David Brook Bids 2020 Adieu By Being 100% David Brooks

Here is the first paragraph of Mr. Brooks' last column of 2020 (emphasis added by me):

This is the year that broke the truth. This is the year when millions of Americans — and not just your political opponents — seemed impervious to evidence, willing to believe the most outlandish things if it suited their biases, and eager to develop fervid animosities based on crude stereotypes.

Here are final paragraphs of Mr. David Brooks from 2005 in which the Democrat's reluctance to [checks notes] means-test Social Security meant they were the Very Incarnation of Reckless, Obstructionist Evil.  From "Calling the Democrats' Bluff":

Don't take people at their word. Don't listen to them when they tell you how to be virtuous.

They're faking it. They don't care about virtue, or you or the common good. They're just taking opportunistic potshots under the guise of sermonizing. They're just a bunch of hypocrites.

This little bit of moral philosophy is drawn from the political events of the past few years... 

George Bush has been willing to address a long-term, politically thorny problem. He's pursued it doggedly while most members of his party wish he would just drop it. But his Democratic counterparts are behaving like alienated junior professors. No productive ideas. No sense of leadership. Just half-truths from the peanut gallery.

This is the difference between the party with a governing mentality and the party with the opposition mentality. The governing party leads. It takes the arrows. It casts about for productive ideas and slowly absorbs the other party's good ones. Bush has now absorbed progressive indexing of retirement benefits.

The opposition party opposes. It doesn't feel any responsibility to come up with positive alternatives. Its main psychological need is to be against its nemesis at all costs. If the governing party steals one of its ideas, it will oppose that idea.

In this way the opposition party is pushed further and further to the edge. It loses control of its identity -- it's simply a negative reactive force to whatever the governing party happens to be doing at the moment. It finds itself in a cycle of opposition, negativity and irrelevance.

This is what's infected the Tories in Britain, and it's infected the Democrats here. When a Republican president embraces progressive indexing, something big is happening. When the Democrats oppose it, you know their party has betrayed an animating ideal.

Just a reminder that Brooks was perfectly capable of writing with fire -- had no qualms throwing around words like "opposition, negativity and irrelevance" and much, much worse -- as long as it was in the service of advancing the second-worst president in modern American history.

Until it all went tits-up, just like those we negative, irrelevant Liberals warned it would.

At which point Mr. Brooks (along with 96% of the American punditocracy) dove head-first into the Both Sides Do It bunker, locked the door behind them, and have been camped out there ever since.  

No, You Move