Educated Class Internecine Warfare

I find it ever so useful when some jackass purports to tell me what the "educated class" believes.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

I'm glad Mr. Brooks has clarified that for me. Otherwise, I might never have known how those educated types thought. I only have one small problem with his lovely, sweeping generalizations.

Last time I checked, the number of college degrees at YPS exceeded residents by a factor of two. By any standard you want to use, J and I qualify as members of the educated class. We disagree with almost every position he ascribes to the educated class. Even if we accepted, arguendo, any of his positions I can guarantee you our policy prescriptions for addressing those issues are not going to be anywhere near what David Brooks would choose.

There is currently a strong vein of anti-intellectual populism in the country, which Brooks has noticed. By falsely presenting the political divide as one of educated vs. non-educated, all Brooks is doing with this column is reinforcing the trend. His readers (I'll go out on a limb and guess NYT Op-Ed readers are generally educated) get to reinforce their smug superiority, while anyone who isn't educated is going to get offended.

Way to go, jackass. Complain about the very phenomenon you're helping to perpetuate.