There’s not much to enjoy about our economic collapse and all the battles between liberals trying to do something about it and conservatives kicking dust up over missing their opportunity to remake this nation into a feudal state, but I have to say that seeing David Brooks naked and exposed is pretty damn fun. His anger after Bobby Jindal’s speech. The barely-concealed rage of a weenie trying to pretend his feathers aren’t ruffled. He’s like a cat who fell in the toilet while trying to drink deeply from it, and is trying to pretend he meant to do that. It’s a beautiful thing.
You wouldn’t know it some days, but there are moderates in this country — moderate conservatives, moderate liberals, just plain moderates. We sympathize with a lot of the things that President Obama is trying to do. We like his investments in education and energy innovation. We support health care reform that expands coverage while reducing costs.
The faux moderate act was a lot more fun during the Bush administration, when you could see “moderate” by mere virtue of occasionally saying something reality-related, if not entirely all there. I don’t think Brooks ever really fooled anyone into thinking that he was anything but a solid conservative of the 21st century uber-wanker variety, but I also have no doubt he sat around very pleased to have fooled us all. At best, he got some people to think he was reasonable, people who mistake tone and obvious weenieness for thoughtfulness. But the fun’s just gone out of it. You can tell that he can tell that we can tell he’s just paying lip service to the Obama agenda, because coming right out against education, green energy, and health care reform in this political climate means that you can’t fake the moderation thing. But one does wonder if soon Brooks will have to apologize to Rush Limbaugh for the implied insult in the word “moderate”.
But the Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once.
“Promiscuous” and “revolutionary”, huh? Say what you will about Brooks, he blows a dog whistle harder than anyone. I had a moment of picturing Pelosi barefoot with flowers in her hair and Obama wearing hemp clothing and smoking weed while listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival myself.
So programs are piled on top of each other and we wind up with a gargantuan $3.6 trillion budget. We end up with deficits that, when considered realistically, are $1 trillion a year and stretch as far as the eye can see. We end up with an agenda that is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new.
And it’s on! Having lulled the morons by self-identifying as a “moderate”, Brooks is ready to dump hysterical right wing nonsense that is rhetorically indistinguishable from some 50s-era red-baiting pamphlet. He’s never been as good at hiding his hard right inclinations as he thinks he is—-particularly with his hero worship of crazed red state fundies and racist rednecks who are reborn in his eyes as the salt of the earth—-but this is particularly bent in the mad ravings department. This is illiterate right wing blog stuff, to pretend that the government just discovered spending money yesterday. To make absolutely sure I wasn’t crazy and missing some kind of “moderation” in his column due to insufficient coffee consumption, I did a command-F search for the word “Iraq”. Indeed, like most full-blown wingnuts, Brooks appears to think that the Iraq War was conducted entirely for free. To be fair, there was nothing new about that social experiment, which was called “colonialism” in more honest times, but then again, there’s nothing new about spending money to improve the state of your own nation or to relieve the woes of a massive depression. I do believe a famous “experiment” of the sort has happened within the past century.
The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment.
Americans are blessedly free of class resentment? That’s not what the author of the book Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class And How They Got There thinks. In fact, the author appears to think class resentments are so strong that they can be used to get working and middle class red state Americans to vote against their own financial interests just to stick it to the yappity, college-educated, latte-drinking, Whole Foods-shopping urban yuppie middle class that votes Democrat. True, there’s not much of an income divide between many of the “upper class” Americans that he held out for ridicule and our salt-of-the-earth redneck cousins who often make more than us and live in cheaper areas. But there is a Whole Foods gap, and that’s the sort of class divisions you can bank a party’s prospects on.
Needless to say, the author—-who claims that we were classless until a month ago—-was David Brooks. He’s unaware of American history of the past century or decade, but he’s also unaware of his own personal history.
The U.S. has always been a decentralized nation, skeptical of top-down planning. Yet, the current administration concentrates enormous power in Washington, while plan after plan emanates from a small group of understaffed experts.
He goes on like this at a clip. It’s pretty amusing, as I’ve said. He repeatedly claims that he’s a “moderate” while indulging hysterics like this, hoping that by repetition it will feel true. Maybe by his next column, 50% of the words will be “moderate” in order to conceal the fact that he’s started to rave about the New World Order and the black helicopters coming to get him. This must be painful for him. Despite his faux admiration for bug-eyed right wing nuts, despite his willingness to quote bona fide white supremacists on the pages of the NY Times, I think Brooks really looks down on these people and hopes to look better and more “moderate” because he slides around in silk socks in expensive loafers. But now the Obama administration has shown small amounts of willingness to actually do what they were voted in to do, and Brooks is finding the magnetic desire to slap a Confederate flag on his car and start raving about how Obama is going to take all his guns. And the word “moderate” has become a tailsman against this horrid and unclassy-in-a-classless society fate.
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Well, but Sailer is a moderate white supremacist—he doesn’t believe in enslaving all nonwhites at once.