David Brooks says we're having a moral convulsion.

As usually seems to be the case with David Brooks, there are enough germs of truth and even inspiration here to make you think that maybe this time, he'll make a strong case and reach a forceful conclusion. 

Then you reach the end, and you're still hungry. 

There'll be those on the right who insist the mistrust of which Brooks writes stems from matters like not enough prayer in schools, and of course abortion rights. Conversely, the left will point to racism and the patriarchy preferred by the right. 

And yet, while the first great "shock" may have been Watergate, how can we rationally discuss any of this without taking into the deep dive into capitalism's late-stage cancerous mutations? Brooks tap dances around it, but he doesn't get near this third rail. 

He should. We all should, in fact. 

This said, it's a piece worth your time to read. My advice is to keep expectations low, and sniff out those few nuggets of worth.

America Is Having a Moral Convulsion, by David Brooks (The Atlantic)

Levels of trust in this country—in our institutions, in our politics, and in one another—are in precipitous decline. And when social trust collapses, nations fail. Can we get it back before it’s too late? 

The events of 2020—the coronavirus pandemic; the killing of George Floyd; militias, social-media mobs, and urban unrest—were like hurricanes that hit in the middle of that earthquake. They did not cause the moral convulsion, but they accelerated every trend. They flooded the ravines that had opened up in American society and exposed every flaw. 

Now, as we enter the final month of the election, this period of convulsion careens toward its climax. Donald Trump is in the process of shredding every norm of decent behavior and wrecking every institution he touches. Unable to behave responsibly, unable to protect himself from COVID-19, unable to even tell the country the truth about his own medical condition, he undermines the basic credibility of the government and arouses the suspicion that every word and act that surrounds him is a lie and a fraud. Finally, he threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our democracy in November and incite a vicious national conflagration that would leave us a charred and shattered nation. Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated. 

This essay is an account of the convulsion that brought us to this fateful moment ...

"Don't you feel repression, just closing in around?" Must be time for a GOP conspiracy, says David Brooks.

(Political tunes from Chicago in 1972: "Tear the system down." Note Peter Cetera's chin beard. There was a time, folks -- a time before it became corporate)

As my friend S noted yesterday, "The dumbing down of the Republican Party is hilarious, but it is also really depressing."

When one pauses to consider that from bottom to top, the purportedly "democratic" party's response to GOP foibles is to drift ever further to the right, and to inform me that my only choice is to join in, only one logical conclusion can be reached.

Feel the Bern.

Time for a Republican Conspiracy!, by David Brooks (New York Times)

Members of the Republican governing class are like cowering freshmen at halftime of a high school football game. Some are part of the Surrender Caucus, sitting sullenly on their stools resigned to the likelihood that their team is going to get crushed. Some are thinking of jumping ship to the Trump campaign with an alacrity that would make rats admire and applaud.

Rarely has a party so passively accepted its own self-destruction. Sure, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are now riding high in some meaningless head-to-head polls against Hillary Clinton, but the odds are the nomination of either would lead to a party-decimating general election ...

 ... Worse is the prospect that one of them might somehow win. Very few presidents are so terrible that they genuinely endanger their own nation, but Trump and Cruz would go there and beyond. Trump is a solipsistic branding genius whose “policies” have no contact with Planet Earth and who would be incapable of organizing a coalition, domestic or foreign.

---

Robert Lamm wrote the music and lyrics, and Cetera shares vocals, but this is Terry Kath's song.

On dopey David Brooks and legal dope.

First came David Brooks in the New York Times.

Weed: Been There. Done That.

For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships.

But then we all sort of moved away from it. I don’t remember any big group decision that we should give up weed. It just sort of petered out, and, before long, we were scarcely using it.

And then followed Michelle Goldberg at The Nation.

This Is David Brooks on Drugs

The fact that David Brooks’s wistful, self-satisfied moralism cloaks a serious moral obtuseness is usually hardly worth noting. It’s simply to be expected, as predictable as Tom Friedman bumping into a taxi driver with pithy insights about globalization or Ross Douthat disapproving of his coevals’ sex lives. Still, Brooks’s lament about marijuana legalization is astonishing in its blindness to ruined lives and the human stakes of a serious policy debate. Somehow, he’s written a whole column about the drug war that doesn’t once contain the words “arrest” or “prison.” It’s evidence not just of his own writerly weakness but of the way double standards in the war on drugs shield elites from reckoning with its consequences.

At the third of three publications I commonly peruse, there was more.

Marijuana legalisation: Sort of in defence of David Brooks, by T.N. (The Economist's "Democracy in America" blog)

I FIND today's collective meltdown over David Brooks's bland column on marijuana slightly baffling. My colleague (along with most of the rest of the internet today) is absolutely right to note that Mr Brooks fails to account for the great harms of prohibition, not least the vast racial disparities in arrest and incarceration rates, and the subsequent difficulties for the victims of that injustice in finding work or public housing. It is shameful that a toot of a pipe can trigger consequences like these, and that is why it is such a relief to see parts of America (and other places) taking steps to wind down the war on drugs.

But let's not pretend that relaxing prohibition is cost-free.

I haven't smoked weed for 17 years. What compelled me to quit was an episode during which I accepted the offer of some really good shit in a one-hitter, and found myself deprived of the power of speech for half an hour. If I ever learn who spiked my bowl with animal tranquilizer, there'll be hell to pay. Legalized marijuana with some indication of potency would not be something I purchase very often. If some found its way to my humidor, I'd probably smoke it alone, at home, and refrain from driving.

And play the White Album, for chrissakes. Some things just fit, and just think of all the music released lately that might.

The tragic tedium of teetotal.

An article I was reading last night reminded me:

"Mitt Romney does not drink for religious reasons."

This was vexing, and so I turned immediately to my own scriptures, where W.C. Fields provided the ethical guidance I was so earnestly seeking:

"Never trust a man who doesn't drink."

Case tested and closed. Does it imply (as I joked on Facebook) that I'm a one-issue voter? Maybe, maybe not, but I'm not about to stand in Romney's way as he rushes to offer second, third and eighteenth issues to justify my vote against him. Yesterday, many of his own ideological supporters were feeding me anti-GOP ammo, like David Brooks of the New York Times. For a while there, it seemed too good to be true, and I thought I was on "Candid Camera."

Then I remembered: The candid camera was focused on Romney.

Folks, this is David "Right Wing Apologist" Brooks, not Michael Moore or Mother Jones, and with a pop culture reference as solid as William Claude Dukenfield.

Thurston Howell Romney

 ... There are sensible conclusions to be drawn from these facts. You could say that the entitlement state is growing at an unsustainable rate and will bankrupt the country. You could also say that America is spending way too much on health care for the elderly and way too little on young families and investments in the future.

But these are not the sensible arguments that Mitt Romney made at a fund-raiser earlier this year.