I’m Not Like Them. Really.

Perhaps I’m unduly cynical, but I simply cannot take this David Brooks column seriously. Brad Plumer and Mark Schmittt seem to think that he’s really on to something, while Matt Yglesias takes issue with it. I think it’s just the usual GOP projection bullshit combined with a little CYA sleight of hand.

I don’t think it’s wrong to say that Democrats should embrace the big ideas. I think we’ve all agreed that our approach has been a bit too long on programmatic details and a bit too short on the vision thing. But the mere idea that the Republicans derive their strength from diversity just cracks me up. Yeah. And FoxNews is fair and balanced. Tipsy disagreements at cocktail parties don’t count as diversity.

Brooks says that Republicans are strong because they argue all the time amongst themselves in a congenial way and everybody is open minded and understanding that they can’t have everything they want. It’s one big philosphy seminar over there in GOPland. Liberals, on the other hand, are so obsessed with our ever expanding list of big complicated government programs that we haven’t given a moment’s thought to the kind of big thinking that evidently goes on among cosmopolitan Republican intellectuals who represent all those heartland values we are supposed to revere.

Why, he asked the unnamed head of a big liberal think tank who his favorite philospher was and he never called him back with the answer. Imagine that. (And here I thought we all knew that the only appropriate response to that question was “Christ — he changed mah heart.”)

Brooks says that we should emulate the right’s unruly but friendly fractiousness and spend more time arguing philosophy. He says that’s what they did when they were completely out of power and it’s shown to be very healthy for their big happy tentful of civilized individualists. This entire discussion about media infrastructure and message discipline is wrong because that is not where the real strength of the right’s political dominance lies.

The rule of thumb for all Republicans giving advice to Democrats on op-ed pages is to assume the opposite. This means that message discipline and the right’s media infrastructure is exactly where the strength of the right’s political dominance lies. And I would argue that regardless of the friendly philosophy seminars in the break room at NR or The Weakly Standard, their governing philosophy can quite easily be summed up as a strong belief in no taxes on wealth, laissez faire capitalism, coercive Christianity and a huge police/military infrastructure. There are only a couple of philosophers who lead you in that direction, and it’s a place that I don’t think America knows it’s going.

He further says that we have a hard time understanding the big philosophical ideas because liberal theorists are so “influenced by post-modernism, multiculturalism, relativism, value pluralism and all the other influences that dissuade one from relying heavily on dead white guys.”

This means that we are on the right track because understanding post-modernism, relativism and the rest is the single most important key to understanding how the right is operating right now. Any party that can win the presidency by saying that hand counting uncounted votes is inherently unreliable compared to the machines that failed to count the votes in the first place cannot be said to be a party that doesn’t understand relativism. Michel Fouccault is a much better guide to modern politics in the radical Republican era than John Dewey could ever be. We should be dragging all those ivory tower Derrida-ites out of the classrooms and hiring them at think tanks to deconstruct Republican rhetoric. (In fact, the most valuable person in the Democratic party may be Michael Berube.)

It’s funny, the last I heard liberals were elitists for being a bunch of pointy headed intellectuals who spent too much time watching PBS and not enough time burning rubber and eating at Red Lobster. There was no end to the lectures telling us that we libs were out of touch with everyday real Americans and we should take our heads out of our nancy-boy literchur and open up the Bible for some real inspiration. And now Brooks says we should be holding a non-stop series of undergrad rap sessions. Man, it’s so hard to know what we should do to be more like Republicans. My head is spinning.

Brooks says that we should embrace disunity. Like the Republicans have. He must be talking about stuff like this:

Conservative leaders across the country are working now to make sure that any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay,” he said.”

I think that is what’s at work here. Brooks has been recently embarrassed by his GOP cronies in a number of ways and now he is trying to excuse his affiliation with them by saying that the Republican party is one big bunch of iconclastic thinkers so don’t even try to say that he’s like them. But hey, you hang around with mangy dogs you get it too. He’s one of them whether he likes it or not.

Update: Jonathan Chait says:

If you look at the major organs of conservative opinion, you’d start with the Standard and National Review, add in The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and probably include columnists like Brooks, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Robert Novak. You could toss in The Washington Times editorial page and, arguably, talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Depending on your definition, you could add or subtract from this group and have a good sense of all the opinion outlets that wield any significant influence over the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

So, what major issues do these conservative intellectuals disagree on? They all supported the Iraq war, with the exception of Novak, who has tellingly muted his criticism. They all supported every one of Bush’s tax cuts and Social Security privatization. They all clucked their tongues at Bush’s Medicare drug benefit but, like the White House, have refused to recognize any connection between the deficit and Bush’s tax cuts. They all passionately supported Bush’s judicial nominees. They all basically endorse Karl Rove’s political strategy. They all see Bush as a towering Churchillian figure of compassion, wisdom, vision, homespun virtue, and basic decency.

Basically, these organs agree on everything–certainly every major political issue of the last five years. Even if you follow Brooks’s bizarre definition and include Reason and The American Conservative, you’ll get some dissent on judicial nominations and the war and a less worshipful view of Bush as a man. But you’ll still have basic agreement on all the major domestic policy questions.

[…]

Brooks insists, “Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly.” In fact, on every important debate of his presidency, Bush has enjoyed a solid phalanx of conservative pundits all repeating the same talking points on his behalf. It’s a successful arrangement. It also worked for the Comintern, for a while. I’m sure the communist intellectuals who relentlessly backed Moscow’s every move liked to flatter themselves by insisting they were a bunch of squabbling freethinkers, too.

And Ezra adds:

…where’s the refusal to face up to big disagreements and ideas? For that matter, what serious factions are missing and therefore leaving converts no place to join up? Is there no DLC, no MoveOn, no place for liberals and greens and law-and-order types and moderates? Because, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t Marc Cooper and Al From pledge allegiance to the same ticket every four years, but spend the intervening periods screaming at each other?

[…]

In recent months, various folks — notably Mike Tomasky — have called for liberals to learn or relearn their history, to understand their evolution. They’re right to do so. But they’ve been joined and, in some cases, mixed up with the David Brooks and Jonah Goldbergs of the world, conserva-scolds who wear their semi-functional knowledge of Hayek and Hobbes on their sleeves, all the better to allude to the moral and intellectual grounding they’ve got that progressives don’t. It’s ridiculous, and we shouldn’t buy into it. Knowing our history is critical to understanding the genesis and thus root causes of contemporary problems, but that imperative shouldn’t be expanded to transform politics into a game of trivial pursuit. If philosophers aid your understanding of your values, fine, great, I suggest you read them. But no Republican needs to know Burke’s views on the French Revolution in order to comprehend his movement and no liberal needs to rattle off philosophers to conservative columnists in order to have her beliefs judged legitimate.

Read thewhole thing. It sizzles.

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