Recommended: David Brooks columns

Two recent New York Times opinion columns by David Brooks seem worth recommending:

The Politics of Exhaustion: Voters pick whichever candidate exhausts them less  (Dec 12, 2019)

and

Impeach Trump and then Move On: Stop distracting from the core issue, elite negligence and national decline (Nov 6, 2019)


With reference to the first piece, his division of the power blocks driving politics these days, both here and in the UK, between the proleteriat and the precariat, is an interesting perspective. And his comment that both see the world in apocalyptic terms seems to me accurate.

With reference to the second piece, I think the nation, except for the activist fringe on both sides, is frankly bored with the whole impeachment thing. Democrats started talking about impeachment before Trump was even sworn in, so most of the nation sees it as nothing more than a Washington knife fight between politicians. Frankly, I think it was a tactically poor move for Democrats. The Trump campaign  has picked up $10 million dollars and 600,000 new small donors since the impeachment push started - all it is doing is energizing Trump's base. And polls show it isn't playing well in the key swing states that Democrats need to win to get the presidency.