When Beltway Pundits Dream, They Dream of Imaginary Lincoln

Now that the modern Republican Party has given up any pretext of being anything more than the shitpile of bigots and imbeciles we have known it was all along, you may have noticed that the market for Both Siderist claptrap has taken a temporary nosedive.

Sure there are still hucksters out there gleaning the "Corrupt Duopoly!" fields (for example, half of the most recent Bulwark podcast was given over to David Jolly to pimp his "Serve America" money-grab which, as we have previously discussed, is a cookbook.)  And I guarantee you that the Beltway State Religion of Both Sides Do It will come roaring back the minute the polls close in November.  But for the moment, with the exception of the periodic, corpse-reflex pundit reaction of "ohmygodthetribalism!" (and the complete denial that the Liberals exist at all) full-blow Both Siderist advocacy is as popular as a Kissing Booth in a COVID-19 isolation ward.

Which lead's one to ask, "What is someone like Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times to do? Someone whose entire brand literally consists of nothing but identical, robotically-extruded 'The Extremes on Both Sides!' columns week after week, every week for the past decade and a half?"

Well to no one's surprise, it turns out that Mr. Brooks copes with this transient inconvenience in exactly they way you would imagine his extreme privilege and his willful political myopia permit him to cope.

He dreams.

Specifically, he gets himself comfortably situated in a hammock slung between two ancient trees on his gated estate, chews a little jimson weed, and daydreams about what it would be like if his Republican Party had not so completely fucked everything up beyond repair.

Of course he doesn't say that.  In fact, as is his custom when describing present state of our nation under Republican leadership (Category F5 Omnishambolic Shit-Show) , Mr. Brooks doesn't use the "R"-word at all.

Instead he puts another plug of jimson between his cheek and gum and lazily pines for the "normal".

If We Had a Real Leader
Imagining Covid under a normal president.

And for the purposes of staffing this argument with noble straw men, Mr. Brooks defines "normal" in the face of tragedy as...

Lincoln after Gettysburg, Reagan after the Challenger explosion and Obama after the Sandy Hook school shootings.

Which is just fucking adorable for reasons I will go into in some detail in a moment.

But first let us consider that while Mr. Brooks never once utters the word "Republican" or "Democrat" in the course of extruding his contractually-obligated 800 words, he does repeat the phrase "leader" or "real leader" 16 times when describing his wish list for our parlous times.  Because we are all so very slow and need this point pounded home:

Such a leader would draw on the common sources of our civilization...

...a real leader steps outside of his political role and reveals himself uncloaked and humbled...

If we had a real leader, he would be bracingly honest...

If we had a real leader, she would remind us of our common covenants...

In times of hardships real leaders re-articulate the purpose of America...

And so forth.

Of the three examples of specifically presidential leadership that Mr. Brooks cites in support his thesis, the two that I find most absurd are Lincoln and Obama:

Lincoln went back to the old biblical cadences to comfort a nation. After the church shooting in Charleston, Barack Obama went to “Amazing Grace,” the old abolitionist anthem that has wafted down through the long history of African-American suffering and redemption.
...

At Gettysburg, Lincoln crisply described why the fallen had sacrificed their lives — to show that a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal” can long endure and also to bring about “a new birth of freedom” for all the world.

Good Christ at Appomattox, these Very Serious Beltway Pundits just fucking love, love, love them some Lincoln, don't they? They just can't stop dream-casting him into every modern travail. Raising him up like a lantern in every dark and bloody corner into which the Republican Party drags us -- a beacon of presidential rectitude and strength.

And Lincoln really was all those things. And more. This is not what makes Brooks' invocation of the man so appalling.

What's appalling is that Very Serious Beltway Pundits like David Brooks have no love for the actual Lincoln. The guy who is buried two miles from my front door. Instead, they love their imaginary Lincoln just as they love their imaginary Reagan.

Their imaginary Lincoln is a Lincoln without Shiloh or Cold Harbor. A Lincoln without the Wilderness or Vicksburg or the Shenandoah Valley.

Their Lincoln is two-dimensional caricature of the actual Lincoln. A gentle redeemer and uniter, and not the man who went through just about every general in the Union Army until he found one that would do what needed to be done: crush the Confederacy completely, regardless of the cost. One that would bomb their cities, burn their crops, slaughter their armies and starve their citizens until, at last, their will to make a traitor's war against the United States was broken and they finally gave up.

There is no place in Mr. Brooks' gauzy cartoon version of American history for a Lincoln who recognized a mortal threat to the nation coming from a despicable confederacy of its own citizens, and who ruthlessly used every bloody means at his disposal to utterly destroy that threat. No place in his idylls for a Lincoln who offered reunion and reconstruct to the South only after they had been beaten to their knees and forced to accept surrender or face extinction.

And if this all sounds weirdly familiar, well it should. I penned something similar when Mr. Brooks reached for that ol' reliable jug of Imaginary Lincoln three years ago ("David Brooks: Controlling The Future By Butchering The Past"):

That's right.  To serve his political agenda, Mr. Brooks has very deliberately omitted the entire context for one of the greatest speeches in American history:  the fact that there were two sides to the Civil War -- one which was dedicate to destroying the nation in order to preserve the institution of slavery, and another -- led by Abraham Lincoln -- which was determined not to let that happen.

And as to Mr. Brooks' claim that "Slavery, Lincoln says, was not a Southern institution, it was an American institution, weaving through our common history for 250 years."?   Well for fuck's sake, David, just read the very next god damn paragraph of the speech you are god damn quoting:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

In Mr. Brooks' Both Siderist version of America history, Lincoln is transformed into a disembodied specter who somehow just floats above all of this, hand-in-hand with Mr. David Brooks, as together they survey the sad and petty squabbles of the wretched Extremes on Both Sides, both in 1865 and 2017. 

And I jotted down a few more notes one year later when Mr. Bret Stephens (also of The New York Times) disgraced himself on live teevee and to save himself, grabbed for Imaginary Lincoln like Donald Trump grabbing a pussy ("Noted Conservative New York Times Columnist Forgets The Civil War Ever Happened".)

Which brings us to Mr. Brooks' second example of noble leadership:

...Obama after the Sandy Hook school shootings.

And

After the church shooting in Charleston, Barack Obama went to “Amazing Grace,” the old abolitionist anthem that has wafted down through the long history of African-American suffering and redemption.

Of course Mr. Brooks is quite correct that in both cases President Obama struck just the right chord of compassion, sadness and leadership that each tragedy called for.  But just as with Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Brooks very deliberately unmoors these specific examples of presidential leadership from their inconvenient context.

Consider that, when faced with actual competent Democratic leadership -- leadership that stood a decent chance to bind up some of the horrible wounds that Mr. Brooks' Republican Party has repeatedly inflicted on our country during the Bush Administration -- Mr. Brooks was somewhat less than supportive.   From Jennifer Rubin back before she reinvented herself as the Never Trumper's "It" girl:

David Brooks: ‘I’m a sap’

By Jennifer Rubin September 20, 2011

No one in the media labored as hard to bolster Barack Obama as a candidate and defended President Obama more strenuously than New York Times columnist David Brooks.

But now Obama is galloping leftward. As Ben Smith and Carrie Budoff Brown write in Politico: “The pivot from appeasement to partisanship is a notable shift for Obama, one that follows a brutal summer during which his compromise on the debt ceiling made him appear weak against the Republican-controlled House and further depressed his standing with Democrats and independents.” Unfortunately that has upset not only Republicans but moderate Democrats (“Moderate Dems duck, cover on tax hikes”).”

All of this leaves Brooks bereft in the wake of Obama’s Rose Garden speech on the debt. He writes:

"This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

"Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around."

But that was based on nothing more than wishful thinking and sharply creased pants. Now Brooks is reduced to throwing a bouquet at the feet of the Republicans, conceding that “at least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think. The White House gives moderates little morsels of hope, and then rips them from our mouths. To be an Obama admirer is to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used.” It sounds like Brooks might need some grief counseling. He’s lost his idol and his credibility...

And when the real world failed to provide him with reason enough to flay President Obama in print, Mr. Brooks simply invented fictional offenses out of whole cloth to get mad about.  From Jonathan Chait in 2016:

David Brooks and the Intellectual Collapse of the Center

...
But even if you accept this very strange notion of the political alignment in Trump’s Washington, it raises a question Brooks is not prepared to answer. If his objection on the left lies with the “Sanders socialism,” then isn’t there an appealing centrist lying to the right of that? A moderate who favors market-oriented solutions that bring together business and labor, who welcomes empiricism, and is willing to compromise? A politician who has led the Democratic Party for the last eight years and, in fact, is still the sitting president of the United States right now?

One might think so. But 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.”...

But the most important point contextual question that Mr. Brooks studiously avoids it this:  What exactly happened as a result of President Obama bravely stepping "outside of his political role and reveal[ing] himself uncloaked and humbled".  

What concrete actions were taken?  How did the world change?

And the sad answer is, no actions were taken.  No new protections for vulnerable citizens were enacted into law. Nothing changed.

And why did nothing change?

Because every single proposal for changes in the law to protect American citizens that was proposed by Barack Obama's Democratic Party was killed in the crib by Mitch McConnell's blood-drunk, gun-addicted, NRA-beholden Republican Party.

A Republican Party that spent eight years driving up gun sales in the United States by whipping the Pig People into a frenzy of fear that the Kenyan Usurper was definitely gonna kick down their doors and seize their stockpiles of surrogate penises any minute now.

A Republican Party that then nominated and elected a racist madman at least in part based on his promise that he would do nothing whatsoever about mass shootings in America.

And so let us put aside Mr. David Brooks' blearly, delusional sophistry about how he wishes history had been and instead wind this up with a quote from one of Lincoln's most effective generals.  One who was as clear-eyed and unsentimental about the true nature of the enemy that threatened the republic and knew exactly how that threat needed to be dealt with.

"My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom."  

-- William Tecumseh Sherman

It is no longer sufficient to merely beat the Republican Party in an election.  Brick by brick they have made themselves into an irreversibly deranged existential threat and to survive as a nation they and their enablers must be broken and driven to political extinction.

No Half Measures