David Brooks: After The Liar, The Liar Still Burns

In case you hadn't noticed (and really, why would you?) Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times spends precious little time in the here-and-now.

And, really, why would he?

After all, the here-and-now is an ongoing Republican-made, disaster-in-progress.  It's an out-of-control tire fire at a toxic chemical dump next to an orphanage.  It's a zombie plane flying on and on with a dead crew and terrified passengers until it slams into nuclear power plant adjacent to the Smithsonian.  And an orphanage.

In other words, for a life-long, wildly-overpaid professional Conservative Public Intellectual like Mr. Brooks, life in the present-tense is a life spent trying to slither between the Scylla of "Holy Shit, my Republican party really is just a mob of paranoid, racist, inbred meatbags" and the Charybdis of "Double Holy Shit, the Left really was right about the Right all along."  For Mr. David Brooks, the present comprehensively sucks, which is why Mr. Brooks spends virtually all of this time either spinning fairy-tales about a Glorious Imaginary Past in which the last 50 years of Republican depravity in the service of oligarchy does not exist...or a Grand Imaginary Future in which everything turns out just great!

And thus we arrive at today's column, in which Mr. Brooks seems to clearly signal his readers which well-thumbed volume of patented Brooksian flapdoodle -- Past or Future -- he will be reciting to them today:

We Used to Build Things

...

Today’s California fires remind me of the largest fire in U.S. history, the Big Burn of 1910, which destroyed three million acres in Idaho, Montana and Washington.

But don't be fooled.  Starting off at the dawn of the 20th century is actually just Mr. Brooks' way of giving himself enough running room within the Glorious Imaginary Past to get up to speed so he can...

...complete oer'leap the last inconvenient half century of Republican perfidy and land safely within the precincts of the Grand Imaginary Future:

...

The good news is that one could have said the same thing in 1890, when politics was steeped in corruption and the economy wracked by crisis. But by 1910 the landscape was transformed. There were new organizations, new movements, a new mentality and a new burst of optimism.

Even the worst fires clear the way for new growth.

So what are the crises that Mr. Brooks hopes a cleansing fire will sweep away?

...

We’ve got just as many problems as previous generations faced — as many as in the progressive era, I’d say. Why has there been this decline in civic institution building?

Political polarization has got to be a big culprit. The federal government can’t build anything new, even something as obvious as a national service program. The churches have let us down, too. The Christian churches have been behind most of the big social movements in American history, like abolition, poverty programs and civil rights. But for the past generation the church has been fighting a defensive war against the sexual revolution, not an offensive assault for opportunity and human dignity.

Political polarization?  Yep.  Brought to you every day and twice on Sunday's for the last quarter century courtesy of Mr. Brooks' Republican party.

A federal government that has been crippled, slandered and bankrupted?  Yep.  Brought to you by the zombie spawn of this guy --

-- every fucking day of the year, even days when the zombie spawn of that guy have shut the government down in a fit of pique.

The Christopath churches whose Levitican, bigoted, anti-science, antediluvian goons have drive decent people the hell away from that nonsense?  Golly, David, who the hell do you think pulled the chair out for them in the first place?

Every decent, humane advancement made by this country has been fought tooth and nail by the movement to which Mr. Brooks has sold his time and talents for the last 30 years.  And now that the Republican party's long, wretched sojourn has finally given us President Stupid, Mr. Brooks is left with nothing to say but a tepid, G-rated little version of Travis Bickel's Taxi Driver mutterings:

Someday (Mr. Brooks confides to his readers) a real social conflagration may come and wash all this scum out of their places of power.

But of course, the Big Burn of 1910 was a natural disaster:  a catastrophe which men and women rose to meet.  But the Trump Administration -- and the Republican party which spawned it -- is the result of decades of deliberate and massive planning and investment by powerful Conservative interests.  Powerful Conservative interests who have made it perfectly clear that their goal is the destruction of the federal government of this country, and that their means to that end has been to shape the Republican base into a mob of infinitely reprogrammable meatbags who will keep handing the monsters who run their party more and more power, regardless of how much destruction they wreak on us.

You see, your party likes to see things burn, Mr. Brooks.  It is led by arsonists, and supported by a base which has been taught by those arsonists that firemen who are trying to put the fire out are actually dirty America-hating Libtards and the cause of all their problems.

And so far the only thing Republicans have ever learned from any of the conflagrations they have touched off was how to make the next one much bigger, much hotter and much more lethal.

Behold, a Tip Jar!