I found this column very interesting, though it posits a recession whose existence is quite uncertain. Looking back from a hypothetical vantage point in 2050, after Elizabeth Warren was elected as President in 2020 (something I’d approve of), Brooks thinks that even if the Senate went Democratic, things still wouldn’t magically improve. Read it for yourself:
One excerpt:
After that election, the Republicans suffered a long, steady decline. Trump was instantly reviled by everyone — he had no loyal defenders. Only 8 percent of young people called themselves conservatives. Republican voters, mostly older, were dying out, and they weren’t making new ones. For the ensuing two decades the party didn’t resonate beyond its white rural base.
The American educated class celebrated the Warren victory with dance-in-the-street euphoria. In staffing her administration, she rejected the experienced Clinton-Obama holdovers and brought in a new cadre from the progressive left.
The euphoria ended when Warren tried to pass her legislative agenda. One by one, her proposals failed in the Senate: Medicare for all, free college, decriminalizing undocumented border crossing, even the wealth tax. Democratic senators from red states, she learned, were still from red states; embracing her agenda would have been suicidal. Warren and her aides didn’t help. Fired by their sense of moral superiority, they were good at condemnation, not coalition-building.
When the recession of 2021 hit, things got ugly. The failure of two consecutive presidencies had a devastating effect on American morale. It became evident that the nation had three political tendencies — conservative populism, progressive populism and moderate liberalism. None of them could put together a governing majority to get things done.
Before Warren, people thought of liberals and progressives as practically synonymous. After Warren, it was clear they were different, with different agendas and different national narratives.
But in the end, the moderate liberals win out.
Not being able to read it, let me guess: he never mentions climate change. It is magically the same world we had in the 1990’s, just with different politics.
“. . .let me guess: he never mentions climate change”
That’s because by 2050 climate change alarms have been reduced to the same level of credibility as “duck and cover” drills in the 1950s. Legendary documentarist Ken Burns, now age 97, plans to document the climate scare era after he finishes his current sports project–about the first white man to break the race barrier in the NBA. 😊
Alternatively, by 2050 the ocean swallows the District of Columbia, and the capitol is moved to Denver. Ken Burns son plans to document the time before warming as a nostalgic remembrance of the good old days. It will include much underwater footage of the statue of liberty, and the Empire State building (which still breaks the surface at low tide). 😎
I hope Elizabeth Warren reads this prediction. Nothing is more irritating than “moral superiority”.
A Moderate Liberal
Well, it’s reassuring, I suppose, to know that, come 2050, there will still be insipid, cliché-humping pundits around to explain to us how it came to be that Democrats were transmogrified into middle-of-the-road Republicans resembling nothing so much as David Brooks himself.
Maybe so, but for a kind of mental masturbation this…
…is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
The Dems are incapable of doing this though. Brooks’ piece is just hot air.
Once again I wonder: Why does David Brooks still have a job? After so many years of being reliably wrong about nearly everything, it’s clear that his crystal ball is nothing but a soap bubble.
Punditry has no formal qualifications and no accountability whatsoever.
Might as well put up the whole piece [It’s below]. David Brooks has no room for the rest of the World in his up-to-2030 fantasy nor any other externalities to his bubble e.g. see comment #1, Steve Gerrard on climate change.
Not impressed given that the US Empire-by-proxy & corporate globalism model is getting pushback now – this century likely will not go well for The West & the hypothesised recession of 2021 may be difficult to climb out of if the US is as inward looking as Brooks appears to be in this piece [I don’t know him]:
Just finishing an old book called Fifty Years of Party Warfare, about the parties in the early Republic. There was a period when the Republican (i.e., Democratic) party was without a meaingful opposition, so, of course, they developed there own, and, eventually, the Whig Party was born. I think it’s high time for a party realignment, and if the Grand Old Party has to disappear, then so be it. Brooks is right to suggest that the party’s exist because of the politics, not the other way around.
It doesn’t make logical sense.
If the Republicans were so thoroughly discredited that it started a long decline from which the party would never recover – then who would the Democratic Party be losing seats to in the red states?
Warren and Sanders both represent a wing of the party that doesn’t particularly hold to the mentality that “The Republicans must lose at all costs.”
For that wing of the party, paying the campaign costs for congress critters and senators who don’t vote for the Democratic mandate is basically pointless, so they may as well let the Republicans take that seat.
So if Warren ended up winning, I would imagine the following scenario:
Warren wins. Pushes her policies during the honeymoon period, manages to get some it passed, but ends up with a lot of it blocked by about a dozen Dems in each vote, pretty similar to what happened to Obama.
Except Warren isn’t a centrist and thus isn’t as nice as Obama about it, and so the party defunds those senators and congressmen.
Mid term elections come, and you get a Republican Congress and Senate, because those red state dems just aren’t worth the cost of maintaining their seats, and actually eat into the electability of the purple and blue state dems.
From there on in, you get deadlock in the government until Warren gets a go at her second term.
The Republicans try to run a milquetoast candidate ala Romney or McCain. They lose. Reason?
The same reason that the Bush family’s near endorsement of Hillary Clinton cost her in the last election. Those Dems who lose their seats aren’t popular on a national level, but they’ll be telling their sob stories as an endorsement of the Republican – and nobody wants to be endorsed by a bitter turncoat.
Warren finishes out her second term, she hasn’t achieved all that much, but she goes out reasonably popular.
The next Dem candidate will however be another Al Gore or Hillary Clinton type – someone who doesn’t push much of a mandate for change, doesn’t have a real central message and bores everyone.
Which means the Republican will win because there is always something to be discontent about and running on “more of the same” isn’t generally a winning strategy.
We will then undergo five to ten years of being told how this new president is so unprecedentedly awful, because nobody bothers to remember the precedents for all the awfulness.
Of course all of this presupposes that Trump loses, and frankly I don’t see that happening. The economy isn’t bad enough, and the worst consequences for Trump are medium to long term, meaning that the real cost of all the stuff he’s doing now won’t hit until halfway through his second term.
The Republican Party is dedicated to cost management as their core philosophy, which means that they’re hostile to spending on maintaining stuff because that stuff will hopefully only break when the next people are in office.
This is the real core to their climate change denialism, sure they might bring about an age of misery and hunger, but they’re willing to bet it will only start during the Democrat’s term.
Everything about the Republicans is dedicated to being able to show short term benefits, and hoping that the long term costs don’t hit during their term.
Look at the housing crisis for an example of this in action – low interest rates fueling economic growth but no real growth in incomes so how was that debt supposed to be paid off?
Look at Trump now, and he was calling for zero rates – it is the same deal. With the Republicans it is all about the short term benefits, and hoping the costs fall due during the next administration.
But until those costs fall due, well the Republicans are going to win because the economy looks okay enough to not really be raising alarm bells.
My immediate reaction is to grin at the idea of pundits predicting the next thirty years when they have so much trouble predicting the next one or two. 😛
Brooks is just a lost pundit, political writer and republican. He crashed and burned after Bush became president and was all in for the Iraq war. When that quickly went bad he was lost and has never been found since. When Trump took over his party he just became delusional and this article shows it. It is the republican party gone down the shitter and David Brooks went with them. Now he tries to define the democrats and that is a laugh, the democrats can’t define them. Right now it is still likely that Trump will not be standing for the next election but he does not even consider that, just as most of the democrats do no consider it. Instead they all want to spend their time worrying about Warren. Just take a pill and see what happens.
“Before Warren, people thought of liberals and progressives as practically synonymous. After Warren, it was clear they were different, with different agendas and different national narratives.”
Somewhere down the line, I could see moderate conservatives and moderate liberals coming together to form a third coalition of voters. I think the majority of the country comes from these two camps, but a lot of them don’t know it and, because of the two-party system, fall into tribalism as well.
That first sentence is almost certainly accurate; the demographic handwriting is on the wall.
The second sentence? In the Party where Donald Trump now has a 90+% approval rating? The Party that’s been cleaving the deplorables to its breast since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”? The Party of the Teabaggers and the Birthers? The Party where next to no one has had the gumption to stand up to Trump — where not a single Republican has dared come out in the last two days to raise a concern over the whistle-blower scandal in which Donald Trump tried to corrupt the new, pro-Western reformist president of the Ukraine for naught but Trump’s own narrow political gain?
In David Brooks’s de-fevered, never-Trump dreams maybe. Brooks has yet to come to grips with what has become of his beloved Grand Old Party.
I’d like to think Warren is too practical to allow her programs to just get voted down. She would attempt to adjust them to fit prevailing sentiments among both Congress and the public. Even Bernie Sanders would compromise to get something done.
Here is the thing to know about government. Even after Trump is gone and all the damage is cleaned up. Laws actually are created in congress and must be passed by congress. All a president actually does is sign bills that have been passed by congress. So no presidential candidate, Warren or Sanders or any one is going to do a health bill or a clean air bill or any bill. It is the congress that has to do it. Candidates can have all kinds of plans and idea but only congress can get it done or not. When one of the candidates said, I am going to take away your AR-15s, no he is not. Only Congress can do that.
Sure. I suspect we all know how the US government works, at least those of us who live here. A President can still show leadership and set an agenda. Even without providing leadership, a President can let Congress know what he or she will sign and what will get vetoed.
She won’t beat Trump because of her immigration policy. I think that people don’t like how it’s being done, but are secretly glad SOMETHING is being done about illegal immigration.
Here is Elizabeth Warren’s comprehensive statement on immigration policy.
Why anyone would vote for a clearly incompetent, dangerously unfit national embarrassment like Donald Trump out of fear over this sane, sensible policy escapes me.
Elizabeth Warren is smarter and more politically astute than he gives her credit. The radical changes proposed could clearly not be accomplished simply by winning the presidency, and her plans will be subject to sensible change. A win for Warren would instead signal to Democrats as well as Republicans that the old swinging pendulum political strategies will no longer work.