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?
