The Mote in Bobo's Eye

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

-- Matthew 7:5

Begin first with this understanding; Mr. Brooks is a Professional Conservative.

Without that one pony to ride, Mr. Brooks has nothing.

Nothing at all.

Which is why, Mr. Brooks, Professional Conservative, has written another 800-word column for the New York Times about Liberals.

 In this column, Mr. Brooks:

1. Wonders aloud why nobody like Liberals. 
2. Puts the entire burden for fixing everything that is broken in America on the back of Liberals. 
3. Suggests that the very first thing Liberals need to do to fix what is wrong with America is to stop everything and purify Liberalism. 

Even though he has demonstrate over and over again in great detail how embarrassingly little he knows about Real Liberals and (conversely) how much of his writing is driven by an obsession with the same Imaginary Liberals which live under Rush Limbaugh's bed, Mr. Brooks nonetheless continues to write frequently -- compulsively -- about us.

Continues to make a princely living telling tale tales about Liberals and hippies and 1960s.

Like his writings on economics and history, most of what Mr. Brooks writes about Liberals is not simply wrong, but always wrong in exactly the same way. All sifted through a corrupt ideological filter which prevents Mr. Brooks from coming to terms with the fact that every problem he identifies has either been created by or made vastly worse by the diligent application of his own ideology.

Or, more simply, Mr. Brooks cannot write honestly about what is wrong with America because Mr. Brooks is what's wrong with America.

That being said, let us poke a stick into today's fresh helping of mire and see what oozes out.

First, Mr. Brooks assertion that nobody like Liberals.

Why aren’t there more liberals in America?


It’s not because liberalism lacks cultural power. Many polls suggest that a majority of college professors and national journalists vote Democratic. The movie, TV, music and publishing industries are dominated by liberals.  

...

Given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism. Yet the percentage of Americans who call themselves liberals is either flat or in decline. There are now two conservatives in this country for every liberal...

Mr. Brooks never bothers to cite any sources for his assertions about how or why American's identify themselves with this or that label, and this graph from Pew explains why.

Because if you simply substitute the word "Progressive" for the nearly-identical word "Liberal" (which the Right has spent billions demonizing) Mr. Brooks' entire argument collapses.

Mr. Brooks' third observation -- that the "solution" to a the nonexistent problem is the mortification of the Liberal flesh, the purification of the Liberal ideal --

..Sailors scrub their ships. Farmers clear weeds. Democrats have not spent a lot of time scraping carbuncles off the state.


Worse, in an attempt to match Republican rhetoric, Democratic politicians are perpetually soiling the name of government for the sake of short-term gain. How many times have you heard Democrats from Carter to Obama running against Washington, accusing it of being insular, shortsighted, corrupt and petty? If the surgeon himself thinks his tools are rancid, why shouldn’t you?


In the past few weeks, the Obama administration has begun his presidential campaign by picking a series of small fights with the Republican-led House over things like recess appointments. These vicious squabbles may help Obama in the short term by making him look better than Republicans in Congress. But they will only further discredit Washington over the long run.


Life is unfair. Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good.


Liberalism has not expanded because it has not had a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years.


If you’ll forgive some outside advice, President Obama might consider running for re-election as Luther. It’s not enough to pick a series of small squabbles and then win as the least ugly man in the room. He might run as someone who believes in government but sees how much it needs to be cleansed and purified.

-- is equally absurd not because the Liberal stables don't need cleaning, but because of the idea that we should turn our attention to cleaning out those stables in the middle of a pitched battle as the wingnut hordes are swarming us with bayonettes fixed is suicidal.

No, amid our many problems, Conservatism stands out as American democracy's Number One massive, sucking chest wound.  The top of the triage list.  And the first civic duty of every public-spirited Liberal must be to hasten the extinction of the Modern Conservative Movement, which is a project that must begin in the Center.

The reason Modern Conservatism was not laughed off the stage decades ago is that it is willing to drop a 16 ton weight on anyone in the media who refused to treat it with respectful seriousness. The Right -- with its legions of bigots, buffoons, Bible thumpers and billionaires -- gets its every Bronze Age theory and popskull proclamation treated with the utmost seriousness because the mainstream media is terrified to do otherwise.

Because news is a commodity, and the Right has convinced the Mainstream Media that it can cut them off at the wallet if they speak out of turn.

And so, behind the shriveled figleaf of objectivity, the Right is permitted to do and say anything no matter how traitorous, destructive or loony while from the Center we get nothing but the mantra of "Both Sides Do It" repeated forever and ever and ever.

Which is not only morally offensive, but also the proximate cause of exactly the kind of public mistrust of government which Mr. Brooks pretends to care about:

...Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don’t trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don’t trust the federal government.


A few decades ago they did, but now they don’t. Roughly 10 percent of Americans trust government to do the right thing most of the time, according to an October New York Times, CBS News poll.


Why don’t Americans trust their government? It’s not because they dislike individual programs like Medicare. It’s more likely because they think the whole system is rigged.

The public distrusts government because they have been told by the very same fuckers who clubbed the media to its knees that the government was their Enemy.  Not the imperfect manifestation of the will of a conflicted people, but a force for Evil constructed by Liberals to destroy them,  And every time those fuckers got hold of the keys to the government they chopped it for parts, sugared the gas tank, slashed the tires, set what was left on fire and then rolled the burning hulk  off the nearest cliff to demonstrate that -- See! See! -- that thing was not safe at all!

So, strike two for Mr. Brooks.

On the other hand, I do happen to agree with Mr. Brooks that Liberals have not been taking sufficient, intelligent action on our own behalf.

Of course, the irony of Mr. Brooks calling for a sense of bravery and purpose which he himself complete lacks is not lost on me -- that when it came to bearing any of the cost or responsibility for his war of choice, the economic disasters his ideology has wrought, or the toxic disaster his party has made of Washington D.C., Mr. Brooks has made a career of excusing himself to the Reasonable Centrist bathroom and then crawling out window whenever another Republican butcher's bill comes due.

However the fact that Mr. Brooks is a coward and a fraud does not mean that Liberals are not occasionally, ridiculously self-defeating.

Yes, we fight for Big Principles, but too often we also let the "narcissism of small differences" turn relatively minor differences into full-on range wars.  I have walked away from Liberal organizations more than once because they failed completely in their primary duty:  getting out of their own way long enough to do the good they all said they believed in doing.

We can also be very bad at communicating. Yes, we are quite good at semaphoring to each other in the language of graphs, policy prescriptions and eyerolls at the latest Republican perfidy, but often we just suck at street fighting. Quit waving charts at the muggles and expecting them to change their minds! You have to be able to connect with people emotionally. You have to explain to people why they should care in the language the respect and understand. And frankly you have to be able to reach into a Conservative's chest cavity and rip out his heart: our current situation requires it and we are all too often  insufficiently competent at delivering it.

We are also cheap fuckers (a theme I heard over and over again at Netroots Nation.)  I'm not talking about the rank and file -- not the people who are barely scraping by, who write to Blue Gal and me every day, who drop us a fiver they can't afford "thank you" notes that blows us away. No, I'm talking about Liberals with very, very deep pockets. The ones on Obama's platinum donor list. The ones who kick it at Davos. Who spend summer on the French Riviera and winters in St. Moritz and who are cheap fuckers when it comes to building the institutions on which a movement depends.

The Right beat us into a corner because they were willing to spend without limit, decade after decade after decade. Willing to spend whatever it took to build political think tanks and interlocking media empires which all geared to pour continuous hellfire onto the word "Liberal".

And it worked.

We, on the other hand, couldn't manage to keep the Koufax Awards going.