Columnist David Brooks on Trumpism
Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s OpEd in the NY Times by David Brooks:
“Trumpism… is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice. …
What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power. …
I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now.”
As a percentage, there are very few people on this planet who view Earth as “one big group project,” but these folks are, in the main, members of the more than 200,000 groups whose purpose is environmental and social justice.
We really do have a weird phenomenon at work here in the United States.
When my wife and I brought kids into this world in the 1990s, it seemed a reasonable thing to do. But that was before:
If the future looks like the past, it’s very clear that our legacy for generations to come will feature overwhelming amounts of authoritarianism, greed, ignorance, racism, environmental collapse, perhaps along with nuclear conflagration.
To be fair, the SCOTUS didn’t rule that the president is “above the law”; they ruled that the president can’t be prosecuted for something he did as an “official act.”
Part of the beauty of the societies of Scandinavia and most of the rest of the developed world is their understanding of the fact that a well educated populace tends to commit very few crimes. Sweden, for example, is closing some of its prisons because they don’t have a sufficient number of inmates to justify keeping them open.
Many of us can remember the early days of renewable energy, and our concern that resources like solar and wind were intermittent. Could such energy sources offer value even though they are not “baseload?”
As the physician points out at left, changing the ingredients in Coca Cola may not be the boon for Americans’ health it’s represented to be.
Anyone who thinks that an ExxonMobil franchisee actually posted this sign is a fool. Big Oil’s only hope for extending its corrupt stream of wealth is via Trump’s policies, and his deceit, e.g., “Gas is under $2 / gallon.”
