Stay Off My Corner, Mona Charen

So last week Mona Charen decided it would be fun to critique a David Brooks column.   

Without consulting me, or availing herself of my 18.5 years of experience in the field.

And after her column started with this promise -- 

Trump Supporters Are Responsible for Their Choices
On David Brooks’s attempt to get inside the MAGA mind.

-- I found out why.

You were aware that our new "allies", really despise us, right?  Remember Winston Churchill's definition of a fanatic? Someone  "who can't change his mind and won't change the subject”?  It's like that.

Hardcore Cons like Charen have spent their entire adult lives professionally despising us.   The subject line of everything they wrote and every speech they gave was basically "Dirty hippie libertines are responsible for every bad thing in the world". 

Which made their grudging, seething, forced-march out ot the Party of St. Reagan especially galling.  Turns out, the crazy was coming from inside the house all along.

It also initially made their involuntary career change pretty awkward.  They had to stop typing "Dirty hippie libertines are responsible for every bad thing in the world" and start typing "Donald Trump and virtually every Republican I have ever known and respected turned out of be either fascists or really, really cool with accommodating fascist and dirty hippie libertines are still responsible for almost every bad thing in the world, also too". 

And while you can practically hear the lays of enamel being sheared off their molars every time they are required to talk about the state of their recently-former party, you can also feel their palpable sense of relief whenever the opportunity to get back behind that old, familiar Weekly Standard-era mule, and plow a few more furrows in their beloved "Dirty hippie libertines..." south 40.

Charen engages with Brooks as if they're two old gossip mongers at the backyard fence, spreading third-hand rumors that clearly comfort them about what those awful "progressives" are up to.

Here's a sample. 

 

BROOKS, STILL SEEKING to describe the worldview of Trump-supporting populists, does have a fair point when he takes progressives to task for wielding what used to be called politically correct language as a weapon. They keep changing the names of things to demonstrate their bona fides. Brooks notes that elites know all the correct terminology, while “members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.” A recent example of this language switching is driving me crazy. Have you noticed that progressives now say “unhoused” instead of homeless? If there is any earthly reason for the change, I cannot detect it. It’s virtue signaling. I doubt if using the old term would get you fired, but it’s a thrown elbow by the cognoscenti.

By my count the "latinx" thing has come up about three million times on Charen's Bulwark podcast.  Really bugs the fuck out of her -- a resentment which she IMAX's all over "members of the less-educated classes."  But if Brooks knows five actual "members of the less-educated classes" to whom this actually happened, I'll eat my hat.  If Charen knows three such creatures, I'll eat my shoes for dessert.  

And as I have noted elsewhere, how is it that using "latinx" instead of "hispanic" is such a wild hair up these mope's collective asses, but using "low-information voter" instead of the more accurate "redneck moron" doesn't' bother then at all?

Charen does pick some medium-sized nits over the sweep of Brooks' claims and the weakness of any data he purports to have to back up any of those claims, but still thinks the whole masturbatory idea of the "elites" like you and me being responsible for the rise of Trump to be a useful exercise

Brooks writes that most people in elite circles think of themselves as the forces of “progress and enlightenment” while viewing Trump fans as “reactionary bigots and authoritarians.” Perhaps to play Devil’s advocate, Brooks offers an alternative view. I think it’s a useful exercise even if some of Brooks’s arguments got my back up! 

 

In this alternative view, the “anti-Trumpers,” he writes, are actually the bad guys who, through selfishness and arrogance, made Trump inevitable. Brooks employs “we” when discussing anti-Trumpers, though the origin of his critique stretches back to what at the time were called “limousine liberals.”

Charen even sneaks in a quote by the Right's favorite amatuer phrenologist, Charles Murry, because these people cannot help themselves.

.
There is, of course, zero mentions of the vast and staggeringly well-funded Conservative media machine which has spent +30 years honing Republican voter rage, racism and paranoia to the point where it can  split atoms or overthrow governments.  Nor is there any mention that both Charen and Brooks spent their entire professional lives serving that machine and breezily lying to the general public about the white supremacist madness that was roiling just below the surface of their Party of Personal Responsibility.

And in the end, Charen returns to the safe harbor of the Biggest Lie of All.  The one that shelters and sustains her and Brooks and hundreds of other professional Havers of Terrible Opinions.

See if you can spot it!

It is wrong to lay all of the resentments and grievances of non-elites at the feet of progressive elites, but Brooks seems to be doing so to prod those on the left to reflect a bit more on their own role in our polarized culture. Both sides would profit from that. Contempt is a two-way street. Manhattanites may disdain conservatives in “flyover country,” but the good ol’ boys of Arkansas aren’t exactly overflowing with admiration and appreciation for liberals, either. 

And once again, just like *that*, the entire Obama administration and its eight-year exercise in trying to do all the things Charen and Brooks swear progressives never do just...vanishes.  

Why Does David Brooks Still Have A Fucking Job?