http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/opinion/05brooks.html?src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB

“The Republicans have changed American politics since they took control of the House of Representatives. They have put spending restraint and debt reduction at the top of the national agenda. They have sparked a discussion on entitlement reform. They have turned a bill to raise the debt limit into an opportunity to put the U.S. on a stable fiscal course.

Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators. They have been tough and inflexible and forced the Democrats to come to them. The Democrats have agreed to tie budget cuts to the debt ceiling bill. They have agreed not to raise tax rates. They have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.”

Fellow readers of Mr. Brooks, is there any doubt that he is, at the least, a committed propagandist for the Modern Republican Party, from the 1968 victory onward ? There can be no doubt after reading these two opening paragraphs of his latest column, that one might become heady from the aggrandizing rhetoric of congratulation: one might even opine that it is a burlesque of a Pravda “news story”. Is the Great Fake Budget Reform of Mr. Paul Ryan the centerpiece of this vision for the future? The Modern Republican Party has become the political voice of an atavistic, reactionary irrationalism, seamlessly attached to the care and maintenance of an entrenched Plutocracy. Mr. Brooks casts the Modern Republican Party in messianic terms, while arguing an almost patent critique of the Tea Party Jacobins, as the heretics of a Conservative Legitimism, bent on the advent of a destructive political nihilism. The question then becomes a matter of theology rather than politics, a matter of conflicting belief systems, of world views, of faith.  But one could argue that the mainstream Party, itself, is, in fact, just that thing identified as heresy, with a not so carefully maintained veneer of bourgeois political respectability. One could, then, argue as Mr. Brooks does, that he is ready to endorse a particular extremity of choice, arguing that his choice is representative of a moderate form of the extremes, and therefore demonstrative of an arguable, simulacrum of moderation. Mr. Brooks maladroitly performs that rhetorical gambit, for want of a better term, but fails to convince his readers of his premise, that the Republican Party is fulfilling its mission of Political Redemptionism but for the pernicious Jacobins.

Almost Marx