David -- The Thugs and Barbarians are at your gated community. And you’re letting them in and giving them a place of honor.
You write, today:
This election has also presented members of the educated class with an awful possibility: that their pleasant social strata may rest on unstable molten layers of anger, bigotry and instability. How could this guy Trump get even 40 percent of the votes? America may be not quite the country we thought it was.
So close, David! You could have changed just two words:
America Republican may be not quite the country Party we thought it was.
When young writers are advised: “Write what you know,” it’s meant to be intentionally. Brooks is writing both what he knows and willfully doesn’t know. He knows there is a rot among 40% of the country. He willfully doesn’t “know” this is limited to the party he has nurtured and made a good living from for 25 years. He sees no connection between his own demonizing of Al Gore, of Iraq War opponents, of tax cut foes, of Bill Clinton and liberals over that time, and the unseemly, ugly hordes from less “pleasant social strata” who now follow the logical extension of that demonizing to its racist, xenophobic end.
He is shocked, shocked, that conservative David French is the object of vile messages from the Barbarians, as though for the last quarter century he was unaware of the noxious oil spill of right wing hate while it was bubbling up. He still clings to the Holy Church of Both Siderism (h/t Driftglass), desperately flailing about to find false equivalence and shift some blame from himself:
The election campaign isn’t really about policy proposals, issue solutions or even hope. It’s led by two candidates who arouse gargantuan anxieties, fear and hatred in their opponents.
Except the gargantuan anxieties of one side are real and the other are imagined, and one side is actually is about policy proposals and the other is about argle-bargle, mixed with fear and hatred.
But the pinnacle of his continuing lack of self-awareness is in paragraphs like this:
We’ve seen a level of thuggery this election cycle that is without precedent in recent American history. Some of the anti-Trump demonstrators seem more interested in violence than politics. Some of the Trumpians are savage.
See — some anti-Trump demonstrators are just as bad as the Trump “savages.” Where does he get this? Just look at his last column:
As the James O’Keefe videos remind us, wherever Hillary Clinton has gone in her career, a cloud of unsavory people and unsavory behavior has traveled alongside.
James O’Keefe!
Our man Brooks, who gets awards for “civility,” who comments sagely on the News Hour, and who loves to cite (usually inaptly), Burke, Montaigne and other high-falutin’ minds, is relying on James O’Keefe — the scummiest of the scum, king of deceptive and racist videos, Senator’s office burglar, alleged attempted rapist and convicted misdemeanant.
David — The Thugs and Barbarians are at your gated community. And you’re letting them in and giving them a place of honor.
See also Rectification of Names — with Driftglass, the two most eminent Brooksologists of our time.