In his New York Times column today, David Brooks, a leading soi-disant conservative intellectual, purports to write a letter to a young man who is dismayed at the current Republican Party.
Brooks says, yes, he understands; he, too has been disgusted by the GOP. Ever since Sarah Palin. (Lots of readers sneered at him for his long-term memory gap.)
Brooks continues, offering a pitch for the GOP:
We either have two responsible political parties in this country or we do not. And it will be reforming Republicans, with your energies and ideas, that determine the outcome.
The Republican Party is going to hold a lot of power in the years ahead. Even with a losing candidate at the top of the ticket, the GOP managed to pick up 12 House seats in 2020. It is possible that the Republicans will control the House and the Senate in just two years.
Yeah, oh yeah. Sure, David. Who doesn’t mention the quality of those House pick-ups, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, a key member of what Nicolle Wallace just called “the QAnon wing of the Republican Party.”
Then he summarizes the Democratic Party:
The Democrats have become the party of the educated metropolitan class. There will always be a lot of Americans who do not share the interests or values of that class and they tend to vote Republican.
Is this how anyone views the Democratic Party? Does Brooks stand on his head while he’s writing this stuff?
Somewhere in his mind-boggling pitch for conservatism, Brooks explains to this young Republican friend of his the core of the new Republican/conservative dynamic. You know, the reason why the Republican Party is “going to hold a lot of power.” Because — remember, he’s writing to a young Republican friend — here are the crucial things the GOP is going to have to handle:
Are you dedicated to the ideas that are at the heart of current conservatism: the need to hold off the China threat; the need to restrain the power of cultural elites and centralized government; the need to build an economy that functions for the working class.
Huh? Huhuhuhuhuh, etc?
I, for one, am not sitting around pondering the threat of China.
I, for one, am not shivering over the unrestrained power of cultural elites. Since I don’t know who Brooks is talking about, I certainly can’t attribute to “them” unrestrained power. The only unrestrained power I’m sure of is Big Money.
I don’t want to restrain centralized government. The catastrophe we’re in now is because our centralized government was hollowed out by Trump. Only a strong centralized government can manage disasters like a pandemic, climate change, economic devastation, hunger, homelessness, and on and on.
And Brooks has the chutzpah to suggest the heart of the GOP must be building “an economy that functions for the working class”????? What working class is he talking about? The hedge fund working class?
Brooks is what passes for an intellectual in conservatism. He is both shallow and delusional.