David Brooks: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Pretend The Civil War Never Happened

After a long and profitable career spent slandering and ignoring Liberals who were warning that the real Conservative agenda has always been a rollback of the Enlightenment itself, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has finally come to that place where most ideologically-bankrupt Beltway Conservatives eventually arrive: bootlegging our entire critique of his depraved movement -- from soup to nuts -- and reprinted it as their own Breathless Epiphany without mentioning us dirty hippies at all.  

The Enlightenment Project

David Brooks

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Hill didn’t say it, but I’d add that anti-Enlightenment thinking is also back in the form of Donald Trump, racial separatists and the world’s other populist ethnic nationalist movements.

Today’s anti-Enlightenment movements don’t think truth is to be found through skeptical inquiry and debate. They think wisdom and virtue are found in the instincts of the plain people, deep in the mystical core of the nation’s or race’s group consciousness.

Today’s anti-Enlightenment movements believe less in calm persuasion and evidence-based inquiry than in purity of will. They try to win debates through blunt force and silencing unacceptable speech.

...

When Trump calls the media the “enemy of the people” he is going after the system of conversation, debate and inquiry that is the foundation for the entire Enlightenment project...

Of course, "Repeating as Breathless Epiphany stuff that thoughtful Liberals have been saying for the last 30 years" used to be Mr. Andrew Sullivan's job back when he was a "blogger" (as you might have heard me mention once or twice) -- 

-- but now that Mr. Sullivan is busy not-blogging at New York Magazine about how we Liberal sons-of-bitches are responsible for spawning Conservatism's worst hate-mongers,  I guess Mr. David Brooks now has the duty.

(Heh.  He said "doodie")

If you would like to read whole books on the subject by respectable people who were saying all of this a long time ago, you could pick up a copy of "Bush's Fringe Government" by  Garry Wills (2006) or anything by Frank Schaeffer.

If you would like to read articles in respectable magazines that were saying all of this a long time ago, you could do worse than "America Rapture" from Vanity Fair in December, 2005:

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Best-selling author and evangelical leader Tim LaHaye has contacts that extend to the White House. That could spell trouble, since his theology espouses a bloody apocalypse in Israel.

“LaHaye writes as if there’s a humanist brain trust sitting around reading [American philosopher and educational reformer] John Dewey, trying to figure out ways to destroy Christianity,” says Chip Berlet, a senior analyst with Political Research Associates and the co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort.

“In LaHaye’s world, there are the godly people who are on their way to the Rapture,” says Berlet. “And the rest of the world is either complicit with the Antichrist or, worse, actively assisting him. If you really believe in End Times, you are constantly looking for agents of Satan.… [And if] political conflicts are rooted in the idea that your opponent is an agent of the Devil, there is no compromise possible. What decent person would compromise with evil? So that removes it from the democratic process.

“Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation want to roll back the New Deal. LaHaye wants to roll back the Enlightenment.”
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Or, if you prefer taking your drams of "We Fucking Told You So" on the less reputable side of town, you could always stop by the Liberal blogosphere, where the glasses are dirty, but the pours are generous

From me back in 2006) ...

Like Colonial Williamsburg or South Dakota, Americans had manufactured another wholly fake community for some socially intriguing reason that our descendants (or the descendants of the people we speak to when we call the 800-number on the back of our major appliances when they flake out) will theorize cleverly about. 

That rather than efficiently generically engineering the incapacitating disease of conservative fundamentalism out of our blood, we humanely gave them their own s-l-o-w children’s camp. It was a dim-but-cheery place with its own, comforting fake history of the planet, its own cartoon God, and even its own news network that told the stupid people that God loved them better than anyone else. That they didn’t need sense enough to pound sand or as much compassion as God gave a Pitcher plant, as long as they were “Saved”. 

And anyway, they weren’t really stupid. 

The “elites” were stupid.

And maybe these “Flowers For AlgernonLand” designers even had a few chuckles at the expense of their devolved fellow citizens; perhaps once in a while laughing themselves to tears as the dense denizens of the place scared themselves over and over again scampering down “The dimly lit Corruption galleries, by comparison, will feature videos of pain and suffering, noxious odors and the heat, literally, turned up.”

Dumbing down by several orders of magnitude a complex allegory about the inherency of pain and loss in a dualistic Universe within the field of Time…into God’s own a Pull-My-Finger joke. 

At least I hope that’s the tale they’ll tell themselves, because the truth is so much simpler and sadder. 

The truth is that for all of its think tanks, fake media and Small Gummint bluster, the Republican Party would evaporate tomorrow like dew in a firestorm if it were not kept lavishly stocked with bigots and idiots. Without its bumper crop of racists yielded from the Southern Strategy, its millions of fanatically anti-Enlightenment Christopaths and the millions of garden variety stupids, the GOP would be one dead fucking parrot…and the people running the Party like a Long Con damned well know it.

...

From me, again, back in 2006:

...the Battle of Tours took place on a particular date and no other, within a particular context. 

Hannibal was not defeated by Tomahawk missiles. 

The atomic weight of Selenium is 78.96. 

You cannot poke the Moon with a stick, no matter how high a roof you find to perch on and how much on ippy-tippy-toes you stand.

Even if you stand on your brother’s shoulders on that very same roof and he stands on ippy-tippy-toes.

Even if you throw the stick. Unless you throw it at upwards of 25,000 miles per hour. And have VERY good aim.

So literality has its uses, but it becomes a cultural disaster when you try to crush faith into that frame, and it is at this point at which these so-called Christians fail Christianity; at which Fundamentalist try to mortar-and-pestle the poetry and parable of religion onto their tiny skulls. This is the precise mile-marker at which millions upon millions of American’s have decided to abandon the Enlightenment and flee pell-mell back into darkness.

Hey look!  It's me back in 2007!

And since today's GOP will always put Party ahead of Nation, and will never risk it’s long-term project oblivion by eradicating the Wingnuts who win it’s elections, staff its phone banks, stuff its envelopes and define it’s dogmatic parameters, they will keep this country stuck in a religious-hypocrisy-stasis in the exactly the same way we were was stuck in a civil-rights-stasis when we castigated the USSR for human rights abuses abroad while tolerating segregation and lynching here at home.

I mean, who in their right mind is going to believe that we stand for Enlightenment and Democracy as long as preening demagogues and raging fascists like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity continue to be the faces and voices of one of our two main political Parties?...

So there's that.

But sadly, dear reader, I feel I must inflict one more reprint on you to make a larger and very creepy point. Specifically, that in order to keep their High and Holy Church of Both Siderism from collapsing completely, Beltway Conservatives are now resorting to pretending that the American Civil War never happened.

Allow me to repeat that.

Beltway Conservatives are now resorting to pretending that the American Civil War never happened.

ABC News' chief political analysis -- Mr. Matthew Dowd -- did so just last week: imploring The Bastard President to look to Mount Rushmore  to understand what makes leader's great.  As examples of great leaders who "unify the country and build up the bonds that linked all Americans to each other."

Here is part of what I wrote in reply:

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Yeah, the monkey-wrench in this evergreen Beltway Both Siderist fairy unity tale is always Lincoln. The man who, along with George Washington, bookends the faces on Mount Rushmore.   Who launched his political career about two miles of my little house right here in the middle of Middle America, and whose tomb is my town's most famous and revered site.

Lincoln -- America's first Republican president -- did, in fact, attempt to "unify the country and build up the bonds that linked all Americans to each other".  But the slave-holding South would have none of it: their fervent belief their "peculiar institution" was both sanctioned by Almighty God and critical to their economic future made unity or compromise so unthinkable that they seceded from the Union and turned their guns on the federal government rather than discuss the matter any further. Convinced that they were fighting with the Lord on their side against an implacable and existentially evil enemy, they launched a civil war that ended only after their cities were burned, their ships sunk, their armies destroyed and their Confederacy blown to bits at the cost of over 600,000 dead.

And even after America paid this terrible price to settle the question of slavery once and for all, the minute the Union army's boot was taken off of their collective throats, the states of the former Confederacy immediately went back to their old ways and Jim Crow was born.

So "unity" my shiny metal ass...

Which brings us back to Mr. David Brooks in The New York Times today:

When anti-Enlightenment movements arose in the past, Enlightenment heroes rose to combat them. Lincoln was no soulless technocrat. He fought fanaticism by doubling down on Enlightenment methods, with charity, reason and patience. He worked tirelessly for unity over division. He was a hopeful pessimist who knew the struggle would be long but he had faith in providence and ultimate justice.

And again, "unity" my shiny metal ass.

In the face of such blatant and radical revisionism marshaled in defense of a lifetime of fraud and incompetence, what can one say but, Holy Fuck, David!  Literally the only earned credential you have to your name is a bachelors degree in history from the University of Chicago, David, and you forgot the fucking Civil War.

How, David?

How the fuck do you forget the fucking Civil War?