Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Yes. David Brooks wrote that. The same David Brooks who has spent the past 8 years adding a pseudo-sociological sheen to this exact argument. He has two books extolling the simple, exurban virtues of Patio Man while mocking the Thai food and concern for social welfare of the coastal Bobos.
He has built his name and his New York Times column around the idea that there are two kinds of people--rich cosmopolitan white people with degrees on the coasts--who are bad--and rich conservative white people with John Deere dealerships in the exurbs--who are good. He has written possibly hundreds of columns with this exact premise. And now he notices that this argument could become part of a conservative anti-intellectualism?
I'm sure we'll hear Brooks in a future column repudiate his past decade of writings romanticizing white flight and deriding "snobs… doctors and lawyers and journalists and media consultants [who] went to fancy colleges."
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