RUSH: Ready for this? He-he-he. Sound bite coming up. David Brooks, our old buddy, the conservative columnist, New York Times. He’s had a realization.
He maybe thinks that the elites may have overstepped on immigration just a little bit, maybe have brought in too many, maybe have brought in more people than should be here at the moment. Grab sound bites eight and nine. David Brooks by himself, no big deal, don’t misunderstand. But, in the sense that he is a mirror for what the elites and the establishment think at any given moment, this was back on Friday night on The NewsHour at PBS, Judy Woodruff said to David Brooks, “The vote in the UK to leave the European Union, what do you make of this, Dave?”
RUSH: Whoa.
BROOKS: — a good patriotism that is cosmopolitan, that is outward-spanning and that is confident and therefore a bad form of parochial inward-looking Trump nationalism has had free rein.
RUSH: You don’t hear this. You don’t hear this kind of admission from anywhere inside the ruling class. You don’t hear this anywhere within the establishment. And I’m not suggesting it means anything. It’s just self-contained interesting. Don’t worry that it portends change on the part of the establishment. Doesn’t mean that at all. Just a self-contained opinion by David Brooks. He’s rather a lowly member of the establishment, but he’s still there, and these ruminations of his are his alone. Maybe other people are thinking it.
I don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea, I’m not suggesting, “Hey, hey, folks, there may be something up. Maybe the establishment’s starting to get it.” I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think Brooks is starting to see things, because he’s right whether he knows it or not. They have flooded the system with more than it can handle and at the expense of nationalism. It’s exactly what’s going on. He’s a little concerned about it. And here’s the next. Woodruff said, “Wait a minute, is Trump the only one of the two candidates speaking to these people like you just talked about?”
BROOKS: If you ask Donald Trump supporters do they think immigration’s good or bad for the country, 80% say it’s bad. Do they mind that they are around people who don’t speak English well? Three-quarters mind. And so there’s just a — not intolerance, but a sense of the country’s getting too diverse and that somehow they’re the losers in this process or the country as a whole is a loser in the process, a sinking ship. So that is I think at the center central core of what Trump is tapping into. It’s a sense of collective loss as much as personal loss that’s driving a lot of those voters.
RUSH: That’s a key point. That’s a key thing to admit, for Brooks and people like him, to admit that this is not personal on the part of all the people voting for Trump, that they are Americans and that they are worried about their country, not themselves first. That’s a big admission. Again, I’m not attaching any weight to this in terms of it having any meaning in the sense of policy change. It’s self-contained, it is what it is, but I thought it was interesting to share because it’s such a divergence of direction from that which you usually get from Brooks, the columnist at the New York Times.
Now, I just personally am asking myself why. I don’t think things happen in a vacuum. There has to be some outside influence on Brooks that would make this. I don’t know what it is, but it would be interesting to me. But he talks here about do they mind that they’re around people that don’t speak English. Yeah, but not because they don’t speak English. It’s because of what it means for the country, for crying out loud.
It’s not intolerance. It’s a sense the country is getting too diverse. It’s not that the country’s getting too diverse. It’s that we’re losing the country. These guys think in oddball terms even. Diversity in and of itself is not a problem except the way these guys define it. Diversity is how we equal greatness in their world, and diversity is not how you get to greatness. Merit is. Achievement, accomplishment, and all that, not skin color makeup, quotas, racial guidelines or ethnic guidelines, but these people think it is.
But, anyway, it’s interesting, and I think it’s an offshoot of the Brexit vote and the fact that nobody saw this coming.