As many of you know, in the United States the day after Thanksgiving is traditionally celebrated with two rituals: the bloated consumerism known as Black Friday and the blowtorching of lifelong Republican partisans who pretend they had no idea until very five minutes ago that their Republican Party was full of Republicans which we call Lifeboat Burning Day.
Today, as our Liberal ancestors have done for millions of years, we build a bonfire from a representative sample of the warped boards, moldering canvases and rotting ropes of prose out of which various Elite Republicans are trying to build themselves an armada of lifeboats. Then we dance around the blaze while committing the most transgressive sin imaginable: remembering the past. Then we roast wieners and marshmallows on the dying embers and drink and swap lies until dawn.
First on the pyre, David Fucking Brooks, who has made himself a wealthy and influential man by spending decades alternately lying about the rising tide of fascism on the Right, and lying about the shiny, new Republican Renaissance that is always juuuuuust around the corner. David Fucking Brooks, who, when he wasn't defending or ignoring Republican depravity could be found happily slagging the decadent, virtue-signaling, Murrica-hating, speech-code McCarthyite Left for pointing out those depravities.
The Rotting of the Republican Mind
When one party becomes detached from reality.
Now don't get too excited. Every now and then the sheer hydraulic pressure of Reality that builds up beneath Conservative hacks like Mr. Brooks reaches the point where they go right out on the lawn, shake a fist at the sky and say naughty things about Republicans...after they have looked both ways to make absolutely sure there is zero professional risk in doing do so.
Because Conservative hacks like Mr. Brooks are, above all things, big ol' cowards.
Because he has been such a metronomically reliable Sulzberger family house pet, Mr. Brooks' employers do not mind his occasional tantrums, but after he has let off a little steam they gently remind him that he needs to get back to Both Sidesing the shit out of everything hurry-up-quick. Which is why these extremely rare outbursts are always followed a week or two later by some bullshit about campus speech codes or whatever. So, like Halley's Comet, enjoy Mr. Brooks pitching a Liberal blogger fit while you can because it will not pass this way again for a long, long time.
Mr. Brooks continues:
My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.”
His "analysis". Isn't that just fucking adorable? Because you can scour Mr. Brooks' outburst line-by-line and never hear anything that sounds remotely like "Wow. The Left was right about the Right all along."
Instead, like every other Never Trumper, Mr. Brooks presents the fact that the Republican Party is irretrievably fucked-in-the-head as if were some deeply held secret of nature that he and a handful of other trailblazers had been personally discovered after sweating behind the eyepiece of a mighty telescope for years, carefully noting the movements of the political cosmos. Some kind of Earth-shattering, mind-blowing revelation akin to Edwin Hubble announcing in 1924 that the Andromeda nebula was actually a galaxy.
The alert reader will also notice that words like "race" or "racism" or "white supremacy" are not to be found anywhere within the scope of Mr. Brooks' "analysis". Instead he wears the edges off of his thesaurus trying to bring the bullshit "economic anxiety" alibi back from the dead.
People need a secure order to feel safe. Deprived of that, people legitimately feel cynicism and distrust, alienation and anomie. This precarity has created, in nation after nation, intense populist backlashes against the highly educated folks who have migrated to the cities and accrued significant economic, cultural and political power. Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center calls this the “Density Divide.” It is a bitter cultural and political cold war.
In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them.
Then comes the razor in the apple. The single most important structural element of Mr. Brooks' lifeboat: Control of the timeline.
Sure, Mr. Brooks' Republican Party may have been awash with bigots and imbeciles economically anxious humans for decades. And, sure, the reason that Mr. Brooks' Republican Party may have been awash with bigots and imbeciles economically anxious humans for decades was that it was very deliberately built on a foundation of bigots and imbeciles economically anxious humans. But, sadly, the truth or falsity of these assertions are lost to the memory of man and therefor inherently unknowable.
Instead, all we know for sure is that everything that has gone horribly wrong inside the GOP began four years ago with the "evangelists of distrust":
People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community.
Then, having dispensed with the entire history of the modern Republican Party from Nixon's Southern Strategy through Birtherism, Mr. Brooks is free to blame it all on Trump and his "media allies":
Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime.
And to whom does Mr. Brooks once again delegate the dirty, thankless task of trying to repair all that his Republican Party has destroyed?
You and me kid. You and me.
The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it.
By the way, the comment section for Mr. Brooks' article was immediately closed. which doesn't feel very "reducing social chasm"-y to me.
So now that Mr. Brooks' has given us a nice pile of kindling to get Lifeboat Burning Day started, let's turn our attention to Mr. Tom Nichols, whose antics are only known to me second-hand because Mr. Nichols blocked me for cruelly pointing out that his Republican Party actually existed prior to 2016.
Today we find Mr. Nichols not just making the words "us" and "we" do some heavy lifting, but flogging them nearly to death as he forces them to build a monument to "Tom Nichols, Heroic Leader of the Resistance!"
So strap in, because shit is about to get surreal.
What'd I tell you? And complete the circle of Elite Never Trumper life,
The Bulwark podcast
put a microphone in front of him today so he could swear he had no idea that his Republican Party was full of Republicans.
UPDATE #1: In which Mr. Nichols tries to get
all the way on my corner (h/t Alert Reader
PartyTrike):
Except it's not Trumpism. It's Republicanism.
UPDATE #2: And of course, there was no way Tom was gonna be able to get his big ol' head all the way up his ass without some powerful lubricant, so once again it's Both Siderism to the rescue!
Tom Nichols: Yeah I mean it's almost like the Center-Right and the Center-Left, we're all becoming kind of, um you know John F. Kennedy Democrats or Nelson Rockefeller Republicans or some you know squishy middle that the people on on both wings of our respective parties hate. Uh, and I am encouraged by the fact that... that... that... there are plenty of people in the Center-Left, um, who agree with us for example that just as we don't need to talk to the Seb Gorka fans. um, we don't need to have long conversations with kids that are pulling down statues of George Washington.
Nichols: I mean... I... just to be bipartisan about this, um, you know if you're out in the streets arguing that, you know, the inner city should be a six-by-six block autonomous zone, um, ruled by an anarcho-syndicalist collective whose executive has chosen and rotate you know blah blah blah blah that's not a serious conversation either. That's the kind of stuff you do right, um, because you're, um, you couldn't go back to college and you're bored...
And speaking of The Bulwark podcast, let's round out Lifeboat Burning Day by noting this exchange between Mona Charen and Charlie Sykes.
First came the obligatory round of stuttering disbelief that their Republican Party -- which is full of people they know! -- has been full of Republican all this time.
Unpossible! How did this happen? Why did no one warn us! And so forth.
Then there was a moment of handwaving concern from Ms. Charen, because don't Republicans realize that if they trash the very idea of elections and instead openly declare that cheating and stealing elections of perfectly OK that someday some Democrat may do exactly the same thing to them! Once again, it is so fucking clear that none of these Elite Never Trump brain wizards a) have ever met an actual Republican voter in real life and, b) cannot let go of their own, poisonous "Someday some Democrat somewhere might be just as bad!" propaganda.
And then came this:
Charen: Yeah. Right. Exactly. I mean you would never have thought that any Republican group would would make such a petition, right? That would have been unthinkable. And it would have been unthinkable for a sitting Republican senator from South Carolina to phone the Secretary of State of Georgia and say, you know, how about those ballots that where the signatures don't... can you just dump a bunch of those and and, uh, you know. That is where we are. This...the... the Republican Party, I'm sorry, it has become a conspiracy against democracy. That's where we are.
Actually, Ms. Charen, a whole lot of us have known for decades that, if pressed, pretty much every Republican group was perfectly willing to seize and hold power by any means necessary.
Sykes: And you know what's really frustrating is that for years I pushed back against that argument. I said, "No no no, there's no voter suppression. No this is all about fighting fraud. This is legitimate. This is about voter integrity."
And then Mr. Sykes stumbled straight into the one place no Never Trumper ever wants to go.
Sykes: "All of you Lefties who are talking about voter suppression or how anti-democratic this is, you are exaggerating." What... what... what do we say now...?
Sykes: ...when, in fact, the intention here driven by the President of the United States is
let's nullify millions of votes. Let's just throw them away.
Charen: Yep. Uh. That's right.
Good question, Charlie. What do you say to us Lefties now? I mean after you immediately block us on social media whenever we bring these things up.
Here is his "answer".
Sykes: So you saw Tim Alberta's piece in Politico magazine...
And just like that, Mr. Sykes and Ms. Charen scamper the hell away from having to form the words "The Left was right about the Right all along." and get back to the important business of building The Bulwark's brand.
So Happy Lifeboat Burning Day everyone. May our bonfires light the way to a better tomorrow!
No Half Measures
