Category: David Brooks Fisking Day

This news is perhaps not shocking to regular readers of the New York Times‘ token “conservative” columnist, but if we ever needed smoking-gun proof, his column today is like RINO fingerprints covered with country-club DNA:

I’m registering a protest because for someone of my Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective, the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand. . . .
The Republican growth agenda — tax cuts and nothing else — is stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible. . . .
Republican politicians don’t design policies to meet specific needs, or even to help their own working-class voters. They use policies as signaling devices — as ways to reassure the base that they are 100 percent orthodox and rigidly loyal. Republicans have taken a pragmatic policy proposal from 1980 and sanctified it as their core purity test for 2012. . . .
If there were a Hamiltonian Party, it would be offering a multifaceted reinvigoration agenda. It would grab growth ideas from all spots on the political spectrum and blend them together. Its program would be based on the essential political logic: If you want to get anything passed, you have to offer an intertwined package that smashes the Big Government vs. Small Government orthodoxies and gives everybody something they want. . . .

You can read the whole thing, which I think you will agree constitutes conclusive proof of the utter uselessness of David Brooks. From time to time, as a sort of accidental consequence of the Law of Large Numbers, Brooks will criticize liberals from a conservative perspective — the blind pig finding an acorn, as it were. Yet when push comes to shove, Brooks habitually tries to push Republicans toward a Democrat Lite agenda of Big Government. Continue reading BREAKING: David Brooks Is a Douchebag →

My apologies for neglecting my regular “David Brooks Fisking Day” duties for several months. Perhaps I’ll have to start outsourcing this task. The NYT’s house “conservative” has published a pretentious new book, The Social Animal, which gets completely dismantled by Will Wilkinson at Forbes:

Brooks supplies neither drama, high emotion, nor the mindbending metaphysics of aging without time. He serves up instead a shapeless story of ruling-class, Davos-goers so tedious, so lacking in passion and intensity, one begins to hope Harry and Erica will be pursued by proletarian lynch-mobs, revealed as rubber fetishists, or at least stranded at sea one ominous afternoon on a friend’s yacht, just so one may be sure these cardboard cutouts have functioning cardboard hearts. . . .
It’s easy to see the appeal of a spoonful of human interest to make the medicine of science go down. And it would be easy to forgive Brooks the insipidity of his characters and the tedium of his tale if he really delivered on his promised synthesis of the paradigm-busting sciences of the mind, but he delivers only a muddle. . . .
The story of Harold and Erica does not really illustrate a new, coherent, science-based theory of human nature. It is a bowl hammered from Brooks’ philosophic predilections into which a jumbled stew of scientific anecdotes is poured. And it is not good stew. . . .

Read the whole brutal thing, which is nearly enough to make me regret having previously urged the arrest of Wilkinson, a “scofflaw dopehead” whom my confidential sources suspect of having commited fornication with Kerry Howley. 

Despite Wilkinson’s obvious criminal tendencies, however, I think we can agree that a man who despises David Brooks can’t be all bad. So when America’s law-enforcement community finally awakes to the looming menace of reefer-crazed libertarians — after a joint task force led by the Iowa City SWAT unit raids Wilkinson’s home, tasers him, and hauls him away to jail — I hereby offer to testify as a character witness at Will’s trial.

No one — not David Frum, not Conor Friedersdorf, not even Charles Johnson — has been the source of more genuine evil in American politics than David Brooks. His 1997 paean to big government Republicanism, “A Return to National Greatness,” was a blueprint for the abandonment of Reaganite principles.

“National Greatness” was sort of a Protocols of the Learned Elders of RINO, helping pave the intellectual way toward “Compassionate Conservatism,” No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drug coverage and everything else loathsome about Bush-era Republican policy.

Brooks considered it a “damned outrage” when TARP-sucking Bob Bennett got beat in the Utah GOP convention, and in May bemoaned the victory of Rand Paul in the Kentucky Republican primary while also bemoaning the defeat of turncoat Arlen Specter in the Pennsylania Democratic primary:

Yes, well, this is a frustration for me. For people in the center, Arlen Specter is symptomatic of a problem, which is that there is no centrist philosophy. You know, people in the center should be able to say, we have big budget deficits, out of control, and here’s our agenda. . . .
And, yet, the center has not developed that. People who consider themselves moderates have not developed that philosophy. And, so, a lot of people who look like centrists and who seem basically centrist, like Arlen Specter, just seem like opportunists. . . .

Yes, exactly, Mr. Brooks: Specter did seem like an opportunist, because he was an opportunist, just like you. Specter was a vain and unprincipled power-seeker, and you are a vain and unprincipled power-worshipper.

Look how adept you are at trimming your sails to the prevailing winds, Mr. Brooks. When Obama was riding high, you were there to sniff the creases of his pants, and now you’re back to lecture us on behalf of your own opportunistic centrism, “A National Greatness Agenda“:

The country is restive and looking for alternatives. And before the next round of voting begins, I suspect we will see another mass movement: a movement of people who don’t feel represented by either of the partisan orthodoxies; a movement of people who want to fundamentally change the norms, institutions and rigidities that cause our gridlock and threaten our country.

Make book on it: If Republicans stand strong on conservative principles, play shrewd politics, nominate good candidates and capture the Senate and White House in 2012, Brooks will be there after Election Day to lecture the re-ascendant GOP that they should abandon “partisan orthodoxies . . . and rigidities.”

Be careful, Mr. Brooks. After the bloodthirsty Tea Party mobs have finished publicly horsewhipping and stomping Pete Sessions to a bloody pulp, they may come looking for you.

UPDATE: Daniel Larison provides a thorough dissection of the Brooksian Error.

That’s Dan Riehl’s reaction to the latest eruption of elitist idiocy from the “conservative” New York Times columnist:

Let’s imagine a character named Ben. A couple of decades ago, Ben went to high school.
It wasn’t easy. His parents were splitting up. His friends would cut class to smoke weed. His sister got pregnant. But Ben worked hard and graduated with decent grades and then studied at East Stroudsburg University and the University of Phoenix.
That wasn’t easy either. Ben would like to have majored in history, but he needed a skill so he studied hotel management. Others spent their college years partying, but Ben worked hard. After graduation, he got a job with a hotel chain. A few years later, he got a different job and then a different one. . . .

After meandering onward in hypothetical “‘let’s pretend” mode for a while, Brooks finally brings it down to what we might suppose to be his point:

Once there was a group in the political center that would have understood Ben’s outrage. . . .

(As previously noted in another context, this is just retreading Arthur Schlesinger’s misleading and obsolete “Vital Center” thesis, but let’s get back to Brooks and his imaginary “Ben” character.)

So when Ben looked around for leaders who might understand his outrage, he only found them among the ideological hard-liners. In Arkansas, he saw a MoveOn candidate, Bill Halter, crusading against the bailouts and the spoils culture. On the right, he saw the Tea Party candidate Rand Paul crusading against runaway spending and debt. . . .

And so Brooks trundles on to “conclusion” wherein he hopes for “moderates . . . to revive and define the free labor tradition.” Just more rainbows-and-unicorns wishful thinking by the least insightful political columnist in American history.

What Brooks does not seem to grasp is that there can be no “moderate” compromise between defenders of a free-market economy and Democrats who are implacably hostile to economic freedom. By his “pox on both your houses” stance, Brooks suggests a moral equivalence that permits Democrats to claim that they must protect America from the “extremist” threat on the Right.

There is no “Vital Center.” There never was any such thing. Arthur Schlesinger cooked up that propaganda concept in the midst of a rightward backlash during the Truman era as a way of portraying conservatives as extremists. The only purpose “Vital Center” rhetoric has ever served is the purpose for which it was conceived — to encourage Republicans to follow the continued leftward drift of the Democratic Party.

And why the hell does Brooks need to create imaginary voters for the purposes of political argument, when Pennsylvania’s 12th District is less than a four-hour drive from David Brooks’s D.C. home and a flight from Dulles to Louisville can be booked online for under $300? Interviewing actual voters, however, might disabuse Brooks of his preconceived notions, to which he clings with the frightened tenacity of a 3-year-old hugging her favorite teddy bear.

David Brooks represents a fatal cancer to American journalism. He should be loaded onto an Air Force C-130 and air-dropped over Waziristan, without a parachute.

By the way, I’m sorry I missed David Brooks Fisking Day on its regular Tuesday schedule. I was kinda busy Tuesday.

As a general rule, when Matthew Yglesia leaps to your defense, that’s an ironclad guarantee that you’re wrong, but this latest Brooks column is actually quite good. 

I figure Brooks is sandbagging, setting us up for his next column, which will exceed every imaginable dimension of suckiness.

So the market impact of that Greek debt crisis is probably overrated. Wall Street trembles in fear of the next Brooks column.