Rippers and Weavers

Six weeks into the Covid pandemic, New York Times columnist David Brooks, a who’s had a stellar career in journalism and book publishing, sat down to write a column. Brooks sees America’s public sphere as a place inhabited by “rippers” and “weavers”. Under the headline “How the Trump Ploy Stopped working,” Brooks said Donald Trump and his ilk are rippers. They see everything through the prism of politics. Rippers, whether on the left or right, see politics as a war that gives their lives meaning. Weavers try to fix things and bring society together in times of crisis.

Now, at the end of April, 2020, as people hunkered in their homes, trying to teach their own children and, if lucky enough to still have a job, put in a full day’s work, the weavers were winning. Trump was still president but the great majority of Americans supported lockdowns. A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll had found 90 per cent of Americans thought a second wave of Covid was likely if the lockdowns ended,” Brooks wrote.

He went on: “According to a USA Today/Ipsos poll, most of the policies on offer enjoyed tremendous bipartisan support: increasing testing (nearly 90 percent), temporarily halting immigration (79 percent) and continuing the lockdown until the end of April (69 percent). A KFF poll shows that people who have lost their jobs are just as supportive of the lockdowns as people who haven’t.”

America’s polarization industry – the partisans of Fox News and MSNBC, the MAGA crowd, and the rest – was on the ropes. The country was, Brooks said, more united than it had been since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Decades of polarization had made Americans hate each other. The rippers dehumanized their opponents, and many people had bought into that.

Now things had changed. “The pandemic has been a massive humanizing force — allowing us to see each other on a level much deeper than politics — see the fragility, the fear and the courage.” He told people to tune into shows on PBS and Unite.us that showed people all over the world supporting each other by using the fantastic power of the Internet. Unite.us was about to run a 24-hour global “streamathon” with “appearances by world leaders, musicians, religious leaders, actors and philosophers — everybody from Oprah and George W. Bush to Yo-Yo Ma and the emotion scholar Marc Brackett.”

“Politics had changed. “In normal times, the rippers hog the media spotlight. But now you see regular Americans, hurt in their deepest places and being their best selves.

“Everywhere I hear the same refrain: We’re standing at a portal to the future; we’re not going back to how it used to be.”

Reading Brooks’ column now, it’s easy to believe your cat is smarter than a New York Times columnist. That’s because we’ve edited our memories of the early days of the pandemic. Don’t roll your eyes at Brooks if you hoarded toilet paper and yeast and elbow-bumped your work colleagues. We all watched the bodies coming off the cruise ship at Yokohama and the big machines spraying some kind of chemical fog through downtown Wuhan. I believed I would die of Covid if I caught it, and I was likely right. I’m an old, fat man with asthma. When Brooks wrote this piece, he seemed right: Trump tried to look like a weaver, though the mask slipped a few times. Justin Trudeau, holed up in a house on the grounds of Rideau Hall with a wife who’d caught Covid on a trip to London to talk at a WE Day, offered encouragement every day while public servants, working from home offices and kitchens, put together Covid relief programs for people who’s lost their jobs and business owners who couldn’t open their shops. For a while, the rippers were quiet.

Brooks’ column is an artifact, a still photo from a time when people were more afraid than tired. He was right, that day. More important, he had identified the two forces in Western politics, the rippers and weavers. Pierre Poilievre is a ripper. Donald Trump, who, like some form of herpes, kept coming back after he lost the 2020 election, will keep ripping until he dies. Another ripper will replace him. The MAGA movement is too big to be left on the scrap heap of history.

Ripping makes exciting TV. It powers social media, especially X, or Twitter, a malignant thing run by a man who acts like a villain from a James Bond movie. And not from one of the good films. He’s something out of one of the Roger Moore pictures from the early 1980s whose name and plot you can’t remember, except that there was a big guy with metal teeth. We didn’t used to be a society run by rippers. No one could make billions of dollars from the dopamine rush that people get by watching them or reading their pithy little quotes. Voters and members of the political class required a certain amount of intellectual depth and civility. Not much, maybe: America barfed up hairballs like Spiro Agnew, Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. Canada’s rippers tended to be stuck in municipal politics and student councils. Few made it to the big leagues and those who did – almost always at the provincial level – didn’t last long.

But now that’s changed. We have a Tory front bench full of rippers, led by Pierre Poilievre. Charlie Angus was a ripper, but his party wouldn’t pick him to be its leader son, after doing as much damage as he could, he quit politics. Both men tried to destroy Marc and Craig Kielburger, two of the country’s greatest weavers. I get queasy every time I think of that.

Are rippers the cure for our national ills? Or are they just another way of making us all feel miserable? I figure it’s the latter but, frankly, I have no idea how to save our weavers.

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