Worshiping a Dying God With David Brooks

Because I am known far and wide for being fair and even handed -- and because so many of you forwarded me the clip of Mr. David Brooks on the PBS News Hour being all stunned and stammering over Trump's ambush of Zelenskyy and his psychotic break on live teevee -- we did acknowledge on the Tuesday edition of The Professional Left Podcast, that, yes, Mr. David Brooks had actually admitted to feeling ashamed about Donald Trump and how low his own former party had sunk.  

We made note of it because it's important to understand how cataclysmic a Republican catastrophe has to be for Brooks to unequivocally blame Republicans for it, and to say out loud that it brought him shame.  It is as rare a thing as a Great Conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn which happens roughly every 20 years.  

And lo and behold, it had been 20 years since Brooks, once again on The News Hour, had expressed shame in reaction to George W. Bush's botched response to Hurricane Katrina.  Which I wrote about on this very blog 20 years go.

(And yes, the sheer tonnage of trivia which is stacked and stuffed every which way in my mind palace is, uh, something.)

But we also warned our listeners not to be too impressed with David Brooks' expressions of shame, because these rare spikes of honesty and conscience always fade back into bland, toxic Both Siderism soon enough.  I guaranteed listeners that, having documented Brooks'  atrocities for two decades now, eventually he would return to his baseline programming.  That something something, you know Liberals were wrong about yadda yadda too! 

And you know what?  His regression back to the Both Siderist Mean too less than a week.

To be fair, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times did not say: "If you're gonna be mad at Nazis for using planes and tanks, you can't turn around and approve of the Allies using planes and tanks.  You have to have some intellectual consistency."

And, to be fair, he also did not say,: "If you're going to admonish Trump supporters who clashed with police on January 6th, 2021 at the capitol, you can't turn around and admire civil rights protesters who clashed with police March 7th, 1965 at the Edmund Pettus Bridge."

However, just yesterday, Brooks definitely did say this:

Brooks: And I thought the Democrats should have just sat there. When Marjorie Taylor Greene behaved shamefully, a lot of progressive commentators were rightly offended. Then last night you had the screaming and Al Green’s removal. You have to have some intellectual consistency. You can’t oppose Marjorie Taylor Greene and then think what Al Green did was totally fine.

Because Mr. David Brooks is a clueless, opinionated old man deep the bitter dregs of a long career of being wrong about everything.  And now that the end of that career is so much closer than its beginning, he has no place to go but to the temple to the god who he has worshipped his whole life.  

A god, in whose names, he has burned the sacred incense and chanted the holy words without ceasing.  

A god whose favor elevated him to the highest ranks of the legacy media.  

It is a god that presents a thousand aspects -- Tone Police, False Equivalence, Fictional Liberal Sins, False Nostalgia, a Conservative Renaissance which  never materializes, Centrism, Imaginary "Independents", Third Party Salvation -- but in the end it's all the same god.  The God of Both Siderism.  And if it is true that Gods come into existence when worshippers conceive and venerate them, and Gods pass away when their worshippers desert them, then at this moment the God of Both Siderism is kinda fucked.  It is a withered wreck in Deity Hospice, bed-ridden, while events in the Real World pound away at it every day -- 

-- making it and its handful of remaining worshippers look more and more ludicrous.

And yet, even after watching the pillar of his Both Siderist temple blown to flinders by the shrieking, fascist madness of Donald Trump and his supplicants, we find Mr. David Brooks waddling back up the crumbling stairs to light one more votive candle in the rubble.

Because Mr. David Brooks has spent his entire career spinning comforting fairy tales about American politics, telling his readers the lies they desperately wished to believe even as Republican fascism was howling at the door.  And now that Trump has shredded the last scraps of that protective scrim of lies that Mr. David Brooks cast over the Real World to reassure his readers, we find that Mr. Brooks cannot bear the idea of living in that Real World.

So he intoxicates himself with the delusions.  Like, for instance, that Elissa Slotkin's response was the antidote to what ails Democrats.

Brooks: I thought the Democrats were losing their way until the response. I thought Elissa Slotkin’s response was excellent...She spoke in a way that appeals to swing voters. She didn’t talk like she was coming out of Washington, D.C., or some faculty club. 

To be clear Elissa Slotkin's response, which few saw and fewer still will remember a week later, would have been an perfectly fine rebuttal to a Republican president's speech ... if this were 1991, and the president was George H.W. Bush.  Or if it was 2013 and we all lived along a different timeline in which Mitt Romney had won.  

But however hard David Brooks prays in the temple of his dying god that it were so, it is not 1991, and we do not live in the universe where Mittens beat Obama in 2012.

And just to be clear, however miffed and pearl-clutchy Brooks wants his readers to get about the a few Dems blowing off courtesy class, back here in the Real World modern political history tells a different story.  From No More Mr. Nice Blog:

But let me remind you what happened after the outburst that began the modern era of heckling at presidential speeches. Surely you remember:

A Republican congressman is under fire for shouting "You lie" during Barack Obama's speech to Congress on healthcare reform.

In an extraordinary breach of political protocol, Joe Wilson, a Republican representative for South Carolina, shouted at Obama as the president told the joint sitting that his plan for a universal healthcare system would not cover illegal immigrants.

Obama looked in the direction of the shout, said "It's not true" and went on with his speech. But the outburst stunned both Democrats and Republicans and drew condemnation from the public. Republicans froze, with several looking in Wilson's direction.

That was in September 2009 -- fourteen months before the midterms. Did it spell doom for Republicans in 2010?

Hardly:

Republicans gained seven seats in the Senate (including a special election held in January 2010).... In the House of Representatives, Republicans won a net gain of 63 seats, the largest shift in seats since the 1948 elections. In state elections, Republicans won a net gain of six gubernatorial seats and flipped control of twenty state legislative chambers, giving them a substantial advantage in the redistricting that occurred following the 2010 United States census. The election was widely characterized as a "Republican wave" election.

Brian Beutler writes:

Even after Tuesday’s spectacle, many in the liberal elite and the Democratic leadership still believe studied submissiveness is the best form of resistance. A “dignified presence,” as Hakeem Jeffries put it.

They theorize that defeating Trump requires capturing the center, which abhors showy antics and partisan rancor.

The center "abhors showy antics and partisan rancor" -- and yet four months ago the center voted for Donald Trump in sufficient numbers to give him both a popular-vote win and an Electoral College win. How do scared Democrats explain that?...

You really should go read the whole thing.  It is delightful.   

And, for the record, history has shown again and again that Mr. David Brooks does not have the slightest inkling what "swing voters" want, or what any voters want, or what normal people think and feel about anything.  

In support of this thesis I submit this quote from the same article.

Brooks: Well, take a couple other examples. He talked about all the people allegedly getting Social Security benefits, even though they’re 160 years old. Now, people like us, we’re media obsessed, so we know that was all disproved -- 

He means "those were all god damn lies" as was virtually everything else in Trump's speech.  

-- that there really are no 320-year-old people getting Social Security benefits. There are no 160-year-olds getting those benefits. That has been shot down by Trump’s own Social Security administrator. But when you’re sitting there reading and you’re just a normal person who pays normal attention to politics, you think: “Wow, that’s ridiculous. I’m glad he’s getting rid of this stuff.”

First, here we find further proof that David Brooks hasn't been within a country mile of a "normal person" since puberty.  

This was the longest once of these speeches ever.  The thing clocked in at 99 minutes, longer than Clinton ever went, and the legacy media loved to mock for his long-windedness.   And yet Mr. David Brooks think there exists out there "a normal person who pays normal attention to politics" who is so deeply interested in the minutiae of a political speech by this bloated, lie-filled carcass that they will actually spend the time to "[sit] there reading" this bloated, lie-filled nonsense until they hit the 23rd paragraph (I counted) where Trump runs down a mind-numbing list of Social Security numbers. 

At which point, Brooks' concept of a "normal person" will then leap to their feet, spilling their grappa and pork scrapple or whatever Brooks thinks normal people have for breakfast, and tell his equally imaginary normal wife to fetch his quill and foolscap because he will, by God and St. Matthew (the patron saint of accountants) be writing an angry letter to those politicians in Washington givin' 'em what fer.  

Second, notice how Brooks shrugs off as inevitable that "normal people" will buy the horseshit that Trump is peddling.  This is pure D.C. pundit brain.  

Consider that  Brooks clearly believes that there are "normal people" out there who are so detached and disinterested in politics they have no clue when they're being lied to, and yet somehow also have the time and inclination to crack open a newspaper over their morning absinthe and cornflakes, or whatever normal people have for breakfast, and pore over all 122 paragraphs (I counted) of Trump's  bilious nonsense  -- including the endless repetition of how everything is the best it's ever been, or how everything will be the greatest it's ever been, or bigger that anyone has ever seen before, or so bad no one has ever seen anything like it ... 

... including how he is the most unfairly persecuted man who ever lived ... 

... including how God Himself chose Trump to be president ... 

... including denigrating Democrats to their faces ... 

... including insulting and blaming Joe Biden for all the sins of man ... 

... and including calling Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" to her face while the fascists in the chamber hooted and cheered.  

Somehow Brooks' normies will wade through all that, and still walk away completely bamboozled by Trump's transparent Social Security lies.  

And sadly, there's absolutely nothing to be done about it.  Maybe if Dems had been more polite and 2002-ish, but nooooo.

But think about that for one minute.  According to Mr. Brooks, his normies may be detached and clueless about politics, but apparently they also gobble up newspaper political content like Wimpy at an all-you-can-eat hamburger bar.  

And do you know what?  By an amazing coincidence, Mr. David Brooks works for a newspaper!  The New York Fucking Times!  Maybe you've heard of it.  And that Times column of his is also syndicated in hundreds of papers around the country and around the world.

In fact, even in our fracturing media universe, Brooks still has enormous resources at his disposal beyond the Times.  He has another print-whatever-you-want-whenever-you-want gig at The Atlantic.  He has his own feature on PBS.  He has his own seat at NPR.  He has an open invitation to Meet The Press whenever he feels like it.  Plus dozens and dozens of paid speaking engagements of every kind every year.

So just imagine if Mr. David Brooks used his keyboard and his vast network of colleagues and sources to detail the lies that Donald Trump trowels out every day, focusing in on the most egregious.  Like, for example, those Social Security lies.  And then imagine if used his enormous media clout to put those columns in front of all those newspaper reading normies as they settle in for a hearty lunch of lambanog and jackfruit, or whatever normies are having for lunch these days.   

But that would anger the feeble god Brooks still venerates, wouldn't it?  

Instead, Both Siderist dogma demands Brooks hold impotently forth about how isn't it a shame that the stupids are fated to fall for Trumps lies, and why can't Democrats be more 1997?

I Am The Liberal Media