Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Come on, man.

You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / Star power, star power, star power over me

Star power, star power, star power over me

by | 80 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

It’s a great time to be a conservative (via):

.. in 2016, we are likely to see Republicans such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) — all of whom have significantly more star power than Romney — make the race.

And:

If you listened to the Republican candidates this year, you heard a conventional set of arguments. But if you go online, you can find a vibrant and increasingly influential center-right conversation.

[…]

Soft Libertarians. Some of the most influential bloggers on the right, like Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok and Megan McArdle, start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way.

[…]

Burkean Revivalists. This group includes young conservatives whose intellectual roots go back to the organic vision of society described best by Edmund Burke but who are still deeply enmeshed in current policy debates.

[…]

Since Nov. 6, the G.O.P. has experienced an epidemic of open-mindedness.

Reader Interactions

80Comments

  2. 2.

    Jay in Oregon

    Since Nov. 6, the G.O.P. has experienced an epidemic of open-mindedness.

    What.

    In.

    The HELL.

    Has he been smoking?

  5. 5.

    Steeplejack

    “Burkean revivalists”? I just threw up in my mouth a little. I’m going to bed. I’ll deal with this in the morning.

  6. 6.

    arguingwithsignposts

    Also, this:

    Some of the most influential bloggers on the right, like Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok and Megan McArdle

    was a tell.

  13. 13.

    pseudonymous in nc

    Some of the most influential bloggers on the right, like Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok and Megan McArdle, start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way.

    I never knew that “doctrinaire” was a synonym for “vaguely coherent”.

  16. 16.

    amk

    old garbage out, new garbage in. Spin it however you like, bobo, the thugs base is capped at that now-proverbial 47%.

  18. 18.

    jl

    Cowen and McArdle do use non doctrinaire logic, I’ll give Brooks that.

    Might be coinkydink, but the Brooks examples of Burkean Revivalists make no sense at all, and strangely resemble complete gibberish. As far as I can tell, his examples of brave Burkean Revivalists advocating for an ‘organic’ society are a debt hawk humbug and a Jack Kemp retread. And, best of all, some lawyer who wants to base jurisprudence on ‘modesty’ whatever that means. Bloomers on piano lege and side saddles for the ladies should be viewed favorably by judges, in their modest robes, or what?

  19. 19.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    Speaking of Manichean monsters, where has Freddie run off to? Is he afraid of something here?

  22. 22.

    Lev

    I was just imagining that Rorschach scene from “The Master” but with David Brooks. Instead of vaginas, every picture would make him think of moderate conservatives.

  23. 23.

    mdblanche

    Since Nov. 6, the G.O.P. has experienced an epidemic of open-mindedness.

    Only a conservative would compare open-mindedness to a disease.

  24. 24.

    Vasya

    From what I understand of Burke, most of his ideals are much closer to the ideals of whom we call liberals or even socialists today – the ideas of community being more important than the individual, that promoting personal liberty over the good of the whole has to be done with care. His was a reaction to the Liberal ideas of the day, which are now generally espoused and perverted by Libertarians.

    My point is – Burkean; they keep using that word. I am not sure it means what they think it means.

  25. 25.

    jl

    @pseudonymous in nc:

    “vaguely coherent”?

    I think both are usually very precisely incoherent.

    And Cowen is a fancy econ perfesser at a fancy kollej. But Gawd all mighty… the howlers… the howlers…

    Edit: oops, I misread your comment. I mumble vaguely coherent apologies.

  26. 26.

    Warren Terra

    Soft Libertarians … start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way.

    I’m fairly sure this translates to “toe the party line, and try to sell it to the rubes using libertarian memes”

    Burkean Revivalists. This group includes young conservatives whose intellectual roots go back to the organic vision of society described best by Edmund Burke but who are still deeply enmeshed in current policy debates.

    I’m fairly sure this doesn’t translate into anything meaningful at all.

  27. 27.

    ? Martin

    Eh. There’s been some isolated outbreaks of marginal sanity that I’ve seen. Maybe there’s more that’s gone unseen, who’s to say. But it’s easy to push a contrarian line after a loss. Harder to get that line to take hold. Let’s see if the GOP adopts any alternate policy here.

    But talk is cheap. Lets see if any votes show up.

  29. 29.

    Redshift

    all of whom have significantly more star power than Romney

    I believe this is known in the real world as a “world’s tallest, er, little person contest.”

  30. 30.

    Alison

    Good lord, the fact that this human compost pile has a job – a probably obscenely well-paid one – makes our unemployment rate even more depressing.

    The NYT’s money would be put to better use if they wiped their asses with it.

  32. 32.

    Spaghetti Lee

    Paul Ryan? You mean the guy who lost? I can’t remember-were they writing odes to Jack Kemp after election day ’96? The Village really, really wants to sell us on Paul Ryan.

  33. 33.

    Petorado

    Brooks really polished that turd to a high luster. But all the name dropping of semi obscure conservatives and rebranding with trendy sounding labels still won’t get past the fact that it’s all window dressing to hide that these guys don’t like the rest of us and could care less if any problem that hamper our lives ever get solved. Conservatives have no new ideas, only newer packaging to sell the same old crap, such as Burkean revivalism.

  37. 37.

    TheMightyTrowel

    I think DougJ must have inadvertently felt up David Brooks at the NY meet up for him to engage in this sort of blatant trolling of our esteemed Manichean monster.

  38. 38.

    Spaghetti Lee

    @Vasya:

    Yeah, I think he’s kind of been dragged through the mud a bit unfairly. Today’s far right is closer to nihilism than anything, or at to a very aggressive radicalism that was traditionally the province of the left.

    I think it’s a kind of weird phenomenon. To the extent that there’s an intellectual culture on the right, they seem to be at a place where they just want to tear it up-government, the economy, everything-and replace it with a set of rules derived from nutty philosophers (Rand, Mises, etc.) that they claim will make society perfect. There’s not much left about preserving the past, although they still use the rhetoric, because ‘the past’ to them is FDR and union labor and Earl Warren and affirmative action and Studs Terkel. No, they want to create a utopia (a dystopia to the rest of us). That sort of tear-it-all-up thinking used to be associated with the far left, but now righties are adopting the language. I just find it strange.

    The few conservatives I like are guys like Burke. I don’t think he’d have much in common with today’s crowd. At some point, ‘standing athwart history’ became tearing history to shreds and using the remains to strangle anyone who remembers the past.

  40. 40.

    different-church-lady

    Bears repeating:

    If Nate Silver and Sam Wang screw up, their popularity will suffer as a result, and they’ll have to reconsider their models. Meanwhile, if Brooks, Jordan, Scarborough, Rubin, or Byers make another poor argument, they’ll continue to collect their paychecks as if nothing had happened.

    November 1.

  44. 44.

    Cain

    Speaking of star power, Anderson Cooper burned some twitter idiot. Here’s a bit of their conversation.

    Then follow the conversation on Reddit

    and watch the male crowd all but throw their underwear at him. Never seen so many men go gay for Cooper. I resisted, until someone suggested Nathan Fillion.. I might go gay for Nathan.

  46. 46.

    Splitting Image

    Since Nov. 6, the G.O.P. has experienced an epidemic of open-mindedness.

    Which will last approximately until the very second someone wins the next primary, after which he will do as he’s told or the lunatics will rip him to shreds.

  47. 47.

    Shalimar

    Since Nov. 6, the G.O.P. has experienced an epidemic of open-mindedness.

    I’m pretty sure they have a vaccine for that, just a matter of how many weeks it takes them to distribute it through the talk radio airwaves.

  48. 48.

    danielx

    Why do I get the idea that Brooks is just fucking with people in this array of drivel? I mean, just putting “GOP” and “open-mindedness” in the same sentence is a major contradiction in terms, and Brooks knows very well that “…people with names like Reihan, Ramesh, Yuval and Derek Khanna” are never going to ring a bell with, say, county level Republicans in Georgia. (Odd how the name Dinesh didn’t appear in this roll of furriners who are going to help the GOP crawl out of the fever swamp.)

    Re Cillizza: if there was ever any doubt that Cillizza is full of shit, it was removed – nay, annihilated – by his reference to Mike Pence as a potential Republican star of the future. For those of us from the Hoosier State who know and loathe him, Pence is well known as a wingnut par excellence and is even better known for being so dumb his nickname ought to be Legume. By the time he gets done inciting the electorate to sincere voter’s remorse, he’ll be lucky to elected as shit-picker in Redkey. Ne’er mind, there’s always the Heritage Foundation or failing that maybe he can go to work with Evan Bayh’s lobbying firm.

  50. 50.

    Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)

    Alternate title:

    We’re gonna find the meaning of feeling good
    and we’re gonna stay there as long as we think we should

  51. 51.

    jonas

    If you listened to the Republican candidates this year, you heard a conventional set of arguments a bunch of utter lunacy, which is why they lost.

    FTFY, David.

  52. 52.

    NonyNony

    @danielx:

    Why do I get the idea that Brooks is just fucking with people in this array of drivel?

    If I thought this blog were big enough to affect the traffic at the NYT, I would assume he posted as linkbait. The way he wrote it it’s almost like catnip for DougJ.

  54. 54.

    Lurking Canadian

    Didn’t we already go through a Bobby Jindal-as-heir apparent in 2009, right up until he shat the bed after the SOTU?

    Can’t they even find a new corpse to prop up?

  55. 55.

    aimai

    @SRW1:
    Non doctrinaire means “dishonest”–Megan’s whole shtick is attempting to obscure logic and reality with a cuttle fish ink blast of incoherence. But that McGarbledy-gook is clearly a desirable form for Brooks precisely because its dishonesty enables it to fool some small portion of her readership. When you read her, you get stupider, and down in the threads you can see what happens to her troglodytic followers as they regress towards total inability to reason. That’s a feature in Bobo’s world, and in Megan’s. Its not a byproduct of her incoherence, its the goal of her dishonesty.

    aimai

  56. 56.

    Rick Massimo

    @pseudonymous in nc: Yup. Newly prominent Republicans are “stars.” Newly prominent Democrats are dangerously untested neophytes whom we’d be taking a big risk on.

    Megan McArdle … start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way.

    Right. The minute libertarian premises hit her in the pocketbook or affect her negatively in any way, out they go.

  57. 57.

    Ash Can

    Lulz. Christie is going to be the Jon Huntsman of 2016 (too liberal), Jindal will insist he’s a creationist but get nowhere, and the real battle for the nomination will be among Santorum, Gingrich, and Ryan (who isn’t a loser himself, no sirree; he was just held back by that loser Romney). And we”ll enjoy every minute of it.

  58. 58.

    El Cid

    If they repeat “Burkean” enough times, then they get to feel like they’re some long unrecognized ethnic lineage deserving of respect, some Celtic or whatever group who really was in line to be King or Emperor somewhere, they’ve just never been given their due.

  59. 59.

    1badbaba3

    Yo, DougJ, dude is callin’ you out, yo! You gonna let that centrist POS diss you like that? He’s practically daring you to interrupt your vacay. Yo man, we gotta dust this boy off. We’ll pick you up in the 98. Respect. Word. You feel me?

  61. 61.

    Shawn in ShowMe

    @Ash Can:

    Lulz. Christie is going to be the Jon Huntsman of 2016 (too liberal), Jindal will insist he’s a creationist but get nowhere, and the real battle for the nomination will be among Santorum, Gingrich, and Ryan

    So you don’t think Rubio is white enough to appease the nativists?

  62. 62.

    MaxxLange

    I notice that all the young conservatives who write in to the college newspaper where I work see themselves as bold iconoclasts, bringing the good news of their exciting and innovative ideas to those still mired in liberal orthodoxy. Are these kids not aware that they are merely repeating the same tired agenda we’ve been hearing since at least 1980, and that it’s been tried and it doesn’t work? No, I guess they are not.

  63. 63.

    El Cid

    @MaxxLange: Republicans and conservatives (and “libertarians,” who are most frequently conservatives who favor wealth authoritarianism) have the amazing ability to believe that throwing one’s support to the wealthiest and most powerful makes one a daring, bold, courageous rebel.

    It’s sort of beautiful in its perverseness.

    This was among the most annoying characteristics of the 1980s douchebag young conservatives and the right’s college asshole brigades.

  64. 64.

    pk

    Rubio just said that he does not know how old the earth is and is not a “scientist guy”. Jindal performed exorcisms. These are the brightest bulbs in the party.

  65. 65.

    Jebediah

    @Ash Can:

    the real battle for the nomination will be among Santorum, Gingrich, and Ryan (who isn’t a loser himself, no sirree; he was just held back by that loser Romney). And we’‘ll enjoy every minute of it.

    Does the GOP understand how frightened and pissed off liberals would be by a Ryan/Palin ticket? Please, GOP, have mercy! Ryan/Palin is too scary! Almost as scary as that briar patch!

  66. 66.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Vasya: I don’t know about that. Burke was a flaming royalist who was very sure that rank and stratification were crucial to societal functioning–political revolution would pull to pieces a whole system that had been developed and passed down like an inherited estate. Less communitarian, more “your betters know best.”

  68. 68.

    Lex

    McArdle still couldn’t find the answer to 2 + 2 = 4 with both hands, a map and a calculator. Which doesn’t disqualify her from the GOP nomination, but still.

  69. 69.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us? (formerly MarkJ)

    @Jewish Steel: Please don’t drag Selma Hayek into this. So far as I know she hasn’t done anything to deserve association with such bad company.

  70. 70.

    RaflW

    @pseudonymous in nc: the Village (wired for Republicans) is always declaring GOP stars in the making.

    Which is why there was a significant effort to wreck Nate Silver. He’s not playing along with the star-anointing.

  71. 71.

    schrodinger's cat

    What’s the deal with Reihan Salaam, I saw him on snooze hour the other day, he looks like the genie of Aladdin’s lamp. I wonder being a Muslim and from Bangladesh, what prompted him to join the wingnut brigade.

  72. 72.

    IM

    Burkean Revivalists

    You can’t make that up.

    I am somewhat in awe. Brooks runs a con, but it is quite brazen.

  74. 74.

    pk

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I wonder being a Muslim and from Bangladesh, what prompted him to join the wingnut brigade.

    Easy money. A brown muslim wingnut. Almost like a rare precious stone. It’s so much better to use a brown or black face to spout racist ideology. Same with Dinesh D’souza. I’m sure there must have been slaves who supported slavery, or jews for Nazis.

  75. 75.

    jake the snake

    Are we sure that DougJ has not hacked the NYT website and posted a parody of a BoBo column?

    Krauthammer, Will, etc have pretty much been engaging in self-parody for years. I suppose BoBo could be doing the same.

    I think Poe’s law is pretty much in effect among all conservative columnists.

  79. 79.

    Mnemosyne

    @MaxxLange:

    It’s the same reason they keep telling racist jokes that Henny Youngman would have found passe in 1952 — if they haven’t heard them before, then they must have come from their brilliant, groundbreaking minds. They certainly couldn’t be ideas that have already been tried and failed.

Comments are closed.