The Broken Pundit

So David Brooks wrote another column today.

Oh boy.

Turns out, even though Mr. Brooks once again doesn’t bother himself with the fussy business of substantiating his thesis beyond vague pop-cult generalizations and grand and utterly unsupported assertions, he's nonetheless pretty damned sure that;

1. Society is Broken. And,

2. The Left and the Right are somehow, mysteriously both equally to blame for society’s brokenness.

Shocking, no?

For our part, we on the Left apparently fucked the country all up crazy/bad by (among other things) staging “a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores.”

Which is certainly an odd way of talking about demanding that the Former Confederate States of American stop butchering their black citizens for trying to vote.

Although admittedly that certainly was “a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores.”

Or maybe Mr. Brooks is referring to the Left forcing the federal government to stop sending kids off to be slaughtered in a stupid, illegal war? (It is my understanding that many of the people involved in that effort were indeed very unmannered.)

Or does he think it was the crafty Liberal plot to create a minimum wage that destroyed America?

Of course, demanding that a criminal presidency be brought to book for its crimes was also a dangerously non-traditional thing to do.

As was fighting for the rights of women to own property instead of being used as property.

Or was it all those worker safety rules that ruined the Land of the Free?

Child labor laws?

Giving poor people lawyers when the slumlord decides to throw them into the street?

Was it the smoking

of the reefer?

Was it all that damned patchouli?

Clearly I am not smart enough to know which of the many, many ways in which the Left has changed society is the exact one Mr. Brooks imagines is Liberal Hammer that somehow perfectly paired with a Conservative Anvil to destroy the United States.

Together.

Mutually.

And with Equal Liability For All.

So how about I just reprint the late Steve Gilliard’s famous laundry-list of Horrible Liberal Sins and you smart people can suss out for yourselves which one(s) Mr. Brooks is most likely referring to as the co-terminator of the Home of the Brave?

I'm a fighting liberal

You know, I've studied history, I've read about America and you know something, if it weren't for liberals, we'd be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren't fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.

What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn't given us anything we didn't have and it wants to take away our freedoms.

The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man's path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?

Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. "Globalism" which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed, the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.

For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn't. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn't enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.

Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.

Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.

It's time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.

It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.

Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi satellite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America's defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.

It is time to stop looking for an accommodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?

Of course, if Mr. Brooks wants to find some actual villains who actually smashed America-- real, live monsters enough to populate a 1,000 columns -- let him go read Barbara Ehrenreich or Richard Sennett on the subject of the relentless, shattering pressure that his beloved unfettered Capitalism’s remorseless race to the bottom has brought to bear on the American Middle Class.

Let him them leaf through David Brock and Frank Schaeffer to find a whole menagerie of his fellow Movement Conservative travelers who have risen to prosperity and power by pissing on the rubble of the American Dream left in the wake of Capitalism’s economic bulldozers. All while daring to call their treachery and fear-mongering Godly and Patriotic.

Of course, Bobo fucking well knows the truth; he just cant bear the way he looks when it stares back out at him from the mirror in all its wretched, horrifying glory.

So instead -- week after week, year after year -- David Fucking Brooks spends his tenure at one of the most powerful positions in American journalism making little Centrist finger paintings of imaginary hippies which somehow always end up miraculously absolving people like David Fucking Brooks.

Also, for some reason, Tories are involved.

UPDATE: Welcome Vanity Fair guests and thank you Mr. Wolcott.

More of that same genre here.