Because he doesn't have to .
Because there is clearly no one at The New York Times with the clout to
shut him down or put him out to pasture. In this way, he is their Sean
Hannity or Tucker Carlson. Bigger than the game...whatever game it is
The New York Times is playing.
Today I glanced at The New York Times just long enough to notice that
this was one of those days when Mr. David Brooks decided it was his job
to explain to American something about which he knows nothing.
This morning's subject?
Racism, and how exactly we are measuring up.
This latest in Mr. Brooks' ongoing series of
"America: A Land of Contrasts" book reports has statistics and
percentages and everything and in three little words, Twitter user Wii Spa
summed up my reaction accurately:
Let's judge how accurately Mr. Brooks' instincts about race are calibrated by
using two of clearest metrics from The Before Time: The Fake Tea Party,
and the wider Republican freak out over the nomination and election of Barack
Obama, starting with a few note from post of mine from A Very Long Time Ago
(2008) entitled
"The Negrological Constant":
In this election, the predictive model we use to explain our cultural
Universe is also deeply warped. Warped by race. Race is, yet again, the
17-ton mastodon in the room, but continues to scud and swirl quietly around
the dark corners of American political discourse like errant dust bunnies.
And so the media develops a suite of “Negrological Constants” to explain
what is happening in the polls without having to face the reality that we
are not a post-racial society.
Not by a damn sight.
Better than we have been? Yes.
Getting better every generation? Yes.
But in 2008, to pretend that that all objects in motion in the American
political system are not being acted on by racism is as silly as pretending
that all objects on the face of the Earth are not being acted on by gravity.
I wrote that in reaction to Mr. Brooks' appearance on the now-defunct
Charlie Rose Show where Brooks was completely befuddled as to why
Barack Obama was clearly being held to different a standard than Jonh
McCain. From David Brooks during that 2008 round-table:
I think there is no doubt that Barack Obama is much more specific than John
McCain. If this were about issues, Obama would be winning by 15 points. The
mystery is, why he's not.
Except, of course, it was most definitely not a mystery to anyone who hadn't
been a privileged, myopic, white Conservative living in the Beltway media
bubble their entire adult lives.
Like Michele Norris appearing on the Charlie Rose Show over the past two
nights:
"One thing we've only touched on lightly here is the issue of race, and
the polling has shown that many of these voters when they say "he's not
patriotic enough", "we just don’t know who he is", "we don’t know what he
really stands for", if you dig down a little deeper there are suggestions
that some of these issues are proxies for this issue of race."
Like Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, also appearing on the
Charlie Rose Show over the past two nights:
“It hurts me to say, as the child of working class people, what these
people were saying. When I get email from these people, there ain't a lot
of nuance.”
And
Connie Schultz:
I think Michele makes a very important point about race ... I've been
writing about this because I come from the working class, and I am very
troubled by some of the things I'm hearing from the working class. About
race. And I said, you gotta go home and have the tough conversations with
family members.
Rose: What do they say?
Schultz: (They say) "I will not vote for..."
Rose (because he is congenitally unable to stop interrupting people trying
to finish their sentences): "...an African American?!?"
Schultz:
Right. If they say it well. If they say it kindly. I think it's code when
they say "Well we really don't know if he's a Muslim" and "we don't know
if he's patriotic". That’s all code for race. And for us to pretend that
isn't happening is irresponsible for us in the media.
Anyway, that was David Brooks --
The New York Times' senior Conservative political columnist --
in 2008 staring Republican racism square in the eye and swearing he didn't see
a thing.
Here is
David Brooks in 2009,
cocking his ear at the deafening, racist primal scream of a Republican party
reacting to the election of Barack Obama, shrugging, and swearing he can't
hear a thing:
Well, I don’t have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama’s
critics, so I can’t measure how much racism is in there. But my impression
is that race is largely beside the point.
We next encounter
David Brooks a year later, in 2010, flashing his PhD in Knowing Racism Stuff in 2010, on Meet the Press,
when E.J. Dionne rolled out this inconvenient truth:
Dionne: Look, there is a concerted conservative campaign on part of the movement,
a minority of the movement…to use race to split people. Glenn Beck says
Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people." J. Christian Adams, a
Republican activist pushing this new Black Panthers story, says the Obama
Justice Department is motivated by a "lawless hostility toward equal
enforcement of the law." Now, there are people playing with this racial
politics out there. I am not saying, the NAACP certainly isn't saying that
this is the whole conservative movement…or most of the conservative
movement or most of the tea party. But it's a part of this strategy, and
people should condemn it.
Well, it turned out that it was pretty much the whole
Conservative movement -- and certainly the overwhelming majority of the GOP
base -- but we'll leave that aside for now and move on to Mr. Brooks'
reaction to this inconvenient truth
First, he rolled out his trademark, "Liberals are just as bad in the opposite
way" thing:
Brooks: There are liberals who call conservatives racist as a matter of
tactics, too
And then, extrapolating from his single, jog-by observation of a Fake Tea
Party Rally and a Black family reunion going on near each other that didn't
result in a riot, that the Tea Baggers are the goddamn salt of the goddamn
Earth. The best kind of people. And not at all racist!
Brooks:
Listen, I was out jogging. You wouldn't know it to look at me. I was out
jogging in the mall. I was at a tea party rally, tea party rally. Also
there was a group called the back--Black Family Reunion, celebration of
African-American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle, sitting
at the same table, eating, watching concerts together. Among most of those
people there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on a, on a
warm Sunday afternoon.
Four years later, we find David Brooks was reassuring his readers that whatever scary
weirdness his party might have been up to, it was over now! The
GOP had detoxified it's brand and there was nothing but blue skies ahead.
Less than two years after that turned out to be utter bullshit, Mr.
David Brooks was back on Meet the Press reassuring his reassuring
his readers that
"the governing wing of the Republican Party" would soon swing into
action and save them from both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz by rocketing Marco
Rubio to power.
And less than two years after all of that turned out to
be utter bullshit, Mr. David Brooks was reassuring his readers that
Trump winning was actually a good thing because it was definitely going to usher in a
New Conservative Intellectual Renaissance
-- a Conservative Intellectual Renaissance so powerful and catchy that it
would sweep aside stodgy oldster political thinking and by next summer all the
rock and roll kids would be dancing to it in their raves and discotheques and
sock hops.
Just like in Footloose!
And then there was Brooks' brief non-confessional confession tour, launched
during the 2016 campaign, when his job was clearly on the chopping block
because he had fucked up so consistently and so very, very publicly on the
pages of The New York Times. Here is a particularly illuminating
snippet from Brooks from the still-defunct
Charlie Rose Show in 2016:
Rose: So you think you were wrong? That you had
somehow been on the Acela too much and had not done what?
Brooks: As I say, I'm out in the country ... every week
I'm somewhere ... but somehow I didn't see it coming.
I'm...I'm...I'm...I was not alone in that. A lot of
us didn't see it coming.
Rose: Oh I don't know anybody that saw it
coming.
Brooks (smirking): Yeah, I'm sure now there are
people claiming they did but...um...
And right here you can see the Beltway Common Wisdom being set in
concrete. Since no one saw this coming, everyone failed equally so no
one is guilty. No one is to blame. And as long as we all
agree to pretend that all the lowliest Liberal bloggers -- who had been
warning about these conditions within the GOP for decades -- simply do not
exist ... and so as long as Brooks promises to do a little painless penance --
to sojourn into the heart of American darkness and compare notes on Edmund
Burke with shit-shovelers in Nebraska and pawn brokers in Kansas -- everything
will be cool. Everyone could safely return to their default setting and
no one would lose their job just because events had shown that they never had
the slightest fucking idea what they were talking about.
So, return now to July of 2021, in the grand scheme of things it it good that
getting punched in the face by Reality over and over and over and over and
over and over and over and over and over again for decades has finally pried
Mr. Brooks' eyes open enough to see some of the realities of race in these
United States?
Yes, in the grand scheme of things, that's good.
But are the standards at The New York Times op-ed page really so low
that a 60 year old ultra-privileged, myopic white Conservative professional haver-of-opinions grudgingly
coming to recognize that racism exists in the United States is a story worthy
of publication and praise?
Yes, the Times' standards really are that low.
No Half Measures
