Imaginary Whigs Assemble! -- Update

David Brooks' Whig Fan Fiction alternate history project just went from bed-wetting pathetic to completely unhinged in one spectacular jump.

Time for a Republican Conspiracy!

Reality-based conservatives should mobilize against the hijacking of our party.

Members of the Republican governing class are like cowering freshmen at halftime of a high school football game. Some are part of the Surrender Caucus, sitting sullenly on their stools resigned to the likelihood that their team is going to get crushed. Some are thinking of jumping ship to the Trump campaign with an alacrity that would make rats admire and applaud.

Rarely has a party so passively accepted its own self-destruction...

The idea that most women, independents or mainstream order-craving suburbanites would back a guy who declares his admiration for Vladimir Putin is a mirage. The idea that the G.O.P. can march into the 21st century intentionally alienating every person of color is borderline insane.

Worse is the prospect that one of them might somehow win...

Shorter David Brooks:  Oh my holy stars and bars!  When did the Republican Party fill up with all these...Republicans!

Wow.

And so in an act of bravery rarely seen outside of "Beetle Bailey" cartoons, Mr. Brooks has taken up the Horn of Whig Clammyhand to sound the alarm

One.

Last.

Time.

Mr. Brooks continues:

...

So maybe it’s time for governing Republicans to actually do something. Yes, I’m talking to you state legislators, or local committeepersons, or members of Congress and all your networks of donors and supporters. If MoveOn can organize, if the Tea Party can organize, if Justin Bieber can build a gigantic social media movement, why are you incapable of any collective action at all?

What’s needed is a grass-roots movement that stands for governing conservatism, built both online and through rallies, and gets behind a single candidate sometime in mid- to late February...

That's right Councilman Jamm

And Councilman Dexhart

It is up to you and all of your fellow imaginary Reasonable Republican alderpersons and state senators and mosquito abatement district directors to immediately drop whatever the hell you are doing, get off your asses and form a sophisticated 50-state, web-based, grass-roots movement Right Now!  A movement so formidable, well-financed, well-managed and laser-focused that it will not only blow Cruz and Trump completely out of the water (without somehow alienating their millions of  loyal followers), but will also simultaneously transform a 98 pound electoral weakling like, say, John Kasich overnight into a sustainable political firestorm so mightily thewed that he can jump to the front of the Republican line and stay there.

And it all has to get done within the next month and a half.

Bwahahahaha!

Everyone who has ever worked in I.T. has had users like this.  They tear into your office at long past the 11th hour, asking/demanding/threatening that you use the Sorcery Powers of Technology to immediately and completely solve a problem that they created and that they have been blown off and let fester for months or years.  

Which is why every I.T. shop I ever worked in had some variation of this sign hanging up somewhere where the troops could see it:

But it gets better,

Mr. Brooks continues:

This new movement must come to grips with two realities. First, the electorate has changed. Less-educated voters are in the middle of a tidal wave of trauma...

Second, the Republican Party is not as antigovernment as its elites think it is. Its members no longer fit into the same old ideological categories...

Actually, this new movement must come to grips with three realities, the third of which is that this new movement will never exist except as the desperate, masturbatory projection of the stunted imagination of the one of the worst hacks in American journalism.

One of the worst hacks in American journalism continues:

Years ago, reform conservatives were proposing a Sam’s Club Republicanism, which would actually provide concrete policy ideas to help the working class, like wage subsidies, a higher earned-Income tax credit, increased child tax credits, subsidies for people who wanted to move in search of work and exemption of the first $20,000 in earnings from the Medicaid payroll tax. This would be a conservatism that emphasized social mobility at the bottom, not cutting taxes at the top.

Maybe it’s time a center-right movement actually offered that agenda...

Actually,  such a center-right movement already exists and has already been trying for years to improve the lives and opportunities of the poor and the working class.  It's called "The Democratic Party" and -- spoiler alert! -- they could have made so much more progress in helping the poor and the working class had Mr. Brooks' Republican Party not made an absolute fetish out of blocking them at any cost every single fucking time they tried.

You know, as America's leading Brooksologist, after Mr. Brooks tipped his hand with a SparkNotes version of this hysteria on The New Hour on Friday, I had a pretty good idea that this was the long, crazy corridor down which he would be caroming today.

And so, to be honest, at the moment I have nothing much to add to the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of essays I have already pissed away into the abyss over the last 11 years, accurately deconstructing the descent of the GOP into raving barbarianism and the accompanying simpering, willful denialism and craven careerism which Mr. Brooks and his wealthy collaborators in the mainstream press have tarted up to look like Very Serious Conservative Public Intellectualism.

People like David Brooks got rich building this party, step by step, column by column.  Their movement crippled  this country and immiserated its weakest and most helpless citizens, and now that the madness they helped unleash has turned on them, I have no tears left for poor David Brooks, sniveling safely behind the wall of money which his career as a Conservative propagandist has provided.  

Instead, I'll laugh my ass off for another few minutes, finish up this post, and then get back to what I have been doing almost every day for the last seven years: gleaning the want-ads and the online job-boards to find any job that will help me and my family work our way back into the working class.


Update:  The American Conservative underscores the yawning chasm between the wishful thinking of Mr. Brooks' pathetic Whig fan fiction and the hard and ugly realities roiling at the heart of the Republican party:

...Even if there were enough time over the next few weeks to do what Brooks suggests, there is no agreement on which “establishment” candidate such a “movement” ought to back. What Brooks proposes would be the very definition of an “astroturf” movement designed to stymie and thwart the two leading candidates for the nomination. It would be seen for exactly what it is: a last-minute attempt by the people that have presided over decades of poor Republican leadership to retain control of a party whose members are sick of them. It would fail, and it should.

Near the end of his column, Brooks asserts:

There’s a silent majority of hopeful, practical, programmatic Republicans.

That seems to be wrong as a matter of fact. Trump and Cruz supporters account for more than 50% of Republicans nationally. Throw in Carson supporters, and you’re getting close to two-thirds. The majority of Republicans isn’t interested in what Brooks is selling, and an eleventh-hour “conspiracy” against the voters isn’t going to change that.

Or, as I wrote five long years ago...

Well Into Their 117th Trimesters 

 

David Brooks and David Frum both suddenly decide they really don't want to keep Reagan's baby...