It was 15 years ago, on a day very much like today. 15 years. That's 1... 2... 3! presidential administrations ago.
Three, going on four.
2009 it was. Early November. Barack Obama had been in office for less than a year, and it was slowly starting to dawn on him that, just maybe, the Republican party was not going to be his good-faith partner in cleaning up the catastrophes that Republican president George W. Bush had left in his wake.
Much later and far too late, president Obama would finally figure out that the the Republican party had, in fact, sworn a blood oath to obstruct, sabotage and otherwise fuck him over any way they could.
Bush had left behind a collapsed global economy, a meat-grinding clusterfuck of a war in Iraq all based on a lie and with no end in sight, and the United States' international reputation in shreds after proof of the Bush regimes program of warrantless wiretapping and torture sites came to light.
The Fake Tea Party, which had begun as handful of Libertarians bitching about taxes, had been repurposed by Koch Brothers money and the Fox News' megaphone into a massive Republican rebranding scam: camouflage behind which the Republican base and the legacy media could collude to pretend this mob of shrieking bigots waving Gadsden flags and wearing stupid hats somehow had no connection to or responsibility for the eight years of Republican catastrophe which we had all just endured.
Yes, given the multiple and immediate crises the United States was facing, what was the #1 priority of the Republican party? From Wikipedia:
In October 2010, McConnell said "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." Asked whether this meant "endless, or at least frequent, confrontation with the president", McConnell clarified that "if [Obama is] willing to meet us halfway on some of the biggest issues, it's not inappropriate for us to do business with him." According to political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, "Facing off against Obama, [McConnell] worked to deny even minimal Republican support for major presidential initiatives — initiatives that were, as a rule, in keeping with the moderate model of decades past, and often with moderate Republican stances of a few years past." The New York Times noted early during Obama's administration that "on the major issues — not just health care, but financial regulation and the economic stimulus package, among others — Mr. McConnell has held Republican defections to somewhere between minimal and nonexistent, allowing him to slow the Democratic agenda if not defeat aspects of it."The Republican caucus threatened repeatedly to force the United States to default on its debt, McConnell saying he had learned from the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis that "it's a hostage that's worth ransoming."
Because, as history as shown again and again, MItch McConnell is a soulless monster.
And as he floated high above this maelstrom in his New York Times Opinion Dirigible, this was the subject uppermost in the mind of America's Most Influential Conservative Pundit.
From The New York Times, November 11, 2009:
What Independents Want
By DAVID BROOKS
Yes, as his Republican party busied itself trying to sabotage the Obama administration by any means necessary, Mr. Brooks had stitched together a couple of snippets from a couple of
polls into a big, floppy sack, and then into that sack had dumped every loose
button and paper-clip of his own privileged, white, suburban, middle-aged,
Boomer Burkean bourgeoisie terror and called it "analysis".
And what did his "analysis" reveal.
Well, you will be shocked to learning that after making a tasty tossed salad out of a grab-bag of different polls and "trends" that were a scant seven months long, Mr. Brooks was able to authoritatively declare that the will of the American people was most truly represented by "independents", and that sometime during the night, "independents" had made a massive leap to the Right. Brooks then sucker-punched the same, wingnut strawmen -- unions, abortion, "too much Gummint"-- in the crotch before leaving his readers with meaningless burbles of eternal Brooksian wisdom like this:
If I were a politician trying to win back independents, I’d say something like this: When I was a kid, I had a jigsaw puzzle of the U.S....and this:
Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order...
If some of the word choices I've made here seem familiar, it's because I poached them from my very own post from 15 years ago in which I carefully and methodically deconstructed Mr. Brooks bullshit argument that, A) "independents" somehow all wanted the same thing and, B) "independents" were a thing at all.
The post was entitled "The "Independent" Granfalloon". Here is me from 15 years ago:
Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":
"...a proud and meaningless association of human beings"Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all...
Then I went on to enumerate many of the mutually-exclusive groups which might call themselves "independent" when the survey man comes around. From 15-years-younger-me again:
Rebel nuns who might just think that letting a rape victim have access to abortion services would not be the end of the world?
Independents.
Snake-handling queer-hating Leviticans who think the GOP is too gutless because it won’t advocate rounding up Teh Gay and putting them in camps?
Independents.
Bunker-dwelling survivalists?
Independents.
Pimple-faced 30-something John Galt wannabees who masturbate themselves blind to “Atlas Shrugged” because that hot chick in accounting won’t give them a second look, but won’t she be sorry when Objectivists stop the engine of the world and people like her will have to stand in line to offer their vajay-jays to the alpha studs wealth producers!
Independents.
Klansmen who want to smoke a little weed?
Independents.
America's compulsive political middle-children who have been taught so thoroughly to compromise their way out of any conflict that they will travel a 1,000 miles just to find a fence to straddle?
The opinionless little ciphers who just want to make sure they line up with a winner?
The moral cowards wouldn’t pick a side with a gun pressed to their heads, because of the terror of then being committed to actually doing something instead of snarking their way through life declaring "Well, ya know, bote sides are juss a buncha crooks anyway!" about every situation regardless of context and circumstances?
If asked, I guarantee you all virtually of those people would tell you that they think of themselves as “independent”.
And this was my finishing move, which history has shown to be 100% correct:
And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?
Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.
Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their lives and futures.
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
But they fool no one.
Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.
And I guarantee you 99.5% of those Republican cowards who burned their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and swore up and down that they were "independents" are now all dog-loyal MAGA Trump voters.
This is what we dirty, disreputable hippies mean when we talk about how, decades ago, we saw the trajectory the Republican party was on and exhausted ourselves writing warning after warning about how bad things could get if if they kept going on this direction
[Spoiler: They kept going in that direction, which is why our Never Trump allies don't invite us to play in their reindeer games. We spoil all the back-patting and Ain't-We-Awesome vibes by bringing the past to the party.]
So why bring this all back to your attention all these years later?
Because time is a flat circle, kids. Because just this week, almost exactly 15 years after David Brooks categorically declared that we dirty, disreputable hippies better fucking shape up because "independents" were the future (and at least one dirty, disreputable hippy took exception to his flatulent fabulism), this was Mr. David Brooks in The New York Times (with emphasis added):
Why the Heck Isn’t She Running Away With This?
Oct. 17, 2024
by David Brooks
Two big things baffle me about this election. The first is: Why are the polls so immobile? In mid-June the race between President Biden and Donald Trump was neck and neck. Since then, we’ve had a blizzard of big events, and still the race is basically where it was in June. It started out tied and has only gotten closer.
We supposedly live in a country in which a plurality of voters are independents. You’d think they’d behave, well, independently and get swayed by events. But no. In our era the polling numbers barely move...
Once again we see the inherent problem with The New York Times allowing Mr. Brooks to tell great big whopping lies to balm the jangled nerves of the cosseted, influential and wealthy shut-ins on whose patronage the Times depends.
Mr. Brooks desperately needs these cosseted, influential and wealthy shut-ins to continue believing that there is a huge yet somehow invisible army of Sensible Centrist "independents" out there who are just like them and just like David Brooks. Sensible Centrist "independents" who, in fact constitute a Secret Majority, or at least a Secret Plurality, of voters.
These Sensible Centrist "independents" are basically Brooks' readers' Great Pumpkin. Which...hey look! I already wrote a long things about that three years ago! Archives are such labor savers! You can look it up if you're so inclined.
You can't miss it. It's entitled "It's The Sensible Center Charlie Brown!"
While miniscule compared to the size of Republican Party, the Sensible Center cultists in the media wield hugely outsized influence relative to their numbers because the tenets of their cult exactly comports with the business model of virtually every America media corporation, and because those media corporations control the cameras.Which is why, even though decade after decade they have show themselves over and over to be grotesquely wrong about pretty much everything, we find these same well-remunerated goofs still gainfully employed and still confidently predicting a Great Centrist Uprising which will rise out of the Sensible Centrism patch and fly through the air with its bag of sensible, Centrist policy solution for all the children. For example, I wrote this +16 years ago in reaction to a typically obnoxious Thomas Friedman in which he scornfully Both Sidesed Bush's Iraqi Debacle. And upon re-reading it +16 years later, I see no reason to change a word of it...
When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.
Brooks then goes on for six paragraphs to chastise Democrats as an orthodoxy-obsessed clerisy who might be right on the issues, but our "priesthood" alienates oil-field workers in Oklahoma or whatever. Only after he has vented his entire spleen on the strawman he has invented, does he bother to pivot to the other party:
The Republicans have exactly the same dynamic, except their priesthood is dominated by shock jocks, tech bros and Christian nationalists, some of whom are literally members of the priesthood.
You may know that just a few days ago Brooks was given the cover of The Atlantic [which is now his other, other, other make-work pundit job] to explain why, even though Democrats still make him "want to flee in disgust", he is now, very reluctantly, willing to temporarily pitch camp on the outer rightward edge of the Democratic party.
A few days later, back in the New York Times home base, like a dog returning to its vomit, Brooks has returned to his worst habits:
Finally, candidates no longer have the ultimate power over what the party stands for. The priesthood — the people who dominate the national conversation — has the power...
The result is that each party has its own metaphysics. Each party is no longer just a political organism; it is a political-cultural-religious-class entity...
Each party’s metaphysic seems to grow more rigid and impermeable as time goes by. Sometimes it seems that Harris is running not to be president of the United States but to be president of a theme park called Democratic Magic Mountain, while Trump is running to be president of Republican Fantasy Island...
Each party has become too narcissistic to get outside its own head...
The political problem for Harris is...
The problem for Trump is...
The problem for the rest of us is that we’re locked into this perpetual state of suspended animation in which the two parties are deadlocked and nothing ever changes.
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.
