David Brooks is getting lots of hosannas today for a column that forthrightly calls the Republican Party nuts for its unwillingness to accept a debt ceiling compromise that’s weighted something like 5:1 in favor of spending cuts and doesn’t raise marginal tax rates a dime in order to generate its modest revenue increases. The GOP, he says, should grab a deal like this with both hands:
But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.
The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise….The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities….The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency….The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name.
….If the debt ceiling talks fail, independents voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.
And they will be right.
I’ve avoided commenting on this today because I didn’t want to seem churlish. But on second thought, there’s nothing wrong with some occasional churl, is there?
So here’s my churlishness for the day: I’ll believe that Brooks has seen the light when he actually keeps this up for a few consecutive weeks. I’ve never been a Brooks hater, but the fact is that he occasionally writes columns like this. Normally, though, having done it, he then devotes his next five or six columns to nitpicking at Democrats and pretending that they are, when all’s said and done, just as bad as Republicans after all.
They aren’t, of course. They’re just a normal party with all the virtues and all the pathologies of any broad-based political party. That means it’s easy to find a laundry list of things to criticize and then add them up to make it seem as if everyone’s equally to blame for the insanity of our current political impasses. But it’s not true, and it’s long past time for non-insane conservatives to give up on this kind of faux Olympianism. As Brooks says, the GOP is no longer a normal political party and they are not fit to govern. The question is, will Brooks still believe that in a couple of weeks when — and it’s bound to happen — Democrats do something he dislikes? I’ll wait and see.
