To the Editor:
Re “The Anti-Party Men,” by David Brooks (column, Sept. 8):
Bernie Sanders is surging on the left because he authentically speaks to the economic concerns of ordinary Americans—unlike candidates who take their orders from elites while they simultaneously fatten their own wallets. Donald Trump is surging on the right for a more or less similar reason—even if his proposed solutions are wildly superficial, likely draconian and largely unrealistic (given how a majority of the country has no stomach for deporting 11 million people).
Americans are hungry for an authentic populist movement—a movement that would place the real-world concerns of ordinary Americans front and center and the obsessions of America’s wealthy, warmongering elites on the back burner. If seeking a decent life makes one an “expressive individualist,” then rational human beings should all be one. Americans on both the right and left increasingly resent being treated as mere serfs and cannon fodder in our elite’s great globalist games.
MATTHEW CARNICELLI
Brooklyn
