Most of you know the joke, and probably know it has a dozen
variations. Some versions are about two young kids -- one an extreme pessimist, the
other an extreme optimist -- others are just about the optimist.
For the sake of brevity, we'll go with the single, very optimistic kid
version.
Kid wakes up early Christmas day and is surprised to find a heap of horse
manure under the tree instead of a collection of presents. But being very
optimistic, the kid is not discouraged. Later that morning his parents
find him excitedly digging through the manure with his bare hands.
He explains to them that, “With all this manure, there must be a pony
somewhere!”
This was apparently Reagan's favorite joke. Or parable. Or
whatever. The point being, hey, the power of optimism, amirite!
Except...is that the point? I mean, if you think about it for even a
second, aren't these worst parents in the world? How many other cruel
tricks have they played on their child? Isn't this really a story about
awful people duping children and/or the mentally ill?
And speaking of people duping dimwits, perhaps you saw this exchange on the
PBS Newshour regarding the Ronna McDaniel/NBC/MSNBC clusterfuck last week.
William Brangham [host]: Yes, but, David, this gets to a point that
journalists — a very difficult issue for a lot of journalists, which is, how
do you represent this slice of the country, the MAGA slice of America, that
believe fervently in the things that they believe, but yet it's very
difficult to have a conversation with people if you can't even agree on
simple facts, like who was legitimately elected?
David Brooks: Yes. This is a problem decades in the making. So
when I started as a police reporter in Chicago, there were tons of
working-class guys there, and I guess, in my case, they tended to be guys,
but they had no college degree. It became over the course of the decades
that if you wanted to work in journalism, you had to have a college degree.
And suddenly we're just slicing off the majority of the country, basically.
And so those people felt their voice wasn't heard. And then so there's this
populist revolt, and then now you have got a lot of people who are
supportive of Donald Trump, but who violate our standards. They don't want
to live up to the standards of just basic modesty or just honesty. We're
just going to respect the truth.
For the record, to my knowledge, over the course of his entire career, Mr. Brooks has never lived up to basic standards of honesty or respect
for the truth for three days running. But do please continue, Mr.
Brooks.
David Brooks: I do think there are a lot of people out
there who would fit both bills, who are good journalists and support Donald
Trump... I think they're out there. We just have to work harder, I
think. I still think we have to work harder to find those people and give
them — so their voices are heard.
For the record, this assertion is absurd on its face. If you just want
to find people who support Trump and have media experience, they're not
exactly hiding. Just come on out here to Trump country. Their
voices are heard loud and clear. We've got 'em vomiting their
derangement on AM and FM radio all day long. They're on Fox.
They're on OANN and NewsMax. They're running the local Republican
party.
The problem, of course, is that to succeed in any of these venues you have to be
either a credulous idiot who actually believes all the lies and the
conspiracies...or a cynical fraud who makes a living exploiting those
credulous idiots. You must have
either take French leave of reality and are never coming back, or you can ape
the derangement of the MAGA goofs well enough to get a job in their media.
But "Good journalists" and "support Donald Trump"? There is no
point at which those two things overlap. Those concepts are matter and
antimatter. And yet there is Brooks, squinting and frowning and
wishfully conjuring such imaginary creatures out of thin air to please the
sensibilities of the Tote Bag Centrists who still take PBS
seriously.
So, let's take a look at the strange pocket dimensions where Brooks believed such exotic
creatures exist.
David Brooks: There's a fine magazine called "Compact"
magazine that's more populist. There's a place called the Claremont
Institute in California that's more populist.
I know nothing about "Compact" magazine other than Glenn Greenwald has found
safe harbor there. But the Claremont Institute?
The
fucking Claremont Institute?
That's Brooks' idea of a Trump-supporting outfit that
lives up to Brooks' ideals of
"basic modesty... honesty...respect the truth."
In the interest of fairness and basic modesty, I'm going to sit my Liberal ass
down and let a 30-year veteran of Conservative media who is no friend of this
blog, tell you all about the fucking Claremont Institute.
Ready?
My latest:
Once one of the most prestigious bastions of conservative thought, Claremont now spends its time putting lipstick on the Trumpian wildebeest. https://t.co/s6rwbiPDsv
"Jack Posobiec ― a Trump supporter who pushed the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory . . ." They forgot to add Claremont fellow. https://t.co/WddObqrkSv
Conserative David Brooks remains pot-committed to the lie that there are are still honest, sensible people within MAGA Right institutions because that lie reassures the Both Siderist invertebrates who are his core audience.
Conservative Never Trumpers loathe MAGA Right institutions for driving them out and selling out to Trump.
And oh how I would love to see these two groups collide on a debate stage somewhere that sells popcorn by the barrel.
By the way, today is my 19th blogiversary, so if you are inclined to support Liberal media...
Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the driftglass blog I ask that you please
pay attention as we review the emergency procedures. Today we will be
deconstructing a typically awful David Brooks column. There are three
emergency exits on this blog. Please take a minute to locate the exit closest to you.
Note that the easiest way to exit the blog may be to quickly move to a calming
YouTube video of green noise or cats playing with mouse toys.
Should you experience dizziness, nausea or a sudden realization that the
Times has paid David Brooks a small fortune to write the same fucking dreck
over and over again for 20 years, stay calm and listen for instructions from
the cabin crew. Oxygen masks will drop down from above your seat. Place the
mask over your mouth and nose. Pull the strap to tighten it. If you are
reading this with children nearby, shame on you.
Now let's get on with our regularly scheduled hippie-punching, as Mr. David
Brooks of The New York Times once again returns to his happy place. (emphasis added)
The enemies of liberal democracy seem to be full of passionate intensity
— Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, campus radicals.
Almost all of the balance of this thing appears to be a tedious recitation of the chapter titles of --
Fareed Zakaria’s important new book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and
Backlash From 1600 to the Present.”
-- which reads as dull and cliched as a 6th grader's book report on
The Call of the Wild based on notes hurriedly cribbed from Wikipedia
the night before.
No kidding.
For example:
His story starts in the Dutch Republic in the 16th century. The Dutch
invented the modern profit-seeking corporation.
And:
Dutch success wasn’t just economic. There was a cultural flowering
(Rembrandt, Vermeer).
And:
There was also moral restraint. Dutch Calvinism was on high alert for the
corruption that prosperity might bring....
And:
The next liberal leap forward occurred in Britain. In the Glorious
Revolution of the late 1680s, a Dutchman, William of Orange, became King
of England ...
And:
British inventors and tinkerers like James Watt perfected the steam
engine...
And:
The great reform acts in the 1800s gave more people the right to vote and
reduced political corruption...
And:
America was next, and the pattern replicated itself: new inventions like
the telephone and the electric lightbulb...
Brooks managed to skip over all the violent uprisings and revolutions
that are the other strand of the DNA of western civilization. Instead it
was just tulips to steam engines to light bulbs.
The great liberal societies that Zakaria describes expanded and
celebrated individual choice and individual freedom. But when liberalism
thrived, that personal freedom lay upon a foundation of commitments and
moral obligations...
...and Madame La Guillotineand a "whiff of
grapeshot" and the brutal suppression of
counterrevolutionary forces and the bloody fall of mighty
empires.
But do please continue, because I sense we are nearing the actual point of
this tedious exercise.
Over the past few generations, the celebration of individual freedom has
overspilled its banks and begun to erode the underlying set of civic
obligations...
And here we go.
So tell us, Mr. Brooks, when exactly did the great liberal democratic
experiment that is America lose it moral footing and fall into the pit of
hedonism and debauchery? (emphasis added)
Especially after World War II and then into the 1960s, we saw the
privatization of morality — the rise of what came to be known as the ethos
of moral freedom.
Ladies and Gentlemen, as you can see we have arrived at our destination and the captain has
turned off the “Fasten Seat Belt” sign. Please move quickly to the
nearest available exit and begin deblogging. Please use caution when
deblogging as the world is still full of idiots who believe Mr. Brooks is
the ne plus ultra of political and cultural wisdom.
May God have mercy on their souls, and don't forget to tip your flight
attendant on the way out.
Today I am going to save you the customer a slice of your valuable time, and
I'm going to accomplish that by doing something cheap and lazy. So it's
win-win!
To date, this is how the very few interactions I've had with Never Trumpers
have gone, because I want to talk about the Before Times. About how
things got the be the way they are. And they manifestly do
not.
In their telling, the history of the Republican Party is as follows:
Buckley drove out the heretics.
Then St. Reagan the Law Giver set down the Articles of Faith. Tax
cuts, good! Guns, good! Deregulation, good! Abortion,
bad! Socialism, bad! Democrats are misguided fools or worse!
Then...buncha stuff really not worth talking about. Yadda
yadda yadda.
Then, suddenly and inexplicably...Trump!
Got that?
OK, I will now repurpose and slightly modify that to save you the customer the
time and trouble of reading an entire, terrible David Brooks column entitled
"The G.O.P. Returns to Its Bad Old Self".
Watch closely and remember, I'm a professional. You should not try to do
this at home.
Ready?
Buckley drove out the heretics.
Dwight Eisenhower was awesome.
Then, later, St. Reagan the Law Giver set down the Articles of Faith.
Tax cuts, good! Guns, good! Deregulation, good! Abortion,
bad! Socialism, bad! Democrats are misguided fools or worse!
Then...buncha stuff really not worth talking about. Yadda yadda
yadda.
Never doubt that Mr. David Brooks has thoughts. Thoughts of his
own. Mighty thoughts that explain all human behavior it is totality and
complexity.
But his thoughts are wrong and dumb, so you will (almost) never catch David
Brooks sharing his thoughts directly. Instead, every week, you will find
Mr. David Brooks down at the Farmer's Marketplace of Ideas looking for just
the right crop of other people's thoughts to put together into column that
proxies for Mr. Brooks' own thoughts but leave no fingerprints.
However, if you actually track Mr. David Brooks' trips through the Farmer's
Marketplace of Ideas over time, like Jimmy McNulty putting his kids to
work on a front and follow surveillance of Stringer Bell --
-- you start to notice that he blows right past most of the succulent,
inviting Ideas on display, and instead focuses on one or two stalls full of
old, stale, rotting produce.
Cherry-picked factoids that are barely adjacent to his theme.
An analysis of more than 65,000 people across 36 countries by the Dutch
scholar Jochem van Noord found that people who do not belong to the new
elite are united not only by...
Polls that don't really say what he wants them to say.
Broad generalizations.
And when Mr. Brooks feels the need to protect his left flank with a "liberal"
perspective -- because fairness! -- he goes fishing around at the bottom of
the bin and always somehow comes up with this guy, who hasn't been relevant in
decades and long since decamped to the American Enterprise Institute because
Conservative knocking shops always need a token "liberal" figleaf.
All right, I finally got through this interview with Ruy Teixeira and it
is one of the most garbage things I've ever heard. Ezra gives him chance
after chance to clarify his views and he just can't. He's awful.
As the analyst Ruy Teixeira pointed out in his The Liberal Patriot
Substack...
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Here is the opening coda of Mr. Brooks' very own Fanfare for the Common
Man:
After Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, most sensible Democrats realized
they had a problem.
Was that problem...
...the baseline misogyny of way too many voters?
...the effect of +20 years of relentless Conservative propaganda turning
Hillary Clinton into a murdering lesbian hellbeast who wanted to eat their
children?
...the effect of +30 years years of relentless Conservative propaganda turning
the GOP base into a zombie army of bigots and imbeciles?
...the effect of +30 years years of the mainstream media aggressively refusing
to believe that the Republican party was full of Republicans?
...David Brooks' employer's wildly out-of-bounds obsession with the
nothing-burger of Hillary Clinton's emails?
...an FBI Director who decided to break all precedent and the DOJ's own
internal policy and drop a big, stinky turd into the Clinton campaign just 11
days before the election?
...the entire mainstream media's
wall-to-wall obsession with Both Sidesing every Trump atrocity? Of beating Hillary Clinton every day like a career-advancement pinata
on the theory that, no matter how despicably they behaved, since Hillary
Clinton could not possibly lose, it was all good?
A rich and toxic hellbrew of all of the above?
Nope. Not according to Mr. Brooks, who has fully shed his scared-shitless 2016 self. The version of Brooks which we find running from door to door begging anyone who will listen to save him from the
monsters he helped create. The following is from me from all the way back in March of 2016. Just before the Before Time became the Before
Time. Which, FYI, was read by around 2,700 people at the time. Miniscule by Atlantic or Washington Post standards, but pretty big for me:
And now, that Trump has done all the things David Brooks swore he could
never do at the head of an army of fire-eyed Republican meatheads that David
Brooks swore could not exist, Mr. Brooks has written a column so
redolent with the stink of begging and fear and schadenfreude that it almost
defies analysis. Suffice it to say, Mr. Brooks really, really, really
wants someone to come along and save him from the beast he has been feeding for 20 years.
Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and
citizenship. He pollutes the atmosphere in which our children are
raised. He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility
that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is
just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.
A beast he promised over and over again to that small clutch of wealthy men
who underwrite his idiocy and protect him from harm was thoroughly
saddle-broke and ready to be ridden like Ann Romney's prized Lipizzaner
right back into the White House.
A beast that has now kicked the barn door off its hinges and is currently
stomping their carefully laid plans for oligarchy to bits.
So today David Brooks wrote a very special column.
It was not a column explaining that the Republican party -- his Republican party, his Conservative movement -- really is just a festering cesspit of paranoia and
bigotry and fury, because he has already written himself into an inescapable
corner by writing so many columns over so many years swearing that this was
not so.
And it certainly was not a column saying the simplest, and most obvious
truth of all -- that the Left was right about the Right all along -- because
on that day the small clutch of wealthy men who have subsidized his Whig Fan
Fiction Factory for years would cast him down from his high place and
leave him unprotected to the predations of the job market. Were that
to happen, Mr. Brooks would not last a week.
Instead, Mr, Brooks has written a letter of supplication to that small
clutch of wealthy men, begging them to let him keep his job as the Greatest
Conservative Public Intellectual in Murrica. Promising to do better next time.
Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they
would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we
were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen
carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I
do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.
Ah, but David, when was your job ever to "report accurately
on this country"? You're not a journalist. You tell lies for a
living. Your lies are not as hot and violent as Trump's, but you and
he are basically in the same racket. You make a princely living
trafficking in fairy tales about "real America" that comfort and flatter the
thousands of Beltway insiders and cosseted plutocrat rubes you hustle every
week, and Trump is paving a path to the White House by telling millions of
low-information rubes the flattering, reassuring lies
that they want to hear.
Same scam, different chumps, except Trump's chumps are ecstatic, rage-drunk
and armed with mighty weapons which you helped to forge, while your chumps
are freaking out and terrified because the Plutocrat Potemkin vision of
America you sold them is being overrun by hordes of rage-drunk,
invincibly-armored Visigoths you told them did not exist.
But of course Brooks kept his job at The New York Times.
And his job at PBS.
And the one at NPR.
Even picked up a new gig at The Atlantic.
And now that the Before Times are well and truly the Before Times, about which none dare speak, , Brooks can safely forget
that scary moment when the true, raging, racist face of his Republican party
came so close to him that his preposterous worldview was very nearly snatched right out of the window of the Acela Corridor Quiet Car.
Instead, Brooks can now get back to pretending that the GOP base are merely
the misunderstood and righteously aggrieved working class.
The [Democratic] party was hemorrhaging support from the white working
class. More than 60 percent of Americans over 25 do not have a four-year
college degree; it’s very hard to win national elections without them.
So in 2020 the Democrats did something sensible. For the first time in 36
years, they nominated a presidential candidate who did not have a degree
from Harvard or Yale.
Because people with degrees from Harvard or Yale lose? And the mere
existence of one of those degrees on the wall -- or, really, any degree on the wall -- is disqualifying to the white
working class, while being a rapist and a traitor is not?
But...but... George H. W. Bush had a degree from Yale and he won.
And George W. Bush has a degree from Yale and he won.
And Bill Clinton has a degree from Yale and he won.
And Barack Obama has a degree from Harvard and he won.
Also J.D. Fucking Vance has a degree from Yale. They made a movie
about it! And yet the morons lined up three deep to vote for him.
And Ted Fucking Cruz has degrees from Princeton and Harvard and Texas
meatheads have elected him twice.
Is it the beards? Do the meatheads look at Vance and Cruz and say,
well, sure, fancy-pants college degrees are skeery, but lookit them dang beards? Or
is it that the meatheads believe that scumbags like Vance and Cruz make
Libtards cry and they're willing to overlook the fancy-pants degrees so long
as some Libtard somewhere is crying?
So, right out of the gate, Brooks has boldly flung (flang? flinged?)
himself in entirely the wrong direction, which, to be fair, he has been doing
pretty much his whole career and it never matters, so why not!
So in 2020 the Democrats did something sensible. For the first time in 36
years, they nominated a presidential candidate who did not have a degree
from Harvard or Yale. Joe Biden won the White House and immediately
pursued an ambitious agenda to support the working class.
By the way, did I mention that it's been 20 years since the Republican party
has won the popular vote?
2024 will mark 20 years since Republicans last won the popular vote.
To misquote David Brooks from just a few paragraphs back, it’s very hard to
win national elections without winning the majority of the voters.
Oh, and if you do the math, the last time a Republican presidential candidate
won the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2004, and did I mention that George
W. Bush has a degree from Yale? And yet somehow he won. With no
beard! Unpossible! Unless, according to Brooks' theory, it was
Bush's relentless pursuit of programs for the working class that overcame his
beardless Yaleness!
... on the eve of George W. Bush’s reelection bid, the anti-gay vibes
were still so strong that Karl Rove, his political swami, had a brilliant
brainstorm. Rove wanted gin up 2004 turnout among Christian evangelicals
who, in his calculations, had been insufficiently enthused when W. eked
out his first win in 2000. And what better way to drive evangelicals to
the polls than to put anti-gay marriage referenda on the ballots in 11
states – most notably Ohio, a swing state back then.
As numerous political science scholars have since determined, those
referenda (which warned that scary gay marriage would sink western
civilization) helped attract an outsized number of evangelical voters –
particularly in pivotal Ohio, where some analysts even believe that the
heftier base turnout was pivotal in putting Bush over the top in 2004.
That’s precisely what a “wedge” issue was designed to do.
The economic results have been fantastic. During Biden’s term, the U.S.
economy has created 10.8 million production and nonsupervisory jobs,
including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs and 774,000 construction jobs.
Wages are rising faster for people at the lower end of the wage scale than
for people at the higher end.
True. The results have been terrific, especially since the party of
bearded demagogues have, A) been trying everything in their power to sink the
economy so they could hang that around Biden's neck while at the same time,
B) taking credit for programs which they loudly opposed and tried to kill.
Republicans Are Taking Credit for Infrastructure Bill They All Voted Against
Amazing about-face from the members of Congress who tried to stop the bill in the first place
It's almost as if the hirsute Just Plain Joe
Lunchbucket leaders of the Republican party have such contempt for their base
that they figure they can just lie to their faces over and over again and base
voters are just too fucking stupid to know better.
Or maybe, just maybe, most of them really are that stupid?
Or maybe they're some hellbrew of both stupid and reprogrammable.
But of course that diagnosis doesn't fit the cure Brooks is pushing, does
it? Because in Brooks' mind it's always the Democrats that
needs to show grace and be understanding. Always the Democrats who need
to be more accommodating to the wingnuts and less judgemental and
Yale-ish. Whereas the Republicans -- the Party of Personal
Responsibility -- can never expected to be anything more that raging toddlers
who have no agency or responsibility for terrible things they say and do.
And since Brooks has no intention of ever changing his ludicrous diagnosis to
fit the disease, he spends column after column after column trying to bend and
blur and rejigger the disease to fit his diagnosis. And this is where
Brooks' stockpile of anecdotes and cherry-picked factoids that are barely
adjacent to his theme comes in handy.
For example, Brooks doesn't
mention that the study from which fancy-pants, beardless scholar Jochem
van Noord is drawing his conclusions --
Finally, less-educated voters feel morally judged for being socially
backward. An analysis of more than 65,000 people across 36 countries by the
Dutch scholar Jochem van Noord found that people who do not belong to the
new elite are united not only by...
-- is the European Quality of Lifesurvey and has nothing to do with the base voters of the Republican party.
And the two authors he drags into this are both British writers, one of whom
is writing explicitly about Britain.
Matthew Goodwin, a political scientist who writes about the diploma
divide in Britain, titled his recent book “Values, Voice and Virtue.” He
argues the educated and less educated have different values...
Now let me stipulate something. Having worked all kinds of jobs, and having been a workforce development
professional specializing in manufacturing and getting young people
into manufacturing (and persuading parents that we were not dooming
their kids to dangerous, dead-end jobs...and persuading lawmakers that
manufacturing wasn't dead...and convincing the Chicago Public School
bureaucracy that opening a high school with a manufacturing-centered
curriculum wasn't madness...and convincing the Chicago City Colleges
bureaucracy that they really, really needed to change their
20-years-out-of-date curriculum and buy $4M worth of new equipment...and convincing manufacturers who hated the public schools and the city colleges
to give us a shot at changing them...
and convincing manufacturers that they really, really needed
to change their 20-years-out-of-date human resources protocols for hiring) I
would never argue that the dignity of that kind of labor hasn't taken a hit
over the last 40 years.
However the extent to which David Brooks has spent his entire career negating,
deflecting, minimizing, ignoring and just plain lying about how ruthlessly
Conservative media has worked to warp and corrode the Republican mind in
inexcusable. As is Brooks' ongoing and disgraceful denial of his
Republican party's calculated strategy of rolling out the welcome mat for
racists, homophobes, xenophobes, misogynists', gun nuts, dominionist
Conservative christians, grifters, traitors, fascists, white nationalists,
demagogues and a grab bag of assorted other weirdos and freaks.
For example, Brooks is eager to credit Tom Suozzi's victory in Long Island to
--
...playing up issues like controlling the border and fighting crime.
-- but he just can't bring himself to mention the third pillar of
Suozzi's campaign. From
Teen Vogue:
2024 Election: Tom Suozzi’s Win Proves That Abortion Is a Winning
Issue
As Trump reportedly supports a 16-week abortion ban, Democrats would do well
to remember that abortion rights win elections.
Also Suozzi has not one but two fancy-pants degrees, no beard, and:
Before entering politics, Suozzi worked as an accountant at Arthur Andersen
from 1984 to 1986, a law clerk to Thomas Collier Platt Jr. of the U.S.
District Court for the Eastern District of New York from 1989 to 1990, and a
commercial litigator at Shearman & Sterling from 1990 to 1993
Very glad he won, but we're not exactly talking Tom Joad here.
And as much as Brooks wants to fuzz up the Republican party's "white
working class" problems with soft spongey language like "the diploma divide",
"traditionalist" values, "feelings of misrecognition " and so forth, the real
issue is the same as it ever was. From The Intercept:
Time to Kill the Zombie Argument: Another Study Shows Trump Won Because
of Racial Anxieties — Not Economic Distress
Three previous studies found a link between cultural anxiety and Trump
voters.
Now a fourth, from the Voter Study Group, finds the same connections.
DO YOU REMEMBER “economic anxiety”? The catch-all phrase relied on by
politicians and pundits to try and explain the seemingly inexplicable: the
election of Donald J. Trump in November 2016? A term deployed by left and
right alike to try and account for the fact that white, working-class
Americans voted for a Republican billionaire by an astonishing 2-to-1
margin?...
Everyone from Fox News host Jesse Waters to socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders
has pushed this whole “economic anxiety” schtick. But it’s a complete and
utter myth. As I pointed out in April 2017, referencing both pre-election
surveys and exit poll data, the election of Trump had much less to do with
economic anxiety or distress and much more to do with cultural anxiety and
racial resentment. Anyone who bothers to examine the empirical evidence,
or for that matter listens to Trump slamming black athletes as “sons of
bitches” or Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” in front of cheering crowds,
is well-aware of the source of his appeal...
Brooks core assertion is that Republicans have an iron grip on the base of their party because "less-educated voters feel morally judged for being socially backward".
Is this true?
Hell yes, as long as we stipulate that "less-educated" and "socially backward" are just the latest
in a long line of Brooksian euphemisms deployed to avoiding saying "racist" at
at costs.
In this Year of Our Lord 2024, I for one definitely pass severe
moral judge on the millions and millions reprogrammable meatbags in the GOP
who are racist and form the bedrock of that party. I also pass severe
moral judge the party's cadre of homophobes. And Republican transphobes.
And Republican xenophobes. And Republican misogynists.
And Republican gun nuts. And Republican Christopaths
(tm). And Republican fascists. And
Republican traitors. And Republican grifters. And
Republican white nationalists. And
Republican demagogues, And the assorted other
Republican weirdos and freaks who are too intellectually underclocking or
to deluded not to know any better.
So, subtracting out all those mopes, who does that leave inside the Party of
Trump that feel aggrieved that Liberals like me judge them too harshly?
A small cohort of rich assholes, who all still believe their Republican party is something it manifestly is not, and who all cry themselves to sleep at night jerking off to David Brooks columns.
Not so long ago
I wrote a thing about the Very Serious Conservative Thinkers' obsession with
"-isms", and that David Brooks has been the worst of them.
For decades, this has been Brooks' way of separating himself and his Imaginary
Republican party and his Fairy Tale Conservative movement from the grim and
grubby and racist realities of the actual Republican party and the
actual Conservative movement. In fact, this has been Mr. Brooks' Great Project, and
if you are a longtime reader of this lil' blog out here in the exurbs of
respectability you may have come across this description of Brooks' Great
Project by some 100% unemployable Liberal degenerate several thousand posts ago:
In his mighty war against the encroachments of reality, deflecting Republican
perfidy with a series of strategic -isms has been one of the Very
Serious Conservative Pundits' signature moves. When the outward sign if
the inner rot of the Republican party was George W. Bush, the failure was not
attributed Republicanism or Conservatism, but to Bushism.
When it was Tom DeLay, the problem was Delayism not Republicanism,
not Conservatism.
Gingrich? Gingrichism.
Palin? Palinism.
See how this works? It's nothing more than the "No True Scotsman"
fallacy dressed up in a Reagan mask.
The Media is attempting to separate the Republican Party from Donald Trump.
Who voted for him again?
And now we come to the core of David Brooks' professional and ideological problem, which, it turns out, is actually pretty simple. His party is dead. It's been dead a
good long while, as is the movement to which he devoted his entire life.
And the Republicans with whom he shared political confidences have betrayed themselves
as liars or cowards or traitors of some rancid slumgullion of all three.
But Brooks' whole job is being an expert on politics. Specifically,
Republican politics. And not just just the surface stuff which any
amaetur Liberal midwestern blogger can plainly see: the
New York Times and the Atlantic and PBS and NPR and Yale and on
and on and on ain't pay top dollar for those scraps. Brooks is supposed to
be the man with the skinny. With a jug of the Pure Quill. The man with exclusive access to the deep recesses of the Conservative soul: those mystic Republican secrets that lie hidden from us peons behind
the polite chatter at exclusive Beltway cocktail parties.
But if the party is dead, and there are no secrets, what then is the plan for
our man Brooks?
Turns out the plan is a dull, endless cycle of Denial, Grief/Bargaining, Both
Siderism, then back to Denial again and so forth. On and on and
on. World without end.
Think of it this way. Brooks is standing on a stage in a large
auditorium. The auditorium is full. On the stage next to Brooks is
a corpse on a table. A long-dead corpse that is stinking up the place.
And Brooks' job is to interpret on the corpse's activities to the audience as
if the corpse were a lively, active, cunning person.
So first Brooks pokes the corpse with a long stick. The he breaks into
the political equivalent of the Dead Parrot sketch.
See! It moved! It moved! It's not dead. It was
just shagged out from a prolonged bout of Palinism, but it's fine now.
In fact, I predict it's going to leap up from that table and launch an awesome
Conservative renaissance any minute now.
And the audience waits...and waits...and then the corpse's leg falls
off. Rotten. Full of worms.
Then Mr. Brooks comes over all shocked and confused. The
Grief/Bargaining begins.
This happened most notably after Donald Trump nearly swept the field on
Republican Super Tuesday in 2016 after David Brooks, political expert, had
assured everyone that such a thing was impossible.
Brooks spent his next
New York Times column practically begging his bosses not to fire
him for being a clueless hump. He also went on the now long-defunct Charlie Rose Show and
repeated most of his mea culpa there. Of course, since that show is long gone, your
average blog might only have a dim and distant memory of this. But being
a recovering pedant on the subject, I watched the whole damn thing and
transcribe the relevant portions, so here you are.
Brooks: I messed up big time in not knowing Trump was
coming. And so when something like that happens you take a look
at yourself and you think "What did I miss about America?"
And...I'm...too much in the Acela corridor. I've gotta get out.
That's one thing. … Believe me, I travel every week, but I'm at
a college here...so I'm always within the bubble. And so I've gotta
get out. But then the other thing is, like, I've achieved way more
career success than I ever thought I would, so it's time to take some
chances on the spiritual realm, on the personal -- the emotional realm...
But because he absolutely cannot help himself, just 20 minutes
later Brooks was already making the transition from Grief and Bargaining, to
Both Siderism, explaining that, really, Barack Obama is the one who set the
tone for all this acrimony because Obama refused to compromise with David
Brooks’ Republican Party:
Brooks: I think what Barack Obama taught us, it's not enough to be a
skilled politician. He came in wanting to transcend every line you could
imagine and create a governing majority.
But his policies that he came in with were orthodox Democratic policies.
So you have to have a set of policies that cuts across lines. That's
a little from column A and a little from column B.
At this point, Rose and Brooks both damn well knew they’re lying, but to the
Beltway media maintaining the “Blame Both Sides” lie is always and forever more important
than the facts.
So back in 2016, Brooks found out the Republican party was -- OMG!! -- full of
Republicans…traveled around the country like Albert Brooks in
Lost in America, touching Indians and gaining wisdom…and came back transformed and, finally,
able to see the Republicans party clearly.
Right?
Nah!
This is from Brooks is trolling me again, just last week when he once again
re-re-rediscovered the Republican party!
I thought I was beyond shockable, but this week has been profoundly
shocking for me. I spent the bulk of my adult life on the right-wing side
of things, generally rooting for the Republican Party, because I thought
that party best served America. People like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump
chased me out of the Republican orbit (gradually and then all at once),
but I have still held out the hope that my many friends on the right are
kind of like an occupied country. They have to mouth the Trumpian
prejudices to survive in this era, but somewhere deep inside, the party of
Reagan still lives in their souls.
And then came the inevitable smug, condescension:
My progressive readers are now thinking: Have you not been paying
attention? Donald Trump has owned this party for years. If he told them to
kill the immigration compromise because he needed a campaign issue, they
were going to kill that proposal.
To which I respond:
I don’t think you quite understand what just happened...
So, having once again shockingly re-re-re-rediscovered the fundamental toxicity of the Republican
party (even as more of its decomposing limbs plopped loudly to the floor in front of
God an everybody), and having dismissed those of us who have
actually been right about the Right all along as insufficiently
savvy to "understand what just happened", where do you suppose Mr.
Brooks goes next?
If you guessed that he dove right back into his Both Siderist Happy Place, because I entitled this post "In Which David
Brooks Takes His Readers On Yet Another Blathering Meander Through The
Crumbling Sepulcher of Both Siderism", well aren't you the clever one!
Because, yep, that is exactly where Mr. Brooks has gone.
Except now Brooks goes one step further.
Having tried and failed miserably to deploy the "-ism" of Trumpism to
quarantine the Very Bad Awful Donald Trump (and the actual Republican base... and
virtually every Republican elected official) from Brooks' Awesome
Imaginary Republican Party, Brooks is now, believe it or not, trying to morph
Trumpism into something that would be acceptable at those exclusive Beltway
cocktail parties by quarantining Trumpism ... from Trump.
I think I detest Donald Trump as much as the next guy, but Trumpian
populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial
overreach; the need to preserve social cohesion amid mass migration; the
need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of
globalization.
See, Trump the man is bad, but Trumpism versus Liberalism? Well that's a
horse of a different color!
The struggle against Trump the man is a good-versus-bad struggle between
democracy and narcissistic authoritarianism, but the struggle between
liberalism and Trumpian populism is a wrestling match over how to balance
legitimate concerns.
As always, Brooks ducks the question of how these "legitimate concerns" of
"Trumpian populism" are actually manifesting themselves in, say, the actual
Republican party by hand-waving away the manifest corruption and incompetence
and racism and derangement of the Republican party by blaming "Congress":
America is economically thriving but politically dysfunctional. We have
the material, technological and military resources to remain the world’s
leading superpower, but the current Congress is unable to make decisions
about basic issues, like how to fix the immigration system or what role we
should play in the world.
What do we have to do to rectify this situation? Well, a lot of things,
but one of them is this: More of us have to embrace an idea, a way of
thinking that is fundamental to being a citizen in a democracy.
That idea is known as value pluralism...
Then Brooks explains how terrible "monists" are using the examples of Maxists
and Nazis:
Berlin had a word for people who think there is one right solution to our
problems and that therefore we must do whatever is necessary in order to
impose it: monists. Berlin was born in pre-revolutionary Russia and came
of age in the 1930s, when two monist philosophies were on the march,
Marxism and fascism. They claimed to be all-explaining ideologies that
promised an ultimate end to political problems.
And...you can see where this is going, right? (with a little emphasis added.)
Today, monism takes the form of those on the left or right who see all
political conflicts as good and evil fights between the oppressors and the
oppressed. The left describes these conflicts as the colonizer versus the
colonized. The Trumpian right describes these conflicts as the coastal
elites, globalists or cultural Marxists. But both sides hold up the
illusion that we can solve our problems if we just crush the bad
people.
So if the Left and the Right are both equally bad as Marxists and Nazis were
equally bad, who are the good guys? Where are the heroes who will save
us from the Extremes on Both Sides?
Yes, once again, it's David Fucking Brooks and the Sensible Center
to the rescue!
We pluralists resist that kind of Manichaean moralism. We begin with the
premise that most political factions in a democratic society are trying to
pursue some good end. The right question is not who is good or evil. The
right question is what balance do we need to strike in these
circumstances?
So, having bullshitted his way through the collapse of the Bush regime, and an eight-year Republican racist primal scream during the Obama administration,
and the four-year near-death of our democracy under Trump, and three years of
Joe Biden trying to hold this country together with his bare hands...Brooks is
still exactly the same duplicitous, Pecksniffian, sanctimonious asshole he was
18 years ago.
Because Brooks' column today is literally nothing more than a slight reworking
of the tantrum he threw
back in 2006
when his very good friend and fellow Iraq War pimp, Joe Lieberman, lost fair
and square to Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Democratic senatorial
primary.
Brooks has swapped "monists" for
"DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party" and
"pluralists" for "The McCain-Lieberman Party", but other than
that...
The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite
style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to
their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who
believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through
aggression and stridency.
The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies
are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their
behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their
integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have
achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the
moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.
But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic
Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may
have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to
partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them
extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.
The McCain-Lieberman Party counters with constant reminders that country
comes before party, that in politics a little passion energizes but
unmarshaled passion corrupts, and that more people want to vote for
civility than for venom...
And thus it shall always be at The New York Times.
My progressive readers are now thinking: Have you not been paying attention? Donald Trump has owned this party for years. If he told them to kill the immigration compromise because he needed a campaign issue, they were going to kill that proposal.
To which I respond: I don’t think you quite understand what just happened...
Yeah.
Because we're the morons.
We're the priggish, pretentious pollyannas.
We're the willfully myopic stooges who have spent a lifetime making ourselves wealthy and influential spinning toxic fairy tales about the imaginary nobility and seriousness and moral superiority of the Right.
To quote the late, lamented Kurt Vonnegut, "Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?"
And when you get to the top of the front range of the
mountains Republican horseshit, you realize that, like the Rockies, the mountains of Republican horseshit go on and on, range after range.
And leaning from the balcony of his ivory tower that sits atop one of the
mighty mountains of Republican horseshit, David Brooks looks upon the hundreds
of miles of jagged peaks of poop that stretch all the way to the horizon, and
is consumed with one thought:
"Out there, somewhere, must be the most awesome Republican pony that ever
lived!"
This is from the PBS NewsHour yesterday. I have highlighted the places
where Brooks lets his fantasy Republican party and his fantasy Tim Scott
completely off the leash.
David Brooks: The Republican Party obviously went in a
very different direction. And now Tim Scott is adjusting to the winds. And
so he's probably pro-Trump. He's probably a little anti-Nikki Haley. South
Carolina politics is the roughest state politics in the country, in my
opinion. And so betrayal is nothing new. And so Scott and Haley have
had a — not a great relationship, even though she appointed him. And
so it's — betrayal is the art form.
And if Tim Scott becomes vice president, the vice presidential candidate,
frankly, I'd be happy.
And...
Brooks: Tim Scott is a pretty good — he's a good senator. He's a good guy.
He's a good human being. He would have a — if he was elected, he would
have a moderating effect on the Trump administration.
And...
Brooks: And maybe someday there'd be a future President Tim Scott, which would be a lot better than what the Republicans are offering.
Even before he put the MAGA hanky on his head and did his little buck-and-wing
dance endorsing Trump, Scott was very obviously not a good
senator, a good guy or a good human being. And now that he has sold off
his soul at Huge!Markdown!Prices to Donald Trump, there is nothing redeeming
left at all. Just a husk of black skin Trump can put out there like a
marionette in the hopes of coaxing a few more credulous dopes into thinking
that he can make their lives better.
And everyone knows it. Certainly Brooks knows it. And after $75 of airport scotch, I'd lay odd that Brook could be provoked into saying so.
But not on PBS. On PBS Brooks is paid to perform a very specific function, which he now carries out with all the enthusiasm of a goof from HR reading a clear-out-your-desk-we-wish-you-well-in-your-future-endeavors script for the 10th time, late on a Friday afternoon.
It has been a strange and singular thing to see the ideological terrarium in which David
Brooks operates getting smaller and and more suffocating with every passing
month since the high cotton days of the Dubya administration. To see all
his political fantasies slowly dying of oxygen starvation until, at last, he
is reduced to this state of nearly comatose political apathy. Just
...saying...words. Anything. Anything. Exhaling stale packing
peanuts of time-worn syllables -- which everyone involved knows are nonsense
-- just to fill the air.
An empty, exhausted ritual, performed in
the name of a deity which everyone involved knows does not exist, but they
plod on because no one knows any other way.
And as long as Mr. Brooks has his New York Times credential, none of his other employers are going to reading him the clear-out-your-desk-we-wish-you-well-in-your-future-endeavors speech any time soon.
Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has, by my estimation, spilled one
million banal words since the implosion of the Bush Administration he so
energetically and uncritically supported. And yet, despite that wide and
tepid tide of tortured tautologies. Mr. David Brook has not only kept himself
almost completely mum on the subject of the Age of Dubya, but has gone so far
as to --
-- shamelessly lie in public about his own deep complicity during his wild Bush years.
The errors and scandals of the early 21st century (Iraq, the financial
crisis, etc.) produced a crisis of legitimacy for this brand of liberal
democratic capitalism.
That's it. That's all. Mistakes were made. Let's move on.
Also, despite the fact that the column is entitled
"What Biden Needs to Tell Us", Brooks spends 2/3rd's of his
contractually obligated word allotment blatting on about William Petty, David
Hume, Adam Smith and capitalism.
Ok. Fine. We get it. Brooks needs to polish the knobs of the
monied interests that underwrite his eternal employment at
The New York Time.
And then, because it is a David Brooks column, there comes...
Well, you know what comes next, right?
Because it's always what comes next. It is the razor-in-the-apple for which David Brooks has been famous for decades.
It starts with this:
MAGA is the zero-sum concept in political form. What’s good for
immigrants is bad for the American-born. What’s good for Black people is
bad for whites. Trade deals are exploitation. Our NATO allies are out to
screw us. Every day for Trump is an Us/Them dominance game.
But it doesn't end there does it? Because it can't end
there. Because Mr. David Brooks is professionally, psychologically and
emotionally incapable of ending it there. If the Right is
in the thrall of some destructive mind virus then, as sure as night follows day...
(emphasis added)
Zero-sum thinking is surging on the left as well. A generation of
college students has been raised on the dogma...
And there you go. Paragraphs of meandering, high school book-report
grade pedantry about The Glorious History of Capitalism, followed by the
rankest, laziest Both Siderist claptrap imaginable.
So, you may ask, what can Brooks possibly add to a column entitled "What Biden Needs to Tell Us"
to elevate it from a merely a typically godawful David Brooks column to a perfectly godawful David Brooks column?
What would the cherry-on-top
be?
One cherry-on-top, coming up!
Personally, I’d ask Team Biden to take a look at Ronald Reagan’s 1980
campaign.
Coooool.
OK, so Biden should begin his campaign near the site of an infamous civil
rights triple lynching and in his remarks lean really hard on supremacy of state's rights?
Or perhaps Biden should barnstorm the country talking about "welfare queens"
and their mink coats and Cadillacs? And those "young bucks" eating the T-bone
steaks they bought with your hard-earned tax dollars, Mr. & Mrs. White
America?
Or maybe Biden should put his arm around various infamous, grifting
segregationist Bible-thumpers to show how tight he is with Jebus?
Over here on the Left, much has been made (and rightly so) that, despite having gone the bloodthirsty madness of the Bush years, the eight-year-long Republican racist primal scream of the Obama years, and the absolute collapse of any pretense of sanity or basic civility on the Right during the Trump years, political journalists have learned absolutely nothing.
This is not true.
Hacks like Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times have, in fact, learned a very valuable lesson. And that lesson is that, no matter how staggeringly wrong they have been about pretty much everything, decade after decade, they will never be held professionally accountable for any of it.
The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase.
And so now we have two [Republican] blocks that are really irreconcilable, almost, with each other, with as much chaos and madness and hatred in public as it's possible to imagine. And then the underlying cause is that you have a rising group of Republicans who have no loyalty to the institutions and its norms.
Because of his insider Beltway pundit status, David Brooks is currently enjoying the kind of book promotional tour that 99.9% of all other authors wouldn't dare to dream of.
This is the title of his book:
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
While the huge ad campaign for Kristen Welker's disastrous interview with
Trump was depriving every other "God damn, the mainstream media sucks!"
story of oxygen, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times slipped this over
the transom and ran away.
I shall not ask you to suffer a line-by-line Fisking of his dreck, but instead
hold in your mind that, after decades of bringing nothing but shame on the
profession, Brooks still fancies himself some kind of "journalist".
Someone who, in theory, exists to climb inside the mighty machines of
politics, industry and government, and come out with important information for
the rest of us peons about what's really going on among all those powerful men and women behind all those closed doors.
So first, bear that in mind as you read this quote from Brooks' "Mitt Romney
Has Given Us a Gift", column. it's is not an interview with Romney, but a book report
on what someone else has written about Romney.
"Romney puts on the record what so many of us have been hearing for years
off the record — that the Republican Party has become a party of fakers,
that its congressional leaders laugh at Donald Trump contemptuously behind
his back while swooning over him before the cameras."
This is Brooks confessing that he and his comrades in the mainstream media
damn well knew that the saltiest, sweariest Liberal critiques of the GOP were
true...but he and his cronies elected not to share that vital information with
the rest of us -- to keep it all "off the record" -- for ...
reasons.
And, second, bear in mind that Brooks is about to begin a huge promotional tour
for the launch of his upcoming book, "How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply
Seen." Bear in mind that sole justification for Brooks' job-for-life at
The New York Times has been his alleged ability to take his
readers deep inside to corridors of power and tell them what was really going
-- in other words, his capacity to see the Republican party and
its elected official "deeply" and report back to
New York Times subscribers what he saw.
And yet during his decades-long runs at both the Times and the
Weekly Standard (and now The Atlantic) Brooks has gotten
every single fucking thing wrong.
Hold in your mind Brooks' nearly superhuman skill at getting every single fucking thing wrong
alongside his upcoming media blitz to sell his book on The Art of Seeing Others Deeply as you read his diagnosis of one of the most vile, most cold-bloodedly reptilian human
beings extant: Mitch McConnell (emphasis added):
Mitch McConnell is the tragic figure in Romney’s tale.
He comes across as — and I believe actually is — a decent man who is
trying to mitigate the worst of Trump’s effect on his party.
But we see the daily corrosions that McConnell must endure to keep up this
front — turning a blind eye to Trump’s crimes, turning a blind eye to the
threats that were coming in the lead-up to Jan 6.
At one point, McConnell resorts to the rationalization we’ve heard a
thousand times — that if Trump loses and the Democrats win, they will pass
a hard-left agenda that will ruin America forever. McConnell has to
exaggerate how radical Joe Biden is, and what the electorate will support,
in order to justify supporting his own party’s lamentable leader.
McConnell’s core problem is that you can’t negotiate with
narcissism.
No, McConnell’s core problem is that he doesn't have a conscience and he
doesn't have a soul: preexisting conditions which predate the rise of Trump by
several decades.
Next, Brooks has this to say about scuttlefish Paul Ryan. He...
...makes a sad appearance in this story. Romney tells Coppins that Ryan
called him during the first impeachment trial, seemingly lobbying Romney
to acquit. Preserve your viability with Republicans, Ryan advises;
preserve your ability to do good.
It’s advice that once seemed plausible and that guided many upright
people to enter the Trump administration as voices of sanity.
The rest of it is a victory lap taken of old glories long gone to rust and ashes --
...the Republican Party that once featured people like Abraham Lincoln,
Theodore Roosevelt and more recently George Romney, Mitt’s father, and
George H.W. Bush..
-- and a lamentation that Brooks' Grand Old Party fell, not because men like
Brooks spend the last 30 years pretending to "see deeply" into the Republican
party and, instead of sounding honest alarms about the monsters his party
was incubating inside the chrysalis of the memories of Lincoln and TR, men
like Brooks chose to lie to his readers. To sound the "all clear" and
reassure them that everything was going great, and was only going to get
better.
And now that those monsters are loose and breeding even more toxic offspring
of their own, all Brooks has to left to offer is the pretence that all of this
came to pass because of the hoodoo wielded against "decent" men like McConnell by a single, loud, orange, racist
madman.