The Razors Are Moving

As longtime readers of this blog know, the easiest way to spot a bad faith Both Siderist hack in the wild is to peruse their work for the Both Siderist "razor in the apple".

OK, to be 100% fair the truly easiest way to spot a bad faith Both Siderist hack in the wild is to notice telltale signs like "Opinion columnist at The New York Times" or "host of Katy Tur Reports" or "Chris Cillizza" in their bio.  But the second easiest way to spot 'em is the quickscan their column or podcast or whatever to locate the inevitable Both Sides Do It"razor in the apple".  

If you look, you will almost always find it.  It's both a ritual and a contractual obligation.  Like the Introductory Rites and Concluding Rites of a traditional Catholic Mass, the absence of a Both Siderist razor in the apple would be the shocking aberration, not its presence.  

And, in the case of Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times, for a while there I got to be eerily good at predicting what the subject of his next razor in the apple would be, and in which paragraph he would make that turn.  That I could do this magic trick -- predict the size, shape and subject of a Brooks column before it was published and tell you within a couple of column inches where he would inject the poison -- amazed my wife (no small thing) but, I think, also freaked her out a little.

But it wasn't really a magic trick.  It was just that Brooks is so utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly, predictably banal.  Like the press and die of a metal stamping machine that spits out 1,000 screwdrivers an hour, or the filling heads of a bottling machine, the whole reason for the existence of creatures like Brooks is to reliably hammer home exactly the same bullshit over and over again, decade after decade.

And here I am going to borrow a line which Brother Charlie Pierce used in a different context in his excellent Esquire column today:

We’ve wandered into a deranged political version of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, in which we are warned:

“Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.”

Interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.

Yep.  That is indeed the pernicious labor of the professional Both Siderist, captured neatly in a phrase.

But I've noticed a change.  Interesting to me only, perhaps, but I've noticed that the Both Siderists seem to be burying their razors further and further down.  Even tacking it on to the tail end of whatever they're writing or saying as if, of yeah, I'm still required to tell this stupid lie aren't I?  So they toss it on the table practically as they're walking out the door.  I would speculate that it even feels like an act done with a sense of shame...but we all know that professional Both Siderists are untroubled by emotions like shame or guilt.

I'll give you two examples and you can judge for yourself.  Both from New York Times employees.  Both named "David".  One, a printed column, and the other, parting remarks on a podcast.

In The New York Times today, Mr. David Brooks opens his column by tripping over a fact that Liberals have been shouting about for decades

I had hoped this election would be a moment of national renewal. I had hoped that the Democrats could decisively defeat MAGA populism and send us down a new national path.

That’s clearly not going to happen. No matter who wins this election, it will be close, and this is still going to be an evenly and bitterly divided nation.

In retrospect, I think I was expecting too much of politics...

And as usual, we Liberals have warehouses full of receipts explaining in excruciating detail exactly how our country got to be this way.

Let me explain.  

No.  There is too much.  Let me summarize.

The deplorable state we are in is all down to David Brooks' former party -- the Republican Party -- which David Brooks swore in 2014 had "detoxified" itself, and David Brooks' conservative movement, which he has been swearing every few months since Christ was in short pants would be flowering into a full-on renaissance of awesomeness any minute now.

For more on this subject, try here: "In The Beginning..."

Brooks then takes his readers on a typical Brooksian "America: A Land of Contrasts" speed tour through the late 19th and early 20th centuries:

For example, the Settlement House movement, led by women like Jane Addams of Chicago...

moguls like J.P. Morgan...

Philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller...

By the time Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency in 1901...

Before finally arriving at the razor in the apple in the very past paragraph of this forgettable mishmash.

For a whole society to change, the people in the society have to want to change themselves. A smug, self-satisfied, “I am right” nation is going to be perennially stuck in place.

This is Brooks prescription for social change: everyone has to simultaneously agree to change all at once, and everyone [meaning Democrats] needs to stop going around claiming that we anti-fascists are right and that the fascists are wrong in that smug, self-satisfied way of ours. 

The other David is Mr. David French, also now of The New York Times, who had a long and not-particularly-interesting conversation with Mr. Tim Miller of the MSNBC Green room about...stuff.  Mostly about the intractability of the zombie Republican base.  About how creepy it is that absolutely nothing can or will budge them.  

Miller: It's just, to me, it's, like so obvious that if you see the Trump threat, like, why aren't there more of us?  Why are there so why are there so few of us? I guess that's my final question.  Do you do you have any clarity for me on that?

As you might imagine, I have many thoughts as to why this is so, which neither Mr. French nor Mr. Miller would want to hear, but that's not where we are going today.

So, as Miller and French are wrapping up, French is explaining that, as cynical as he is, he was surprised at the intensity of the backlash that was (and is) directed at him now that he has finally endorsed Kamala Harris (you may remember that French was one of those whiny Republican hard-cases who pissed away their vote in 2016 and 2020 by voting third-party.)

Which would have been an excellent place to stop.  

But Both Siderist can't stop, can they?  They have this kind of compulsive false-equivalence logorrhea 

And so...

French:  And I think Tim what we constantly underestimate, just because it's kind of hard to wrap our minds around, animosity at the level of intensity that we see.  We constantly underestimate the raw animosity that exists on the Republican side for Democrats and by the way on the Democratic side for Republicans.

Yes, even before Trump, French says, Both Sides hated each other.  

So where did all that anger on Both Sides come from?

French says, three or four times, that it's "negative polarization" which is defined as:

Whereas traditional partisanship involves supporting the policy positions of one's own party, its negative counterpart in turn means opposing those positions of a disliked party.

There's is not even a passing acknowledgment of the decades of labor men like David French poured into turning the Republican base into an army of reprogrammable meatbags whose reflexive response to the word "Democrat" is "Marxist!Commie!Socialist!Monster!"

Or, as Never Trumper Hero #1 Liz Cheney was describing us until about five minutes ago, baby-murdering filth who are "the face of pure evil":

Instead of correctly diagnosing what the fuck happened to the Republican party as the end product of a decades-long Republican campaign of calculated, premeditated and well-funded demonization of Democrats -- and Democratic reacting to the rise of this American fascist party by despising fascists as any patriot should -- French whisks all that inconvenient history away with the magic conjure words "negative polarization" which is a mysterious thing that apparently just happens.  You know, like an ill-timed fart at a funeral or the like the description of the wind from John, 3:8

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.

The Both Siderist razors on the apples are shifting location, kids.

But they are most definitely still there. 

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Both Siderists Racing Endlessly Through The MAGA Rat Maze

There's a part of the brain of those afflicted with Compulsive Centrist Disorder that Trump and the Republican Party have broken forever.     Broken like Kirk and crew broke Norman's brain in I, Mudd. 

The existence of Trump and the Republican party presented them with an unresolvable paradox, and many of them have gone mad trying in vain to square that unsquarable circle.  

Take, for example, Mr. William Galston, who "holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a senior fellow. Prior to January 2006 he was the Saul Stern Professor and Acting Dean at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland..." an several other academic and political resume items.  He is also a contributor at the vile Federalist Society, and a columnist at Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.

He is also a hardcore, life-long slightly-left-leaning centrist, and honestly, among all of our "allies", these sorts are just the fucking worst.  Because they do the work of the radical Right while wearing the jersey of the Sensible Left-Leaning Centrist.  

Specifically, as the Right kept rocketing further and further down the political color spectrum into Infrared Crazytown, to maintain their Sensible Left-Leaning Centrist credentials this species of cage-fed academic pundit was always too happy to pull up stakes and relocate the "center" further and further to the right.  In Galston's case, after Democrats elected Barack Obama (who might as well have been built in a Sensible Centrist lab) and, in response, Republicans began an eight year, racist primal scream and embarked on a plot to destroy Obama by any means necessary...

...from high atop his academic ivory tower, Galston surveyed the scene and concluded that, damnit!, what Murrica needed right now was Moar Centrism!  Moar Both Siderism!  And so he and a number of other useful idiots grifters founded No Labels, about which I wrote a long thing two days after they launched, and which as proven to be an extremely accurate and prescient bit of blogging.  

If you want to read it, it's here, "Dead Center".  

That was in 2010.

In 2014 -- fully six years into the relentless Republican campaign of slander and sabotage -- Galston once again cast his gaze across the political landscape and, as a Sensible Left-Leaning Centrist, concluded that the country's best way forward was to get behind a group of clean-cut, well-meaning rising rising Republican stars who called themselves the "Young Guns".  From the Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2014:

A Cautious Step Toward Republican Reform

Challenging conservative orthodoxies on tax policy and education, but not going far enough.

By William A. Galston

As a member of the gang of insurgents who prepared the way for Bill Clinton's presidency, I know something about reforming a political party on a losing streak. The conservative manifesto "Room to Grow," released May 22 by the advocacy group YG Network—the YG stands for Young Guns—offers a glimpse of a similar effort among today's Republicans...

The document's scope is limited—deliberately, I assume. It has nothing to say about foreign policy or hot-button social issues such as same-sex marriage. The focus is on economic opportunity and mobility for people striving to enter the middle class or struggling to remain there. The frame is narrowed even further. "Room to Grow" is all but silent on the budget, trade and immigration. It touches on tax reform and Social Security only tangentially, and on Medicare only in the context of the Affordable Care Act...

The document's emphasis on the middle class is a thinly veiled repudiation of the Romney campaign, whose emphasis on "job creators" reduced the 2012 Republican convention to a gathering of the National Federation of Independent Businesses. As Sen. Mitch McConnell noted at a "Room to Grow" public event last week...

By acknowledging and cataloging the challenges facing the middle class, policy analyst Peter Wehner takes a large step toward reality in the "Room to Grow" introductory chapter...

And then comes the yummy-yummy Both Siderist gravy that Sensible Left-Leaning Centrists slather on everything they write

It isn't just the fault of one administration or party, and the American people know it. "When it comes to Republicans and Democrats," Mr. Wehner writes, "the public's attitude is: A pox on both your parties." Conservatives, he says, need to "set aside their habit of speaking as if the very same solutions we offered a generation ago would work equally well today."...

Sure, it doesn't go far enough.   And sure, there are critical issues that are, as yet, too hot to touch.  But just maybe, with sober-minded elders like Mitch McConnell to guide them,  those crazy kids will turn this whole cockeyed caravan around!

Throughout the remainder of the Obama administration, the entirety of the Trump administration and the first two years of the Biden administration, No Labels (and it's legislative arm, the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus which, fun fact, never actually solved any problems) remained dogmatically committed to the proposition that everything was always the fault of Both Sides, and that only Sensible Centrist movement of some kind could save the nation from the Extremes on Both Sides.

When, in fact, No Labels has only ever truly served one purpose.  From The Intercept, December 4, 2018:

Here’s a Better Name for No Labels: Republicans

Far from remaining aloof from politics, No Labels has been swooping down into the fray in recent years on behalf of Republicans and conservative Democrats.

As we all know by now, journalists, academics and think tanks acting as stalking horses for terrible Republican ideas while masquerading as Sensible Centrists are the lollipops in the mouths and butter in the asses of the Beltway media.   

They absolutely cannot get enough of it, which is why No Labels never lacked for glowing publicity and a steady flow of dark money.  And you can see how useful such creatures are to schemes of some recently-former Republican Never Trumpers who dream of returning to their Bush/Cheney glory days.  Which is why Mr. Galston and his dreary "But the Democrats..." mantra is a cast regular on Mona Charen's weekly Bulwark podcast.   

But then, about five minutes ago a whole lotta people started to catching up in big a hurry with where your 'ol Unca Driftglass had been all along.  That was when No Labels began its most ambitious fifth column project on behalf of the Republican party; when, in a move guaranteed to drain votes from Joe Biden and accomplish nothing else, they announcing they were launching a foredoomed third-party run for president.

There sometimes comes a moment in the lives of at least some of these broke-brained, Sensible Centrist goofs when the terrors real world intrude deeply enough into their cosseted, Centrist comas that they suddenly realize just how close to the snapping jaws tyranny their little pink toes actually are.  

Then, in a fleeting moment of clarity, they actually do something.

From USA Today, May 13, 2023:

A Trump-Biden rematch? Pass, says this group searching for a third-party option in 2024
...
Whatever its rationale, No Labels’ pursuit of a third-party option has caused strife even within the organization. William Galston, another of the group’s founders, resigned in April after questioning the wisdom of its launching third-party campaign.

“My judgment is that an independent third-party candidacy would make Donald Trump’s return to the White House more likely, not less likely,” Galston said. “I decided I had to act on that belief.”

So good on him for that.  

However, that junkie itch of the hardcore Both Siderist is well nigh impossible to resist for long.  

And so, last week on the aforementioned Bulwark podcast, during a long and tedious discussion of the various shades and styles of partisanship (oh, the things I listen to for you people! :-), when Mr. Galston's turn came around, this is, in part, what he had to add to the conversation:

Will Saletan:  ...a recent survey in which 62% of Republicans said they were prepared to vote for a candidate who faced allegations of sexual harassment more than 40% would vote for a convicted felon more than 40% said they would vote for a candidate who compromised National Security and [professor of political science Shanto Iyengar] said that there was quote a huge partisan divide with more...with Republicans much more likely to ignore these things.  So to what extent do you think the partisan hostility accounts for this loss of self- policing within the Republican party or to what extent do you think other factors are more salient.

Galston, [after explaining that it would be way too much work to go through all the relevant studies and statistics] :...I'd really have to put in a lot of work to be able to answer your question at a social science level of rigor so let me just revert to informal punditry and say that it seems to me obvious that the worse you think would be the consequences for the country of the other side taking control the more likely you are to make excuses for the misdeeds of your own side.  The stakes are too high to allow those misdeeds to get in the way of the overall objectives which is to save the country from those evil people on the other side.  Uh... and I think from that standpoint... uh... y'know... uh... I think there's a certain symmetry between the two political parties at this point.  Namely each party, for different reasons, believes that a takeover by the other party would entail catastrophe for the country, uh, and that's so that's half of the answer...

Some of you may remember the final episode of the outstanding Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which the new WJM station management announced that it was going to keep idiot Ted Baxter on the payroll and fire everyone else.  All the talented, hardworking news professionals who actually made the show work.

In a moment of bravado, Ted threatened to resign if management fired the rest of the staff. However, when pushed, he immediately caved. This prompted, Murray Slaughter, the writer, to remark, "When a donkey flies, you don't blame him for not staying up that long." 

Same deal here.

There is no exit from the MAGA Rat Maze which does not involve conceding that both sides are emphatically not the same.  At all.  Period.  Which is why Compulsive Centrism Disorder/Both Siderism is not only every bit as much of a cult as MAGA Republicanism, these two cults exist in symbiotic relationship to each other.  

The further into Crazytown the Republican party goes, the further to the Right the Both Siderist cult must haul the fulcrum of Centrism in order to keep up the pretense of fairness and neutrality (and continue marketing themselves as the safe harbor from The Extremes on Both Sides.)   And, seeing that Both Siderists will reflexive respond to growing fanaticism on the Right by dragging the "center" rightward, the Republican party is encouraged to continue driving ever further in the direction of outright fascism.   

One cult is full of shrieking bigots, demagogues, grifters, perverts, imbeciles and heavily armed gun-nuts waiting for the signal to grab their muskets and take the fight to the streets, while the other cult is stocked with pundits, op-ed writers, academics and other mild-mannered users-of-correct-grammar-and-cutlery, but make no mistake, they're in this together.

Or, in the wise words of Omar Little...

"I got the shotgun.  You got the briefcase. But it's all in the game, though, right?"

I Am The Liberal Media

March 2024 Jennifer Rubin Is Now Fully April 2012 Norm Ornstein

From The Brookings Institute, April 27, 2012:

Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem

[by] Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein

...

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition...

The Washington Post, yesterday:

Forget ‘polarization.’ It’s the GOP’s radicalization.

By Jennifer Rubin

The notion that the United States is “polarized” into two conflicting, equally stubborn and extreme camps infects much of the mainstream news coverage and everyday chatter about politics. Washington is “broken.” “Gridlock” is a problem. “No one goes out to dinner with someone on the other side.” Such mealy-mouthed language masks a stark dichotomy: Democrats have to move to the center to get bipartisan support; Republicans have become radicalized and unmovable.

This is not “polarization.” It is the authoritarian capture of much of the GOP by a right-wing movement bent on sowing chaos...

And this completes that particular circle.

Powerful and completely accurate @JRubinBlogger . Should be read by all journalists, especially editors, and reporters at the Post, the Times, AP and CNN. And points out how devious and pernicious is No Labels. https://t.co/yMOLXYnhRO

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) March 10, 2024

Good to see Rubin catching up to where Norm was 12 years ago, and where the Left was decades ago, back when even whispering such thoughts was the darkest heresy.  However, ultimately none of this will matter very much.  

There just aren't any minds left to be persuaded on the Right.  And Centrists are just as pot-committed to their poisonous cult of Both Sides Do It as the Right are pot-committed to their Orange Rapist Fascist Daddy.  It's just that, in the case of pathological Centrists, virtually the entire mainstream news media are members of that cult, so they use their their position occupying the commanding heights of the normie media to camouflaged their weirdo fetish as "objective" and "normal". 

See also The New York Times every fucking day.

 

I Am The Liberal Media

Today In "Both Sides Don't" News

Q:  What's more addictive than meth, more profitable than iPhones. more indestructible than Kevlar and easier to make than Top Ramen?

A: Garbage Both Siderist opinions.

"Both Sides Do It" is easily the biggest of the Big Lies.  The Big Lie that enables all the little lies. From trying to sound smart at the office, to propping up an entire political media ecosystem, it's a lie that's perfect for all circumstances and occasions.  

Since the very earliest days of the blogosphere, we Liberals have spilled tens of millions of pixels debunking the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It, week in and week out, year in and year out, decade in and  decade out.  And we have actually made some progress, so "Yay!" for us.

And yet, when cornered, what is still the first tool the worst people always reach for?

From Crooks and Liars via Media Matters for America:

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): I think both candidates have to realize this, that if on the left, if Joe Biden listens to the squad, he loses. And I think if Donald Trump listens to Matt Gaetz and Steve Bannon he loses. They have to understand that most of the people are not on the extremes, and that if you can understand that you are going to win. The first one to understand that, and does what they think they should do, and not what the extremists are bullying them to do, is going to be successful.

Remember kids, Both Sides Don't.

Pass it on.

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