David Brooks: The Crepes of Wrath Rides Again

I'm recycling this intro from a thing I wrote in 2020 because as a lazy Liberal I clearly do not understand the nobility of labor or working class values.

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Mr. Brooks was raised in academic privilege, loitered at the University of Chicago long enough to score a BA in history (which, based on how routinely he molests and whitewashes the past in order to advance his political agenda, should have been revoked decades ago) after which he latched onto the wingnut welfare teat like a lamprey and has been nursing at its ample bosom ever since.  Brooks is America's most ubiquitous cheerleader for the myopically wealthy, the cluelessly privileged and politically inbred and has made his a career out of telling the rich and powerful the silky lies they desperately wish to be true.

Yes truly it can be said (and has been said, once or twice) that in all this wide, bountiful, fatally-conflicted nation -- from the mountains to the prairies and the whole rest of that song -- there is no one who can speak with less forged-in-the-crucible-of-hardship authority about what hard times have to teach us than David Fucking Brooks.

And yet he keeps doing it.  

However this time Mr. Brooks took his extremely limited knowledge of everything beyond the Acela corridor out for a spin tarted up as an "Orange Man Bad", and I will I admit I took some unhealthy pleasure in seeing Brooks' get absolutely railed for it by Wingnut Twitter all the next day.  I know Mr. Brooks doesn't know or care what anyone outside of his Beltway peer groups thinks of the glop he writes, but it provided this dirty hippie with some cheap fireworks on a chilly February afternoon.

What's hilarious about the Wingnut Twitter freakout is that Brooks' Orange Man Bad stuff only runs on for the length of the headline -- 

Defeat Trump, Now More Than Ever

-- and about a paragraph of text -- 

In the United States that, of course, is Donald Trump. This moment of heightened danger and crisis makes it even clearer that the No. 1 domestic priority for all Americans who care about democracy is to make sure Trump never sees the inside of the Oval Office ever again. As democracy is threatened from abroad it can’t also be cannibalized from within.

-- but nowhere is there to be found any mention of the underlying reasons why Donald Trump remains a threat.  And I checked.  Thoroughly.

For Brooks, the actual source of the problem -- the +70M reprogrammable Republican meatheads who thrill at the thought of putting Trump back in office with a mandate to stomp American democracy to death -- doesn't even rate a mention.  Nor does the sprawling, multi-media Conservative propaganda industry that pumps The Crazy into the skulls of those +70M reprogrammable Republican meatheads all day, every day.  

That entire slab of debased humanity and the morally bankrupt scum that belt-feed them propaganda is just written off as something inevitable and unstoppable.  A force of nature, like a hurricane or an avalanche.  

Personally, I find the fact that America's most ubiquitous Conservative public intellectual just offhandedly dismisses +70M adult Americans as mindless, unpersuadable zombies -- creatures without agency or conscience -- pretty amazing.  I mean, as you and I know (and have been warning for decades), they are indeed mindless, unpersuadable zombies, but the fact that life-long Republican David Brooks simply breezes past that staggering rot at the heart of our democracy in his rush to nag Democrats about how they should talk to a handful of working class "independents" in five states should not go unremarked upon.

And now that we've remarked upon it we'll be moving onward.

Another piece of surpassing weirdness about Brooks' writing is that, over and over again, like every other goofball Never Trumper, this cosseted Acela corridor fop -- who had no fucking idea that his Republican party was full of Republicans until the day Donald Trump took the oath of office --  nonetheless believes he is possessed of some special insight into the hopes and dreams and grievances of the working class "independents" of Michigan and Wisconsin.  

For the record, in times of epic Republican bed-shitting, Mr Brooks has always peered deeply into the murky waters of "What Independent's Really Want" and come 100% certain that they just so happen to want exactly what David Brooks wants!  Quelle surprise!

For example, less than a year after the failed Bush regime limped out of office leaving behind multiple catastrophes for the Obama team to clean up, David Brooks put his Bush Administration cheerleader outfit into cold storage and began what would become a decade's long infatuation with "Independents" beginning with this column boldly asserting that he knew exactly what "independents" wanted.  And if Democrats didn't want to get thrown out of office at the next opportunity they had better immediately  stop trying to please the Extreme Left and start catering to the whims of the "independents".

Whims which, once again, just so happened to comport exactly with Mr. Brooks' own predilections.  

And Brooks was pretty blunt about it.  No shading or nuance.  Just this headline -- 

What Independents Want

--  followed by a wish list of things that "independents" supposedly wanted which which miraculously comported exactly with Mr. Brooks' own wish list.

Here's a short snip from what I wrote about it back then because I have been doing this a long time now.  

So after stitching together a couple of snippets from a couple of polls into a big, floppy sack, Bobo dumped every loose button and paper-clip of his own privileged, white, suburban, middle-aged, Boomer Burkean bourgeoisie terror into it and called it analysis...

Surprise! By making a tasty tossed salad out of a grab-bag of different polls and "trends" that are a scant seven months long, Bobo desperately wants you to infer that the country is being driven by "independents", and independents have made some massive leap to the Right. He then sucker-punches the same, wingnut strawmen -- unions, abortion, "too much Gummint"

But I'd like to think that my most enduring contribution to the literature is bringing Kurt Vonnegut's term "granfalloon" to the table. 

Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":

"...a proud and meaningless association of human beings"

Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.

As I said, I'd like to think of this as my enduring contribution to the literature, but since no one but me has ever picked it up and run with it, it wasn't.

And so it goes.

Anyway, it's been 13 years since then, and if those intervening years of being completely wrong about everything has taught Mr. Brooks anything, it's to be a little less declarative about things that he knows absolutely nothing about.  Like the secret hopes and dreams and grievances of the working class "independents" of Michigan and Wisconsin.  Don't get me wrong: Brooks still believes they're out there in their millions just waiting to be harvested by Democrats if only they would run their party to suit Mr. David Brooks, but these days its easier to deduce exactly what stimuli what these "independents" respond to by eliminating the things they do not care about.

For example, from this paragraph -- 

The second Democratic myth is, “Economics trumps culture.” This is the idea that if Democrats can shower working- and middle-class voters with material benefits then that will overwhelm any differences they may have with them on religious, social and cultural issues — on guns, crime and immigration, etc. 

-- we can deduce that "independents" would rather lose their insurance, drink polluted water and work in unsafe conditions for shit wages than give up their guns or their fear of immigrants or their hatred of gays and/or their belief that God demands that impregnated women be forced to carry that pregnancy to term regardless of circumstances.  

That's some first rate intel, David Brooks!  But don't these "independents" sound a lot like, say, Republicans who are momentarily too ashamed to admit they're Republicans?

Next example:  

The third myth is, “A progressive ascendancy is emerging.” The fact is that only 7 percent of the electorate considers itself “very liberal.” I would have thought the Biden economic agenda, which basically consists of handing money to the people who need it most, would be astoundingly popular. It’s popular, but not that popular. I would have thought Americans would scream bloody murder when the expansion of the existing child tax credit expired. They haven’t.

First, thing to contend with here is Brooks' studiously sloppy writing, because there are at least several thousand miles between the idea that "A progressive ascendancy is emerging”  and the fact that "only 7 percent of the electorate considers itself “very liberal."  Because what the fuck does "very liberal" mean anyway?  And how does that differ from pretty Liberal, or  kinda Liberal, or sorta Liberal or Liberal about some stuff or "very Liberal but I can't really talk about it because my neighbors are MAGA goons" or just "I'm a Democrat".  

And how does any of that in any way equate to "independent" except as another example of the aforementioned "granfalloon".

Second, since, except for geographically, there is no such group as "Americans" it is impossible for  "Americans" as a group to have screamed bloody murder for anything  Of course, many, many Americans have screamed bloody murder about it, with more undoubtedly to follow as the reality of throwing millions of children into poverty sinks in.  Just as many, many Americans screamed bloody murder about Bush lying us into the wrong war, and the election of Donald Trump, and the murder of George Floyd.   But I guess if we all don't rise up together and sing the same hymn from the same page in the same key, then it doesn't count.

But third, if what Brooks is trying to say is that "independents" don't give a shit about the fate of poor children, then he should just say so.  And if some large number of these "independents" really don't give a shit about the fate of poor children I must once again point out that these "independents" sure as hell sound an awful lot like Republicans.

Brooks is generally positive about building stuff like roads and bridges, so good on you Dems for that!

But, according to Brooks, that is nowhere near enough to coax those slippery "independents" down off the fence.  No what, Dems must doo or they are doomed is (and I quote):

Craft a cultural narrative around the theme of social order.

And that's when the my laughter got loud enough to scare the neighbors.  

So we're back to yet another Never Trumper bitching about "messaging".  Mr Brooks continues.

The Democrats have been blamed for fringe ideas like “defund the police” and a zeal for “critical race theory” because the party doesn’t have its own mainstream social and cultural narrative.

No, the Democrats have been blamed for fringe ideas like “defund the police” and a zeal for “critical race theory” because Republicans have spent 30 years building a GIANT SPRAWLING multi-billion dollar propaganda machine that blasts out lies about Democrats all day, every day.

Democrats are in this position because Democrats don't have their own, GIANT SPRAWLING, multi-billion dollar media machine at their disposal with which they could out-shout the endless firehose of lies from Right.  Instead, Dems have relied on the putatively "fair" mainstream media as the arena in which they can make their case.

Except the mainstream media is not in any sense fair.  Democrats are in this position because the mainstream media so hopelessly addicted to conflict and has been so cowed by the Right that it will pass those lies right along to Mr. and Mrs. American in their passive "Many people are saying..."  and "Critics say..." configurations.  And thus have generations of "independents" been spawned who have been trained by high-dollar frauds like Mr. David Brooks to automatically blame Both Sides for the depravities of the Right.

See the thing is, Democrats do have our very own cultural narrative around the theme of social order.  It sounds like this:

Democrats believe poverty, disease, and ignorance are our enemy.  

Republicans have contempt for the poor, use disease as a political weapon and aggressively cultivate ignorance and fear because it is only by these barbaric means that they hold power.

Democrats know that free and fair elections are the foundation of our democracy, and fight to make voting as open and  open to every voter counts and fight to expand voting rights to every legal voter 

Republicans loathe democracy and work tirelessly to corrupt and corrode it.

Of course, if Mr. Brooks' mythical "independents" don't value these things, then fuck 'em.  

On the other hand, if Mr. Brooks' mythical "independents" do value these things, then I have two, very simple questions that, to my knowledge, absolutely no one in the media has ever bothered to put to them.  

First, if you value integrity and honesty and civil rights and voting rights and clean air and water and education and helping your fellow citizens in their times of need, how the fuck have you not noticed that one party in American politics is working -- sometimes falteringly -- in this general direction, and the other party has been working unceasingly for decades to undermine, obstruct and otherwise sabotage all of this?

Second, how do you complete this sentence:  “I don’t want to vote for the racist, authoritarian, insurrectionist book-burning party, but ______”?

An finally, a word of advice:  if you are one of those "independents" who can survey the rubble left in the wake of decades of Republican vandalism and sedition but who still reflexively blames "Both Sides" then your beef is not with the Democrats.  

Your beef is with the respectable Beltway media snake oil salesmen who have spent decades brainwashing you into believing such arrant horseshit.

Your beef is with men like Pope Bias the First, Bishop of the Acela Corridor, aka, Vicar of Both Sides, Successor of the Prince of the Kristols, Supreme Pontiff of the Washington Beltway, Primate of Fake Centrism, Archbishop and Metropolitan of Humility, Sovereign of True Conservatism's City State and Servant of the servants of the Church of Lyin'tology...

...Mr David Fucking Brooks.

Both Sides Don't