Life inside the Acela Corridor quiet car is a strange one. William Westmancott tailors are on-hand to stitch bespoke masks for any passenger who may have mislaid of forgotten theirs. The hand sanitizer is gelled Tito's Handmade Vodka with an infusion of aloe and mint. And the world zipping by outside will soon be a blazing hellscape, with two equally vile bands of marauders fighting over the ruins.
At least that's how David Brooks of The New York Times sees it.
Because even as the shadow of the apocalypse falls across the Land of the Free, David Fucking Brooks remains congenitally unable to stop with the Both Sides Do It bullshit even for a moment:
A certain kind of Republican takes to the streets to enforce Trump’s version of events. According to research done by Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt, 50 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Nearly as many believe, “A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.”If Brooks' hysterical, brown-acid hippie-punching sounds familiar, well it should: in tone and intention it is identical to the barrage of neurotic, pro-war venom he unloaded on the anti-war Left again --
The left is in the streets, too. On the fringe of the left there are those who want to overthrow the racist, cisgendered, patriarchal neoliberal oligarchy. This is their chance at mayhem, too, and they seize it with sometimes violent passion.
Today's Progressive Spirit--and again --
The scenes in Baghdad flow from understandings realized at the American founding.
1:00 PM, APR 9, 2003
I suspect they will not even now admit their errors. I doubt the people of Europe will say: We were wrong. You really are the liberators of the Iraqi people. I doubt the Arab propagandists will say: We will never spread such distortions again. We will never again be so driven by resentment and dishonesty.
Sad to say, human nature doesn't work that way. The rump 15 percent of Americans who still oppose this war may perhaps grow more bitter, lost in the cul-de-sac of their own alienation.
The Fog of Peace-- and again --
The evasions, distractions, and miasma of the anti-war left...
Optimism Rediscovered-- back-when he was George W. Bush's cheerleader and Bill Kristol's loyal stooge at the now-defunct Weekly Standard.
[From the April 4, 2003 London Times]
Suddenly, things don't look so grim.
10:25 AM, APR 6, 2003
...
Second, one hears of a growing distaste for the peace marchers, again from people who don't necessarily support the President. Their objections are not so much substantive as tonal. These peace marchers seem driven by bile and self-righteousness, and are fundamentally out of step with a country that wants, now that the war is on, to back the troops.
In short, the mood feels a bit as it it did after September 11. Americans are pulling together. There is a yearning to perform some act of public service. There is greater revulsion at those who are trying to divide the country. There is no tolerance for alienated poses.
But if course, all of that happened in the Before Time and since it is now a thoughtcrime to remember such things, let us stick to the present. Or, rather, David Brooks' imaginary immediate future when decent folks will be forced to hide in their cellars and subsist on generic-brand soppressata, capicollo, baguettes and coffee while Republican Mongols and Leftist Visigoths fight it out in the streets of Murrica.
And in David Brooks' masturbatory end-times fantasy, who will rise up in our darkest hour to save us all?
Why, David Brooks of course!
Obviously it would ruin the brand of Yale's own Professor of Humility to claim the title of Savior of the Republic out loud, but his implications are absolutely clear. The Mighty Center shall awaken.
But a new force looms into view. For the whole Trump era a certain sort of conservative has been cowering from the Trump onslaught. Certain sorts of moderates and liberals have also been keeping their heads down, so they won’t get bitten off by the woke mobs. But now the very existence of the Republic is at stake.A Mighty Center that will follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther King, Jr.:
It turns out, amid the existential crisis, there really is a group of sober people who are militant about America, who can see reality unblinkered by the lens of partisanship, and who are finally compelled to organize...
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once argued that sin is buried so deep in the human soul that sweet words are insufficient to get people to give up their unjust power. “Instead of assured progress in wisdom and decency,” he wrote, “man faces the ever-present possibility of a swift relapse not merely to animalism, but into such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice.”At this point I should warn you that I'm about to do more "Remembering the Past" thoughtcrimes, so unless you want to end up in the bunk next to mine at the re-education camp, you should probably stop reading now.
But the realist militants who walk in King’s shadow also know that it is the U.S. Constitution that keeps us from slipping into chaos, along with all the norms and values built around it over the centuries...
First, we should take a moment to dispense with the ludicrous notion that there is some vast, untapped army of "a certain sort of conservative" just waiting for a clarion call to arrive on the right frequency. Then, after looking both ways and crossing with the lights, they will leap into action to defend the Constitution.
And you know what? Long ago I, too, once entertained the vain hope that the Right would somehow summon the intestinal fortitude to cast out its bigots and imbeciles and join our national experiment in self-government in good faith.
And I gave up even that vain hope once the GOP, loudly and publicly, turned the keys to the Party of Lincoln over to these two monsters and their acolytes and imitators.
That, boys and girls, was more than a quarter of a century ago, and since then several trends have been depressingly and predictable consistent:
- Mr. David Brooks' Republican Party has been on a rapidly accelerating course towards fascism.
- The overwhelming majority of Republicans have been 100% cool with that.
- That "fringe Left" (that's us!) that Mr. Brooks loathes so deeply has been right about the Right all along.
- Year in and year out, Mr. Brooks has published the same "You needn't worry about the GOP, because whatever minor bugs or glitched is may have, the Left is so much worse and anyway, an awesome Republican renaissance is right around the corner!" claptrap over and over and over again.
In other words, Mr. David Brooks has never had the slightest fucking clue about what goes on in the real America that exists beyond of the tinted windows of an Acela Corridor quiet car.
And now that we have arrived at the threshold of actual authoritarian dictatorship with Donald Trump continuing to enjoy the overwhelming support of the Republican Party, the sickening depths of Mr. Brooks' pathological and bizarrely patronizing inability to ever admit that he has ever been wrong about anything in the face of overwhelming evidence that he has almost always been wrong about almost everything has never stood more starkly revealed.
Which is not to say that no one is coming to save us.
In fact the cavalry is already here.
They were the tens of millions of women and their allies all over the country who swiftly organized massive protests against Trump after the 2016 election; protests which David Brooks dismissed at the time as an indulgent, frivolous waste of time and scolded protester for failing to offer (and yes, this is an actual quote) .
...a better nationalism, with diversity cohering around a central mission, building a nation that balances the dynamism of capitalism with biblical morality.Those who would save the nation were still on the job two years later when Democrats swept to power in the House in a landslide largely thanks to the street-by-street, block-by-block organizing efforts of ordinary, decent Liberals across the country.
And what was Mr. David Brooks doing as the Left rallied to stand athwart the now-openly-fascistic Republican Party and shout "Stop!"?
He and those "certain sorts" of conservatives he is so fond of were sitting in their well-appointed spider holes, bitching that the Left might just be going too far! And that if we on the Left failed to heed Mr. Brooks' dire warnings, we would almost certainly drag the country into a Hugo!Chavez! Dystopia! And then the backlash from, y'know, daring to hold the Party of Personal Responsibility in any way personally responsible for the horrors they have unleashed on this country would be, well, just super awful!
The only thing I’d say to my progressive friends is, be careful how you win your victories. It is one thing to win by persuasion and another thing to win by elite cultural intimidation. Illiberalism breeds illiberalism. Using elite power, whether economic or cultural, to silence less educated foes usually produces a backlash.Those who would save the nation are to be found among the young voters, who now plan to vote in record numbers:
...If you exile 40 percent of the country from respectable society they will mount a political backlash that will make Donald Trump look like Adlai Stevenson.
Number of youth voters 'definitely' voting jumps to 77 percent: pollThose who would save the nation can be found attending the thousands of peaceful, hopeful, family-friendly Black Lives Matter protests and civil rights marches across the country that don't get any headlines at all ("The Only Thing That Got Overheated at the Springfield Black Lives Matter Procession Yesterday...") because a handful of anarchists and infiltrators in a couple of cities know that video of fiery sturm und drang will always beat out stuff like this on the nightly news:
The number of youth voters in battleground states who said they “definitely” plan to vote in the November elections jumped to 77 percent in August, according to a new poll released by the progressive group NextGen America.
Seventy-seven percent of registered voters aged 18 to 35 across 13 battleground states said they “definitely will vote” in the upcoming elections, according to results of an August survey exclusively shared with The Hill.
It’s a 7-point increase since July, when a similar poll found just 70 percent of registered youth voters across the battleground states said they will “definitely vote.”...
Those who would save the nation can be found at my local Methodist church, which is full of faithful, decent "moderates and liberals" who damn well know what's at stake. A church that got a little more Christ-like when a couple who was so offended by the pastor speaking the phrase "LGBTQ" from the pulpit that they stormed out and vowed never to return. And believe me, just because the "moderates and liberals" in my congregation don't swear like certain disreputable bloggers I could name (OK, me) doesn't mean they have in any way "been keeping their heads down".
The cavalry is already here, Mr. Brooks.
And if, God forbid, it should not prevail, it will only be because your fascist Republican Party has spent the last 30 years digging in and readying itself for the battle to come while you have spent those decades using your privileged position at the apex of the American media to stand in front of the GOP's fortifications and its slavering mob of bigots and imbeciles, telling everyone that this was nothing to worry about.
The cavalry is already here, Mr. Brooks.
And it is not interested in anything you have to say.
No Half Measures
10 comments:
Damn straight. He is a man perpetually inadequate to the time.
The radical center will be manned by Bwooksie and the other 5 Republicans who've heard of Edmund Burke. Dear God, what an asshole.
What will your bothsiderism have to say when the ashes of the constitution are blowing away in the wind, and Putin's puppet Trump is propped up as der leader for life, as long as Putin wills it. Will you sputter on about how the liberals made you do it, and what an honorable man you imagine yourself to be. For without "bothsides do it" who are you but hollow little man who helped to burn our Democracy to the ground. You chickenshit little snollygoster.
With the scribble of a sharpie. Trump could make special medals to honor people like Rand Paul and Himself ( Donald).
The medal of Brain spurs.
Never to be awarded to the suckcers that actually served in the military.
The Brain Spur excuse award.
And
The Libertarian Medal
For, buying your own damn bullets, pay your own damn military pay and benefits while you protect my wealth and investment Award.
The not a sucker Ribbon. with Oak Leaf cluster(s) for each additional deferment from military service you purchased.
In a brighter future time, with clean air and water, with the polar ice restored, with the forests replanted, there is an unloved gravestone. It lies on the grounds of what once was a pretentious and tacky 4 million dollar miserable mansion. No one comes to visit it. No one ever has. It bears no name, no dates. All that is written is "But the Democrats..."
DFB: "...building a nation that balances the dynamism of capitalism with biblical morality."
So Brooksie is a Calvinist now?! Let me laugh even harder!!!
If I remember correctly, Calvinists actually WORK for a living. And their ethos of frugality don't really align with "vast spaces for entertaining".
Brooks is a fraud. And a moron. Always has been, always will be.
From your lips Mr. DG..... from your lips.
RetiredPatriot
The Republican party and our current climate of vitriolic violent polarization reminds me of an old Bill Hicks joke about Jack Palance in Shane who eggs on the sheep herder to pick up the gun and after bullying him into picking it up Palance shoots him and says, "You all saw him. He had a gun". Conservatives have been lying, cheating, and gas lighting this country to the far right for 35 years and now that the left starts pushing back they accuse liberals and progressives of being violent and radical. I have a conservative friend I can occasionally get into conversation with about our differences and every time I bring up the historical track record of why liberals are offended by Republicans he either has no memory of the wake of destructive activities republicans have left or he genuinely is surprised and moderately enlightened by the facts. A few years ago, NPR did a story on a former hard line conservative turned liberal. It was an interesting interview but what I think stood out the most was him describing the mental and emotional responsibility when he became a liberal. He said he had no idea how hard it would be to think through issues more fully. Being a conservative is easy because the world is black and white.
I sincerely miss DFB's columns when he would divulge his intimate conversations with his brilliant knowledgeable everyday "Joe" the cab Driver?
How that Cabby took the creative brilliant words right out of the brain of Brooks for him to print on paper in the NYT's The Loser cabby. Who never got nothing out of being DFB's vital inspirational source.
All those wonderful words of the common man who said the same exact things that Brooks would write as a golden rule.
But then. The occasional column by his colleague exposing his inadequacies from drowning in his own delusions of grandeur. Even with his life boat at the NYT.
Why doesn't anyone ever interview how the fish that get wrapped in his column feel about being covered in Brooks?
``The left'' -- this vague, monolithic group that Bropks elsewhere and always defines as ANYbody who deviates from strict center-right Democratic practices, seeks ``mayhem.''
On the other side, the differentiated ``certain kind of Republican'' are maybe kinda sorta rogue actors -- but they take to the streets and threaten violence to preserve ``the traditional American way of life.''
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