One of the mysteries of America 2020 is the New York Times continuing commitment to periodically turning over its valuable editorial real estate to the maundering word-smithery of David Brooks. His latest offering asks the question:
There will be a brief pause while everyone considers where they would like Republicans to go. WARNING: before you click on the link, it is not advisable to read it while drinking anything.
The sub-header offers the following optimistic claim: The party looks brain-dead at every spot Trump touches. But off in the corners, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment.
Brace yourself:
My guess is that if Trump gets crushed in the election, millions of Republicans will decide they never liked that loser and jerk anyway. He’ll get relegated to whatever bargain basement they are using to hold Sarah Palin. But something will remain: Trumpism.
The basic Trump worldview — on immigration, trade, foreign policy, etc. — will shape the G.O.P. for decades, the way the basic Reagan worldview did for decades. A thousand smarter conservatives will be building a new party after 2020, but one that builds from the framework Trump established.
emphasis added
And this will happen because Brooks claims the party will be abandoning Reaganism for Trumpism — it will be a paradigm shift. They’re just fighting about what paradigm it will be. (Brooks is mistaking exercises in rebranding for actual paradigm shifts.)
Brooks claims he is already out front:
My own leap came early. On Sept. 15, 1997, William Kristol and I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal on what we called National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the G.O.P. had become too anti-government. “How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?” we asked. Only a return to the robust American nationalism of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt would do: ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility.
emphasis added
(Brooks really needs to trademark National Greatness Conservatism if only to cover T-shirt and trucker cap merchandising.)
Have you stopped laughing yet? Brooks mentions the previous attempt at a paradigm shift: Compassionate Conservatism. Yeah, we saw how that worked out. Brooks offers a tip on how to spot potential paradigms: look for some new word or phrase tacked in front of conservatism.
I will spare you the description Brooks provides of the new paradigms fighting to become the flavor of the day. I will just give you his list of the elements he thinks this should be based on:
- Everything is not OK.
- Economic libertarianism is not the answer.
- The working class is the heart of the Republican Party.
- China changes everything.
- The managerial class betrays America.
Here’s who Brooks thinks could be leading the way forward, depending on which of them prevails with their individual vision: Senators Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Ben Sasse.
Aren’t you glad I warned you about trying to read this while drinking anything? Of course you may need a strong drink afterwards...
Who will be providing the intellectual backing for this? Here’s Brooks’ take on who the ‘thought leaders’ are:
Behind these public figures there is a posse of policy wonks and commentators supporting a new Working-Class Republicanism, including Oren Cass, Henry Olsen, J.D. Vance, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Saager Enjetti, Samuel Hammond and, in his own way, Tucker Carlson.
Hypothetically, if someone was postulating a wall and needed a list of who should be first up against it when the revolution comes, they now have a starting point… Thanks Mr. Brooks!
The real spit-take bomb is lurking at the end, when Brooks offers up this caveat:
None of this works unless Republicans can deracialize their appeal — by which I mean they must stop pandering to the racists in the party and stop presenting themselves and seeing themselves as the party of white people — and wage a class struggle between diverse workers in their coalition and the highly educated coastal manager and professional class in the Democratic coalition.
David Brooks — Class Warrior!!!
The only question I have at this point is does Brooks actually believe any of this, or is it all world-class trolling? He’s a conservative Ellsworth Toohey analog, only without the self-awareness. Brooks is really not all that funny. He is taking an excessively Panglossian view of the Republican Party paradigm shifts he is promoting here.
In his own way, he is as detached from reality as Donald Trump. Republicans have been offering magical solutions for decades. The results speak for themselves. They are the party of snake oil salesman, grifters, ideologues, and thugs. All the pretty visions in the world can only hold off reality for so long. Brooks is trying to put lipstick on a lot of pigs here.
I would offer the observation that Brooks’ real role at the NY Times is not as a representative of conservative viewpoints today. It’s to help the obliviator class* in the media and their audience continue to promote the belief that conservatism is still a respectable movement with rational underpinnings, and not just a continuing descent into right-wing authoritarianism.
(*obliviator — expanding on the Harry Potter job description, someone whose job is to blank awareness of facts the world is not ready for, in the opinion of the people who set the agenda — or think they do. See illuminati.)
I offer Charles P. Pierce from 2018 as an antidote to Brooks.
Far too many people are far too delicate about this. The Republican Party is completely mad, and it has been going in that direction for a very long time. It has been raving through all the halls of all the governments, large and small, like a lost soul with a big knife. The symptoms of the enveloping disease have been obvious for decades, ever since Ronald Reagan served up the first helping of monkey brains in 1976, when he nearly wrested the party’s nomination from Gerald Ford. It is full-blown now, and it is general throughout the Republic. The Republican Party has infected every institution with its own private insanity.
It did not begin with Donald Trump, god knows. It was there when Bob Dole, who is looked upon now with nostalgic fondness, declared that he represented all those people who didn’t vote for Bill Clinton, an unprecedented public statement by the leader of an opposition party. It was there when various influential Republicans met on the night of Barack Obama’s inauguration and declared open warfare against his agenda before they even knew what it was, and this in the middle of the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression. It was there when they meddled in the care of Terri Schiavo and it is there in their pathological insistence that supply-side economics works. It cost Merrick Garland a seat on the Supreme Court. And it was the direct cause of the election of the current president*.
88 days...
Friday, Aug 7, 2020 · 5:53:04 PM +00:00
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xaxnar
UPDATE: Bonus Pierce commentary on Brooks from 2017.
Come on in, I said. Moral Hazard, the Irish setter owned for photo op purposes by New York Times columnist David Brooks, stood dripping and shivering in my foyer. I half-filled his dog bowl with Jameson and he took it down in several big gulps.
"I had to get out," he said. "It was starting to get crazy down there. Master's off the rails and there's nothing anybody can do about it. He walks around, day and night, mumbling to himself, saying weird stuff about community and prosciutto. People are starting to wonder. Douthat, the former houseboy, jumps into closets now when he sees him coming and Stephens, the new one, hides behind the sofa. Nobody wants to listen to 15 minutes on how Edmund Burke's Reflections warned us against radicalism and balsamic vinegar. I mean, OK, hear it once and it's interesting but around the third time, you want to talk about hockey."
I was horrified. I'd never seen him like this, even on the days when he'd sneak me into the Young Fogies Club through the kitchen door at the top of the fire escape. There was great despair in his eyes and bits of Milk Bones in his teeth. He picked up the dish and waved it toward the whiskey bottle...