Political Cynic comments, and contemplates the toxic Legacy of Leo Strauss.

The New York Times has become the Official Newspaper of The American National Security State. David Brooks is one its many apologists on the ‘Editorial Page’. Yet nothing quite prepares The Reader for this maladroit political kitsch:

Headline: Can We Talk About Joe Biden? Oct. 6, 2023

Where might The Reader begin her political archology of Brooks’ 3368 word political hagiography of Biden? Recalling that the Neo-Conservative/Straussian propaganda strategy, is to exhaust the patience, in tandem with the critical faculty of The Reader, with an avalanche of words, ideas, speculations, and worshipful commentary, not to mention a Cast of Characters almost worthy of that Hollywood Hack, Cecil B, DeMille.

These paragraphs is what Raymond Chandler would have called ‘Hollywood Vomit’, adhering to the ‘Hollywood Theme’ :

Nearly two decades ago, I tried to write a group biography about the senators whose offices happened to be on the second floor of the Russell Office Building on Capitol Hill. The group included John McCain, Joe Biden, Lindsey Graham and Chuck Hagel. I got to know and study each of those senators during that long-ago-abandoned project.

The more I covered Biden, the more I came to feel affection and respect for him. Then, as now, he could be a tough boss, occasionally angry and hard on his staff. But throughout his life, Biden has usually been on the side of the underdog. I’ve rarely met a politician so rooted in the unpretentious middle-class ethos of the neighborhood he grew up in. He has a seemingly instinctive ability to bond with those who are hurting.

Our politics have gotten rougher over the ensuing years but that hasn’t dampened Biden’s basic humanity. When he was vice president, I remember a searing meeting with him shortly after his son Beau died, his grief raw and on the surface. And like many, I’ve felt the beam of his empathy and care myself. A year and a half ago, the day after my oldest friend fell victim to suicide, Biden heard about it and called me to offer comfort. He just let me talk about my friend and through his words and tone of voice joined me in the suffering. I experienced the solace of being seen.

He has his faults — the tendency to talk too much, the chip on his shoulder about those who think they are smarter than he is, the gaffes, that episode of plagiarism and the moments of confusion — but I’ve always thought: Give me a leader who identifies with those who feel looked down upon. Give me a leader whose moral compass generally sends him in the right direction.

…

The video from 1993 contradicts Brook’s apologetic, from the mouth of Biden!

Joe Biden Warns Of “Predators On Our Streets” Who Were “Beyond The Pale” In 1993 Crime Speech demonstrates that Biden expressed unapologetic racism! This highlighted sentence is rendered, not juts moot, but is a self-serving lie:

Give me a leader who identifies with those who feel looked down upon.

Identify this paragraph as what? The Powerful comforting each other? And Brooks’ ‘experienced the solace of being seen’, more moralizing chatter. Think of Mitt Romney’s sons hurt looks, in their eyes, as another teachable moment in the Moral Awakening of Brooks, through the ‘camera’ of his opinion column.

When he was vice president, I remember a searing meeting with him shortly after his son Beau died, his grief raw and on the surface. And like many, I’ve felt the beam of his empathy and care myself. A year and a half ago, the day after my oldest friend fell victim to suicide, Biden heard about it and called me to offer comfort. He just let me talk about my friend and through his words and tone of voice joined me in the suffering. I experienced the solace of being seen.

Yet The Reader has just reached 311 words, of this 3,370 word, what to name it?

Might a list of the Cast of Characters of this Political Melodrama be instructive as to the intent of Brooks?

John McCain, Joe Biden, Lindsey Graham and Chuck Hagel

Beau Biden

my oldest friend fell victim to suicide,

Donald Trump

Democrats

ABC poll

three-quarters of American voters

Democrats under 30

a Trumpian Götterdämmerung.

The Conversation over and over again

Some Democrats

Nevada, New Hampshire, Michigan, California

Ted Kennedy weakened Jimmy Carter in 1980

Pat Buchanan hurt George H.W. Bush in 1992.

rank-and-file Democrats

Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey

Note: Brooks political moralizing:

I’ve tried to set aside my affection for the man and look anew at the question of Biden and 2024: Should we really do this?

Note: Biden’s age

he’s like a pitcher who used to throw 94 miles an hour who now throws 87.

he is more crisp and focused than he used to be

Biden is fit, does not smoke or drink alcohol

both men could qualify as “super-agers”

public anxieties on this front will diminish.

Note: Bidens accomplishments:

Biden’s domestic legislative accomplishments are as impressive as any other president’s in my adult life.

Biden’s team overlearned the lessons of the Obama years.

Anger about inflation is ripping across the world,

Note: Approval Ratings:

Biden’s 40 percent approval rating may look bad

Justin Trudeau 36 , Olaf Scholz29,Rishi Sunak 28, Emmanuel Macron 23, Japan Fumio Kishida 23.

Trump 38 on leaving office, Today, 48 percent.

Americans now trust Trump

Inflation: American Jaundice.

Note: The American Mood

Bitterness, cynicism and distrust pervade the body politic.

At 3.8 percent, America’s unemployment rate is objectively low, but 57 percent of voters say that the unemployment rate is “not so good” or “poor.” 

The nation’s bitter state of mind is a self-perpetuating negativity machine.

The bracing reality is that Trump’s cynicism and fury match the national mood more than Biden’s faithful optimism.

“They seem hell bent on nominating the one Democrat who would lose to Donald Trump,” Karl Rove told me recently.

Note: A return to Politics

“They seem hell bent on nominating the one Democrat who would lose to Donald Trump,” Karl Rove told me recently.

First, there is the Kamala Harris problem

People can make an all-star wish list of other Democratic nominees, but in the real world there is simply no easy way to push Harris aside.

As a former Obama administration official, Dan Pfeiffer, has pointed out, Biden has higher favorability ratings among Democrats than Trump does among Republicans

Finally, and most important, when you really start to imagine what it would look like if the Democrats didn’t nominate Biden, one whopping issue becomes clear. 

Note: Brooks puts The New Democrats and Republicans on The Couch?

A lot of the dump-Biden conversations are based on a false premise

But Biden is not the sole or even primary problem here.

…it’s the Democratic Party as a whole that’s ailing

…Morning Consult poll, Americans rate the Democratic Party as a whole as the more ideologically extreme party by a nine-point margin. 

In a recent Gallup poll 53 percent of Americans say Republicans will do a better job of keeping America prosperous over the short term while only 39 percent thought that of the Democrats.

Note: Performative Narcissist

Here are the hard, unpleasant facts: The Republicans have a likely nominee who is facing 91 charges. The Republicans in Congress are so controlled by a group of performative narcissists the whole House has been reduced to chaos. And yet they are still leading the Democrats in these sorts of polling measures.

Note: Political Nostalgia appears:

When I think back to the glory days of the Democratic Party, the days of the New Deal and the Great Society, even to the days when Joe Biden was a young senator being mentored by the likes of Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party was at its core a working- and middle-class party. Over the last half century, the Democrats have become increasingly the party of the well-educated metropolitan class

Note: ‘The well-educated metropolitan class’ is another way of saying the obvious, that Brooks hasn’t the balls to make, that The New Democrats, in the Persons of the Clintons, betrayed the New Deal Tradition, and became full fledged partners in The Neo-Liberal Swindle: that Crashed with a thud in 2008.

Note: The political watershed of The New Democrats:

It is not news that the Democrats have been losing white working-class voters ever since the emergence of the Reagan Democrats. But today, the party is bleeding working-class voters of all varieties.

Note: The New Democrats on the Couch again, with a nauseating dose of Brooks’ Old Time Political Religion

But Democrats are losing something arguably more important than a reliable base of supporters. The party is in danger of letting go of an ethos, a heritage, a tradition. The working-class heart and soul the Democrats cultivated through the Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy years rooted Democratic progressivism in a set of values that emphasized hard work, neighborhood, faith, family and flag. Being connected to Americans’ everyday experiences kept the party pinioned to the mainstream

Note: The Patient Reader is near the end of this -diatribe is the wrong word , as Brooks mimes the journalistic ethos, while writing unconvincing political propaganda. He was the political protégé of William Buckley Jr. whose very politics were steeped in mendacity. Reader your are close to the end’ so let me clear away the underbrush?

As the party became dominated by the more educated activist and media sectors, it lost touch with some of what can be called its psychological and emotional power sources.

This is what happened in 2020. There were moments in that campaign when it looked as if Bernie Sanders was going to run away with the race, sending the party into uncharted ideological waters. Most of the other candidates sprinted leftward.

Joe Biden was nominated in 2020 because he was the cure to this malady. He was the guy most plainly with roots in the working and middle class. He was the guy who didn’t engage in the culture war and identity politics theatrics.

And that is the fact I keep returning to. Biden is not what ails the party. As things stand, he is the Democrats’ best shot at curing what ails the party. 

There is no other potential nominee who is so credibly steeped in knowing what life is like for working- and middle-class people, just as there was no other potential nominee in 2020. After watching him for a quarter century, I think he is genuinely most comfortable when he is hanging around the kinds of people he grew up with.

These cultural and spiritual roots give him not just a style but a governing agenda. He has used the presidency to direct resources to those who live in the parts of the country where wages are lower, where education levels are lower, where opportunities are skimpier. Biden’s ethos harks back to the ethos of the New Deal Democratic Party, but it also harks forward to something — to a form of center-left politics that is culturally moderate and economically aggressive. Aggressive in investing resources in the left-behind places, aggressive in using industrial policy to revive manufacturing, green tech and other industries, aggressive in using federal largess to bolster the care economy. His administration has put racial justice at the top of the agenda. It has moved the party beyond the technocratic centrism of the Clinton-Obama years.

 But I also find myself arriving foursquare at the conclusion that rejecting the president now would be, in the first place, a mistake. He offers the most plausible route toward winning the working- and middle-class groups the Democrats need, the most plausible route toward building a broad-based majority party. 

But it would be worse than a mistake. It would be a renunciation of the living stream of people, ideas and values that flow at the living depths of the party, a stream that propelled its past glories and still points toward future ones. 

Political Cynic