Remember When The Women's March Was an Indulgent, Frivolous Waste of Time?

Last week, as some of you recall, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times boldly threw his cap over the wall of What Worker's Want...

...and then sent an intern to fetch it back because it's a damn expensive cap and, let's face it, David Brooks knows fuck-all about the hopes and fears of the American working class.

He was, rightly and properly and for the 1,000th time, mocked across the Interwebs as a cossetted embarrassment to American journalism, which he surely is.   But none of that really matters, because the House of Sulzberger does not pay Mr. David Brooks to be a journalist.  To write in the style of planting one's feet and telling the truth.

The House of Sulzberger pays Mr. David Brooks dress up and pretend to be a journalist while spinning fables that reflect how a handful of wealthy, sclerotic plutocrats wish the world to be.  And when it turns out that the world is manifestly not as Mr. Brooks has told them it was -- when the toxic, racist sludge the GOP has been running through the veins of the American body politic erupts in an electoral embolism so monstrous that it cannot be ignored...

... Mr. David Brooks' feeble-minded acolytes turn to him not to tell them the truth -- never that -- but to tell them bigger, better comforting lies.

For example, with the issues and results of the 2018 midterms still fresh in our minds, let's set the Wayback Machine for a very short hop to "Literally Just Last Year" to find out how Mr. Brooks interpreted the Women's March for his wealthy, simpleton benefactors:

After the Women’s March

According to Mr. Brooks, sure, the march was a lot of fun for the ladies:

The women’s marches were a phenomenal success and an important cultural moment. Most everybody came back uplifted and empowered. Many said they felt hopeful for the first time since Election Day. 

But tactically, it was a silly waste of time:

But these marches can never be an effective opposition to Donald Trump.

Why?  Because these coastal elite ladies don't understand politics

In the first place, this movement focuses on the wrong issues. 

Silly ladies!

Now put on your Imagination Caps and pretend you are hearing the following in the most insufferably condescending tone of voice that human vocal cords can produce.

Of course, many marchers came with broad anti-Trump agendas, but they were marching under the conventional structure in which the central issues were clear. As The Washington Post reported, they were “reproductive rights, equal pay, affordable health care, action on climate change.”

These are all important matters, and they tend to be voting issues for many upper-middle-class voters in university towns and coastal cities. But this is 2017...

That was the sound of David Brooks patting tens of millions of women on the head and telling them, "Look toots, all this stuff may make the girls at your San Fran Cisco sewing circle swoon, but ain't nobody gonna organize and vote around it."  

And according to Mr. Brooks, what would move humans to the polls in numbers large enough to pry power out of the hand of the America Fascist Party?   Big issues.  Sweeping, abstract issues. Manly  issues.

...globalization, capitalism, adherence to the Constitution, the American-led global order. If you’re not engaging these issues first, you’re not going to be in the main arena of national life.

And what did the Women's March offer instead?

Instead, the marches offered the pink hats, an anti-Trump movement built, oddly, around Planned Parenthood, and lots of signs with the word “pussy” in them...

"Pussy" obviously confuses the hell out of David Brooks, which explains an enormous amount.

Mr. Brooks continues, explaining to the ladies that the central threat is certainly not the patriarchy.

The central threat is not the patriarchy. 

See?  (Translation:  Get your socialist lady-hands off of my wholly unearned and undeserved privilege.)

So what is the central challenge to Murrica?

The central challenge is to rebind a functioning polity and to modernize a binding American idea.

Wow.  That is a lot of words that don't add up to a damn thing.  Would you care to rephrase that?

If the anti-Trump forces are to have a chance, they have to offer a better nationalism, with diversity cohering around a central mission, building a nation that balances the dynamism of capitalism with biblical morality.

Uh huh.

Well as it turned out, rather than adopting Mr. Brooks'a bold agenda of rebinding biblical capitalism in a functioning morality of balanced dynamism or whateverthefuck he was trying to say, Democrats instead went with that Scary Vagina-Based agenda of health care, clean water, clean air, decent schools and not being racist or a misogynist.  You know, all those elements that were present right there in the DNA of that frivolous, indulgent Women's March back in January of 2017.

And based on the results as they stand today and where they look like they are headed in the days to come, the Democrat's Scary Vagina-Based agenda stomped the holy hell out of the Republican Party virtually everywhere they were within a mile of winning, up and down the ticket, at every level of government, in a year when the electoral map was brutally slanted in the Republican's direction.

And so, having had his hot-take on the Women's March stress tested and smashed to atoms out here in the Real World -- shown to be just one more slice of David Brooks-Brand Clueless Claptrap --  wouldn't it be hilarious if Mr. Brooks still just could not leave it alone?  Wouldn't it be hilarious is he was so pathetically desperate to hang onto yet another David Brooks-Brand Ludicrous Theory that, in the face of unequivocal proof that he'd been dead wrong, he would still try to cook up some equivocating alibi about how "midterms" really don't count? 

Hey guess what!

Welcome at last Sunday's Meet the Press with the petty, supercilious bit emphasized:

DAVID BROOKS: ... The question to me is do [Democrats] have an agenda for the future? Running on pre-existing conditions, something that passed eight years ago, is not exactly a vision for the future. Do they have an affirmative vision for how a diverse country should work? How work should work? How moral integrity should be reintroduced? These are the big issues that are happening in countries all around the world. Democrats have been running on a very small set of issues, maybe excusable for the midterm, not going forward.

"Excusable"?  Really?

And this right here is what truly marks David Brooks as a True Conservative.  His pathological and bizarrely patronizing inability to ever admit that he has been wrong about anything in the face of overwhelming evidence that he has almost always been wrong about almost everything. 

Behold, a Tip Jar!