David Brooks on National Greatness

David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times is another nasty attack on Trump that reveals some nastiness about Brooks, too.  He talks about the importance of myths in civilization, but contrasts what he sees as good American myths with evil Russian myths   His good myth is to spread democracy and freedom, to welcome and embrace huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  I agree with him that American myths have been bruised by multiculturalism, and the decline of religion and patriotism.  

I disagree with him that the Trump myth is a Russian myth.  This is partly just a nod by Brooks to the commentariat obsession with Russia since the hacking involved in Trump’s election.  I find it hard to agree with Brooks, however, that Russian thinkers such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Pasternak created horrible myths inimical to human decency.  

What I see in Brooks’ column is a Jewish racist bigotry growing out of a long history of Jewish residency in Russia.  Jews were discriminated against and oppressed in Russia.  That may explain the hatred, but doesn’t mean the Jewish hatred does not exist.  Almost all Ashkenazi Jews come from greater Russia, which over history has covered most of Central Europe from Germany to the Asian steppes.  Israel is to some extent little Russia on the Mediterranean  Israel’s population is largely of Russian extraction if you go back a few generations, and in many cases just to the place of birth of current Israeli citizens.  Brooks’ column oozes with this inherited race hatred.  To Brooks the idea that Tolstoy could provide any spiritual or philosophical guidance to Americans is anathema.  

To Brooks, the fact that Russia turned back two of the most aggressive tyrants in Western European history, Hitler and Napoleon, is meaningless.  Brooks’ description of the Russian outlook embodied by Trump is evocative of Tolstoy and other Russian writers:  

Their myth is an alien myth, frankly a Russian myth. It holds, as Russian reactionaries hold, that deep in the heartland are the pure folk who embody the pure soul of the country — who endure the suffering and make the bread. But the pure peasant soul is threatened. It is threatened by the cosmopolitan elites and by the corruption of foreign influence.  

No doubt Brooks finds his own reference to the threat of “cosmopolitan elites and the corruption of foreign influence” too close to his own Jewishness.  Brooks says the American myth should embrace “strangers,” i.e., Jews (and Hispanics and Muslims and anybody else who wants to come).   Brooks fails to recognize that Jews like him have their own parochial, restricted vision that itself excludes certain people.  His reference to “pure folk who embody the soul of the country” is clearly a reference to middle America, the South and Midwest, the enemy, who are not part of the East and West Coast establishment.  

The Jews thought that they had bought and paid for the Clintons and with Hillary’s election, Jews would rule the US as the power behind the oval office.  They are unbelievably upset that they failed, and continue to rail against the new order.