David Brooks Is Fully Back To David Brooksing

No point in dwelling on this too deeply.  Suffice it to say that the Times’ owner, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and his executives have elevated Brooks to the status of a dull, grinding, morally entropic force — as permanent as tooth decay or the heat death of the universe.

The title of Mr. Brooks' abomination today is "The Era of Dark Passions".  

So far, so good, right?

And then...

But these days, and maybe through all days, leaders across the political spectrum have found that dark passions...

Here we go:

Trump is a master of this dark art, but I wouldn’t say my Trump-supporting friends have darker personalities than my Trump-opposing ones. Progressives also appeal to dark passions...

Brooks’ imaginary ‘friends’ are as handy as Tom Friedman’s imaginary cab drivers -- always Johnny-on-the-spot with exactly the uplifting attitude Brooks needs.

When you see cops beating a man who is on the ground and barely conscious, that’s the urge to dominate. It can also take more subtle forms. I’m struck by how powerful the human urge to segregate and exclude is. For example, once left-leaning people established a dominant position in academia, the media and nonprofit sector...

Yes, Brooks just compared cops beating the shit out of someone to [checks notes] speech coded at a handful of elite universities and such.  Also too, what fucking Liberal media?

Today American politics is driven by dueling fears, hatreds, resentments...

Not Republicans.  Just "American politics".

How can we reverse our downward trajectory? First, let me tell you how not to reverse it. There is a tendency in these circumstances to think that the other side is so awful that we need a monster on our side to beat it. That’s the decision Republicans made in nominating Trump. Democrats are moving in that direction too...

Fuck you, David Brooks.

I often hear Democrats say their party needs to fight harder. These are people who don’t really believe in democracy. Fighting is for fascists.  Democracy is about persuasion...

Really?  I don't recall George W. Bush dispatching high school debate teams to Iraq.  Or Eisenhower sending the troops in on D-Day armed with  Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People.  

And Lincoln?  Don't worry, we'll get around to Lincoln in 3...2...1...

History provides clear examples of how to halt the dark passion doom loop. It starts when a leader, or a group of people, who have every right to feel humiliated, who have every right to resort to the dark motivations, decide to interrupt the process. They simply refuse to be swallowed by the bitterness, and they work — laboriously over years or decades — to cultivate the bright passions in themselves — to be motivated by hope, care and some brighter vision of the good, and to show those passions to others, especially their enemies.

Vaclav Havel did this. Abraham Lincoln did this in his second Inaugural Address...

Since I took the trouble to write about this the last few times that David Brooks, 1980 University of Chicago history baccalaureate, butchered the history of the Civil War to serve his insipid drivel, I see no reason why I shouldn't just reprint it all here.  From "When Beltway Pundits Dream, They Dream of Imaginary Lincoln"  five years ago:

... Good Christ at Appomattox, these Very Serious Beltway Pundits just fucking love, love, love them some Lincoln, don't they? They just can't stop dream-casting him into every modern travail. Raising him up like a lantern in every dark and bloody corner into which the Republican Party drags us -- a beacon of presidential rectitude and strength.

And Lincoln really was all those things. And more. This is not what makes Brooks' invocation of the man so appalling.

What's appalling is that Very Serious Beltway Pundits like David Brooks have no love for the actual Lincoln. The guy who is buried two miles from my front door. Instead, they love their imaginary Lincoln just as they love their imaginary Reagan.

Their imaginary Lincoln is a Lincoln without Shiloh or Cold Harbor. A Lincoln without the Wilderness or Vicksburg or the Shenandoah Valley.

Their Lincoln is two-dimensional caricature of the actual Lincoln. A gentle redeemer and uniter, and not the man who went through just about every general in the Union Army until he found one that would do what needed to be done: crush the Confederacy completely, regardless of the cost. One that would bomb their cities, burn their crops, slaughter their armies and starve their citizens until, at last, their will to make a traitor's war against the United States was broken and they finally gave up.

There is no place in Mr. Brooks' gauzy cartoon version of American history for a Lincoln who recognized a mortal threat to the nation coming from a despicable confederacy of its own citizens, and who ruthlessly used every bloody means at his disposal to utterly destroy that threat. No place in his idylls for a Lincoln who offered reunion and reconstruction to the South only after they had been beaten to their knees and forced to accept surrender or face extinction.

And if this all sounds weirdly familiar, well it should. I penned something similar when Mr. Brooks reached for that ol' reliable jug of Imaginary Lincoln three years ago ("David Brooks: Controlling The Future By Butchering The Past"):

That's right.  To serve his political agenda, Mr. Brooks has very deliberately omitted the entire context for one of the greatest speeches in American history:  the fact that there were two sides to the Civil War -- one which was dedicated  to destroying the nation in order to preserve the institution of slavery, and another -- led by Abraham Lincoln -- which was determined not to let that happen.

And as to Mr. Brooks' claim that "Slavery, Lincoln says, was not a Southern institution, it was an American institution, weaving through our common history for 250 years."?   Well for fuck's sake, David, just read the very next god damn paragraph of the speech you are god damn quoting:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

In Mr. Brooks' Both Siderist version of America history, Lincoln is transformed into a disembodied specter who somehow just floats above all of this, hand-in-hand with Mr. David Brooks, as together they survey the sad and petty squabbles of the wretched Extremes on Both Sides, both in 1865 and 2017. 

And I jotted down a few more notes one year later when Mr. Bret Stephens (also of The New York Times) disgraced himself on live teevee and to save himself, grabbed for Imaginary Lincoln like Donald Trump grabbing a pussy ("Noted Conservative New York Times Columnist Forgets The Civil War Ever Happened".)...

Back to Brooks in the here-and-now:

Over the last 30 years the richest, whitest and best-educated members of our society have become the most extreme people on the right and the left and began a war on each other that leaves all sides feeling furious and fearful.

Which is wild considering how Brooks began this crime against journalism.

Sometimes when I have nothing better to do, I think back on the elections we had in the before times — when, say, Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama or John Kerry ran against George W. Bush. I try to figure out why politics and society in general felt so different then.

It felt different back then because Brooks categorically refused to pay attention to what was actually happening with his Republican Party and his Conservative movement.  Simply ignored the fact that something had gone very wrong on the Right and was getting worse because that would have conflicted with the fairy tales he was selling to his credulous readers.  

Like someone who dismisses clear early warnings of a heath emergency and then, when it bursts out of their chest like the xenomorph from Alien (yes, I’m mixing metaphors) and starts killing the crew, they curl into the fetal position in the Acela Quiet Car (yep, mixing again) and moan about Both Sides.

 The rest of this is a book report about something someone else wrote, and a typically Brooks-brand treacly sermon on the importance of being humble or forgiving or whatever.  

Once again...

I Am The Liberal Media