David Brooks (of all people) has an op/ed in the Times, where he takes the professional/managerial/class (PMC) to task.

“What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?” [David Brooks, New York Times]. “We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation…. Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No, most of us are earnest, kind and public spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject. It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. Trump understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we road in on. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “”History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.”” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.”

Ouch!

But, wait. Wasn’t Trumpism caused by racist Americans yearning to make America great again?

Or, weren’t the Russians responsible? I thought that absolving the PMC’s for their disastrous policies over the last 40 odd years was the whole point of Russia-gate?

Meanwhile, I don’t think this gambit will go over well with Brook’s fellow PMC’s. I mean, they bought into Russia-gate hook, line and sinker and are the most belligerent cold warriors now with a sizable majority of liberals preferring direct war with Russia in Ukraine. Not to mention, many of them suffered nervous breakdowns when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Their reaction amounted to “he’s a Bad Person, he’s not supposed to win! Or, if he won it’s due the diabolical actions of that nefarious Putin. It couldn’t have been our actions and privileges that caused Americans to lose so much faith in the political establishment that they were willing to settle for Trump, of all people, as an alternative. 

They are not about to drop all of that and look in the mirror and blame themselves. They went to the best schools, work hard, and dammit, they deserve to rule. Furthermore, the PMC’s have evolved into a social class in which the most ironclad rule is that nobody must ever suffer the consequences of their own choices.