http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/13/1431426/-David-Brooks-on-The-Republicans-Incompetence-Caucus
This was not just the work of the Freedom Caucus or Ted Cruz or one month’s activity. The Republican Party’s capacity for effective self-governance degraded slowly, over the course of a long chain of rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals. Basically, the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own.
Brooks argues that conservatism stands for intellectual humility - on that point I trust that most here would part company. Like many who identify as Conservative he seems blind to the notion that what he calls humility is rather a self-interested willingness to oppose any kind of "change" that would undermine the position of privilege in which he finds himself.
He traces the problem not back to the rhetoric of Goldwater in 1964 - remember the words about "extremism"?? - or even further back to the knee-jerk rejection of the New Deal, especially Social Security, and the willingness of some "conservatives" like Cornelius Vanderbilt and his friends to sponsor a military coup against FDR (about which the man approached for the coup, retired Marine General and two-time Medal of Honor winner Smedley Butler testified to Congress), but instead only about 30 years (meaning not even to the beginning of the term of Ronald Reagan:
Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.
Further down Brooks writes
Politics is the process of making decisions amid diverse opinions. It involves conversation, calm deliberation, self-discipline, the capacity to listen to other points of view and balance valid but competing ideas and interests.
In his following paragraph he notes that the extremists on who he is focused disagree with this, and argue for a purity, and that
Countrymen with different views are regarded as aliens. Political identity became a sort of ethnic identity, and any compromise was regarded as a blood betrayal.
In his masterwork, “Politics as a Vocation,” Max Weber argues that the pre-eminent qualities for a politician are passion, a feeling of responsibility and a sense of proportion. A politician needs warm passion to impel action but a cool sense of responsibility and proportion to make careful decisions in a complex landscape.
If a politician lacks the quality of detachment — the ability to let the difficult facts of reality work their way into the mind — then, Weber argues, the politician ends up striving for the “boastful but entirely empty gesture.” His work “leads nowhere and is senseless.”
Welcome to Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and the Freedom Caucus
Brooks believes in the importance of conversation, otherwise he would not have spent so many years as a partner of Mark Shields on The News Hour. He argues that those who don't accept democracy will not be good at conversation.
To which I would respond that in all the times I have watched him on PBS and in the many columns I have perused this is the first time I have ever encountered him recognizing what so many others have known for years - that many of the Republicans have no desire either for conversation nor democracy. They want to silence and belittle those of differing viewpoints and suppress the votes of those who would oppose what they would want.
The final paragraph expresses what must surely be the despair of many more traditional conservatives:
These insurgents are incompetent at governing and unwilling to be governed. But they are not a spontaneous growth. It took a thousand small betrayals of conservatism to get to the dysfunction we see all around.
not a big fan of Brooks but boy did he hit this one out the park, the part about politicians needing warmth and passion, a cool sense of responsibility and proportion sound like anyone you've known the last 7 years?????
Politics is the process of making decisions amid diverse opinions. It involves conversation, calm deliberation, self-discipline, the capacity to listen to other points of view and balance valid but competing ideas and interests.
once more sound like the MO of anyone you know????? as descriptive as those words are of Pres. these words equally describe the party of the rich.
that many of the Republicans have no desire either for conversation nor democracy. They want to silence and belittle those of differing viewpoints and suppress the votes of those who would oppose what they would want.
you would think that if someone kept telling you want you want and say knowing you don't want or didn't say there is something stinking in thay dynamic and maybe you should ask yourself if i do think and want these things why am i questioning them or just simply why??????????????
