David Brooks' Expedition To The Rest Of America Has Been Delayed Indefinitely

Remember about ten minutes ago when Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times suddenly noticed he was really terrible at his job and had fucked up very badly and didn't know a damn thing about what was going on in his own country?  And then promised his employers that he would immediately rectify this situation by boldly leaving the cozy bubble of the Acela corridor and boldly cross the dangerous demographic seas to Working Class Skull Island where he would boldly capture the Terrible Truth about the Real America and bring it back to New York in chains!

Boldly!

Yeah, it turns out that, for David Brooks of the New York Times, getting out to see the real America --

-- is apparently much more complicated than, say, using the NYT credit card to book a leg on an elite $120K globe-hopping vacation.

And besides, that hammock out in his own back yard hung between his favorite pop-sociology tropes is sooooo damn comfortable.

And so, today in "How to Fix Politics"...

In the middle of this depressing presidential campaign I sometimes wonder, How could we make our politics better?

Oh, I know!  I know!  Call on me!  Step one, burn what's left of the Party of Limbaugh to the ground and salt the Earth on which is stood.  Step two, sack every single fucking leach of a "pundit" who has ever made a living selling "Both Siderist" schlock to the American public.  Step three...

Drat.  Once again, Mr. Brooks is not going to call on me.  Out here.  In the cornfield.

Instead...

It’s possible to imagine an elite solution. The next president could get together with the leaders of both parties in Congress and say: “We’re going to change the way we do business in Washington. We’re going to deliberate and negotiate. We’ll disagree and wrangle, but we will not treat this as good-versus-evil blood sport.” That kind of leadership might trickle down.

But it’s increasingly clear that the roots of political dysfunction lie deep in society. If there’s truly going to be improvement, there has to be improvement in the social context politics is embedded in...

Yes, ever the careerist coward, Mr. Brooks has once again steered another column as far away from the dangerous shoals of honest political analysis as possible by once again opting to blame the brokenness of our politics on Very Big Sociological Trends For Which Everyone Is Equally At Fault...

...instead of the actual, calculated decisions taken by actual people and institution with identifiable names and histories which turned the GOP from the Party of Eisenhower into the Party of Limbaugh.

In fact, Republicans are not to blame for anything in particular at all.

Instead, we begin in the dim and noble Past when everything was Better...

...

In healthy societies, people live their lives within a galaxy of warm places. They are members of a family, neighborhood, school, civic organization, hobby group, company, faith, regional culture, nation, continent and world. Each layer of life is nestled in the others to form a varied but coherent whole.

But starting just after World War II, America’s community/membership mind-set gave way to an individualistic/autonomy mind-set. The idea was that individuals should be liberated to live as they chose, so long as they didn’t interfere with the rights of others...

...and end up -- through no fault of anyone -- in our parlous Present where -- surprise! -- somehow Both Sides have become equally tribal and terrible!

With middle-ring memberships deteriorating, Americans have become worse at public deliberation. People find it easier to ignore inconvenient viewpoints and facts. Partisanship becomes a preconscious lens through which people see the world...

We’re good at bonding with people like ourselves but worse at bridging with people unlike ourselves. (Have you noticed that most people who call themselves “connectors” are actually excluders because they create groups restricted to people with similar status levels?)

With fewer sources of ethnic and local identity, people ask politics to fill the void. Being a Democrat or a Republican becomes their ethnicity. People put politics at the center of their psychological, emotional and even spiritual life.

This is asking too much of politics. Once politics becomes your ethnic and moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor...

I could point out for the 1,000th time in excruciating detail how consistently and transparently dishonest Mr. Brooks is.

Or I could just point to the fact that the Big Both Siderist Lie which Mr, Brooks will simply NOT let go of has become so ridiculously indefensible that even some of his most stalwart Beltway co-enablers can't keep up the fraud any longer (from Salon):

They’re radicals, pure and simple: The GOP has finally destroyed the political press’ most destructive narrative

For years, we've been told both sides are to blame for government dysfunction. Not anymore, not after this primary

...for some of us, it didn’t take Donald Trump’s careening campaign to confirm the destructive state of the GOP. But if it’s the Trump circus that finally opens some pundits’ eyes, so be it.

Recently, Dan Balz, the senior political writer for the Washington Post, seemed to do just that while surveying the unfolding GOP wreckage as the party splinters over Trump’s rise. Balz specifically noted that four years ago political scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein examined the breakdown in American politics and zeroed in their blame squarely on Republicans.

“They were ahead of others in describing the underlying causes of polarization as asymmetrical, with the Republican Party — in particular its most hard-line faction — as deserving of far more of the blame for the breakdown in governing,” Balz acknowledged.

“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional,” Mann and Ornstein wrote in The Washington Post in 2012. “In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”

But I will do neither.

Because I actually live out here, across the dangerous demographic seas, on Working Class Skull Island.  A place which David Brooks has no intention of ever visiting, inhabited by a people to whom David Brooks has no intention of ever listening.