David Brooks' Surprisingly Honest Column

Well, OK, the column itself is just the 1,000th retread of the same drivel that the House of Sulzberger has been paying Brooks to extrude for 19 years now.

19 years.

But if you're a cagey, veteran Brooksologist like me you understand that so many of Brooks' columns are like the autorefractor machine that optometrists use to measure a person's refractive error and prescribe the right corrective lenses.  Brooks' column itself is a fuzzy, dopey, maudlin mess about how he's not gonna let his big brain be infected by Trump this time around, no siree. 

But change the focus just a click or two by altering the focus just a little -- a word or two here or there -- and the whole of Brook's Ignoring Inconvenient Reality methodology opens up to you.

From Brooks:

I try to be a reasonable person. 

Translation:  Brooks obsessively clings to an imaginary center regardless of where the imaginary center happens to be at any given moment.

Brooks:

I try to be someone who looks out on the world with trusting eyes. Over the decades, I’ve built up certain expectations about how the world works and how people behave. 

Translation: When Brooks says "trusting" he means aggressively tendentious.   And over the decades Mr. Brooks has used his tendentious eyes to develop a reflex of either outright ignoring the depravity of his Republican party, or automatically diffusing every act of Republican depravity through the magic conjure words "Both Sides Do It".

Brooks:

I rely on those expectations as I do my job, analyzing events and anticipating what will happen next.

Translation:  Brooks' columns have been so completely on Both Sides Do It autopilot for decades that in our house we used to have a little contest in which we'd try to predicts where not if Brooks would put the "But the Democrat..." razor in the apple.  

My success at this little game was legendary.

Brooks:

And yet I’ve found that Donald Trump has confounded me at every turn. 

Translation:  Brooks and his fellow Beltway hacks had a really good thing going with their Both Sides Do It scam.  That Big Lie was so universally parroted across the political media that came to be regarded by the punditocracy as their state religion, and Brooks was their pope.  

And then Trump came along and cracked out of turn.

He crumbed the play!

Brooks again:

I’ve found that I’m not cynical enough to correctly anticipate what he is capable of.

Translation:  After decades of aggressively ignoring what was plainly happening to the Republican party and, instead, making his living lying to CEOs, college presidents, and other rich, privileged cultural shut-ins by spinning for them the fairy tales they desperately wanted to believe...Brooks has been forced to come face-to-face with the brutal fact that he doesn't know shit all about anything.

Brooks again.  Just the snips:

I have consistently underestimated...

I was shocked at how thuggishly...

...I was stunned to find out just how aggressively

Trump had worked to overthrow the election. And then, just last week, in reading his federal indictment, I was once again taken aback...

The veteran Brooksologist recognizes the callback to Brooks circa March, 2016 when, after all of his Very Serious, Supremely Confident predictions went utterly to shit, the very first thing he did was abjectly apologize to the only audience that really matters to him -- his plutocrat sponsors to whom he had spent his entire career selling piles of Whig Fan Fiction as serious reportage on the state of the nation.  From me back then:

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.

This was followed by Brooks swearing by Ronald Reagan and all of his angels that he was gonna by God get the fuck out of the Acela Corridor Quiet Car and go forth into the wilds of the American heartland, to lend an ear to the sad stories of Real Americans (from the NYT, March, 2016):

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.

He was gonna get out of that damn bubble, you betcha! Especially colleges! They're the worst!

He was gonna get out of that damn bubble and touch Indians! See the mountains and the prairies and the whole rest of that song!

But, of course, not very long after that, Brooks' pledge to scour every diner in Ohio until he grokked why Republicans were, y'know, Republicans quietly crawled under a porch and died.   Then he went right back to being the same rote Both Siderist hack he has always been, diligently rewriting history to suit the fantasies of his patrons.   

What I used to refer to as Mr. Brooks' Great Project.

And now it's 2023 and Brooks is right back where he was seven years ago. Shocked!Stunned!Taken aback! by the plain and obvious fact that Trump is exactly who he has always been, and the Republican party is exactly who they have always been.

So, seven years later, what's Mr. Brooks plan of attack this time?

Brooks, today:

And yet I can’t quite feel ashamed of my perpetual naïveté toward Donald Trump. I don’t want to be the kind of person who can easily enter the head of an amoral narcissist.

Translation:  Brooks doesn't really want to write about the one thing the House of Sulzberger is paying him to write about.  

 Brooks, today:

I’d rather not let him infect my brain. I’d rather not let that guy alter my views of the world. If occasional naïveté is the price for mental independence from Trump, I’m willing to pay it.

Translation:  Facing the reality of what the Republican party actually is would be an unbearable strain on Brooks' beautiful mind.  So this time around he's not going to even pretend to go on safari to the Lands Beyond The Acela Corridor to find out WTF is going on with Republican voters.  This time around he's just gonna fucking ignore Trump even harder.

The rest of the column is self-justifying crap.  

First, there are lot of "I" statements about how it's actually noble to consciously hold himself in this state of complete denial about how fucked the country is right now.  Not as a child hiding under the bed, but as a grown as man who has made a fortune telling lies to wealthy people about the world as they wished it to be announcing that he plans on coping with these parlous times by Heroically Refusing To Look The Monster In The Eye.

Second, there is a whole lot of bullshit about how Trump, apparently all by himself, has done terrible things to the country.  No mention of the Republican party at all, except to blame Trump for "corroding" it.  As if they never nominated him, elected him, stayed dog-loyal to him as he wiped his ass with the Constitution, cheered on his savagery and racism, and then re-nominated him virtually by acclamation, and came out to vote for him in even great numbers than they had in 2016.

Trump didn't "corrode" the Republican party: the Republican party manifested Trump.  Because for decades, every Conservative with a media platform from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck to Bill Kristol and David Brooks did everything in their power to engineer a GOP voting base of reprogrammable meatheads that turned out to be the perfect feeding ground for a monster like Trump.

Which, by an amazing coincidence, is exactly what I wrote about Trump on this here blog a scant 36 hours after Trump announced his candidacy in 2015.  Because that's just how blindingly obvious it was to those of us outside the Media Cave that the GOP was nothing more than a shitpile of bigots and imbeciles, primed and ready to receive a Mussolini Messiah:

...As I wrote a few years ago,the brain-caste of the GOP spent 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.  

In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

So you see, it isn't actually impossible to figure out where the GOP is going and why it's so anxious to get there.

Unless, that is, you're someone like David Brooks.

Someone who has made a cottage industry out of continuously lying to his readers about the state of the world.  

Someone who has helped do enormous damage to the world by continuously using his incredibly privileged and influential position at The New York Times to crush the world-as-it-is into the Procrustean bed of the dangerously-fictional-world-as-his-wealthy-patrons-wish-it-to-be.

I Am The Liberal Media