Continue reading the main story

David Brooks
Politics, culture and the social sciences.
The Trump Administration Talent Vacuum
MAY 19
When the World Is Led by a Child
MAY 15
The Pond-Skater Presidency
APR 28
The Jane Addams Model
APR 25
The Crisis of Western Civ
APR 21
See More »

RECENT COMMENTS

Miss Ley 43 minutes ago
Surrounded by men at the moment, trying to keep them apart where they nearly came to blows about how to restore fencing on this small…
Richard 43 minutes ago
Mr Brooks fails to mention the most significant attribute of the “angry voter” that led to #45’s election: willfull ignorance. For had they…
Ken 43 minutes ago
It is hard to get around the fact that people truly believe someone is going to take away your guns. I hear this from children of Trump…
SEE ALL COMMENTS WRITE A COMMENT
The alienated long for something that will smash the system or change their situation, but they have no actual plan or any means to deliver it. The alienated are a hodgepodge of disparate groups. They have no positive agenda beyond the sort of fake shiny objects Trump ran on (Build a Wall!). They offer up no governing class competent enough to get things done.

As Yuval Levin argues in a brilliant essay in Modern Age, “Alienation can sometimes make for a powerful organizing principle for an electoral coalition. … But it does not make for a natural organizing principle for a governing coalition.”

Worse, alienation breeds a distrust that corrodes any collective effort. To be “woke” in the alienated culture is to embrace the most cynical interpretation of every situation, to assume bad intent in every actor, to imagine the conspiratorial malevolence of your foes.

Alienation breeds a hysterical public conversation. Its public intellectuals are addicted to overstatement, sloppiness, pessimism, and despair. They are self-indulgent and self-lionizing prophets of doom who use formulations like “the Flight 93 election” — who speak of every problem as if it were the apocalypse.