No. Really. He said that.
First he said this:
Joe Biden ran on unity and bipartisanship. His goal was to restore the soul of America and make Washington work again. His first major proposal was a $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill. Ten Republicans countered with a $618 billion plan.
They could have negotiated for even a week to see if they could settle on a compromise. Republicans and Democrats have already cooperated to pass about $4 trillion in Covid relief. It’s plausible to think some of them could have cooperated to pass a fifth trillion.
Biden would have shown that a bipartisan political process can still work. He would have divided the G.O.P. between the Republican normies and the Trumpian crazies. He would have taken a giant step to depolarize our politics, restore political legitimacy and make Congress function. That would have been a huge accomplishment.
Which, as we all know perfectly well, is utter bullshit. Exactly the same brand of bullshit David Brooks has been hawking on the op-ed page of The New York Times, where he has been conjuring ghost legions of "Republican normies" out of thin air for a couple of decades now.
And honestly, after all these years, the nature of Brooks' bullshit itself should be the subject of a whole lot more serious scholarly investigation than a semi-regular post on some little blog out on the exurbs of respectability. Because while it's much less armed-and-shouty and much more profitable and establishment-friendly than QAnon derangement, Mr. Brooks' pathology obviously represents an equally mindless and incurable idée fixe -- a psychological deformity which is at once patently ridiculous, aggressively oblivious, relentlessly knocked on its ass by reality every fucking day and fully on autopilot.
Mr. Brooks continues:
But it wasn’t even attempted. There are many reasons, including the size of the Republicans’ offering, but the core is that most Democrats, outside Joe Biden, don’t trust Republicans and don’t believe in bipartisanship right now. We are too close to the horrors of the Trump presidency and the trauma of Jan. 6. With some justification, Democrats have contempt for Republicans and don’t want to work with them. The Democratic Party is not emotionally ready to enact the kind of government Biden promised.
I think this is a mistake, but you can’t argue with an emotion. You can’t turn on trust like a light switch. It takes time.
Spoken like a man who has been repeatedly caught cheating on his wife and now just wants to get marriage counseling over with as quickly as possible so he can dump her and get back to canoodling with his much younger research assistant.
You know doc, I know she has some justification, but doesn't this really comes down to the fact that she's just not emotionally ready to get over it.
I think this is a mistake, but whatdya gonna do? You can’t argue with an emotion. /shrugs/ I mean chicks, amirite?
3 comments:
As has been repeatedly noted, Biden (and, indeed, other senior Democrats) seems to have finally figured out that "bipartisanship" actually means looking at what the electorate want, rather than what billionaire donors want.
And it's the inescapable fact that the electorate generally want more "liberal" policies is what terrifies the pundits (and the Republicans) so much.
Someone as well-connected as Brooks could easily ask Republican Senators what reasons they had to offer a package a third the size of the Democratic one, and present their reasons to the public to demonstrated their sincere concerns.I
This assumes they have reasons and sincere concerns, so I wonder why he didn't?
DFB's time will expire some day at the NYT unless, they go into Brooks Reruns after he leaves. Rerunning his past columns like Gilligan's Island on the TV.
I am sure which ever past DFB past column is reprinted in his column space when he is gone. Will be as relevant as it was the first time it was printed.
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