David Brooks Gets Something Right

You know something is up when the longtime deeply conservative establishment pundit David “Aw Shucks” Brooks calls for a “a comprehensive national civic uprising” against Trumpism, as he did one week ago.

“It’s time,” Brooks wrote, “for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.”

Brooks described “Trumpism” as “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men,… driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.”

“Trumpism,” Brooks writes, “is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake.”

Trump’s assault on America’s institutions is “not normal,” Brooks says, arguing that the movement to stop Trumpism must also be “not normal.”

Brooks criticizes the early Trump47 resistance for letting itself be divided and thereby potentially conquered because it has failed to properly to understand that the various different Trump attacks are all part of the same Trumpist offensive:

“So far, we have treated the various assaults of President Trump and the acolytes in his administration as a series of different attacks. In one lane they are going after law firms. In another they savaged U.S.A.I.D. In another they’re attacking our universities. On yet another front they’re undermining NATO and on another they’re upending global trade. But that’s the wrong way to think about it. These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back….Slowly, many of us are realizing that we need to band together. But even these efforts are insular and fragmented. Several members of the Big Ten conference are working on forming an alliance to defend academic freedom. Good. But that would be 18 schools out of roughly 4,000 degree-granting American colleges and universities” (emphasis added).

Brooks even chided the progressive Democrats Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for failing to think outside the box of “normal” politics:

“So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this too is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans. What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.”

What would Brooks’ “comprehensive national civic uprising” look like? He cites the academics Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan to advocate the use of “many different tools… lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance” and “clear messages that appeal…to a variety of groups” and “shift… the narrative so the authoritarians [are] no longer on permanent offense.” He even notes that past successful anti-authoritarian movements have “sometimes… used nonviolent means to provoke the regime into taking violent action, which shocks the nation, undercuts the regime’s authority and further strengthens the movement. (Think of the civil rights movement at Selma.)”

“Chenoweth and Stephan emphasize,” Brooks adds, “that this takes coordination. There doesn’t always have to be one charismatic leader, but there does have to be one backbone organization, one coordinating body that does the work of coalition building.”

There are some things for a revolutionary Marxist anti-fascist (like the present writer) to criticize in Brooks’s column. It’s absurd in my view for Brooks to describe capitalist business firms, bourgeois constitutions, bourgeois legal systems, and corporate media outlets as “institutions [that] make our lives sweet, loving and creative.”

Brooks is wrong to see Trumpism as about power for its own sake. Trumpism is a 21^st Century US-Amerikaner version of fascism, which seeks to lock in dictatorship on behalf of white supremacism, patriarchy, and xenophobic nationalism – the aggressive re-institution of oppressive “traditional values.” Fascism leaves the underlying capitalist class dictatorship over the nation’s core material/economic/productive institutions fully intact, minus the fig leaf of bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy atop the political superstructure.

Like Bernie and AOC, Brooks does not call out the full politico-ideological content and pathology of Trumpism. The problem with the progressive Dem duo’s rallies isn’t just that they “make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.” Intimately related to that, the problem is that they keep harping on “oligarchy,” when the real issue now is fascism.

If you are just using the word “oligarchy” to describe the Trump fascist regime, you are in danger of being part of the problem. We’ve had oligarchy all our lives. We still very much do, of course, with an especially nasty “gangster capitalist” feel under Trump47. What’s distinctive about the current era is the attempted consolidation of a new form of governance beyond previously normative bourgeois electoral, parliamentary and rule of law governance: fascism.

Brooks underestimates how truly and normally American Trumpism and its critical ingredients – militantly illiberal authoritarianism, white supremacism, political violence, patriarchy, xenophobic nationalism, anti-intellectualism, Christian fundamentalism, and more – actually are (please see the sixth chapter, titled “America Was Never Great: On ‘The Soul of This Nation,’” in my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America.)

And Brooks fails to take up the (I think now) essential demand that Trump’s “fascist regime” (as the Yale philosopher Jason Stanley describes the Trump47 administration) be forced out as soon as humanly possible –well before the next presidential election (bearing in mind that Trumpists don’t accept election outcomes they don’t like and are already hard at work undermining the 2026 and 2028 elections if they are even held).

Now would be a good time for Trump to go. Fascism is taking great leaps forward right now. Trump’s brazen defiance of a 9-to-0 Supreme Court ruling that his regime must “facilitate the return” of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, coupled with Trump’s horrific pledge to send US citizens to prisons in El Salvador (which he claims are beyond the reach of US courts), crosses the Rubicon into sheer lawlessness. The implications are stark: anyone who Trump and his fascist minions designate as a “threat” or an “enemy” – or anyone who is swept up by “mistake” – can be disappeared to rot and face torture beyond any semblance of legal oversight in a distant Third World Fascist prison. This is not a drill. This is fascism here and now. This is the five alarm fire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker tried to warn his state about last month.

Still, it is very good indeed that David Brooks – yes, David Brooks – has outflanked Bernie on people’s power by calling for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” against Trumpism – one that transcends single-issue divide and rule politics and takes on the Trump offensive as a whole, and one that doesn’t fall prey to mere partisan electoral politics and the lethal quicksand of the election cycle.

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