In modern popular culture there may be no more perfect metaphor for the arc of
the Never Trumpers than Breaking Bad, Season 5 Episode 14: Ozymandias.
If you haven't seen it and don't want to know how it goes, leave now.
You have been warned.
The episode opens on Walter White as a happily married man, out in the desert
having just cooked his first batch of meth, lying a little awkwardly to his
wife about where he was and what he was doing. I mean, other than the
actual cooking of the meth, he's not really a criminal, right? Not a
"criminal" criminal. He's just breaking somes stupid law to raise enough
money so that his wife and children won't be left penniless when he dies of
the cancer that is killing him.
He's doing this for his family, for god's sake!
For the Greater Good!
And for the next five years, as the peril and violence and extortion and
bloodshed and money all kept escalating, Walter keeps telling himself that
this was all worth it because he was doing this for his family, for god's sake!
For the Greater Good.
But to keep this all going, over the course of those five years, Walter found
he had to partner up with, at first, some bad people. Then some very bad
people.
Then some very, very bad people.
And,
finally, literal Nazis.
But when you think about it, golly, none of this was really his fault was
it? This was was just the price of keeping his
political party meth empire going. After all, his
intentions were good. He was doing all of this for the highest
motives. For tax cuts and deregulation and freedom his
family. This was just how the game of politics meth was
played. Was it his fault he was really good at it? And
besides, he had everything under control and he was getting rich
in the process. Where's the harm?
And then one day exactly what anyone who was not
a Never Trumper Walter White knew would eventually
happen...happened.
Having grown his meth empire political party at the expense
of giving away his power to Nazis. one day the Nazis were strong enough turned the tables.
As Never Trumpers Walter looked on powerless to stop
what they he had set in motion, the Nazis at last had the money and the
firepower to get away with doing whatever they want to do.
And what they wanted to do was shoot Walter's DEA brother-in-law
Liberal democracy in the head.
Walter begged them not to. Offered them anything to please just don't
do this, because Walter's DEA brother-in-law was family. Because Never Trumpers Walter still clung to the
delusion that somehow all of this had been for
Conservative valuesfor his family, for god's sake!
For the Greater Good!
Then the Nazis calmly shot Liberal democracy in the head without a second though.
Shot it in the head, laughed about it, collected their reward, buried the bodies in the
desert and drove away.
So my next doomed word-of-mouth campaign is urging that, whenever you hear pundits tsk-tsking the folly or ignorance or cruelty or 'economic anxiety' of "voters", "the public" or "the American people", kindly put a digital boot up their ass with my compliments.
This disaster was not brought to us by "voters", "the public" or "the American people". It was delivered to us by the same bigots and imbeciles who always visit such catastrophes on us.
A few years from now when the New York Times building lies in ruins, you will
still find Mr. David Brooks there, sitting amid the rubble like Mrs. Havisham,
wearing tatters, keeping himself warm by burning remaindered copies of
The Road to Character and offering to trash "the Left" for the price of a
meal, a first-class Acela corridor train ticket and a
$60 glass of top-shelf airport scotch.
Mind you, he will reassure you, his condition is temporary. On his uppers only due to mistakes that will no doubt be rectified soon. Sure, things
look a little bleak now. And, sure, Mr. Brooks' "teevee" appearances are
now limited to sitting next to a discarded Amazon shipping box with the words
"Meet the Press" scrawled on the side and fielding "questions" from a
potato Brooks calls "David Gregory", but this is all just a
misunderstanding. A glitch in the Beltway matrix. Just as soon as
No Labels or the McCain/Lieberman party get back on their feet, and the
Sulzberger family finishes up their vacation at whichever reeducation camp
they've been assigned to, and that sweet-sweet Third Way money starts rolling,
Brooks will be right back in the clover
Just you watch!
But, or course, that is all in the future.
In the here and now, Mr. Brooks is still gainfully employed by the House
of Sulzberger and still frantically trying to appease the fascists by playing
the golden oldies in the hopes that during the Trump 2.0 regime, the orthodoxy police
won't take his lunch money and stuff him in a locker forever.
And so, as was the case in 2004 and 2006 and 2008 and 2010 and 2012 and 2016
and 2018 and 2020 and 2022, so is now the case in this
annus horribilis of 2024. It is once again time for Brooks to assure
his tiny, terrified readership that:
None of this has anything to do with racism or misogyny,
Trump is not a fascist,
The concerns of the "working class" (about whom Brooks knows absolutely
nothing) are all legitimate and economic-anxiety based, and,
This is all the fault of the pampered, privileged,
college-degree-flauntin' "Left" who were so concerned with gender-studies
classes or whatever that they yadda yadda yadda...
We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in
pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation
whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels.
Fun fact: Without the largesse of us snooty Blue state elitist snobs, the economies of those coal-and-Jebus-and-we-hate-Libtards Red states would collapse almost overnight.
Brooks again:
[High school graduates] don’t speak in the right social justice
jargon or hold the sort of luxury beliefs that are markers of public
virtue.
The chasms led to a loss of faith, a loss of trust, a sense of
betrayal...
And:
These people, and many other Americans, weren’t interested in the
politics of joy that Kamala Harris and the other law school grads were
offering.
And:
The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a
great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many
Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial
inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. I guess it’s
hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a
multibillion-dollar endowment and do environmental greenwashing and
diversity seminars for a major corporation...
Except the Biden administration has been laser-focused
on fighting for the working class. Here is just a partial list of
what they got done in the face of rabid and nearly-unified Republican
opposition.
Unions are the strongest they've been in decades.
Wages among the lowest earners grew the fastest.
The child tax credit was expanded.
A minimum corporate tax was enacted.
A tax on stock buybacks was added.
Passed the CHIPS Act.
High inflation was brought down to normal levels without a recession.
Millions of jobs were created.
Unemployment has remained low.
Presided over the return of manufacturing to the US.
Lowered prescription drug prices.
More Americans have healthcare than ever before.
Billions were given to student debt relief.
The American Rescue Plan got Americans back to work, covered Cobra payments,
and even directly gave Americans money.
Biden actually, publicly supported labor.
Biden saved union pension funds.
Biden helped negotiate a favorable labor contract for railroad workers.
All the labor people here were *very* pro Harris.
And what did the Trump administration do for working men and women, besides getting hundreds of
thousands of them killed by botching our response to the COVID pandemic?
You may remember almost exactly eight years ago, in November of 2016, when the
election of Donald Trump shattered Brooks' hermetically-sealed terrarium of
smug Centrism, Brooks did exactly the same thing: went hunting for
villains on the Left to blame.
And, finding none, he just made a bunch
of shit up to justify his contention that
if only Democrats had heeded Brooks' advice and been more Centrist...
Brooks spent the last eight years defining the center as something Obama
was not. It didn’t matter that Obama supported a health-care plan first
devised by Mitt Romney, or a cap-and-trade plan endorsed by John McCain.
Brooks nestled himself into the territory between Obama and the angry,
no-compromise Republicans who were shutting down government and boycotting
all negotiations with the president.
If Obama endorsed the policies Brooks preferred, he would simply pretend
that Obama had not proposed them. Indeed, one of the most common genres
of David Brooks column was a sad lament that neither party would endorse
policies that in fact Obama had explicitly and publicly called
for.
And eight years later, rather than inflict some painful truth on his privileged, timorous readership, it's once again time for Brooks to go 15 rounds with some of
the tiredest, stupidest, most toxic Beltway straw men extant.
"What painful truth might that be?" you ask This one. From Esquire:
Kamala Harris Never Had a Chance
It’s obvious now. We should have known all along.
...Donald Trump’s victory lays bare the troubling-to-the-max truth that Vice President Kamala Harris never had a realistic shot to become the next president, that millions upon millions of Americans had predetermined to vote, at all costs, on behalf of white power/supremacy. That it mattered little-to-not-one-motherfucking-iota how much the vice president’s backstory affirmed the so-called American dream, or how excellent or qualified or experienced she was, or the fact that she has a clean criminal record and no bankruptcies. Her landslide loss made plain the truth that there was no policy she could propose to persuade a majority of white people, that it didn’t matter how much she preached about unity and peace and hope, that it mattered none the number of times she flashed her bright smile or how charismatic she was on SNL, that I was naive as fuck to think any of that would have ever been enough.
Back to Brooks today again:
As the left veered toward identitarian performance art...
And again:
There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the
inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people.
Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again
and again.
The alert reader will notice how, in Brooks' construction, the demonstrably bigoted, brainwashed and completely reprogrammable Republican base are transformed into "the American people". Just as, say, a $60 glass of top-shelf airport scotch magically becomes"This is why Americans think the economy is terrible."
Brooks again:
American voters are not always wise, but they are generally sensible,
and they have something to teach us.
And again:
Can the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the
hipster urban cores do this?
And again:
Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism.
I would remind Brooks that every actual expert on fascism disagrees with his stupid opinion, and that sowing chaos is precisely how fascists rise to power, but I'm betting Brooks already knows all of this.
Because Brooks is not a stupid or clueless man.
Brooks is a toxic parasite whose job for the last 20 years has been to spin reassuring fairy tales for the shrinking, cosseted readership of an ossified, terminally-ill media corporation run by a fourth-generation nepo baby.
This is what Republicans wanted, and now they have achieved it.
For longer than I'd care to think about we have been warning anyone who would
listen that the Republican party was building a monster machine, and that if
this went on,
it would end in tears and terror.
The Conservative elite laughed those warnings off as Liberal hysteria and
crackpot alarmism until it was far too late. Now most of the
Conservative elite bends the knee to the demons they created, while a few
flail around trying to understand what just happened, and a fewer still seem
willing to entertain the possibility that the Republican base they helped to
create really are a mob or reprogrammable meatbags and completely lost to
reason.
The legacy media mocked and ignored those warnings as absurd, or childish or
otherwise unserious, or somehow too shrill and strident to be "tonally" acceptable. They
categorically refused to see the danger coming for them with knives out until
it was far too late. Now most of the legacy media bends the knee to the
monsters they enabled, while a few stumble about looking for an answer --
any answer -- that doesn't implicate them.
As for me, other than being unutterably sad at the outcome of the election and
fearful in a hundred new ways about the future, nothing has fundamentally
changed in my estimation of the forces at work in our country. The Republicans party remains a fascist killdozer being run by hobgoblins and grifters. The legacy media continues to be a near-comatose husk of its former self, being run by amoral moguls and fascist-friendly cooperators.
The dangers have escalated and are much more immediate, but other than
the fact that no one need bother with figleave hyphenates like "neo-" or "proto-" to describe what is very clearly our American fascist party, the job remains the same. Protect the weak and
the vulnerable who didn't ask for and do not deserve any of this, support each
other and take it one day at a time.
So whether you are a person of
faith or not, whether in victory or defeat, this by John Wesley remains
sound advice.
Olbermann [referring to the New York Times' one last, godawful, drive-by election headline]:
"Win or Lose, Trump Has Already Won.” How about "Win or Lose, Cancer Has Already Won” or maybe the New York Times -- and I assume they're just trolling us now or they have a bet -- a tontine -- as to who gets the Times when everybody else is no longer subscribed. The last subscriber gets the paper. I don't know...
Y'know, Keith, the next time you drop by for a quick read, leave a comment :-)
The third day of the near-disaster of the Apollo 13 moon shot.
Everyone involved has been doing everything they can to save the crew:
frantically trying to think and improvise their way through a minefield of
potentially lethal problems, using only the materials at hand on the damage spacecraft to stave off
catastrophe.
And everyone involved is exhausted.
The whole world is watching, worried, riveted, hungry for any scrap of
reliable information, not knowing how this will end.
Except this time roughly half of our own country is openly rooting for Lovell, Swigert
and Haise to crash and burn.