David Brooks' Secret Plan To Save The Republican Party

Preface:  All you really need to know about Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times is that, for more than a quarter of a century, he has been Conservatism's Scheherazade. The spinner of 1,001 tales to please his employers and the cosseted elite who read his fairy tales and sigh with delight.  Except, instead of 1001 different stories, Mr. Brooks has just recycled the same, 2-3 hackneyed claptrap yarns 1,001 times.  

And one of the monotonously repeated bald retreads on which his career has been rolling along for a generation is the Myth of the Conservative/Republican Renaissance about which I have already written more than I care to think about over the past 16 years.  From "David Brooks: ...And a Doughy Pantload Shall Lead Them":

And of course, Mr. Brooks perennial insistence that an Imaginary Conservative Renaissance (which will wipe every tear from yadda yadda yadda) Is Just Around The Corner.  And I do mean "perennial" in the literal sense --

lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time; enduring or continually recurring.

--because Mr. Brooks has been confidently predicting an Imaginary Conservative Renaissance Which Is Just Around The Corner about once every five or six months for at least the last 19 years.

Every now and then, Mr. Brooks likes freshen up his monotonous repetitions of bullshit by framing them as response to An Imaginary Baffled Young Person Who I Have Invented For The Occasion.  His most infamous straw man was young Joey Tabula Rasa, who Mr. Brooks conjured up to defend his relentless cheerleading of the Iraq War, kick the shit out of the stupid, antiwar Left, and generally reinforce his (as one wag described it) "...reputation for Deep Insights into the very soul of the inhabitants of the land of the free -- his nearly-superhuman understanding of the "heart has reasons that reason cannot know" business of the American people, which he vouchsafes to his Beltway colleagues every week in the reverential tone of a Yang chief incanting the E Plebnista to his tribe."

End Preface

In this week's episode of that long-running dramedy, Mr. Brooks pens a...

Letter to a Young Republican

Who...

In college ... realized he wanted to make a difference in this world by serving in government. His opinions leaned right, so the Republican Party became the vehicle for that service. He’s spent 10 years working his way up the Washington policy ladder.

But...

...is dismayed by what the Republican Party has become. He’s disgusted by the whole political game

Today Mr. Brooks had some advice for this young man which I will summarize for you TL:DR readers, after which I will disassemble Mr. Brooks' column paragraph by paragraph for those of you who are fans of such vivisections.

First, the abridged version.  

Ahem.

According to Mr. Brooks, all the GOP has to do to save itself -- by some means which  Mr. Brooks never quite gets around to explaining -- is become something which bears no relationship whatsoever to the Republican Party as it exists and is, in every measurable way, completely alien and actively hostile to what it it now.  

What Mr. Brooks described in his column is not an "If my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle." situation but rather an "If my aunt had thick, cleat-covered aluminum wheels with titanium spokes, a robotic arm for rock-coring, ran on plutonium-238 oxide and has a BAE RAD750 radiation-hardened single board computer, she'd be a Mars rover" miracle which rivals the transubstantiation at The Last Supper. 

Mr. Brooks dresses his disquisition up as a "letter to a young Republican" thus proving once again that, in his entire life, David Brooks has never met an actual Republican, young or otherwise, in the wild.

TL;DR readers, please feel free to stop reading now and visit the Gift Shoppe on the way out, because I tell you truly this is an completely accurate precis of what The New York Times has paid David Brooks to write this week, and which I'm sure you will hear him repeat at one of the other media venues wher e he is paid to spout his opinions..

For fans of a longer post, let's begin with the calendar.

According to Mr. Brooks, his young friend joined the Republican Party and has "spent 10 years working his way up the Washington policy ladder".  This means, as a graduate of an elite college (where else would he have met Mr. Brooks?) he joined the GOP in 2011 or thereabouts.  Which, at that time, was the party of Birtherism and Death Panels in a full-blown racist freakout over The Commie Kenyan Usurper.  It was the party of obstruction, sabotage and sedition.  The Teabagger party in which monsters like Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Conservative media colossi like Hate Radio and Fox News had long since stopped being novelty acts and were now unequivocally the blood and sinew and heart and soul of the Party of Personal Responsibility.  

It was party about which even extremely measured, moderate, Washington D.C. think tankers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein were writing this in The Washington Post:

Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

In other words, Mr. Brooks' young friend, college-educated and with eyes wide open, joined a fully mature American Fascist Party which had already spent decades building a base out of paranoid, anti-science bigots and imbeciles, already lied us into the wrong war and then fucked that war up, already crash the American economy, countenanced torture as official United States policy and were clearly careening at high speed down the dark road that would soon seen Donald Trump in the White House.

So right off the bat, fuck Mr. Brooks' young friend in the ear with a fucking steam hammer.  

And with that out of the way...

Dear Young Republican,

I get it. I’ve been increasingly dismayed and disgusted by the Republican Party since the moment Sarah Palin first stepped onto the national stage...

Bullshit.  Sarah Palin "stepped onto the national stage" in 2008.  Here is what Mr. David Brook was saying about his Republican Party in November of 2014:

The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase. 

Like all Conservatives, to prop up the myth of his sagacity and maintain his viability in the mainstream media in the here-and-now Mr. Brooks must constantly lies about and retcon his own past.  

Mr. Brooks continues:

But we do face a political crisis in this country, and the Republican Party is the epicenter of that crisis. Destiny has placed you, all of you young Republicans, at the crucial spot in the line.

First part, true.  Second part, ridiculous.  "Destiny" has shit all to do with the manufacture of the next generation of Tucker Carlsons and Ben Shapiros.  

The Democrats have become the party of the educated metropolitan class. There will always be a lot of Americans who do not share the interests or values of that class and they tend to vote Republican.

The Democrats are a huge, contentious coalition which, broadly speaking, is in favor of clean air, clean water, good jobs at livable wages, good schools, affordable health care, racial justice and people not slaughtering each other with guns.   Republicans, on the other hand. have very spent the past +40 years methodically building a white supremacist party powered by the fury and ignorance of reprogrammable racist meatbags who would rather die in darkness screaming in incoherent rage at The Enlightenment than admit they fucked up very badly.  

The party is politically viable, but it is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Under Trump it became an apocalyptic personality cult. 

Trump did not create the Republican Party.   The Republican Party manifested Trump as the avatar of its depraved desires.

But you should know, as I’m sure you do, that there are many Republicans who want to change their party and make it a vehicle for conservative ideas.

And all nine of those "many Republicans" are in heavy rotation on MSNBC seven days a week.  On the other hand,  having steeped in the madness and sadism of  Donald Trump for four years, 11 million  more Republicans went to the polls to vote for him in 2020 than showed up for him in 2016.  So maybe, just maybe, David Brooks has no fucking idea what he's talking about.

These people are energized as never before and feel their whole lives have been preparation for the coming moral, intellectual and political struggle. This is a struggle to create a Republican Party that is democratic and not authoritarian, patriotic and not nationalistic, conservative and not reactionary, benevolent and not belligerent, intellectually self-confident and not apocalyptic and dishonest.

 David Brooks is now describing the Democratic Party. 

The conservative movement left an opening for Trump because it didn’t understand what was on the mind of actual voters.

Translation:  Men like David "It's Going To Be Rubio!" Brooks, who built entire careers purporting to know the secret heart of real Americans, never had the slightest fucking clue what they were talking about.  

But you know who did know what was going on with the GOP?  Who was right about the Right all along?   Those "educated metropolitan" Liberals who actually live out here in the real world.

 Fancy that.

The party has the potential to be something truly good for America: a multiracial working- class coalition, a party that serves the interest of all those who don’t fit in with the definition of the good life that is promulgated by the meritocracy.

 Once again, David Brooks is describing the Democratic Party. 

It’s to be a champion for those who didn’t complete college, don’t want to leave their hometown for the big city, do have a set of traditional values centered around their faith.

It always cracks me up when David Brooks swipes Josh Hawley's copy of "Rube Talk For Dummies" and goes into his Crepes of Wrath -- 

-- "I'm just simple, country pundit, unfamiliar with your Big City ways..." routine.

As Senator Ben Sasse put it...

Bwahahahaha!  I know just where Senator Ben Sasse can put it.

Will this work? Is the Republican Party salvageable? Nobody knows. 

Oh! Oh! I know!  Call on me!

Right now Republicans are rallying around Trump because they believe Democrats and the media are going after him. 

No, Republicans are rallying around Trump because they are the same mob of reprogrammable racist meatbags they have always been.

 It’s pie in the sky to ask rank-and-file Republicans to denounce the man they’ve clung to.

Breaking:  Fascists love their Dear Leader.

Suppose new leaders, issues and movements arose? 

And suppose my aunt were a Mars rover?

 It’s not my struggle, and maybe it’s not your struggle. But it is certainly a noble way for the right people to spend their lives.

Since before you were born, young Republican, Conservatives like me have been doing immeasurable harm to this country by lying to our huge audiences of credulous elites about the real condition and trajectory of the Republican Party.  Conservatives like me made an excellent living by telling America to ignore the growing threat from the Right (and to ignore the crackpot alarmists on the Left who were trying to warn us about the terrible direction the GOP was headed) even as that threat metastasized to the point where it has very nearly killed the country.

And for my sins I was richly rewarded with a job-for-life at America's newspaper of record along various other influential media gigs and the he approbation of my peers. 

In other words, I am now set for life several times over, so I wish you the best of luck, young Republican, picking up the tab for hellacious mess which Conservatives like me have left behind.  

Behold, a Tip Jar!