David Brooks wrote another column sneering at the people not good enough to get into Harvard – and who wouldn’t be caught dead there if they could.
Get in your car. If you start in rural New England and drive down into Appalachia or across into the Upper Midwest you will be driving through county after county with few immigrants. These rural places are often 95 percent white. These places lack the diversity restrictionists say is straining the social fabric.
Are these counties marked by high social cohesion, economic dynamism, surging wages and healthy family values? No. Quite the opposite. They are often marked by economic stagnation, social isolation, family breakdown and high opioid addiction. Charles Murray wrote a whole book, “Coming Apart,” on the social breakdown among working-class whites, many of whom live in these low immigrant areas.
That book does not mean what Brooks thinks it means. Murray’s Coming Apart is about the betrayal of working class whites – and the ideal of a middle class America – by the new upper-middle elite who segregate themselves from the working class, send their jobs overseas, import workers to take jobs that remain, and then have the bad grace to condescend to these working class whites.
It is not enough, though, for the Ivy League Supremacists simply to condescend to working class whites. Instead, Brooks and his ilk harbor the age-old temptation to “be as gods.” They want to use their technocratic knowledge of good and their democratic knowledge of evil to play the role of Savior to the world. But they are too soft to make sacrifices of themselves. Instead they send poor whites to hang on the cross.
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