Thread by @RadioFreeTom

I am going to take issue with this @nytdavidbrooks piece because I think Brooks, and many others, are missing a crucial piece of the puzzle in the "death of truth" and the "unwinding of demcracy problem. Thread follows. /1

nytimes.com/2021/07/01/opi…

Brooks writes that Trumpers buy Trump's lies "because he tells stories of dispossession that feel true to many of them," and that kids on campuses are intolerant because they "feel entrapped by a moral order that feels unsafe and unjust." Maybe. But that's not the core issue. /2

What so many intellectuals miss is how bored and listless these people on both the right and left feel, and how energizing and *good* it feels to believe the lies, no matter what side they come from. It's ennobling. It's heroic. It's self-actualizing. /3

Are there "forgotten places" that breed despair? Is the social order unjust? Sure. But mostly, the people leading the charges on this stuff aren't the primary victims of the forgetting or the injustice. Middle-income whites and kids on Ivy campuses are not the victims here. /4

The worst off, most dispossessed in this country don't even *vote*, for crying out loud. This is the lashing out of the bored bourgeoisie, not "stories that feel true to them." These are stories they WANT to be true because it would ennoble their own dull lives to believe it. /5

We ignore at our peril - and yes, this is part of my book's argument - the idea that a bored and affluent middle-class, raised on a steady diet of narcissism and self-actualization are the real danger here. We have to stop making up noble excuses for illiberal ideas. /6

If you wonder why super-privileged kids or retirees in nice condos are so angry, it's because it feels *great* to be angry. Otherwise, life becomes about getting a job (if you're young) or just accepting the twilight of age. Easy heroism is crack to Americans raised on cable. /7

None of this denies actual injustices in the world; rather, I'm saying that Brooks is wrong to think more "civic education" or something solves this. It doesn't. You can't educate a morally adrift, affluent, and bored public into stocism and tolerance and liberality. /8

I think one thing that helps this is to stop coddling people who demand you respect their childish anger. Be the example you'd like to set. Refuse to accept the terms of debate offered by tantruming children (of any age). /9

This is where, I think, Brooks and so many others go wrong. They are taking seriously people who are fundamentally unserious in their objections to modern democracy. They are letting the least serious among us set the parameters of liberalism. This is a grievous error. /10

Brooks (and many others of us) are right about an epistemic crisis. But it's being driven by people with a selfish, emotionally charged need to feel better about themselves. There is no compromising with this because there is no point at which such a need is sated. /11

This is a bubble that will pop with a lot of people doing dumb stuff and going to jail, others opting out of political life, and yet others saying "just keep the wifi on and beer cold." None of this ends well and a bad outcome is not only inevitable but in progress. /12

If we really want to live the values of the Fourth, a stoic refusal to compromise with the most destructive and selfish of our fellow citizens is a good start. Stand for liberal democracy and don't get baited into narratives that only serve dysfunctional emotional purposes. /13x