My Amazing Political Card Trick

So, in the theater of your imagination, imagine me fanning out, say, five hundred David Brooks columns.  Like deck after deck of cards in the hands of Ricky Jay, appearing and then being flicked one by one. neatly and precisely, here, there and everywhere until the stage is covered with them.  Five  hundred columns, all face-down, which have already been chosen at random from the pile of more than a thousand such columns which The New York Times has paid Mr. Brooks to write over the past 15 years.

Then I ask for one hundred volunteers from the audience -- you, the readers -- to step up and each pick one.  Any one you like.  Entirely at random.  In fact, I'll stand way over in the corner where I can't influence your decision in any way.   Then keeping them all face down, I ask each of you to very slowly run one finger down the underside of the slip of paper you hold in your hand.

Starting...Now!

Alright...Stop!

Now, turn the paper over and, at the place where your finger has come to rest, read what is written there and tell me if it is some generic, off-the-rack Both Siderist horseshit that sounds a whole lot like this:

Both the Trumpian populists and the social justice warriors are more intent on denouncing the people they hate than on addressing the concrete problems before them..

Or this:

Trump’s convention speech was the perfect embodiment of the politics of distrust... 

Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” riff comes from the same spiritual place...

Or this:

Devoted Conservatives subscribe to a Hobbesian narrative... 

Progressive Activists, on the other hand, subscribe to a darkened Rousseauian worldview...

If I could pull that of with the right lighting and level of theatricality, the "oohs" and "ahs" and shouts of "How the deuce does he do it!" would go on for 20 minutes.

I'd tour the capitols of Europe!  I'd be the toast of Old London Towne!

And the trick is, that there is no trick whatsoever.  Because if you pick literally any David Brooks column from the period after he scuttled away from the collapse of Dubya Administration until today -- literally any column -- and scrape off all the wistful sighing, the more-in-sorrow hectoring, the bunkum, the cloying pseudo-religious argle bargle, the wishy-washy flapdoodle and the outright lies,  you will invariably find the same Both Siderist razor-in-the-apple buried in pretty much the same place. every time.

Here is Monday's column.  Once again it is a simple tale of heroes and villains.

The villains are, as usual the, Extremes on Both Sides:

What is new is how cultish this dispute has become. The researchers asked a wide variety of questions, on everything from child-rearing to national anthem protests. In many cases, 97 to 99 percent of Progressive Activists said one thing and 93 to 95 percent of Dedicated Conservatives said the opposite. There’s little evidence of individual thought, just cult conformity. The current situation really does begin to look like the religious wars that ripped through Europe after the invention of the printing press, except that our religions now wear pagan political garb.

The good news is that once you get outside these two elite groups you find a lot more independent thinking and flexibility. This is not a 50-50 nation. It only appears that way when disenchanted voters are forced to choose between the two extreme cults...

Devils!

And who are the heroes?

Well, they're the good, old-fashioned, real Murrican Joey Sixpacks, trapped in the Sensible Center by the mad dogs of the Left and the Right.  Cut off from the Promised Land with no voice of their own and no Moses to lead them.

Joey doesn't know much about history; he was born in 1983 and was only 6 when the Berlin Wall fell. He really has no firm idea of what labels like liberal and conservative mean. But now he is in college, and he's been glued to the cable coverage ... and is ready to form some opinions. Over the past months, certain facts and characters have entered his consciousness, like characters in a play he is seeing for the first time... 

The American system of government, moreover, is clearly the best system. In Joey's eyes, the United Nations is a fractious debating society. The European Union is split. The French are insufferable, the Germans both hostile and pacifist. The Arab ruling class is treacherous... 

In Joey's eyes, the people who get to do the most exciting things are not members of the meritocratic elite--Harvard and Stanford alums who start software companies. They are the regular men and women of the armed forces, or, as he remembers from the days after 9/11, they are firemen and cops. They are people without prestigious degrees and high income prospects... 

Joey likes to think of himself as fundamentally independent. He looks at the people living in their dream palaces--the Arabists, the European elites, the Bush haters--and he knows he doesn't want to be like them. He doesn't want to be so zealous and detached from reality... 

The final group Joey sees on the political landscape are the marchers. These people are always in the streets with their banners and puppets. They march against the IMF and World Bank one day, and against whatever war happens to be going on the next. Joey is not sure what these people are for. ...They just march against. Joey figures it must be part of their personality. 

Joey knows that this is what people did in the 1960s, and he regards the marchers as vaguely archaic. He knows that they tend to come from Hollywood and academia. Joey is not hostile to those worlds. He loves movies and likes many of his professors. He just senses that they are cloistered worlds, removed from day-to-day reality, and he doesn't plan on spending his life there. Marching for peace is something people in those worlds do...

Yes, if he can only get his shit together and find a leader that speaks his language, good ol' Joey may yet save us all!

Joey isn't one of a kind. There are millions of Joeys, and variations on Joey. Inevitably, then, in ways subtle and profound, the events of the past month will shape our politics for the rest of our lives.

Oh wait a minute.  I am terribly sorry.  This is not David Brooks in The New York Times yesterday.

In an early example of what the literary world would come to call Magic Ruralism, this is David Brooks in The Weekly Standard 15 years ago,  writing about how the unhinged Extremists on the Left (that would be you and me) and the  "--the Arabists, the European elites, the Bush haters--" would soon cause Joey Tabula Rasa (seriously, that's the moniker David Fucking Brooks invented for his Imaginary Proletariat Hero of a working class about which Mr. Brooks has never had the slightest clue) to rise like a Patriotic Murrican Colossus and demand that we Libtards shut the fuck up once and for all and finally acknowledge the unrivaled genius of  George W. Bush.

Please excuse the error.  I assure you, the hapless goof who caused it will be sacked.

And speaking of hapless goofs who should be sacked...

...this is Mr Brooks this week (the part of "Joey Tabula Rasa" is now being played by  "the exhausted majority".)

Roughly two-thirds of Americans, across four political types, fall into what the authors call “the exhausted majority.” Sixty-one percent say people they agree with need to listen and compromise more. Eighty percent say political correctness is a problem, and 82 percent say the same about hate speech.

Unfortunately, people in the exhausted majority have no narrative. They have no coherent philosophic worldview to organize their thinking and compel action...

So right off the bat you should leave here immediately (well, as soon as you have made a substantial contribution to my pre-birthday fundraiser -- see TIP JAR below) and head over to Salon to read this article:

Do Americans really hate “political correctness”? Another misguided attempt at balance falls flat

In a lightning-rod article, Yascha Mounk claims most Americans hate “political correctness.” What does that mean?

Why should you read it?  Because in a brick-by-brick deconstruction of Yascha Mounk's article it uses salty language like this:

Pretty much all of this is bunk, starting with the 80 percent figure, as James Newburg, a University of Michigan grad student, explained in a Twitter thread...

And this:

But you don’t have to be an ANES nerd to have figured this out. The “Hidden Tribes” report itself presents evidence to the contrary in a chart on page 129, the page before the chart showing how isolated left-wing elitists are! It shows that 67 percent of Americans think "We need to protect people from dangerous and hateful speech," with only the three most conservative "tribes" registering at less than 70 percent and "Devoted Conservatives" far outside the mainstream at 43 percent. That’s almost the exact opposite of the point Mounk’s article tried to make, and points to much deeper problems with the report, which is basically clueless about the actual long-term forces driving polarization.

And this:

“Political polarization is a byproduct of structural economic and political features, as well as a cause of a host of other bad outcomes,” Texas A&M research scientist Nick Davis told Salon. “I don't understand how asking people to be more patient or less caustic about an administration and party that seems hell-bent on trampling human dignity is going to do anything to reverse those trends.”

So, again, why should you care about that, because sweet Jebus, driftglass, your shit is TL:DR enough already without handing out homework, OK?

Because Mr. Brooks' entire column (ahh) of off-the-rack wistful sighs, more-in-sorrow hectoring, bunkum, cloying pseudo-religious argle bargle, wishy-washy flapdoodle and Both Siderist bromides --

Devoted Conservatives subscribe to a Hobbesian narrative... 

Progressive Activists, on the other hand, subscribe to a darkened Rousseauian worldview...

-- is built around this single, fatally flawed hot take on American culture and politics.

More old whine in new skins.

But just for the hell of it, let's talk about that “exhausted majority" who lack a "coherent philosophic worldview to organize their thinking and compel action".

What about clean air, David?  Or clean water? Or safe schools?  Or affordable health care?  What about decent jobs at decent wages? What about respect for basic human rights?  What about a sustainable future?

To me -- a card-carrying, extreme Libtard cultist -- these all seem like pretty decent, easy-to-understand views around which to organize one's thinking and compel action.

So, Mr. Brooks, which of our "extreme cults" actually works hard, issue by issue, to patiently build policies and electoral mandates to deal with these problems...and which of our cults wants to smash it all down because Gummint is Evil and because they have substituted "letting Rush Limbaugh take a dump in their skulls" for thinking for the last 30 years?

Which of our "extreme cults" walked on egg-shells and treated the unhinged, rage-drunk Republican Party with the kid gloves Mr. Brooks and his imaginary love-child, Joey Tabula Rasa, believes they deserve?  Which of our "extreme cults" twice elected a calm, rational, humane, honorable, compromise-prone Centrist president who -- in the middle of two wars, a global economic collapse and a health care debacle all of which were brought to us courtesy of Mr. Stephens' Republican Party -- offered the GOP every possible opportunity not to be racist, seditious assholes?

Which of our "extreme cults" told Barack Obama to go pound sand and then elected the King of the Birther?

Two years ago in NYMag, this question broke briefly out of the Liberal blogger ghetto when Jonathan Chait summarized the intellectual rot at the heart of David Brooks' Fake Centrism.  The response from the rest of his colleagues was a swift and complete silence:

...

But even if you accept this very strange notion of the political alignment in Trump’s Washington, it raises a question Brooks is not prepared to answer. If his objection on the left lies with the “Sanders socialism,” then isn’t there an appealing centrist lying to the right of that? A moderate who favors market-oriented solutions that bring together business and labor, who welcomes empiricism, and is willing to compromise? A politician who has led the Democratic Party for the last eight years and, in fact, is still the sitting president of the United States right now?

One might think so. But Brooks spent the last eight years defining the center as something Obama was not. It didn’t matter that Obama supported a health-care plan first devised by Mitt Romney, or a cap-and-trade plan endorsed by John McCain. Brooks nestled himself into the territory between Obama and the angry, no-compromise Republicans who were shutting down government and boycotting all negotiations with the president. If Obama endorsed the policies Brooks preferred, he would simply pretend that Obama had not proposed them. Indeed, one of the most common genres of David Brooks column was a sad lament that neither party would endorse policies that in fact Obama had explicitly and publicly called for.

If Obama offered a deal to raise taxes through tax reform while reducing entitlements, Brooks would write a sad column about how nobody was willing to raise taxes through tax reform while reducing entitlements. If Obama favored education reform, an infrastructure bank, and more high-skill immigration, Brooks would write a sad column about how nobody favored those things. When Obama supported market-oriented health-care reform, Brooks opposed it as an extravagant government takeover. Then later he wrote a sad column about how “we’d have had a very different debate if we knew the law was going to be a discrete government effort to subsidize health care for more poor people” rather than “an extravagant government grab to take over the nation’s health-care system.”

The effect of all this commentary was not to empower the moderate ideas Brooks favored, but to disempower them. Brooks was emblematic of the way the entire bipartisan centrist industry conducted itself throughout the Obama years. It was neither possible for Obama to co-opt the center, nor for Republicans to abandon it, because official centrists would simply relocate themselves to the midpoint of wherever the parties happened to stand...

Mr. Brooks' relentless dishonestly has always been right there for anyone to see. And yet, after nearly 14 years of writing out this obvious fact over and over again, when I look over my shoulder I see almost no one but a few disreputable Liberal bloggers daring to say a mumbling word about it.  This is because Mr. Brooks and the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It are protected by a formidable human shield of media colleagues, pundits, Big Thinkers, deluded Pollyannas  and fellow travelers all of whom depend financially, socially and psychologically on keeping the Both Sides lie alive, even though it is clearly wrecking the country.  

That is the level of systemic corruption at which the American political media has operated for decades. 

You see, everybody knows where the Both Siderist booze is.  The problem isn't finding it.  The problem is, who wants to cross Capone?

Behold, a Tip Jar!