In which David Brooks takes a short respite from his grand, pious and very lucrative Episcopalian tent revival "Scold America Tour" to lie about American politics.
The Center-Right MomentMAY 12, 2015...Globally, voters are disillusioned with large public institutions. They seem to want to reassert local control and their own particular nationalism (Scottish or anything else). But they also seem to want a slightly smaller public sector, strong welfare state reform and more open and vibrant labor markets as a path to prosperity.For some reason, American politicians are fleeing from this profile, Hillary Clinton to the further left and Republicans to the right.
As longtime readers know, the end-game of Mr. Brooks' "Great Project" is the methodical sandblasting of the last 30 years of Conservative history out of existence and the "repackag[ing] of the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks". And while his long con depends on a number of major and minor scams all working harmoniously together ("Off the top of my head, I'd say you're looking at a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros and a Leon Spinks, not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever!") the two pillars of his long con without which the Great Project cannot function are:
- The constant, constant, constant repetition of the Big Lie that American politics is fucked up because it is hostage to two, equally culpable political cliques -- one on the Right and one on the Left -- which are both equally intractable, powerful, irrational, well-funded and destructive and both on the run from an imaginary Reasonable Center which always just happens to be wherever Mr. Brooks is pitching camp for the night. And...
- A cabal of media cronies who are financially dependent on never, ever pointing out that this is arrant bullshit.
As I have written many times before, Modern Conservatism is not that hard to understand. It operates like a simple, two-stroke engine: Conservative demagogues like Rush Limbaugh tell the base what to think, and Conservative Thought Leaders like David Brooks tell everyone else that Conservative demagogues like Rush Limbaugh don't really exist.
I'd say more, but since David Frum (yet another, still-inexplicably-employed Bush Regime Dead Ender and devout Both Siderist) slung around pretty much this same dung last week -- and parlayed it into a seat at the MSNBC table over the weekend -- I used up my fortnight's ration of words on this subject here -- "David Frum's Awesome Imaginary Conservatism".
How both parties are misreading the times via @nytdavidbrooks http://t.co/Ug1QlpgF23
— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) May 12, 2015
2 comments:
Alberta.
And in David "Axis of Evil" Frum news, he was quick out of the gate on Twitter to blame the train derailment on the stimulus bill - because you know, in a country with something like 4 million square miles in size and 300 million people, an $800 billion stimulus bill, larded up with hundreds of billions in tax cuts to get Co-Presidents Snowe and Collins on board, should be able to fix every infrastructure deficiency everywhere forever.
Yeah, he's a "reasonable" one. God, we're all so fucked.
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