It would be a trivial matter to chalk up David Brooks' latest crime against
journalism as yet another bottom-of-the-barrel scraping from one of the most
"legacy" of the legacy media's professional opinion-havers who lost what
little hold he had on the plot 40 years ago and has been drifting further and
further from the gravitational field of actual reality ever since.
And perhaps this was the project all along. Brooks as Sulzberger
family sociological experiment like those conducted on the International Space
Station on Antarctic moss or freeze-dried mouse sperm or E. coli. to see
what effect microgravity, extreme temperatures, the hard radiation of the
vacuum of space might have on normally Earthbound biological life.
In this case, the experiment began almost by accident, with the House of
Sulzberger buying Patriotism Insurance during the high cotton days of
the Dubya administration by hiring not one but two of the Iraq War's biggest
cheerleaders from the Weekly Standard stable of neocon vipers: David Brooks
and Bill Kristol. Then, as the Dubya administration began to collapse, they
decided to hang onto Brooks (and sack Kristol) because, A) sacking both of
their peak-Iraq-War diversity hires at the same time would make them look even
more craven than they already looked, and, B) as the legacy media mantra
abruptly shifted from "Liberals are America-hating, terrorist-loving dupes" to
"Both Sides Do It" Brooks was able to show the Sulzberger family his real
value by his willingness to transform himself almost overnight from the
acid-penned scourge of the Murrica-hating Left to America's most zealous
evangelist of Both Siderism.
But then, having set this experiment in motion, the House of Sulzberger just
sorta filed Brooks away and moved on to other things, leaving the David Brooks
Project to overrun the Petri dish where it had originally been cultivated.
This environment of permissive neglect led Brooks to (pardon the metaphor
shift) achieve an opinion-having escape velocity from the Real World's
gravity-well of facts, history and consequences where the rest of us
live. Now Brooks exists almost entirely in a state of ontological
free fall, responsive only to the microgravitational influence of the
political, cultural and financial elites who are desperate to believe in the
fairy tale world Brooks has invented for them. A world where
hippy-punching is still considered great sport, and the *real* Republican
party -- the Party of Reagan -- is still out there somewhere waiting for this
temporary MAGA aberration to subside.
A world where the Times can't be bothered to proofread Brooks and edit
for glaring typos:
However, even as he floats safely high above the treacherous shoals of history
and razor-sharp mountains of facts, the rise of Trump as irrefutable proof
that Brooks has been wrong about the Right all along, has made Brooks' Both
Siderist scam exponentially tougher than it was back when
I wrote this during the Before Time:
Longtime readers know of my crazy theory that Mr. David Brooks of the New
York Times does not write editorial columns twice a week per se, but is instead engaged in a massive, long-range project to assemble an
entire, fictional alternate history of Modern Conservationism, which is
being created right before our eyes by the slow, steady accretion of one
godawful Whig Fan Fiction column at a time.
To David Brooks' ongoing, long-range project of radically revising modern history by removing all the Republican treasony bits, you may now
add this little gem of falsification which was partially buried under his woozy praise for Hillary
Clinton's "muscular" ideas about foreign policy...
These stories are not about the world as it actually exists, but the
world as Mr. Brooks wishes it to be. And since he is not a very
good fiction writer, there are many, many points where the gears of the
real world and his fake Whig World grind and howl, forcing Mr. Brooks to
apply gallons of fictive lubricant to keep the keening noise of the real
world ripping Whig World off its hinges from drowning out the tepid
drone of his writing.
When Mr. Brooks needs an imaginary moral high ground of
Centrism on which to stand, he conjures an imaginary army of Dirty
Fucking Hippies on the Left that exactly counterpoises the very real mob
of Pig People on the Right.
When he wants to redress what he believes to be the immorality of the
deficit, he wishes away the entire, debt-drunk Bush Era and instead
pounds away at naughty people having sexy sex time in ways Mr. Brooks does not approve of and invents Whig FanFic "grand bargain" and "austerity"
sub-genres wherein he expounds on his rustic theories about money and
cutting social programs. After which he regularly has his ass
absolutely sawed off and served up on the fine china by people
like Dean Baker and Paul Krugman and myriad others who actually know what they're
talking about.
...
What makes it remarkable and revealing it is not its scholarly depth or
historical breadth or scathing, confessional honesty, but rather that it
is a work of almost pure fiction being passed off as fact in America's
Newspaper of Record...
Protected as he is by the permissive neglect of his employers and the
desperation of the elites for whom he performs, the lies Brooks has to spin to
protect his readers from the crushing reality snarling right outside their
front door have become increasingly ludicrous and fragile in the Age of
Trump. The gossamer-thin fantasies and still require constant
maintenance. Which explains Friday's column which began with this
declaration:
Members of the two parties have different sorts of pride in their
country.
Followed by this truly jaw-dropping bit about the Republican party during the
Obama administration, which, well, the word "lie" hardly covers it. It
is the complete negation of the reality which every one of us saw with our own
eyes, and heard with our own ears.
Republican pride is unconditional. Democrats like Barack Obama and Joe
Biden can get elected to the presidency, and it has almost no effect on the
pride Republicans feel for America.
From the day of his inauguration until the day he left office, the Republican
party and Conservative media spent all of their energies openly rooting for
Obama to fail and pulling every lever they could lay their hands on to disrupt
and sabotage everything Obama the Centrist tried to do. For example,
from
The Guardian, February 2, 2009:
When Barack Obama became president there were celebrations around the
world. Car horns were honked in Mexico City, thousands gathered to watch
the inauguration on big screens in Liverpool and Leeds, feasts were held
in Kenya. Yet the festive spirit failed to permeate one small corner of
Manhattan, home to the right-leaning cable channel Fox News. While the
city's streets were filled with the sound of fireworks and champagne corks
popping, the mood in its studios was almost sombre. This is the
conversation that took place on air between the two Titans of conservative
broadcasting, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity:
Hannity: "So do you want [Obama] to succeed?"
Limbaugh: "I'm so glad you asked me this question . . . No! I want him to
fail."
A few days earlier, speaking on his own talk radio show, broadcast from
his home in Palm Beach, Florida, Limbaugh had put his feelings even more
pithily. Responding to a newspaper that asked him to express in 400 words
his hope for the Obama presidency, he replied: "I don't need 400 words, I
need four: I hope he fails"...
On the Right, the Obama years were an eight-year racist primal scream followed
by nominating and electing the King of the Birthers because Barack the
Communist Kenyan Usurper has stolen their country.
But their country is not our country.
Their country -- the one in which they have such pride --
surrendered to our country at Appomattox Courthouse
on April 9, 1865. They have never gotten over it, and since
the 1960s, they have been busy, busy, busy turning the Party of Lincoln in the
Party of Jefferson Davis and in doing so, paving the way for the rise of a
monster like Trump.
Our Mr. Brooks Picks His Own Private History
Up there on the left, that's Harry Dent, Sr. He was a conservative
political strategist of the 1960's and 1970's. He worked for, among other
people, the famous wandering and miscegenating penis, Strom Thurmond, and
for Richard M. Nixon, who, back then, was not yet history's yard waste.
While working for the latter, Dent devised what has become known as the
"Southern strategy," by which he attached the Republican Party to the
rising white counter-assault on the gains of the civil-rights movement,
and to modern American conservatism, which already had done so, largely
through the efforts of William F. Buckley and the National Review crowd.
Dent begat Lee Atwater, who begat Karl Rove. In today's column in The New
York Times, in which he traces the current paradox of modern American
conservatism, David Brooks mysteriously overlooks all the hard work Harry
Dent and his acolytes did in making sure that conservatism could count on
the backing of the supporters of American apartheid.)...
Our country is the one that believes that resurrecting an
overtly fascist version of the Confederacy decked out in 21st Century glad
rags is a terrible idea. Which leads us to Brooks' second, sweeping
declaration:
Democratic pride is more conditional. It dropped a bit during George W.
Bush’s first term, then began to gradually decline during the Great
Awokening around 2014 and really collapsed during each of President Trump’s
two terms.
Textbook Brooksian fatuous argle-bargle coupled with some gratuitous hippy
punching, and the Alert Reader will notice how Brooks skips over George W.
Bush's catastrophic second term which bore out every critique
the Left had about the Right all along, and exposed men like Brooks as the
willfully blind, partisan hacks that they are.
Then comes Brooks' reminder to his elite clientele about how much more
patriotic he and they and Republicans are than us dirty hippies:
I don’t side much with the party of MAGA these days, but my patriotism is
more like the Republican kind — unconditional. ...
At this point I'm guesstimating that Brooks has killed about half the bottle
of top shelf scotch I assume he was nursing to give him the Dutch courage
needed to grind his way through this codswallop.
Then, killing the rest of the bottle, Brooks decided to go all-in, and lash
Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump and Elon Musk with the binding of love of
country
When you love America for its raw energy, you are loving it for a force
that also produces crassness, materialism and, from time to time,
immaturity. That is to say, the same cultural winds that propel the noble
aspirations of an Abraham Lincoln, also propel the gaudy display of a Donald
Trump and the occasionally recklessness of an Elon Musk.
Reducing the monstrous shadow Trump has thrown across American democracy to
the word "gaudy", and reducing Musk's berserker, chain-saw gutting of the
American government to "occasionally recklessness" is wild, but
praising Lincoln's "noble aspirations" while
criticizing Democratic pride as "conditional" absolutely
takes the prize, and is symptomatic of a fetish shared by a number of
Conservative opinion-havers: praising Lincoln as a Great Uniter with noble
aspirations while carefully avoiding any mention of the actual Lincoln.
From me, five years ago:
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 reconstruct 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 dedicate
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...
Among America's elite pundits you see this detaching of reality from the
fairy tale they are selling everywhere. This absurd proposition that
"America" is somehow unrelated to the attitudes and actions of the actual
Americans who make up the country. That "MAGA" and "Republicans" are two
different things. In this case we find Lincoln's "noble aspirations"
completely divorced from the bloody and brutal war which was the price of
realizing some of those noble aspirations: the wholesale destruction of
American cities and putting hundreds of thousands of Americans into their
graves.
And the dilemma which faced Lincoln is a pretty fair glass-half-empty analog
of where Democratic pride in our country stands right now: the sobering
realization that, to save the country we love, will require the recognition
that millions of our fellow Americans have become enemies of democracy.
That their version of "love of country" is founded on rage, racism and
paranoia, which has all been relentlessly fueled by Conservative media.
And that to save our democracy from our carefully cultivated, home-grown
demons, severe measures may have to be taken to pry their poisonous claws away
from Lady Liberty's throat.
Having come this far, it will not surprise you that Brooks winds his brief
excursion through a modern American political history which never existed, by
lighting votives and reciting a praiseful paean at the tomb of St. Reagan,
pretending that MAGA is some kind of exotic parasitic disorder which has only
recently infected his Republican party and will one day soon be shrugged off,
and, of course, as little more gratuitous hippy-punching.
Some Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California seem to think they can
win the White House by behaving more like Trump, by thinking more like
Trump, by adopting that dark American carnage vibe. This strikes me as
political lunacy.
This from the same guy who, in 2014, crowed that the Republican party had
definitely cleaned up its act and was definitely on its way to a bright future
and who, in 2016, confidently predicted that the Republican nominee for
president was gonna be Rubio!
You, dear reader, could be forgiven for wondering -- loudly -- how the fuck
this clown with a nearly perfect track record of being consistently wrong
about the one subject the Sulzberger family pays him a king's ransom to know
something about...how this buffoon keeps his job at the Times.
And that would be an excellent question, if the Sulzberger family were paying
Brooks for his savvy, insider political expertise. But they're
not. The Sulzberger family pays David Brooks float far above our mundane
world of fact and history and consequence and spin golden, gossamer lies to
ease the fears and reinforce the parochial political follies and fantasies of
the wealthy patrons who desperately want to buy what Brooks is
selling.
I Am The Liberal Media
