1. Brooks is taking advantage of the always-convenient Red State / Blue State “divide” by saying the 0.1% live in the blue states. But that doesn’t mean that their money comes from only the blue states. And it doesn’t mean that the political access and influence their money buys them affects only the Blue states.
The financial crisis affected homeowners in Arizona in a big way, despite its Red State cred.
2. Brooks is strongly implying that the existence of the college-educated Red State elite is the cause of their neighbor’s problems. It’s not, for example, that manufacturing jobs went overseas in the 80’s. (Consider: you could use his same numbers to say—as many do—that the college graduates are doing fairly poorly and those who didn’t go to college are doing much worse. What would be the different effect of a column written that way?)
3. He shifts attention from a problem that is growing increasingly worse, especially over the last decade, to one that stopped growing worse well before the last decade.
4. The tax money that could come from increasing taxes on those who’ve done so well (helping with one problem) could be spent on increased access to college (helping with the other). But he presents them as an exclusive choice: “you have a much bigger and different agenda” (my emphasis).
5. He lumps together the Red State economic and social problems into one big pile. He needs to do this in order justify calling the thing he’s pointing at while saying ignore the problem behind the curtain a “much bigger” problem.
Now, I bet sending more people to college would help with the Red States’ moral decline, but it’s exceedingly odd to find someone who professes to be a Burkean conservative weighing in on the side of economic determinism. He sure doesn’t do that when talking about inner city problems. And I strongly suspect that if OWS fizzles, we won’t see David Brooks taking a stand with actual concrete proposals to help the Red State losers. Instead, their usefulness as foils in one particular diversionary argument over, they’ll be back to representing the virtues of the Real America and Small Towns and the Heartland.
——-
Brooks is the go-to guy when you need a defense of the status quo or Republican policy presented in a way that appeals to the NPR tote-bag set. Need to stop OWS, a movement that’s about solidarity (“the 99%”)? You divide them. It’s not 99% - it’s Blue State people stealing attention from Red State problems. Or it’s about those income-sucking college graduates. And, as always, we can’t forget that any protest is by definition dominated by dirty hippies.
