No David Brooks it’s not a college education divide, it’s a failure of leadership
According to recent Census Bureau data, around 37.7% of Americans have a college degree or higher. So if every person in America with a college degree had voted for Harris she would have had over 53 million more votes and won in a landslide.
As I talked about here, America has no plan, no vision and this was the dominant force in this election. If one gives any thought to the ridiculous explanation David Brooks gives, it begins to disintegrate.
First off Brooks gives HVAC repair as an example of manual labor, but that’s totally an information age job. I had a long discussion with my HVAC repairman and he is a Russian immigrant and shops at the same very expensive farmer’s market that I do (turns out the lady that sells Polish sausage is also a Russian immigrant).
From The Policy Circle: According to the 2019 Nation’s Report Card, issued by the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of American adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, and nearly one in five adults reads below a third-grade level.
You can stop all immigration and bring back all manufacturing, but there will still be the same class divide. Today’s manufacturing jobs run on a high level of automation and will end up being like HVAC repair.
Stopping immigration might open up jobs in construction but many of those are highly skilled and when they pay enough will they will be snatched up by more educated workers as well. Under a pseudo meritocracy, there will simply always be a pseudo performance class divide (pseudo performance instead of real performance because much of the supposed productivity is actually making the world worse).
Second Brooks cites policy decisions that supposedly led America to this point but it’s much the same situation with Yoon Suk Yeol and the People Power Party in South Korea, various countries in Europe experiencing the same forces, etc. A capitalist society will always eventually reach this point — just read one of the definitions of “capitalist” that Google AI provides you:
Believes in free enterprise and the idea that people can gain wealth through hard work and intelligence
A wealth divide between people based on aptitude is practically the entire point of capitalism. Making pre-school and college free won’t change that. Making health care free won’t change that. The one small possible mitigation, Universal Basic Income, was rejected by Bernie Sanders.
This is the failure of leadership — we are unable to imagine a more equitable world. The Nordic model is of course absolutely better than what America has, but it’s not a long term solution.
Even if you are a Danish billionaire, we are one planet and the state of the global south can still affect you. Denmark’s economy in general is reliant on Ozempic being marketed to capitalist stress induced weight gain victims. Norway’s oil production in 2023 was around 2 million barrels per day, which is expected to increase into 2025. Iceland just barely survived its 2008 banking crisis.
David Brooks says that after a few years of turmoil Americans will create a new consensus as we have in the past. But if you look beyond the bubble that Brooks complains others live in but really resides in himself, that’s not the picture you get:
Since the 1990s, only 34 middle-income economies have succeeded in that feat. The rest — 108 at the end of 2023 — have been stuck in “the middle-income trap. Since 1970, the median income per capita of middle-income countries has never risen above 10 percent of the US level.
A country can absolutely get “stuck” and this surely is and will be America’s fate also unless we work very hard to avoid it. There is inside of America another economy, one that is in a middle income trap, and escaping a middle income trap is against the odds.
David Brooks lists the federal reserve as one of the key parts of government that should be retained because “it works”. No David the federal reserve is not working as I and uncountably many others have written about. Definitely New York Times opinion columnists are not on any reasonable retention list either.
The truth is that everyone in America is failing at leadership. Whether it is liberal elites unable to conceive a world beyond meritocracy or a pastor falling for a future full of fascism, there is an unwillingness to grow up.