This week in Privileged Middle-Aged Conservative White Guys Talking About
Race, we take a short dive into the tortured theories of anti-Trump Republicans about how their party went insane, their Object Permanence problem when it
comes to understanding of their own party's base, and their seething
resentment over Liberal's pointing out that their racist party was, in fact, a
racist party back when they were still swearing that it wasn't.
But first, a Fun Fact. As I was taking a break from
screwing around with my blog format because now that Trump has a blog,
well... outlining this post, I chanced to listen to Wednesday's offering from
The Bulwark podcast and found that Charlie Sykes had dropped an even
more craven and venomous example of how deeply committed anti-Trump
Republicans are to contorting reality in order to weasel out of responsibility
for what their party has become than the original "Tom Nichols and Charlie
Sykes Bitching About Liberals" episode which had moved me to start writing
this thing. In this example, "Robert Tracinski and Charlie Sykes
Bitching About Liberals" Mr. Sykes and his guest go so far as to blame
Liberal both for the election of Donald Trump and for somehow
inducing his Republican party to become a racist shithole.
You have to hear it to believe it. Or read it, because I'll be quoting
it later on.
Listening to Michael Steele interview Alice Stewart is the weirdest, most
dissociative "We're Still Republicans But Not The Bad Kind" audio experience you
can have for free.
For those of you who are late to the party, Michael Steele is the former RNC
chair who swears that, sure, before he ran the party it was, indeed,
full of racists. However, during the brief interregnum when he was party chair
he drove all the racists out of the GOP just like Saint Patrick drove the
snakes out of Ireland! But once he had been cruelly deposed, all the
racists came back. Sad! And thus, in his own mind, Michael Steele
-- the black man who hired himself to front for a party defined by contempt
for people of color -- bears no personal responsibility whatsoever for the GOP
being what it is today.
And for his sins, Michael Steele is now a paid MSNBC contributor and was
awarded a Senior fellowship at Brown University's Watson Institute for
International and Public Affairs.
For her part, Ms. Stewart has spent her career working for the worst of the
worst -- Santorum...
New Bachmann press aide Alice Stewart was former news anchor and
Huckabee aide
...Cruz...
...and so forth -- and is entirely unapologetic about every bit of
it.
And for her sins, Stewart is now a paid CNN contributor and was awarded a
Harvard fellowship at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
And what's notable about these two prominent Republicans in conversation in
July of 2021 is not just that they are delusional, but that each of them is
delusional in their own distinct way that reflects their own, unique
failings. Like listening to two children arguing over whether
Martians are three feet tall and blue or eleven feet tall and orange when,
hate to break it to you kids,
there are no fucking Martians. But the way the respective
delusions of these two adult professionals carom off of each other is what
makes it weirdly entertaining and instructive.
First, their similarities. They are bot still card-carrying members of
the GOP. They both despise Liberals like you and me. They both
like Joe Biden personally, but hate his agenda in which they see the hidden hand
of AOC in "paying people not to work" and so forth. They're both
adamant that this is still a "Center/Right" country". They both want
to see Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion outlawed. And they both
clearly long for the glory days of their youth when Reagan bestrode the
Earth like a colossus and there appeared to be no limit to the damage they
could do in the name of Freedom.
But their differences are where the crazy really comes out.
Stewart wants the wind the clock back to 2015. Of maybe just 2019. She
is Terminator-focused on winning the congress back in 2022 and the White
House back in 2024, and insists that returning unified control of the
government over to the Ted Cruz/Rand Paul/Marjorie Taylor Greene/Mitch
McConnell/ Paul Gosar/Jim Jordan GOP will somehow cure the party of its
flaws and let it return to the good old days and values of [checks notes]
Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.
The Republican Insurrection and the Republican Big Lie leave a bad taste in
Stewarts's mouth, but she is 100% cool with everything else her party has
done. She would be delighted to keep Trump himself in the party if he
would just chill out a little bit. She definitely wants to keep the
Trump base in the party and thinks if the party could just just move on all
the, y'know, out-and-proud racism, insanity, violence and treason -- just
put it all in the past -- that there are a millions of "rational
Republicans" out there who are horny as hell to leap back in bed with the
Party of Bigots and Imbeciles.
Stewart's delusions about the existence of massive numbers of "rational
Republicans" who she wants to add to the party without displacing the
existing base of bigots and imbeciles reflect the profound depths of her
sociopathy. The fact the actual base of the GOP are Fox-drunk
meatheads and white supremacists does not bother her at all, because in her
mind you and me and everything we value are the
real enemies. And therefor the thought of keeping the
existing Republican mob of racists and lunatics intact and in-harness as a
tool for crushing the Evil Left once and for all is, to Stewart's way of
thinking, a perfectly acceptable means to that noble end.
Steele believes the exact opposite: that the key to glorious Republican
victory and the enactment of the despicable agenda that both he and Stewart
believe in is to cut the base loose. Just grab 'em by the Klan hood
and chuck 'em out the door. How exactly he would go about kicking them
out of the party when, for all intents and purposes,
they are the fucking party I have no idea -- but in response to
Stewart's insistence that she still wants Trump around -- still wants him to
be part of the party -- Steele says:
Steele:But do we? Do we? Do we
really still want him around? I'll be honest with you, I
don't. I think he's an abomination. I think he...I think he's
an apostate to everything I grew up believing in the party, even in the
face of some of the ugly stuff in the...recent history of the party.
I think Trump has been an avatar for a lot of that...really given a breath
of fresh air to the Southern Strategy...
And in that confession, and in this one...
Steele:
Like the worst cancer you could possibly have, cut that shit out of your
body. You need it gone.
..and this one...
Steele:
To be honest with you, I don't want...I don't want a redneck white
nationalist racist to be a Republican. I don't want them in my
party.
...you see Steele's delusions manifested.
Until Trump ripped the mask off of his party, Steele could get away with the
shuck that, hey man, the party wasn't this was when I joined up,
when I rose in its ranks, or when I was its national
chair. Because to admit that would be to confess what everyone knows:
that to succeed in Republican politics, either Mr. Steele had trained
himself to not to see what his party truly was, or he knew that, as a black
man willing to swallow his dignity and front for a racist party, his future
was secure...as long as some fool didn't come along with a very big
megaphone and give the game away.
And then along came this fool with a very big megaphone --
-- who gave the game away.
So the only way Mr. Steele can continue to keep his pathetic delusions intact
(and continue his cable teevee viability) is to conjure into existence an
entirely imaginary future Republican party full of so many rational,
honorable humans (all of whom agree with the GOP's depraved agenda) that
they can not only displace the entire Republican base, but will flock to
Steele's banner in such numbers that they can sweep this New GOP to power
and something something freedom.
When pressed on where exactly all these people are going to come from once
he somehow managed to kicks 90% of Republicans out of "his" Republican
party, Steele gets very metaphysical. As if he were building a
ballfield in the middle of an Iowa cornfield because a disembodied voice
told him to.
Except he's not.
Instead what he's proposing, in effect, is that Baskin-Robbins keep their
name, but stop selling ice cream and instead offer the public what's left
over -- empty cones, tiny spoons and napkins -- on the expectation that even
bigger crowd will show up for that. And when pressed even further for
any example of such a thing ever happening anywhere, Mr. Steele had to go
all the way back to the early 1990s when he was chairman of the Prince
George's County Republican Central Committee and he and a small band of
Republicans managed to get a few reforms passed. Property tax
stuff. Charter school stuff. That sort of thing.
That's it. That is the quarter-century-old weak reed on which Mr.
Steele's whole fantasy future GOP rests.
And this really is all that remains of the mopes who think Trump is icky but
continue to remain loyal Republican party members.
One zombie-eyed, True Believer who wants to snuff out Liberalism so badly
that she's perfectly happy keeping Trump and his brown shirts inside the
party but thinks that cladding a layer of non-existent "rational
Republicans" on top of that radioactive crazy will be enough to cure the
party of its excesses (Translation: Can just go back to not saying the
quiet part out loud...) and win smashing victories forever.
And one life-long Republican hood ornament who believes that the key to the
future success of his GOP consists of...
Kicking 90% of the Republican party out of the Republican party and
Replacing those tens millions of bigots and imbeciles with
even more tens of millions of imaginary new Republicans
who believe all the same horrible shit that current Republicans believe
but minus the overt racism.
Not so long ago
I wrote a thing about the Very Serious Conservative Thinkers' obsession with
"-isms", and that David Brooks has been the worst of them.
For decades, this has been Brooks' way of separating himself and his Imaginary
Republican party and his Fairy Tale Conservative movement from the grim and
grubby and racist realities of the actual Republican party and the
actual Conservative movement. In fact, this has been Mr. Brooks' Great Project, and
if you are a longtime reader of this lil' blog out here in the exurbs of
respectability you may have come across this description of Brooks' Great
Project by some 100% unemployable Liberal degenerate several thousand posts ago:
In his mighty war against the encroachments of reality, deflecting Republican
perfidy with a series of strategic -isms has been one of the Very
Serious Conservative Pundits' signature moves. When the outward sign if
the inner rot of the Republican party was George W. Bush, the failure was not
attributed Republicanism or Conservatism, but to Bushism.
When it was Tom DeLay, the problem was Delayism not Republicanism,
not Conservatism.
Gingrich? Gingrichism.
Palin? Palinism.
See how this works? It's nothing more than the "No True Scotsman"
fallacy dressed up in a Reagan mask.
The Media is attempting to separate the Republican Party from Donald Trump.
Who voted for him again?
And now we come to the core of David Brooks' professional and ideological problem, which, it turns out, is actually pretty simple. His party is dead. It's been dead a
good long while, as is the movement to which he devoted his entire life.
And the Republicans with whom he shared political confidences have betrayed themselves
as liars or cowards or traitors of some rancid slumgullion of all three.
But Brooks' whole job is being an expert on politics. Specifically,
Republican politics. And not just just the surface stuff which any
amaetur Liberal midwestern blogger can plainly see: the
New York Times and the Atlantic and PBS and NPR and Yale and on
and on and on ain't pay top dollar for those scraps. Brooks is supposed to
be the man with the skinny. With a jug of the Pure Quill. The man with exclusive access to the deep recesses of the Conservative soul: those mystic Republican secrets that lie hidden from us peons behind
the polite chatter at exclusive Beltway cocktail parties.
But if the party is dead, and there are no secrets, what then is the plan for
our man Brooks?
Turns out the plan is a dull, endless cycle of Denial, Grief/Bargaining, Both
Siderism, then back to Denial again and so forth. On and on and
on. World without end.
Think of it this way. Brooks is standing on a stage in a large
auditorium. The auditorium is full. On the stage next to Brooks is
a corpse on a table. A long-dead corpse that is stinking up the place.
And Brooks' job is to interpret on the corpse's activities to the audience as
if the corpse were a lively, active, cunning person.
So first Brooks pokes the corpse with a long stick. The he breaks into
the political equivalent of the Dead Parrot sketch.
See! It moved! It moved! It's not dead. It was
just shagged out from a prolonged bout of Palinism, but it's fine now.
In fact, I predict it's going to leap up from that table and launch an awesome
Conservative renaissance any minute now.
And the audience waits...and waits...and then the corpse's leg falls
off. Rotten. Full of worms.
Then Mr. Brooks comes over all shocked and confused. The
Grief/Bargaining begins.
This happened most notably after Donald Trump nearly swept the field on
Republican Super Tuesday in 2016 after David Brooks, political expert, had
assured everyone that such a thing was impossible.
Brooks spent his next
New York Times column practically begging his bosses not to fire
him for being a clueless hump. He also went on the now long-defunct Charlie Rose Show and
repeated most of his mea culpa there. Of course, since that show is long gone, your
average blog might only have a dim and distant memory of this. But being
a recovering pedant on the subject, I watched the whole damn thing and
transcribe the relevant portions, so here you are.
Brooks: I messed up big time in not knowing Trump was
coming. And so when something like that happens you take a look
at yourself and you think "What did I miss about America?"
And...I'm...too much in the Acela corridor. I've gotta get out.
That's one thing. … Believe me, I travel every week, but I'm at
a college here...so I'm always within the bubble. And so I've gotta
get out. But then the other thing is, like, I've achieved way more
career success than I ever thought I would, so it's time to take some
chances on the spiritual realm, on the personal -- the emotional realm...
But because he absolutely cannot help himself, just 20 minutes
later Brooks was already making the transition from Grief and Bargaining, to
Both Siderism, explaining that, really, Barack Obama is the one who set the
tone for all this acrimony because Obama refused to compromise with David
Brooks’ Republican Party:
Brooks: I think what Barack Obama taught us, it's not enough to be a
skilled politician. He came in wanting to transcend every line you could
imagine and create a governing majority.
But his policies that he came in with were orthodox Democratic policies.
So you have to have a set of policies that cuts across lines. That's
a little from column A and a little from column B.
At this point, Rose and Brooks both damn well knew they’re lying, but to the
Beltway media maintaining the “Blame Both Sides” lie is always and forever more important
than the facts.
So back in 2016, Brooks found out the Republican party was -- OMG!! -- full of
Republicans…traveled around the country like Albert Brooks in
Lost in America, touching Indians and gaining wisdom…and came back transformed and, finally,
able to see the Republicans party clearly.
Right?
Nah!
This is from Brooks is trolling me again, just last week when he once again
re-re-rediscovered the Republican party!
I thought I was beyond shockable, but this week has been profoundly
shocking for me. I spent the bulk of my adult life on the right-wing side
of things, generally rooting for the Republican Party, because I thought
that party best served America. People like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump
chased me out of the Republican orbit (gradually and then all at once),
but I have still held out the hope that my many friends on the right are
kind of like an occupied country. They have to mouth the Trumpian
prejudices to survive in this era, but somewhere deep inside, the party of
Reagan still lives in their souls.
And then came the inevitable smug, condescension:
My progressive readers are now thinking: Have you not been paying
attention? Donald Trump has owned this party for years. If he told them to
kill the immigration compromise because he needed a campaign issue, they
were going to kill that proposal.
To which I respond:
I don’t think you quite understand what just happened...
So, having once again shockingly re-re-re-rediscovered the fundamental toxicity of the Republican
party (even as more of its decomposing limbs plopped loudly to the floor in front of
God an everybody), and having dismissed those of us who have
actually been right about the Right all along as insufficiently
savvy to "understand what just happened", where do you suppose Mr.
Brooks goes next?
If you guessed that he dove right back into his Both Siderist Happy Place, because I entitled this post "In Which David
Brooks Takes His Readers On Yet Another Blathering Meander Through The
Crumbling Sepulcher of Both Siderism", well aren't you the clever one!
Because, yep, that is exactly where Mr. Brooks has gone.
Except now Brooks goes one step further.
Having tried and failed miserably to deploy the "-ism" of Trumpism to
quarantine the Very Bad Awful Donald Trump (and the actual Republican base... and
virtually every Republican elected official) from Brooks' Awesome
Imaginary Republican Party, Brooks is now, believe it or not, trying to morph
Trumpism into something that would be acceptable at those exclusive Beltway
cocktail parties by quarantining Trumpism ... from Trump.
I think I detest Donald Trump as much as the next guy, but Trumpian
populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial
overreach; the need to preserve social cohesion amid mass migration; the
need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of
globalization.
See, Trump the man is bad, but Trumpism versus Liberalism? Well that's a
horse of a different color!
The struggle against Trump the man is a good-versus-bad struggle between
democracy and narcissistic authoritarianism, but the struggle between
liberalism and Trumpian populism is a wrestling match over how to balance
legitimate concerns.
As always, Brooks ducks the question of how these "legitimate concerns" of
"Trumpian populism" are actually manifesting themselves in, say, the actual
Republican party by hand-waving away the manifest corruption and incompetence
and racism and derangement of the Republican party by blaming "Congress":
America is economically thriving but politically dysfunctional. We have
the material, technological and military resources to remain the world’s
leading superpower, but the current Congress is unable to make decisions
about basic issues, like how to fix the immigration system or what role we
should play in the world.
What do we have to do to rectify this situation? Well, a lot of things,
but one of them is this: More of us have to embrace an idea, a way of
thinking that is fundamental to being a citizen in a democracy.
That idea is known as value pluralism...
Then Brooks explains how terrible "monists" are using the examples of Maxists
and Nazis:
Berlin had a word for people who think there is one right solution to our
problems and that therefore we must do whatever is necessary in order to
impose it: monists. Berlin was born in pre-revolutionary Russia and came
of age in the 1930s, when two monist philosophies were on the march,
Marxism and fascism. They claimed to be all-explaining ideologies that
promised an ultimate end to political problems.
And...you can see where this is going, right? (with a little emphasis added.)
Today, monism takes the form of those on the left or right who see all
political conflicts as good and evil fights between the oppressors and the
oppressed. The left describes these conflicts as the colonizer versus the
colonized. The Trumpian right describes these conflicts as the coastal
elites, globalists or cultural Marxists. But both sides hold up the
illusion that we can solve our problems if we just crush the bad
people.
So if the Left and the Right are both equally bad as Marxists and Nazis were
equally bad, who are the good guys? Where are the heroes who will save
us from the Extremes on Both Sides?
Yes, once again, it's David Fucking Brooks and the Sensible Center
to the rescue!
We pluralists resist that kind of Manichaean moralism. We begin with the
premise that most political factions in a democratic society are trying to
pursue some good end. The right question is not who is good or evil. The
right question is what balance do we need to strike in these
circumstances?
So, having bullshitted his way through the collapse of the Bush regime, and an eight-year Republican racist primal scream during the Obama administration,
and the four-year near-death of our democracy under Trump, and three years of
Joe Biden trying to hold this country together with his bare hands...Brooks is
still exactly the same duplicitous, Pecksniffian, sanctimonious asshole he was
18 years ago.
Because Brooks' column today is literally nothing more than a slight reworking
of the tantrum he threw
back in 2006
when his very good friend and fellow Iraq War pimp, Joe Lieberman, lost fair
and square to Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Democratic senatorial
primary.
Brooks has swapped "monists" for
"DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party" and
"pluralists" for "The McCain-Lieberman Party", but other than
that...
The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite
style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to
their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who
believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through
aggression and stridency.
The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies
are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their
behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their
integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have
achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the
moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.
But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic
Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may
have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to
partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them
extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.
The McCain-Lieberman Party counters with constant reminders that country
comes before party, that in politics a little passion energizes but
unmarshaled passion corrupts, and that more people want to vote for
civility than for venom...
And thus it shall always be at The New York Times.
Warning: This post is very long. Much longer than anything else I have ever done on this blog, clocking in at just over 16,000 words. It took me quite awhile to finish, but although I felt compelled to write it, you are not compelled to read it. I'm also certain that if you do read it, you will find a typo or three that I missed since my Writer Brain has not yet had time too cool off and switch over to my Editor Brain.
Also if you would like to support work that I do here, please consider dropping something into my tip jar.
Thanks. I'm going to sleep for a week now.
Your pal, driftglass
Behold, a Tip Jar!
So the Republican Party has finally reached the place towards which they have been marching with single-minded fervor for forty long and awful years, and everywhere the smoke from their Bonfire of the Sanities makes the day into a choking twilight, while the flames make the night a lurid hellscape as Trump and his wingnut mob put one civic institution to the torch after another.
The Liberal fire-brigade is out there too, as we have always been, passing buckets from hand-to-hand, frankly pissed off and exhausted from forty years of warning this day was coming and being slandered and ignored for our trouble. Saying "Fuck these fucking fuckers!" as the wingnut mob capers from building to building, spreading the conflagration, while we try to focus on the immediate crisis -- saving what we can from the ravenous, racist malignancy of the Right -- and at the same time not lose sight of the long-term need to rebuild our civic institutions once the Trumpfire is brought under control.
And from the United States Constitution to the cemetery at Normandy to the steps of the Lincoln memorial, the leader of the mob -- the Arsonist-in-Chief -- goes right on lobbing incendiaries in every direction to the delight of the Republican Party.
The Trumpfire is even licking at the walled enclave of the American punditocracy. There is no personal danger to any of the pundits therein, of course -- the ivory tower atop which their offices are located may be a little scorched and smoke damaged around the base, but it's a mile high and has been continuously upgraded with the latest fire-suppression technology -- but there is no longer any doubt that there really is a fire and it really does run from horizon to horizon.
Which brings us to the matter of Mr. Michael Gerson: former George W. Bush chief speechwriter, senior Republican policy adviser and reliable Beltway Republican stalactite who now exists in a perpetual state of shock that his Republican Party is full of Republicans.
I suppose you could consider this a teaser or a trailer for the No Fair Remembering Stuff podcast we just did on the subject of Sarah Palin. She was
the Republican's party's beta-test version of Donald Trump, and the thing is, pretty much all of
your recently-former Republican Never Trump heroes knew
exactly why she was so appealing to the base.
Long before Donald Trump, they knew
that the center of gravity in their party had shifted from Buckley/Romney/Bush to Limbaugh/Hannity/Gingrich.
Bill Kristol said as much in an October 27, 2009
Washington Post column.
A good time to be a conservative
Bien-pensant conservative elites and establishment-friendly Republican big shots yearn for a more moderate, temperate and sophisticated Republican Party. It's not likely to happen. And probably just as well...
Obviously, many Republicans and conservatives -- and lots of moderates and independents -- will be grateful to Mitch McConnell if he can stop ObamaCare, and to Jon Kyl if he can induce the president to embrace a stronger foreign policy. But it's unlikely that the minority party in Congress will be the source of bold new conservative leadership over the next three years. Even if Republicans pick up the House in 2010, the party's big ideas and themes for the 2012 presidential race will probably not emanate from Capitol Hill.
The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties. Some will lament this -- but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots...
The lesson activists around the country will take from this is that a vigorous, even if somewhat irritated, conservative/populist message seems to be more effective in revitalizing the Republican Party than an attempt to accommodate the wishes of liberal media elites.
So the GOP is likely, for the foreseeable future, to be of a conservative mind and in a populist mood. In American politics, there are worse things to be.
They knew.
They fucking well knew which way things were
going.
And they had no ethical qualms about the lies, the racism, the
batshit conspiracies or the rising tide of insanity inside their own
party. As long as Conservative media and their fellow travelers in the
mainstream media could diffuse, deflect and "Both Sides" them out of
responsibility for what their party was doing, they were fine with
all of it. As long as they could focus the rage of the mob they had
made on to you and me and the Kenyan Usurper -- as long as they could prod the
monster they had made into pulling their political plow where they wanted it
to go -- they were perfectly content to let things keep getting worse and
worse.
Until the day when Donald Trump took their mob away from them by speaking directly to the mob in the mob's native language and promising to make good on all the promises that the Republican establishment had made to them to get their votes, and had reneged on over and over again. Only then did all of these Never Trump Heroes pretend to suddenly notice that something was terribly wrong with their Republican party. Only then did they all suddenly become interested in democracy and fairness and facts.
But in the interim. even after Sarah Palin pulled back the mask and showed the world the leering,
lunatic mob that was the foundation of their party, as soon as McCain and
Palin crashed and burned in 2008, party and media elites grabbed hold of that mask with both hands and, with all
their collective might, yanked it back into place.
Don't worry, Murrica! You didn't see what you just saw! You didn't
hear what you just heard! Everything is fine. Just a little
glitch. Just a little turbulence. But Sober, Sensible
Professionals are on the job and everything will be smoothed out in a
jiffy.
Every party in opposition goes a little crazy. For Republicans in the
early Obama era, insanity took the form of the Sarah Palin spasm.
Veteran politicos took the former Alaska governor seriously as a
national figure. Republican primary voters nominated the likes of Todd
Akin, Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. Glenn Beck seemed
important enough to hold a big rally at the Lincoln Memorial.
Fortunately, serious parties eventually pull back from the fever
swamps. That’s what’s happening to the Republican Party. It has re-established itself as the nation’s dominant governing party...
During the primary season, groups like the Chamber of Commerce chased away or defeated renegade conservatives and opened the way for the triumph of this sort of institutional conservative...
The new Republican establishment is different from the old one. It is more conservative. It’s shaped more by the ideas of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the American Enterprise Institute than it is by the mores of the country club. But, at least judging by the postelection comments coming from all corners, it does believe in politics, in legislating, in compromise.
During the Palin spasm, Republicans seemed to detest the craft of governing. Hothouse flowers like Senator Ted Cruz preferred telegenic confrontation to compromise and legislation.
But current party leaders are talking about incremental progress, finding areas where they can get bipartisan support: on trade, corporate taxes, the XL oil pipeline, the medical devices tax, patent reform, maybe even tax reform generally.
Republicans are also talking about restoring the traditional practices of the House and Senate. Let individual members introduce bills. Let those bills work through the committee structure and get votes. Pass budgets on time and according to the rules.
If the party is to fully detoxify its image, something will have to pass next year. Midwestern Republican governors will have to develop a compelling governing model. And the volcanic effusions of the Palin era will have to look like 1970s neckties — inexplicable oddities from another age.
That was David Brooks, in a New York Times op-ed titled
"The Governing Party", from November 6, 2014.
For context, that David Brooks Remain Calm, All is Well! horseshit --
-- was written a full two and a half years after Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published their
devastating analysis of the state of American politics and the Republican
party. Excerpted from Mann and Ornstein in the Washington Post, April 27, 2012:
Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40
years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings,
we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today,
however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem
lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is
ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional
understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the
legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly
impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the
country’s challenges....
In the end, while the press can make certain political choices
understandable, it is up to voters to decide. If they can punish ideological
extremism at the polls and look skeptically upon candidates who profess to
reject all dialogue and bargaining with opponents, then an insurgent outlier
party will have some impetus to return to the center. Otherwise, our
politics will get worse before it gets better.
For further context, David Brooks' Remain Calm, All is Well! horseshit was written just seven months before Donald Trump – the King of the Birthers – announced that he was running for president.
Because rather than making every effort to figure out what the hell had gone so
drastically wrong inside the Republican party, all those Sober, Sensible
Professionals who were gonna fix this little glitch spent all their time and energy making sure no such diagnostics
were ever performed. Because, as I've already mentioned, they fucking
well knew what was going on and were
instead singularly focused on making sure that no one else knew.
But of course, lots of other people knew what was happening
because it was happening out in public all over the country. In fact,
you'd have to twist yourself into a pandimensional pretzel to deny seeing what
was going on inside the rapidly unhinging Republican madhouse, which is
exactly what Conservative media and the Beltway media did. And what they
are still doing today.
As to the people wo could see what was happening and wrote about it every day? We were mocked and dismissed as crackpots and alarmists. We made media pariahs. And that, too, is still going on today.
In 2008, pundits called what had gone wrong with the Republican Party “Palinism”, just as they had called the same disease “Trumpism” after Palin, “Delayism” before Palin, and “Gingrichism” before Tom DeLay.
But the truth is, the problem with the modern Republican party has always been that it’s full of Republicans.
The problem with the modern Republican party is “Republicanism”.
If you want more on the subject of Sarah Palin and the trajectory of the Republican party, we did an hour on the subject available for free over at The Professional Left website.
For the record, this was the 797th episode of The Professional Left podcast since we launched 14 years ago. Which, you must admit, is a lot of ad-free content.
"New York Times op-eds are the opium of upper classes." Comrade
David Brooks
Based on both the public and sub rosa notifications I've been getting
on social media, and my overflowing email inbox, it seems like I am no longer
needed to point out the inevitable Both Siderist razor in the apple to be
found in every New York Times op-ed by Mr. David Brooks.
For example...
Reading David Brooks' column and thinking "actually this is not too ba..
Uh-oh. "Razor in the apple": status CONFIRMED. Woke university students
are responsible for Trump itssosad. #Goddammit. #EveryFuckingTime cc:
@driftglass.bsky.social
I understand that it's easy to get distracted by the fact that a column by the
balding, bespectacled guardian of the privileges of the privileged which
begins
"What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not
Normal."
and ends with "We have nothing to lose but our chains" but don't get
too excited. Like the 1970s Taco Bell menu, all Brooks has really done
here is remix the same few ingredients out of which he has been making columns
with for years and called it a Bell Beefer.
So, let's proceed on the well-founded axiom that Mr. Brooks has merely written
a slightly more click-baity variation of his bog standard drivel, and indulge
your old Unca Driftglass as I repurpose the opening paragraph of one of
Brooks' most notorious jobs of hackwork from way back during the before time.
It was called "The Collapse of the Dream Palaces" by David Brooks, April 28,
2003 and I have added emphasis to note my emendations.
GEORGE ORWELL was a genuinely modest man. But he knew he had a talent for
facing unpleasant facts. That doesn’t seem at first glance like much of a
gift. But when one looks around the world, one quickly sees how rare it
is. Most people nurture the facts that confirm their worldview and ignore
or marginalize the ones that don’t, unable to achieve enough emotional
detachment from their own political passions to see the world as it really
is.
The always hilariously clueless David Brooks never noticed that he is not
playing the part of Orwell here; that he is the myopic partisan dope who has
made a career out of steadfastly seeing the world as it really is.
Now that the war in Iraq is over,Trump as been re-elected we’ll find out how many people
around the worldin the punditocracy are
capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months
confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use
Fouad Ajami’s phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply
do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate
conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether
or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have
exposed them as the falsehoods they are.
Mr. Brooks willingness to fold, spindle and mutilate plainly observable
American political reality in the ferocious defense of his own dream
palace -- and the devotion of the millions of Americans who are desperate to
believe his fairy tales -- has made Mr. Brooks a wealthy and influential
man.
And like almost every other Never Trumper, this particular dream palace is
based on what you might be tempted to call a "category error" --
A category mistake (or category error, categorical mistake, or mistake of
category) is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to
a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different
category.
-- were it not for that pesky word "error". Because it's not. What
Never Trumpers like Brooks are doing is lying. Plain and simple.
Deliberate and widespread.
And the origins of this lie can be found in this excellent article written by
my wife all the back in
August of 2016:
Don't You Dare Call It 'Trump-ism'
The Media is attempting to separate the Republican Party from Donald Trump.
Who voted for him again?
Have you noticed a number of media outlets calling the Republican campaign
for President, "Trumpism"? It isn't Trumpism. It's the Republican
Party. And it has been for far longer than Donald Trump has been running for
President.
My wife then references a 2015 video in which Alisyn Camerota asks a focus
group of Trump and leaning toward Trump voters why they like him. Those of
you who have watched any of these "average Trump voter" interviews know
their trademarks.
The reason the news media interviewed these particular people is,
they are registered Republican Primary voters.
They didn't just register to vote this year or fall off a truck into the
Republican Party. They voted for Bush, twice. They voted for McCain/Palin.
They voted for Romney. And they're tired of losing and being embarrassed by
their votes, so embarrassed that they fell for a "Tea Party" rebranding just
so they would not have to associate themselves with Bush.
And then the establishment had the nerve to suggest
they vote for Bush's brother.
Donald Trump lies about a lot of things, but he is not lying when he says he
received more Republican Primary votes than any other candidate in US
history. That statistic is skewed by how many Republicans voted "Not Trump,"
but the fact that the race boiled down to Trump versus not-Trump is not
helpful to the "Trumpism" argument. Republican voters selected Trump as
their candidate, in state after state after state.
The beltway news media is terrified that the Republican Party will be
forever tarnished by this Trump candidacy. Why? Because Trump-as-Republican
busts open their "both sides" myth, that "both sides" of the political
spectrum are equally bad, equally wrong and right, equally to be blamed for
the "mess" in Washington.
Both-siderism protects the Beltway's need for an election horserace, as well
as a "view from nowhere" in which the media is outside the race altogether
and just an "observer" of "the process." But both-siderism picks a side: the
side that is willing to lie repeatedly to win elections and policy points...
Because pundits like Brooks had been lying about the basic nature and origins
of the Republican base for so long (while steadfastly ignoring the warnings
from Liberals like us about the ugly trajectory of their party) they were all
caught completely flat-footed when their party -- the same party which, when
faced with the reality of our first black president, had just spent eight
years in an extended racist primal scream -- turned around and nominated the
King of the Birthers.
To these arrogant fucks, who live lives completely removed from everyday,
on-the-ground political reality and yet who have been gifted huge media
megaphones with which to make ex cathedra pronouncements about the
state of American politics, this was...impossible.
Incomprehensible.
Inconceivable.
It would also have been professional suicide for them to admit the plain
truth: that this was, in fact, the Republican party --
their Republican party. And that, all along, they had been
either catastrophically wrong or had been lying. And, worst of all, the
dirty hippie Liberals had been right.
This could not be allowed to be true.
During calendar year 2016, by my count, I wrote no fewer than 37 posts about
what I called "Republican Detachment Disorder" which I defined here as
simply as I could --
Republican Detachment Disorder Defined
It's a huge shit sandwich and everybody but me is gonna have to take a bite.
The arrogant fucks of the legacy media and the tiny clutch of Conservative
pundits who would soon designate themselves as Never Trumpers linked arms
and presented a united front: whatever was happening to the GOP somehow had
nothing to do with them, or the Republican party they had spent their
professional lives building (Conservative pundits), or spent their
professional lives excusing and ignoring (arrogant fucks of the legacy
media.) Ergo, what was happening to the GOP must be due to some mysterious, exogenous force which suddenly appeared out of nowhere and which obviously no one
could have predicted.
Fascism is now in the algorithms, the neural pathways, the social interactions. How did we fail to see all this? “We wanted to see Trump in terms of his absences, so that our way of seeing the world would go unchallenged,” Timothy Snyder writes.
And so, in an act of collective self-protection, the arrogant fucks of the
legacy media invented a new thing.
And they called it "Trumpism".
"Trumpism" was to be a thing separate and apart from their "true" Conservatism
and "real" Republicanism. It would be their very own political
"cosmological constant".
In 1917, Albert Einstein inserted a term called the cosmological constant
into his theory of general relativity to force the equations to
predict a stationary universe in keeping with physicists' thinking at the
time. When it became clear that the universe wasn't actually static, but
was expanding instead, Einstein abandoned the constant, calling it the
'"biggest blunder" of his life.
A mysterious political force conjured out of thin air by the arrogant fucks of
the legacy media to spare them the ignominy of having to admit they had
been talking out of their asses for decades. A mysterious force which
would also spare the tiny number of Republicans who were run out of the
Republican party the ignominy of admitting that they been more than willing to
go along with building their party on a foundation of bigotry, paranoia, white
grievance, religious intolerance and plain, old stupidity...until those forces
turned on them personally [Note: the difference here being, the
actual "cosmological constant" turned out to be a real thing.]
All bullshit, of course: "Trumpism" is nothing more than "Republicanism"
shorn of its thin veneer of legacy media respectability.
After all, it was the Republican party which overwhelmingly nominated
Donald Trump for president in July of 2016, and came out to the polls in
November to elect him.
It was Republican congressmen and senators who enabled all of the
horrors that Trump administration inflicted on this country, and who withheld
their votes to impeach him, which opened the door for him running again.
It was the Republican party which overwhelmingly nominated
Donald Trump for president again in August of 2020, and came out in
record numbers in the middle a global pandemic to try to elect him
again.
It was every element of the Republican party which
conspired to keep Trump active and influential during the Biden
administration, acting as the head of a shadow government and positioning him
for 2024...
... when the Republican party overwhelmingly nominated Donald
Trump for president for a third time, ignoring the Trump-led
insurrection, falling into line behind the lie that the 2020 election was
rigged, dismissing as Fake News the overwhelming evidence of Trump's
corruption, pathological lying and sexual predation and once again turning out
to the polls in record numbers to elect him for a second term.
So it is ludicrous on its face to continue pretending that the Republicans
party which now controls the White House, the Supreme court and both houses of
congress is somehow not the real Republican party.
But we little bloggers of the Left have never been a match for the mighty
megaphones of the arrogant fucks of the legacy media, so "Trumpism" is now in
the dictionary, on Wikipedia and thrown around by pundits in exactly the way
it was intended: as some sort of inexplicable third force in American
politics, separate and apart from Republicans and Conservatives..
So let's have some more fun at the expense of David Brooks at
The Weekly Standard in April of 2003:
THESE DREAM PALACES have taken a beating over the past month. As the
scientists would say, they are conceptual models that failed to predict
events. But as we try to understand the political and cultural importance
of the war in Iraq Trump's re-election, the question is this: Will they crumble under the weight of undeniable
facts? Will the illusions fall, and the political landscape change?
And we find, once again, with only a slight rejiggering of a few words, we can
see how eerily David Brooks predicted his own, pathological refusal to face
reality:
In other words, there will be no magic “Aha!” moment that brings the
dream palaces down...
...no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and
say, “We were wrong. BushThe Left was right.”
But even after Never Trump Republicans cemented "Trumpism" into the national
vocabulary so they could hold themselves harmless from the actions of the
Republican party, the only organization with the national reach and resources
to oppose the Republican Trumpist party were the
Democrats. And that was a very big problem but these Never Trumpers were
the same people who had spent their entire professional lives demonizing
Democrats as the dirty, Commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving,
baby-murdering face of Pure Evil.
These people had defined themselves as Never Democrats long before Trump
showed up and pulled the mask off their party, so how could they possibly make
common cause with the dirty, Commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving,
baby-murdering face of Pure Evil?
By inventing a magical fix which didn't involve Democrats at all.
You remember, right? Suddenly there sprang from the ground a crop of
nearly-identical "movements" which all used the same, focus-group tested
buzzwords and were all predicated on the same ridiculous Beltway-created myth:
that there is an army of "independents" out there which
1) Are all truly "independent" and not just garden variety first-world
American crankies who are never satisfied with their choices of anything,
2) Are all "independent" for reasons similar enough to one another that
they would naturally cohere as a third party.
3) Are vast enough to create and sustain a viable third party that is
markedly different than both the Republicans Trumpers and
the aforementioned dirty, Commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving,
baby-murdering Democrats, and,
4) Are credulous enough to quench the greed of an unlimited number of
grifters promising them the world.
None of these conditions were true then or ever likely to be true in the
foreseeable future, and yet it seemed like every day yet another new
"bipartisan group" came out of the woodwork, each promising a
Centrist/Independent third way which would stand up to Trump while, at the
same time, continuing to rebuke those awful Democrats.
Every one of them failed, and all for the same reason: none of the
Exciting!Centrist!County!Over!Party! promises they made in their brochures was
remotely feasible. There is no math on Earth in which any successful
opposition to the Republican president, the Republican congress and the
Republican courts will not end up being 95% Democrats, and yet this ridiculous
kabuki continues.
You can hear it everywhere, from Anthony Scaramucci to Cory Booker to Joe
Manchin. Just Google "Not about Left and Right" or "Not about
Conservative and Liberal" or "Not about Republicans or Democrats" or,
especially, "Not partisan". The way to defeat the
Republican party Trumpism cannot be as simple
as "Get more Democrats elected". Instead, they posit that some grand
Democracy Alliance which will ... something something ... and that will be the
end of Trump.
But unless you squint yourself blind to avoid looking at the obvious truth and
the basic math, this obviously comes
down toa fight between Left and
Right. And definitely a fight between Republicans and Democrats. And
despite the chorus of influential voices all trying to pretend otherwise, it
is literally a partisan fight, because, inconveniently, "partisan" is an
actual English word with an actual definition:
par·ti·san: noun -- a strong supporter of a party, cause, or person.
Which is why all the talk of a grand Democracy Alliance -- or, as Brooks put
it in his column, a "... comprehensive national civic uprising" in
which
"Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific
community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass
movement." has the stink of George W. Bush's bogus Coalition of the Willing all
over it.
You remember the Coalition of the Willing, right? According to the
Bush administration and press reports, the coalition is was made up of
Afghanistan, Albania, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Czech
Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Honduras,
Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Marshall
Islands, Micronesia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Palau, the Philippines,
Poland, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, Singapore, Slovakia, Solomon Islands, South
Korea, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.
The administration is trying too hard to prove something that isn’t. By
insisting that the “coalition of the willing” is larger, deeper, and wider
than is in fact the case, the administration only emphasizes the extent of
its own isolation. Only Britain is offering meaningful support.
Take the list coalition countries the White House is updating daily.
Sure, there are some important allies aside from Britain—notably Japan,
South Korea, Spain, and Italy as well as number of “new” Europeans. But
only three countries of these allies are actually contributing combat
troops and capabilities (2,000 Australian troops, a Danish submarine and
naval escort, and 200 Polish troops and refueling ship)—all in all less
than one percent of the total number of troops in the region. The rest of
the list is a motley crew of supporters—including such powerhouses as
Afghanistan, Albania, Macedonia, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and
Palau.
Because, to repeat, there is no math on Earth in which any successful
opposition to the Republican president, the Republican congress and the
Republican courts will not end up being 95% Democrats. And yet, for a
whole host of reasons, men like Brooks are desperate to pry the struggle we
are in out of the realm of a straight fight between the American fascist
party, the Republicans, and the American non-fascist party, the
Democrats. Because once that happens we are in Brooks
wheelhouse.
You may recall Brooks' Very Big Freakout of 2005 when anti-war candidate Ned
Lamont beat Brooks' good friend and fellow Iraq war cheerleader, Joe
Lieberman, in a free and fair Democratic primary and Brooks reacted by going
on an absolutely insane rant about how the Extremes on Both Sides were ruining
this country, and how only a McCain/Lieberman third party could save us from
the Tom DeLays on the Right, and the "netroots Delays" of the Left.
It was the stuff of tantrum-throwing, bed-shitting legend. and ever since,
about once every nine months since, Brooks has reheats the same, leftover
fantasy about the inevitable rise of some bespoke, bipartisan, third-way
movement, that just so happens to be perfectly tailored to Brooks' political
and cultural predilutions. And which always takes the form of some sort
of third way, independent, Centrist, Neo-Whig, Reformicon movement or party in
which the Glorious Centrist Majority finally manifests itself, muscle the
Extremes on Both Sides out of the way and into the dustbin of history, and
finally sets everything to rights in a way that exactly suits David Brooks
But what if a movement arises without Brooks' seal of approval? And what if it
isn't perfectly tailored to Brooks political and cultural predilutions?
Well, you probably remember the 2017 Women's March:
The Women's March was a worldwide protest on January 21, 2017, the day
after the first inauguration of Donald Trump as the president of the
United States. It was prompted by Trump's policy positions and rhetoric,
which were and are seen as misogynistic and representative as a threat to
the rights of women. It was at the time the largest single-day protest in
U.S. history, being surpassed 3 years later by the George Floyd
protests.
But do you remember David Brooks' reaction to the that huge, well-organized
protest against Trump?
Because I do.
He thought it was a frivolous, indulgent waste of time. And now, to save
time, I'm just going to copy/paste what I wrote about it back
then. According to Mr. Brooks, sure, the march was a lot of fun for the
ladies:
The women’s marches were a phenomenal success and an important cultural
moment. Most everybody came back uplifted and empowered. Many said they
felt hopeful for the first time since Election Day.
But tactically, it was a silly waste of time:
But these marches can never be an effective opposition to Donald
Trump.
Why? Because these coastal elite ladies don't understand politics
In the first place, this movement focuses on the wrong issues.
Silly ladies!
Now put on your Imagination Caps and pretend you are hearing the following
in the most insufferably condescending tone of voice that human vocal cords
can produce.
Of course, many marchers came with broad anti-Trump agendas, but they
were marching under the conventional structure in which the central
issues were clear. As The Washington Post reported, they were
“reproductive rights, equal pay, affordable health care, action on
climate change.”
These are all important matters, and they tend to be voting issues for
many upper-middle-class voters in university towns and coastal cities.
But this is 2017...
That was the sound of David Brooks patting tens of millions of women on the
head and telling them, "Look toots, all this stuff may make the girls at your San Fran Cisco
sewing circle swoon, but ain't nobody gonna organize and vote around
it."
And according to Mr. Brooks, what would move humans to the
polls in numbers large enough to pry power out of the hand of the America
Fascist Party? Big issues. Sweeping, abstract issues.
Manly issues.
...globalization, capitalism, adherence to the Constitution, the
American-led global order. If you’re not engaging these issues first,
you’re not going to be in the main arena of national life.
And what did the Women's March offer instead?
Instead, the marches offered the pink hats, an anti-Trump movement
built, oddly, around Planned Parenthood, and lots of signs with the word
“pussy” in them...
"Pussy" obviously confuses the hell out of David Brooks, which explains
an enormous amount.
Mr. Brooks continues, explaining to the ladies that the central threat is
certainly not the patriarchy.
The central threat is not the patriarchy.
See? (Translation: Get your socialist lady-hands off of my
wholly unearned and undeserved privilege.)
So what is the central challenge to Murrica?
The central challenge is to rebind a functioning polity and to
modernize a binding American idea.
Wow. That is a lot of words that don't add up to a damn thing.
Would you care to rephrase that?
If the anti-Trump forces are to have a chance, they have to offer a
better nationalism, with diversity cohering around a central mission,
building a nation that balances the dynamism of capitalism with biblical
morality.
Uh huh.
Well as it turned out, rather than adopting Mr. Brooks'a bold agenda of
rebinding biblical capitalism in a functioning morality of balanced dynamism
or whateverthefuck he was trying to say, Democrats instead went with that
Scary Vagina-Based agenda of health care, clean water, clean air, decent
schools and not being racist or a misogynist. You know, all those
elements that were present right there in the DNA of that
frivolous, indulgent Women's March back in January of 2017.
And so here we are, eight years later, and this time the most visible movement
leaders are Bernie and AOC who are barnstorming the country on their "Fighting
Oligarchy" tour, drawing overflow crowds wherever they go. Capacity
crowds, even deep inside Trump country.
In a bid to corral the anti-Trump resistance, Bernie Sanders, AOC visit
red states
Stephanie and Ryan Burnett were perplexed. The crowd was enormous. The
line snaked endlessly between buildings. Were they in the right
place?
As the mother and son approached an aging college basketball arena in
Salt Lake City, the mass of people seemed way too big for the Bernie
Sanders rally they were planning to attend in one of the most
conservative states in the country.
“We’re not used to that in a place like Utah,” said Ryan, a 28-year-old
server and retail manager from South Weber, about 20 miles north of the
arena.
Sanders, alongside his fellow progressive champion Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, took his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour deep into Trump
territory this week and drew the same types of large crowds they got in
liberal and battleground states.
Outside Boise on Monday, the Ford Idaho Center arena was filled to
capacity, with staff forced to close the doors after admitting 12,500
people. There are just 11,902 registered Democratic Party voters in
Canyon County, where the arena is located, according to the Idaho
Secretary of State’s office.
Crowds so consistently large and enthusiastic that even David Brooks sat up
and took notice. From his column this week.
So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement —
has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez.
So good news, right?
Nope. This is the entire paragraph from Brooks' column:
So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement —
has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But this too is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan
rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and
Republicans.
Because they're "partisan", see. Democrats taking on Republicans.
And for the committed Never Trump fraud, thatis what makes the
Sanders/AOC tour intolerable.
From the next paragraph.
What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on
the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear
loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.
You will not fail to notice how that one, little word -- "should" -- is doing
so much heavy lifting here that it threatens to shatter its spine.
Of course Republicans "should" swear loyalty to the fundamental
institutions of our civic life you asshole. But the whole fucking
point of the last 40 years -- and especially the last decade -- is that
Republicans do not feel loyalty to the fundamental institutions
of our civic life. In fact, Republicans have boundless contempt for them
and want them put to the torch.
Then Republicans want to dance around the bonfire in orgiastic delight
that they can finally, publicly be their true, swinish fascist
selves.
Republicans want to revel in the fact that, at last, they have a leader who
will not court them for their votes, then turn around and scold them or ignore
them or make them them feel ashamed of their bigotry and stupidity. At
last they have a leader who will encourages them to burn more, smash more, and
scream the "N" word as loud as they damn well please.
This is the ugly reality of the modern Republican party which
Never Trumpers like Brooks categorically refuse to face.
Which is why the word "Republican" is only found twice in Brooks' article, in
the two paragraphs which I have cited. Whereas "Trump" and "Trumpism"
are dropped 26 times: as thick as bird shit on a Grant Park statue.
This is why Brooks' whole plan comes down to wish casting the rise of a
sustained mass movement involving every level of society which will somehow
drive the scourge of Republicanism Trumpism back into the
sewers, while at the same time not be "partisan" in any way.
And of course every night the monkey butlers will regale us with jungle
stories.
However, if this imaginary movement does not meet David Brooks'
specifications... should it start to, y'know, blame people... or
remember stuff... or recognize that the root of all of our
problems is that the Republican party is full of Republicans... or fail to, uh, build a nation that balances the dynamism of capitalism with biblical
morality, then be forewarned that it is doomed to fail!
Doomed I tells ya!
And if that happens, you can count Mr. David Brooks of
The New York Times o-u-t out of your mass uprising.
