We had the makings of just such an "independent media" decades
ago.
It was the Liberal blogosphere.
We saw through the legacy media's toxic addiction to the "Both Sides"
lie. We warned -- very clearly, every day -- exactly where the poisonous
combination of escalating conservative-media lies and racism, coupled with
obstinate legacy-media Both Siderist denialism, was going to lead.
And all of those warnings were routinely slandered and dismissed by the likes
of Longwell, Kristol and all the rest of them until it was far, far too
late. After all, we were just Dirty Fucking Hippies.
Funny thing about the term Dirty Fucking Hippies, which was coined, I believe
by Atrios/Duncan Black sometime during the early aughts. This would have
been during roughly the same period that Sarah Longwell was working for the
Conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and Bloody Bill Kristol was
pimping the shit out of Bush's Iraq Debacle, promising it would all be over in
a matter of weeks, and calling anyone who opposed it a clueless libtard
traitor.
Y'know, the Good Old Days.
The point of “Dirty Fucking Hippies” wasn't the profanity: it was the sarcasm.
It was how Beltway pundits and journalists portrayed the online left precisely
because bloggers could say things establishment media figures refused to say.
In fact, it could get you fired. From Sarah Boxer, in
The New York Review,
February 2008:
Bloggers give new, Web-inflected meanings to old words. A “troll” on the
Web is someone who posts provocative things just to cause an outcry.
“Astroturfing” is creating a fake grassroots movement. Bloggers also
sprinkle their blogs with expressions like WTF (translation: “What the
fuck?”), lol (laugh out loud), and meh (a verbal shrug). They willfully
misspell—like “teh” for “the.” They call the Internet “the internets,”
cutely following George W. Bush’s slip. If people wrote like this for
publication, they’d be fired.
And, indeed, there is a term for getting canned because of your blog:
“dooced,” named for the blogger Dooce, now a stay-at-home-mother (SAHM)
or, as she puts it, a “Shit Ass Ho Motherfucker,” who got fired for
blogging about her employer.
Bloggers challenged mainstream-media gatekeeping and the way the media had
become an insulated, self-satisfied cult of performative "objectivity".
It's Jay Rosen's "view from nowhere". And starting during the Bush years, Liberal bloggers treated
profanity as evidence that they were not performing objectivity for elite
approval.
Which sure sounds a fuck of a lot like the makings of an "independent media"
to me.
And of course, during all that time, Longwell, Kristol and all the rest of
them never objected to the corrosive Both Siderism of the legacy media,
because that corrosive Both Siderism always tilted the playing field heavily
in favor of the Right. It still does. And so only now, when the same
Both Siderism is no longer reliably serving their side, do Longwell, Kristol
and all the rest of them seem to have discovered that there's something
wrong.
But it's the word "inadvertently" that makes it art.
As you might know, The Bulwark runs live-read ads for
The New York Times, and were running live-read ads for
The Washington Post right up until pundits like Jennifer Rubin began
fleeing the place. Their rapid growth has depended almost entirely on
MSNBC (now MS NOW) promoting their business and their employees practically
every single day since it was founded in 2019, plus regular appearances on NPR
and that bastion of Both Siderism, the Sunday Shows. And, of
course, by maintaining at least a cordial relationship with the legacy
media. A small sample:
"Washington Post economics columnist moves to The Bulwark"
Which is no surprise given that the Trump origin myth that Never Trumpers have
been peddling since day one: that Trump came outta nowhere and somehow
hypnotized 77 million voters and virtually every elected Republican into
becoming fascists. Isn't that weird?
That story is ever so much more congenial to the Both Siderist bubble the
lords and ladies of the legacy media live in than the actual history of the
modern GOP that Liberals are always yapping about.
So why go out of your way to piss off institutions who you wish to speak
kindly of your business and your brand new book?
Today we're going to take a break from the daily barrage of life-and-death
lies pushed by fascists and talk about the importance of scale.
Not vibes. Not anecdotes. Scale.
Because one of the things the last decade has taught us—over and over and
over again—is that if you don’t understand scale, you don’t understand
propaganda. And if you don’t understand propaganda, you’re already losing.
The subject of scale -- or, rather, the conspicuous avoidance of the subject
of scale -- glided quietly past during one of the Pod Save lads’ daily
recitations of the “Why Democrats Suck” rosary—Kamala was a bad candidate,
Joe Biden is history’s greatest villain, etc.
Anyway, then there was this (with emphasis added)
Jon Favreau: Yeah. I mean to the ... to the broader question of that Lakshya [Jain]
raises in that in that Argument piece about like why Democrats aren't
gaining on the generic ballot by as much as Trump's approval is falling.
I do think there's a probably a number of reasons.
Jon Lovett: Oh, definitely.
Before we move on, a quick side quest into a subject these people never
discuss in depth... and which I have been writing about on this blog since
these gentlemen were fresh outta college, Kerry campaign
volunteers.
Both Siderism.
Let's start with how most people have traditionally understood politics for
a long time. The idea that politics behaves like a thermostat.
From
Good Authority:
Good to Know: The public is a thermostat
Why there is a never-ending cycle of governments doing something and the
public wanting the opposite.
...one of the most enduring puzzles of democracy [is that] governments,
no matter what they do, often seem unable to satisfy voters. When
governments take action, the public often seems to want the opposite.
Push policies left, and opinions shift right. Increase spending, and
people want cuts.
This phenomenon – where public preferences shift in the opposite
direction of government action – is known as thermostatic politics.
The thermostatic model, first formalized by political scientist
Christopher Wlezien in 1995, describes the public’s reaction to
government policies as akin to a thermostat adjusting a room’s
temperature. Just as a thermostat signals when to cool down or warm up
based on current conditions, public opinion signals to policymakers when
to increase or decrease policy activity.
A little like Newtonian physics, right? Push and pull. Action, and
equal and opposite reaction.
But that Newtonian model is broken. Broken by 40+ years of Both Sides
Do It bullshit from America's Very Serious pundits and professional
opinion-havers. Despite the fact that America's two major parties are
almost exactly diametrically opposed on almost every issue, thanks to the
daily barrage of media Both Siderism, for millions of voters, that Newtonian
model of action and reaction has been replaced by a kind of
Einstein/Schrödinger quantum politics, with the parties becoming "entangled"
in the public mind regardless of how distant and different they are from
each other.
By now you all know how this entanglement shows up in the everyday language
of way too many American voters. For example, a few months ago we
talked "Steve" who was one of the subjects of a Vox article titled, "Meet the newly uninsured -- Millions of Americans will soon go
without insurance. We spoke with some of them."
"Steve" is a retiree. who had insurance through his wife's job. But
then the company shut down her division, so she decided to retire, and off
they went to the exchange to shop for new coverage. His story is
tragic and, with minor variations, is being experienced by millions of
American families including ours.
But when you hit that last sentence, remember that "Steve" is saying this in
the Fall of 2025, living in the rubble of a full decade of felonies,
conspiracy mongering, corruption, lying, bigotry, treason, insurrection,
fascism and assorted other catastrophes that a Trump-led Republican party
has left in its wake.
Up until last year, his family of three was covered by his wife’s
insurance, provided by the large corporation for which she worked. It
was $500 a month with a low deductible. But then, the company shut down
her division, she decided to retire, and the couple and their son
enrolled in the same plan on the state’s ACA marketplaces.
They couldn’t get such a great deal, but they found something usable:
about $1,000 per month — pricey, but they were able to keep all of their
doctors, who were in network. Their deductible was about $4,600.
But next year, their current plan would cost $2,700 every month to
keep, and their deductible would be higher — up to $5,300. They could
consider dropping their college-aged son off the plan, but he would
struggle to afford health insurance on his own, and it would only save
his parents $300 a month.
Steven says he feels trapped. Given their age, he and his wife don’t
feel they can afford to go without insurance. But they’re now going to
have to pull money out of their retirement accounts to cover the cost of
their health plan.
“We cannot wing it and not have health insurance,” Steven said. “I’m
spending a lot of money that I really do not have on health care.”
He’s done the math. If he kept his same plan, paid all of the premiums,
and paid the maximum out-of-pocket costs, he could spend $50,000 on
health care out of pocket — even with a health insurance plan.
“It kinda seems like the two political parties want to be right and
not care about people,” he told me.
Even when the stakes are life and death -- and even when proof of who is
right and wrong is at everyone’s fingertips -- allocating blame correctly
feels literally unthinkable to tens of millions of citizens who have come to
believe the “Both Sides Do It” lie as gospel.
So, when Republican corruption, lies and policies fuck them over, in order
to make the quantum entanglement between the two parties balance out,
somehow, in some mysterious way, these people hold as irrefutably true that
Democrats must be equally to blame.
Every time you hear another "undecided" or "independent" or "centrist" or
"unhappy Trump voter" bitching about "Congress" or "politicians in
Washington" or "both sides of the aisle" in the the face of a
Republican party which has devolved into a mob of violent bigots and
imbeciles, fueled by lurid, home-grown fascist propaganda masquerading as
news, and ruled by monsters and demagogues...you are seeing the effect of
40+ years of Both Sides Do It media curb-stomping thermostatic politics and
replacing it with quantum entanglement politics.
And even at the cost of our democracy, the legacy media would rather go
right on pumping that narcotic lie into our politics than risk the wrath of
the MAGA mob and the loss of revenue that would surely accompany telling the
masses the simple, ugly truth.
But this was just supposed to be a side-quest, wasn't it?
Damn.
Well, let's pick it up in Part 2, which I'll get to later today or tomorrow
when we get back to the subject of "scale" in what I am sure will end up
being a TL;DR post.
There's only one thing wrong with the title of this post. It's the word "return", because Magic Ruralism never left.
In case you are unfamiliar with the term:
Magic Ruralism: Noun: a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and
naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of political
fantasy.
As I have mentioned once or twice before, after Trump slithered
down the escalator and into the hearts of Americas bigots and imbeciles, Magic
Ruralism became the Beltway media's
favorite new genre of fiction:
...just as Thrilling Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly were in the business of cranking out hard-boiled crime genre fiction
for the titillation of their readers, so have The New York Times and the
Washington Post gone into the business of cranking out True Tales Of
Rust-Belt Trump Murricans! for the titillation of their readers.
And at this point, we as a country have already run enough versions of the
"Just reach out humbly and respectfully to Republican base voters with
policies that will materially benefit them and they'll see reason and
stop voting for lunatics, grifters and fascists"
experiment to understand that it never fucking works and never will.
This strategy was the sum and substance of the entire Obama administration,
which had to immediately set to work cleaning up after the various
catastrophes Bush and the Republicans had left behind. The Right reacted
with an eight-year-long racist primal scream followed by the nomination and
election of the King of the Birthers.
The coastal media remained positively obsessed with that goddamn Ohio diner,
because rich city folks live a million social and economic miles from the
actual Middle America and their lives were substantially untouched
in any material way by the Republican madness abroad in the land, they were
free to savor hair-raising tales (from TheWashington Post July 30, 2018) --
White, and in the minority
She speaks English. Her co-workers don’t. Inside a rural chicken plant,
whites struggle to fit in.
-- of rural Murrican pity and terror (the New York Times also from July 30, 2018) --
How to Talk to a Racist
White liberals, you’re doing it all wrong.
-- from a safe distance.
After the disaster of Trump 1.0, the Biden administration's policy of reaching out to people
whose lives have gotten worse under Republican administrations and yet still
fucking hate Democrats and always vote for the party that screws them was
directionally the same as the Obama administration: focus on manufacturing in
red states, infrastructure, raising the standard of living for the working
class, and lifting poor children out of poverty.
Once again the Right reacted by ignoring reality, obsessing over the lies and
slanders being cranked out all day, every day by Conservative media,
nominating the King of the Birthers for the third time, and electing him
again.
As has been proven time and time again, the whole notion
that ignorant ofay "Ohio diner" voters are driven by
"economic anxiety" is bullshit. They are driven by fear, paranoia, rage
and racism and no matter how genteel your language or calm you approach, it
doesn't work and it's never gonna work.
The author's case for wasting time and energy pursuing the same
outreach to the unreachable strategy that has already failed more often than
Trump Mortgage, Trump University, Trump Steaks, and Trump Vodka combined is
based entirely on her conversation with one woman and her brother-in-law, six years ago.
Roxanne lived in a double-wide trailer with her husband, plus her
parents-in-law and brother-in-law. It was during the Covid-19 pandemic, so
we sat distanced on her porch to talk.
Because of the garbage she'd read online, Roxanne was very confused about
Joe Biden.
Some of them said Biden was the worst thing that could happen to America,
while others said they were relieved at the outcome of the election because
Trump was evil and had to go. She was open to talking with me because she
was trying to sort through all of it for herself, to figure out what she
believed. “Regardless, I don’t plan on voting in the runoff election,” she
told me. “I don’t think it makes much of a difference.”
At least one of the presumably many reasons Roxanne was worried about Joe
Biden was based on some absolute bullshit which she had picked up from
somewhere and had apparently never bothered to find out the truth of it.
Roxanne had voted for Trump in the general because she had been told Biden
would take away their disability. Now that Biden had won, fear of losing
their benefits kept her up at night. “I don’t know how we’d live without
it,” she said.
And here comes her brother-in-law Jeremy who is also full of stupid opinions.
While we were talking, her brother-in-law, Jeremy, came outside. He had
splurged and gotten his nails done, and they looked fantastic, which I was
sure to compliment him on. They were long purple stiletto-shaped acrylic
nails. Roxanne told him I was there to talk about the runoff elections, and
he quickly told me of his distrust of the Democratic candidates, especially
Jon Ossoff. “For someone that young to be that successful, they had to do
something crooked.”
Then Astral Projection David Brooks entered the chat...
“Hold on now,” Roxanne told him. “She’s here to talk about voting for
them. Let’s be polite.”
“Well, I don’t hate them,” he said, “but I don’t like any of them —
neither side. I won’t vote for any of them anyway.”
Because Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...
You can practically hear a generation of legacy media Both Siderism and
Republican excuse-making pinging around Jeremy's head like a BB in a rain
barrel.
As they talked, I listened for what was underneath their distrust of the
political process. They were afraid of losing their health care, their
disability benefits and their home. They were worried about losing their
family members who were sick. Roxanne grieved the loss of her health. They
worried about their neighbors who didn’t have heat in the winter. These
problems had only gotten worse over the years, never better, no matter who
was in office. “It hasn’t mattered if there was an R or a D after their
name,” Roxanne said.
Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...
And rather than perhaps, y'know, gently pointing
out the many Democratic policies that already have materially improved
Roxanne's life and would have improved it even more had it not been for
Republican obstruction, sabotage, slander, and gutting, the author opts instead
to...
I affirmed their experiences, validated their feelings and pointed out the
very real injustices in their lives, the very real failure of either
political party to help...
Again, Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...
In the words of BlueSky user Always Jae...
Ohhh...that's what kept them voting for all this? They weren't
"welcomed" enough? Seriously? The interference that the media
continuously runs for white people in the sticks is almost pathological at
this point.
To which I would only add that, when it comes to the way legacy media runs
cover for these people, we no longer need to modify the word "pathological"
with the word "almost".
The 7,000 words of meandering TL;DR Both Siderism that
The Atlantic paid David Brooks to write is actually just three David
Brooks New York Times, "The Extremes on Both Sides" columns in a trench
coat.
Once again Brooks has divided the human universe into "traditionalists" and
"progressives", who are both a little bit right and both equally wrong.
Example:
...to contend successfully with the traditionalists’ effects on our
politics and culture, we also need to recognize that elements of their
worldview are correct. But which parts are correct, and which are completely
off the rails?
And, as always, Brooks offers up a Third Way out of the artificial and reductive
binary human universe he has invented: a sorta forward-leaning
revival of tradition within modernity.
It's really nothing more than that, bloated up to 7,000 words.
Some scientists have theorized that the reason David Brooks has been unwilling
to write anything other than variations on "Both Sides Do It" for the last
quarter of a century is that he was traumatized by this terrible season three
episode of Star Trek TOS at a tender age --
-- and that, in order to temporarily exorcise that trauma, he enacts and externalizes it every time he sits down to write.
Others, who are less charitable, think that Mr. Brooks figured out early on that the American political, academic and corporate elite will never tire of having their favorite cliche Beltway fairy tale endlessly repackaged and repeated back to them. And that dedicating his professional life to doing that one thing was the key to winning the devotion of those elites, and a a license to print money.
While everyone else (including me) was watching the Artemis II crew's bull's-eye splashdown,
safely and successfully ending their historic mission, over in the pocket
universe of PBS three relics of a bygone media age sat around a table asking,
"What the fuck happened to our profession?"
Geoff Bennett:
And, Jonathan, 61 percent of Americans, including 30 percent of
Republicans, now say that President Trump has become erratic with age.
That's according to a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll.
The press corps -- I guess we should hold up a mirror to ourselves. The
press corps spent two years making President Biden's mental fitness, his
acuity the story. Why isn't that same scrutiny now being applied to
President Trump broadly?
Jonathan Capehart:
Yes. Yes, exactly.
That has been my question since -- excuse me -- since January 20 of last
year. We, the press, spent a lot of time talking about President Biden and
his age because he looked old. He moved slowly. He wasn't as vigorous and
agile, supposedly, as the guy he pushed out of office and then the guy who
was running against him.
And even little slips of the tongue were used to show, see, aha, he's not
all there. He's losing his mind.
How does that compare to what we're going through right now? I wish people
who have written books -- people who have gone on air talking about
President Biden nonstop, where are they now? Where are those books now
that we have a president who has given ample evidence, ample evidence that
something is not right?
Where are the people who are standing up and saying, you know what,
something needs to be done? And that goes back to some -- you were talking
about the founders. They were prepared for something like this. What they
weren't prepared for was the Article I branch just ceding all authority.
What they weren't prepared for were people from the president's own party
willing to either turn a blind eye or enable him to run roughshod over the
Constitution. Even when you have got him out there threatening
annihilation of a civilization, even when he's started a war for no reason
and the enemy is in a stronger position now than it was before he started
this war of his own choosing?
At some point, Republicans writ large and those on Capitol Hill have to
start standing up for the Article I prerogatives, but also start standing
up for the country. I don't know how much longer we as a nation can
withstand this. And I know the world is beyond done with us, but I think
they're also frightened of us.
David Brooks:
I wouldn't say that we in the mainstream media have been exactly pro-Trump
Cheering section. I mean, our business model is bashing Trump. We know we
can get clicks and ratings if we bash Trump enough. So we do it over and
over and over and again, without having anything interesting to say half
the time.
And, by the way, if we did do everything we could, it wouldn't -- it
wouldn't make a difference. The people who need to be persuaded are not
persuaded by us. We have been doing this since 2015. And so I'm not
totally persuaded it would make a huge difference if we challenged his age
and mental acuity, because we have been doing it morally for 10 years.
So, to summarize, in this creaky, ancient ritual, as the moderator, Bennet, is constrained to never state an opinion about anything. If a meteor smacked into the
studio during taping, his contractually obligated response would be,
"Some people say that a meteor has just crashed through our ceiling.
What, if any, are the political implications?"
The other participants, one supposedly "Right" and the other putatively "Left"
then engage in a civil exchange in which David Brooks says something absurd or
ridiculous or false on its face, and the other party is required by the rules
of this kabuki to never raise their voice or call into question Mr. Brooks'
honesty or integrity.
Thus the illusion of a free press operating
in an open marketplace of ideas is maintained for the eleven people who still
watch this routinized diorama.
However, on any given Friday there are theoretically an unlimited number of
questions that could be posed by the moderator. And usually those
questions are designed to be very...beige. Tepid. Bland, poorly seasoned
potato salad at the barbecue, served up so as not to raise the blood pressure of the
eleven senior citizens for whom this is Friday evening must-see teevee.
But this time the question was about the media itself. Specifically -- and
swaddled in carefully neutral tones -- about how the media has
catastrophically failed us all.
To be clear, according to the arcane rules under which this ritual operates, Mr. Capehart could not come right out and say, "Fuck you Jake Tapper." But he
might as well have. Also taking pains to specify that the Republican partyis the problem is always appreciated.
Of course, finishing with
"At some point, Republicans writ large and those on Capitol Hill have to
start standing up for..."
yadda yadda is just sheer wish-casting nonsense. The GOP Capehart dreams
of is long dead and its zombie corpse is trying to drag the rest of us into
the grave with it.
But the real prize here is the bitter, post-facto nihilism of David
Brooks.
But while Hur's views about Biden's memory were worth mentioning, the
media instead treated Hur's amateur medical judgments as a political
crisis for Biden and an existential threat to his reelection campaign. But
the actual threat to Biden's political prospects is the deluge of negative
media coverage based on Hur's conjecture. A Popular Information analysis
found that just three major papers — the New York Times, the Washington
Post, and the Wall Street Journal — collectively published 81 articles
about Hur's assessment of Biden's memory in the four days following the
release of Hur's report. Incidents that raised questions about former
President Trump's mental state received far less coverage by the same
outlets.
Overall, The New York Times published 30 stories about Biden's alleged
memory issues between February 7 and February 10. Over those four days,
the story was covered by 24 reporters (some of whom filed multiple
stories), four opinion columnists, and the New York Times Editorial Board.
The media's circular logic and destructive obsession with Biden's
age
Yes, it's fast becoming the 2024 version of the media's obsession with
Hillary's emails
The New York Times was, of course, just asking questions.
Why, oh why, do Joe Biden’s age, memory failures and gaffes seem to
hurt him so much more than Donald Trump’s age, memory failures and
gaffes hurt him?
These questions were being pondered in the most influential real estate
in all of media: a front-page news article, above the fold, on Sunday.
(Even in this digital age, that print front page, especially on Sunday,
packs a punch.)
The sub-headline summarized the issue: “Biden Is Hurt by Flubs More
Than Trump Is.”
And the article stated: “While Mr. Biden, 81, has been dogged by doubts
and concerns about his advancing years from voters, Mr. Trump, who is
77, has not felt the same blowback.”
“Dogged by,” you say? Who, exactly, is doing the dogging?
Maybe the Times and other major media outlets ought to look in the
mirror.
CNN, meanwhile, was running this chyron: “Is Biden’s Age Now a Bigger
Problem Than Trump’s Indictments?” A panel gave this question every due
consideration, and then some.
And then there was the rundown of Times opinion offerings — one piece
after another, all in a neat row, about Biden’s age and memory.
...The New York Times led the pack of "Biden is old" legacy media
jackals trying to kneecap the 2024 Biden campaign, at a time when Mr. Brooks
was the apex op-ed writer at that publication.
Also Margaret Sullivan's comparison was spot-on: "Biden is old" did become the 2024 version of
the media's obsession with Hillary's emails.
And, as long-time readers may recall, Mr. Brooks was also the apex op-ed
writer at The New York Times as it led the pack of "But her
emails" legacy media jackals trying to kneecap the 2016 Hillary Clinton
campaign. First, when it looked like Bernie Sanders might win the
Democratic nomination, Brooks cranked out 700 words of drivel "Both
Sidesing" Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. And when Hillary Clinton
won the Democratic nomination, Brooks immediately pivoted, cranking out 700
words of drivel "Both Sidesing" Hillary and Trump (see "David Brooks: Both Siderism Is a Farce that Gives Us Meaning").
And this was not a one-off. After the Bush regime collapsed and
all of Brooks' Neocon National Greatness dreams died with it, Brooks spent the rest of his career literally doing nothing but vomiting out one
column of Both Sides garbage after another on the op-ed page of The New York
Times.
And now that the mask has dropped and the beating heart of Brooks' former party has shown itself
to be the fascist monster Liberals warned that it was?
Now that it is unequivocally clear that the media's "Both Sides" fetish is
what helped keep MAGA bigots and imbeciles on-side, and lowered the bar far
enough for America's feckless, clueless "Undecides" and "Independents" to
vote to put the worst person in the world back in the White House?
After all that, where does Mr. Brooks land?
First, he renders his profession down to what clowns like Brooks have made
of it: the crass pursuit of "clicks and ratings".
Second, and most pathetically of all, he reduces his entire, toxic career to
a giant shrug emoji. Claiming as his alibi for his poisonous career choices
that none of it made any difference. That even if clowns like Brooks
had actually tried harder, it wouldn't have matter.
And, by the way, if we did do everything we could, it wouldn't -- it
wouldn't make a difference. The people who need to be persuaded are not
persuaded by us.
This is a lie so immense that it's genuinely hard to quantify.
Sure, the MAGA
zombies are unpersuadable, but that's because they're wired that way.
Their impregnable ignorance? Their impervious bigotry. Son,
those were features, not bugs. These MAGA zombies were drawn into the
party precisely because they found a welcome home there. Their
ignorance was flattered. Their intolerance was praised as
patriotism. They became the GOP's reliably reprogrammable meatbags, in
a process that unfolded over decades right in front of David Brooks --
America's most ubiquitous public "intellectual" -- who went right on
pretending that everything was fine and/or that Both Sides were equally
awful.
But as for the "Both Sides Do It" media cult that Brooks piloted? Take
it from someone who has been documenting its deleterious effects on our
politics for 21 years, that has been wildly successful.
We may never know how many millions of wobbly Republicans who were having
doubts about the GOP were persuaded to stay on Team Evil because they
believed the Both Sides lie. And we may never know how many additional
millions of those feckless, clueless "Undecide" and "Independent" voters --
people who actually watch things like PBS and Meet the Press and read
publications like The New York Times and believe what they see
and read -- cast their ballot for the worst people in the world or pissed
their vote away on doomed third-party candidates because scum like Brooks
spent a professional lifetime telling them that it didn't matter because
speech codes at Cornell University were somehow as bad and dangerous as an armed insurrection waged against the United States government.
But we can say with confidence that the Both Sides lie has been incredibly
persuasive. That it has helped determine the outcome of critical
elections. And that it has done real and permanent damage to this
country.
And for his sins, Mr. David Brooks has been lured away from the
Times by The Atlantic, where he will spend his declining years
cranking out the same drivel as always, but instead of being paid a princely
sum to perform his little dance twice a week,
The Atlantic appears to be happy paying him a princely sum to do his
thing once every few months.
...her former party built a mighty, many-tentacled propaganda machine that fed various hateful
and credulous constituencies a steady diet of lies and fear-mongering that
have welded them into, what some wags might call, a "doomsday machine".
A distributed Hate Media network in which talking points aren't just handed
down from above, but the vast supply of excuses and lies the Trump regime
needs to remain propped up are also manufactured locally, so that at all
times the zombie MAGA legions have a rich and varied supply of both official
and artisanal lies, deflections, bullshit conspiracies and whataboutisms to draw
upon.
And how, on the other hand, Democrats are made up of a wide and extremely
diverse set of constituencies and have no such weapon of mass media deception
in their arsenal. Mind you, since it won't be published until
September, this is just my idle but informed speculation based on chatter
about the book, and selected blurbs, like this from The Bulwark:
"It lays out a strategy for building a pro-democracy coalition large enough
to defeat authoritarian populism."
And this from the publisher, MacMillan Press:
"Longwell argues the path forward is not just polling or ideological
debates, but building a new communications infrastructure and narrative
dominance similar to what the political right developed."
At this point I might be tempted to say something snarky along the lines of
"Well golly, I shall alert the media. Oh, wait. Liberal
bloggers have already been alerting the media to this dynamic for more than
20 years. And the media has repeatedly told us to fuck off"
except, thanks to the years of unstinting support The Bulwark has
gotten from elements of the legacy media and cable news, Ms. Longwell's book
is already rocketing up at least one best-seller list despite the fact
that it hasn't gone to print yet, but you can pre-order it from Amazon, Barnes
& Noble, B Bookshop, Target, Apple Books, Audible and Kobo.
So the press has already been alerted.
Which is no surprise, given that it's being published by Macmillan, one of the
major global book-publishing companies. Within trade publishing, it's
considered one of the “Big Five” English-language publishing
powerhouses. Their reach is huge, publishing thousands of titles each
year across fiction, and Macmillan and its parent company back this up with a
vast global network of distribution, marketing infrastructure, and relationships
with booksellers, libraries, and digital platforms. In practical terms,
being published by Macmillan means a book is backed by one of the world’s
largest publishing organizations, with access to international distribution,
professional editorial and marketing teams, and the ability to reach large
audiences through bookstores, online retailers, libraries, and media
promotion.
So this tome is getting one helluva marketing push.
But just for laughs, I'm going to try and compare and contrast Ms. Longwell's work
with three other politically-themed books, which were published over the course of 16 years. Not for
quality or content, since it would be completely unfair to review a book that does not yet exist and I have not read, but to interrogate the various ways similarly politically-themes books are
published and received depending on who writes them, when they are written,
and whether or not the author(s) are on good terms with the legacy media and powerhouse publishers.
First, we have Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right
Insane. It was written by staunch Liberal Crooks & Liars good eggs John
Amato, David Neiwert, Jane Wong and published in 2010 by PoliPointPress, which
is a small independent press with limited distribution.
In 2010, Crooks & Liars had been up and running for six years and was,
along with a few others, a destination and gathering place for much of the
Liberal blogosphere. Unfortunately the authors didn't have the money or the extensive media contacts necessary to create their own media push. And in 2010 the new hotness wasn't Liberals writing with increasing alarm about the
trajectory of the GOP. The new hotness was .... the Tea Party. Add
to that the fact that Liberal analysis of the Right losing its mind always
includes a pretty severe critique of the complicit legacy media which, well ... suffice it to say that, however expert, fact-based and
credible the authors of Over the Cliff might have been, and
however vibrant and informative Crooks & Liars had proved to be over the six
years it had existed, nobody in the legacy media wanted to hear from the Left about how the Right was losing its mind.
Contrast that with The Bulwark which, within a year of its launch, was
effectively a division of MSNBC.
Next up,
It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System
Collided With the New Politics of Extremism written by well-known, traditionally-Centrist Washington policy analysts Thomas Mann
and Norman Ornstein. It was published in May 2012 by Basic Books, which
is a relatively small but respected New York publishing house that caters to
serious nonfiction on politics, history, science, and public affairs.
The book got the authors an interview on NPR and in
The Economist largely because both authors were well-known Washington
policy analysts who, over the years, had received the blessings of the Very
Serious People.
However, you will also remember that this book was basically an expansion of the
authors' Brookings Institute column in April of 2012,
"Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem" which effectively
got Mann and Ornstein blackballed by the legacy media. Because, to
repeat myself, the legacy media, with its cult-like fetishization of Both
Siderism, did not want to hear this shit. And most of them
still don't.
Finally, lets look at "How the Right Lost Its Mind" by 'Wisconsin's
Rush Limbaugh', Charlie Sykes. Note especially the date it went to print
-- 2017 -- well after the rise of Trump. After the Left had been
proven absolutely right about the right. The publisher was St. Martin’s
Press, one of the largest U.S. trade publishers, a major imprint of Macmillan
(about which you have already heard) known for producing bestselling fiction
and nonfiction for a broad national audience. It also got strong reviews in
legacy media outlets like The Washington Post, which helped boost
sales and visibility.
On December 15, 2016, Sykes also got his very own pre-launch op-ed column in
The New York Times heralding his upcoming book. And for a
couple of years at MSNBC, you could not swing a dead vole without hitting
Charlie Sykes getting glowing face time to opine about his book, Trump, and
how Democrats were doing it all wrong!
And once Sykes had established a foothold at MSNBC, the Never Trumpers began
their colonization of the place in force. After Sykes came Bill Kristol,
then Sarah Longwell, Mona Charen, Tim Miller, Michael Steele and all the rest. And even
though the place was now packed with Bulwark employees, somehow MSNBC also managed
to find room in their lineup of regulars for every employee of the Lincoln
Project.
It was during this period of unstinting praise from the legacy media, that
Longwell, Kristol and Sykes gathered enough wealthy donors (and millions of
dollars worth of free publicity) to launch The Bulwark in January
of 2019.
Consider that the whole
"Thank God someone is finally speaking out about how the Right has
lost it's mind"
ticker-tape parade for this handful of recently-former Republicans all took
place 15 years after Liberal bloggers had
been writing every dayabout the rising threat from the
Right. 15 yearsafter John Amato launched
Crooks & Liars, which received no glowing, daily legacy media
coverage, and no fanfare. There were no wealthy donors queuing up to
back the enterprise. No millions of dollars in free publicity. There
was no parade of Crooks & Liars writers and talkers invited to
opine on cable news every hour of every day. There were no op-ed columns
in major newspapers, and there were no book deals on offer from major
publishing houses.
During all the years the Republican party was on its deranged downward
trajectory towards fascism, Liberal critiques of the Right were
routinely and categorically dismissed as the Cheeto-smeared ravings of
crackpot alarmists living in the mother's basements.
We we're pariahs.
And when the Republican party enthusiastically nominated and elected Donald
Trump in 2016 proving unequivocally that the Left had been
right about the Right all along -- surprise!-- Liberals remained media pariahs
but for a completely different reason. The legacy media absolutely did
not want to be reminded of how arrogantly and stupidly wrong and complicit
they had been in the devolution of the GOP and the rise of Trump, just as they
they had been arrogantly and stupidly wrong and complicit in carrying water for Dubya, Iraq, torture and all that.
And you know how those dirty hippies are! Given half a chance, they'd would show up with bags and
bags of receipts from the Before Time showing how right they had been all
along.
Can't have that. No, no, no. Can not.
So much better, then, to turn the microphones and cameras over to a handful of
recently-former Republicans with whom the legacy media was already palsy-walsy
and who would never be so rude and ungrateful as to lay a big, fat slice of
the blame for rise of Trump at the feet of the legacy media.
Now I must go and put a cold cloth on my Herbert Lom eye twitch, which tends
to flare up when I write like this.
As longtime readers are aware, the chorus of hundreds of Liberal voices which,
for decades, provided ample evidence and brutally accurate warnings that the
Eisenhower cheese was sliding off the Republican party's cracker and into the
fascist abyss was, by, turns, scornfully, mockingly, angrily and then airily
dismissed for years by Mr. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic.
Ol' Tom held those critiques to be ludicrous on their face. Or, at best,
wild over-reactions by alarmist, Liberal cranks.
Then some time passed and, ok, something has clearly come undone inside the
party of Reagan, but it is asinine to suggest that the rise of Trump has its
roots deep in the Republican party. Gotta be something mechanical and
fixable like a spun bearing or a cracked dilithium crystal, not
structural. And whatever is going on, calling it "fascist" is waaaay out
of line. At best, Trump was a black swan event. A fluke.
[brief driftglass aside: No Tom. It wasn't something mechanical
and fixable. It wasn't a spun ideological bearing. It was your
party's Pretty Hate Machine with a fatal leaking coolant...
...which I was writing about in detail20 fucking years ago.: end brief driftglass aside. We now return to the cartography of ol'
Tom's long, winding, through-gritted-teeth journey to where the Left has been
all along.]
Or, ok, so, Trump's not going away. The fever is not breaking. But
-- and I want to make this 100% clear -- as a child of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!), there is
no way I personally could have known what was happening with the Republican
party in faraway lands like Georgia and Mississippi. Despite the fact
that knowing what's happening with the Republican party is my job.
And anyway, ol' Tom's got nothing to feel guilty about because the Left's
hands are plenty dirty here! (From a since deleted Tom Nichols Tweet
barking at brother Charlie Pierce who had the temerity to point out that Tom
was full of shit.)
You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of
matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.
And now, at last, in February of 2026 -- decades too late -- we arrive here.
Call Them What They Are The Republican Party has become a haven
for Nazi sympathizers. By Tom Nichols
And this is the front-page teaser or "refer" for that story:
The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem How did the GOP become a
haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich?
Great question! Which we will definitely get to in a minute.
But at least as important as what ol' Tom says in this article is where the
article was published. It's in The Atlantic.
And knowing that, you may ask yourself this question: how exactly does
ol' Tom -- who has been wrong, tardy and dismissive all along -- rate a
column in The Atlantic, while the folks who have been right all along
-- folks who ol' Tom routinely derided, ridiculed and blocked from his perch
at The Atlantic -- are still legacy media pariahs?
Again, great question. And I would suggest that it's the same reason so
many other recently-former Republicans and Neocons have found a home at The Atlantic. Because in that pundit world, the fact that you
have been wrong all along matters so very much less than the fact that you
were wrong in all the right ways. Ways that flattered the average legacy
media reader or viewer. A writer of things that are declarative, but
cautious. Timid. And always, always riding that Both Sides Do It
lane right down the middle, so that however harsh your Trump critique of the
day may be, you make sure to take snide shots at the Left every step of the
way.
Which is why this guy --
You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of
matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.
Four-fifths of this thing reads like an utterly anodyne, Wikipedia-style
history of the modern Republican Party. Just another 9th grade book
report recitation of the familiar facts and milestones of the modern
Republican party with which, I'm sure, most of you are not only drearily familiar, but have been shouting from the rooftops since forever. Of course, St.
Reagan’s image is carefully guarded and burnished, but from Nixon to Gingrich
to Trump, there’s nothing here we haven’t known, discussed, dissected, blogged about,
podcasted about, and thoroughly masticated for decades.
And the striking thing is, it doesn’t sound like Tom Nichols at all.
None of the snark and bile he routinely unlimbers in the cause of belittling
and tone policing any Liberal who disagrees with him. Instead it reads
like a second cousin to Jay Rosen's
"View from Nowhere".
The only time it even begins to sound like Nichols is when he dips into a
wide-eyed, golly-how-did-this-happen voice -- as if he’s a child just
discovered that Santa Claus isn’t real. What? When did this happen? How did
this happen?
Then he ambles back over to Wikipedia, looks up the history of the Republican
Party during his entire adult life, and says, "Oh, so that’s what
happened."
However, to give Nichols his due, there is at least one sentence that had to
cost him dearly to see published in a national magazine, and here it is:
In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite
embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of
violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party,
until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.
Then Nichols asks the next obvious question:
Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency
latent in the DNA of the party?
And here was my reaction:
Now you and I both know that, in this life Tom Nichols -- Mr.
"Expertise" -- is never gonna call on a dirty, disreputable hippie to explain
[checks notes] his own political party to him. However, he did the next
best thing.
To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged
a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former
Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the
Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats,
then bolted from the party because of Trump. I asked Stevens to tell me
when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven
for Nazis was inevitable.
For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party.
White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964
and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters
deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his
’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard
Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected
white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By
the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.
In Nichols' view, it was Reagan's personal charisma that kept the various
Republican factions -- gun nuts, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, bigots,
imbeciles, paranoid conspiracy junkies, millionaires, Conservative
evangelicals, Bill Kristol, George Will and Charles Krauthammer -- in line and
pulling in the same direction. But once Reagan died...
Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of
Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican
Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked
by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in
2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon
discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs.
Allow me to repeat that which I have already said a dozen times on this blog
and on The Professional Left podcast: it's not a "hijacking" when they
throw you the keys and beg you to drive.
And given that the base of the party threw the keys to Trump
three times in 10 years...? Sure as shit doesn't sound like a hijacking. Sounds like the
fascist Meathead Messiah had arrived and the bigots and imbeciles were and are
ecstatic about it.
But the best -- the very best -- use of the view from nowhere comes in the
form of a very familiar dodge. A dodge I hadn't heard deployed so
brazenly since Matthew Dowd was making the rounds with it.
Nichols, who has a long and well-documented history of dismissing or swatting
away criticism of Republicans from the left, suddenly transported himself up,
up, up to David Brooks' "view from nowhere" orbital punditing platform where
he can safely opine about the deplorable Both Siderism of "Conservatives..."
and "People on the right..." --
Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated
their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors
lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s
most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who
co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the
U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have
casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an
office in the West Wing 15 years later. And no one on the left has shown up to
work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of
Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.
-- without having to add the damning modifier, "Conservatives like me..." and "People on the right like me..."
Moral grandstanding with a big bump of selective amnesia is a helluva drug. Because what Nichols was up to during all the years he was averting his
eyes from what his party was doing was busying himself telling liberals to calm
down. Informing Democrats what they should and shouldn’t say.
Tone-policing anyone who challenged his perspective -- a
perspective now definitively disproven.
What’s striking isn’t simply that he’s arrived at this realization. After all, the
world is full of slow learners and thumb-suckers who need to be told,
over and over again, in the immortal words of Wade Garrett, "Don't Eat The Big White Mint."
What's striking is that Nichols is my age and he is only now, grudgingly, arriving at this revelation.
What's striking is that, instead of being some waterhead propping up a wall at a dive bar, Nichols' whole deal is Expertise. Right from jump he'll let you know that, in his expert opinion, he is always the smartest guy in the room.
What's striking is that he holds a column at
The Atlantic based on his alleged expertise in this very subject. One he appears to
have been in denial about until roughly ten minutes ago.
And so to wrap this up, we circle back to these questions. Why does The Atlantic staff itself with people like
this? Why are the people who were right about the Right all along still
treated as pariahs? Why are they not only unwelcome in the circles where Tom Nichols,
David Brooks, David Frum, and the rest circulate, but are treated as if they do not exist at all?
Because The Atlantic is in the business of telling its audience what it is
prepared to hear. Its readers are ready to hear that Donald Trump is as bad as
he appears, that the people around him are terrible. But they are not prepared
to hear that the Left was right. They cannot bear the thought that the highly
paid columnists of legacy media were wrong -- and that their readers were
misled along with them -- while the so-called dirty hippies were right all
along.
Like a some Conservative version of the Casimir Effect*, I believe I can
prove, to a scientific certainty, that when two old-school neocon Never
Trumpers are put in close proximity to one another, eventually at least two of
the most odious and deeply held core tenets of their ideological faith will
always manifest themselves out of the air.
First element to emerge will be sanctimonious Both Siderism. An
above-it-all certainty that because Both Sides are pretty terrible they are
now "politically homeless".
The second element to emerge will be condescension. The airy dismissal
of any prior criticism from the Left of their now-former party, which, in
actual fact, will turn out to be just blatant Straw Man bullshit. We
know this because such derision never involves interviewing any actual
Liberals or citing anything that anyone on the Left has ever actually written.
Instead, the entire constellation of thoughtful, detailed and brutally
accurate analysis of the long, ugly trajectory of the Republican party --
decades of labor by hundreds of smart, savvy lefties -- is sneered at and
waved off as, "Well, you know how those people are."
And thanks to whoever it was that had the bright idea of putting old-school
Neocon Never Trumper Mona Charen and old-school Neocon Never Trumper
David Frum together on Frum's podcast, we now had a perfect opportunity to
either confirm or disprove my hypothesis by experiment and observation!
Let's see what happened.
First test: Emergent Both Siderism:
Frum:
What Trump is doing to poison the social conversation here at home, to
allow in these voices, to really mainstream people like Nick Fuentes and
Tucker Carlson, that is deeply frightening. That’s where we live. (Laughs.)
And it is opening the door to the kind of—there’s a lot of left-wing
anti-Semitism, but frankly, the right-wing variety still scares me a little
more because it is truly Nazi-like in its ferocity against Jews.
There is quite a bit of that. Sure, the right is awful, but they only
scare Frum "a little more" than the left.
Also Frum:
On the other hand, assuming there is an election and J. D. Vance is the
Republican nominee, he will be running against a nominee from a party that
just vetoed the most plausible-looking running mate for Kamala Harris
because he was Jewish and because he wouldn’t renounce his support for
Israel and wouldn’t hedge his condemnation of anti-Semitic outbursts on
American college campuses, and where important voices in that party are
saying that the test, their most important test for their support in 2028 is
Holocaust inversion...
Charen: As you say, J. D. Vance is very close to Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens
is a huge influencer, and all of that. On the left, it is, for now, the
precinct of the hard-left progressives. It’s untested as to whether that
will become the dominant strain in the Democratic Party. We’ll see. That
would be very, very worrisome.
So, Both Siderism? Check.
On to the second test: The Straw Man.
Frum: ...I think there’s something important that we [Never Trump Republicans]
bring, and that is a sense of that this is a group that has a unique sense
of the uniqueness of what is happening now. And I’m sure you’ve seen often
in the comments you get from readers or viewers or listeners, they’ll say
something [like], Aha, we warned you that the moment Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson,
Trump was the inevitable outcome—
Charen: Absolutely. All the time.
Really? You've heard Liberals blaming Ike for Trump?
"All the time"?
Because I am one of a whole army of Liberals who've spent decades warning you
fuckers of the dangerous trajectory your party was on and I have never heard
anyone say this. Not a single serious historian. Not a single
political theorist. Not a single potty-mouth blogger. There is no record
whatsoever of anyone arguing that the moment Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated
Adlai Stevenson in 1952, the eventual rise of Donald Trump became
“inevitable.”
Of course what Frum and Charen are desperate to do here is avoid talking about
things like Goldwater and the seismic ideological shift he represented in
1964 as the GOP began devolving through various stages, towards Trump-era
populism.
They don't want to talk about Nixon's Southern Strategy. Or the Powell
Memo. Or the red carpet the party rolled out for southern white
conservative Evangelical segregationists like Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson.
They'd like you to forget Paul Weyrich too, and Lee Atwater, and Karl
Rove.
They'd really appreciate it if you'd also forget about Newt Gingrich.
And Tom DeLay.
They're also praying that no one mentions the profound, malignant influence of
the Right's most popular bigot, Rush Limbaugh, or his hundreds of imitators,
or the fact that George H. W. Bush was so thirsty for Limbaugh's support that
he invited him to the White House for a Lincoln Bedroom sleepover and carried
in Limbaugh's baggage personally.
In fact, they'd be eternally grateful if you'd agree to forget the rise of the
entire Conservative media ecosystem -- talk radio, cable news, online
platforms, church pulpits, direct mailing lists -- emerging from the 1980s
onward.
Instead, Frum rolls out one of the stupidest Straw Men I've ever heard of, and
he and Charen deal with their barely sublimated guilt and shame by taking
turns punching it.
Frum: No, he’s not the inevitable outcome of Dwight Eisenhower and
Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and George W. He’s
different. And we’re here to tell you that as people who liked all those
people. He’s different. And because we liked all those people, we can tell
you how and why he’s different in a way that the typical commenter who’s
blaming Dwight Eisenhower for being the start of Donald Trump can’t tell
you.
Charen: Well, yeah, the people who are kind of—and I’ll say this—I
think they’re kind of smug, and they say, This was always
conservatism, and this is just the full flowering of all the things that
conservatism always was. I say that is absolutely not the case...
So, Straw Man? Check.
Cowards? Check.
Experiment complete.
Theory confirmed by observation.
Submitted for peer review this day, February 20, 2026, by your pal driftglass.
*The Casimir effect is a weird little consequence of quantum physics that
says even “empty” space isn’t really empty. Imagine putting two perfectly
smooth metal plates extremely close together in a vacuum. You’d think
nothing would happen — but tiny quantum fluctuations are constantly
flickering in and out of existence everywhere. Between the plates, only
certain fluctuations can fit, while outside them, more kinds can pop up.
That imbalance creates a tiny pressure pushing the plates together. So the
Casimir effect is basically proof that empty space has a kind of restless
energy, and if you confine it just right, it can produce a measurable
force.
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:
Typos 3 through 5: a great man liked St. Augustine, the occasionally
recklessness, and “great replacement: are bad David Brooks typos for a
great man like St. Augustine, the occasional recklessness or occasionally
the recklessness, and “great replacement.” cc
@jfidelino_nytpic.twitter.com/7H3CfF1r5y
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.
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.
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.
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.
