David Brooks Is Trolling Me

Since the day I opened this little blog out in the far, weed-choked exurbs of respectability, I have maintained -- often quite bluntly and with salty language that would make my pastor blush -- that understanding how America's Most Ubiquitous Public Intellectual maintains his position at the top of the American pundit food chain despite always being wrong all the time is not much of a mystery once you understand that whether or not Mr. Brooks is ever right about anything is irrelevant to of The New York Times.

Because "being right about things" is not, in fact, his job.

So if "being right about things" has nothing to do with the reason The New York Times and NPR and PBS and NBC shower Mr. Brooks with wealth and influence, then what exactly is his job?

I'm glad you asked! 

From me,  several years ago...

...it is now painfully clear that Mr. Brooks is engaged in a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political  economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

And odds are he'll get away with it too.

Also from me, some years ago 

David Brooks:  The Great Project Continues, Ctd.

Longtime readers know of my crazy theory that Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times does not write editorial columns twice a week per se, but is instead engaged in a massive, long-range project to assemble an entire, fictional alternate history of Modern Conservationism, which is being created right before our eyes by the slow, steady accretion of one godawful Whig Fan Fiction column at at time.

I make mention of it every now and then --

To David Brooks' ongoing, long-range project of radically revising modern history by removing all the Republican treasony bits, you may now add this little gem of falsification which was partially buried under his woozy praise for Hillary Clinton's "muscular" ideas about foreign policy...

-- not because I am under any illusion that I can do anything to stop it --

These stories are not about the world as it actually exists, but the world as Mr. Brooks wishes it to be.  And since he is not a very good fiction writer, there are many, many points where the gears of the real world and his fake Whig World grind and howl, forcing Mr. Brooks to apply gallons of fictive lubricant to keep the keening noise of the real world ripping Whig World off its hinges from drowning out the tepid drone of his writing.

When Mr. Brooks needs an imaginary moral high ground of Centrism on which to stand, he conjures an imaginary army of Dirty Fucking Hippies on the Left that exactly counterpoises the very real mob of Pig People on the Right. 

When he wants to redress what he believes to be the immorality of the deficit, he wishes away the entire, debt-drunk Bush Era and instead pounds away at naughty people having sexy sex time in ways Mr. Brooks does not approve of and invents Whig FanFic "grand bargain" and "austerity" sub-genres wherein he expounds his on his rustic theories about money and cutting social programs.  After which he regularly has his ass absolutely sawed off and served up on the fine china by people like Dean Baker and Paul Krugman and myriad others who actually know what they're talking about....

-- but simply because it is sickening to see such a brazen slow-motion theft and mutilation of history --

University of Chicago history baccalaureate David "Even David Brooks" Brooks has written a genuinely remarkable and revealing column about the rise and fall of American Conservatism.

What makes it remarkable and revealing it is not its scholarly depth or historical breadth or scathing, confessional honesty, but rather that it is a work of almost pure fiction being passed off as fact in America's Newspaper of Record

In his fairy tale, Mr. Brooks describes and eulogizes a fictional Conservatism built from a tense but harmonious fusion between what Mr. Brooks refers to as "economic conservatives" and "traditional conservatives" -- 

The economic conservatives were in charge of the daring ventures that produced economic growth. The traditionalists were in charge of establishing the secure base — a society in which families are intact, self-discipline is the rule, children are secure and government provides a subtle hand.

-- that never existed in the real world...

...whereas the real American Conservatism that has blighted this land for +30 years -- the Conservatism  of Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, Phyllis Schlafly, Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater and the Southern Strategy -- is to be found nowhere at all in Mr. Brooks' telling.

Remarkable.

-- taking place in broad daylight, with no one else saying or doing a damn thing about it.

Which brings us to Mr. David Brook' column in the in today's NYT:

The Whig Party is so lit right now. https://t.co/ZLyJlxfvv4

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) May 15, 2018

I have nothing further to add to my previous statements.

Behold, a Tip Jar!