David Brooks Gets In On That Magic Ruralism (™) Dollar

Magic Ruralism: noun: a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of political fantasy.

To stay regular out on the campaign trail, Mr. David Brooks, the Faith and Humility reporter for the Acela Corridor Pantograph, has discovered the benefits of eating Nebraska corn.

Lots and lots of Nebraska corn.

In fact, his Friday chamber pot leavings were literally nothing but good old Nebraska corn --

What Rural America Has to Teach Us

-- which may prompt some cynics who actually live out here in the Real World to ask "Who the fuck is this 'us' you're talking about?", but I would advise going a little deeper to see what forces are really at play here.

You see, ol' Mr. Brooks is in bit of a pickle, which is an expression commonly used among us folk of Rural America, along with "up a tree", "the North end of a South-bound mule", "chin-deep in chinchilla shit" and "Why the fuck does David Brooks still have a job?"

In a bit of pickle indeed.

Because, you see, Mr. David Brooks has wanted to be a writer since he was a wee lad.

BROOKS:  At age seven, I decided I would be a writer. And it's such good fortune to know at an early age what your calling is.

And more than anything, little Davey Brooks he wanted to write about Murrica! 

The Sensible Conservative Murrica he dreamed about.  A glorious Imaginary Republican Murrica where Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks was a real and practical guide to young, urban strivers and where rural folk might "eat a mess o' chicken with their fangers" (not an actual expression) but then, for an after dinner entertainment, use the chicken bones to debate the finer points of Edmund Burke's views on monetary policy, while their 17 children played jug band music or whatever.

However, at the heart of everything Mr. Brooks has ever written likes a barely sublimated existential panic.  An awareness of his own fraudulence. It haunts him that, in his mad scramble up the greased pole of the pundit business, he never actually bothered to find out anything about what the real America was really like.  Instead, he established his bona fides for employment at the Big City Newspaper (where he now has a job-for-life) by working at a string of right-wing publications --

BROOKS: Yes, I started out on the left in college. And then I went to the right. I worked with National Review. I worked at the Washington Times. I worked with the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page. I worked at the Weekly Standard.

-- by pimping the hell out of the Iraq War when that was popular, and, as he has mentioned in several interviews, talking to politicians on both sides of the aisle on a regular basis.

In other words, Mr. Brooks decamped to the terrarium of the Washington Beltway and has spent his entire career sucking up to Green Room politicians like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Paul Ryan and Joe Lieberman who spare him the trouble of doing any actual investigative reporting on the state of the nation by reflecting back to Mr. Brooks his own fantasy of what Murrica was supposed to look like out beyond the Hudson and the Potomac.

For you science fiction fans, you might recognize Mr. Brooks' method of professional advancement as eerily similar to that of Lord Dorwin from Isaac Asmiov's Foundation series.  Like Mr. Brooks, Lord Dorwin was a foppish representative of an empire in decline who thought doing archaeology by visiting historical sites and digging things up was silly and a waste of time.  Much better to stay at home where it was comfortable and safe, weigh what various long-dead "authorities" had to say about things and then find a happy medium among them.  And just like Mr. Brooks, Lord Dorwin's other skill was his ability to talk for days on end and never say anything at all:

“What of it?” demanded Hardin. “I realize it was a gross breach of hospitality and a thing no so-called gentleman would ever do. Also that if his Lordship had caught on things might have been unpleasant; but he didn't and I have the record and that's that. I took that record, had it copied out, and sent that to Houk for analysis, also.”

Lundin Crast asked, “And where is the analysis?”

“That,” replied Hardin, “is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Houk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damn thing, and said it so that you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire.”

And thus, during roughly the first decade of the 21st century, while Mr. Brooks is indisputably at the apex of his profession, the is not really a writer, except in the literal sense of "one who is paid to put words in a row".  Mr. Brooks is, instead, is a dime-a-dozen pitchman.  A peddler of banal establishmentarian ad copy whose lucrative position as cog in the Beltway Conventional Wisdom Feedback Machine consists of taking the pulse of his fellow Beltway political insiders to suss out what the Beltway Conventional Wisdom is on any given day.

After which he poops out a column which imputes these opinions to "the voters" or "the sensible Center" or "independents" or "the American people".

After which his column and others like it are sloshed together and cited as authoritative evidence by those same Beltway insiders that their Convention Wisdom is indeed the vox populi. 

And around and around the feedback machine goes.   A pundit Ouroboros forever swallowing its own tail, listening to nothing but the echoes of its own bullshit and blithely ignoring anything which does not comport with what it already believes to be true.

This is how the Beltway Conventional Wisdom Feedback Machine managed to dismiss Fox News for decades as irrelevant.   Hate Radio as virtually nonexistent.  Rush Limbaugh as a buffoon that no one takes seriously and Newt Gingrich as a jolly old political uncle, sometimes a little goofy, but always camera ready with a tasty quote.

And of course any hint that there was actually a whole lot of bigotry and xenophobia and paranoia and gun nuttery and medieval religious fundamentalism and arrogant, bone-deep ignorance going on inside the Republican Party -- that the modern Republican party was, in fact, deliberately built on a foundation of unreconstructed Confederate racism -- was obviously so ludicrous that it was barely worth mentioning except to mock it.  From Mr. Brooks in 2001:

What on earth has gotten into the liberals and the media? Perhaps affected by some sort of post-Palm Beach stress disorder, reporters and activists on the left have depicted George W. Bush as the leader of some sort of arch-conservative jihad. They've portrayed his tax plan as dangerously radical, some of his nominees as Confederacy-loving loons, and his voucher plan as a menace to the future of public education. To put it bluntly, this is all deranged. You get the impression that the left has actually started believing its own direct-mail fund-raising letters...

This how Mr. Brooks of The New York Times could go on The Chris Matthews Show in 2006 to slander Liberals like me as crazy even as the Bush Administration and its Iraqi Debacle were  collapsing around his ears just as Liberals like me had warned it would --

-- and how, a decade later and having been completely wrong about everything along the way, the same David Brooks could still be employed by the same New York Times, and could still be invited on Meet the Press to assure everyone that Donald Trump was a fluke and that Marco Rubio would definitely be the 2016 Republican nominee for president.

DAVID BROOKS:  It's going to be Rubio. I'm telling you, it's going to be Rubio. Right now, you have the conflict between the conservative, the philosophical conservative wing, which is the National Review crowd, and the rogue wing, which is talk radio and Trump. And so it's interesting to see how that breaks down.

Right now, Trump has the advantage in that, because the conservative movement is less conservative than it was ten years ago. The financial crisis has hit people hard, and they want a government that's on the side of the little guys, as long as it's not filled with liberal values. So Trump, in the short term, but we’re prepping the establishment. Do not panic. There are going to be months of this. Wait for Rubio.

Trash built on trash built on trash.  And everyone involved knows it's trash but no one with enough authority to step in an cry "Foul!" does s because, frankly, everyone was making so much fucking money and no one wanted to be turned into a pariah and have their career rendered down into glue by the Beltway Conventional Wisdom Feedback Machine.

A Beltway Pundit Bubble remarkably similar to the housing bubble as it was going "Boom!" in slow motion.

And like the housing bubble, the reckless grifters like Mr. Brooks knew a little secret about their Very Serious Punditing that they never shared with anyone out here in Middle America.  That the Beltway Conventional Wisdom Feedback Machine would be protect and indemnify them against any breakage cause by their colossal lies and bottomless cupidity.  

That it didn't matter how cataclysmically wrong they proved themselves to be over and over again, decade after decade. Didn't matter how much toxic drivel they pumped into out politics. Didn't matter how irreparably their obsessive Both Siderism warped our ability to talk like normal human beings about the causes and solutions for the things that are killing us ... Mr. Brooks knew that he and his friends assumed no personal risk or liability for any or it.

Because after all, when the Dubya Bubble burst, it didn't end so badly for the Beltway pundits.  Sure a few thousand American service men and women died, and tens of thousands more will suffer permanent physical and emotional damage.  And a few hundred thousand Iraqis died.  And a few trillion dollars went up in smoke.  And our international reputation was trashed.  And the economy cratered.

But hey, it's not as if anyone important lost a job, or got a hangnail or missed a meal, right?  (from Crooks & Liars):

 And along came Obama who not only agreed to clean up the Dubya regime had created while not holding Beltway pundits accountable for any of it, did so while the Beltway Conventional Wisdom Feedback Machine morphed into one continuous, smirking episode of "Why Won't Obama Lead?" even as the Republican Party openly bragged about sabotaged anything Obama tried to do.

So why change, right?   Why learn anything at all?  Bubbles come and bubbles go, but the republic abides.  And yeah, sure, we're all very clear now that the GOP is nothing but a mob of zombie racist arsonists under the direction of a teevee network disguised as a political party who will burn down anything they can't loot, but since none of that materially affects the paid-up members of the Beltway Conventional Wisdom Feedback Machine, none of it matters.

And besides, sooner or later some Democrat will always be along after the conflagration to dutifully pick up a broom and dustpan and start tidying the place back up.  And will do so while the paid-up members of the Beltway Conventional Wisdom Feedback Machine pundits who paved the way for that conflagration bang on him or her like a gong.

Because that's how things work now, right?  That is the system.  And nothing in Heaven or on Earth can change it because the Beltway Conventional Wisdom Feedback Machine will not allow themselves to be held accountable for anything, which means they will not allow our public conversation about right and wrong and politics to change in any way that would threaten their privileges and profits.

So relax. It's all a fucking game anyway.  And besides, it's not like the GOP is really, really nuts.  They just play nuts on teevee and we know this for a fact because Very Serious People like Mr. David Brooks are in secret, personal communication with them every day, and he assures us that behind the scenes everything is Jake --

The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase. 

--  David Brooks, November 5, 2014.

-- so how bad could it really get, anyway?

Well, as it turned out,  pretty fucking bad. 

End-of-the-republic bad.

And how is The New York Times' senior Conservative thought-leader dealing with the end of the world? With a political apocalypse which he spent the last 30 years helping to midwife?

By camping out in unexplored interior of the American continent for a minute.  By touching Nebraskans. By seeing the mountains and the prairies and the whole rest of that song.

Everybody says rural America is collapsing. But I keep going to places with more moral coherence and social commitment than we have in booming urban areas. These visits prompt the same question: How can we spread the civic mind-set they have in abundance?

For example, I spent this week in Nebraska, in towns like McCook and Grand Island. These places are not rich. At many of the schools, 50 percent of the students receive free or reduced-cost lunch. But they don’t have the pathologies we associate with poverty...

By talking to the people of the land  -- people who sound a lot like my neighbors -- about all kinds of things --

One woman I met came home and noticed her bedroom light was on. She thought it was her husband home early. But it was her plumber. She’d mentioned at the coffee shop that she had a clogged sink, so he’d swung round, let himself in and fixed it...

Nebraska ranks eighth in the country for social capital. McCook has only 7,700 residents, but it has a Rotary club, a 4-H club, a future farmers group, a music festival, a storytelling festival...

Jared Muehlenkamp returned from Los Angeles to McCook and runs a print and design store...

It should be acknowledged that things are not as rosy as they appear on the surface. “There are a lot of people here in desperate economic circumstances doing extraordinary things to look middle class,” one Nebraskan told me.

-- that I, too, think are pretty important and which you will find almost any day of the week as Page 3 filler in City/Local section of my slowly expiring local paper.

Tragically, at least one proud son of McCook, Nebraska is no longer around to participate in future farmers groups or music festivals or the Rotary club, because in 2007, 20-year-old McCook native Randy Matheny was killed when a bomb was detonated near his vehicle while he was serving as a sergeant in the Army National Guard in Baghdad.

In fact, dozens and dozens of sons and daughters of Nebraska were killed in the war which Mr. Brooks' so exuberant and repeatedly pimped in the pages of The Weekly Standard that he finally sold The New York Times on the idea of hiring him into a job-for-life as a cog in the mightiest engine of the Beltway Conventional Wisdom Feedback Machine.

And that is what's so appallingly conspicuous by its absence from Mr. Brooks' whirlwind tour of the Rurals.

Because, Mr. Brooks is interested in soliciting the opinions of these Nebraskans on all sorts of subjects...

...except for the tragedies and disasters which Mr. Brooks' Republican Party and Beltway Conventional Wisdom Feedback Machine have visited on their country.

Or how those tragedies and disasters came to be.

Or who the citizens of McCook, Nebraska believe should be held responsible for those tragedies and disasters.

And what they think should be done about it.

Behold, a Tip Jar!