Image by ALEXANDRE DINAUT.

You know something is up when the longtime deeply conservative establishment pundit David “Aw Shucks” Brooks calls for a “a comprehensive national civic uprising” against Trumpism, as he did one week ago.

“It’s time,” Brooks wrote, “for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.”

Brooks described “Trumpism” as “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men,… driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.”

“Trumpism,” Brooks writes, “is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake.”

Trump’s assault on America’s institutions is “not normal,” Brooks says, arguing that the movement to stop Trumpism must also be “not normal.”

Brooks criticizes the early Trump47 resistance for letting itself be divided and thereby potentially conquered because it has failed to properly to understand that the various different Trump attacks are all part of the same Trumpist offensive:

“So far, we have treated the various assaults of President Trump and the acolytes in his administration as a series of different attacks. In one lane they are going after law firms. In another they savaged U.S.A.I.D. In another they’re attacking our universities. On yet another front they’re undermining NATO and on another they’re upending global trade. But that’s the wrong way to think about it. These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back….Slowly, many of us are realizing that........

© CounterPunch