NY Times political columnist David Brooks, who doubles as the paper's lay sociologist, wrote a piece last week whose headline was as jarring as it was suspiciously accurate: "America Is Falling Apart at the Seams."
I say suspiciously (or troublingly) accurate, since Brooks arrived at his general, headlined conclusion inductively. That is to say, his argumentation's parts fail to justify the whole, yet the whole of his argument seems pretty much undeniable.
America is falling apart, it's in a clinical funk, something or somethings are terribly, terribly wrong, out of kilter, discombobulated and all that. Brooks-colleague Bret Stephens was as "struck" as I was by his column, which Stephens summarized as a "catalog[uing of] all the ways in which socially destructive behavior has been on the rise: reckless driving, hate crimes, drug overdoses, homicides, you name it."
Stephens added that "obviously the pandemic has a lot to do with this, but there’s got to be more at work here." Indeed, because just as obvious is that upticks in the number of reckless driving cases or even homicides are scarcely signboards of an entire nation unraveling. Nevertheless, it is.
The pandemic aside, then, what else can we blame? Or, rather, should we blame? One quite popular contestant in the blame game is social media, which Brooks cited, as did Stephens and yet a third Times columnist, Gail Collins, who also entered the America-is-falling-apart fray. Any precise or even rough measurability of social media's malign influence is an impossibility, though.
In fact, a guess is as good as a statistic. SocialMediaToday.com reported in Jan. 2021 that "the latest data from Pew Research ... [showed] around 71% of people now get at least some of their news input from social media platforms." Yet Pew Research itself reported in 2020 that only 18% of Americans "rely primarily on social media for news." The spectrum its wide, interpretive, shifting and muddled.
Brooks then mentioned — and I do mean mentioned — the influence of "rotten politics," noting that "when President Donald Trump signaled it was OK to hate marginalized groups, a lot of people were bound to see that as permission" for wretched behavior.
There he left it. There, however, is where Brooks should have begun. And continued. And finished.
The least readable, most amateurish volume ever penned by the otherwise enchanting Christopher Hitchens was God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I shall trouble you not on its unreadably amateurish specifics. But Hitch provided us with a magnificent subtitle, which is also conveniently malleable: i.e., How Trump Poisons Everything. How Trump Poisoned Everything. How Trump is Still Poisoning Everything.
That one man — that loathsome creature, that ghoulish Philistine, that squalid, grotesque figure of inhuman turpitude — poisoned America. He poisoned it prior to 2016, he poisoned it in 2016, he poisoned it for four ghastly years in the White House, and he's still at it, poisoning every vulnerable artery and vein of American civilization.
While it's true that Trump was, and is, merely a symptom of the Republican Party's gathering historical rot, he alone deracinated the GOP from every last vestigial grounding of its politico-ethical decencies. He murdered Burke's shadow, killed Eisenhower and finished off Dirksen. He created the Frankensteinian hobgoblins of Kevin McCarthy and Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis. In so doing he catastrophically poisoned not only the party but nearly half of America's minds — which the other half must daily endure.
It's the longest of Rumsfeldian slogs, this foul, fetid, American captivity of the poisonous Trump Era. Columnist Brooks winced under the oppressive stench of it all, without ever recognizing the hovering face of the rancid beast. "What the hell is going on?" he asked. "The short answer: I don’t know," he wrote. "As a columnist, I’m supposed to have some answers. But I just don’t right now."
Mr. Brooks, take another look around. The cause of America's hell is all too obvious.