January 2017.

     And then the Grey Lady struck out the side.  Perhaps the next three entries should be called the “the David Brooks trilogy.”  Over a few weeks in early 2017, three letters were sent to The New York Times in response to opinions by Mr. Brooks.  Each was consigned to the epistolary boneyard.

     David Brooks has long been a sad character.  He’s what passes for an intellectual in conservative circles and this has left him the unenviable task of defending a political theology – it requires too much willing suspension of disbelief and magical thinking to be a philosophy – that is well beyond its expiry date.  If Mr. Brooks has an admirable quality, it’s his devotion to this Sisyphean endeavor.  His seemingly irresistible and inexhaustible impulse to hold movement conservatism blameless for the Trump phenomenon serves him well.  The intellectual contortions this job demands are a sight to behold.

     There’s a fair question to pose:  If these three essays by Mr. Brooks and my three responses are placed cheek by jowl, whose views have been vindicated by the four years of the Trumpian rule?

     In the first essay, David Brooks posits that a kumbaya moment will materialize in which The Orange Waddler’s cabinet appointees and GOP legislators will summon the integrity and forthrightness to enforce political and constitutional norms and place The Boy King on a leash.  Right.

Here’s the editorial:

David Brooks, “The Internal Invasion,” The New York Times, 20 January 2017, A29 (www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/opinion/the-internal-invasion.html).

Here’s the unpublished letter:

When David Brooks identifies gemeinschaft and gesellschaft as the wellspring of our political dysfunction, he offers a tattered fig leaf to the GOP to obscure its willful dumbing down of its electorate and Mr. Trump’s Svengali-like manipulation of these voters’ basest instincts.  Is Mr. Brooks so naïve that the kabuki theater of the confirmation hearings portends for him an effective curtailing of Mr. Trump’s narcissistic, authoritarian impulses, when his cabinet selections mostly share his proclivities?  Does Mr. Brooks believe that the GOP – long a power-obsessed, non-legislating party – will magically succumb to a quasi-Hegelian melding with a vanquished opposition to thwart Mr. Trump’s nascent corporate statism?  Does Mr. Brooks foster confidence in his opinion when his crystal ball is a light British comedy of the early 1980s with dubious relevance to our troubling circumstance?  Mr. Brooks should suppress his pseudo-intellectual maundering and offer a sober analysis of how best to navigate the Trump era.