David Brooks can spend more words tediously bullshitting and sidestepping his way around obvious answers to obvious questions and then racing to the Both Sides Do It safe house than anyone I know. And in his maundering, 34 paragraph ramble through Western Civilization ("Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?") Brooks outdoes himself: burying the inevitable Both Side Do It razor-in-the-apple all the way down in the 27th paragraph.
And it's a doozy. So let's get right to it (with emphasis added by me):
As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.
So of course many people don’t find Trump morally repellent. He’s just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create. And Democrats, don’t feel too self-righteous here. If he was on your team, most of you would like him too. You may deny it, but you’re lying to yourself...
The media’s most destructive meme: Why we need to admit that the GOP’s extremism is virtually unprecedentedFor years, the political press has covered for Republicans, insisting (without evidence) that Dems were just as bad
Perhaps, like cuttlefish using chromatophores to mesmerize small prey before they are gobbled up, Brooks thought the boredom he could induce by meandering through 23 centuries of human history before getting to the fucking point would dull reader's senses enough that they would just glide right past it. The op-ed equivalent of white line fever: that altered state drivers can fall into during long, monotonous drives, after which they have no conscious recollection of the trip.
Or perhaps Brooks thought that to get away with a razor-in-the-apple this idiotic and this poisonous he'd better take a helluva running start.
Which is exactly what he did.
I’m going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. It’s a story that draws heavily on the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, who died in May at age 94. It’s a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.
The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle...
Fast-forward from ancient Athens a thousand-plus years to the Middle Ages.
Then came the 17th-century wars of religion, and the rivers of blood they produced.
Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems...
And then in the 19th and 20th centuries, along came the crew who tried to fill the moral vacuum the Enlightenment created....
Today, we live in a world in which...
We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong...
People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they’re really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences...
Each of us comes to regard other members of society as simply means to our ends, who can be coerced into believing what we believe...
Over the past 30 years, people have tried to fill the hole in their soul by seeking to derive a sense of righteousness through their political identities...
No wonder Brooks thought he had to go all the way back to "Athens in the age of Aristotle" to get a big enough running start to make a leap this huge and loathsome. But I think even starting with ancient Greece didn't give Brooks a runway nearly long enough to get this turd in the air.
Got to go back further. Say to the dawn of agriculture.
Did you know that the story of Cain and Abel was originally intended as a metaphor for the defeat of the nomadic herdsman economy by the agrarian economy? Cain is depicted as a tiller of the soil, while his brother Abel is a keeper of sheep. Cain kills Abel, but isn't himself slain by God. Instead he is sent exiled; sent into the world and cities based on regional agriculture are born.
This gives rise to written languages, mathematics, op-ed columns and lying.
But no, that's still not far enough.
Got to go back even further, say to the breakup between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. One theory holds that a giant, black, Lucite brick came down from Heaven and gave man's simian ancestors the ability to use tools to beat each other up.
This was the beginning of partisan politics. Sad!
But wait. Perhaps we need to go back further still. Does the answer lie within the infamous Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary when a large asteroid strike caused the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs and other species? Or the Permian-Triassic boundary which marks the end of the Paleozoic Era and the beginning of the Mesozoic Era? This event, known as the "Great Dying," is the largest mass extinction in Earth's history.
(See! I can read Wikipedia summaries too!)
Who can say what kind of species memories these prehistoric catastrophes stamped into our DNA?
On the other hand, who can say what effect the free-wheeling, if-it-feels-good-do-it manic abundance of the Cambrian Explosion has had on the most ancient parts of our brains?
What we know for sure is that, sometime after the Cambrian Explosion and the Great Dying, came people. Possibly from a garden and made out of dust. Or from a rib. The records are unclear, Anyway, here comes people. People who did stuff. Then, according to one theory, came the big black brick, but according to another theory a guy killed his brother over some nonsense and tried to cover it up, but according to yet another theory a guy lost his best friend fighting the Bull of Heaven. Then there was a flood of some kind that really disordered things, but thanks to a weirdo who Yahweh hired as a shipwright subcontractor, hurry-up-quick things got right back to normal and urban culture made a big comeback, along with written language, astronomy and editorial boards.
And yes, it is very impressive how I juxtaposed "weirdo", "who" and "Yahweh".
Anyway, then came poetry, trebuchets, metallurgy, gunpowder and coffee. Forced perspective. Indoor plumbing. Followed by the invention of poker, capitalism, box fans, jazz and Marxism.
Libertine men and scarlet women! Ragtime!
Then came hippies with their protests and moral relativism and the pill.
Then Republicans thought, hey, being awesome is boring and very much no fun, let's try some of that moral relativism stuff.
The next thing you know, Republicans in Viking hats were stomping cops and pooping on the floor in Congress.
And don't fucking lie to yourselves, Democrats! If you ever spent 30 years letting grifters, lunatics and demagogues take a shit in your skull every night, then raised up a corrupt, bigoted game show host and convicted sex offender as your demigod, and you owned a Viking hat, you know damn well you would have done an insurrection to put your Dear Leader back on the throne, and pooped on the floor of the People's House too!
The End.
