"The Reactionary Fringe Has Won."

This is in the pull quote from David Brooks's latest at The Atlantic. Yesterday it was apparently the new article for the day that The Atlantic deemed worthy of exempting from its paywall, so I skimmed it. Intending to discuss it in greater detail today, I found that it's back behind the paywall, and the task of starting a free trial so I could go back to it proved too daunting.

I think the gravamen of his argument is that there are polite Ivy Leaguers, who run the world, and impolite ones, who are trying to take over. He makes the point that just about everyone in the Trump cabinet has an Ivy degree, but they're terrible people like Pete Hegseth (Princeton), Bobby Kennedy (Harvard), and Scott Bessent (Yale). Brooks tries to tie both Trump and Elon Musk to Penn, but neither has degrees from Penn's College of Arts and Sciences, the traditionally Ivy style liberal-arts school there, but The Wharton School, the business school, instead.

He then goes to some length to tie the impolite, Trump-style Ivy Leaguers to, of all things, The Dartmouth Review. I know a thing or two, though hardly everything, about The Dartmouth Review, certainly more than David Brooks. I was a frequent contributor in the early to mid-2000s during what might be called the Second Dartmouth Alumni Trustee Rebellion, to the point that I was briefly approached to submit my name for nomination as an alumni trustee to serve on the Dartmouth board (I immediately and firmly declined).

I was an undergraduate well before the rise of The Dartmouth Review and its attendant controversies in 1980, and in fact, since I only wrote for them decades after that, I was unique as a contributor who wasn't a current or recent undergraduate. I was certainly familiar with the Review's reputation, built on episodes like the 1989 Dartmouth Review v. Dartmouth College case:

On February 24, 1988, the Review published an article entitled "Dartmouth's Dynamic Duo of Mediocrity", criticizing courses taught by two Dartmouth professors. One of those criticized was William Cole, a black professor in the music department. Apparently there is a history of ill will between Cole and the Review. Prior to publication of the February 24 article, Review members made two attempts to contact Cole by telephone to give him an opportunity to reply to the article. Cole hung up on the students the first time and allegedly became "abusive and insulting" during the second call.

. . . On February 25, 1988, the following events took place which gave rise to the disciplinary action against the individual plaintiffs. Plaintiffs Sutter, Baldwin, and Quilhot, and one other member of the Review staff approached Professor Cole after he had finished teaching a class to give him a copy of the editorial policy and to demand the apology in person. Plaintiff Quilhot held a camera, and plaintiff Sutter brought a tape recorder. There ensued an approximately five-minute altercation between the plaintiffs and Cole, during which Cole became extremely agitated. . . . Quilhot began taking pictures of Professor Cole, at which point Cole allegedly grabbed his arm and broke the camera flash. . . . Cole then noticed the tape recorder, and Sutter acknowledged he was taping the incident. Sutter complied with Cole's request that he stop taping. Plaintiffs then left the room.

The next day, on the complaint of Professor Cole, the Dartmouth Committee on Standards ("COS") charged the student plaintiffs with "harassment, violation of the right to privacy and disorderly conduct."

. . . The COS found plaintiffs guilty of the charges against them, and the following penalties were imposed: plaintiffs Sutter and Baldwin were suspended from classes until the fall of 1989, and plaintiff Quilhot was suspended from classes until the fall of 1988. The students appealed the COS decision to Dean Shanahan, who upheld the decision.

All of the student plaintiffs sued, and the judge eventually ruled in their favor. This is The Dartmouth Review Brooks has in mind that's now infested the Ivy League. But here's Brooks's problem. The film National Lampoon's Animal House was released in 1978, when the Review was hardly a glimmer in anyone's eye:

The film is about a trouble-making fraternity whose members challenge the authority of the dean of the fictional Faber College.

. . . it was inspired by stories written by Miller and published in National Lampoon, which were based on Ramis' experience in the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity at Washington University in St. Louis, Miller's Alpha Delta Phi experiences at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and producer Reitman's at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

Miller, the Dartmouth alum, wrote the original stories on which the script was based, and when I first saw the film shortly after it was released, I instinctively felt it was about Dartmouth, well before anyone noted that Miller based his stories there. I thought Dean Wormer was the spitting image of Dean Thaddeus Seymour, who in fact spent the rest of his life insisting that he wasn't the model for Dean Wormer. According to the Wikipedia link,

In 2001, the United States Library of Congress deemed National Lampoon's Animal House "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Heck, I was in the ROTC at Dartmouth until they determined that I wasn't officer material. Faber College's Cadet Commander Douglas C. Neidermeyer was something straight out of Dartmouth ROTC. This is all to say that there were elements at Dartmouth, and probably elsewhere in the Ivy League, that long predated The Dartmouth Review. Just for starters, I think about the bon vivant writer Lucius Beebe, who managed to get himself thrown out of both Harvard and Yale, Tom Lehrer, a Harvard math prodigy better known as a writer of satirical songs, or for that metter, well-known Harvard dropouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, or Columbia dropouts like Whittaker Chambers or Jack Kerouac, or Princeton dropout F Scott Fitzgerald.

In fact, if pressed, I would relate Trump and his Ivy League cabinet to this strain of the Ivy League -- noting, however, that Bluto Blutarsky in Animal House might also be a putative Dartmouth undergraduate placed on double secret probation by Dean Wormer in the spirit of the 1989 Dartmouth Review plaintiffs -- except there's a better Trump archetype than anyone in the Ivy League, real or imagined, polite or otherwise.

This is the neo-noir anti-hero:

[N]eo-noir films are characterized by making audiences cheer for someone who very well may be the bad guy—cynical antiheroes abound.

These would include Jason Bourne in the eponymous franchise, or even more so, John Wick. Another would be the Batman depicted in The Dark Knight Rises. A recurring theme in several such films is that the anti-hero, like John Wick or Bruce Wayne, is retired, but for one reason or another, he's forced to resume his old role. But this in turn refers to the retired gunslingers in great Westerns like Shane or The Unforgiven, who are also driven by circumstances to return to their former roles as hired assassins.

Trump is turning out to be a very similar figure. He should have been, let's face it, a retired one-term president on the line of a Jimmy Carter or Poppy Bush. Whether this fits the true biographical circumstances, it's easy to imagine Trump, driven by the oppobrium and criminal cases against him, undergoing the sort of transformation that drove John Wick or Bruce Wayne to reprise his former role, but this time in an even more fearsome, Nietzschean way, in a sort of cynical realm beyond righteousness. Trump 2.0 owes something to Bruce Wayne or John Wick.

Trump is the reactionary fringe like Bluto Blutarsky is just a dreamy sophomore. He's a politico-cultural force of nature. This is not The Dartmouth Review, which Brooks belittles as producing Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza. Ingraham and D'Souza are not Bluto Blutarski. The Review, for that matter, was never Bluto Blutarsky, who came before it and will long outlast it. David Brooks isn't even any one of them.