DAVID BROOKS MORPHED INTO GARRISON KEILLOR SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: PBS Mourns a Month Of ‘Ivy League Right-Wing Nihilism.’
PBS News Hour host Amna Nawaz, Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart, and New York Times columnist David Brooks came together on Friday to mourn the first month of Donald Trump 2.0. Together, the trio would lament the supposed lack of “guardrails” that is allowing Trump to run “roughshod” over the government in pursuit of “Ivy League right-wing nihilism.”
Nawaz began with Capehart, “Can I just get both of you to briefly weigh in on this? Because we’re nearing one month into the Trump presidency. Is it clear to you where the guardrails are, Jonathan?”
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Brooks further accused Trump of being concerned with the wrong things, “Donald Trump was elected by those people. You’d think he’d care enough about them to do something on behalf of the people who elected him. Instead, he’s going after, you know, USAID. He’s going after any place he thinks there might be liberal people with college degrees.”
The idea of trimming the bureaucracy is a Republican idea that predates Trump, but Brooks has never been completely onboard with even that pre-Trump version of the GOP, so it was hard to take his next point too seriously, “And so what we’re seeing is not populism. What we’re seeing is a sort of Ivy League right-wing nihilism. And, to me, that is so disorienting and so shocking and so appalling that you can’t even serve the legitimate needs of the people who put you in power. They’re totally off the board this last month.”
A decade and a half before being airbrushed out of history by his fellow leftists in the #metoo era, Garrison Keillor had a similar rant about George W. Bush’s supporters:
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.
Brooks will never learn, will he?
Last week, in assessing the rise of Donald Trump, New York Times columnist David Brooks engaged in an uncharacteristic bit of self-reflection:
“Trump voters,” he wrote, “are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else. Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.” (Emphasis added.)
Well, it’s a lesson for a lot of people in the punditocracy, of whom Brooks — who famously endorsed Barack Obama after viewing his sharply creased pants — is just one. And if Brooks et al. had paid attention, the roots of the Trump phenomenon wouldn’t have been so difficult to fathom.
Brooks is, of course, horrified at Trump and his supporters, whom he finds childish, thuggish and contemptuous of the things that David Brooks likes about today’s America. It’s clear that he’d like a social/political revolution that was more refined, better-mannered, more focused on the Constitution and, well, more bourgeois as opposed to in-your-face and working class.
The thing is, we had that movement. It was the Tea Party movement. Unlike Brooks, I actually ventured out to “intermingle” with Tea Partiers at various events that I covered for PJTV.com, contributing commentary to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Examiner. As I reported from one event in Nashville, “Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry — and they are — but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun.
—From Glenn’s March 20th 2016 column in USA Today, “How David Brooks created Donald Trump.”
The Tea Party was fun, but running nice guy candidates like Mitt Romney who cheerfully took their abuse from the DNC-MSM and didn’t punch back twice as hard (as a legendary community activist would say) and played the role of the Washington Generals wasn’t. And it’s curious to see Brooks, who spent his salad days at National Review, the Hoover Institute, the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard isn’t responding well to Trump’s efforts at cutting government waste. But then, Brooks is far from the only alumnus of the Standard to “unexpectedly” find newfound love for Big Brother:
