David Brooks Is Saddened To Learn That...It Was MAGAtha All Along!

If you've been reading this blog awhile, you'll know that when I haul this bit I wrote back in 2013 out of the trunk --

...it is now painfully clear that Mr. Brooks is engaged in a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political  economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

And odds are he'll get away with it too.

-- David Brooks has gone and done something very David Brooks-ish.  

Mr. Brooks spent his entire adult life lying about the Republican Party.  Pretending it was something it manifestly was not .  Conspicuously ignoring the truth that was staring everyone in the face and mocking Liberals for warning that the GOP was a shitpile of bigots and imbeciles rocketing down the road to fascism.  

And time after time, when Liberal predictions turned out to be 100% correct, Brooks would simply pivot from outright lying to the Beltway media's go-to form of defection: Both Siderism.    For years your could always depend on finding -- usually somewhere between the third and fifth paragraphs -- the "Both Sides Do It" razor in the apple.

And when I say always, I mean always.  In our house, it became a game: predicting where and how Brooks' would Both Sides whatever Republican perfidy had boiled to the surface this week.  Over the decades we have seen Both Siderism rise from a toxic mainstream media reflex, the the official state religion of the Beltway press.  And the pope of  the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It was David Fucking Brooks.

But when the reek from the Right got too rancid to deflect, Brooks had one more tool in his Very Serious Pundit kit: ruminating gauzily about the Glorious Republican Party and the Amazing Republican Renaissance that was always just around the corner, but never quite arrived.

So when I was on Brooks-watch last Friday, allocating barely a tenth of my attention to his News Hour droning, and heard him, near tears, say the following -- 

I don't want to prettify the past.

-- Brooks had my full attention.

Literally all Brooks has done for more than a quarter of a century is deny the evidence of his senses in order to prettify the past on behalf of his political party -- a record which this blog has spent millions of words documenting chapter and verse since the earliest days of the Liberal blogosphere. 

But suddenly Mr. David Brooks -- who's only academic credential is a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Chicago -- was in full possession of the history of his Republican party: a history which, up until a minute ago he would've sworn was either nonexistent or far too inconsequential for Very Serious Big Thinking Pundits like him to notice.  

Over the course of his entire career, Brooks may have mentioned filth like Limbaugh and filth factories like Conserative Hate Radio and Fox News once or twice.  Maybe more than that, but not by much.  And when he did it was to pooh-pooh the idea that filth like Limbaugh or filth factories like Conserative Hate Radio and Fox News had any material effect on Republican voters or Republican policies.

But last Friday, in the halting, circuitous and detached manner Brooks adopts when he is pushed onto a topic that he'd rather burn his tongue from his mouth than discuss:

I think they're sort of moving on beyond Trump, but they still say it was a lie. And so there's a lack of loyalty to the truth. And when I look on — after two years, and now we have a longer time frame, so I think about the gradual — all the doors the Republican Party and the country had to walk through to get to January 6.

A "lack of loyalty to the truth" is the Brooks version of the New York Times stylebook recommend alternative to "lying Republicans scum".  And what kind of gibberish is "And when I look on — after two years, and now we have a longer time frame, so I think about the gradual..."?

Brooks continues:

And, to me, I don't want to prettify the past. There was Father Coughlin. There was nativists. There's been a lot of ugliness in American history. But I would say, over the course of my lifetime, and, frankly, my, at one time, alliance with the Republican Party, there were a lot of doors they walked to that created what you might call a loss of moral knowledge that — what was it, the panic of Rush Limbaugh, the — a lot of what happened to the white Christian nationalists and the evangelical communities.

A decent shrink could spend a week dissecting all the verbal furniture Brooks is trying to scurry behind here to avoid stating the obvious.  That the Left was right about the Right all along.   And then spend another week diagnosing the farrago of psychological malfunctions behind Brooks' dissociative  weirdness as he tried to passively speed through a severely truncated version of decades of accelerating Republican madness as if these were events he had passively witnessed from space...while at the same time trying to awkwardly squeeze out the most minimal admission possible that, yes, once upon a time "and, frankly, my, at one time, alliance with the Republican Party".

Brooks continues:

There was on the radio, on TV the rise of Tucker. And so it — the standards of acceptable behavior went down and down and down, and the tolerance for violence went up and up and up.

And Brooks myopically lumbered through all of it, using his privileged position at the very pinnacle of the elite media to reassure the shut-ins, CEOs and college presidents who take his claptrap as gospel, that all was right with the world, that what they should really be concerned about was those terrible liberal speech codes at a few elite universities and however unpleasant things may seem at the moment, take heart!

Because a mighty Conservative renaissance is surely near at hand!

And finally, as the Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks foretells,  as the  Brooks of Yesterday giveth (from Brooks' 01/06/2023 News Hour appearance referenced above)-- 

But I would say, over the course of my lifetime, and, frankly, my, at one time, alliance with the Republican Party,

-- the Brooks of Today taketh away (from Brooks' five days later, in his 01/11/2023 NYT "conversation" with Bret Stephens)

Even in my red-hot youth, when I worked for Bill Buckley at National Review, I didn’t see myself as a Republican, just a conservative. I maintain a distance from political parties because I think it’s always wrong for a writer to align too closely to a party. That’s the path to predictability and propagandism.

More about this "conversation" once I stop laughing.  

I Am The Liberal Media