What David Brooks Missed

By Dan McLaughlin

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

 

 

David Brooks argues in the New York Times that America’s poisonous politics derives from social segregation between the college-educated class and the non-college-educated class, mainly through the fault of the former:

 

More Americans used to join cross-class community organizations like the Rotary or the Elks clubs. But gradually, highly educated people left them for professional organizations filled with others more like themselves. Skocpol wrote: “Once highly educated Americans would have been members and leaders of such cross-class voluntary federations. Now many barely know about them.” That self-segregation was symptomatic. Many college-educated people were at the same time segregating themselves in neighborhoods where nearly everybody had college degrees into professions where everybody did, into social circles in which you can go weeks without meeting somebody from the working class. . . . Those of us in the college-educated class are good at segregating ourselves from others, but we’re astoundingly good at segregating our kids — simply by equipping them to join our ranks.

 

Leaving aside aspects of the column that may catch in the throat of conservative readers, it’s a well-argued thesis as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough.

 

Some of the collapse of cross-class institutions was driven by external and generational factors. For example, the Veterans of Foreign Wars was once a major community institution crossing class lines, just as military service was a common experience. That began to fray during Vietnam, when college deferments meant that college-going young men were much likelier to avoid the draft. But with the passing of the generations that fought the world wars and the shift to an all-volunteer military, only a small fraction of Americans born in the past 70 years have served in foreign wars. It’s just no longer a common, shared experience.

 

But what Brooks is not bold enough to tell his readers is that this isn’t just a class thing; it’s an ideological thing. Progressive lawsuits, pressure campaigns, and marches through the institutions had a lot to do with killing cross-class institutions, especially those that once served men. The Boy Scouts are Exhibit A of this dynamic: dads and sons camping in the woods and learning knots and archery and the like was once an activity where it didn’t matter if your dad was a surgeon or a bricklayer. Endless assaults on the Scouts’ all-male environment and resistance to gay scoutmasters were a big part of what decimated their ranks. Similar stories can be told in other such institutions, all of them driven by the particular moral postures of college-educated left-wingers. If our divisions have driven increasing numbers of working-class and blue-collar Americans to the right, it’s partly because they know who made those dividing lines and who considers them a cultural enemy.