Middle-aged white man David Brooks loves to use his New York Times column to tell protesters how they’re doing something wrong. He did it with Occupy Wall Street. He did it with Colin Kaepernick. And the Women’s March is no different.
In his column Tuesday, Brooks writes that these various women’s marches “can never be an effective opposition to Donald Trump.” He dismisses the issues championed in the march—reproductive rights, equal pay, climate change—as “voting issues for many upper-middle-class voters in university towns and coastal cities.” Despite the fact that he refuses to even consider the role of women of color and issues of race and immigration in this succinct description, he still managed to claim that these weren’t important enough to march on. According to Brooks, they are all the wrong issues. As for his geography, referencing Niles, Michigan as a small town that barely heard of this march, Brooks might want to take a look at this map, courtesy of his own news organization. Hint: they weren’t all in big, coastal cities or college towns.
Brooks also argues that identity politics would not be effective–that the marches should’ve been more patriotic, to counter the strong nationalist rhetoric from the inauguration the day before. “Instead, the marches offered the pink hats, an anti-Trump movement built, oddly, around Planned Parenthood, and lots of signs with the word ‘pussy’ in them. The definition of America is up for grabs.” (Emphasis mine.)
Tasteful as ever.
To conclude his lecture, Brooks writes that though he “loathed” the inauguration, he recognized Trump’s message and lauded Trump’s “coherent vision” as a President who is “rallying a true and fervent love of our home.” On the other hand, the Women’s March didn’t meet the Brooks Patriotic Standard. Women, Brooks argues, need a mission “building a nation that balances the dynamism of capitalism with biblical morality.”
Of course, how could women forget. For Brooks, we are not nearly as patriotic or as moral as white men would have us.
Rosa is a senior editor at Bitch Magazine. She’s written for Washingtonian and Smithsonian magazine.
