http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/opinion/22brooks.html?_r=1&hp

This Dramaturge, this master of Platonic essences, confects for his readers amusement another installment of The American Political Melodrama set against the imminent collapse of the The Empire’s good faith and credit.  This essay resembles thinking as a form of schematics, all intersecting lines and angles as in an architectural blueprint, a demonstration of his idiosyncratic formalism.  And, I might further speculate that the abstract nature of his thought, of his reductionist stance leads to a demonstrable ignorance, even a self-willed blindness, to any notion of nuance, political or historical. There are the names of the significant political actors pinned at their places of intersection but this is inert, static yet imbued with an ideological energy. The title, The Grand Bargain Lives, is a bloated , capacious  metaphor, filled with historical portent.  As if Wall Street, the ultimate paymaster, of the whole of the political establishment, would allow a default to interfere with their obscene profit taking. Is it naïve of Mr. Brooks to assume that a default is even possible? Or simply a dreaded eventuality, that adds a certain frisson, in terms of the melodramatic action.       

What escapes the notice of Mr. Brook is the basic conflict between the Establishment Republicans and The Tea Party Jacobins, but that is of no interest to our writer, since the imperatives of the political propagandist takes the lead.  The dismantling of what is left of The New Deal and The Great Society is the commitment of the Right, as a matter of policy, this time under the banner of ‘reform’ of ‘austerity’ of living within our means: as an antidote to the unlikely possibility of an ascendant  Neo-Keynesian government policy, a checkmate ,as it were. After positing the existence of Leftist Democrats and Tea Party Jacobins as the extreme positions in the debate, it is easy to congratulate your confreres on the fine art of compromise, which is the heart of democratic governance, while staunchly maintaining your Conservatism as synonymous with the National Interest. But as usual with Mr. Brooks,  it simply too tidy, too well managed, for the political world as it is, for human actors as they are. It glibly imitates reasonable discourse, it takes it’s measure inaccurately, of lived reality and revels in its’ inaccuracy, as demonstrative of its’ correctness. Can thoughts, completely disembodied and nebulous, ideas as separate entities, with the capacity to act in historical time, while maintaining a separation from the beings who conger them, then make history?

Political Observer