The David Brooks Touching Indians Tour Has Been Suspended Indefinitely

You might remember that exactly one hundred years ago 

fifty years ago 

ten years ago  

five years ago

about a year ago, after the Savior of the Republican Party --

DAVID BROOKS: It's going to be Rubio. I'm telling you, it's going to be Rubio. Right now, you have the conflict between the conservative, the philosophical conservative wing, which is the National Review crowd, and the rogue wing, which is talk radio and Trump. And so it's interesting to see how that breaks down.

Right now, Trump has the advantage in that, because the conservative movement is less conservative than it was ten years ago. The financial crisis has hit people hard, and they want a government that's on the side of the little guys, as long as it's not filled with liberal values. So Trump, in the short term, but we're prepping the establishment. Do not panic. There are going to be months of this. Wait for Rubio.

-- was effortlessly dispatched by a DayGlo racist pussy-grabbing con man...

...Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times was forced to face a terrifying truth.  A truth which Mr. David Brooks had spent his entire professional life denying.

It turns out that his Republican Party was, in fact, full of Republicans!

Shocking I know.

So after shacking up with a bottle of tequila the size of the Stanley Cup for a few days, Mr. David Brooks knew what he had to do to save his job.

First he needed to abjectly apologize to the only audience that really matters to him -- his plutocrat sponsors to whom he had spent his entire career selling piles of Whig Fan Fiction as serious reportage on the state of the nation:

And now, that Trump has done all the things David Brooks swore he could never do at the head of an army of fire-eyed Republican meatheads that David Brooks swore could not exist,  Mr. Brooks has written a column so redolent with the stink of begging and fear and schadenfreude that it almost defies analysis.  Suffice it to say, Mr. Brooks really, really, really wants someone to come along and save him from the beast he has been feeding for 20 years.

And, second, to swear that that he was gonna by God get the fuck out of the Acela Corridor Quiet Car and go forth into the wilds of the America heartland, to lend an ear to the sad stories of Real American's (from the NYT, March, 2016):

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

He even went across the street to rend his garments on The Charlie Rose Show:

Brooks:  I messed up big time in not knowing Trump was coming.  And so when something like that happens  you take a look at yourself and you think "What did I miss about America?"  And...I'm...too much in the Acela corridor.  I've gotta get out.  That's one thing.  

Brooks:  Believe me, I travel every week, but I'm at a college here...so I'm always within the bubble.  And so I've gotta get out.  But then the other thing is, like, I've achieved way more career success than I ever thought I would, so it's time to take some chances on the spiritual realm, on the personal -- the emotional realm, and I've...got nothing to lose...

Gonna get out of that damn bubble, you betcha!  Especially colleges! They're the worst!

Gonna get out of that damn bubble and touch Indians!  See the mountains and the prairies and the whole rest of that song!

But it turns out that actual Republicans --

-- we here in the actual heartland interact with every single fucking day --

-- are wildly different from the Screensaver Republicans which Mr. David Brooks was clearly hoping to find:

And so, since Mr. David Brooks is in fact made entirely of Conservative shape-memory polymer from 1988, no matter how much stress and ideological deformation he is temporarily subjected to, as you humble scrivener has pointed out many times. he will always, always, always find a way back to regurgitating one of his two basic columns:

1. The personal and triumphal when he finds occasion to flaunt his ridiculous, bankrupt ideology. 


2. The moon-faced alien anthropologist, orbiting the Earth and noting the fall of American civilization from the safe distance of wealth and privilege that this relentlessly mediocre man has somehow been afforded when confronted with the cratered wasteland he and his beliefs have created.

Thus it will come as no surprise to anyone that Mr. Brooks returns fully to form today by blaming the rise of Trump on the rudeness of college students who rudely shout things at Mr. Brooks' friends:

Finally, there has been the collapse of liberal values at home. On American campuses, fragile thugs who call themselves students shout down and abuse speakers on a weekly basis. To read Heather MacDonald’s account of being pilloried at Claremont McKenna College is to enter a world of chilling intolerance.

And of course, the Extremes on Both Sides:

Then there has been the collapse of the center. For decades, center-left and center-right parties clustered around similar versions of democratic capitalism that Western civilization seemed to point to. But many of those centrist parties, like the British and Dutch Labour Parties, are in near collapse. Fringe parties rise.

And that our nation's college curricula now often includes all of Western Civilization history, and not just the Tighty Whitey parts that make myopic bubble-dwelling Straussians like Mr. David Brooks feel snuggly all over:

This Western civ narrative came with certain values — about the importance of reasoned discourse, the importance of property rights, the need for a public square that was religiously informed but not theocratically dominated. It set a standard for what great statesmanship looked like. It gave diverse people a sense of shared mission and a common vocabulary, set a framework within which political argument could happen and most important provided a set of common goals.

Starting decades ago, many people, especially in the universities, lost faith in the Western civilization narrative. They stopped teaching it, and the great cultural transmission belt broke. Now many students, if they encounter it, are taught that Western civilization is a history of oppression.

But of all the turds Mr. Brooks tries to polish up and pass of as Received Conservative Wisdom to his audience of privileged intellectual shut-ins, the biggest one is this:

While running for office, Donald Trump violated every norm of statesmanship built up over these many centuries, and it turned out many people didn’t notice or didn’t care.

The faith in the West collapsed from within. It’s amazing how slow people have been to rise to defend it.

"Many people"?  Really?  Are you fucking kidding me?

What Mr. Brooks is frantically trying to avoid saying is that the "many people" who didn't notice or care that Trump was obviously a lying racist lunatic were the rank-and-file members of Mr. Brooks' Republican party.  And it's not that they simply "didn’t notice or didn’t care" about the myriad, horrifying, suppurating character flaws of President Stupid.  No, Mr. Brooks, they fucking reveled in it.

And who has been fighting a long and lonely war against this rising tide of bigoted yahooism and for the values of reason, diversity, justice, religious pluralism and tolerance that Mr. Brooks' claims to esteem?

Liberals.

You know, the same people who have been standing athwart Mr. Brooks' Conservative movement and Republican party for the last 25 years shouting "Stop!" as clowns like Mr. Brooks pandered to the worst, most atavistic impulses of the Right in order to win elections.  The same people who shouted "Stop!" as clowns like Mr. Brooks looked the other way when trolls and hobgoblins like Gingrich and Limbaugh took over the Party of Lincoln.  The same people who shouted "Stop!" as clowns like Mr. Brooks aggressively deflected blame away from those trolls and hobgoblins by loudly blamed Both Sides for every Republican atrocity.

And now, here we are, nearly 100 days into a nightmare which Mr. Brooks helped midwife into existence as you and I an millions of others were shouting "Stop!"...

...and we find Mr. Brooks giving up entirely on even pretending that he gives a shit the Real America anymore, crawling right back into his brand-new, gated retreat deep inside the bubble and going right back to blaming the Rise of Trump on the dirty hippies who don't know how to behave around their better on America's college campuses.  Which sure sounds awfully familiar...

And the biggest joke of all?

Spoiler Alert! The single clearest predictor of who would stand on the side of Trump and who would stand against him was education.

From FiveThirtyEight:

Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump

Sometimes statistical analysis is tricky, and sometimes a finding just jumps off the page. Here’s one example of the latter.

I took a list of all 981 U.S. counties with 50,000 or more people and sorted it by the share of the population that had completed at least a four-year college degree. Hillary Clinton improved on President Obama’s 2012 performance in 48 of the country’s 50 most-well-educated counties. And on average, she improved on Obama’s margin of victory in these countries by almost 9 percentage points, even though Obama had done pretty well in them to begin with.
...

 If a county had high education levels, Clinton was almost certain to improve there regardless of the area’s other characteristics.

Now here’s the opposite list: The 50 counties (minimum population of 50,000) where the smallest share of the population has bachelor’s degrees...

These results are every bit as striking...

Apparently the more a person has been subject to the horrors of American higher education, the more likely they are to stand up for Truth, Justice and The American Way.

And you'll never guess what the other big driver among the ecstatic supporters of President Stupid!

Racial resentment. Surprise!

From the Washington Post, June, 2016:

More recent data is bringing the drivers of Trumpism into sharper focus, and what we're seeing is striking: Racial attitudes may play a larger role in opinions toward Trump than once thought. Economic concerns, on the other hand, don't seem to have as much of an impact on support for Trump.

Two recent studies bear this out. In the first, Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner analyzed data from the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES) survey (a representative sample of 1,200 Americans) to compare feelings and attitudes toward Donald Trump and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. He explored how economic opinions, racial attitudes and demographic variables predicted an individual's feelings toward Trump and Clinton. He found that one factor was much stronger than the other:

"My analysis indicates that economic status and attitudes do little to explain support for Donald Trump," he wrote for Vox last week. More to the point, "those who express more resentment toward African Americans, those who think the word 'violent' describes Muslims well, and those who believe President Obama is a Muslim have much more positive views of Trump compared with Clinton," Klinkner found.

In Klinkner's data, responses to questions such as "Do you think people’s ability to improve their financial well-being is now better, worse, or the same as it was 20 years ago?" and "Compared with your parents, do you think it is easier, harder, or neither easier nor harder for you to move up the income ladder?" had little effect on a person's preference for Trump or Clinton.

But,  Klinkner found, racial attitudes were highly determinative:

Moving from the least to the most resentful view of African Americans increases support for Trump by 44 points, those who think Obama is a Muslim (54 percent of all Republicans) are 24 points more favorable to Trump, and those who think the word "violent" describes Muslims extremely well are about 13 points more pro-Trump than those who think it doesn’t describe them well at all.

Well, Jiminy Christmas and Lord ha' Mercy.  It turns out, after all the hueing and crying and David Brooks speed-date spelunkings of the American Heartland, that Gonzo Freak Number One had it right all along:

In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward mobile — and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely. 

The Republican Party really is little more than a mob of angry and often bigoted idiots whose Very Loud Opinions can are be flipped off and on by Fox and Friends in the service of con men and oligarchs who do not give the tiniest shit about this country.

And Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times still obediently drives their getaway car.