Joey Tabula Rasa Revisited

David Brooks is back baby!  Back from traveling the country to talk to Real Murricans, touch Indians see the mountains and the prairies and the whole rest of that song...

...just in time to promote the paperback release of his book.

Which is weird, because for a very, very long time, Mr. Brooks has been dining out on his reputation for Deep Insights into the very soul of the inhabitants of the land of the free -- his nearly-superhuman understanding of the "heart has reasons that reason cannot know" business of the American people, which he vouchsafes to his Beltway colleagues every week in the reverential tone of a Yang chief incanting the E Plebnista to his tribe.

But it turned out that David Brooks never understood We The People.  Never.  Which is why, after completely and publicly screwing the pooch over the Trump nomination, instead of being sacked outright for gross and ongoing incompetence, Mr. Brooks appears to have cut a deal with his employers at the New York Times tin which he hurry-up-quick hikes up his petticoats and takes a series of short, bathyscaphic excursion down among the filthy rabble and reports back on the comings and goings of Real Americans.

I smell another best seller!  May I suggest "The Chardonnay Grapes of Wrath"?

Anyway, now that Mr. Brooks has figured out yet another tactic to avoid mentioning his many years of journalistic malpractice in the service of a party which he now confesses he does not know the first fucking thing about, I thought it would be fun (since no one else seems to have the balls to do it) to revisit the high-cotton  days of the George W. Bush administration.  Long before Mr. Brooks' latest prediction of a radical party realignment --

Time for a Realignment

-- Mr. Brooks was making exactly the same, sweeping predictions of political realignment based on the internal musings of an entirely-fiction, "typical", silent young American patriot named (I am absolutely not making this up) "Joey Tabula Rasa".

And who is Joey Tabula Rasa?

Joey doesn't know much about history; he was born in 1983 and was only 6 when the Berlin Wall fell. He really has no firm idea of what labels like liberal and conservative mean. But now he is in college, and he's been glued to the cable coverage of the war and is ready to form some opinions. Over the past months, certain facts and characters have entered his consciousness, like characters in a play he is seeing for the first time.

The first character is America itself. He sees that his country is an incredibly effective colossus that can drop bombs onto pinpoints, destroy enemies that aren't even aware they are under attack. He sees a ruling establishment that can conduct wars with incredible competence and skill. He sees a federal government that can perform its primary task--protecting the American people--magnificently.

The American system of government, moreover, is clearly the best system. In Joey's eyes, the United Nations is a fractious debating society. The European Union is split. The French are insufferable, the Germans both hostile and pacifist. The Arab ruling class is treacherous...

In Joey's eyes, the people who get to do the most exciting things are not members of the meritocratic elite--Harvard and Stanford alums who start software companies. They are the regular men and women of the armed forces, or, as he remembers from the days after 9/11, they are firemen and cops. They are people without prestigious degrees and high income prospects.

...

Joey likes to think of himself as fundamentally independent. He looks at the people living in their dream palaces--the Arabists, the European elites, the Bush haters--and he knows he doesn't want to be like them. He doesn't want to be so zealous and detached from reality...

Joey isn't one of a kind. There are millions of Joeys, and variations on Joey. Inevitably, then, in ways subtle and profound, the events of the past month will shape our politics for the rest of our lives.

Yes, back in 2003 -- at the peak of the Iraq War propaganda war, with his career firing on all cylinders -- Mr. Brooks confidently predicted that, based on the slow awakening of Joey Tabula Rasa's political consciousness. the very meaning of "progressive" and "conservative" would radically realign based entirely on the degree of support for George Bush's Awesome Iraqi Adventure.  It would be a change so tectonic that leaders of the new "progressive" movement will --

...include Christopher Hitchens, Dennis Miller, Paul Wolfowitz, Joseph Lieberman, John McCain, Richard Holbrooke, Charles Krauthammer, the staff of Fox News, Bernard Lewis, and George Bush.

-- and leaders in the new "conservative" movement will include:

...Brent Scowcroft, Joe Klein, the State Department, John Kerry, Chris Matthews, Robert Novak, and most of the press corps.

There would also be a third group -- the "marchers" -- which would slowly fade into irreverence. 

And who's the leader of this club that's made for you and me?  

Hollywood-types and academics!  

And what does Joey Tabula Rasa thinks of the marchers?  

That the're kinda anarchic and weird, just like they were in the 60s!

The final group Joey sees on the political landscape are the marchers. These people are always in the streets with their banners and puppets. They march against the IMF and World Bank one day, and against whatever war happens to be going on the next. Joey is not sure what these people are for. They don't seem to have any alternative to globalization. They don't seem to know how to deal with the Taliban or Saddam. They just march against. Joey figures it must be part of their personality.

Joey knows that this is what people did in the 1960s, and he regards the marchers as vaguely archaic. He knows that they tend to come from Hollywood and academia. Joey is not hostile to those worlds. He loves movies and likes many of his professors. He just senses that they are cloistered worlds, removed from day-to-day reality, and he doesn't plan on spending his life there. Marching for peace is something people in those worlds do...

And now, 13 years later and a thousand failures later, and we find the Sage of the Acela Corridor still revered by his Beltway tribe and still prospering from plying the same old trade: spinning and selling the fairy tales his tribe wants to hear as if they were holy writ.

You know, perhaps as a public service, we could give Joey Tabula Rasa the Michael Apted "Up" treatment.  Document the ongoing mental and emotional disintegration of Mr. Brooks' imaginary Regular Murrican every seven years as the bright Republican future Mr. Brooks invented for him in 2003 gradually collapses under the weight of the horrifying Republican reality which Mr. Brooks has worked so hard to enact.