Theda Skocpol is smarter than you or me. Which puts her about 60 IQ points above David Brooks:

Although Brooks implies that the Republican Party is the true populist party these days, the party did not adopt the privatization proposal at the urging of voluntary, grass-roots membership associations or a broad-based social movement. Bush got the idea from right-wing think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. What's more, the privatization campaign has been fueled by big-money donors who favor unfettered markets and, in many cases, hope to profit from fees paid by the government to Wall Street for managing the new private accounts. Democrats should no doubt be touched that Brooks is so worried about the challenges our party faces in building broad coalitions and appealing to vast numbers of ordinary citizens -- in both red and blue states. But since 2000, when the need to hang together became starkly clear, Democrats, organized in all kinds of associations, have been trying hard to bridge the concerns of different social constituencies. Still, Democrats do need to take care lest single-issue causes appealing to the privileged take our focus away from broad appeals to average citizens, many of whom have not been to college.