Looking At David French

The other day, I ran into a piece by David French on Jonah Goldberg's Dispatch newsletter, "The Moral Collapse of America's Largest Christian University". Up to now, I haven't given David French much thought. All I knew about him was that, as a writer for National Review, he briefly mulled running against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2016, making him a never-Trumper. Poking around the web, I saw that he's now, like David Brooks, a contribuing writer for The Atlantic, as well as Senior Editor for Goldberg's Dispatch and a columnist for Time.

Yet Wikipedia says of him,

David Austin French (born January 24, 1969) is an American political commentator, theologically conservative traditional Christian, and former attorney who has argued high profile religious liberty cases.

The "theologically conservative traditional Christian" part puzzles me. Here's what he has to say about "Christians" in the Dispatch story at the link:

A few days ago I was eating dinner with a small group of students at a Christian university, and the subject of post-liberalism came up. A person directly asked me why I seemed to object to formally seeking Christian governance in the United States. I answered his question with a question, “Why do you think it would be better than what we have?”

I was thinking both historically and presently. Historically, one could arguably locate the apex of Protestant power in the United States as somewhere around the time of Prohibition. After all, Christians were powerful enough to pass a constitutional amendment banning alcohol, all as part of an effort to improve public morals and public health.

Yet what was the state of American righteousness at that time of apex Christian power? Lynch mobs roamed the South. The entire region was an oppressive nation-within-a-nation, largely cut off from the rule of law. Anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments proliferated across the United States. Not even religious liberty was safe when Christians ruled.

And what about the present? Its largest institutions reel from scandal. A great mass of its members have succumbed to conspiracy theories. Its “religious” anti-vaxxism is claiming lives by the thousands.

So he's essentially conflating Christianity with Protestantism and then saying "Christians" are Prohibitionists, segregationists, anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists. Though he doesn't mention it here, they're probably Trumpists, too. (He also doesn't mention that Prohibition was an anti-Catholic measure aimed principally at Irish and Italian immigrants.)

But wait. I'm not aware of any movement that is "formally seeking Christian governance in the United States". This would require a repeal of the First Amendment, something I just don't see on the horizon. This sounds an awful lot like a straw-man argument to me. It sounds like some people thought he "seemed to object to" something that as far as I can tell just doesn't exist. Well, I strongly object to space aliens invading the planet to steal our oxygen. Maybe he and I can join forces.

What was that about conspiracy theories?

In reality, especially in a world where Donald Trump has expanded the possible range of activism, at least some Christians, especially Catholics, have adopoted a stance of advocacy, and indeed political alliances, on a case-by-case basis. Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas recently said,

The Catholic Church should feel free to criticize the government when necessary and “shouldn’t be captive to one party or another[.]”

, , , “The Church has to have an independent voice to say we agree when we can agree, and when we can’t agree we’re going to say something,” Bishop Flores told Crux, an online Catholic news outlet.

“And that’s the way it works. I mean, the church is free to speak, and we shouldn’t be captive to one party or another,” he added.

Flores is the new head of the doctrine committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which is charged with assisting the bishops “in areas of faith and morals, providing expertise and guidance concerning the theological issues that confront the Church in the United States.”

This is consistent with recent statements I've noted here from Abp José Gómez, USCCB President, whose view is that there's currently a great deal about which to speak out. Does David French think this is "Christian governance"? I think it's more like the right of petition for redress of grievances, also in the First Amendment.

French isn't much of a legal mind if this is any indication. He certainly isn't much of a writer. I guess that's why he's at Time and The Atlantic.

Let Them Buy Electric Cars!

President Biden channeled Marie Antoinette yesterday:

"For the hundreds of thousands of folks who bought one of those electric cars, they’re going to save $800 to $1000 in fuel costs this year,” Biden said, referring to the $112,595 electric Hummer pickup he test drove at a General Motors factory in Detroit earlier this month.

The least expensive new electric car is the 2022 Nissan Leaf, with a starting price of $28,375. You can get a used Leaf cheaper, but they're still more expensive than comparable gas-driven cars. But not many people currently suffering from high gas prices will come out better, since trading in a gas-driven car will bring a new, higher car payment no matter what.

Another issue is vehicle range. Available models start at about 100 miles, which for many commutes is a single round trip. Recharging can take from 30 minutes to 12 hours, so you can't just swing by the corner gas station to fill up. Longer trips other than commutes are problematic. Conversion just isn't a practical option for most people given current costs and technology..

Beyond that, there are other questions like the need to upgrade the electrical grid if significantly more people are charging those electric cars. If that isn't done, the grid becomes less reliable, so that there are tradeoffs in social costs as well as family budgets. These issues can't be dismissed with a wave of the hand.

But there's a bigger question here -- what is the formal cause of President Biden's remarks? In Aristotelian terms, what's the plan behind them? Joel Kotkin has the most insightful take I've seen so far, which matches my own view that Marx had nothing to say about climate change or gender dysphoria, and he didn't think the Lumpenproletariat was a reliable working class ally:

[U]nlike the social democracy movements that followed World War Two, the New Socialism focusses not on material aspirations but on climate change, gender, and race. While the old socialism sought to represent the ordinary labourer, many on the Left today seem to have little more than contempt for old working-class base and its often less than genteel views on issues such as Critical Race Theory.

Yet perhaps the most critical difference between traditional socialism and its new form relates to growth. The New Socialism’s emphasis on climate change necessarily removes economic growth as a priority. Quite the opposite, in fact: the Green agenda looks instead towards a shrinking economy and lowered living standards, seeking to elevate favoured groups within a stagnant economy rather than generating opportunities for the general population.

. . . But there can be little doubt that the biggest change is taking place on the Left. Historically, the British and Australian Labour Parties, the French Socialist Party, America’s Democrats and Canada’s Liberals evolved from a strong working-class base. But in recent years, for both economic and cultural reasons, these parties have become dominated by professionals, academics and government workers increasingly bent on introducing paternalistic, puritan policies.

I don't think he pays enough attention to the actual political dynamic. Most "professionals, academics and government workers" are still middle class -- they're computer programmers, community college instructors (increasingly untenured), administrators, and paper pushers. They have to fill the gas tanks on their older cars like everyone else. They're faring no better than UPS drivers or construction workers, unionized or not.

There's a separate class of elites, the Dr Faucis, Speaker Pelosis, or Al Gores who fly to climate conferences on private jets and go blithely unmasked at lavish parties. (Why didn't Prince Charles ride to Glasgow on the all electric royal train, by the way? Why doesn't Biden tell the secret service to get him an electric presidential limo?)

The current de facto policy objective is actually to punish the working and middle classes by reducing their liviing standards, subjecting them to ever increasing levels of crime, and implementing pansexualist policies that, via discouraging marriage, allowing men into women's toilet facilities, and allowing men to compete in women's sports, reduce the status of women.

Kotkin concludes his piece by hoping the left can rediscover its working-class roots, but the utopia envisioned by the current elites has nothing to do with traditional leftism. The policy the elites seem to be aiming at is a new aristocracy that consumes the resources of subordinated, demoralized middle and working classes.

President Biden is fully on board with this -- this isn't a cognitive issue. His refusal to answer questions even from a generally sympathetic press is an inevitable passive-aggressive strategy forced on him by his insistence on continuing unpopular and unworkable polcies.

We Agree This Is Happening -- The Question Is Why

As an Aristotelian, I look for causes. We don't have a whole lot of insight for now into the "final" cause of Darrell Brooks Jr's crashing a very snazzy red Ford Escape into a Waukesha, WI Christmas parade on November 21. It sounds as though he may have been fleeing another crime scene, or a fight, and it's hard not to speculate that drugs may also have been involved. But that's less important for now than the "efficient" cause, for which we have some informed insight. Brooks is

the entirely predictable product of a political- and social-media driven effort to address crime by pretending that it doesn’t exist.

To present criminals — particularly black criminals — as victims. To pay no meaningful attention to actual victims — who overwhelmingly are black themselves.

. . . Brooks, however, is a depressingly familiar type.

He had been released on nominal bail Friday after being charged Nov. 5 with domestic abuse, resisting an officer, second-degree recklessly endangering safety, disorderly conduct and felony bail-jumping.

More specifically,

Just two days before the horror on Sunday, he was released from jail on $1,000 bail following an arrest for allegedly deliberately running over the mother of his child at a gas station.

As I said yesterday, this is the effect of a national campaign sponsored most visibly by George Soros to raise the felony threshold for crimes like retail theft, elect district attorneys who decline to prosecute career criminal offenses, and abolish cash bail. A recent book by John McWhorter, Woke Racism, nibbles around the edges of the problem:

"The people who are calling themselves black people saviors don't understand this, but they're hurting black people because what they're caught up in is more about virtue signaling to one another than helping people who actually need help."

At the link,

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with the 56-year-old McWhorter about what white people get out of cooperating with an ideological agenda that casts them as devils, what black people gain by "performing" victimhood, and what needs to change so that all Americans can get on with creating a more perfect union.

But judging from reviews, I get the impression that McWhorter, a linguistics professor, sees the issue mainly in rhetorical and linguistic terms. Rhetorical virtue signaling may be satsifying, but it isn't a perceived good that can "efficiently" cause deadly social policy, which is what we see in the Waukesha case. The virtue signaling rhetoric of wokeness is only a byproduct of the policy's "formal" cause. Elsewhere, McWhorter gets closer to the issue:

I have no doubt that Martin Luther King would have understood what I'm saying in terms of helping people who actually need help. It's not an accident that at the end of his life, he was beginning to focus more on poverty in general than on the race question.

The idea is to help people who need help. The modern idea that microaggressions and how white people feel in their heart of hearts is what we should be thinking about to me is a detour.

But what, specifically, are we detouring away from here? If virtue signaling isn't the point, what is? It looks to me as if the subtext of some of McWhorter's remarks is that the civil rights movement had effective goals and achieved partial success up to about the time of Martin Luther King's death, after which elites seized on side issues that emerged from the 1960s ghetto riots to redefine the movement's goals, placing blame on law enforcement as a means of imposing a tacit policy of resegregation and continuing to keep poor African-Americans in isolated communities sustained by destructive subsidies and misdirected social services.

This would be the "formal" cause of the Waukesha tragedy and a great deal else. McWhorter is right in saying wokeness is a distraction, but the question is the actual "formal" cause of the curent dilemma. So far, I haven't seen much insighful discussion of that.

The Lumpenproletariat And Class Consciousness

I was doing some research into the Weimar Republic (Germany 1919-1933) and ran into this passage at Britannica:

Because of the hopes aroused in 1918–19, the fact that no far-reaching plan for securing public control over industry or for breaking up the big landed estates was carried through had two consequences. First, although the German working class undoubtedly improved its political and economic status under the republic, a considerable portion of it was embittered by the failure to effect drastic reform of the social and economic systems. This disenchantment was to provide the left-wing opposition with strong working-class support, which weakened both the Social Democratic Party and the republic.

This brought to mind Whittaker Chambers's observation that as of the 1920s, German was in fact the language of international socialism, and Germany was the locus of the movement. My takeaway from the link above is that the German working class at the time had clearly articulated interests that it systematically pursued, if utterly without success.

I was looking up Weimar because I've been seeing references to a contemporary "Weimar America", but a few minutes' thought brings me to the conclusion that any parallels are superficial at best. Consider that the class interests that have been advanced most visibly since 2020 are those of the Lumpenproletariat, the urban underclass, not the working class, whose interests have been more clearly bourgeois and Republican at least since Nixon's 1972 landslide defeat of George McGovern.

But now let's look at the puzzling case of the SUV that crashed into a Waukesha, WI Christmas parade yesterday evening. The circumstances so far aren't completely clear, but the SUV driver appears to have been identified:

Darrell Brooks Jr. is the man who was taken into custody in connection with the Waukesha Christmas parade tragedy on November 21, 2021, according to police. When Brooks was detained, police found a Ford key on him, according to scanner audio obtained by Heavy.

His social media accounts and online court records show that he is an aspiring rap singer with a lengthy criminal history and two open felony cases for which he was released on $500 and $1,000 bail, the latter just days before the parade deaths.

At 39, he's had a lifetime career as a petty criminal, which places him clearly in the Marxist Lumpenproletariat. But Waukesha and Kenosha, although both in Wisconsin, aren't all that close at about 55 miles distant. It's hard to conclude that the attack, if that's what it was, had any connection with the Rittenhouse trial, in which the defendant was acquitted in charges relating to the deaths and injury of three white Lumpenproletariat:

The motive is not clear. David Begnaud of CBS News tweeted that, according to a law enforcement official, the parade suspect was “fleeing another scene – possibly a knife fight” before injuring 40 people in the parade. “Several LE sources say preliminary: Wisconsin incident appears to be vehicle fleeing a separate crime scene (stabbing) when it plowed into parade. One person in custody. Investigation ongoing but so far no initial link to terror or the recent Rittenhouse verdict w/@tom_winter,” NBC reporter Jonathan Dienst wrote on Twitter.

This strikes me as, if anything, confirmation of the Marxist theory that the Lumpenproletariat, unlike the working class, lacks class consciousness and is not a reliable ally -- Brooks, as far as we can tell so far, was fleeing his personal demons and not acting for or against anyone else's interest. That he should plow through a Christmas parade in Waukesha was unplanned, undirected, and has no similarity to, say, the 2016 Islamist truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market.

This raises the open question of why US elites have allied themsleves with the Lumpenproletariat, who are unreliable, disorganized, and not capable of returning favors even if they wanted to. It's been wealthy elites, from George Soros to Laurene Powell Jobs, who have sponsored ballot measures to raise the felony threshold for crimes like shoplifting, supported the election of district attorneys who decline to prosecute career criminal offenses, and abolish cash bail. The criminals themselves can't organize and pursue that agenda themselves.

In fact, the most organization the criminals themselves can undertake is planning mass smash-and-grab attacks, three of which occurred in the San Francisco area over the weekend. This helps only the criminals on a short term basis, but it hurts the working and middle classes when the stores they patronize close in response, and indeed it hurts the shareholders and managers of those stores as well. The only benefit is to the wealthiest, who are insulated from the effects of their policies and feel virtuous in enabling the Lumpenproletariat.

This is an odd alliance. I'm not sure if it has any historical parallel.

Allen Guelzo, Reconstruction, And The Rittenhouse Case

Last week I ran into a 2018 paper by the Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo, Reconstruction as a Pure Bourgeois Revolution, in which I found a stimulating perspective on the current political situation, which I think represents a counterrevolution by the elites allied with the Lumpenproletariat, white climate activists, and pansexualists, against "Trumpism" a populist alliance of the working and middle classes that is in fact multiracial. (These are precisely the people David Brooks sneers at, though he also finds them "terrifying".)

Guelzo's paper has also appeared on YouTube as "Reconstruction: The Last Bourgeois Revolution":

After last year's election, my attention was drawn to the US presidential election of 1876, that was disputed and resolved by an electoral commission that produced the Compromise of 1877, which awarded the election to the Republican Rutherford Hayes while effectively ending Reconstruction by withdrawing Union troops from the southern states. Guelzo has little to say about the compromise itself, but he deals with Reconstruction as a historiographical phenomenon. In doing so, he circles around to the central issue, that whatever the good or bad of Reconstruction itself, it was ended by an alliance of northern capital, northern philanthropy, and southern segregationists.

This is a view clearly reflected in Frank Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man, and it's a major part of the protagonist's dilemma. Jim Crow was an institution supported by the national Democrats and the do-gooder elites., but a revisionist historical narrative has also emerged that even as all right-thinking people disavowed it in the 1960s, actual social policy after that continues to enforce segregation and suppression of African-Americans via urban ghettos and the eugenic measure of widespread abortion.

Guelzo hiself favors a related historical "revisionist" interpretation of Reconstruction:

The great Republican goal of abolishing slavery was not seen by Republicans, as we are tempted to see it, as a crusade to right a racial injustice; abolishing slavery was not, to them, much of a racial question at all but rather an economic one. . . . The Union “represents the principles of free labor,” declared William Cullen Bryant, and only when “the victory of the Northern society of free labor over the landed monopoly of the Southern aristocracy” was complete would the war be over. . . In the most basic sense, free labor was simply shorthand for liberal economic democracy. It was the Enlightenment’s school of economics, and like the Enlightenment, it predicted that “democratic, bourgeois freedom and the supremacy of economics would one day lead to the salvation of all mankind.” (pp 56-57)

Guelzo in fact doesn't go much farther than to support what he calls this "revisionist" historiographic view of reconstruction, but it raises a number of productive questions. It's generally accepted that northern capital and philanthropy allied with southern segregationists to halt Reconstruction and establish Jim Crow. It's hard to tell at this remove how or why this was done, but it clearly had the approval of the industrial elites of the time.

Guelzo cites the hard Marxist theory that fully freeing the slaves was undesirable in that the northern capitalists wanted to avoid a full proletarian revolution, and there may be some merit to that view. But you don't have to be Marxist to think it was in northern capital's continued interest to have a supply of cheap labor, although slavery actually proved less efficient economically than at-will employment. George Washington's own plantation ran at a loss.

But if we follow the broader revisionist theory of the post-Martin Luther King civil rights movement as effectively a Democrat-led extension of the 1877 compromise, an urban re-segregation and re-formation of African-Americans as a new underclass, we get results that can provide insight into the Rittenhouse case and its outcome.

The first has been, especially since the 2020 BLM riots, a near-universal tendency to equate African-Americsn's with the Lumpenproletariat, the Marxist unreliable underclass of career petty criminals, addicts, prostitutes, and street people. George Floyd was one of these, but because he was African-American, his class identity was minimized in favor of his racial identity, but his treatment was actually an outcome of his class, not his race.

We can then move to the strange incongruities of the Rittenhouse case: Kyle Rittenohuse himself, a bourgeois aspiring college student of mixed race, naively got himself into a situation during a BLM riot where he was attacked by at least four white men (Jump Kick Man included) with criminal records, effectively members of the Lumpenproletariat, who were allied with and agitating in protest at the killing of another violent petty criminal by police, this one African-American.

So far, the Rittenohuse outcome has brought a collective sigh of relief from bourgeois supporters of law, reason, and social order, and so far, there's been no large renewal of BLM style riots from the Lumpenrpoletariat and their elite allies in the media and politics. But this case is a clear indication of the actual fault lines that have existed since Reconstuction, and to which we still await a remedy.

David Brooks On Religion

I ran into a couple of almost comical passages in the current Atlantic piece by David Brooks that I linked yesterday. He disparages

the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land.

(It should be just "Toqueville, not "de Toqueville", by the way, unless you have "Alexis" in front of it. There. That's off my chest.) Later, he says,

Evangelical Christianity has lost many millions of believers across recent decades. Secularism is surging, and white Christianity is shrinking into a rump presence in American life. America is becoming more religiously diverse every day. Christians are in no position to impose their values—regarding same-sex marriage or anything else—on the public square. Self-aware Christians know this.

The first observation to be made here is that Brooks is at best fuzzy on Christian taxonomy and isn't up on current events. According to Christianity Today,

Evangelicals in the United States are holding steady at just under a quarter of the population, according to the latest biennial figures from the General Social Survey (GSS), one of the longest-running measures of religion in America.

According to Wikipedia, "Anywhere from 6 percent to 35 percent of the United States population is evangelical, depending on how 'evangelical' is defined." Definition is a problem, because evangelicals for instance may identify as "born again" without bothering to attend church. Nevertheless, nearly every discussion of the movement says it's either holding steady or growing. On the other hand, the consensus is that mainline Protestants are the group that's declining. According to this site,

In the 1970s, the GSS indicates that over 30% of all Americans could be classified into a mainline denomination. But that quickly changed. By the late 1980s, the share of the mainline dropped below 20%. . . . [T]here’s general agreement in these surveys - mainline Protestants have declined over time and are probably between 10-13% of the population today.

So what's puzzling is that Brooks, who is supposedly a respected commentator on contemporary culture, is oblivious to a major long-term US religious trend (which is also reflected in the decline of Reform and Conservative Judaism), the sharp decline of mainline Protestant denominations. His use of the term "Evangelical" in the passage above is simply incorrect. It also says a lot about The Atlantic that his editor didn't catch this.

So, who are the "self-aware Christians" who know they're in no position to impose their values on the public square? I assume they're the right-thinking Episcopalians, Methodists, and Lutherans whose numbers are approaching insignificance. We might assume they're in no position to impose their thinking becuase there are so few of them that they can't, and Brooks is cool with this, and presumably they are, too.

In the first passage above, he takes an indirect swipe at Catholics via the young conservative ones in fellowship programs, whatever that means. But the US Bishops themselves have become more conservative in recent decades. Abp Gómez, the President of the USCCB, recently made this point in an address to the Congress of Catholics and Public Life in Madrid:

“With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied,” Gomez said.

. . . “We recognize that often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs — about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family, and more,” he said in the address.

In other words, Abp Gómez is determined that Catholics reassert their place in the public square over precisely the issues Brooks thinks Christians are in no position to argue. It's intriguing that Brooks is irritated specifically with Catholics and Orthodox Jews, when these are the groups that pursued successful legal action that lifted government restrictions on religious service attendance as a result of last year's lockdowns.

The odd thing is that Brooks regularly disparages working and middle class people in a straw-man argument that says they want to return to the 1950s, when he himself so publicly underwent a mid-life crisis of wife dumping and pseudo-religious third wave awakening so reminiscent of the me-decade 1970s.

Revisiting David Brooks

My wife and I were late adopters of cable, and in fact we must have been among the last people ever to have a rabbit ear antenna on top of a tube TV. This meant we mostly watched PBS, The News Hour, and thus inevitably David Brooks. When we finally got cable ten years ago, we quit watching any news, and we forgot about David Brooks. The last I heard of him, he was admiring the crease of Obama's trousers, and Obama was courting him and George Will as influential conservatives whom he could coax over to his side.

Somewhere yesterday I saw a link to an essay by him in the Atlantic, "The Terrifying Future of the American Right". I went to look at it and discovered he's a contributing writer who publishes there regularly. I guess this says something about The Atlantic, the New York Times, and PBS. I guess it also says something that I'd been ignoring him all this time and don't feel like I've missed a thing.

I did read his Bobos in Paradise when it came out, and my memory of it is a troubling cognitive dissonance -- how could someone who, about the year 2000, was so respected, write such a silly book? For those who haven't read it, its premise is that after World War II, elite universities dropped their Jewish quotas, began using the SATs. adopted selective admissions, and became true meritocracies, which they continue to be today. As evidence of this, we need look no farther than Brooks himself, from a Jewish family, who made it into the University of Chicago on merit.

This is a self-congratullatory premise that also flatters its audience, the Ivy-educated book buying public. Brooks makes it plain that by bobos -- bourgeois bohemians -- he means principally suburban Jews. But this contradicts Alan Dershowitz, a much more prominent figure, who maintained in Chutzpah that Jewish quotas still exist, along with more recent quotas for Asians, that serve to limit the rise of talented and hard-working groups in favor of -- wait for it -- existing elites.

Indeed, admission of "Episcopalian Jews" into upper-crust society was a phenomenon that took place decades before the postwar period, and families like the Guggenheims worked in close colaboration with the Morgans. They were elites and had full admission to elite schools on that basis. Quotas always apply to a different group.

Last August, Brooks revisited Bobos in Paradise in The Atlantic, "How the Bobos Broke America".

“The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste,” I wrote in 2000. “Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That turned out to be one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.

. . . [W]e’ve come to hoard spots in the competitive meritocracy that produced us. , , , the test-score gap between high- and low-income students has grown by 40 to 50 percent. The children of well-off, well-educated meritocrats are thus perfectly situated to predominate at the elite colleges that produced their parents’ social standing in the first place. Roughly 72 percent of students at these colleges come from the richest quarter of families, whereas only 3 percent come from the poorest quarter. A 2017 study found that 38 schools—including Princeton, Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, Colgate, and Middlebury—draw more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent.

In other words, nothing changed, the bobos as some sort of new creative class that rose on its merits is a chimera. But Brooks clings to his theory and sees the Trump phenomenon as primarily a reflexive working-class rebellion against the bobo meritocacy:

The working class today vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls. In revolt, populist Trump voters sometimes create their own reality, inventing absurd conspiracy theories and alternative facts about pedophile rings among the elites who they believe disdain them.

At the start of his essay, he cites boat parades of Trump supporters as a key indicator:

During the summer and fall of 2020, a series of boat parades—Trumptillas—cruised American waters in support of Donald Trump. The participants gathered rowdily in great clusters. They festooned their boats with flags—American flags, but also message flags: don’t tread on me, no more bullshit, images of Trump as Rambo.

. . . How could people with high-end powerboats possibly think of themselves as the downtrodden?

He clearly views such people with contempt. And his essay just published in the current Atlantic expands on this:

Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century. But the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it.

This is what Brooks finds "terrifying": the fact that Trump hasn't gone away. The specter Brooks sees is what commentators are slowly recognizing: the Biden counter-revolution against Trump has been a disaster, and Trump is still hovering in the wings. Brooks is effectively acknowledging that the new elite is the old elite, and now they're frightened.