Clay Risen once described David Brooks this way:
Brooks has a good sense of humor and an incisive wit. He is ruthless in his depiction of the vagaries and contradictions of Bobo culture (“they want an oven capacity of 8 cubic feet minimum, just to show they are the sort of people who could roast a bison if necessary”). The problem is that he doesn’t know how to turn that wit into anything that might support his conclusion, which, oddly, seems to be that despite their shallow materialism, wishy-washy politics and narrow careerism, the Bobos are really a great bunch of people who “have the ability to go down in history as the class that led America into another golden age.”
That was part of a review of Brooks’s 2000-released book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. It’s twelve years later now, and there are many things that Brooks still has not learned. For example, he still thinks that Golden and Gilded Age can be used interchangeably. Yet, he is beginning to show small signs of understanding. Today’s column is ostensibly about “opossum Republicans.” These are moderate Republicans, like Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar, who abandon all moderation in a desperate struggle to survive as viable politicians in the modern Republican Party.
It’s not honorable to adjust your true nature in order to win re-election. It’s not honorable to kowtow to the extremes so you can preserve your political career.
Indeed, it is sometimes better to resign in protest than to compromise your core beliefs. It is one thing to hang on in the hope that you can reform the party from within. But, to do that, you have to retain your core principles and fight for them.
The wingers call their Republican opponents RINOs, or Republican In Name Only. But that’s an insult to the rhino, which is a tough, noble beast. If RINOs were like rhinos, they’d stand up to those who seek to destroy them. Actually, what the country needs is some real Rhino Republicans. But the professional Republicans never do that. They’re not rhinos. They’re Opossum Republicans. They tremble for a few seconds then slip into an involuntary coma every time they’re challenged aggressively from the right.
Brooks seems to have picked up the scent of danger. Born into a Jewish family in Manhattan exactly one week after the president was born in Kenya Honolulu, Brooks has done his best to fit in. And, much like the president, he’s been tremendously successful. He even became the champion of bourgeois values, which isn’t what you’d predict from a nice Jewish boy from Stuyvesant Town. There he is on the PBS Newshour, or on Meet the Press, extolling a form of respectable conservatism even as he watches it be devoured by the Palins and Becks and Limbaughs and Koch Brothers of the world.
He watches as latinos are demonized, blacks are vilified, gays are discriminated against, and women face an assault on their birth control and bodily integrity. And something stirs within his soul. Perhaps it recalls Yeats:
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Did that seem strangely inappropriate? Okay, then. Let’s see what Brooks is about.
Leaders of a party are supposed to educate the party, to police against its worst indulgences, to guard against insular information loops. They’re supposed to define a creed and establish boundaries. Republican leaders haven’t done that. Now the old pious cliché applies:
First they went after the Rockefeller Republicans, but I was not a Rockefeller Republican. Then they went after the compassionate conservatives, but I was not a compassionate conservative. Then they went after the mainstream conservatives, and there was no one left to speak for me.
Yes, he went there, all the way to Godwin and back. He’s riffing off Pastor Martin Niemöller. Niemöller was jailed by the Nazis in 1937.
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
So, Brooks can now see the signs? A race-based party that obsesses about fertility, hates homosexuality, espouses a hyper-nationalism, and that plays on the majority’s fears and anxieties to maintain its power?
Is David Brooks feeling like that frog who waited too long in the heated pot?
Good, thoughtful piece Booman. Thanks. (Though James Fallows will never forgive that last line.)
Sadly, based on his track record over the past decade, I’d expect Brooks’ next column to be a scathing attack on Obama, or a righteous defense of Rick Santorum (or Mitt Romney, whichever one wins Michigan today). The man has the uncanny (and unnerving in one who does not suffer from amnesia) ability to forget his last column and write something wildly contradictory in the next one.
Paychecks can have that effect on people.
Yeah, but his paychecks come from the Sulzbergers. By contrast, Jeff Jacoby is a longtime conservative columnist for the Boston Globe. There’s a consistency about Jacoby’s writing and his views that one doesn’t get from Brooks.
Both are “reasonable” conservatives. Both write columns with which I occasionally agree. Both (Jacoby more than Brooks) write columns in which I can appreciate their reasoning even if I don’t agree with it. But only Brooks does this teasing dance between telling the truth of what the Republican Party has become, and swearing abject fealty to said party.
You do know where Bobo’s paychecks came from before he got that sweet NYT gig, right?
The simple fact is that the Republicans embraced “teh crazy” in 1979, when the Moral Majority convinced them it was the key to power, and it’s worked for them ever since. Teh crazy has gotten more and more crazier because the shtick doesn’t go over like it used to. Barack Obama was the last straw. But now it’s too late.
In 1979 it was like “Fly, my pretties!” Karl Rove spent years as happy as a pig in sh-t. The GOP developed a whole repertoire of manipulating these forces, and at the same time a very deep dependence on them. Now that their pretties have turned against them there’s not much they can do except throw money and hope it will accomplish something. But the Koch Brothers also have money. Shelly Adelson has money. It’s out of control.
I should worry?
He fulminates like this twice a year, then goes back to attacking liberals for destroying the country by buying organic vegetables.
Yes, this is his bi-annual column vainly worrying about the worrisome postures of his ideological fellow-travelers and employers. In this way he can pretend to have earned bi-partisan cred and so lecture us on “bourgeois paternalism”. This man is not to be taken seriously at any time, ever.
Bigger than most, but two by two by two is one small bison.
Is David Brooks feeling like that frog who waited too long in the heated pot?
I think Brooks has already been boiled alive.
So, per Our Mr. Bobo the party’s new motto is “”Quando omni flunkus moritati”??
They’ll need more duct tape.
“Indeed, it is sometimes better to resign in protest than to compromise your core beliefs. It is one thing to hang on in the hope that you can reform the party from within. But, to do that, you have to retain your core principles and fight for them.”
OH REALLY? Then I suppose, Booman, that your core beliefs include going to war with Iran and Syria, keeping the Afghan war going, protecting the banks from prosecution, spying on American citizens and interning or assassinating them without due process, ramping up the drug war and incarcerating more people than any other country in the world, deporting a record number of immigrants, and allowing torturers to walk free. As long as you retain access to the White House.
But hey, at least you’re not like a Nazi or anything. Oh, wait.
Does he qualify as a mainstream conservative in the current environment? I don’t even know what that means anymore.
Why does Brooks’s whining about opossums remind me of some progressive Democratic whining?
Can this be? Is there a slight sign of change?
Does Bobo have the sads? Maybe time for him to fire up that oven and cook him some bison. Maybe invite George Will over to a reading of Allen Ginsburg or Neal Cassady. Sip a little wine over some far-out jazz? Put on that black-ribbed sweater and beret.
Calling the host a Nazi would be perfectly legitimate use of the ban hammer.
Nobody would miss such a person’s “contribution” anyway.