David Brooks Returns to Form

Warning:  I am about to break the Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks.  By continuing to read this you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to stuff David Brooks wrote in the Before Time.

According to Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times America is now facing Five Epic Crises All at Once!

America Is Facing 5 Epic Crises All at Once
This is not the time to obsess about symbolism.

See?

Four of these five crises are racism,

...all Americans, but especially white Americans, are undergoing a rapid education on the burdens African-Americans carry every day. 

a looming economic depression,

...we could be on the verge of a prolonged economic depression. 

COVID-19 (and not for nothing, but while "we" are pretty thoroughly tired -- like "roll out the tumbrels and lets start with the NYT op-ed page" tired -- "we" haven't given up on a god damn thing.  Republicans have.  Just ask Paul Krugman you smug little tapioca dampness),

Our behavior doesn’t have anything to do with the reality around us. We just got tired so we’re giving up.

and the death spiral of Donald Trump's Republican Party --

The American public is vehemently rejecting Donald Trump’s Republican Party...

-- which, for the record, is also David Brooks' Republican Party, and also for the record, the rejection of that Party of Bigots and Imbeciles is no way a crisis except for a certain species of parasitic pundits whose livelihoods depends entirely on relentlessly pimping the Both Sides Do It Lie.

And speaking of parasitic pundits whose livelihoods depends entirely on relentlessly pimping the Both Sides Do It Lie, you will never guess what Mr. Brooks' Fifth Crisis is.

It is (Avert your eyes!  Hide the children, pets and senior citizens!) those terrible...Social Justice monsters!

...a quasi-religion is seeking control of America’s cultural institutions. The acolytes of this quasi-religion, Social Justice, hew to a simplifying ideology...

And the reason I'm sure that David Brooks believes the Social Justice monsters are the worst crisis of all is that he spends literally half his column bed-wetting about them and their elite universities!

The loudest theory of change is coming from the Social Justice movement. This movement emerged from elite universities.

And their performative zealotry (FYI, among the Never Trumpers the word "performative" is their new favorite thing.  It has replaced "Libtard" when they are speaking to each other about you and me.)

They pay enormous attention to repeating certain slogans, such as “defund the police,” which may or may not have anything to do with policy, and to lifting up symbolic gestures, like kneeling before a football game. It’s a very apt method for change in an age of social media because it’s very performative.

And did you hear what they did to the statue of that nice Mr. Jefferson Davis!

Members of this movement pay intense attention to cultural symbols — to language, statues, the names of buildings.  

I read this and honestly my first thought was, "Now here is a guy who hasn't been tear-gassed nearly enough."  Which was unkind of me, I know.

Then I calmed myself and began asking my brain archive of David Brooks trivia when was the last time that Mr. Brooks threw himself into hippie punching with such fervor.  I mean, as America's leading Brooksologist I should know this stuff, right?

Oh yeah.  Now I remember.

It was during the last, catastrophically-failed Republican administration, when a bunch damn dirty performative hippies were in the streets protesting David Brooks' Dear Leader and his most awesome Iraqi Adventure.

Back when David Brooks was making his living working for Bloody Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard and shitting on decent Americans who thought the Iraq War was doomed fuck-up by a despicable administration:

Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil.

In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.

Back when Mr. Brooks was building a resume that would land him a job-for-life at The New York Times by slandering on people like you and me for our performative zealotry:

In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of gray. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion -- that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed--but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis.

Back when Republicans confidently predicted that they were never gonna lose again, so David Brooks could let his inner Ben Shapiro run wild and break out his favorite hippie-punching vocabulary, like "parochialism" --

This is the dictionary definition of parochialism--the inability to consider the larger global threats because one is consumed by one's immediate domestic hatreds. This parochialism takes many forms, but all the branches of the opposition to the war in Iraq have one thing in common: Iraq is never the issue. Something else is always the issue. For Schama and many others, the Bush crowd is the issue. They stole the election. They serve corporate America. They have bad manners. This is the prism through which Maureen Dowd, Molly Ivins, and many others view the war.

-- and "the 1960s" --

They are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election.

 -- and  "playing culture war" --

They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq.

-- and of course those damn "peaceniks" --

For example, on September 19, a group of peaceniks took out a full-page ad in the New York Times opposing the campaign in Afghanistan and a possible campaign in Iraq. Signatories included all the usual suspects: Jane Fonda, Edward Said, Barbara Ehrenreich, Tom Hayden, Gore Vidal, Ed Asner, and on and on.

-- who were drunk on their own"decadence" and "moral exhibitionism".

The entire exercise is a picture perfect example of moral exhibitionism, by a group of people decadently refusing even to acknowledge the difficulties and tradeoffs that confront those who actually have to make decisions about policy.

Because as every right thinking person knew, opponents of the war were foggy-brained academic and literary intellectuals, probably from elite universities!

When you get deep enough into the peace camp you find fog about the fog. You find a generation of academic and literary intellectuals who have so devoted themselves to questioning meanings, deconstructing texts, decoding signifiers, and unmasking perspectives, they can't even make an argument anymore.

And speaking of  right thinking people, this was all back during a time when David Brooks literally invented a completely imaginary Average American whom he named Joey Tabula Rasa (no I am not kidding) and out of who's mouth came all the working-class, blue collar, aw-shucks pro-war wisdom that David Brooks assured his cloistered, Beltway readership was Out There Somewhere.

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. 

That was back in 2003, and 17 years later, Mr. Brooks' remains exactly who he was 17 years ago: a myopic and morally soured little man whose relentless ambition and the mighty shield wall of The New York Times  have liberated from any fear of accountability, freeing him to float above mere humanity, spinning out one asinine economic and cultural theory after another, radically revising history whenever the need arises, freely contradicting himself as he pleases, and always -- 

-- twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!

Not tear-gassed nearly enough.

No Half Measures