David Brooks has been the “conservative” columnist for the New York Times for many years. I usually read his column, but I never liked him. I’m a liberal, he’s a conservative, and we disagreed on just about every political issue.
The Trump presidency changed that. Brooks is still a conservative; I’m still a liberal, but we both love our country. In an article in the most recent issue of The Atlantic, Brooks discusses how conservatives value long-term institutions and respect tradition. The following quotation is from that article.
Trumpian Republicanism plunders, degrades, and erodes institutions for the sake of personal aggrandizement. The Trumpian cause is held together by hatred of the Other. Because Trumpians live in a state of perpetual war, they need to continually invent existential foes–critical race theory, nongendered bathrooms, out-of control immigration. They need to treat half the country, metropolitan America, as a moral cancer, and view the cultural and demographic changes of the past 50 years as an alien invasion. Yet pluralism is one of America’s oldest traditions; to conserve America, you have to love pluralism. As long as the warrior ethos dominates the GOP, brutality will be admired over benevolence, propaganda over discourse, confrontation over conservatism, dehumanization over dignity.
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