Krugman Goes Full Driftglass. Almost.

From K-Thug today:

The Education of Fanatical Centrists
Will they finally admit what the G.O.P. has become?

By Paul Krugman

Short answer?

No.

But I do like where you're going, Doctor. 

Or course we all understand that the quaint, antebellum customs of the The New York Times prohibit you from saying that you're actually talking about your colleague, David Brooks.  So strictly for my own amusement, as we go along I'll just be mentally plugging in his name where it belongs (with emphasis added.)

Please continue.

And the whole tenor of our national conversation has changed. It looks to me as if we’re witnessing the rapid collapse of a powerful faction in U.S. public life, one whose refusal to accept facts at odds with its prejudices has long been a major source of political dysfunction.

But I’m not talking about the right-wing extremists who dominate the Republican Party. Sorry, but they’re not going anywhere. Most of Trump’s base is sticking with him, while the list of prominent Republican politicians willing to call out Trump’s malfeasance in clear language consists so far of Mitt Romney and, well, Mitt Romney.

No, I’m talking about cloistered hacks like David Fucking Brooks fanatical centrists, who aren’t a large slice of the electorate, but have played an outsize role in elite opinion and media coverage. David Fucking Brooks, These are people who may have been willing to concede that Trump was a bad guy, but otherwise maintained, in the teeth of the evidence, that our two major parties were basically equivalent: Each party had its extremists, but each also had its moderates, and everything would be fine if these moderates could work together.

Please continue.

Some of us have been pushing back against that worldview for many years, arguing that today’s Republican Party is a radical force increasingly opposed to democracy...

Some of have indeed, Doctor.

For a long time, however, making that case — pointing out that Republicans were sounding ever more authoritarian and violating more and more democratic norms — got you dismissed by David Fucking Brooks as shrill if not deranged...

With a very few exceptions, like Paul Krugman and Charlie Pierce, it also made you a social pariah and pretty much unemployable; dependent on little more than persistence, a tip jar and the good will of a small group of readers.

So it’s now crystal clear that the G.O.P. is not a normal political party; it is an American equivalent of Hungary’s Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice, an authoritarian regime in waiting.

And I think — I hope — that those who have spent years denying this reality are finally coming around.

Sadly, this is where the good doctor and I part company.

It’s important to understand that the G.O.P. hasn’t suddenly changed, that Trump hasn’t somehow managed to corrupt a party that was basically O.K. until he came along...

No, Trump isn’t an aberration. He’s unusually blatant and gaudily corrupt, but at a basic level he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for decades. And U.S. political life won’t begin to recover until malignant Both Sidersist goofs like David Fucking Brooks centrists face up to that uncomfortable reality.

Because short of an open revolution that brings this fight directly to the doorstep of, say, The New York Times, this will never happen.

Never.

Because it would extinguish the careers of every single one of those fanatical centrists who now enjoy a virtual stranglehold over elite media-driven political opinion.  Because in one, fell swoop they would be forced to admit that they have been wrong all along.  That the Left has been right about the Right all along.  And it's not like they have a backup career to fall back on: spouting Both Siderist bullshit is literally all cloistered hacks like David Fucking Brooks have been doing for the past couple of decades.

Worse still, it would completely upend the extremely profitable Never Trump scam by which many highly-paid Republican henchmen were magically transformed overnight into highly-paid Respected Columnists, Trusted Cable News Contributors and Best-Selling Authors.  But that transformation would never have been possible if newspapers and cable news outlets and book publishers (and way too many Liberals in the media who should have damn well known better) hadn't more-or-less collectively agreed to let them get away with pretending they they only discovered five minutes that their Republican Party was... OMFG !!! ...

...full of Republicans!!!

The media corporations which control 90% of our public discourse simply have too much invested in the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It and the hundreds of paid, professional liars who promulgate that lie to let it all go and start turning the microphones over to those of us who haven't been wrong about the Right all along.

And I for one will bet on media corporations putting the interests of their bottom line above the interests of the country every time.

Behold, a Tip Jar!