David Brooks and the Road to Caricature

A few years from now when the New York Times building lies in ruins, you will still find Mr. David Brooks there, sitting amid the rubble like Mrs. Havisham, wearing tatters, keeping himself warm by burning remaindered copies of The Road to Character and offering to trash "the Left" for the price of a meal, a first-class Acela corridor train ticket and a $60 glass of top-shelf airport scotch.

Mind you, he will reassure you, his condition is temporary.  On his uppers only due to mistakes that will no doubt be rectified soon.  Sure, things look a little bleak now.  And, sure, Mr. Brooks' "teevee" appearances are now limited to sitting next to a discarded Amazon shipping box with the words "Meet the Press" scrawled on the side and fielding "questions" from a potato Brooks calls "David Gregory", but this is all just a misunderstanding.  A glitch in the Beltway matrix.  Just as soon as No Labels or the McCain/Lieberman party get back on their feet, and the Sulzberger family finishes up their vacation at whichever reeducation camp they've been assigned to, and that sweet-sweet Third Way money starts rolling, Brooks will be right back in the clover 

Just you watch!

But, or course, that is all in the future.

In the here and now,  Mr. Brooks is still gainfully employed by the House of Sulzberger and still frantically trying to appease the fascists by playing the golden oldies in the hopes that during the Trump 2.0 regime, the orthodoxy police won't take his lunch money and stuff him in a locker forever.

And so, as was the case in 2004 and 2006 and 2008 and 2010 and 2012 and 2016 and 2018 and 2020 and 2022, so is now the case in this annus horribilis of 2024.   It is once again time for Brooks to assure his tiny, terrified readership that: 

• None of this has anything to do with racism or misogyny, 

• Trump is not a fascist, 

• The concerns of the "working class" (about whom Brooks knows absolutely nothing) are all legitimate and economic-anxiety based, and,

• This is all the fault of the pampered, privileged, college-degree-flauntin' "Left" who were so concerned with gender-studies classes or whatever that they yadda yadda yadda...

Think I'm kidding?

Nope.

From Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times today:

We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels.

Fun fact:  Without the largesse of us snooty Blue state elitist snobs, the economies of those coal-and-Jebus-and-we-hate-Libtards Red states would collapse almost overnight.

Brooks again: 

[High school graduates] don’t speak in the right social justice jargon or hold the sort of luxury beliefs that are markers of public virtue.

The chasms led to a loss of faith, a loss of trust, a sense of betrayal...

And:  

These people, and many other Americans, weren’t interested in the politics of joy that Kamala Harris and the other law school grads were offering.

And:  

The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. I guess it’s hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a multibillion-dollar endowment and do environmental greenwashing and diversity seminars for a major corporation...

Except the Biden administration has been laser-focused on fighting for the working class.  Here is just a partial list of what they got done in the face of rabid and nearly-unified Republican opposition.

• Unions are the strongest they've been in decades. 
• Wages among the lowest earners grew the fastest.
• The child tax credit was expanded.
• A minimum corporate tax was enacted.
• A tax on stock buybacks was added.
• Passed the CHIPS Act.
• High inflation was brought down to normal levels without a recession.
• Millions of jobs were created.
• Unemployment has remained low.
• Presided over the return of manufacturing to the US.
• Lowered prescription drug prices.
• More Americans have healthcare than ever before.
• Billions were given to student debt relief.
• The American Rescue Plan got Americans back to work, covered Cobra payments, and even directly gave Americans money.
• Biden actually, publicly supported labor.
• Biden saved union pension funds.
• Biden helped negotiate a favorable labor contract for railroad workers.
• All the labor people here were *very* pro Harris.

And what did the Trump administration do for working men and women, besides getting hundreds of thousands of them killed by botching our response to the COVID pandemic?

You may remember almost exactly eight years ago, in November of 2016, when the election of Donald Trump shattered Brooks' hermetically-sealed terrarium of smug Centrism, Brooks did exactly the same thing: went hunting for villains on the Left to blame.  

And, finding none, he just made a bunch of shit up to justify his contention that if only Democrats had heeded Brooks' advice and been more Centrist...

From N.Y Magazine, November 29, 2016:

Brooks spent the last eight years defining the center as something Obama was not. It didn’t matter that Obama supported a health-care plan first devised by Mitt Romney, or a cap-and-trade plan endorsed by John McCain. Brooks nestled himself into the territory between Obama and the angry, no-compromise Republicans who were shutting down government and boycotting all negotiations with the president. If Obama endorsed the policies Brooks preferred, he would simply pretend that Obama had not proposed them. Indeed, one of the most common genres of David Brooks column was a sad lament that neither party would endorse policies that in fact Obama had explicitly and publicly called for.  

And eight years later, rather than inflict some painful truth on his privileged, timorous readership, it's once again time for Brooks to go 15 rounds with some of the tiredest, stupidest, most toxic Beltway straw men extant.

"What painful truth might that be?" you ask    This one.  From Esquire:

Kamala Harris Never Had a Chance

It’s obvious now. We should have known all along.

...Donald Trump’s victory lays bare the troubling-to-the-max truth that Vice President Kamala Harris never had a realistic shot to become the next president, that millions upon millions of Americans had predetermined to vote, at all costs, on behalf of white power/supremacy. That it mattered little-to-not-one-motherfucking-iota how much the vice president’s backstory affirmed the so-called American dream, or how excellent or qualified or experienced she was, or the fact that she has a clean criminal record and no bankruptcies. Her landslide loss made plain the truth that there was no policy she could propose to persuade a majority of white people, that it didn’t matter how much she preached about unity and peace and hope, that it mattered none the number of times she flashed her bright smile or how charismatic she was on SNL, that I was naive as fuck to think any of that would have ever been enough. 

Back to Brooks today again:

As the left veered toward identitarian performance art...

And again: 

There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again.

The alert reader will notice how, in Brooks' construction, the demonstrably bigoted, brainwashed and completely reprogrammable Republican base are transformed into "the American people".   Just as, say, a $60 glass of top-shelf airport scotch magically becomes "This is why Americans think the economy is terrible."

Brooks again:

American voters are not always wise, but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us. 

And again: 

Can the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the hipster urban cores do this?

And again: 

Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism.

I would remind Brooks that every actual expert on fascism disagrees with his stupid opinion, and that sowing chaos is precisely how fascists rise to power,  but I'm betting Brooks already knows all of this.

Because Brooks is not a stupid or clueless man.

Brooks is a toxic parasite whose job for the last 20 years has been to spin reassuring fairy tales for the shrinking, cosseted readership of an ossified, terminally-ill media corporation run by a fourth-generation nepo baby.   

I Am The Liberal Media