The Further Adventures of David Brooks, Useful Idiot

 

If you've been around these parts for awhile, you probably seen me skin and dress a David Brooks column or two.  It's not difficult per se, but it does require both practice and, more importantly, the ability to temporarily put aside the infuriating fact that Mr. Brooks is paid extremely well for extruding the same, dreary slabs of toxic bafflegab decade after decade after decade.

But never mistake this overpaid assembler of 800-word doses of tepid poison as "useless", because Mr. Brooks is not useless.  He is, in fact, one of the legacy media's last and mightiest Atlases, straining every day to keep the punditocracy's dearest and most profitable lies propped up and breathing long after observable reality, causality and common decency would otherwise have forced them to slouch off to unmarked and unsanctified graves.

So, by way of a "How To" tutorial, today we're not going to try to vivisect an entire column.  Instead, we're going to look at how efficiently Brooks packs so much legacy media pundit claptrap into a single exchange.  See if you can count how many different way Brooks is wrong, and having done so, deduce why he is telling those specific lies.  

From Friday's PBS News Hour:

David Brooks:  And so — and then I think it's a mistake to have, frankly, AOC and Sanders out there doing the rallies.

AOC has a approval rating of 30. And so why are you leading with someone who is going to turn off a lot — is going to rally the base, for sure, but turn off a lot of the voters who you need to win?

And so what I think this is not the — this should not be fought right now as a left-right conventional Democrat, Republican. Donald Trump is attacking institutions. And this should be — opposition to Donald Trump should be of nonpartisan defense of institutions, of the courts, of rule of law, of NIH.

And the more you make it partisan, the more you're cutting yourself off from at least half the country.

First, no one is "having" AOC and Sanders out there doing rallies.  They are not taking orders from DNC Central Command.  They are doing this on their own initiative and on their own dime.

Second, as Jonathan Capehart pointed out is his response -- 

Sanders and AOC were going to red states. They weren't rallying the base in Virginia, New Jersey. They were in Montana and Idaho.

-- after which the moderator quickly changed the subject.

Third, and most egregious of all, is this utterly ludicrous pretense which one hears bruited about (look it up) on all the best Centrist and Never Trump media outlets, that somehow this is not a "partisan" problem.  Not a Democrat/Republican problem.  Not a Left/Right problem.  

Except it manifestly is all of those things, because, inconveniently for Mr. Brooks, "partisan" is an actual English word with an actual definition:

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

So, as an act of Christian charity, let's us catch Mr. David Brooks up on a few news items he seems to have missed.

While it is undeniably true that "Donald Trump is attacking institutions" what follows that is Brooks' all-too familiar, ham-handed attempt at misdirection.  Forcing the word "should" to do so much heavy lifting --

"And this should be — opposition to Donald Trump should be of nonpartisan defense of ..."

-- that it snaps its spine.

Yes, David, Donald Trump is indeed "attacking institutions".  And that is because the Republican party elected him to do so.  

In fact, in case you hadn't heard, the Republican party nominated Trump for president three times and elected him twice.

He enjoys the full and unequivocal support of virtually the entire Republican caucus in both houses of congress, which were all, in turn, nominated and elected by Republicans.  

The myrmidons he has dispatched to lead the attack on our institutions were approved by Republicans in the Senate.  

Trump encounters much less pushback from the courts than he would in a health society largely because of all the Republican judges he has appointed, most of which were approved of by the Republicans in the Senate.  

The governors who are most enthusiastic about doing his bidding are Republican governors.  

The state legislatures who are most aggressively trying to destroy our institutions at the local level are Republican-majority state legislatures.

For decades, Brooks has dined out on the fairy tales he has spun for his credulous readers.  Back in the early, glory days of the Dubya Bush administration, Brooks was all about the moral superiority of his "Book of Virtues" Republican party.  Then, after the collapse of the Bush administration, Brooks pviotes fast and hard to waxing on and on about the moral superiority of some imaginary political Center, which is always calm and Whig-like and in every other way exactly what Brooks wishes it to be on any given occasion.  

And yet, like Linus sitting in the pumpkin patch year after year, waiting for the Great Pumpkin to rise up and reward the faithful, for decade after decade David Brooks has been sitting at his desk promising, speculating, postulating and otherwise predicting the imminent arrival of the Sensible Center, which will definitely rise up and set our entire political system to rights, but only if we all remain perfectly and quietly nonpartisan.  Because even a whisper of partisan rancor will scare the Sensible Center away:

It's The Sensible Center Charlie Brown!  

Of all the stupid, dangerous cults that litter our rubble-strewn political landscape, arguably the most subtly toxic and dangerous of all has been the Cult of the Sensible Center which is also known around these parts as the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It.  

For the record, if anything like an actual, policy-based Center exists anywhere, it's at the heart of the Democratic party, somewhere between Dick Durbin and Bernie Sanders.  But out there among the hoi polloi there is no Sensible Center stewing in disgruntled silence outside of the two major parties.  Instead, in the population at large there are a tiny number of flighty, timorous goofs who float around between the two parties via some kind ideological Brownian motion because they want to tell themselves that they are bold independents.  But they're not.  They're just cowards and mopes who, rather than plant their feet and take a stand, would travel 1,000 miles to find a fence to straddle.  

You know the type and you know that type never changes.

On the other hand, the reason that the Cult of the Sensible Center is so poisonous is directly related to their massive overrepresentation in the media.  Which has, over the course of decades, enabled the second most dangerous political cult in America -- the Republican party -- to continually ratchet further and further into outright fascism without any appreciable consequences...

But there is no Sensible Center, no matter how hard Brooks tries to wish one into existence.  And no matter how desperately Brooks tries to localize the problem to Donald Trump alone, the plain and obvious truth is that the entire Republican party is the problem, from the root to the fruit. 

Which makes it, by definition, a partisan issue.  And in this fight -- which is both partisan and existential -- the fact that Democrats now own clear and unrestricted title to the moral high ground has driven David Brooks a very special kind of crazy.  

Oh, and getting back to the original PBS glop that started us down this road, the fourth lie Brooks tells is just dumb:

And the more you make it partisan, the more you're cutting yourself off from at least half the country.

Nope.  The current population of the United States is around 343.6 million people.  Trump got a little over 77 million votes in 2024 (Fun fact, Biden got a little over 81 million in 2020 .)  That's 22.4% of the country, not "at least half the country".  

I supposed I can understand Brooks' desperate need to protect the legacy media's crumbling Sensible Center dream palace even at the cost of continuing this horseshit about the Partisan!Evils! of choosing to support [checks notes] the anti-fascists against the fascists.  But for the love of Euclid and Eratosthenes, can he at least not lie about basic arithmetic. 

Burn the Lifeboats