Old Both Siderists Never Die

They just briefly shift with the prevailing winds every now and then.

One of the only advantages of being the world's leading David Brooksologist is that when David Brooks occasionally shifts his position on something and the interwebs leaps with joy and proclaims that the millenium has arrived, I can just sit on my old porch, whittling, and shaking my head and muttering at the exuberant crowds rushing past my yard on their way to the David Brooks Parade that we've seen this before.  

Many times.

Militant Iraq War Pimp David Brooks built a mid-career surge that landed him at The New York Times out of bashing stupid Libtards and heaping unalloyed praise on George W. Bush for his economic and military genius.  When it all went tit's up, he shrugging and said, in effect, "Welp, I guess Both Sides got that one wrong!" and just... moved on.  

When the Bush Administration completely fucked up the response to Hurricane Katrina, David Brooks got good and mad about it for a minute and then just... moved on.  

When the corruption, lies and naked authoritarianism of an early Republican rough-draft of Donald Trump named Tom Delay was showing the world what a shitpile of bigots, imbeciles, cowards and fascists the GOP really was, David Brooks was very cranky ... at Both Sides. 

When any idiot could see that the berserk primal-scream response on the Right to the election of Barack Obama the Kenyan Usurper was primarily due to deeply rooted racism, David Brooks said, nope, nope, nope.  It's something else.  It must be something else.  Maybe something ... like ... economic anxiety!

The list of David Brooks' brief, awful moments of horror when the Real World breaks into his hermetically sealed Beltway Media bubble goes on and od, and such moments are always followed by a course correction when he spackles over the hole with a schmear of Both Siderism and reverts to his default setting.  Here's a big one: the moment it became clear that Trump was running away with the nomination of David Brooks' party.  Here's part of what I wrote five years ago as that was happening.  It should also make clear (if I haven't already) why I have no time for Never Trumpers who insist on pretending that the decades during which they actively profited from and pandered to the escalating corrosive insanity that was metastasizing within their party leading up to Trump somehow never happened.

From me in March of 2016 ("David Brooks: The Sword and The Shield"):

And I beheld Trump's mighty army crossing the wasteland of the American Dream, armed and ready to do Trump's bidding.

In their Right hand they wielded a great Sword called Ignorance, Bigotry and Rage which had been forged in the fires of Fox News and Hate Radio.  With it they mowed down fact and science and history just as they had been taught to do by Rush and Sean and Erik and Greta and Mark and Anne and Bloody Bill and the Other Bill and Dinesh on and on and on.  With it they decapitated their own past and buried it without breaking rank or stride, as they had been taught to do when they burned their Bush Administration team jackets and took up the Tea Party colors.

And on they came.

In their Left hand, they bore a strange Shield inscribed with the most potent Beltway magic conjure words of all: "Both Sides...".  It was thin and frail-looking, but had been so cunningly fitted together by the wealthiest artisans of the Beltway out of bits of "The extremes on the Right and the Left" and "If only Barack Obama would lead" that it easily deflected any payload of reality or reason no matter how powerful or sturdily constructed.  With it they flicked away all criticism , appeals to reason, and general dumbfoundedness at the bullshit they believed, just as they had been taught to do by David and the Other David and the Other Other David and the Other Other Other David and Ron and Good Ol' Joe and the Other Joe and Cokie and Mark and Tom and Pickled Peggy and Ramesh and Kathleen and Chuck and Hugh and Ross and Newt! and Every Single Fucking Mealworm Employed By The No Labels Scam and on and on and on and on and on.

"The Kenyan Usurper is the Divider in Chief and Libruls are the real racists!" they roared, and on they came.

Precisely as predicted here in the more rustic precincts of the despised and rebuked Left, Trump rose from the filthy, fertile breeding ground the Republican party has spend the last 20 years composting with fear and loathing and money.

As predicted, every time the high-dollar con men the ruling class employs to spin fairy tales of Burke and Whigs and sweet, sweet Centrism insisted that Trump would gradually weaken, Trump's army got stronger, thanks to the Sword the Right has given them and the Shield the Center had given them

As predicted, Trump easily sidestepped the ridiculous Maginot Line which the high-dollar, soft-handed, Very Reasonable con men the ruling class employs to spin fairy tales of Burke and Whigs and sweet, sweet Centrism threw together to stop his advance.  Trump's army whittled the Beltway's sputtering volleys of "but...but...but..." to splinters with the great Sword of  Ignorance, Bigotry and Rage Trump's army , and Trump's army effortlessly parried the Beltway's pleading to for fuck's sake come to your senses and quit tearing up our country club by their clever Shield of Both Siderism

"Both Sides are to blame!"  they raved.  "So we must burn it all down!"

And on they came.

And now, that Trump has done all the things David Brooks swore he could never do at the head of an army of fire-eyed Republican meatheads that David Brooks swore could not exist,  Mr. Brooks has written a column so redolent with the stink of begging and fear and schadenfreude that it almost defies analysis.  Suffice it to say, Mr. Brooks really, really, really wants someone to come along and save him from the beast he has been feeding for 20 years.

Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and citizenship. He pollutes the atmosphere in which our children are raised. He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.

A beast he promised over and over again to that small clutch of wealthy men who underwrite his idiocy and protect him from harm was thoroughly saddle-broke and ready to be ridden like Ann Romney's prized Lipizzaner right back into the White House.

A beast that has now kicked the barn door off its hinges and is currently stomping their carefully laid plans for oligarchy to bits.

So today David Brooks wrote a very special column.

It was not a column explaining that the Republican party  -- his Republican party, his Conservative movement -- really is just a festering cesspit of paranoia and bigotry and fury, because he has already written himself into an inescapable corner by writing so many columns over so many years swearing that this was not so.

And it certainly was not a column saying the simplest, and most obvious truth of all -- that the Left was right about the Right all along -- because on that day the small clutch of wealthy men who have subsidized his Whig Fan Fiction Factory for years would cast him down from his high  place and leave him unprotected to the predations of the job market.  Were that to happen, Mr. Brooks would not last a week.

Instead, Mr, Brooks has written a letter of supplication to that small clutch of wealthy men, begging them to let him keep his job as the Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual in Murrica.  Promising to do better next time.

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

Ah, but David, when was your job ever to "report accurately on this country"?  You're not a journalist.  You tell lies for a living.  Your lies are not as hot and violent as Trump's, but you and he are basically in the same racket.  You make a princely living trafficking in fairy tales about "real America" that comfort and flatter the thousands of Beltway insiders and cosseted plutocrat rubes you hustle every week, and Trump is paving a path to the White House by telling millions of low-information rubes the flattering, reassuring lies that they want to hear.

Same scam, different chumps, except Trump's chumps are ecstatic, rage-drunk and armed with mighty weapons which you helped to forge, while your chumps are freaking out and terrified because the Plutocrat Potemkin vision of America you sold them is being overrun by hordes of rage-drunk, invincibly-armored Visigoths you told them did not exist...

Easy to forget that just a couple of months prior to that column, David  Brooks was Both Sidesing the shit out of "Trump and Sanders" and a few months after that column -- once Hillary Clinton had clinched the Democratic nomination -- David  Brooks was Both Sidesing the shit out of "Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump".

Four years ago, immediately following Trump's nomination, David Brooks was dismissing the Women March as indulgent and frivolous, and I have lost count of the number of times in the past four years that he has "discovered" an emergent Conservative renaissance or the budding of a New Centrism that was going to tamp down on The Extremes on Both Sides.

So please, do not come to me today bringing the Good News that David Fucking Brooks has seen the  light just because tucked in among all the usual godawful Brooksian Both Siderist boilerplate --

Today we have homegrown feudalism. On the right, we have white supremacy, an effort to perpetuate America’s racial caste system, and Christian nationalism, an effort to define America in a way that erases the pluralism that actually exists.

On the left, less viciously, we have elite universities that have become engines for the production of inequality. All that woke posturing is the professoriate’s attempt to mask the fact that they work at finishing schools where more students often come from the top 1 percent of earners than from the bottom 60 percent. Their graduates flock to insular neighborhoods in and around New York, D.C., San Francisco and a few other cities, have little contact with the rest of America and make everybody else feel scorned and invisible. 

-- you found one line that aligns with your belief the filibuster should be killibustered:

If this doesn’t work and Republicans go into full obstruction mode, Democrats should absolutely kill the filibuster.

Because when I hear Mr. Brooks say something like this, I immediately want to know who exactly will be the judge of what "full obstruction mode" means?  Will it be Joe Manchin?  Michael Steele?  Will it be the same people who responded to the Republican Party's full obstruction mode during the Obama Administration with "Why won't Obama lead?"?

Until I see the fine print, I don't believe a god damn word of it.  And do you know why?  20 fucking years of David Brooks' very own words, that's why.

And so, when David Brooks says in his column today --

Recently, I was on a call with the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus and a similar group of senators.

-- what I hear is: 

I just had a most excellent session of three-way frottage with Ben Sasse and Joe Manchin who, by the way, have never actually "solved" a single fucking "problem".

And when David Brooks says --

Will he be able to pass this sort of sweeping legislation? I have far from given up hope. Everyday, I read that Republicans will never go for these spending plans, and I always want to ask the writer: Have you noticed that Republicans have already voted for roughly $3 trillion in new spending over the last 10 months?

 -- what I hear is: 

For the love of  Jesus, Simpson and Bowles, will everyone please forget that Republicans always reverse themselves and memory-hole their own pasts once the party in power changes.  And they get away with it because they are always abetted by enablers in the media like David Brooks.  

And when David Brooks says --

The salient divisions in the Biden era won’t just be left versus right.

I immediately think:

After four years of Republican failure, off-the-chart corruption, looting, lies, treason and death on a scale greater than World War II, 74 million reprogrammable Republican meatbags went to the polls in November to vote for four more years of it, it damn well is about Left versus Right and David Brooks fucking well knows it.

So you all go off and enjoy celebrating the New David Brooks and maybe bring me some cake.  

Meanwhile I'll be here, whittling, when the inevitable heel-turn comes.

UPDATE: Rachel Bitecofer speaks for me:

I mean, here's a man, in @nytdavidbrooks who's done more, personally, to put people in that Capitol insurrection than nearly anyone else, yet, bc he does it politely, he's still writing at @nytimes & invited on all the top shows? Just take a 2nd to reflect on the moral equiv here

— Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer 📈🔭🍌 (@RachelBitecofer) January 22, 2021

The only thing would add is this.  

Some of us have been reflecting on this for a lot longer than a second.  

In fact some of us have been trying very hard to have that convo for going on 16 years now.  

And the reason you may not have any idea who we are is precisely because the family that owns The New York Times and the corporations that own all the top shows and book all the guests are not going to allow us to get within 1000 miles of that conversation on their properties.

And of course Tom Nichols had to open his gob -- 

Really? pic.twitter.com/00DGAZDbRF

— Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer 📈🔭🍌 (@RachelBitecofer) January 22, 2021

-- because Tom Nichols is has name and troweling out David Brooks-lite Both Siderist claptrap is his game.

No Half Measures