David Brooks: We Have Created An Inherited Caste System
PBS NEWSHOUR: New York Times columnist David Brooks and Kimberly Atkins Stohr of the Boston Globe join William Brangham to discuss the year in politics, including President Trump’s return to the White House and the significant changes from his first term.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM, PBS NEWSHOUR: I mean, as you’re both describing what we have been seeing unfolding, this is — none of this should come as a surprise. I mean, this is what candidate Trump promised on so many different levels. I will be your retribution. I will — I want my Roy Cohn in the Department of Justice. I will deport, I mean, those signs that the rallies. To this question you were asking before, David, about how — what we ought to look at as far as whether we got ourselves here, how do you answer that question? DAVID BROOKS, NEW YORK TIMES: The surprise or how we got ourselves. BRANGHAM: Yes. BROOKS: I mean, my simple answer is that we live in a country where people with high school degrees die 10 years sooner than people with college degrees, where people with high school degrees are five times more likely to die of opioids, where people with high school degrees are much less likely to get married, much more likely to have kids out of wedlock. People with high school degrees are 2.4 times more likely to say they have no friends. People with high school degrees are less likely to go to parks. And so we have created an inherited meritocratic system, an inherited caste system. And if you tell successive generations that your kids are not going to have an equal shot because your kids by eighth grade have fallen five grades level below the educated class, well, if you know your kids are going to have no shot, they’re going to flip the table. And that’s why it’s always important to see this phenomenon as a global phenomenon. It’s not just Donald Trump. It’s Nigel Farage in Britain. It’s the right in France. It’s the AfD in Germany. It’s in Poland. BRANGHAM: South and Central America. BROOKS: It’s South and Central America, in Korea. This is a global phenomenon. It is a phenomenon of the information age. That information age records people with money, with education, with money, and it creates this class system. And just as in the 1880s and 1890s, we screwed up responding to industrialization, we have over the last 20 or 30 years not adequately responded to the shifts that the information age has brought about us. And so I look at this as a moment of rupture and repair, that it’s ugly to live through. I hate what Donald Trump is doing, but every time America or any country or us personally, think of your own personal life, life moves forward through a process of rupture and repair. Something falls apart, something terrible happens, but you are strong enough as a nation to ask yourself honest questions, what part of this problem am I responsible for? And when you do that, then repair begins to happen. And America’s been through this so many times, 1830s, 1890s, 1860s, 1960s. I’m confident that America will go through this horrible period of rupture and something will come out the other end if we’re creative enough to adjust.
