Che What? The Ongoing Adventures of David Brooks.

"New York Times op-eds are the opium of upper classes."  Comrade David Brooks

Based on both the public and sub rosa notifications I've been getting on social media, and my overflowing email inbox, it seems like I am no longer needed to point out the inevitable Both Siderist razor in the apple to be found in every New York Times op-ed by Mr. David Brooks.

For example...

So good on y'all!  Well done.  

I understand that it's easy to get distracted by the fact that a column by the balding, bespectacled guardian of the privileges of the privileged which begins "What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal." and ends with "We have nothing to lose but our chains" but don't get too excited.  Like the 1970s Taco Bell menu, all Brooks has really done here is remix the same few ingredients out of which he has been making columns with for years and called it a Bell Beefer. 

So, let's proceed on the well-founded axiom that Mr. Brooks has merely written a slightly more click-baity variation of his bog standard drivel, and indulge your old Unca Driftglass as I repurpose the opening paragraph of one of Brooks' most notorious jobs of hackwork from way back during the before time.

It was called "The Collapse of the Dream Palaces" by David Brooks, April 28, 2003 and I have added emphasis to note my emendations. 

GEORGE ORWELL was a genuinely modest man. But he knew he had a talent for facing unpleasant facts. That doesn’t seem at first glance like much of a gift. But when one looks around the world, one quickly sees how rare it is. Most people nurture the facts that confirm their worldview and ignore or marginalize the ones that don’t, unable to achieve enough emotional detachment from their own political passions to see the world as it really is. 

The always hilariously clueless David Brooks never noticed that he is not playing the part of Orwell here; that he is the myopic partisan dope who has made a career out of steadfastly seeing the world as it really is.  

Now that the war in Iraq is over,  Trump as been re-elected we’ll find out how many people around the world in the punditocracy are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami’s phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are.

Mr. Brooks willingness to fold, spindle and mutilate plainly observable American political reality in the  ferocious defense of his own dream palace -- and the devotion of the millions of Americans who are desperate to believe his fairy tales -- has made Mr. Brooks a wealthy and influential man.   

And like almost every other Never Trumper, this particular dream palace is based on what you might be tempted to call a "category error" --

A category mistake (or category error, categorical mistake, or mistake of category) is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category.

-- were it not for that pesky word "error".  Because it's not.  What Never Trumpers like Brooks are doing is lying.  Plain and simple.  Deliberate and widespread.  

And the origins of this lie can be found in this excellent article written by my wife all the back in August of 2016: 

Don't You Dare Call It 'Trump-ism'

The Media is attempting to separate the Republican Party from Donald Trump. Who voted for him again?

Have you noticed a number of media outlets calling the Republican campaign for President, "Trumpism"?  It isn't Trumpism. It's the Republican Party. And it has been for far longer than Donald Trump has been running for President.

My wife then references a 2015 video in which Alisyn Camerota asks a focus group of Trump and leaning toward Trump voters why they like him. Those of you who have watched any of these "average Trump voter" interviews know their trademarks.

The reason the news media interviewed these particular people is, they are registered Republican Primary voters.

They didn't just register to vote this year or fall off a truck into the Republican Party. They voted for Bush, twice. They voted for McCain/Palin. They voted for Romney. And they're tired of losing and being embarrassed by their votes, so embarrassed that they fell for a "Tea Party" rebranding just so they would not have to associate themselves with Bush.

And then the establishment had the nerve to suggest they vote for Bush's brother.

Donald Trump lies about a lot of things, but he is not lying when he says he received more Republican Primary votes than any other candidate in US history. That statistic is skewed by how many Republicans voted "Not Trump," but the fact that the race boiled down to Trump versus not-Trump is not helpful to the "Trumpism" argument. Republican voters selected Trump as their candidate, in state after state after state.

The beltway news media is terrified that the Republican Party will be forever tarnished by this Trump candidacy. Why? Because Trump-as-Republican busts open their "both sides" myth, that "both sides" of the political spectrum are equally bad, equally wrong and right, equally to be blamed for the "mess" in Washington.

Both-siderism protects the Beltway's need for an election horserace, as well as a "view from nowhere" in which the media is outside the race altogether and just an "observer" of "the process." But both-siderism picks a side: the side that is willing to lie repeatedly to win elections and policy points...

Because pundits like Brooks had been lying about the basic nature and origins of the Republican base for so long (while steadfastly ignoring the warnings from Liberals like us about the ugly trajectory of their party) they were all caught completely flat-footed when their party -- the same party which, when faced with the reality of our first black president, had just spent eight years in an extended racist primal scream -- turned around and nominated the King of the Birthers.  

To these arrogant fucks, who live lives completely removed from everyday, on-the-ground political reality and yet who have been gifted huge media megaphones with which to make ex cathedra pronouncements about the state of American politics, this was...impossible.  

Incomprehensible.  

Inconceivable.

It would also have been professional suicide for them to admit the plain truth: that this was, in fact, the Republican party -- their Republican party.  And that, all along, they had been either catastrophically wrong or had been lying.  And, worst of all, the dirty hippie Liberals had been right.

This could not be allowed to be true.  

During calendar year 2016, by my count, I wrote no fewer than 37 posts about what I called "Republican Detachment Disorder" which I defined here as simply as I could -- 

    Republican Detachment Disorder Defined

It's a huge shit sandwich and everybody but me is gonna have to take a bite.

-- and all the usual suspects were jumping onto this bandwagon as fast as possible:  Jennifer Rubin, Michael Gerson, Ramesh Ponnuru, Michael Steele, Frank Luntz, Charlie Sykes, David Brooks, Rush Limbaugh, Ron Fournier, Kathleen Parker, George Will, Tucker Carlson, David Frum, Joe Scarborough, Peggy Noonan, Bill Kristol, and on and on and on.  

There were also a couple of my posts from 2016 on this topic with headlines that I particularly like.

To Save The Republican Party, Jennifer Rubin Demands The Ideological Self-Deportation Of The Entire Republican Party

And

Suddenly There Is No "I" In "Republican"

The arrogant fucks of the legacy media and the tiny clutch of Conservative pundits who would soon designate themselves as Never Trumpers linked arms and presented a united front: whatever was happening to the GOP somehow had nothing to do with them, or the Republican party they had spent their professional lives building (Conservative pundits), or spent their professional lives excusing and ignoring (arrogant fucks of the legacy media.)  Ergo, what was happening to the GOP must be due to some mysterious, exogenous force which suddenly appeared out of nowhere and which obviously no one could have predicted.  

And so, in an act of collective self-protection, the arrogant fucks of the legacy media invented a new thing.

And they called it "Trumpism".

"Trumpism" was to be a thing separate and apart from their "true" Conservatism and "real" Republicanism.  It would be their  very own political "cosmological constant".

In 1917, Albert Einstein inserted a term called the cosmological constant into his theory of general relativity to force the equations  to predict a stationary universe in keeping with physicists' thinking at the time. When it became clear that the universe wasn't actually static, but was expanding instead, Einstein abandoned the constant, calling it the '"biggest blunder" of his life.

A mysterious political force conjured out of thin air by the arrogant fucks of the legacy media to spare them the ignominy of having to admit they had been talking out of their asses for decades.  A mysterious force which would also spare the tiny number of Republicans who were run out of the Republican party the ignominy of admitting that they been more than willing to go along with building their party on a foundation of bigotry, paranoia, white grievance, religious intolerance and plain, old stupidity...until those forces turned on them personally  [Note: the difference here being, the actual "cosmological constant" turned out to be a real thing.]

All bullshit, of course:  "Trumpism" is nothing more than "Republicanism" shorn of its thin veneer of legacy media respectability.  

After all, it was the Republican party which overwhelmingly nominated Donald Trump for president in July of 2016, and came out to the polls in November to elect him.

It was Republican congressmen and senators who enabled all of the horrors that Trump administration inflicted on this country, and who withheld their votes to impeach him, which opened the door for him running again.

It was the Republican party which overwhelmingly nominated Donald Trump for president again in August of 2020, and came out in record numbers in the middle a global pandemic to try to elect him again.  

It was every element of  the Republican party which conspired to keep Trump active and influential during the Biden administration, acting as the head of a shadow government and positioning him for 2024...

... when the Republican party overwhelmingly nominated Donald Trump for president for a third time, ignoring the Trump-led insurrection, falling into line behind the lie that the 2020 election was rigged, dismissing as Fake News the overwhelming evidence of Trump's corruption, pathological lying and sexual predation and once again turning out to the polls in record numbers to elect him for a second term. 

So it is ludicrous on its face to continue pretending that the Republicans party which now controls the White House, the Supreme court and both houses of congress is somehow not the real Republican party.

But we little bloggers of the Left have never been a match for the mighty megaphones of the arrogant fucks of the legacy media, so "Trumpism" is now in the dictionary, on Wikipedia and thrown around by pundits in exactly the way it was intended: as some sort of inexplicable third force in American politics, separate and apart from Republicans and Conservatives..

So let's have some more fun at the expense of David Brooks at The Weekly Standard in April of 2003:

THESE DREAM PALACES have taken a beating over the past month. As the scientists would say, they are conceptual models that failed to predict events. But as we try to understand the political and cultural importance of the war in Iraq Trump's re-election, the question is this: Will they crumble under the weight of undeniable facts? Will the illusions fall, and the political landscape change?

And we find, once again, with only a slight rejiggering of a few words, we can see how eerily David Brooks predicted his own, pathological refusal to face reality:

In other words, there will be no magic “Aha!” moment that brings the dream palaces down... 

...no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, “We were wrong. Bush The Left was right.” 

But even after Never Trump Republicans cemented "Trumpism" into the national vocabulary so they could hold themselves harmless from the actions of the Republican party, the only organization with the national reach and resources to oppose the Republican Trumpist party were the Democrats.  And that was a very big problem but these Never Trumpers were the same people who had spent their entire professional lives demonizing Democrats as the dirty, Commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-murdering face of Pure Evil.

These people had defined themselves as Never Democrats long before Trump showed up and pulled the mask off their party, so how could they possibly make common cause with the dirty, Commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-murdering face of Pure Evil?

By inventing a magical fix which didn't involve Democrats at all.

You remember, right?  Suddenly there sprang from the ground a crop of nearly-identical "movements" which all used the same, focus-group tested buzzwords and were all predicated on the same ridiculous Beltway-created myth: that there is an army of "independents" out there which 

1) Are all truly "independent" and not just garden variety first-world American crankies who are never satisfied with their choices of anything,

2) Are all "independent" for reasons similar enough to one another that they would naturally cohere as a third party.

3) Are vast enough to create and sustain a viable third party that is markedly different than both the Republicans Trumpers and the aforementioned dirty, Commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-murdering Democrats, and,

4) Are credulous enough to quench the greed of an unlimited number of grifters promising them the world.

None of these conditions were true then or ever likely to be true in the foreseeable future, and yet it seemed like every day yet another new "bipartisan group" came out of the woodwork, each promising a Centrist/Independent third way which would stand up to Trump while, at the same time, continuing to rebuke those awful Democrats.  

Every one of them failed, and all for the same reason: none of the Exciting!Centrist!County!Over!Party! promises they made in their brochures was remotely feasible.  There is no math on Earth in which any successful opposition to the Republican president, the Republican congress and the Republican courts will not end up being 95% Democrats, and yet this ridiculous kabuki continues.  

You can hear it everywhere, from Anthony Scaramucci to Cory Booker to Joe Manchin.  Just Google "Not about Left and Right" or "Not about Conservative and Liberal" or "Not about Republicans or Democrats" or, especially, "Not partisan".  The way to defeat the Republican party Trumpism cannot be as simple as "Get more Democrats elected".  Instead, they posit that some grand Democracy Alliance which will ... something something ... and that will be the end of Trump.

But unless you squint yourself blind to avoid looking at the obvious truth and the basic math, this  obviously comes down to a fight between Left and Right. And definitely a fight between Republicans and Democrats.  And despite the chorus of influential voices all trying to pretend otherwise, it is literally a partisan fight, because, inconveniently, "partisan" is an actual English word with an actual definition:

par·ti·san: noun -- a strong supporter of a party, cause, or person.

Which is why all the talk of a grand Democracy Alliance -- or, as Brooks put it in his column, a "... comprehensive national civic uprising" in which  "Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement."  has the stink of George W. Bush's bogus Coalition of the Willing all over it.

You remember the Coalition of the Willing, right?  According to the Bush administration and press reports, the coalition is was made up of Afghanistan, Albania, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Palau, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, Singapore, Slovakia, Solomon Islands, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.

And yet, from The Brookings Institute:

The Coalition That Isn’t

The administration is trying too hard to prove something that isn’t. By insisting that the “coalition of the willing” is larger, deeper, and wider than is in fact the case, the administration only emphasizes the extent of its own isolation. Only Britain is offering meaningful support.

Take the list coalition countries the White House is updating daily. Sure, there are some important allies aside from Britain—notably Japan, South Korea, Spain, and Italy as well as number of “new” Europeans. But only three countries of these allies are actually contributing combat troops and capabilities (2,000 Australian troops, a Danish submarine and naval escort, and 200 Polish troops and refueling ship)—all in all less than one percent of the total number of troops in the region. The rest of the list is a motley crew of supporters—including such powerhouses as Afghanistan, Albania, Macedonia, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau.

Because, to repeat, there is no math on Earth in which any successful opposition to the Republican president, the Republican congress and the Republican courts will not end up being 95% Democrats.  And yet, for a whole host of reasons, men like Brooks are desperate to pry the struggle we are in out of the realm of a straight fight between the American fascist party, the Republicans, and the American non-fascist party, the Democrats.  Because once that happens we are in Brooks wheelhouse.  

You may recall Brooks' Very Big Freakout of 2005 when anti-war candidate Ned Lamont beat Brooks' good friend and fellow Iraq war cheerleader, Joe Lieberman, in a free and fair Democratic primary and Brooks reacted by going on an absolutely insane rant about how the Extremes on Both Sides were ruining this country, and how only a McCain/Lieberman third party could save us from the Tom DeLays on the Right, and the "netroots Delays" of the Left.

It was the stuff of tantrum-throwing, bed-shitting legend. and ever since, about once every nine months since, Brooks has reheats the same, leftover fantasy about the inevitable rise of some bespoke, bipartisan, third-way movement, that just so happens to be perfectly tailored to Brooks' political and cultural predilutions.  And which always takes the form of some sort of third way, independent, Centrist, Neo-Whig, Reformicon movement or party in which the Glorious Centrist Majority finally manifests itself, muscle the Extremes on Both Sides out of the way and into the dustbin of history, and finally sets everything to rights in a way that exactly suits David Brooks

But what if a movement arises without Brooks' seal of approval? And what if it isn't perfectly tailored to Brooks political and cultural predilutions?

Well, you probably remember the 2017 Women's March:

The Women's March was a worldwide protest on January 21, 2017, the day after the first inauguration of Donald Trump as the president of the United States. It was prompted by Trump's policy positions and rhetoric, which were and are seen as misogynistic and representative as a threat to the rights of women. It was at the time the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, being surpassed 3 years later by the George Floyd protests.

But do you remember David Brooks' reaction to the that huge, well-organized protest against Trump?

Because I do.  

He thought it was a frivolous, indulgent waste of time.  And now, to save time, I'm just going to copy/paste what I wrote about it back then.  According to Mr. Brooks, sure, the march was a lot of fun for the ladies:

The women’s marches were a phenomenal success and an important cultural moment. Most everybody came back uplifted and empowered. Many said they felt hopeful for the first time since Election Day. 

But tactically, it was a silly waste of time:

But these marches can never be an effective opposition to Donald Trump.

Why?  Because these coastal elite ladies don't understand politics

In the first place, this movement focuses on the wrong issues. 

Silly ladies!

Now put on your Imagination Caps and pretend you are hearing the following in the most insufferably condescending tone of voice that human vocal cords can produce.

Of course, many marchers came with broad anti-Trump agendas, but they were marching under the conventional structure in which the central issues were clear. As The Washington Post reported, they were “reproductive rights, equal pay, affordable health care, action on climate change.”

These are all important matters, and they tend to be voting issues for many upper-middle-class voters in university towns and coastal cities. But this is 2017...

That was the sound of David Brooks patting tens of millions of women on the head and telling them, "Look toots, all this stuff may make the girls at your San Fran Cisco sewing circle swoon, but ain't nobody gonna organize and vote around it."  

And according to Mr. Brooks, what would move humans to the polls in numbers large enough to pry power out of the hand of the America Fascist Party?   Big issues.  Sweeping, abstract issues. Manly  issues.

...globalization, capitalism, adherence to the Constitution, the American-led global order. If you’re not engaging these issues first, you’re not going to be in the main arena of national life.

And what did the Women's March offer instead?

Instead, the marches offered the pink hats, an anti-Trump movement built, oddly, around Planned Parenthood, and lots of signs with the word “pussy” in them...

"Pussy" obviously confuses the hell out of David Brooks, which explains an enormous amount.

Mr. Brooks continues, explaining to the ladies that the central threat is certainly not the patriarchy.

The central threat is not the patriarchy. 

See?  (Translation:  Get your socialist lady-hands off of my wholly unearned and undeserved privilege.)

So what is the central challenge to Murrica?

The central challenge is to rebind a functioning polity and to modernize a binding American idea.

Wow.  That is a lot of words that don't add up to a damn thing.  Would you care to rephrase that?

If the anti-Trump forces are to have a chance, they have to offer a better nationalism, with diversity cohering around a central mission, building a nation that balances the dynamism of capitalism with biblical morality.

Uh huh.

Well as it turned out, rather than adopting Mr. Brooks'a bold agenda of rebinding biblical capitalism in a functioning morality of balanced dynamism or whateverthefuck he was trying to say, Democrats instead went with that Scary Vagina-Based agenda of health care, clean water, clean air, decent schools and not being racist or a misogynist.  You know, all those elements that were present right there in the DNA of that frivolous, indulgent Women's March back in January of 2017.

And so here we are, eight years later, and this time the most visible movement leaders are Bernie and AOC who are barnstorming the country on their "Fighting Oligarchy" tour, drawing overflow crowds wherever they go.  Capacity crowds, even deep inside Trump country.   

From the AP:  

In a bid to corral the anti-Trump resistance, Bernie Sanders, AOC visit red states

Stephanie and Ryan Burnett were perplexed. The crowd was enormous. The line snaked endlessly between buildings. Were they in the right place?

As the mother and son approached an aging college basketball arena in Salt Lake City, the mass of people seemed way too big for the Bernie Sanders rally they were planning to attend in one of the most conservative states in the country.

“We’re not used to that in a place like Utah,” said Ryan, a 28-year-old server and retail manager from South Weber, about 20 miles north of the arena.

Sanders, alongside his fellow progressive champion Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, took his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour deep into Trump territory this week and drew the same types of large crowds they got in liberal and battleground states.

Outside Boise on Monday, the Ford Idaho Center arena was filled to capacity, with staff forced to close the doors after admitting 12,500 people. There are just 11,902 registered Democratic Party voters in Canyon County, where the arena is located, according to the Idaho Secretary of State’s office.  

Crowds so consistently large and enthusiastic that even David Brooks sat up and took notice.  From his column this week.

So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

So good news, right?  

Nope.   This is the entire paragraph from Brooks' column:

So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this too is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.

Because they're "partisan", see.  Democrats taking on Republicans.  And for the committed Never Trump fraud, that is what makes the Sanders/AOC tour intolerable.  

From the next paragraph.

What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.

You will not fail to notice how that one, little word -- "should" -- is doing so much heavy lifting here that it threatens to shatter its spine.

Of course Republicans "should" swear loyalty to the fundamental institutions of our civic life you asshole.   But the whole fucking point of the last 40 years -- and especially the last decade -- is that Republicans do not feel loyalty to the fundamental institutions of our civic life.  In fact, Republicans have boundless contempt for them and want them put to the torch.  

Then Republicans want to dance around the bonfire in orgiastic delight that they can finally, publicly be their true, swinish fascist selves.  

Republicans want to revel in the fact that, at last, they have a leader who will not court them for their votes, then turn around and scold them or ignore them or make them them feel ashamed of their bigotry and stupidity.  At last they have a leader who will encourages them to burn more, smash more, and scream the "N" word as loud as they damn well please.

This is the ugly reality of the modern Republican party which Never Trumpers like Brooks categorically refuse to face.  

Which is why the word "Republican" is only found twice in Brooks' article, in the two paragraphs which I have cited.  Whereas "Trump" and "Trumpism" are dropped 26 times: as thick as bird shit on a Grant Park statue.

This is why Brooks' whole  plan comes down to wish casting the rise of a sustained mass movement involving every level of society which will somehow drive the scourge of Republicanism Trumpism back into the sewers, while at the same time not be "partisan" in any way.   

And of course every night the monkey butlers will regale us with jungle stories.

However, if this imaginary movement does not meet David Brooks' specifications... should it start to, y'know, blame people... or remember stuff... or recognize that the root of all of our problems is that the Republican party is full of Republicans... or fail to, uh, build a nation that balances the dynamism of capitalism with biblical morality, then be forewarned that it is doomed to fail!

Doomed I tells ya!

And if that happens, you can count Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times o-u-t out of your mass uprising.

Burn The Lifeboats