The Faith and Humility Reporter for the Acela Daily Pantograph has returned with a startling proposition. David Brooks -- who discovered Christianity five minutes ago and very evidently doesn't understand it at all -- claims he has the cure for Christian Nationalism.
Think I'm kidding? Here's the headline:
How to Replace Christian Nationalism
Well, if nothing else, I'm sure Brooks will succeed in catching the attention of the Tiki torch, "Jews will not replace us", Nazis-in-Dockers mob.
As your humble scrivener wrote on this very blog not so long ago, whenever he publicly belly-flops into the empty swimming pool of his own boundless ignorance about how America lives and works and thinks and feels in the Land Beyond The Hudson, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times frequently retreats to the one safe place where he can pontificate in galactically-sweeping language and no one will dare gainsay him.
The pulpit.
In the pulpit, Mr. Brooks is free to sermonize on the State of The Human Soul to his heart's content on the Sulzberger family's dime. Which is nice work if you can get it.
This time, Mr. Brooks affects an understanding of the chaotic parade of American humanity so deep and so wise that he can not only diagnose how to undo Christian Nationalism, but explain exactly how and why the MAGA morons came to power here in the Land of the Free.
Well, more or less.
Here is the exact quote:
Somehow MAGA has swept in and made us a frightened nation, stagnant, callous and backward.
"Somehow"?!
Jesus, Mary, and Erwin Schrödinger, it would take a better mind than mine to calculate exactly how much of the inconvenient past Brooks casually obliterated with that word. Acres? Oceans?
How many decades of Conservative propaganda -- to which Brooks eagerly contributed -- and how many decades of legacy media complicity -- to which Brooks still eagerly contributes -- did he just negate?
How many elections did Brooks just annul?
How much of America's long history of racism did Brooks just wish away with one, little word?
If you've followed Brooks' long career of getting everything wrong, you would understand why he has to seal the long and well documented trajectory of the GOP that led to Trump and MAGA in an oil drum and sink it deep, deep into the River Lethe. Because the inconvenient history of his Republican Party and his Conservative movement are incompatible with the toxic scam Brooks has been successfully running for 30 years.
As I have mentioned once or twice, while it is clear that the House of Sulzberger is going to go right on letting Brooks get away with murder on the op-ed page of The New York Times until he chooses to retire, for his brutal and ongoing mutilation of the past, at the very least the University of Chicago should revoke his B.A. in History.
Remember, this is the very same, willfully blind hack who casually dismissed racism as a motive for the Right's rabid, hysterical opposition to Barack Obama. Who decided that there was no racism in the Fake Tea Party movement based literally on ... jogging past a small Tea Party rally once. Who assured everyone in 2014 that his Republican Party had fully and finally "detoxified" itself and was looking ahead to a bright future, and assured everyone in 2016 that his party would obviously never nominate someone like Trump: that it was definitely gonna be Rubio!
And then there was Brooks' brief nonconfessional-confession tour, launched during the 2016 campaign, when his job was clearly on the chopping block because he had fucked up so consistently and so very, very publicly on the pages of The New York Times. Here is a particularly illuminating snippet from Brooks on the still-defunct Charlie Rose Show in 2016:
Rose: So you think you were wrong? That you had somehow been on the Acela too much and had not done what?
Brooks: As I say, I'm out in the country ... every week I'm somewhere ... but somehow I didn't see it coming. I'm...I'm...I'm...I was not alone in that. A lot of us didn't see it coming.
Rose: Oh I don't know anybody that saw it coming.
Brooks (smirking): Yeah, I'm sure now there are people claiming they did but...um...
And right there you could see the Beltway Common Wisdom being set in concrete. Since no one saw this coming, everyone failed equally so no one is guilty. No one is to blame. And as long as we all agree to pretend that all the lowliest Liberal bloggers -- who had been warning about these conditions within the GOP for decades -- simply do not exist ... and so as long as Brooks promised to do a little painless penance -- to sojourn into the heart of American darkness and compare notes on Edmund Burke with shit-shovelers in Nebraska and pawn brokers in Kansas -- everything would be cool.
Everyone could safely return to their default setting and no one would lose their job just because events had shown they never had the slightest fucking idea what they were talking about.
So, back here in the Year of Our Lord, let's all gather 'round to bask in Brooks' next bit of Beltway folk wisdom.
I don’t think this alien cultural implant can last forever.
The "alien culture implant[s]" Brooks is referring to here are MAGA and its Christian Nationalist core proving once again, that Brooks has no qualms about dismissing centuries of inconvenient history when that history conflicts with the fairy tales he is still selling to his readers. In this case, the fairy tale is one of inevitable American spiritual progress that has only been momentarily sidetracked, but will resume once Real Murrica shrugs off these alien cultural implants.
I don’t think this alien cultural implant can last forever. Eventually Americans, restless as any people on earth, will want to replace threat with hope and resume our national pilgrimage. When that cultural and spiritual shift occurs, a lot will change in our religious and political life.
Once you put people into categorical boxes, you are inviting them to see history as a zero-sum conflict between this group and that one. And sure enough, today we live in a political, cultural and religious war between two impoverished armies.
On the one side are the Christian nationalists, who practice a debauched form of their faith. Christian nationalism is particular rather than universal. It is about protecting “us” against “them” — the native versus the immigrant. It is about power more than love. It is about threat more than hope. It is rigid and pharisaical rather than personal and merciful.
On the other side are the exhausted remains of secular humanism. That humanism started out trying to liberate people from dogma, but it has produced societies in which people feel alienated, naked and alone. It has failed to formulate a shared moral order that might help people find meaning and solidarity in their lives. It is so enfeebled that it is being replaced by the religion of the phone — by shallow, technological modes of living.
As near as I can tell, David Brooks is actually contending that, somehow, bad polling questions (?!) have shunted all of us into one of these "two impoverished armies."
This is followed by a hilariously awkward pivot from Brooks' ludicrously reductive assessment of the entire population of the United States ... to an unverifiable, anecdotal laundry list of what Brooks believes other people really, truly believe way down deep where only he can see. And it's all based on this sentence here:
In my experience most believers...
This really is a museum-quality sample of everything wrong about Brooks.
His entire career has been a series of sweeping observations and predictions about politics, faith and culture virtually all of which have turned out to be laughable wrong...and which Brooks validated with his own, personal experiences and insider information, which have also turned out to be hilariously and unerringly wrong.
In fact, Brooks has been so consistently wrong about everything in exactly the same way over and over again, that I've often thought that descriptors like "hack", "goof" or "Sulzberger family houseplant" are insufficient. So I've been fiddling with alternations . None of them are entirely satisfactory, so I welcome any suggestions.
The Lay-Scholastic Pretension: An intense episode of Aquinas-level bravado, typically triggered by reading a paragraph in a secondary commentary which under looming print deadline and immediately assuming one has unlocked the entire metaphysical universe.
The Ecclesial Overreach Principle: The belief that one’s private interpretation implicitly carries ecumenical authority, despite having no synod, council, bishop, or even small committee concurring.
The Magisterium of Me: A potent affliction where a single individual speaks as though they are a church council, despite their only conciliar experience being an encounter with overpriced airport whiskey.
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