In a surprising article, David Brooks jumps on the uprising bandwagon even if he does not fully understand that Trumpism goes beyond Reagan.
David Brooks finally gets it!
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Summary
The video chronicles host Egberto Willies’s reaction to David Brooks’s startling New York Times column, “What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising.” Willies applauds the conservative writer’s call for a nationwide, non‑violent rebellion against Trumpism but faults Brooks for ignoring the deeper roots of the crisis in decades of Reagan‑era neoliberalism. He urges listeners to expand the fight beyond polite protests, unite ordinary people across ideological lines, and strike at the economic power structures that birthed authoritarian politics.
- Brooks’s alarm: A self‑styled moderate conservative concedes that Trumpism is a “multifront assault” on every institution that tempers raw power and calls for a coordinated civic uprising.
- Historical context missing: Willies argues Brooks overlooks how Reaganomics, deregulation, and rising inequality sowed the ground for Trump’s brand of authoritarian politics.
- A broad coalition is needed: The host insists that success hinges on solidarity between MAGA-leaning workers, disaffected progressives, and centrists, all of whom suffer under oligarchic rule.
- Beyond rallies: Drawing on Erica Chenoweth’s research, he highlights boycotts, strikes, lawsuits, and civil disobedience as essential tactics to disrupt authoritarian momentum.
- “Chains of the mind”: True liberation, Willies contends, requires breaking psychological acceptance of neoliberal capitalism and replacing it with an economy rooted in justice and shared prosperity.
Progressively speaking, the conversation highlights a historic opening: when even establishment conservatives acknowledge that the system is broken, the left must provide the structural analysis and bold agenda that Brooks omits. By linking nonviolent resistance to a vision of economic democracy—living wages, universal healthcare, and climate justice—organizers can transform defensive mobilization into a forward-looking movement that dismantles oligarchy and rebuilds multiracial, pluralistic self-government.
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David Brooks has spent three decades polishing the conservative establishment’s aura of calm inevitability. His columns have typically counseled incrementalism, scolded radicalism, and reassured polite society that the American project will navigate its way through. That is why his April 18 New York Times essay, “What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal,” lands like a thunderclap. Brooks now concedes that Donald Trump’s movement poses a threat to the entire latticework of democratic institutions, and that only a broad, coordinated civic revolt can halt its advance. In a single column, he discards the right’s favorite euphemisms—“populism,” “polarization,” “culture war”—and names the moment for what it is: a naked power grab that will trample any guardrail that stands between a demagogue and unchecked authority.
Brooks deserves credit for calling Americans to virtual arms when many elite commentators still normalize the abnormal. Yet his analysis stops at the water’s edge of causation. He indicts “Trumpism” but skirts the long neoliberal march that paved the way for it. Reagan’s union‑busting, Clinton’s financial deregulation, and Bush’s permanent‑war footing hollowed out communities, concentrated wealth, and convinced millions that the governing class could not—or would not—protect them. Trump merely weaponized that disillusionment and draped it in performative cruelty. If one reads Brooks in isolation, the uprising appears as a sudden necessity triggered by a single man, rather than the predictable backlash to a forty‑year policy regime that entrenched plutocracy while selling false hope to the working class. Robert Reich’s analysis of America’s structural inequality, for instance, locates the crisis not in cultural grievance but in the obscene funneling of corporate profits upward—a trend exacerbated by both parties’ fixation on market absolutism.
A progressive reading broadens the lens and insists that any effective uprising must strike at the root of neoliberalism, not merely prune its latest poisonous bloom. That means coupling resistance to Trump’s authoritarian impulses with a positive program: living wages, universal health care, labor law reform, climate action financed by taxing wealth, and a recommitment to multiracial democracy. Movements that marry defensive urgency to affirmative vision historically win more allies than those that only cry “stop.” Erica Chenoweth’s exhaustive dataset of global campaigns from 1900 to 2019 shows that nonviolent movements triumph roughly twice as often as violent ones, and their victories endure because they recruit the broad middle rather than terrorizing it. Brooks cites Chenoweth and Maria Stephan to argue in favor of strikes, boycotts, and mass refusal. Progressives should seize that opening to popularize tactics, such as debt strikes against predatory lenders, solidarity walkouts to defend immigrant neighbors, and shareholder revolts inside fossil-fuel firms, that hit authoritarian financiers in the pocketbook while modeling the cooperative economy the left seeks to build.
Brooks’s plea also signals an ideological crack within the conservative intelligentsia. A writer who once dismissed Occupy Wall Street now echoes its language of “multifront assault” and “acquisition of power for its own sake.” That rhetorical migration matters. Successful uprisings often depend on defections from ruling coalitions that deprive would‑be despots of elite cover. Political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft refers to this as an “asymmetric erosion” of regime support. The fact that a New York Times conservative feels compelled to tell readers the republic is in mortal danger suggests that Trump’s coalition is more brittle than it appears. Activists should exploit that brittleness by amplifying conservative voices who reject strong‑man rule, even while challenging them to grapple with the policies that fertilized authoritarianism in the first place.
The timing is propitious. Contrary to pundit claims that “the resistance” has fizzled, field counts show more than 2,000 public protests in February 2025 alone—double the number in the first month of Trump’s original term. Organizers increasingly pair street demonstrations with economic non‑cooperation: Tesla boycotts to chasten Elon Musk’s political meddling, student‑led fossil‑divestment campaigns pressuring university endowments, and credit‑union drives that pull deposits from the Wall Street banks underwriting anti‑voter laws. Such tactics translate moral outrage into material leverage, forcing corporations and state officials to pick sides.
Still, scale remains the movement’s Achilles’ heel. Brooks tallies 18 universities defending academic freedom, then notes America hosts roughly 4,000 colleges; the proportional gap is similar across labor, faith, and civic sectors. Progressive strategists must therefore concentrate on mass replication mechanisms—open-source organizing toolkits, decentralized digital hubs, and networked leadership models—that enable ordinary people to launch semi-autonomous actions without waiting for national organizations to intervene. Black Lives Matter’s 2020 blueprint and the Sunrise Movement’s “Hubs” offer templates: they train local volunteers, provide branding and tech infrastructure, and trust frontline communities to adapt tactics to local terrain.
Equally essential is narrative coherence. Brooks calls for a short‑term plan to “stop Trump” and a long‑term plan for a fairer society. Framing research confirms that people mobilize when they can envision a tangible alternative, not simply calamity avoided. Progressives should articulate how democracy’s renewal can improve daily life: decarbonized jobs that pay prevailing union wages, public broadband that ends digital redlining, and child‑care subsidies funded by closing the carried‑interest loophole. By linking systemic critique to pocketbook deliverables, the uprising can attract persuadable voters still wavering between economic self-interest and reactionary identity politics.
Brooks’s conversion does not absolve him from the establishment he long served of complicity. But it does hand the left an unexpected megaphone. A conservative columnist’s alarm can reach readers who tune out progressive media as ideological noise. Movements win by accumulating every scrap of legitimacy they can find. They must welcome Brooks’s warning while supplying the structural analysis he omits. The uprising America needs is not a defensive tantrum but a multiracial, multigenerational reconstruction project that finally ends the power-worshipping neoliberal consensus Brooks once championed. Only then can the nation turn its belated insight into lasting liberation.
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