Peak David Brooks

Because we are a storytelling species, the business of telling sweeping sagas about faraway, unexplored and possibly unreachable places has a proud if sometimes-bloody history that's as old as the human race.

 This is why, before the iron horse and Diet Coke annexed the American continent in the name of capitalism, East coasters filled in unexplored canvas of the West with tall tales of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill.  Before Mariners and Vikings sent back word that Mars was as dead as Dillinger, writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury colonized the imaginations of the young and young at heart with stories of Barsoom and Martian princesses.  Of lost civilizations (from The Martian Chronicles) --

The next afternoon Parkhill did some target practice in one of the dead cities, shooting out the crystal windows and blowing the tops off the fragile towers. The captain caught Parkhill and knocked his teeth out 

-- whose ghosts do not know that they're dead:

“There’s dust in the streets,” said Tomas.

“The streets are clean!”

“The canals are empty right there.”

“The canals are full of lavender wine!”

“It’s dead.”

“It’s alive!” protested the Martian, laughing more now. “Oh, you’re quite wrong. See all the carnival lights? There are beautiful boats as slim as women, beautiful women as slim as boats, women the color of sand, women with fire flowers in their hands. I can see them, small, running in the streets there. That’s where I’m going now, to the festival; we’ll float on the waters all night long; we’ll sing, we’ll drink, we’ll make love, Can’t you see it?”

“Mister, that city is dead as a dried lizard. Ask any of our party. Me, I’m on my way to Green City tonight; that’s the new colony we just raised over near Illinois Highway. You’re mixed up. We brought in a million board feet of Oregon lumber and a couple dozen tons of good steel nails and hammered together two of the nicest little villages you ever saw. Tonight we’re warming one of them. A couple rockets are coming in from Earth, bringing our wives and girl friends. There’ll be barn dances and whisky — ”

All human history is interlaced with myths of gods in the clouds, on the mountaintops and under the sea.  Of mighty heroes battling mythic monsters.  Of stellar constellations full of deities getting up to all kinds of naughty bad fun.

Sometime the stories of faraway places and the beings who live there are fanciful.  And sometimes they come to be woven so deeply into the faith of a people that those people would rather fight and die than give their stories up.

But like the bear that went over the mountain to see what he could see, once we actually visit the impossible places -- once we climb the mountain or cross the continent or fly our machines to the Red Planet -- our myths and fantasies about Zeus and John Henry and John Carter usually die away because now we can see with our own eyes what was once just a distant province of pure imagination.  This was the point of Clarence Darrow's speech about Genesis during the Scopes trial nearly a century ago (dramatized here by Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind):

And this is what brings us around at last to Mr. David Brooks.

As America's leading Brooksologist, I shudder to think how many tens of thousands of words I have already spilled in the cause of convincing the reading public that Mr. David Brooks is, in his own way, every bit as much of a toxic threat to our democracy as Rush Limbaugh.  So as regards Mr. Brooks' latest atrocity against journalism lemme shut my gob for a minute and turn your attention to the sober judgement of veteran political journalist, brother Charlie Pierce:

I’m not linking to it but David Brooks has written the worst piece ever published in the NYT.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) October 4, 2019

Yes, on a day when Donald John Trump boldly committed treason on live teevee twice, David Brooks has written a Hot Take on The Trump Voter so godawful that, as of this writing, it is the top trending item on Twitter.

And yes, it really is that fucking awful.

Here's a taste.

The Collapse of the Dream Palaces

...
How will the fall of Saddam affect their voting patterns, their approach to the next global crisis? One way to think about this is to conduct a thought experiment. Invent a representative 20-year-old, Joey Tabula-Rasa, and try to imagine how he would have perceived the events of the past month.

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 of the war 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.

OK, you may fairly ask who the hell is Joey Tabula Rasa and why does he care about Saddam Hussein?

Fair questions.

Keep reading.

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 of the war 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 first character is America itself. He sees that his country is an incredibly effective colossus that can drop bombs onto pinpoints, destroy enemies that aren't even aware they are under attack. He sees a ruling establishment that can conduct wars with incredible competence and skill. He sees a federal government that can perform its primary task--protecting the American people--magnificently.

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...

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...

I must now genuinely apologize to you because by now you must have guessed that I have deliberately misled you.  That was not David Brooks from today.  That was David Brooks from 2003.  Back when Mr. Brooks was making a very good living slandering Liberals and giving the Bush Administration soothing political reach-arounds as it plunged the nation ever further into disaster.

You see, rather than risk halitosis or worse by personally riding shank's mare into the savage, unexplored Interior of the America Continent and, y'know, actually talking to actual people, back in 2003 Mr. David Brooks made do by sitting on his ass and inventing a purely fictional denizen of Out There into whose mouth Mr. Brooks could shove the words he wished such a person would say in order to pretend to have a conversation.

Thus it was that back in 2003 -- at the peak of the Iraq War propaganda war, with his career firing on all cylinders and through the invented orifice of Joey Tabula Rasa -- Mr. Brooks confidently predicted that  the very meaning of "progressive" and "conservative" would radically realign based entirely on their degree of support for George Bush's Awesome Iraqi Adventure.

It would be a change so tectonic that leaders of the new "progressive" movement would be led by (not kidding) --

...Christopher Hitchens, Dennis Miller, Paul Wolfowitz, Joseph Lieberman, John McCain, Richard Holbrooke, Charles Krauthammer, the staff of Fox News, Bernard Lewis, and George Bush.

-- and leaders in the new "conservative" movement would include (no kidding):

...Brent Scowcroft, Joe Klein, the State Department, John Kerry, Chris Matthews, Robert Novak, and most of the press corps.

There would also be a third group -- the "marchers" -- which would slowly fade into irreverence.

And who's the leader of this club that's made for you and me?

Hollywood-types and academics!

And what did Joey Tabula Rasa thinks of the marchers?

That they were kinda anarchic and weird.  Just like they were in the 60s!

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 don't seem to have any alternative to globalization. They don't seem to know how to deal with the Taliban or Saddam. 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...

I have dragged you down this long road to make this one, very simple point: David Brooks has never written about his Republican Party as it actually exists.  In fact, David Brooks is not, in any meaningful way, remotely interested in his Republican Party as it actually exists at all. Mr. Brook entire career is predicated on pandering to the creepy political delusions of a handful of provincial, cloistered plutocrats who desperately want to believe the fairy tales Mr. Brooks whispers to them from the op-ed page of The New York Times.  About which I have already written hundreds of times:

Mr. Brooks is engaged in a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political  economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

And odds are he'll get away with it too.

Spoiler: He has gotten away with it.  Because the Sulzberger Family pays him to get away with it. 

Which is why, sixteen years after Mr. David Brooks invented Joey Tabula Rasa out of whole cloth, and five year after he confidently confided to his readers that...

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. 

... and three years after he was utterly certain that ...

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.

... I was completely unsurprised to see this is the headline staring back at me from America's Newspaper of Record today:

Why Trump Voters Stick With Him 

An imagined conversation with Flyover Man. 

By David Brooks
Opinion Columnist

Which was, floor-to-ceiling, nothing but lazy Beltway Dry Heave fiction like this:

Urban Guy: I hope you read the rough transcript of that Trump phone call with the Ukrainian president. Trump clearly used public power to ask a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his political opponent. This is impeachable. I don’t see how you can deny the facts in front of your face.

Flyover Man: I haven’t really had time to look into it. There’s always some fight between Trump and the East Coast media. I guess I just try to stay focused on the big picture.

Because when it comes to American politics, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times does not have the slightest fucking idea what he's talking about and never has.

Instead, he has made himself a rich and influential man by enthralling a small cohort of rich, gullible idiots with toxic fairy tales of an Imaginary Republican Party that is as purely fictional as stories of Atlantis or Barsoom. And thus it was today that, in the short but dense tradition of the Beltway media's favorite new genre of fiction -- Magic Ruralism (™) -- Mr. David Brooks has once again spared himself the agony of figuring out what's actually going on among humans living in flyover country and has instead reached right up his own ass and plucked out a little dab of godawful Beltway Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about how things would be if David Brooks were king. 

And despite the fact that we Libtards have been to the other side of that mountain and have faithfully reported for decades on the real doing of real Republicans out here in the Real World, the Beltway media corporations that underwrite frauds like David Brooks are simply unwilling to give up on the toxic product Mr. Brooks has been selling to their readers under their brand for decades.

And that, boys and girls, is how political journalism in America died.

Behold, a Tip Jar!