Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has spent literally his entire career as a professional establishmentarian testicle-cozy. Mocking the very idea of protest. Shamelessly catering to the whims of the powerful. Blaming Woodstock and the 1960s for everything from the Penn State rape scandal to the collapse of his marriage.
Now he has a whole column on the proper way to "resist".
How Should One Resist the Trump Administration?
Wow.
According to Mr. Both Sides Do It, the entire "baby boom establishment" is somehow equally responsible for Trump:
The baby boomer establishment polarized politics, lost touch with the voters and paved the way for Trump.
And according to Mr. Pathologically Centrist. there are exactly three ways to "resist". The extreme one way. The extreme the other way. And the middle way, which is the right way. The David Brooks way.
And it doesn't involve actually "resisting" anything, but instead relies on the entire Republican Party wandering off and getting lost in the woods so that the apparatus of government can be magically taken over and repaired by a generation of Gerald Fords who will suddenly appear and spring into action and fix everything.
Double wow.
For your enjoyment, here it is in video form:
5 comments:
Best. Headline. Ever.
And I haven't even read the post yet.
A generation of Gerald Fords? Cue Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi and a picture of President Obama windsurfing.
The David Brooks plan to save the Republic is pretty much as follows:
1.) Sit quietly and wait until the Trump Administration destroys itself in an astonishing blaze of incompetence that also takes out a large portion of the United States (hopefully just figuratively).
2.) Find a Great Man. Pretty much de rigueur for Brooks, although Gerald Ford is not the one I would have picked.
3.) Get the Youngs to spend the next twenty years painstakingly reassembling all the things that Brooks' buddies broke. Yes, I know that not two years ago he wrote a whole book arguing that everyone under 30 is a borderline sociopath with no pleasure except to slit his friend's throat to claim his position. Iron Rule and all that; besides, it's not like Brooks is gonna fix any of this shit.
4.) Having repaired the damage from their elder's attempts to destroy the world, all the Youngs and Youngers all read Burke, decide that institutional rule based on tradition is the only way to live and the glorious Empire of Paleoconservatism begins its thousand year reign. Yes, I know that Brooks was previously predicting that some nebulous "anti-establishment sentiment" was going to turn all the Youngs into Burke-reading paleocons and now they're supposed to be the ones to rebuild those establishments they supposedly hate so much and IRON RULE DAMMIT.
Aside from this, Brooks briefly considers the possibility of trying to start the Administration from destroying the country, but that just seems like so much work, plus it would mean staking out actual positions and the high is never as high as the low is low and all that shit. Or you could go live in Rod Dreher's hermitage with wine and cheese parties, which sounds an awful lot like Brooks' "Do nothing" strategy but it's totally different because...I don't know, it doesn't entail moving enough moral furniture around your moral ecology.
Are we sure we are looking at DFB through the corrective (right) lens?
Like Colbert portrayed a conservative.
Here it out. Think it over.
Perhaps DFB is portraying Charles Krauthammer?
A pretend opinion writer portraying a pretend FOX anchor/ analyst.
If not, What in the hell is it?
Brooks is looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The problem is that Boomers actually bought the conservative BS and elected Saint Ronnie. It has been downhill ever since.
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