I know, I know it's David Brooks. Believe me, I know he's frequently way off.
And yes, on this day of all days maybe this particular column seems badly timed. It's titled "The Democrats’ Problems Are Bigger Than You Think." On a day when Democrats are dancing a jig over the social media battle between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, maybe Democrats aren't the ones with the problem?
And yet, after reading this I think Brooks is on to something. In fact, I think what happened today only makes his point sharper. I'll explain that in a moment but first here's how the piece opens.
I have a lot of Democratic friends who are extremely disappointed with their party leaders. They tell me that the Democratic Party is currently rudderless, weak, passive, lacking a compelling message. I try to be polite, but I want to tell them: “The problem is not the party leaders. The problem is you. You don’t understand how big a shift we’re in the middle of. You think the Democrats can solve their problems with a new message and a new leader. But the Democrats’ challenge is that they have to adapt to a new historical era. That’s not something done by working politicians who are focused on fund-raising and the next election. That’s only accomplished by visionaries and people willing to shift their entire worldview. That’s up to you, my friends, not Chuck Schumer.”
From there he goes to a review of populism and how Trump has embodied that in America.
The Republicans have adjusted to the shift in the zeitgeist more effectively than the Democrats. Trump tells a clear story: The elites are screwing America. He took a free trade party and made it a protectionist party, an internationalist party and made it an isolationist party...
Trump has taken the atmosphere of alienation, magnified it with his own apocalypticism, and, assaulting institutions across society, has created a revolutionary government. More this term than last, he is shifting the conditions in which we live.
Many of my Democratic friends have not fully internalized the magnitude of this historical shift. They are still thinking within the confines of the Clinton-Obama-Biden-Pelosi worldview. But I have a feeling that over the next few years, the tumult of events will push Democrats onto some new trajectory.
That's the basic point Brooks is making. We're entering a new world now. In order to compete in this new world, Democrats are going to have to change, probably a lot.
The Democrats’ first core challenge is that we live in an age that is hostile to institutions and Democrats dominate the institutions — the universities, the media, Hollywood, the foundations, the teachers unions, the Civil Service, etc. The second is that we live in an age in which a caste divide has opened up between the educated elite and everybody else, and Democrats are the party of the highly educated...
For today’s Democrats that means this: If people rightly distrust establishment institutions and you are the party of the establishment institutions, then you have to be the party of thoroughgoing reform. You have to say that Trump is taking a blowtorch to institutions, and we are for effectively changing institutions.
Isn't that last bit sort of what Ezra Klein has been telling Democrats? You can't be the party that runs everything into the ground. You have to demonstrate some competence and willingness to bypass the web of regulations and special interests that own the party. That could mean saying no to teachers unions and environmental groups.
But can you really imagine the Democrats doing that? I can't. And that's why the party is in real trouble. They need to change and move and do something different and they are locked in ideologically by the woke extremists and systemically by the big donors like the unions. They are stuck in a bad place and one day of arguing among Republicans isn't going to fix that for them. If anything, it demonstrates that Republicans are doing things and having real fights about things while the Dems are going nowhere fast, not unlike an aging president who is long past his prime.
