Nanny state, bad. Nanny head of state, good. David Brooks, the worst.
By 
Hello.
Are you enjoying your day? If you are, do not fuck it up with David Brooks’ latest word load. He emits Deep Thoughts about how former U.N. Secretary Nikki Haley can save the Republican Party from its archenemy, Republican voters. But if your gruntle is already dissed, watching this lunkhead not solve his problem might distract you for a few moments.
You see, Brooks and his shitty friends who are either never trump but also never any Democrat, or what Roy Edroso calls “just the tip trumpers (xitter link)” are ISO a Republican savior. Again.
They’ve been looking around for the candidate they can support and give their dollars to, somebody who is an antidote to Donald Trump and who can win a general election.
The problem Brooks and his friends want to ignore out of existence is that Republican voters and GOP leadership have made it clear they do not want a cure for their trumpriapism. But if Brooks n’ Pals want to burn their money, I can only say stop, don’t, come back. ;-)
We’ve had endless conversations about who this person might be.
The original draft of The Inferno includes a tenth circle. There the damned listen to Brooks n’ Pals play Fantasy President for eternity. Dante cut it because it was too horrific.
Wednesday’s debate illustrated the cancer that is eating away at the Republican Party.
We know the cancer is the Republican Party. Brooks is pretending it is something else, which is not how you cure cancer.
It’s not just Trumpian immorality. The real disease is narcissistic hucksterism. The real danger is that he’s creating generations of people, like Vivek Ramaswamy, who threaten to dominate the G.O.P. for decades to come.
The Brooksian wing of the Republican Party is also suffering from blindness caused by relentless chicken fucking. There are two main camps in the party now. One camp is going to follow trump until he dies, and likely after. The other claims it wants its party back but won’t admit it helped create the first camp and the party it allegedly lost.
If Trump emerged from the make-believe world of pro wrestling, Ramaswamy emerges from the make-believe world of social media and the third-rate sectors of the right-wing media sphere.
That’s a weird way to describe yet another rich jackass. Especially when the describer’s political party insists the wealthy deserve:
- Tax breaks, tax breaks, tax breaks and more tax breaks.
- Endless worship from supplicant job takers.
- A throne made of the bones of union members and their children.
His statements are brisk, in-your-face provocations intended to produce temporary populist dopamine highs. It’s all performative show. Ramaswamy seems as uninterested in actually governing as his idol.
Again, someone follows wealthy duds around crooning “Crush Story” like a bunch of weirdos, and it is not the liberals. But as a result when one of the zillions of mouthy twerps who think they shit rainbows gets extremely rich, Very Serious People who breathe the rarefied air of their splenic flexure find it hard to ignore them. Feathers will be ruffled.
And I don’t mean the chickens’.
Republicans have been unable to take down Trump because they haven’t been able to rebut and replace the core Trump/Ramaswamy ethos — that politics is essentially a form of entertainment.
Pretending that the Republicans who worship trump and don’t want to take him down aren’t Republicans (or don’t exist?) is one way Brooks demonstrates his determination to avoid solutions to his problem.
And when he announces Haley as the next Republican savior he shows off another.
But Wednesday’s debate persuaded me that the best Trump alternative is not Scott, it’s Nikki Haley. Nothing against Scott; he just didn’t show the specific kind of power and force needed to bring down Trump. Haley showed more than a glimpse of that power.
A woman of color with enough power and force to bring down trump and break the GOP’s grip on what he represents would have the power to turn Republicans into pillars of salt with a thought. In fact, that is the only way she could do it.
And Brooks would be midway through a column on the incivility of it all when Twing! Salt pillar. But Brooks doesn’t want her to have that much power. He wants to indulge that weird fantasy where a no nonsense lady sails in, makes all the naughty children behave, makes everything perfect and give the good children a spoonful of compassionate conservatism with their medicine.
For you younger folks – compassionate conservatism means conservatives try to look solemn when they pass bills and enact policies that will kill you. Now they just laugh like the members of a cut-rate Legion of Doom.
But time and again, Haley seemed to look at the Trump/Ramaswamy wing and implicitly say: You children need to stop preening and deal with reality. She showed total impatience for the kind of bravado that the fragile male ego manufactures by the boatload.
We all know how much Republicans love to be told what to do by anyone. Especially people they don’t regard as full humans, real Americans and combinations of the two.
As an aside, when a man divorces the woman he’s been married to for nearly three decades for a woman who is nearly three decades old, that isn’t fragile male ego. That’s God-given hormones.
Brooks goes on, listing all of the ways that Haley is a better candidate and human being and sentient life form than trump. And she is. Yes, it is an extremely low bar, but she clears it without breaking a sweat. And that’s why even if she was a white cishet man with a Bible glued to one hand, she wouldn’t have a fucking chance against trump.
The candidate who can bring down Emperox Petite Pattes is not a better person than he is. It is someone the Republican base wants more. That means someone who is just as white, just as male and significantly flashier and grosser, whinier and crueler.
We have evidence of this preference in the unpleasant and moist form of Gov. Ron DeSantis. He has ruthlessly persecuted transgender Floridians, kidnapped immigrants, signed one of the strictest abortion bans in the country and flapped around croaking “Woke” like an evil raven.
Meanwhile, TFG has trundled around accumulating indictments, emitting rage, begging for money.
Ron can’t get close enough to see his dust, much less eat it.
I’m not au courant with the flashy, trashy, fashy scene, so I don’t have any suggestions for who could fit the bill. Is that suburban cowpoker Kid Rock still hot?
Anyway, Brooks finishes up in a truly Brooksian blaze of obliviousness.
My largest question about Haley is: Does she know what year it is?
Says the man who talks like he fell into a cave when Regan was elected and didn’t emerge until right after tRump was elected.
The most interesting exchange of the night was between Ramaswamy and Mike Pence. Ramaswamy, to his credit, was talking about the nation’s mental health crisis and the national identity crisis that lies beneath it. Pence waved away all that talk about the loss of meaning and purpose as so much woo-woo and argued that the real problem is that government is not as good as the people. Pence, like many in the field, is still living in the age of Reagan, or at the latest, the Tea Party.
The ages that predated, but in Brooks’ view, have nothing to do with the party’s trumpocene.
They haven’t reoriented their focus to the sorts of concerns that are most important to heartland voters without a college degree.
Just say the Republican base. But based on that voting block’s voting patterns, one candidate knows exactly what they care about. Brooks doesn’t like it, but who can blame them for not giving a shit what he wants?
They don’t understand why the old Republican orthodoxy was so fragile in the face of Trump. They haven’t faced the new realities that have emerged this century.
How and why the party of bigotry, venality and selfishness sent a short fingered vulgarian to the White House. Truly a mystery for people devoted to ignoring the obvious.
People who post off-topic comments think David Brooks is the wisest political thinker of all time.
