Mr. Brooks continues to contribute to the divisiveness in politics. He is creating and perpetuating the myth that democrats are coastal elites who look down on rural republicans. The reality is more the reverse. Rural republicans insist that democrats are the devil/socialist/babykillers. But it’s important to separate rank and file Democrats from politicians who are Democrats. Just as it’s important to separate rural voters from the politicians and media machines who have corralled them. Democrat Voters are frustrated with Rural Republican voters to be sure. And Vice versa. But progressives in cities do not look down on our rural brothers and sisters. We know their circumstances and lifestyles are different but they experience financial stress, insecurity, hardship and occasional success like everyone in large cities does. They want security and agency just like urban dwellers do.

Economic conditions do unite us far more than divide us. Do you want job security and livable wages? Do you want to be able to start and run your own business? Do you want equal access to higher educational opportunities to improve yourself if you choose? Do you want to know with certainty that great health care is available to you and yours regardless of circumstances? Do you want to know you will be able to retire with dignity and security? Importantly, in the richest country in the world, do you want this for your brothers and sisters, your fellow citizens, too? The progressive answer to these questions is Yes. I am certain that the vast majority of conservative rural Americans would also say Yes to all of this set of questions. What policies actually effectively promote and assure Yes to these questions?

There is a radical failing of the Democratic party. It promotes Everything Except these in its actual real efforts. It supports wall street and monopolistic corporations and Not small businesses. It supports all the identity political issues in ways that are alienating not only to those not in the identity group, but to huge percentages of those within the aggrieved identity group. The truth about justice is it happens for everyone or it really happens for no one. Gays Blacks Latino Asians Whites Women Men Rural Urban Religious Atheist Middle Class Poor…all experience injustices. The wealthy are the only identity group who do not experience injustice as a negative. Instead, injustice works For them. If you are wealthy enough, no other identity can bring negative injustice to your door. If you aren’t about justice for everyone, you aren’t really about justice at all. And if you aren’t about justice, identity grievances carry very little force. They appear to be merely self-serving and not morally grounded.

So the party is rightly despised as hypocritical; presuming the support of everyman while actually promoting the Financial Elite. It must be made clear to Brooks…the “elite” that matters is the Financial elite. Experts, be they farmers or carpenters or scientists or professors are in some sense elite by virtue of work and knowledge. They are actually generally respected. That is NOT the elite that is resented. The financial elite are corrupters and rentiers and to a very large degree not deserving of their disproportionate wealth. That because in our system after a point it is not work or innovation that increases wealth, but simply having wealth increases wealth. It’s not that they don’t deserve reward for their actual work and contributions, even extremely generous reward, but what we have now is beyond the pale and obscene. It is out of balance and unsustainable. Democrat Establishment Politicians have been complicit. That is why voters tried the (radically failed) Trump experiment. They have rejected Trump now in a tepid resignation for Biden. Sadly, the real and positive alternative was thwarted by both the right and left financial elite and the systems, including the NYT, that support them.

What Brooks and Stephens and all the other “pundits” (in their unseeing role of support for the financial elite) will continue to not see and actively try to prevent others from understanding is: the answer to rebalancing and uniting our country is class oriented justice and rebalancing, A La Sanders in 2016 before the excessive incursion of other identity politics. From a perspective of material security and actual democratic agency, unfettered by gerrymandering, active disenfranchisement efforts and arcane and harmful political traditions (electoral college, Senate Power) all other identity justice issues have less urgency and can be addressed more positively and cooperatively. So economic progressive politics is what rank and file democrats need to make of their party so the 99% (rural and urban) have something positive to vote for and support. Republican Party Elite have been nakedly and openly the party of the financial elite, abusing evangelicals for votes. They also need to rethink their purpose and relevance to the 99% of American citizens. Their financial elite have to re-embrace actual conservatism and reject immoral, illogical, and impractical Libertarian sophistry. So say the voters.