Yesterday the weather here was fine and cool. True, the air quality was for shit (smoke from distant wildfires) but as we know, we can't have everything, can we?
So yesterday, I pitched my hammock between the Spanish/Italian term "morbo" (which means morbid curiosity, but can also imply enjoying things that are grotesque, taboo, or unpleasant) and the Spanish term "resentimiento alegre" (cheerful resentment, or the satisfaction of seeing someone get their comeuppance.)
Because yesterday Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times was trending on Elon Musk's Nazi hellsite. And this time he was trending because he said a naughtybadsinful thing that triggered the MAGA meatheads.
"But," you very reasonably ask, "doesn't literally everything trigger the MAGA meatheads? After all these decades of grooming by Hate Radio and Fox News, at this point aren't they basically skinbags packed with hair-triggers just waiting to go off, like those ping pong ball and mousetrap demos of how nuclear fission works from Mr. Kluge's high school physics class?"
First, wait? You had Kluge for high school physics too? Damn! We should compare notes one of these days because me and my boys got up to a lot of shenanigans in that class.
Second, no, not everything triggers MAGA meatbags.
For example, yesterday were they in a white-hot fury over Brooks once again spending his contractually-obligates 850 New York Times op-ed page words clutching another fistful of pearls to dust and weeping that his former party was compelled to become a mob on bigoted, brainwash fascist zombies because of the lefty-ness of "educated-class institutions"?
Nope. Bigoted, brainwash fascist zombies don't read the Times, and anyway, bigoted, brainwash fascist zombies love being reassured that their daily atrocities are actually the fault of baby-killing commies like you and me.
About which more later.
Then was it because Brooks then moved on to the NewsHour where he announced that Netanyahu's Gaza genocide isn't actually genocide? Or that he explained away the atrocities as being mostly due to incompetence?
Nah. To whatever extent MAGA meatheads care about the Middle East at all, it's mostly the right-wing evangelical core of the MAGA mob. And all they give a shit about is getting Israel tidied up, scraped clean and made ready for the Rapture.
They went berserk because someone told them that, on the NewsHour, Brooks said this:
I don't think it can cross Donald Trump's mind that there are neutral arbiters who are objective and are not politicized. But this is the weakness of authoritarian or pseudo-authoritarian regimes, is, they create an atmosphere in which it's not possible to be honest with the executive.
How fucking dare he suggest the Dear Leader is in any way "authoritarian"!!! Defund PBS Now!Now!Now
Also David Brooks is obviously a flaming liberal, lefty, commie who wouldn't know "neutral" if it crawled up his leg and bit him in the means of production!!!!
These were typical, and hilarious. Hence, "morbo".
And now on to the thing I said I'd get to later on., because later on is now.
First, this from Salon a week ago goes briefly over Brooks' decades-long record of aggressively amputating the history of Conservatism in order to force it into the happy magic box that people like David Brooks wish their pasts had been:
David Brooks faces the truth of US history — and runs away
NY Times' pet conservative offers a lengthy apologia for America — and gets pretty much everything wrong
...I won’t bore the reader by recapitulating the process of his shocked realization, 40 years too late, that the reactionary “fringe,” as Brooks calls it, was the true core of the party, the seed of a poisonous fruit that required decades to reach its putrid bloom. It’s said that every confession is a species of boasting, and Brooks’s mea culpa, that he “should have seen this coming,” is in that vein: He was just too good-hearted to think his fellow travelers in the conservative movement capable of such iniquity.
Of course, maintaining one’s innocence requires rearranging history. It was mainstream conservatives, not some fringe, who perpetrated the Iran-Contra affair, invaded Iraq under false pretenses, enthusiastically tortured prisoners in the quixotic war on terrorism, and recklessly cut taxes and deregulated markets to pave the way for the biggest global financial crash since the Great Depression. It was mainstream conservatives who voted unanimously against Barack Obama’s rather tepid Affordable Care Act, itself a rehash of a Heritage Foundation proposal from the 1990s.
Brooks’ labored apologia is a history — his history — of recent American conservatism, a Manichaean fable of civilized, conscientious conservatives full of marvelous ideas and déclassé, knuckle-dragging right-wingers. But beyond its heroes-and-villains simplicity, the piece reminds us of a characteristic habit of conservatives.
Brooks distorts not only his own past, and that of the conservative movement, but the American past as well, since much of his piece is a Parson Weems-style potted history of our country, apparently written to vindicate his optimism that everything will come out right in the end.
If this all sounds amazingly familiar to longtime readers, it should. This is from me, 13 very long years ago, summarizing what I came to call Brooks' Great Project:
...it is now painfully clear that Mr. Brooks is engaged in a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.
To stay on-side, this is exactly the kind of unholy mental gymnastics that every Never Trumper and every legacy media outfit put themselves through every fucking day for decades, which is why their advice and council should be greeted with the kind of skepticism the Trojans should have shown when the Greeks offered them the gift of a big, wooden horse.
Back to Brooks' NYT op-ed, where we get another sweeping, Brooksian sermonette on what makes for a decent and sustainable society. Stable families. Coherent neighborhoods. Just laws. A belief in a moral order. That sort of thing.
OK, fine. There are several dozen other critical factors omitted from this list like a planet that isn't burnt to a crisp, decent and affordable education, housing and health care. Clean water. On and on like that, but OK, for the sake of argument we'll start with Brooks' list
And then Brooks executes his signature David Brooks-brand op-ed pivot: going 12 parsecs out of his way to avoid specifying what exactly happened in this country over, say, the course of David Brooks' lifetime that has impeded, fractured and ultimately destroyed the possibility that sort of decent and sustainable society he described could exist. For example, Brooks is incapable of conceding the simple fact that this country has a long, deep and still-virulent strain of racism running right through it. And that his party spent the last 60 years harnessing that dark energy and feeding it on lies, grievances and increasingly insane conspiracies to the point where they're willing to throw it all away on the promise that Trump will kill the bogeyman under their bed.
David Brooks Almost Gets it Right
But he ignored the problems caused by conservatism
...So far so good - but then his head gets lost in his nether regions. At the end of this paragraph he adds: “The educated-class institutions have grown increasingly left wing and can sometimes feel like a hostile occupying army to other Americans.”
He concludes that “In this contest, the Republicans have their champions, and the Democrats aren’t even on the field.”
What?
All of the problems he described were either brought about or exacerbated by conservative, free market ideology. Suburban sprawl, the destruction of rural communities, the white flight from urban downtowns, the detachment of elites in their gated communities, and the sense that morality is for “thee but not for me” all grow out of a conservative world view that atomizes people into units and commodifies them into consumers. The “educated-class institutions” had nothing to do with them.
Brooks doesn’t notice that the decline in public trust in our institutions and our sense that the government is broken began in the 1980’s - the very moment when Ronald Reagan and friends told us that government was the problem and began dismantling the programs that could have ameliorated social decay.
Indeed, the reason so many people are alienated from our institutions is because conservatives and their media allies have waged a relentless assault on them. Republicans led the attack on the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time rule leading to Fox News spewing disinformation 24 hours a day. Thus, in national election, people who are wrong about issues - on the facts - increasingly voting for Republicans.
For Brooks, though, conservatives are better attuned to the “pre-covenental” values of faith, family, neighborhood, and culture than liberals who are “are prone to the kind of thinking that does not see the sinews of our common life — the stuff that cannot be quantified.” But Brooks apparently forgot that Barack Obama and Joe Biden made express moral arguments addressing social decay AND delivered policies to combat those problems - e.g., ObamaCare and the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. And that federal spending to make neighborhoods more livable was opposed by most Republicans. Or that Republicans opposed the continuation of the Covid-era child tax credit...
Nothing new here. Nothing that will surprise you. But after +20 years I've gotten a little tired of writing the same David Brooks vivisection over and over again, so today I'm leaning on others, like Mr. DiPippa (above), and from Mr. Hans Sandberg here:
David Brooks Fights His Own Windmills
Does the GOP Really Stand for Social Order?
Brooks claims that the left and the right have had their hobbyhorses: Big government vs tax cuts. But in the new century, we have a new problem, and the Republicans have abandoned their commitment to small government under Donald Trump.
He then quickly moves on to the growing political polarization and a weakening of “America’s social order” which according to him happened after 2007.
“America’s social order has fractured, and that has made all the difference.”
What he doesn’t tell us is that this happened to be the time of the global financial crash which shook the lives and savings of millions of middle- and working-class Americans, resulting in America’s first Black President – Barack Obama – who had the audacity to save the economy that the Republican president (G.W. Bush) had wrecked, and introduce an expanded, affordable and moderate, Republican-inspired healthcare reform.
The economic and social aftershocks of the financial meltdown was then manipulated by the proto-fascist Tea Party and demagogues like Newt Gingrich into a right-wing rebellion with racist overtones. The Tea Party was by the way funded by billionaires like the Koch brothers.
But to Brooks, it was all about social decay and “disorder”.
“Millions of Americans believe that this is where we are. They see families splinter or never form, neighborhood life decay, churches go empty, friends die of addictions, downtowns become vacant, a national elite grow socially and morally detached. We have privatized morality so that there are no longer shared values. The educated-class institutions have grown increasingly left wing and can sometimes feel like a hostile occupying army to other Americans.”
Alas. it was an “occupying army” of left-wing academics rather than the Republican’s racist recalcitrance that created the disturbance of the order. Brooks knows better but chose to forget that there were other factors than empty churches contributing to the “social disorder”...
Again, nothing new here. Just Brooks' Great Project still grinding along, doling out sugar-water-and-Quaalude doses of "Both Sides Are To Blame (But Really The Liberals Caused It)" to an increasingly small audience of desperate cowards and moral shut-ins still cling to ancient delusions. Gliding safely above decades of Republican catastrophes with David Brooks in his big, old Sensible Centrist dirigible.
I'll leave you with a couple of David Brooks New York Times' op-ed quotes to illustrate what I mean.
The Republican Party is running into a problem: the conservatism of the American people. Over the past decade, the Republicans have set themselves up as the transformational party... [But the American people] have a taste for order and a distrust of those who want too much change on too many fronts too quickly...
This does not mean good news for Democrats. That party is at risk of going into a death spiral. The Democrats lost white working-class voters by 23 percentage points in the last election, and now the party is being led by people who are guaranteed to alienate those voters even more: the highly educated and secular university-town elites...
Nor does it mean that Republicans should abandon their ideas, but it may be time to think about methods.
Typical, innocuous Brooksian argle-bargle, right? On the one hand, Republicans are broadly on the right track, but should maybe tamp down their methods a little because people are starting to balk. On the other hand, Democrats suck because of that left wing "hostile occupying army" of "educated-class institutions".
Except I have played a mean trick on you, the nature of which, when I quote the second paragraph in full, will become clear.
This does not mean good news for Democrats. That party is at risk of going into a death spiral. The Democrats lost white working-class voters by 23 percentage points in the last election, and now the party is being led by people who are guaranteed to alienate those voters even more: the highly educated and secular university-town elites who follow Howard Dean and believe Bush hatred and stridency are the outward signs of righteousness.
Yes, this claptrap is not from David Brooks this week, or even this decade.
This is from the very first time I vivisected a pile of Brooks' respectable lies, more than twenty years ago. Back in April of 2005.
Back when the highly accurate critiques of the Republican party that we Liberal bloggers were making were routinely dismissed by hardcore, Neocon Bush-cheerleaders like Brooks as mere "Bush hatred and stridency".
You will remember that, then as now, the Republican party had delivered itself into the hands of a corrupt and depraved monster. In 2005, that particular monster was named Tom DeLay who, you will also remember, was also up to his ass in the business of trafficking human beings. From Daily Kos, July, 2007:
Ending Neo-Slavery on Tom DeLay's Island
...For more than 25 years, a system of human trafficking and abuse has flourished on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a US Territory in the Western Pacific some 40 miles North of Guam.
Tom DeLay used to call the CNMI his "...perfect petri dish of capitalism". For Tom and those on his team, the CNMI was a shinning ideal—a playground of experimentation. And it was an experiment in unrestricted greed, abuse and exploitation.
What grew in DeLay’s Petri dish were decades of well documented, detailed and irrefutable cases of sweatshops, forced prostitution, rape, money laundering, gambling, graft, corruption and incompetence. This was reported to Congress multiple times since 1985. By 1995 bi-partisan Legislation was moving to end the abuse. Then, the Pirates of Saipan hired Jack Abramoff to block any reform. It worked. For more than twelve years the abuse has continued.
Then there is the Tom DeLay situation. Conversations with House Republicans in the past week leave me with one clear impression: If DeLay falls, it will not be because he took questionable trips or put family members on the payroll. It will be because he is anxiety-producing and may become a political liability...
Translation: DeLay has been a foaming-at-the mouth, rabid Evangelical freak show for about 15 years now. For naked political advantage, he has been sloppily knobbing the militia movement, cross-burners, clinic bombers, queer-bashers and basically anything he can fish out of the absolute dregs of the DNA barrel around who’s fetid cock he could fit his mouth. Now that you’ve noticed him in all his Gorgon Awfulness and we in the Neutered and Rightwing Media can’t keep pimping the story that he’s a “colorful kook." Now we have to be Shocked! Shocked! at his bestial excesses.
House Republicans like what DeLay has done, and few have any personal animus toward him, but his aggressiveness makes them - and his own constituents - nervous. Only 39 percent of DeLay's Texas constituents said they would stick with him if he were up for re-election today, a Houston Chronicle survey found.Me again:
Translation: DeLay has their nuts in his medicine bag and they don’t fucking dare say a word against him. DeLay makes a viper like Gingrich look like a charming Southern Gentleman, that’s how de-ranged he is. Don’t fuck with The Hammer, dude. My cousin said she had a friend who saw him beat a homeless guy to death with a congressional staffer. Then he ate him, whole, like an Anaconda eating a rabbit. He’s Kaiser Fucking Sose, man. Prince of Darkness. On the plus side, two-out-of-every-five ambulatory humans in Sugarland, TX would still support him even now that he has been outted as the Satan’s Wingman. Gotta love Texas: It’s like a whole other Special Olympics Purgatory.All of which only goes to show a few things that most of you already know perfectly well.
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