driftglass: The Razors Are Moving

Friday, October 25, 2024

The Razors Are Moving

As longtime readers of this blog know, the easiest way to spot a bad faith Both Siderist hack in the wild is to peruse their work for the Both Siderist "razor in the apple".

OK, to be 100% fair the truly easiest way to spot a bad faith Both Siderist hack in the wild is to notice telltale signs like "Opinion columnist at The New York Times" or "host of Katy Tur Reports" or "Chris Cillizza" in their bio. But the second easiest way to spot 'em is the quickscan their column or podcast or whatever to locate the inevitable Both Sides Do It"razor in the apple".

If you look, you will almost always find it. It's both a ritual and a contractual obligation. Like the Introductory Rites and Concluding Rites of a traditional Catholic Mass, the absence of a Both Siderist razor in the apple would be the shocking aberration, not its presence.

And, in the case of Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times, for a while there I got to be eerily good at predicting what the subject of his next razor in the apple would be, and in which paragraph he would make that turn. That I could do this magic trick -- predict the size, shape and subject of a Brooks column before it was published and tell you within a couple of column inches where he would inject the poison -- amazed my wife (no small thing) but, I think, also freaked her out a little.

But it wasn't really a magic trick. It was just that Brooks is so utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly, predictably banal. Like the press and die of a metal stamping machine that spits out 1,000 screwdrivers an hour, or the filling heads of a bottling machine, the whole reason for the existence of creatures like Brooks is to reliably hammer home exactly the same bullshit over and over again, decade after decade.

And here I am going to borrow a line which Brother Charlie Pierce used in a different context in his excellent Esquire column today:

We’ve wandered into a deranged political version of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, in which we are warned:

“Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.”

Interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.

Yep. That is indeed the pernicious labor of the professional Both Siderist, captured neatly in a phrase.

But I've noticed a change. Interesting to me only, perhaps, but I've noticed that the Both Siderists seem to be burying their razors further and further down. Even tacking it on to the tail end of whatever they're writing or saying as if, of yeah, I'm still required to tell this stupid lie aren't I? So they toss it on the table practically as they're walking out the door. I would speculate that it even feels like an act done with a sense of shame...but we all know that professional Both Siderists are untroubled by emotions like shame or guilt.

I'll give you two examples and you can judge for yourself. Both from New York Times employees. Both named "David". One, a printed column, and the other, parting remarks on a podcast.

In The New York Times today, Mr. David Brooks opens his column by tripping over a fact that Liberals have been shouting about for decades

I had hoped this election would be a moment of national renewal. I had hoped that the Democrats could decisively defeat MAGA populism and send us down a new national path.

That’s clearly not going to happen. No matter who wins this election, it will be close, and this is still going to be an evenly and bitterly divided nation.

In retrospect, I think I was expecting too much of politics...

And as usual, we Liberals have warehouses full of receipts explaining in excruciating detail exactly how our country got to be this way.

Let me explain.

No. There is too much. Let me summarize.

The deplorable state we are in is all down to David Brooks' former party -- the Republican Party -- which David Brooks swore in 2014 had "detoxified" itself, and David Brooks' conservative movement, which he has been swearing every few months since Christ was in short pants would be flowering into a full-on renaissance of awesomeness any minute now.

For more on this subject, try here: "In The Beginning..."

Brooks then takes his readers on a typical Brooksian "America: A Land of Contrasts" speed tour through the late 19th and early 20th centuries:

For example, the Settlement House movement, led by women like Jane Addams of Chicago...

moguls like J.P. Morgan...

Philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller...

By the time Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency in 1901...

Before finally arriving at the razor in the apple in the very past paragraph of this forgettable mishmash.

For a whole society to change, the people in the society have to want to change themselves. A smug, self-satisfied, “I am right” nation is going to be perennially stuck in place.

This is Brooks prescription for social change: everyone has to simultaneously agree to change all at once, and everyone [meaning Democrats] needs to stop going around claiming that we anti-fascists are right and that the fascists are wrong in that smug, self-satisfied way of ours.

The other David is Mr. David French, also now of The New York Times, who had a long and not-particularly-interesting conversation with Mr. Tim Miller of the MSNBC Green room about...stuff. Mostly about the intractability of the zombie Republican base. About how creepy it is that absolutely nothing can or will budge them.

Miller: It's just, to me, it's, like so obvious that if you see the Trump threat, like, why aren't there more of us? Why are there so why are there so few of us? I guess that's my final question. Do you do you have any clarity for me on that?

As you might imagine, I have many thoughts as to why this is so, which neither Mr. French nor Mr. Miller would want to hear, but that's not where we are going today.

So, as Miller and French are wrapping up, French is explaining that, as cynical as he is, he was surprised at the intensity of the backlash that was (and is) directed at him now that he has finally endorsed Kamala Harris (you may remember that French was one of those whiny Republican hard-cases who pissed away their vote in 2016 and 2020 by voting third-party.)

Which would have been an excellent place to stop.

But Both Siderist can't stop, can they? They have this kind of compulsive false-equivalence logorrhea

And so...

French: And I think Tim what we constantly underestimate, just because it's kind of hard to wrap our minds around, animosity at the level of intensity that we see. We constantly underestimate the raw animosity that exists on the Republican side for Democrats and by the way on the Democratic side for Republicans.

Yes, even before Trump, French says, Both Sides hated each other.

So where did all that anger on Both Sides come from?

French says, three or four times, that it's "negative polarization" which is defined as:

Whereas traditional partisanship involves supporting the policy positions of one's own party, its negative counterpart in turn means opposing those positions of a disliked party.

There's is not even a passing acknowledgment of the decades of labor men like David French poured into turning the Republican base into an army of reprogrammable meatbags whose reflexive response to the word "Democrat" is "Marxist!Commie!Socialist!Monster!"

Or, as Never Trumper Hero #1 Liz Cheney was describing us until about five minutes ago, baby-murdering filth who are "the face of pure evil":

Instead of correctly diagnosing what the fuck happened to the Republican party as the end product of a decades-long Republican campaign of calculated, premeditated and well-funded demonization of Democrats -- and Democratic reacting to the rise of this American fascist party by despising fascists as any patriot should -- French whisks all that inconvenient history away with the magic conjure words "negative polarization" which is a mysterious thing that apparently just happens. You know, like an ill-timed fart at a funeral or the like the description of the wind from John, 3:8