As longtime readers will know, I've dedicated a considerable fraction of this blog to tracking what I call the "razor and the apple" - that's the point after which a pundit, usually David Brooks or someone like him, has grudgingly acknowledged the sins or crimes or whatever incompetent malevolence the GOP had gotten up to that week.
But then comes the inevitable "razor and the apple", usually around the sixth or fifth paragraph: the moment at which they pivot to the blame-dispersal trope of "But the Democrats..." or "And the Democrats...". Here, the facts will be waterboarded to the point that, whatever perfidy the Republican party has gotten caught doing, it will somehow always end up being the fault of (sing it with me now) Both Sides.
Over the decades, this particular genre of legacy media and Republican Party codswallop became so automatic and ubiquitous that it reached a point where I could predict to a joyless degree of precision what a mope like David Brooks was going to write about next: what the subject matter would be and in which paragraph you would find the "razor and the apple".
From me in 2007:
Finally, just for fun, let us snap on the hazmat gloves, unsheathe the poo-snippers, and unfairly flense a few sentences from Bobo’s Friday NYT column and assemble them out of all context just to see what we can divine from them – like reading chickenhawk entrails -- about Iraq and who is about to be framed for the GOPs historic failure there. See if you can spot the card Bobo is trying to palm...
If the Democrats don’t like the U.S. policy on Iraq over the next six months, they have themselves partly to blame.…but the Democrats never came up with anything remotely serious.…The liberals who favor quick exit never grappled with the consequences of that policy……The centrists who believe in gradual withdrawal never explained why that wouldn’t be like pulling a tooth slowly....
Funny, Bobo is usually a little more deft in hiding the razor in the apple.
But then again, when attempting to spackle over such an enormous mound of shit with such a weak and watery thimble of third-rate prose, one has to deal with the fact that entire limbs of feces are going to stick out all over...
And the reason I could be so frequently and depressingly accurate was (and is) because it's a genre: a genre that is as structured and repeated as Square Dancing, and which, paradoxically allows lazy, fraudulent writers to get away with being lazy frauds. Lazy, fraudulent writers whose primary mission is to ensure that the party or movement they are there to represent is not blamed for disasters that their party or movement clearly created. Or, when there is no way to wish away Republican and Conservative liability entirely, as has been the case since the collapse of the Bush administration, then blame must be dispersed.
The public zeitgeist must never, ever be allowed to become, as Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann put it in their 2012 Brookings Institute essay: "Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem." That would spoil everything!
Instead, some Liberal or some Democrat somewhere -- either wholly imaginary or wildly exaggerated -- must be dragged into it so that after five paragraphs quoting Pliny the Elder and grudgingly acknowledging that Republicans have done something awful, here it comes! Pulling into the station right on time! The "But the Democrats..." false equivalence that, golly, when you think about it, aren't speech codes at Brown nearly as bad as encroaching fascism?
And if Democrats had half a chance, wouldn't they nominate and elect someone just as monstrous as Trump?
To be fair, this became such an easy lie to spot because precisely because, as a false equivalence, its ridiculousness and ubiquity has had to grow at the same rate as Republican depravity. And after a while, like an old programmer ferreting out a specific kind of bug in COBOL code, I knew what I was looking for: roughly where it was, and roughly what it was going to be. Then you take a look and, "Yep, that's what went wrong, and that's where it went wrong, and that's why it went wrong."
And now, thanks to you all out there calling out the "razor and the apple" everywhere, the Both Sides Do It thing, has almost become a group puzzle or a sport. A genre unto itself. And the ludicrousness of the false equivalences these days have reach the stage where I barely need to prompt anyone anymore. Instead, not a day goes by when I don't get a note from someone saying, "Did you get a load of this shit over here?" and I go over and take a peek, and yep, there it is.
Because once you start looking for it, it's like looking for Italians in Inferno -- Dante's in version of Hell. Holy shit, it's everywhere.
And what's really heartening is the number of commenters who now pounce on this garbage the minute it's published and call it out for what it is really it. Way to go, everyone!
Well, this week I encountered a mutation of that species of op-ed writing.
It's by David French, a right-wing, evangelical, professional "hate the Left" kinda guy who had his resume hurriedly tidied up by The New York Times enough that he could be slotted into their op-ed lineup without causing a riot.
Like Liz Cheney, the late Michael Gerson, David Brooks, Michael Steele, Tim Miller, Charlie Sykes, Mona Charen, Kathleen Parker and hundreds more, David French is just one more Conservative culture warrior who spent his entire career enthusiastically building a monster which would eventually turn on him and chase him out of the party. Just one more Conservative culture warrior who refuses to recognize that the monster he spent decades helping to build was a monster long before it chased him out of the party. A monster whose vile nature he took to be a virtue...as long as its ferocity was directed at people like us.
And when people like us recognized the monster for what it was and pushed back against it, well you'll never guess how David French remembers it. I highlighted the relevant passage:
The online response to my argument, however, was volcanic. I was accused of legitimizing heresy. Another writer said that I’d suffered an apparent “brain injury.” My appreciation of Talarico’s approach even put the soul of evangelicalism at risk. Once again, I was written entirely out of the Christian faith by angry Trumpist evangelicals.
(I did have to laugh at the Babylon Bee’s joke headline: “David French Praises Satan as ‘Most Christian Person in History.’”)
In their minds, I was elevating “niceness” over justice and righteousness. To this way of thinking, Talarico’s manner makes him more dangerous, not less, and it was my responsibility to warn Christian America away from this dreadful man.
In their anger and vitriol, I saw the mirror image of the far-left intolerance I’ve encountered through much of my career...
And this is the op-ed in which we find a dizzyingly bizarre inversion of the usual "razor in the apple" claptrap because David French has managed to write an entire "apple among the razors" column and publish it without anyone at the Times throwing themselves in front of the "Publish" button and telling him, "No. This is too stupid even for the times.
I the name of healing the nation (which his party, his movement and his faith have damaged almost beyond repair, French unspools paragraph after paragraph of Both Siderist false equivalence, pausing only briefly, in the seventh paragraph, to say that of course isn't doing what he very obviously is doing.
To say that both sides view each other with equivalent disdain is not to say that both sides are equally dangerous. When a hateful, vengeful man is in the Oval Office, wielding the awesome power of the presidency beyond its constitutional limits, then he immediately becomes the most dangerous person in America.
So, knowing what you know about the Both Sides Do It cult, and the pathology of it's followers, what word do you suppose Mr. French uses to being the very next paragraph after explicitly telling his readers that he is not, not, not doing false equivalence.
If you guessed the word "But", give yourself a big gold star!
French began by asking this question:
Does anyone think a healthy nation with a healthy political culture would elect a man like Donald Trump not once, but twice? The eternal return of President Trump is a sign of our national sickness, and a recent Pew Research Center study shows us exactly what that sickness is.
And what is that sickness? That the GOP has been on rocket ride towards fascism for more than 40 years? That men like French not only ignored every red flag, but kept stomping harder on the accelerator? That a party which elevated racist scum like Rush Limbaugh and his hundreds of imitators as it's political voice and a vicious Newt named Gingrich and his hundreds of imitators as their spirit animal was headed towards disaster?
Nope.
French says its because we hate each other. And that is where his analysis ends, because any further inquiry into exactly why we hate each other would make men like French look very, very bad.
Instead, French treats hatred as if it were a pandemic that just cropped up out of nowhere and has no specific, traceable cause. There is no mention of the fact that racism, misogyny and blind hatred of the Left has been the Mother Tongue of the Republican party for my entire adult life. That it has been stoked by the Right for ratings and votes and billions is profits.
No inkling that, until he got run out of the party, this was the team he happily played for.
And now that the damage is done? Now that his party has dropped the final veil and bared its fascist fangs for all the word to see?
Now we get this:
For example, in a 2022 survey, Pew found that large shares of Democrats and Republicans thought of each other as closed-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent, and the measurements were getting worse every year.
And this:
Both sides hate each other so much that it’s almost meaningless to ask who hates whom the most.
And this:
If you’re a Republican or a Democrat, the best way to imagine the other side’s view of you is to simply mirror your own attitude. They despise you with the same intensity that you despise them. They view you with the same sense of threat and alarm that you view them.
The rest of the column is spent hand-wringing, wishful thinking and pretending the Obama administration never existed.
So the problem is very clear. David French's party, his movement, and his religion, are the fucking problem.
Period.
But David French cannot bear the thought of living in a universe where this is true, because, well, for one reason, there's no money to be made in that universe. Because that universe is already occupied by Liberals living out of tip jars, because we've been writing about this shit for decades now. So there's no fortune to be found -- no New York Times audience to be found -- for someone who says, "Yep, the Republican party sucks, and it's sucked forever, and the Right-wing evangelicals like David French were at the core of the problem."
Instead, we get the same Republican Dissociative Disorder we've seen in virtually every other Never Trumper. Everything was fine and then, suddenly and with no warning, everyone around David French in the fundy evangelical world went spontaneously crazy. To men like David French, modern history began on that day. Before that day, everything was fine. After that day, everyone went nuts, except him.
And since people like David French cannot live in a universe where they and their people are the villains and the authors of the madness and ruin we see all around us, they very badly needs for there to be a bunch of people on the left who are just as bad.
Which is how we get a little bite of apple among the razors.
Which is just the way the legacy media likes it.
