It's "What The Fuck" Wednesday!
The things you see will shock and amaze you
Links are at the end, for what that’s worth.
“American Compass has been pushing a working-class agenda”
Bret Stephens and David Brooks locked themselves in a room at The Times to hash out the future of the GOP.1 Despite one’s low expectations, the lack of self-awareness astonishes. Brooks thinks the GOP could eventually remake itself as the responsible party of the multiracial working class. Stephens thinks it will remake itself as the party of Reagan — “the party of economic freedom, social aspiration and moral responsibility” — which he evidently sees in apposition if not opposition to the working class of any stripe.
“I came to believe that the free market policies that were right to combat stagnation and sclerosis a few decades earlier,” says Brooks, “were not right for an age of inequality and social breakdown.”
How, one wonders, did we wind up with an age of inequality and social breakdown if not as a result of the policies Brooks and Stephens supported back then?
More accurately, how did Brooks miss the inequality and social splintering of his golden age, and how does he still not see the acceleration of those in the 2000s and beyond as the inevitable outcome of the policies he supported back then? (Stephens is not noticeably disturbed by the circumstances Brooks describes.)
To his slight credit, Brooks, unlike Stephens, recognizes that the rise of the reactionary insanity at present defining his erstwhile party did not begin with Trump. He dates it back more or less to Pat Buchanan's success in the 1996 presidential primaries; in fact, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory was a triumph of Bircher jetsam over mainstream Republicanism.
Here’s what Stephens had to say in response: “The problem was that, when the illiberal barbarians were at the conservative gates, the gatekeepers had a catastrophic loss of nerve. Whether it’s too late to regain that nerve is, to me, the ultimate question.”
That quote might sound as though it means something, but it has no real-world application beyond self-exculpation.
The “American Compass” pull quote harks back to an op-ed Josh Hawley wrote the week after Congress and Joe Biden forced a settlement on rail worker unions, and which we wrote about in turn.2 His piece was called “Which Side Are You On, D.C.?” and in it he made a religious/moral/conservative case for advancing labor rights and pay.
No member of Congress or White House bureaucrat would ever have accepted this bad bargain, to say nothing of the Fortune 500, where white-collar employees just spent the last two years working “remote.” Many of them are still at it. And yet somehow, Biden and lawmakers decided even a few sick days for railway workers was a bridge too far.
Which raises the question: Do we want blue-collar work in this country or not?
And more in that vein. It’s an interesting read especially in light of who wrote it. Hawley is obviously not the basket you want to put your working class eggs in, nor Republicans generally, but that’s likely the sort of thing Brooks was talking about in reference to remaking the GOP as a working-class party. With some luck Democrats will get there first, a subject we touched on yesterday.3
The Brooks-Stephens colloquium is supposed to be seen as an exchange of Big Ideas about the Future of Conservatism and the Republican party, but it’s really just two guys going “what the fuck?” and “not my fault.”
Today’s music
Martha Hill, “Dog Hearted Man;”4 W. H. Lung, "Vanities."5
And that, Comrades, is all we got
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I think it’s important to remember that we should always refer to the person in question as Bret “Bedbug” Stephens.