David Brooks Will See You On The Dark Side Of The Moon

Every year is getting shorter.

Never seem to find the time. 

Op eds either come to naught 

Or half a page of scribbled lines 

Hanging on in moneyed desperation is the Beltway way 

Your time is gone, your song is over, 

You have nothing more to say.

Like tens of millions of his fellow Americans, yesterday Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times paused in his daily perambulations long enough to look up and witness the 2017 eclipse.

But Mr. David Brooks is no ordinary American human.  Mr. Brooks a Modest Man.  A Centrist Man.  A cardinal of the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism.

Mr. Brooks believes "The truth is plural" -- a skittish unicorn which exists in "...a tension between two or more views, each of which possesses a piece of the truth."

Mr. Brooks is a sailor upon a rough sea who, like his fellow Moderate Rebel Saviors of the Republic, "...[doesn’t] operate from the safety of their ideologically pure galleons." 

A Both Siderist rebel who knows that "Creativity is syncretistic."   And that "[v]oyagers don’t just pull their ideas from the center of the ideological spectrum. They believe creativity happens when you merge galaxies of belief that seem at first blush incompatible."

Galaxies!  Galleons!  Face it people, Mr. David Brooks is a god damn raging torrent of ideas, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives who uses his tongue purdier than a twenty dollar whore.

And so, being a Americas Most Trusted Both Siderist Tension Truther, Mr. Brooks carefully listened to one side who warned that staring into the sun with your naked eye is bad, and then carefully listened to the other side which believes that science is bunkum.  Then, merging those galaxies of partial truths, Mr. Brooks confidently closed one eye and stared directly into the sun with the other.  

Then there was a tiny sizzling sound.  Like spit hitting a hot griddle.  Followed by a fast trip to the ER.  Followed by a somber conversation between Mr. Brooks and his person physician.   Apparently, in addition to frying his sclera, cornea. pupil, iris, vitreous humors, retina, and optic nerve, Mr. Brooks also cooked the bits of his cerebral cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia that handle the perception of time.

Which is why Mr. Brooks apparently his no memory whatsoever of already writing this same fucking ridiculous Both Siderist claptrap over and over and over again pretty much every god damn week, rain or shine, for the past 14 years.

David Brooks, “Party No. 3”, August, 2006:

...

There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.

All were on display Tuesday night.

The Democratic Party was represented by its rising force — Ned Lamont on a victory platform with the net roots exulting before him and Al Sharpton smiling just behind.

The Republican Party was represented by its collapsing old guard — scandal-tainted Tom DeLay trying to get his name removed from the November ballot. And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.

The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.

The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.

But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.

The McCain-Lieberman Party counters with constant reminders that country comes before party, that in politics a little passion energizes but unmarshaled passion corrupts, and that more people want to vote for civility than for venom.

...

David Brooks, "What Independents Want", November 2009

Liberals and conservatives each have their own intellectual food chains. They have their own think tanks to provide arguments, politicians and pundits to amplify them, and news media outlets to deliver streams of prejudice-affirming stories.

Independents, who are the largest group in the electorate, don’t have any of this. They don’t have institutional affiliations. They don’t look to certain activist lobbies for guidance. There aren’t many commentators who come from an independent perspective.

...

The most telling races this year were the suburban rebellions across the country. For example, in Westchester and Nassau counties in New York, Republican candidates came from nowhere to defeat entrenched Democratic county officials. In blue Pennsylvania, the G.O.P. won six out of seven statewide offices.

...

Why? What do these voters want?

...

According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who believe that there is too much government regulation rose from 38 percent in 2008 to 45 percent in 2009. The percentage of Americans who want unions to have less influence rose from 32 percent to a record 42 percent.

Americans have moved to the right on abortion, immigration and global warming. Over the past seven months, the number of people who say government is doing too many things better left to business has jumped from 40 percent to 48 percent, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll...

If I were a politician trying to win back independents, I’d say something like this: When I was a kid, I had a jigsaw puzzle of the U.S...

Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order...

And David Brooks today: "What Moderates Believe":

...

For some people, the warriors of the populist right must be replaced by warriors of the populist left. For these people, Trump has revealed an ugly authoritarian tendency in American society that has to be fought with relentless fervor and moral clarity.

For others, it’s Trump’s warrior mentality itself that must be replaced. Warriors on one side inevitably call forth warriors on the other, and that just means more culture war, more barbarism, more dishonesty and more dysfunction.

The people in this camp we will call moderates. Like most of you, I dislike the word moderate. It is too milquetoast. But I’ve been inspired by Aurelian Craiutu’s great book “Faces of Moderation” to stick with this word, at least until a better one comes along.

Moderates do not see politics as warfare. Instead, national politics is a voyage with a fractious fleet. Wisdom is finding the right formation of ships for each specific circumstance so the whole assembly can ride the waves forward for another day.

...

According to Mr. Brooks, "moderates" just so happen to also not like it when Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter are denied their inalienable right to get paid for spewing white supremacist bile on campus, and "moderates" also cried themselves to sleep over a Google employee being fired for saying stupid shit, because "moderates" know these are merely the rest stops on the Road to Tyranny!

If you try to suppress those facts, by banning a speaker or firing an employee, then you are putting the goals of your cause, no matter how noble, above the search for truth. This is the path to fanaticism, and it always backfires in the end.

"Moderates" also hate monads!  

Before they brutalize politics, warriors brutalize themselves. Instead of living out several identities — Latina/lesbian/gun-owning/Christian — that pull in different directions, they turn themselves into monads.

And there is more.  So much more.  And all of it is treacly and nauseating and aggressively and willfully oblivious to everything of political importance that has happened in America for the past four decades.  Ending with this:

If you have elected a man who is not awed by the complexity of the world, but who filters the world to suit his own narcissism, then woe to you, because such a man is the opposite of the moderate voyager type. He will reap a whirlwind. 

In fact, Democrats did elect a man who checks every one of Mr. Brooks' boxes.  A modest, competent, incrementalist who Mr. Brooks' Republican Party spent eight straight years tirelessly trying to destroy at any price.

And then Mr. Brooks' Republican Party elected an unhinged, racist monster, because Republicans are unhinged racist monsters.

In case I was not clear enough the last 1,000 times I have written this, Mr. Brooks is not putting together galleons.  Or assembling a  fractious fleet. Or trying to jigger some other nautical cliche into just the right formation.  

Mr. Brooks is once again trying to tinker together an armada of Both Siderist lifeboats our of the timbers of his last armada of Both Siderist lifeboats, which he constructed out of the timbers of the Both Siderism lifeboat armada before that.  Mr. Brooks is doing the only thing he has ever done: salvaging his career and his reputation, and the careers and reputations of his Beltway cronies by creating a safe, Both Siderist place for all of them to hide from the consequence of their incompetence, fraud and years and years of Quisling complicity.

And once again there will be no one to stand their way but you and me kids.

Behold, a Tip Jar!