David Brooks, Shield Boss

Of course I'm not a racist, David.  It just upsets me "to see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!"

I am aware that on the subject of Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times, I can be annoying.  Relentless.  Pedantic.  Repetitive.  That Brooks in the headline sets some people's eyes a-rollin'.   And that since I will never be adopted by any respectable media outfit, on average whatever I write will be read by no more than a few hundred people and then forgotten.

I am aware that I am the John Adams of critiquing David Brooks.

And you know what?   That is the one, small, true joy of having absolutely no one to answer to.  Of being one of the last of the single-shingle, independent Liberal bloggers.

I can write what I want, when I want, in whatever manner pleases me.  I can take a day off and fiddle around with Photoshop to tease a half-realized idea that's been bugging me out of my head.  And if it turns out to suck, so what?  Is the boss gonna dock me for wasting time and pencils?

No.

And six times out of ten I find there was another idea hiding behind that one that isn't half bad and, with a little polish, I'd be proud to put it out on the front porch on my little blog in the cornfield.

So why David Brooks?

Because the monster that's destroying this country has two enormously powerful weapons.  A Sword and a Shield.  Wielding both, the monster has fair chance of killing democracy in America for the foreseeable future.

Certainly for the remainder of my lifetime.

But if it loses either the Sword or the Shield, it can be beaten.  If this sounds familiar, it should.  I wrote it three years ago...

And I beheld Trump's mighty army crossing the wasteland of the American Dream, armed and ready to do Trump's bidding.

In their Right hand they wielded a great Sword called Ignorance, Bigotry and Rage which had been forged in the fires of Fox News and Hate Radio.  With it they mowed down fact and science and history just as they had been taught to do by Rush and Sean and Erik and Greta and Mark and Anne and Bloody Bill and the Other Bill and Dinesh on and on and on.  With it they decapitated their own past and buried it without breaking rank or stride, as they had been taught to do when they burned their Bush Administration team jackets and took up the Tea Party colors.

And on they came.

In their Left hand, they bore a strange Shield inscribed with the most potent Beltway magic conjure words of all: "Both Sides...".  It was thin and frail-looking, but had been so cunningly fitted together by the wealthiest artisans of the Beltway out of bits of "The extremes on the Right and the Left" and "If only Barack Obama would lead" that it easily deflected any payload of reality or reason no matter how powerful or sturdily constructed.  With it they flicked away all criticism , appeals to reason, and general dumbfoundedness at the bullshit they believed, just as they had been taught to do by David and the Other David and the Other Other David and the Other Other Other David and Ron and Good Ol' Joe and the Other Joe and Cokie and Mark and Tom and Pickled Peggy and Ramesh and Kathleen and Chuck and Hugh and Ross and Newt! and Every Single Fucking Mealworm Employed By The No Labels Scam and on and on and on and on and on.

"The Kenyan Usurper is the Divider in Chief and Libruls are the real racists!" they roared, and on they came.

Precisely as predicted here in the more rustic precincts of the despised and rebuked Left, Trump rose from the filthy, fertile breeding ground the Republican party has spend the last 20 years composting with fear and loathing and money.

As predicted, every time the high-dollar con men the ruling class employs to spin fairy tales of Burke and Whigs and sweet, sweet Centrism insisted that Trump would gradually weaken, Trump's army got stronger, thanks to the Sword the Right has given them and the Shield the Center had given them

As predicted, Trump easily sidestepped the ridiculous Maginot Line which the high-dollar, soft-handed, Very Reasonable con men the ruling class employs to spin fairy tales of Burke and Whigs and sweet, sweet Centrism threw together to stop his advance.  Trump's army whittled the Beltway's sputtering volleys of "but...but...but..." to splinters with the great Sword of  Ignorance, Bigotry and Rage Trump's army , and Trump's army effortlessly parried the Beltway's pleading to for fuck's sake come to your senses and quit tearing up our country club by their clever Shield of Both Siderism

"Both Sides are to blame!"  they raved.  "So we must burn it all down!"

And on they came...

So here's the deal.  We will never be rid of the Sword.  In one form or another, this affliction will be with us for at least the next several decades, hopefully diminishing with every passing year until it is a spent force to be studied only by the historians and archaeologists of whatever civilization grows up in the rubble of our own. 

Ah but the Shield!  The Shield is something we can actually weaken. Perhaps shatter.  And without the Shield, the monster loses, because without the Shield the monster is forced to stand alone, facing the world wearing its true face, which is something the monster cannot abide.

And David Brooks is the Shield Boss.

Literally:

The most important among all the parts of medieval shields was the Boss. It was the round central part of a shield and was therefore the most crucial with respect to defences. Special attention was paid in making this part stronger in order to deflect the heavy bows of enemy swords and other weapons. Among the parts of medieval shields, the boss part was generally made of wood or thick metal and was sometimes also known as the Umbo.

During the Rise of Dubya, Mr. Brooks led the way in stomping the hell out of the stupid, peacenik Liberals like me who were worried about trivia like giant tax cuts leading to deficits, or that lying us into the wrong war might end badly.

Which, of course, is exactly what happened.  And once the Dubya administration began to collapse, Mr. Brooks was forced to pivot to a New Big Lie:  pretending that the Bush Administration never happened, and that the real threat to our democracy was coming from ...

.... the Extremes on Both Sides!  While all of America's millions of Very Serious and Reasonable citizens were all parked right next to David Brooks in the Sensible Center.

This was to be the New Beltway Party Line, and the rest of the Beltway followed eagerly along.

From Mr. Brooks in August 10, 2006:

The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.

The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.

But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people...
...

During the eight years of the Obama Administration, Mr. Brooks and his many imitators went all-in on the Both Sides Do It lie.  Built it into the official state religion of the Beltway media.  And so, for Mr. Brooks and his many imitators, the Republican Party as it actually existed in plain sight simply ceased to exist:

As one disreputable and long-forgotten wag of my acquaintance wrote at the time, Mr. Brooks instead put all of this energies into:

...a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

And odds are he'll get away with it too.

Spoiler:  He did get away with it.

Even as it became terrifying clear that Donald Trump was the Swine King for which the Republican Party had been praying for decades.  That their Rough beast had come 'round at last and was slouching towards the GOP  nomination with alarming speed, David Brooks and his many co-conspirators would not stop yapping about the Extremes On Both Sides.

First, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were The Extremes on Both Sides!

Once Bernie lost, suddenly Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were The Extremes on Both Sides!

But dot worry, because the Republican establishment and the Very Serious and Reasonable citizens of the Sensible Center.had everything under control and it was definitely going to be Rubio!

And every step along the way, the Beltway media followed eagerly along.

Even after it all went boom, Mr. Brooks remained adamant that however bad the "pro-Trump right" may be, the "woke activists, the angry Sanders socialists and social justice warriors" were just as bad because Both Sides.  

Even after his entire farrago of Both Siderist bullshit sank beneath waves,  Mr. David Brooks went went right on telling the same blatant lies about the record of the Obama Administration twice in three days because however bad Donald Trump might be, President Obama has to be bad too because Both Sides!

Even after Donald Trump blew the lid off of every single lie David Brooks has pimped for the past 20 years, everything was still going to be great because now Conservatism was definitely going to remake itself in David Brooks' image!

Except that never happened either.  And now that now that there is no longer any doubt that the Left has been right about the Right all along -- now that Conservatism is dead, and the Republican Party is fully the Party of Trump -- where is there left for pathological Both Siderists like Brooks to hide?

Out of what material can Both Siderists tinker together another Shield to keep the righteous judgement of history from falling on their heads?

I'm glad you asked :-)

Oh FUCK OFF pic.twitter.com/uxIRGZ1Rse

— Xeni (@xeni) August 2, 2019

Yes, at long last Mr. Brooks is getting into faith-healer racket in a big way.

From No More Mr. Nice Blog:

Brooks contrasts Williamson with "the two leading Democratic idea generators," Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who, he says, "are both materialistic wonks." Democrats can't help themselves, the poor dears.

The modern version of the party emerged during the Great Depression to solve one problem: material want. It is a secular party, trapped in a Lockean prison: Politics should be separate from faith. Politics should be separate from soulcraft.

This is Brooks being Brooks -- he's an adult pushing 60, but in his heart he's still an undergrad reading sociology texts and learning to put things in airtight categories (the spiritual here, the material there).

Now that the Beltway Both Siderist hucksters like Brooks have run out of road, there is no alternative left to them but to pretend that the GOP simply does not exist, never did exist, and that Donald Trump is a singular, historical aberration, unmoored to any political party.  Which is exactly what Mr, Brooks was doing just a couple of weeks ago ("David Brooks And The Amazing Disappearing Republican Party...".)

And so, with the entire GOP and its grotesque history safely flensed from living memory, Beltway Both Siderist hucksters like Brooks are now free to verbally discorporate themselves into a woozy astral cloud of "We".

If only Donald Trump were not president, we...

If only Trump were not president, we...

If only Trump were not president, we...

We are all subtly corrupted while this guy is our leader...

We’re one people...

We can’t have deliberative democracy without...

We treasure members of all races and faiths...

We want to be around people with...

We want all children to have...

Yes, with the GOP gone, there is nothing left for them to complain about (with the same, sweeping confidence with which they have declaimed every other horrible idea and bold-faced lie they have ever told) except how Democrats are failing "us".

The Democrats have not risen to the largeness of this moment. They don’t know how to speak on this level. They don’t even have the language to articulate what Trump represents and what needs to be done...

Part of the problem is that the two leading Democratic idea generators are both materialistic wonks...

They are what Michael Dukakis would be if he emerged in an era when the party had swung left...

The bigger problem is simply the culture of the Democratic Party...  

It is a secular party, trapped in a Lockean prison: Politics should be separate from faith. Politics should be separate from soulcraft...

They are free to reduce all editorializing about politics to a contest between one person, Donald Trump, and one party, the Democrats.  And since Donald Trump is obviously a lunatic, every  Beltway huckster hostage letter and holiday wish list lands on our desk.

Dear Santa Claus,  My name is Davey Brooks.  Thank you for bringing me that job at The New York Times where I get to write the same goofy crap over and over again and they still pay me a lot of money.  Also thank you for the new wife to replace the old one I broke.  She's working out great!  This year I have been a very good boy, so for Christmas I would like...

 ...Democrats to rebuild the moral infrastructure of our country.

..and...

...lead an uprising of decency.

Mr. Brooks' prescription for what ails the nation is a Democratic candidate who stands foursquare for:

Unity...
Honesty...
Pluralism...
Sympathy...
Opportunity...

Which all sounds just amazing peachy until you remember that you're a Liberal, which means Memory is your Superpower.  And they you shake off the narcotic woo-woo drivel Mr. Brooks is farting into the noosphere and remember -- holy shit! -- we already had one of those!

The Great Obama Moral Infrastructure Uplift Project rested on the assumption that if Democrats would just elected an honorable, intelligent, decent, scandal-free, humane President who would agree to ignore 30 years of escalating unhinged rage and racism in the GOP and instead offer to work with them to solve our nation's problems with an open hand and a selfless heart that they would meet him halfway.

Or a third of the way.

Or on the five yard line.

Instead, no matter how hard he tried -- no matter how many concessions he made to their increasingly ludicrous demands -- they told this champion of Unity, Honesty, Pluralism, Sympathy and Opportunity to go fuck himself.

They hated him so much, they unloaded eight, straight years of sabotage, slander, sedition, racism, conspiracy mongering on him.

They hated him so much, that they nominated and elected the King of the Birthers on the explicit promise that he would burn down everything Obama had ever touched.

And this naked barbarism is what gives the Republican Sword its the tensile strength.  They're cruel.  They're pig ignorant.  They're racist as hell. And they're not ashamed of it.  In fact,  they revel in it.

But it is this very barbarism that makes the Republican Shield so incredibly fragile -- the very brutishness and savagery of the Republican party that renders David Brooks and the rest of his collaborators and fellow travelers in the media are incapable of facing it.

Because facing it would destroy them.

And when your opposition goes to such lengths to show you exactly where they are at their weakest -- exactly what terrifies them so badly that they have to cower behind a mountain of money and privilege just to avoid catching a glimpse of it -- you should pay attention.

You should pay very close attention.

Behold, a Tip Jar!