There’s actually something entertaining and even, possibly, marginally useful in David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column. The column considers the gap between a relatively small, highly cohesive group of progressives
who went to the same colleges, live in the same neighborhoods and have trouble seeing beyond their subculture’s point of view
and the rest of the country. He proposes a “Rotten Tomatoes” index:
If you want a simple way to see the gap between this subculture and the rest of the country, look at Rotten Tomatoes. People who write critically about movies and shows often have different tastes than the audiences around them, especially when politics is involved.
“Hillbilly Elegy†was a movie in which the hero was widely known, in real life, to be a Republican. Audiences liked the movie fine. It has an 83 percent positive audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Culture writers frequently loathed it. It has a 25 percent positive critics’ score. That’s a 58-point gap.
Dave Chappelle recently released a comedy special that took comic potshots at almost everyone. Audiences adored it. It has a 96 percent positive audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (though admittedly it’s unclear how many of the raters actually watched it). A small group of people found it a moral atrocity and the current critic score is 44 percent positive. That’s a 52-point gap.
There are, of course, multiple ways of looking at that. One could be that the group he’s calling out are out of touch. Yet another way is to wonder whether Internet users are actually representative of the country. The other turns the first explanation around. Most of the people are out of touch with their true best interests and they need the leadership and guidance of that sometimes literally inbred group. That’s the “vanguardism” I have been writing about.
