The Other McCain

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.