The Rise of Antipolitics
But I think it’s much more than the messiness of politics, especially as exemplified by the current deadlock between the legislative and executive branches of our government, that gives rise to the desire for an outsider. Most Americans suspect that politics is corrupt. This is the legacy of Watergate, and that suspicion of political corruption fuels the desire for outsider candidates. What baffles me is that anyone could think that Donald Trump would be an antidote for political corruption.
.. Mr. Trump didn’t just, as Mr. Brooks puts it, walk onto the scene. Mr. Trump was triumphantly ushered in with kid gloves by the media establishment because its ratings skyrocketed when it reported about him.
.. David Brooks presents an allegory regarding what happens when good people say nothing. He was perhaps too young and idealistic to appreciate the nascent monster in the tactics laid out by the G.O.P. political strategist Lee Atwater, or the Machiavellian goals cloaked in Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America. But where was his voice when Sarah Palin was milking the very undercurrent of violence he now attributes to the Donald Trump campaign, or when the media fomented hatred across the airwaves until even our own members of Congress believed the misinformation (Joe Wilson’s shout of “you lie!” during Mr. Obama’s speech to Congress), or when the Senate G.O.P. leader vowed to put party ahead of country to make President Obama a “one-term” president?
Mr. Trump’s candidacy has been more than 30 years in the making,
.. Shortly before the fateful Kennedy-Nixon contest, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said that TV should help foster an alert and knowledgeable citizenry worthy of a modern republic. Alas, the opposite has transpired. We live in a world of sound bites, and we prefer quick fixes and four-word solutions proposed by telegenic candidates. The tragicomic irony: We are confronted with complex challenges, but the zeitgeist does not encourage candidates or voters to respond in kind.
.. As we see in debate after debate, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Mr. Trump’s main competitors, consider Mr. Trump a traitor because he asserts that he will play politics by engaging in compromises. So, Mr. Trump may be all the bad things that Mr. Brooks asserts he is, but he distinguishes himself from and riles the other contenders by his lack of purity and his willingness to play politics.