"The Slate - David Brooks’ Column About the Women’s Marches Should Be Dumped in Acid and Set on Fire

"The Slate -
David Brooks’ Column About the Women’s Marches Should Be Dumped in Acid and Set on Fire

By Ben Mathis-Lilley

gettyimages75592272.jpg.crop.promovarmediumlarge
David Brooks at a Meet the Press taping on July 22, 2007, in Washington.
Alex Wong/Getty Images for Meet the Press

New York Times columnist David Brooks, who is to genuine intellectual inquiry as Flintstones vitamins are to the polio vaccine, filed a column Tuesday about the weekend's spectacularly well-attended anti-Trump women's marches. And there must have been some sort of mistake at Times HQ, because they put his column in the newspaper even though it belongs at the bottom of a well.

Advertisement

Let's go through it. This is Brooks' thesis.

These marches can never be an effective opposition to Donald Trump.
No one said they were. There are articles all over the internet written by and about progressives who acknowledge that the marches were only a first step (har) in the long process of organization required to achieve political and policy success.

We're off to a bad start. Next:

In the first place, this movement focuses on the wrong issues. Of course, many marchers came with broad anti-Trump agendas, but they were marching under the conventional structure in which the central issues were clear. As The Washington Post reported, they were “reproductive rights, equal pay, affordable health care, action on climate change.”
These are all important matters, and they tend to be voting issues for many upper-middle-class voters in university towns and coastal cities. But this is 2017. Ethnic populism is rising around the world. The crucial problems today concern the way technology and globalization are decimating jobs and tearing the social fabric; the way migration is redefining nation-states; the way the post-World War II order is increasingly being rejected as a means to keep the peace.
Advertisement

When I read those paragraphs, I spit my latte all over my Volvo. In what sense are "affordable health care" and "action on climate change" not related to "technology and globalization"? Like, directly related in a manner that would be condescending to even explain out loud? Since when has "affordable health care," which in the form of Medicare is perhaps the quintessential meat-and-potatoes issue in American politics, been a pet cause of "upper-middle-class voters in university towns and coastal cities?" And could he truly be suggesting that the marches would have been more broadly popular and meaningful if organizers had announced that their primary concerns would be the redefinition of nation-states and the deterioration of the post–World War II international security regime?... "

David Brooks women's marches column: not good.