Splitsville THEY CAN'T HANDLE (OR BE AWARE OF) THE TRUTH!

The New-ish Newsletter for Readers of The Split

We’ll get to yet another reason why the USA today can be thought of as consisting of two possibly-incompatible countries living within a single geo-political border, but first…

If you’ve been dying to read a perfect parody of a David Brooks column, we have one. It’s by David Brooks. It’s not a column per se—it’s the transcript of a podcast—but it bears all the hallmarks of the classic David Brooks op-ed each of us has come to know and loathe: massive disingenuousness, lavish intellectual dishonesty, and exactly the sort of gaslight-y fraudulence we need to discuss this week’s Splitsville theme.

Read the whole thing if you must (although you mustn’t; every sentence is saturated with bad faith), but here’s the gist:

I think one of the things that’s happening in our era is that politics is no longer organized rich versus poor, and ethnicity is becoming less important as a predictor of how you vote and how you think. And now, you’d have to say the chief divide in America is between those with college degrees and those with high school degrees, the diploma divide. And Donald Trump has managed to build a multiracial, working class majority around the interests of the working class and against the interests of the educated class.

Where to start? How about with the fact that the entire commentary, which purports to be about “our politics,” mentions the Republican Party exactly twice: once, with regard to how it used to be, in the “Information Age,” and the other, by noting that Donald Trump “took over the Republican Party.” Nowhere does Brooks acknowledge that the GOP has done all it could, for decades, to block Democratic measures that would help the working class for which he has so much crocodile-tear sympathy. Nowhere does he grant that, long before Trump, the Republican Party opposed labor unions and civil rights legislation, blocked raising the Federal minimum wage, sought (dozens of times) to nullify the Affordable Care Act, and in general did and has done its utmost to subvert the accomplishments of both the New Deal and the Great Society, and to Secure the Blessings of Liberty for rich, white, ideally Christian, men, at the expense of everyone else.

Meanwhile, the idea that Donald Trump has built anything “around the interests of the working class” is, as a physicist at Columbia once said about string theory, “not even wrong.” It’s Trump (via Elon Musk) who wants to dismantle the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. It’s Trump who says he wants to impose tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports that will raise the prices of things his adoring working class fans will have to pay. It’s Trump, who plans an administration that intends to eliminate agencies charged with safeguarding our food, drugs, and air quality. That’s bad news for working class people—they need food, drugs, and air as much as the next guy—but Brooks ignores it.

Instead, to Brooks, the plight of “people who are good at fixing a refrigerator…or who work with their hands” is entirely the fault (and the responsibility) of Democrats, who have to get out of their comfy “blue bubbles” and “actually come to understand what working class voters think like…”

Perhaps Brooks has never read the many, many articles in his and others’ newspapers in which reporters “sit down” with hardy, blue-collar types at a local diner in Ohio or Wisconsin or Michigan, and inquire about what they’re thinking. Did Trump do that? Did he take questions from the floor at his rallies, or seek the opinions of anyone at his ludicrous “town halls” who wasn’t pre-screened and whose creampuff queries were written in advance?

As usual, to Brooks, as to so many commentators and pundits on both the right and the left, Murc’s Law applies. Named for a commenter at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Murc’s Law declares: Only Democrats have agency. Everything Republicans do is either caused by, or is failed to have been prevented by, Democrats. Republicans are greedy, hypocritical, bigoted, and reactionary, but they can’t help it, the poor dears. It’s their nature. They’re children, really, and the Democrats are—or are supposed to be—the adults. Trump won because Democrats failed to prevent it.

But that’s not the irony. Do you want to know the irony? Okay, here’s the irony:

And the irony is that the Democratic Party is built for one thing. It’s to address inequality. And Democrats looked out at society and saw a lot of inequalities — racial inequality, gender inequality, discrimination against LGBTQ people.

But they missed the central inequality that really marks American society now, which is academic inequality, which merges with class inequality. And so they allowed Donald Trump, who took over the Republican Party, which we do not associate with the working class, to turn it into a multiracial, working class party.

Note the supreme weasel-ness, or as Heidegger might have put it, uberweaselheit, in his “academic inequality, which merges with class inequality.” (Especially that “merges,” which does so much heavy lifting it sproings a hernia and requires medical attention.) Brooks, as a dutiful apologist for capital, would rather not talk about class inequality. But he has to acknowledge it—it’s by far the dominant social and economic issue of our age—if only to give it a curt nod before hurrying on to blame the Democrats for not reaching out to people with only high school diplomas.

Please be amused by the facts that a) the Dems did reach out to non-college graduates; the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act are, as we “speak,” creating jobs for just such people; and b) diplomas aren’t the tickets to the middle class they once were. Maybe some adjunct professor with a masters (or a PhD) who teaches four courses a semester and earns $40,000 (before taxes, with no benefits) can instruct Brooks in that fact.

Brooks mentions the one thing the Democratic Party is built for, but for some reason doesn’t mention the one thing the Republican Party is built for: to exacerbate inequality, to make the 1% richer at the expense of the 99%. Because of course he doesn’t; he’s been propagandizing for it, and defending it, and ignoring its crimes, bigotries, and bungling, for decades. Besides, to even hint at the grotesque disparity between what CEO’s make versus what workers make would be tantamount to hinting at the existence of—say it with us, now—class warfare. And you don’t get to be in the New York Times, on NPR, or on PBS, by trafficking in such things. (One of our favorite signs at a march on Washington, years ago: THEY ONLY CALL IT CLASS WARFARE WHEN WE FIGHT BACK.)

Better to blame the libs. If the GOP is an authoritarian personality cult striving to initiate a full-bore fascist regime, it’s the fault of Democrats, who “missed” something, and who “allowed” Trump to turn it into a multiracial, working-class party.

The funny part is that nothing Trump says or has said, during the campaign or since the election, promises to bring the tiniest benefit to the stupid schmucks who voted for him. And when, in January, the GOP takes control of the House, the Senate, and the White House (having already taken control of an unprecedentedly corrupted Supreme Court), it will not, repeat not initiate policies that will improve the lives of its supposed multiracial, working-class constituency. Trump didn’t run on doing-good-things-for-his-fans. He ran a campaign of right-wing identity politics—i.e., on validating their hates.

Meanwhile, every Republican in D.C., from Pious Mike Johnson to Concerned Susan Collins, will either lustily participate in, or quietly tolerate, a regime of corruption, destruction, self-dealing, bigotry, chaos, incompetence, and traitorous deference to America’s enemies.

Perhaps Brooks knows this. But apart from the delicate, “My belief is that Trump is the wrong answer to the right question,” he can’t be bothered to address why, apart from what Democrats did or didn’t do, the MAGA cultists and the working-class Undecideds voted for Trump. After all, it’s not as though Trump is an evil mastermind, cannily concealing his intentions. He doesn’t hide the fact that he’s a monster. He brags about it. And yet half the electorate said, “Yes. Him. We want the monster.” Why?

Which brings us to Today’s Splitsville Dichotomy.

Of the many ways to describe the two countries in which we all uneasily co-exist, a particularly fruitful one is this: half the country lives in a world defined by objective reality, and the other half, in a world defined by lies. But these are not just any kind of lies, not trivial ones, like when Timmy breaks Mom’s precious vase and blames his brother. These are lies cooked up in the right-wing meth labs run by Fox News, hate radio, and GOP “messaging” consultants, and then amplified, tweaked, and disseminated online by Russian bots. (Michael Tomasky at The New Republic is very good on this.) They’re the demagogue’s lies, designed, created, and refined to prompt fear, anger, indignation and—let’s face it—hate. They’re always lies about the enemy: liberals, Democrats, LGBTQ people, trans people, immigrants, Blacks, atheists, Muslims, feminists, and—not that the people who hate them know what the word means—socialists.

The result: Half the electorate lives in a fantasy world. The MAGA army of orcs and their quadrennial pro-Trump bedfellows believe things that are not true, and don’t believe things that are true. Brooks doesn’t mention this. To him, the People Who Work With Their Hands were insufficiently attended to by the supposed grown-up Dems. Brooks doesn’t talk about how relentless right-wing propaganda convinced millions that, under Biden, the economy was in recession (it wasn’t and isn’t), schools are performing gender-alteration surgery on children (they aren’t), inflation is out of control (it’s coming down), crime is out of control (it’s at historic lows), and Haitians are eating their neighbors’ pets (they aren’t).

That’s the country Trumpists live in. They’ve been living in it since the Reagan administration. It’s a country where they’ve been taught, manipulated, and gaslighted into blaming their legitimate grievances on the wrong people and institutions, and where the stoking and amping of their fears played on their characteristic authoritarian proclivities. Not for them, the eat-your-peas/be-nice ministrations of the liberal nanny state. They don’t want no nanny. They want a big strong Daddy.

We touched on this in The Split, although we used a different familial-relation metaphor. As President Anita Gulden explains to Lorinda and Stewart, about why the blue states willingly separated from the red:

“We’d had it with their cartel of fascist media demagogues who, for decades, had become the only source of news for thirty-five or forty percent of the country. It was a world that George Orwell could have invented —”

“If he’d had a better imagination,” Stewart interjected.

Gulden laughed. “Right. He couldn’t have imagined that there were a lot of people who wanted Big Brother to be watching them.”

Trump won, not because Democrats forgot something about diplomas, but because half the electorate is stupid, naïve, delusional, or all of the above. Or maybe they’ve been so propagandized that they can’t help themselves, and it’s not their fault. Whatever. In any case, they want to live in a country led by someone who will “shake things up,” and with this convicted felon, pathological liar, lifelong cheater, shameless grifter, and adjudicated rapist, that’s what they’ll get. Trump will shake things up the way the Northridge Earthquake shook things up. That’s the country they’ll live in.

And, unless we find a way to Split, we’ll be living there too—holding fast to truth, facts, and reality, while everyone suffers.