You get the joke, right? Well, may be not. As a rule, I'll excise some sentence or two from a pundit's pronouncement, put it in the Sigs pile and use it, or not, in the Thoughts section. These days, I'm finding more than I can use on the once-a-week schedule.
One of my pet peeves is David Brooks, who along with some others, presents as the Respectable Republican not-a-MAGAnaut. Not really. And today's (dead trees division) column is so full of baloney, he gets a regular
entry, in which he seeks to blame the folks who bothered to get edumacated (and, of course their parents who saw to it). I've said it before in these essays: the redneck shitkickers are poor, stupid, unhealthy, and envious for the simple reason they keep electing politicians who spend their every working moment feeding these rednecks bullshit that they're being actively abused by the northern/city folk who don't value their Traditional Ways. A euphemism for overt racism.
So, let's start somewhere with Brooks
Well, starting about 60 years ago, a group variously labeled the Bobos or the creative class began establishing hegemony over commanding institutions of American life — the universities, the media, the foundations, publishing and entertainment. There are two things you should know about this class. First, like most groups, its members dislike intellectual diversity and tend to impose a stifling progressive orthodoxy in the places they dominate. Second, more than most groups, they see themselves as the moral uplifters of society, on everything from environmental attitudes to sexual ethics, and enjoy preaching in order to enlighten their morally backward countrymen.
There you have it: progressives are the problem. Like hell they are. And, by the bye, the Right Wingnuts are far more strident with their fellow travelers. By a mile; just Hang Mike Pence. Earlier in the piece, Brooks says this
If America elected a populist as president, you would expect him to devote his administration to addressing these inequities, to boosting the destinies of working-class Americans. But that's not what President Trump is doing. He seems to have no plans to narrow the education chasms, no plans to narrow the health outcome chasms or the family structure chasms. He has basically no plans to revive the communities that have been decimated by postindustrialization.
In the first place, addressing those inequalities is exactly what the FDR Dems have been trying to do, with no help from the so-called conservatives. I sense a major league level of projection.
With a few sentences he put the blame where it belongs: on the rednecks who continue to elect politicians (starting at the Top) who exploit their dumb as a sack of hair persecution complex (yes the educated elite are better than you, and very many of them are the ones trying to lift you up, but you're small minded ingrates), The simple fact is: it's been the progressives who've pointed the finger at the existential issues, not the rednecks and their politicians. In a few paragraphs, as most dissemblers, he tries to have it both ways.
He goes on to lament the left-ish tilt of the educated class. Well, d'uh!! The so-called conservative class is driven by a single principle: the Rich ain't Rich Enough. You see this in Kim Don-Felon and his Merry Band of Fascists (so says
this Tesla investor)'s tax giveaway from 2016 and, likely, 2024. The right wingnuts assert there exist no social goods, only profit-making enterprises. Laissez faire on speed. And they always feed the rednecks in the shithole domestic countries race baiting themes. If you're not into race baiting blamesmanship, where ya gonna go? To the nattering nabobs of negativism of course. You can only fix a problem if you, at first, recognize that it exists.
Many of them are not pro-conservative; they are anti-left. There's a big difference. They do not focus on building and reforming the civic institutions that conservatives believe are crucial to any healthy society.
It would help his argument if he simply ennumerated (which he can't) what those (different from what the progs list) institutions are. And how relying on those institutions promotes a higher standard of commonweal. He can't simply because such effort is nowhere in the lifeblood of an American conservative.
He closes the piece
I'm not a fan of populism, but real populism would be better than the right-wing elite nihilists who are running the country now.
Of course, that's a self-contradictory sentence. There is no real populism, of the right wing sort, other than what we see. Trumpism is just as bankrupt as, and identical in structure to, all the other Populists going back at least to Mussolini and Hitler. Real populism, not
Huey Long, is truly what progressives abide: increasing the commonweal.
He won't admit that, because to do so he'd have to shitcan the Prime Directive of the Conservative Class: all that matters is that the Rich ain't rich enough and we need to fix that.
