A few big wrongs in the column:
Brooks [Email him] tells us that "these white identitarians have taken the multicultural worldview... and, rightly or wrongly, applied it to themselves."
The problem here is that the "multicultural worldview" takes no account of whites whatsoever, except to brand them incurably evil oppressors throughout all space and time. It's every other group that's holy and pure.
Alt-rightism, white advocacy, identitarianism—they don't flow from multiculturalism, they're a reaction to it.
But to the extent there's a version of multiculturalism that includes whites, it would make sense. That version's been called universal nationalism—the recognition that every racial and ethnic group has a right of self-determination, including a contiguous territory.
Brooks might recognize one of those groups: Jews in Israel.
Another wrong: "racism is about feeling others are inferior," Brooks tells us. Assuming Brooks is attaching negative connotation to "racism"—a safe bet—it's not "racist" to believe, as research and observation overwhelmingly demonstrate, that races do differ in terms of intelligence and behavior.
And this isn't "felt"—it's real. A genuine, objective reality.
Does David Brooks believe blacks have the same level of intelligence as Asians? I'd like to hear him hold forth on that.
Brooks tells us that we "do violence" by reducing "the complex array of identities that make up a human being into one crude ethno-political category..."
Wrong again. Because every true nation is "crude" by that standard—the "arbitrary" boundaries on the map, the "accident" of birth there, the simplicity of the genetic similarities. Societies are all "crude" in the sense of oil bubbling up from the ground: the stuff all runs together, and out of the same spots.
Duh. That's how it works.
Another wrong: Brooks calls a Muslim ban, Mexican wall and Joe Arpaio's pardon "this garbage" arising from "white resentment." Since when are legitimate policy concerns bearing directly on white safety and security "garbage"?
But the biggest wrong is that Brooks completely misidentifies who's killing what.
It's not Trump killing the Republican party.
It's decades of immigration policy and anti-white politics killing America.
I agree with Brooks that things may well get uglier.
We could have avoided it, but people like Brooks were telling us decades ago how ugly we were not to go in a new direction.
