David Brooks's latest experiment in detoxified masculinity is called: Why Trump Voters Stick With Him: An imagined conversation with Flyover Man.
Unfortunately, like most of his columns, the vague generalizations of non-coastal populations resembles a sophomoric version of the NY Times’s attempts to sample Trump voters’ opinions. This time the caricature of “flyover country” as the Trumpian “forgotten men” seems strangely anachronistic, even for Brooks.
There are cultists who vote for Trump, not Trump voters.
Brooks still imagines himself a centrist who confuses “moderate” ideologies with median voters and believes himself to be a true conservative, because Trump is merely a “sociopath”.
One imagines Brooks being hired to write the remake of Big Trouble. because Dave Barry knows it would be a fool’s errand.
Flyover Man: I haven’t really had time to look into it. There’s always some fight between Trump and the East Coast media. I guess I just try to stay focused on the big picture.
The big picture is this: We knew this guy was a snake when we signed up. But he was the only one who saw us. He was the only one who saw that the America we love is being transformed in front of our eyes. Good jobs for hard-working people were gone. Our communities in tatters. Our kids in trouble. I had one shot at change, so I made a deal with the devil, and you’d have made it, too.
Nothing in this impeachment mess makes me rethink this bargain. If people like you are unable to acknowledge my dignity and see my problems, I’ll stay with Trump.
[...]
F.M.: Fine. Bottom line: I would be open to impeachment if you cared about my problems. I’d be open if all those silent Republican dissenters in the Senate had given me some G.O.P. alternative candidate who speaks our language and addresses our issues. I’d be open if there was a moderate Democratic Party that I thought deserved a shot. But I only see Democrats who’d make everything worse: Open the border! Socialism! More power to Washington! You could have paid attention to the forces driving Trumpism, but you ignored us.
So please don’t ask us to sign up for our own obliteration or support your impeachment. This is about identity and pride.
Here’s a confession. I used to think Trump was a jerk. Now, after three years of battle, I see him as my captain. He deserves my loyalty, thick and thin.
See ya’ in hell, brother.
The IntraWebz responded with a roar:
Friday, Oct 4, 2019 · 6:24:29 PM +00:00 · annieli
I have dragged you down this long road to make this one, very simple point: David Brooks has never written about his Republican Party as it actually exists. In fact, David Brooks is not, in any meaningful way, remotely interested in his Republican Party as it actually exists at all. Mr. Brook entire career is predicated on pandering to the creepy political delusions of a handful of provincial, cloistered plutocrats who desperately want to believe the fairy tales Mr. Brooks whispers to them from the op-ed page of The New York Times.
[...]
... I was completely unsurprised to see this is the headline staring back at me from America's Newspaper of Record today:
Why Trump Voters Stick With Him
An imagined conversation with Flyover Man.
By David Brooks
Opinion Columnist
Which was, floor-to-ceiling, nothing but lazy Beltway Dry Heave fiction like this:
Urban Guy: I hope you read the rough transcript of that Trump phone call with the Ukrainian president. Trump clearly used public power to ask a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his political opponent. This is impeachable. I don’t see how you can deny the facts in front of your face.
Flyover Man: I haven’t really had time to look into it. There’s always some fight between Trump and the East Coast media. I guess I just try to stay focused on the big picture.
Because when it comes to American politics, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times does not have the slightest fucking idea what he's talking about and never has.
Instead, he has made himself a rich and influential man by enthralling a small cohort of rich, gullible idiots with toxic fairy tales of an Imaginary Republican Party that is as purely fictional as stories of Atlantis or Barsoom. And thus it was today that, in the short but dense tradition of the Beltway media's favorite new genre of fiction -- Magic Ruralism (™) -- Mr. David Brooks has once again spared himself the agony of figuring out what's actually going on among humans living in flyover country and has instead reached right up his own ass and plucked out a little dab of godawful Beltway Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about how things would be if David Brooks were king.
And despite the fact that we Libtards have been to the other side of that mountain and have faithfully reported for decades on the real doing of real Republicans out here in the Real World, the Beltway media corporations that underwrite frauds like David Brooks are simply unwilling to give up on the toxic product Mr. Brooks has been selling to their readers under their brand for decades.
And that, boys and girls, is how political journalism in America died.
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