July 2019.

     The Grey Lady failed to smile again, this time by proxy.  June of 2019 found me in the Golden West and The (San Jose) Mercury News had picked up a David Brooks column.  It’s difficult not to wonder whether Mr. Brooks assumes that no reader recalls who William F. Buckley Jr. was.  Mr. Man-and-God-at-Yale was many things; a paragon of tolerance wasn’t one of them.

Here’s David Brooks’ column:

David Brooks, “The Generation Gap and the Imminent GOP Apocalypse,” The (San Jose) Mercury News, 5 June 2019, A7 (www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/opinion/republicans-generation-gap.html).  If The Mercury News posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it.  The link above is to the version in The New York Times.

Here’s the unpublished letter:

     David Brooks correctly diagnoses the demographic and electoral buzzsaw into which the GOP is pushing itself through its stance on “immigration, diversity, (and) pluralism,” but he misses the mark on two points.  Progressive multiculturalism is in no wise pessimistic.  It merely recognizes that the sine qua non for redemption, whether for individual or society, is acknowledgment of and contrition for past misdeeds, something Mr. Brooks, with his boundless capacity for moralizing, surely understands.

     Mr. Brooks, moreover, does not acknowledge how a calculated brand of intolerance has been inextricably woven into the Republican Party’s DNA since the adoption of the “Southern strategy.”  The GOP has no credibility to assert an “optimistic multiculturalism.”  It is rich that Mr. Brooks mentions in this context his “mentor” William F. Buckley Jr., a man whose homophobia is enshrined on videotape (see Gore Vidal) and whose racial attitudes cannot withstand cursory scrutiny.