To keep me out of Twitter-jail, my wife has suggest that rather than emptying out my remaining stock of invective over Mr. David Brooks latest steaming pile of hippie-punching Both Siderism and darkly hinting at what sort of discreet, stomach-lurching services he must be operating out of his New York Times offices to continue to rate a job-for-life there while producing an endless series of identical, 800-word turds...
...that instead I play Dusty Springfield's cover of "Windmills Of Your Mind", which was introduced in the film The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968.
So we'll compromise.
I will do nothing more or less that reprint Mr. Brooks column, pared down to what I believe are it's key sentences, and let you judge what Mr. Brooks' actual job at the Gray Lady must involve they let him run the exactly same fucking broken record over and over and over again without someone in authority intervening to demand that his work at least occasionally show a pulse and brush up against reality if he wants to keep cashing a paycheck from America's newspaper of record.
And then we'll play the pretty song.
From today's New York Times with emphasis added:
An Agenda for ModeratesAnd that last sentence right there?
...the right and left now offer two different magnetic ideas.
...The Trumpian right offers Tribe. “Our” kind of people are under threat from “their” kind of people. We need to erect walls, build barriers and fight.
The left offers the idea of Social Justice. The left tells stories of oppression. The story of America is the story of class, racial and gender oppression.
The problem with today’s left-wing and right-wing ideas is that they are both based on a scarcity mind-set.
...They are both based on the fantasy that the other half of America can be conquered, and when it disappears we can get everything we want.
...They are both based on the idea that if we can just concentrate enough power in the centralized authoritarian state, then we can ram through the changes we seek.
A lot of us don’t want to live in a war society, whether it’s a tribal war or a class war. If the 2020 choice is between Donald Trump and a Democrat who supports the Green New Deal, I’d vote for any moderate alternative.
That is the razor in the apple.
That is Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times -- a professional polisher of Republican offal since the days of George H. W. Bush -- attempting to dictate terms to those of us in the Not Crazy Party. Which just so happens to be exactly the same terms that virtually every other Never Trump refugee from The Crazy Racist Party has been trying to dictate to Democrats -- nominate the candidate of our choosing or we will fucking well hand the next election to Trump.
But you know what David? If you or any other Never Trumper could actually swing anything like that kind of weight, Trump would never have been elected in the first place and you'd be running the GOP instead of running from it. So how about all of you just sit down, shut the fuck up and let those of us who haven't been catastrophically wrong about everything for the last 30 years work out how to save the country from the ruin men like you have inflicted on it.
And if we need you to chop wood or fetch water for the cause, we'll let you know. Because the days of your opinion mattering to anyone outside of your Beltway Bell Jar are over.
Mr. Brooks continues:
The problem with moderates has always been that they don’t have a magnetic idea. Recent moderation has been a bland porridge that defines itself by what it doesn’t like.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
What is the core problem facing America today? It is division: The growing gaps between rich and poor, rural and urban, educated and less educated, black and white, left and right...
There are four affections that bind our society, and moderates could champion a policy agenda for each...Mr. Brooks then identifies four areas of American life which "moderates" could champion...by implementing sweeping government programs which pretty much every Liberal would support.
Then it's yadda yadda ardor.
Yadda yadda humility.
Yadda yadda being intellectually humble.
And then, for the big finish.
Let the left and right stand for endless political war. The moderate seeks the beloved community...And now ladies and gentlemen, Dusty Springfield!
UPDATE: If you seem to recall this very same David Brooks being so desperate to maintain the lucrative fiction of an imaginary "Reasonable Center" midway between the imaginary Extremes on Both Sides during the Obama Administration that he would pen sad laments about how neither party would endorse policies that in fact Obama had explicitly and publicly called for, you would be correct.
From Jonathan Chait in 2016 ("David Brooks and the Intellectual Collapse of the Center"):
...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...
The Wages of Sin ... Barely Cover My Bar Tab.
5 comments:
David stupidfucking Brooks is the deadweight that the whole damn damn hole NYT will keep strapped to its butt and shitty reputation when it plunges sunk under the East River.
Remembered as fondly as the dodo bird.
DG, it is a privilege to observe another first generation veteran of the blog post label taxonomy wars. Finally, to see another string of well-formed blog post label terms that make sense.
That "scarcity mindset" line seemed familiar, so I checked and...yep, it's reused material from columns he wrote in February 2018 and May 2018. And the "four affections" thing means that this column is borrowed from his book, making this column a glorified sales pitch. It's a book that, if history holds true, will be mostly stolen content and his own reused columns, which themselves are mostly stolen content and reused columns, etc. I don't know why he's so down on environmentalism all of a sudden, he's clearly a master of recycling.
Beautiful. Especially:
"Because the days of your opinion mattering to anyone outside of your Beltway Bell Jar are over. "
Thank you.
Poor Our Mr. Brooks. He's spent a career defending the indefensible by a) pretending it's defensible; b) ignoring what it really is and pretending it's something else; c) disclaiming responsibility for defending and enabling it by claiming its opposite is just as bad; d) disingenuously purporting to rise above its badness by discoursing on general matters concerning human nature and "character."
Ever since the unmitigated catastrophe of the Geo. W. Bush administration--which he defended, whitewashed, and acted as apologist for--he's tried to weasel out of accountability by working a new beat: amateur sociologist and psychologist. The more it was obvious that greed, rapacity, hypocrisy, the manipulated ignorance of rubes, and religious lunacy were Republican qualities, the more he's tried to take refuge in both-sides-ism. Well, look. It's a living.
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