This Column is a Trick -- Part II

Just like last time. see if you can spot it.  Without Googling.  I'm serious.  I will pull this blog over.

From David Brooks in The New York Times, November 4, 2017:

The Values-Vote Myth

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put Donald Trump over the top.

This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong...

...
It's ridiculous to say, as some liberals have this week, that we are perpetually refighting the Scopes trial, with the metro forces of enlightenment and reason arrayed against the retro forces of dogma and reaction.

In the first place, there is an immense diversity of opinion within regions, towns and families. Second, the values divide is a complex layering of conflicting views about faith, leadership, individualism, American exceptionalism, suburbia, Wal-Mart, decorum, economic opportunity, natural law, manliness, bourgeois virtues and a zillion other issues.

But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Trump. If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are?

What we are seeing is a diverse but stable Republican coalition gradually eclipsing a diverse and stable Democratic coalition. Social issues are important, but they don't come close to telling the whole story. Some of the liberal reaction reminds me of a phrase I came across recently: The rage of the drowning man.

Did you spot it?

Yes, it is from The New York Times.

And, yes, it is from Mr. David Brooks

And, yes, it is from November 4.

But it's from November 4, 2004.

A little over 13 years ago.

And the subject of the article is not Donald J. Trump, but George W. Bush.  And literally all I did in the excerpts I reprinted was swap one name --

The Values-Vote Myth

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top.

This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong...

-- for the other.  

My point being, Mr. David Brooks has made an entire career out of being America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual.  Made himself rich off of his reputation as the guy who can speak on NPR and PBS and Meet the Press and from the high pulpit of The New York Times' editorial page with sweeping, unimpeachable, ex cathedra authority about the true nature and trajectory of his Republican Party.

And yet, in all that time, it is brutally obvious that Mr. Brooks has never once summoned the nerve or the initiative to actually look and see what sort of people actually make up the rank and file of his Republican Party.  Never once dared to open the access panel of the Pretty Hate Machine that has made him a very rich man to check out how that machine really works and who it really serves.

In 2003, Jason Blair was cashiered from The New York Times for fabricating or plagiarizing details in a half dozen stories he had written for the Times.  And rightly so.  So given that well-established New York Times standard, what do you suppose the penalty would be for someone who fabricated an entire Imaginary Republican Party out of thin air,  populated it with a menagerie of non-existent voters and leaders, and imbued it with a fictional past, a fake present, and wholly preposterous future?  Someone who has -- despite overwhelming and ongoing evidence to the contrary -- continued to write in-depth about his entirely Imaginary Republican Party as if it were the Pure Quill, twice a week, nearly every week, for the past thirteen years?

If you guessed that the penalty for such a monstrous crime against journalism would be a job-for-life at the same corporation that fired Blair and the respect and deference of his professional colleagues, you would be correct.

Funny old world.

Behold, a Tip Jar!