Birthday Fundraiser: Day Four -- David Brooks and I Remember Budapest Very Differently

Longtime readers of this blog know about what I refer to as David Brooks' Great Project: my ridiculously well-documented hypothesis that Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has never practiced what the kids call "journalism" in any sense of the word, nor does he really write whatchacall "op-ed" columns.

Instead, The New York Times has employed Mr. David Brooks at heavy expense for the sole purpose of spinning comforting and imaginative fairy tales about a wholly imaginary "Republican Party" which exists as a collective hallucination in the minds of Mr. David Brooks, a few hundred other, lesser confidence men who live off of the same grift, a handful of extremely wealthy idiots who desperately want to believe what Mr. Brooks writes, and many thousands of cultural cowards who want to feign political sagacity while hiding out in the safe confines of the seemingly-indestructible Both Siderist bunker which Mr. Brooks has built for them.

Or, as one 100% unemployable Liberal degenerate once put it several thousand posts ago:

...it is now painfully clear that 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.

You see, Mr. Brooks' relationship with the actual here-and-now here in America has always been a lot like Mr. Brooks' first marriage: a disaster away from which Mr. Brooks has been fleeing as fast as humanly possible, because it is the graveyard of all his ridiculous postulating and pontificating about Man and God and Culture. This is why Mr. Brooks has always reserved his biggest, gassiest lies for long paeans on the subject of Conservatism's amazing imaginary past -- which is always juuust out of sight in the Republican rear-view mirror -- and Conservatism's awesome imaginary future -- which is always juuust over the Republican horizon.

And in that spirit Mr. Brooks announced this very evening that 2016 is now the Beltway's new, official Year Zero.  According to Brooks, before 2016 Republicans and Democrats were essentially the same: equally decent folk who always strove to act in accordance with societal norms and common standards of decency.

From Mr. Brooks today:

Until four years ago, there was what you might call a Floor of Decency. This was the basic minimum standard of behavior to be an accepted member of society. Even when people did bad things, they at least tried to pretend that they were good, that they operated according to the basic values of society. You may or may not like the people in, say, the Obama or Bush administrations, you may think they made grave mistakes, but you have to admit they generally strove to meet this basic minimum.

And then suddenly, with no warning whatsoever...

I vividly remember the moment in the last campaign when, for me, Donald Trump smashed the floor. Trump had already made fun of the appearance of his rival Carly Fiorina in an interview with Rolling Stone. Then in the second Republican presidential primary debate he looked to Rand Paul and said, “I never attacked him on his looks, and believe me, there’s plenty of subject matter right there.” 

And there it is.

"Until four years ago..."

You knew this newest wholesale revision of the past was coming.  

I knew this was coming.  

We all knew this was coming.  

And here it is.

So  who was responsible for this shocking and instantaneous disintegration of our standards of decency four years ago?

Well certainly not David Brooks' Republican Party, because other than citing the GOP primary debate as the location of Donald Trump's floor-breaking, Brooks does not mention Republicans at all.  Because under the rock where Mr. Brooks' has been hiding out for the past 40 years, there are apparently no political parties.  Or Fox News.  Or Hate Radio.  Or Breitbart.  Or Newt Gingrich.  Or Lee Atwater.  Or Rick Wilson.  Or Karl Rove.  Or Tom Delay.  Or Mitch McConnell.  Or Dick Cheney.  Or even Bush-Era David Brooks. And on and on and on.

Instead, the people responsible for the shocking and instantaneous disintegration of our standards of decency four years ago are a group called "the country" which is populated by "Americans" who did absolutely nothing whatsoever in response to Donald Trump's floor-breaking:

And then, just when you thought the country would rise up in moral revulsion … nothing happened. Trump’s behavior got worse and worse and worse … and nothing happened. He was defying moral gravity. A lot of Americans either had reality TV moral standards or their expectations of politicians were so low they didn’t care.

 Because under the rock where Mr. Brooks' has been hiding out for the past 40 years, there is also no #Resistance.  There was no Women's March.  No Black Lives Matter.  No Veterans Against Trump.  No impeachment.  Democrats did not rise up and organize and take the House back in 2018 with the largest midterm turnout in history.  And on and on and on.

In fact, based on the truly a staggering number of heroes and villains and historical event about which David Brooks' would have to be completely oblivious to continue to believe the drivel that comes out of his pen every week, I would hazard a guess that he has nothing with him under that rock of his but an industrial-size bottle of Jergens lotion, a copy of "Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine" and a Fleshlight shaped like Margaret Thatcher.  

Of course no shitty David Brooks column be complete without a seaming pile of Both Sidersism for dessert!

With the floor gone, the assumption of legitimacy went too. Today, many Trump opponents look at the moral degradation Trump supporters tolerate, the bigotry they endorse or tolerate, and they conclude that such people are beyond the pale. Simultaneously, many Trump supporters conclude that Trump opponents have such viciously anti-American ideas, that they too lack legitimacy.

And since 2016 is the new Year Zero and nothing that came before counts anymore, Mr. Brooks feels smug enough to give himself the usual Never Trump reacharound --

Those of us in the anti-Trump camp will be smiled upon by history I imagine, but we might pause for a moment to consider the mote in our own eye...

-- before scolding his fellow Saviors of the Republic for being, y'know, too hard on Trump and his brownshirt mob.  

Over the past four years we’ve poured out an hourly flow of anti-Trump diatribes and in almost every case they rise to the top of the charts — most liked, most retweeted, most read. 

Even when justified, permanent indignation is not a healthy emotional state. We’ve become a little addicted to our own umbrage, addicted to that easy feeling of moral superiority, addicted to the easy affirmation bath we get when we repeat what we all believe. Trump-bashing has become a business model.

I have been writing about David Brooks for going on 16 years now and I can reliably report two things.

First, he has always been exactly this awful.  

Second, as a Sulzberger family house-pet he will always enjoy a position at the apex of American journalism and the unalloyed reverence of his Beltway colleagues.  

No Half Measures