Of all the failures that have led to the historical disaster of the Trump presidency, perhaps the least-remarked-upon is the abdication of responsibility of the American center. Those of us with moderate inclinations need an effective center as a brake against extremism. When one party veers too far from the center, the center joins the opposing party, until the extreme one can be coaxed back into the mainstream. David Brooks calls for a rejuvenation of the center under the Trump presidency. But Brooks himself is the perfect encapsulation of why the center has proven so hapless, allowing itself to enable extremism rather than prevent it.
The premise of Brooks’s column is that there needs to be space “between the alt-right and the alt-left, between Trumpian authoritarianism and Sanders socialism.” This is a terrible way to conceptualize the political map. First, it distorts the ideas of the two sides, equating a small-d democrat like Sanders (who merely proposes more regulation, taxes, and spending) with Trump, who — as Brooks concedes — is authoritarian. And second, it distorts their power. Sanders remains a left-wing outlier among his party, while Trump is the dominant force within his…
The effect of all this commentary was not to empower the moderate ideas Brooks favored, but to disempower them. Brooks was emblematic of the way the entire bipartisan centrist industry conducted itself throughout the Obama years. It was neither possible for Obama to co-opt the center, nor for Republicans to abandon it, because official centrists would simply relocate themselves to the midpoint of wherever the parties happened to stand. The well-documented reality that the parties were undergoing asymmetric polarization was one they refused to accept…
The centrists could have played a role in braking the growing extremism of the Republican party. It would have meant telling the country that there was now one moderate, governing party and one extremist faction, and parking themselves with the moderate party until such time as the dynamic changed.
–Jonathan Chait
David Brooks and the Intellectual Collapse of the Center
I’ve never really doubted that Russia was involved in influencing the 2016 presidential election. I never got upset about it because I’m sure that they have done the same thing since about the time our nation was founded. The only reason it was of any special interest this year was that one of the major candidates for president was on record as being relatively positive in his posture toward Russia. And as a result, journalists were sniffing around more than they normally would and we learned more.
So who were the people who put Donald Trump in the White House? Is it a revolt of the dispossessed? Or the left-behind — globalization’s losers? Is it the backlash against free trade? Some of the top voices on the US left seem to think so. But what if the economy isn’t the main driver? What if it’s racism and racial resentment that helped put Trump in the Oval Office? What if it’s the “whitelash”?
I’ve become something of an addict of 
Breitbart states that the “origins” of the alt-right can be found in “thinkers as diverse as… Oswald Spengler, H L Mencken, Julius Evola, Sam Francis, and… Pat Buchanan.” It’s an odd collection of forerunners, with a few unknown figures. But note that every single one of the “diverse” thinkers from which alt-right ideas originate has one thing in common. The editor of Mencken’s works found him “clearly and unequivocally” antisemitic, calling Jews “the most unpleasant race ever heard of.” Julius Evola was also a notorious antisemite, and wrote an introduction to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Sam Francis thanked Billy Graham for daring to point out the Jewish “stranglehold” on American media and believed Jews were the technocratic operatives of a managerial class that dominated society. Pat Buchanan has long been notorious, and watched closely by the Anti-Defamation League, for his statements on Jewish political dominance. And while Spengler personally disowned antisemitism, he was the favored philosopher of the Third Reich and his theories have a prominent place in neo-Nazi thinking.
You’re describing the same thing that put Barack Obama in the White House in 2008. Only then, it was a hopeful movement. I mean, people were scared then, too, people were frightened. But what you see in the Trump phenomenon is desperation; it is hope after it has curdled in vinegar for eight years. People had such high expectations for Barack Obama and they were disappointed. And I think that they were right to be disappointed. He really did not deliver in all sorts of ways that people expected him to. And things that he easily could have — it’s not like they were expecting things that were outlandish or really radical or completely off the table. He just didn’t deliver them.
The failure of the American Dream, as we are told repeatedly, has produced a populist revolt of volcanic proportions. At the heart of the problem is the stagnation of real wages and the lack of upward social mobility as higher education costs escalate out of sight. The data is persuasive. Between 1948 and 1973, productivity rose by 96.7 percent and real wages by 91.3 percent, almost exactly in step. Those were the days of plentiful hard-hat jobs in steel and the auto industry when workers could afford to send their children to college and see them rise into the middle class. But from 1973 to 2015 — the era of globalization, when many of those jobs vanished abroad — productivity rose 73.4 percent while wages rose by only 11.1 percent. Trump argued that this was caused by unrestricted illegal immigration and the off-shoring of jobs, though these were only partial causes: the erosion of trade unions probably accounts for 25 to 30 percent of the net loss in earning power. The 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the US form only part of the vast mass of non-unionized labor competing for jobs.
Since the election, it’s been hard for me to blame the voters. I don’t have the highest opinion of them anyway. And I certainly don’t expect them to follow politics the way that I do. But I do blame the Democratic Party. The issue isn’t that Hillary Clinton had bad policy ideas. I’m sure if you sat down the average voter and went through her policies, you would find that they liked them. But in a very real way, Hillary Clinton is paying for the sins of her husband. And by sins, I certainly do not mean Bill’s dalliances. I’m referring to Bill Clinton as the first and most “successful” New Democrat.
In the long term, it led to what we face today. The truth is that things are not good for American workers. And the Republicans deserve a great deal of blame for that. But it is an arguable point as to whether the Republicans are more responsible for that over the last 25 years. And in that case, is it any wonder that people just vote with their guts?
Of all the healthcare reform nostrums in all the world, the most popular among Republicans in the US is allowing the sale of insurance policies across state lines.
In the novel Primary Colors, Libby is distraught after McGovern loses in 1972. And she tells Jack that they need to learn how to play dirty in politics. And Jack tells her no, “Our job is to make it clean. Because if it’s clean, we win — because our ideas are better.” I love that line because it so sums up liberal thinking. It also sums up the way things are today. Regardless of what you think of the Democrats, at least they have ideas. The Republicans don’t have any ideas other than that the rich should be given everything they want.
But that was just a week’s worth of entertainment news. The rest of the time was about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. That was particularly interesting for a number of reasons. The first is that it was a technical matter. It’s the kind of stuff that I make a living writing about. So I know that at most one percent of Americans had even the vaguest idea of what the issue was. And the more you knew, the less you cared. It was truly of no interest.
Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.