A friend praised an article in The Atlantic magazine. He quotes...
Brooks is a simpering boob. Atlantic won't let me read the whole article, HERE, (and, since it's David Brooks, I should thank them; it's bad enough I have to see him in the NY Times) so I can only respond to your quotation. I do not share your admiration for it. I mean, "fill a hole in his soul"? Who says that kind of thing? In 2023, who writes articles about peoples' souls?
And I don't even agree with it if you imagine he meant something less floofy by soul. You guys might think that our descent into civil war is a consequence of having left behind greed, aka, the politics of distribution, but not me. That's the foundation of every culture war. It begat protestantism, France's revolution, our civil war, and on and on.Today's problem doesn't result from some new psychic flaw. It comes from, in my humble opinion, the fact that shitheads can communicate with millions of other shitheads for free, allowing them to self-organize like bubos on a plague victim. Together, they convince themselves that there is no need to have a conscience or accept the validity of anyone outside of their own thousands of fellow shitheads.
Eventually, a truly psychotic shithead, I'm looking at you Donald Trump, finds his way into the hearts of 74 million people who have morally bankrupted themselves with endless, solipsistic reinforcement of their hatred for immigrants and people of color, resentment of those who do better in society than them and, because 'incels' are part of their cohort, how much raping is a good idea for the bitches.
Brooks didn't have to go after Trump to make his point except for the fact that Trump is the point. Without Trump, 74 million morally bankrupt shithead supporters would have no leader. Without him, they would ebb and flow, like the Tea Party did.
I can trace the evil from Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich to Dick Cheney (and his puppet W) to Donald Trump with endless, boring detail and it's true that there has been a process. But it has nothing to do with peoples' souls and plenty to do with the very factor he denies, the politics of redistribution. Greedy people want it all. Greedy people think brown people have too much.
Greediness and Donald Trump are the reason we are so mean.