WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — David Brooks thought he nailed it earlier this month when he made fun of Bernie Sanders’s “democratic socialism” by mocking the Nordic social welfare societies in a column headlined “Livin’ the Danish Dream.”

But the New York Times columnist’s pastiche of bias and misinformation only served to show the yawning gap between a generation that grew up when the American dream was still a reality for many and young people who now find it illusory or unattainable.

In a nutshell, Brooks, at 54 a late boomer, argued that inequality in the U.S. is simply the consequence of a vibrant society that nurtures “disruptive dynamos” like Bell Labs, Walmart, Whole Foods, Google and Apple .

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He contrasted that with the putative “dirigisme” — government-directed investment — in Europe, apparently lumping Denmark and the other Nordic countries together with the continent as a whole and ignoring the vibrant free-market capitalism that marks northern Europe.

Brooks bewails what he perceives as Sanders’s plans for centralizing more power in Washington and depriving “successful people” of their incentives by raising taxes to a horrifying 52%, warning us that entrepreneurs like Tesla’s Elon Musk (who gladly lives in the high-tax state of California) might build their companies elsewhere.

Northern Europe, Brooks concludes, might be a nice place to live, but it’s “not the homeland we’ve always known” — so different from the America of Alexander Hamilton (when only white male property owners were entitled to vote) and Alexis de Tocqueville (the French aristocrat who was fascinated by America’s paradoxes when he visited the country for nine months in 1831).

Livin’ inside his Beltway bubble, Brooks probably doesn’t realize that a younger generation has never been to the homeland he’s always known.

They derive little benefit from disruptive companies that now source most of their production abroad and deliver their profits to the 1%.

Millennials and other readers were quick to register their dissent with Brooks’s broadside against Denmark and its model of social welfare.

New York University law student Daniel Treiman said Brooks fails to acknowledge why many Americans have soured on our economic order.

“Too many American cities — indeed whole regions — have been devastated by mass job losses,” Treiman wrote in a letter to the editor. “More thriving metropolitan areas are increasingly unaffordable places to live. Real suffering accompanies our galloping inequality: Note the shocking uptick in drug- and despair-induced mortality among middle-age white Americans.”

Alan Kraus defended millennials’ desire to mimic a “sluggish” continent.

“Perhaps they know that Denmark has consistently been among the countries with the highest scores on national happiness,” Kraus wrote. “It has the lowest corruption grade in the world, free vocational and university education, low unemployment and universal health care. Its companies actually pay taxes, and young people have no educational debt and find employment after school.”

This reader found it “amazing” that Brooks thinks the U.S. is “a vibrant, future-looking country” when it cannot solve even the most basic problems.

And Lisa Calef wrote: “David Brooks should climb out of the bubble. Most young people I know are hindered from enjoying American vibrancy because they’re a bit busy with their $9-an-hour jobs, trying to pay off their $50,000 student loan debt while hoping that they don’t get sick or injured because they have no health insurance.”

A contributor to the Policy Shop blog of the left-leaning Demos think tank, Matt Bruenig, another millennial, shredded Brooks’s sweeping assertions about Nordic economies as inaccurate.

Brooks touted greater U.S. “entrepreneurial creativity” — alas, at the expense of security — but Bruenig noted that measured by the birth rate of employer enterprises, the Nordics are well ahead of the U.S., with Denmark leading the pack.

Nordic countries are correspondingly innovative, Bruenig said, and have given birth in recent years to Spotify, Skype, Mojang (maker of Minecraft), Rovio (maker of Angry Birds), Supercell (maker of Clash of Clans), and Klarna (cutting-edge fintech firm). (Note to Brooks: That disruptive dynamo Bell Labs now belongs to the Finnish telecoms company Nokia NOK, -1.20% . )

While Brooks argued that America prizes individualism more than Europeans, Bruenig counters that “their welfare systems are aimed at securing the individual well-being of every member of society.”

Health care for every individual, education for every individual, child care for every individual are all aimed precisely at allowing every individual, not just a privileged elite, to attain success and prosperity.

Bruenig went on to demonstrate that redistribution in these social democratic countries gives lower income workers more disposable income, and that far from being sluggish, the Nordic countries have registered much stronger growth in gross domestic product per hour worked than the U.S.

When Sanders launched his campaign last May, ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos warned him Republicans would attack him for wanting America to look more like Scandinavia.

“And what’s wrong with that?” the Vermont senator fired back, well before his message caught fire at massive rallies around the country. “What’s wrong when you have more income and wealth equality? What’s wrong when they have a stronger middle class in many ways than we do, a higher minimum wage than we do, and they’re stronger on the environment?”

Brooks and other conservatives are going to have find stronger arguments than their tired clichés to refute that appeal.