It must, in some ways, suck to be David Brooks. Oh sure, you're a big time columnist with the New York Times, an oh so respectable commentator on PBS and NPR, a frequent guest on talking head shows, you sell a fair number of books regarding the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, and you, I would guess, make absolute fuckloads of money. And yet, you find yourself, a pretty intelligent, congenial, and reasonable guy, having cast your lot with a political tendency that is peopled by and large by malevolent morons and their mendacious manipulators. You have to know in your heart of hearts that, in fact, your ideological fellow travelers pretty much hate all "others" be they black, hispanic, or gay and that this is the driving force behind their "conservatism" -- and -- this may be the really hard part -- they will never really accept you either. You're the conservative that liberals read, the one that Barack Obama seeks out, the guy who PBS and NPR turn to to explain to its viewers that Republicans really aren't so bad -- not the guy that conservatives look to for guidance.
It seems to me that an essential part of Brooks's mission is to try to convince not only others, but himself, that conservatism is not essentially a hate movement notwithstanding the fact that its prime movers and shakers, be they Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Levin, Savage, and Malkin, or politicians like Bachmann, Palin, DeMint, or Huckabee are all either hateful, cynically hateful, ignorant, or cynically hatefully ignorant. And the desperate attempt to deny that racism is in any way the animating force behind events such as the million* rube march that recently graced our nation's capital is unpersuasive at best. (Anyone objecting to the use of the term rube should watch this and this before suggesting that it is in error.)
And so Brooks argued in his column the other day that the teabaggers are not motivated in any way by racism, but rather by the fear that they, the productive workers of society, will have that which they earned taken from them by elitist liberals and redistributed to the undeserving idle. In Brooks's own wonderful words "[m]oney should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites."** This is, of course, a classic racist trope because the people "who do not work" are always, and I mean always, dusky of hue. It's the welfare queen argument of Ronald Reagan and no one for a minute had any question about the color of the welfare queen.
The irony is that a huge number of the teabaggers were clearly retirees over the age of 65 -- the ultimate welfare recipients, non-workers to whom wealth is redistributed every month in the form of Social Security checks and Medicare benefits. Few object to this transfer of wealth though because the recipients by and large prove their worth by the whiteness of both their hair and skin. (To be clear, I am very much in favor of both programs -- but then again, I am pretty much a socialist.) Brooks stakes a position of complete ignorance with respect to the racist history behind the sentence above quoted.
Brooks and I are roughly the same age (he's a little younger, which is hard for me to believe given what a pissy pants old fogy he is). He cast his lot a long time ago with the royalist economics of the Republican Party while I opted for the then quite unfashionable stance of old-fashioned labor-liberal. The notion that conservatism speaks in any form or fashion for the material needs of working people is a bad fucking joke. Sell that bullshit elsewhere David. I'm not buying.
*And by million I mean 70,000.
**I, on the other hand, do not object to being "sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites" as long as she is gentle. (Teabagging optional, but always appreciated.) (Put away the rye bottle Sir Charles -- it's starting to show.)
