In the New York Times, David Brooks writes:
After World War II the Protestant establishment dominated the high ground of American culture and politics. That establishment eventually failed. It tolerated segregation and sexism, led the nation into war in Vietnam and became stultifying.So in the late 1960s along came a group of provocateurs like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the rest of the counterculture to upend the Protestant establishment. People like Hoffman were buffoons, but also masters of political theater.
They never attracted majority support for their antics, but they didn’t have to. All they had to do was provoke, offend the crew-cut crowd, generate outrage and set off a cycle that ripped apart the cultural consensus.
The late 1960s were a time of intense cultural conflict, which left a lot of wreckage in its wake. But eventually a new establishment came into being, which we will call the meritocratic establishment.
David has long used “meritocratic” as a euphemism for, basically, “Jewish.”
Mr. Brooks’ notion is that the upheavals of the 1960s were largely about talented Jews elbowing their way into the top slots in our culture, which is exaggerated but pretty reasonable.
It hardly makes sense to talk of black and brown beneficiaries of affirmative action, such as Michelle Obama, as “meritocrats.”
Obviously, he’s talking about Jews with a few Asians thrown in and a vague appeal to Catholics, who probably lost more under the post-1968 dispensation than they gained.
But since you can’t mention Jewish numbers, almost nobody ever grasps what Brooks is talking about.
Ever since, you are not supposed to mention Jewish predominance. You are supposed to talk about, say, White Privilege in Hollywood, White Privilege on Wall Street, and White Privilege in the Press, but you are never ever supposed to speak of Jewish Privilege. It’s not even a thing.
And that explains a lot of the mania about the President. While Trump is clearly extremely pro-Semitic, his tendency to blurt out inconvenient truths has alarmed much of the “meritocratic establishment” that he will someday blurt out the most unmentionable fact of all: how over-represented Jews are in the best jobs.
It’s perfectly reasonable for Jews to want to have no quotas restricting their personal ambitions. But it’s not reasonable for Jews to insist upon quotas limiting whites, of whom Jews make up only 3% (so that affirmative action barely affects them), while simultaneously censoring all analogous discussion of their own over-representation.
An obvious bargain: Jews should knock it off with the White Privilege / Huddled Masses hate rhetoric. In return, fewer white gentiles would care about Jewish hypocrisy, because there would be less Jewish hypocrisy to care about.
I don’t think David Brooks would disagree all that much, he’d just object to specifying what he is talking about.
Commenter Welsh draws attention to this 2005 book review in the NYT by Brooks:
A woman came up to me after one of my book talks and said, “You realize what you’re talking about is the Jews taking over America.”My eyes bugged out, but then I realized that she was Jewish and she knew I was, too, and between us we could acknowledge there’s a lot of truth in that statement. For the Jews were the vanguard of a social movement that over the course of the 20th century transformed the American university system and the nature of the American elite.
