking for someone to confirm what they already believed about the other. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
Call it “stupid” or whatever term you choose, but Trump did
not make us this way. He merely reflects what we had already become.
