Dave’s Not Here

 

As America's premier chronicler of the frauds and follies of Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times it is my duty to inform you that this appellation is no longer strictly true.

From The Atlantic:

David Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of the forthcoming book Blathering Nonsense From An Aging Hack Who Dumped His Wife For His Much Younger Research Assistant  How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.

I have no idea why The Atlantic has chosen to omit the fact that Mr. Brooks has been the Times' in-house PEZ dispenser of Conservative legacy media claptrap for +20 years.  After all, Brooks' Times credentials are what snagged him all of his book deals and all of his other make-work gigs at places like Yale, Meet the Press, NPR and PBS: 

Let's turn now to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart. That's New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Jonathan Capehart, associate editor for The Washington Post.

But however they market him, there can be little doubt as to why Mr. Brooks was offered yet another featherbedding gig at yet another major American media platform.  After all, the previous editor of The Atlantic, James Bennet, left that job in 2016 to become the editorial page editor and Mr. Brooks' "boss" at The New York Times where he held that position until he was forced to resign in 2020 (He was the brain wizard who thought gifting Tom Cotton a Times op-ed column was a genius idea because Both Sides.)   Bennet was succeeded at The Atlantic by Brooks' friend and fellow Iraq War cheerleader from the good ol' Bush days, Jeffrey Goldberg.

The apex of the elite media food chain constitutes a very small club and they all look out for each other.  For example, after disgracing himself at the Times, you will never guess what happened to James Bennet!  From The Hill, January 26, 2021:

The Economist has hired the former editorial page director at The New York Times, James Bennet, who resigned last year after the newspaper published a controversial op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.). 

The plan was to hire him "for one year" to oversee some digital thing they were working on (because...the future), but somehow he is still there.

Anyhoo, back to The Atlantic and their very odd decision to omit the fact that for +20 years Brooks has been "New York Times columnist David Brooks".  Who knows?  Maybe the editors want to trick their readers into thinking they gave their cover story this month to a different David Brooks?  If so, they failed pretty spectacularly because the column by "David Brooks...contributing writer at The Atlantic" has that signature "New York Times columnist David Brooks" stank all over it.

Let's begin with the title of the very post you are reading.  With his own cover article in The Atlantic, obviously "Dave’s Not Here" isn't referring to Brooks' taking French leave from the high priesthood of the dying legacy media.  Regardless of whatever pundit musical chairs games the dying legacy media might play, obviously Brooks has reserved seating near the head of table for the rest of his life.  

No the title of this post refers to how thoroughly Brooks has managed to absent himself from this own history: the history of Conservatism, of the Republican party and all the absolutely toxic garbage he has written over the decades.  

To hear Brooks tell it in The Atlantic (no link because bite me), he was:

...a proud democratic socialist through college.   Then, in the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s, after watching the wretched effects some progressive social policies had on poor neighborhoods in Chicago, I switched over to the right — and then remained a happy member of Team Red for decades. 

But if you poke at the timeline the tiniest bit, this creation myth quickly unravels.

Brooks graduated college in 1983.  After a very brief stint at the sadly-defunct City News Bureau in Chicago,  he got himself hired at the Moonie Times in 1984.  A year and a half later he's doing book reviews at The Wall Street Journal.  And from then on it was a life of wingnut welfare of our Mr. Brooks.

This is not the resume of an erstwhile democratic socialist whose beliefs were so thoroughly shattered at their first encounter with the real world that he fled to the loving embrace of the Moonie Times. For those of you who don't know the geography, the University of Chicago is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, which is the 5th ward.  And the 5th ward was, in 1983, the most progressive ward in Chicago, shaped in large part by the legacy of its longtime alderman, Leon Despres:

Serving until 1975, Despres gained fame as an independent Democrat, consistently opposing the policies of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. In 1963, a young Bernie Sanders worked on Despres' reelection campaign. Frequently on the short end of 49-1 votes, Despres became known as the "liberal conscience of Chicago. Because of his strong advocacy of civil rights and open housing, Despres also became known as "the lone negro on the City Council," even though he was white and the council had six black alderman allied with the mayor.

Despres spoke five languages, served as Chicago City Council Parliamentarian for eight years after 20 years of service to the city. Despres authored Challenging the Daley Machine, A Chicago Alderman's memoir.

What's more, just as Brooks was beginning his senior year at the U of C, right down the street from him a congressman named Harold Washington was beginning what would become the most consequential, grassroots mayoral campaigns in Chicago history.  

The deplorable housing project conditions that Brooks said affected him so deeply were the result of racist Chicago machine politics, and right then and there, practically at Brook' front door, was the first legitimate challenger to that machine in living memory.  A campaign based on exactly the reforms that Brooks claimed liberalism had failed to deliver. 

Side note:  Richard J. Daley, Da Mare of Chicaga who had his cops beat the shit out of protesters in Grant Park in 1968 and about whom Mike Royko wrote an entire book and was in no sense "liberal" in any way.  But the scrappy opposition to the machine Daley had created very much was.  And I am positive that opposition would have found something useful and productive for a young David Brooks to do with all that spare time he had on his hand from not smoking pot or getting laid.

But Brooks went in the opposite direction, which is why, given the time and the context, his bio reads like a very privileged, very callow young man who was never offered so much as a joint or a pity-fuck at the U of C, who found there was very little call for history baccalaureates out there on the mean streets of American Capitalism and who allowed himself to carried along on the prevailing winds of a new and very well-funded genre of Conservative myth-making and Liberal slandering.

And now back to The Atlantic where Mr. Brooks is doing what he had already been doing at the Times for +20 years: fiddling with history to elide his own shitty judgement and toxic writing.  I have added emphasis here and there because I'm whimsical that way:

Then, in the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s, after watching the wretched effects some progressive social policies had on poor neighborhoods in Chicago, I switched over to the right—and then remained a happy member of Team Red for decades. During the era of social thinkers like James Q. Wilson, Allan Bloom, Thomas Sowell, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Irving Kristol, the right was just more intellectually alive. But over time I’ve become gradually more repulsed by the GOP—first by Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, then by the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, and now, of course, by Donald Trump.

One could argue that the Reagan-Thatcher era ended when Reagan left office in 1989...but that's very misleading because when Republicans speak of that time, it's almost never an "era"; it's always a "revolution".  The Reagan Revolution.  

And what was the Reagan Revolution?

It was fully embracing Nixon's Southern Strategy, and building a constituency by railing against imaginary "welfare queens" and "young bucks" who were stealing money from hard-working, real Murricans.

It was launching his 1980 campaign with a wink and a nod and a "State's rights" speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi just a short walk from the site where three civil rights workers had been murdered and buried in shallow graves by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1964.  David Brooks famously lost his shit when this fact was reintroduced to the public by one of his colleagues in 2007 and the entire internet joined hands to help Mr. Brooks sit his ass back down.

Including me:

...And because he cannot cope with the idea that what he loved is a lie, like Miss Emily [from William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily], Mr. Brooks has instead set up housekeeping with the putrefying corpse of his Once And Future King.

He sleeps with it.

Chats with it.

Holds tea parties with it.

And will not tolerate any back sass about its goodness and purity.

Like so many Modern Conservatives, David Brooks has been fucking the moldering remains of something long dead, gone and rotten for so long, it started to seem normal to him. And sharing a political marriage bed with a corpse in a kind of ideological necrophilia also just so happens to very much suit the despicable goals of the vile, little monsters who actually own and operate Brooks’ Party and his Movement.

And in his column entitled “History and Calumny”, the gagging reek of continuing this absurd, genteel indulgence of Brook’s nauseating brand of conservative paralogia and psychosis has finally gotten to be too much for the rest of us to stand.

Where were we?

Oh yeah.  What constituted the Reagan Revolution

It was officially making "the government" the whipping boy for whatever was pissing you off today.

It was inviting the Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the rest of the segregationist Christian Right filth into the inner circle of the GOP.

It was -- with the assistance of Tony Scalia and Robert Bork -- killing the Fairness Doctrine, which, in-turn immediately gave rise to Rush Limbaugh and the entire Hate Radio industry.  Longtime readers will note that, in all of his writing going back to his Weekly Standard days, Brooks is careful to avoid mentioning Rush Limbaugh, despite the fact that by 1992 Limbaugh had George H.W. Bush literally carrying his luggage for him.  And in 1994, Brooks' own paper ran a long article quoting Republican gushing over the fact that Rush Limbaugh and Hate radio were directly responsible for Republicans taking over the House and Senate that year.  

The Reagan Revolution was also 100 other things such as the disaster of supply-side economics, the treason of Iran/Contra, and breaking the back of labor unions, all of which Rick Perlstein has written about at great length.   But the Reagan Revolution is also ongoing.  It was a point on a continuum going back at least to Goldwater, and that spawned all the things that Brooks says makes him feel icky:

 Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, then by the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, and now, of course, by Donald Trump.

Did you notice that, once Reagan had been dispatched, there is no longer any mention of times or dates or context?  Brooks just drops the names of a couple of villains and a couple of political factions as he hustles his reader straight through more that three decades of very consequential American history like a bouncer kicking an abusive drunk to the curb.    

Reagan, yadda yadda, coupla villains, Trump! Now let's move along!  

Which, when you think about it for even a second, is a very strange thing for a U of C History baccalaureate to do.

I mean, sure, Tom DeLay was a thug piss-drunk on power (and booze) and Gingrich is a shitbag (whose career, I am at pains to remind you, was saved and rehabilitated again and again by Brooks' very good friend David Gregory) but aren't there some conspicuously huge holes here, even in Brooks' hyper-abridged, "Nothing to see here!" sprint through history?  

Like, for example, the eight years we all lived through under the second-worst president in American history, George W. Bush?  

Katrina?  Terri Schiavo?  The Brooks Brother riot?  Iraq?  WMD?  Abu Ghraib?  The collapse of the global economy?  Any of this ringing any bells?  Any at all?

Or course not.  Because what Mr. Brooks of The Atlantic has produced is a museum-quality specimen of the four word motto of  the Never Trumpers and the legacy media.  

Say it with me now.

Served up with some obligatory whining about how the Democratic party still makes Brooks  sick: 

But my new suit is ill-fitting. I’m still not fully comfortable as a Democrat. And given that there are many other former Republicans who have become politically homeless in the Age of MAGA, I thought it might be useful to explain, first, what it is about the left that can make a wannabe convert like me want to flee in disgust...

Go fuck yourself David.

Now, back to the Rules of Remembering.

It's OK to remember Reagan, but only as long as he is properly remembered as St. Reagan.

It's not OK to remember the Bush Administration because David Brooks spent eight years tongue-bathing  Bush as a military and economic genius, Iraq would be a cake walk, promising that deficits were a thing of the past, and so forth.  And mocking and slandering anyone who warned otherwise.  And when asked about that very thing point-blank, Brooks flat-out lied about it, so no fair remembering Dubya.  

It's OK to remember the Tea Party, but only as long as you remember it as something which "repulsed".  

It is not OK to remember when Mr. Brooks was on Meet the Press, flashing his PhD in Knowing Racism Stuff , when right there, in front of God and everybody, he extrapolated from his single, jog-by observation of a Fake Tea Party Rally and a Black family reunion going on near each other that didn't result in a riot, that the Tea Baggers are the goddamn salt of the goddamn Earth.  The best kind of people.  And not at all racist!

Brooks: Listen, I was out jogging. You wouldn't know it to look at me. I was out jogging in the mall. I was at a tea party rally, tea party rally. Also there was a group called the back--Black Family Reunion, celebration of African-American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle, sitting at the same table, eating, watching concerts together. Among most of those people there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on a, on a warm Sunday afternoon.

It's OK to remember that Tom DeLay was and is a scumbag of the highest order. 

But it is not OK to remember how Mr. Brooks used DeLay as raw material when building his indestructible Both Sides Do It fortress after the collapse of the Bush administration (about which we are also forbidden to speak.)  From David Brooks in 2006:

...

There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.

All were on display Tuesday night.

The Democratic Party was represented by its rising force — Ned Lamont on a victory platform with the net roots exulting before him and Al Sharpton smiling just behind.

The Republican Party was represented by its collapsing old guard — scandal-tainted Tom DeLay trying to get his name removed from the November ballot. And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.

The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.

The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.

But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people...

And it is super-duper not OK to remember how, after the collapse of the Bush administration, the Both Sides Do It lie metastasized from the habit of terrible and lazy journalists into the state religion of the legacy media and the all-occasion alibi/permission structure for the Republican base to lower itself deeper and deeper into depravity and madness.

And, finally, it's OK to think of the Republican party as something which was giving Mr. Brooks a dire case of the rumbly tummies more than 30 years ago, but it is very much not OK to remember the many, many, many times over those decades when Brooks confidently announced the coming of Glorious Republican Renaissance which was always just around the corner.  

Or that the 2016 Republican nominee was definitely gonna be Rubio! 

Or, just ten years ago, when Brooks said this:

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.

If you've been reading this blog awhile, you'll recognize this bit I wrote back in 2013 with a little emphasis added:

...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.

And how precisely it pairs with Brooks' writing in The Atlantic this week:

For context, let me explain a little more about my political peregrinations. I think of myself as a Whig, part of a tradition that begins with Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party in the 18th century, continues through the Whig Party of Henry Clay...

Getting the "Whig" bit right more than a decade ago was fun and all, but the balance of that post --  that it has always been Mr. Brooks' 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 -- is what his cover article in The Atlantic was all about.  

By once again using his apex position in the legacy media to contorting the past by obliterating Republican catastrophes, turning villains into heroes and other villains that cannot be erased or inverted into one-word antique curiosities, Brooks transforms a 50-year trajectory of elite Republican willful myopia, complicity, incompetence, outright lies and relentless Both Siderism...

...into a fairy tale where, at every step along the way, Brooks' judgement was sure-footed and far-sighted.

This is the keel of a mighty, superyacht-sized lifeboat he is building for himself.

It's called the "Dave's Not Here" and on it he plans to continue to sail away from his own past in style.

And, once again, odds are he'll get away with it.

Burn The Lifeboats