Trilemma

Image via PopCrush.

Verbatim David Brooks, "Time for a Republican Conspiracy!" January 10 2016:

Given the current strains on middle- and working-class families, many Republican voters want a government that will help the little guy; they just don’t want one that is incompetent, corrupt or infused with liberal social values.

That certainly is a problem! Scylla, Charybdis, or accepting the need to live peaceably with people who are different from you.

No, he doesn't go for door no. 3. His preference is for the Justin Bieber option:

. if Justin Bieber can build a gigantic social media movement, why are you incapable of any collective action at all? What’s needed is a grass-roots movement that stands for governing conservatism, built both online and through rallies, and gets behind a single candidate sometime in mid- to late February.

It's a call for the Republican grassroots, all the humble little Mr. Potters, Chamber of Commerce and Junior League, to get out to those barricades, in their leisurewear, and Take our Party Back from those nasty classless parvenu upstarts Trump and Cruz. A kind of Tea Party where some people are really drinking tea. Demanding a government that is infused with Special Oolong. And they'll all be out on the Twitter throwing shade, that ought to strike fear into the hearts of those vulgarian Robert Mercers and Darwin Deasons and their villainous, unclubbable minions! The avant-garde of the repressed bourgeoisie, in the electronic trenches! Victory or death, or at least missing the cocktail hour!

It's not even truly funny any more how Brooks is incapable of understanding that there is no possibility of a conservative majority in the way he understands conservatism, ever, because it is an intrinsically minority point of view, senseless for anybody who is not a person of privilege or planning to be one, people who really do pay a lot of money in taxes and have particular favors they need to ask of their congressional representatives (about the business, not about getting a kid into West Point), and who really feel oppressed by business regulations. The reason there are these dreadful, violent-sounding vulgarians in the party is that the party cannot hope to win an election without them. You invited them in in 1964, guys, and if they've taken over the building it's your own fault.

I've run this (via Loomis) before, but I never get tired of it.

Driftglass says, "at the moment I have nothing much to add to the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of essays I have already pissed away into the abyss over the last 11 years," but fortunately he's being modest again.