No one who reads my blog needs to be reminded (he said, remindingly) that Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times is not really in the business of telling anyone anything about Murrica as it actually exists, but is instead engaged in a Great Project to

...radically redact the entire history of Modern Conservatism. And while at times my language has been sharp and pungent, I am quite serious about the core premise. This is quite clearly what he is doing, and spinning this ridiculous fairy tale over and over again for the benefit of his Beltway co-conspirators and America's richest and most luxuriously cocooned white people is quite clearly an immensely profitable enterprise.

And so no one who reads my blog can be surprised that the hinge on which Mr. David Brooks' column turns today is this (emphasis added):
...

In this election we’ve been ignoring the parts of America that are working well and wallowing in the parts that are fading. This has led to a campaign season driven by fear, resentment and pessimism. And it will lead to worse policy-making down the road, since prosperity means building on things we do well, not obsessing over the things that we’ve lost.

The person chiefly responsible for this all-warts view of America is, of course, Donald Trump.

Trump has focused his campaign on the struggling white neighborhoods in the industrial Midwest. The prototypical Trump voter is an upscale man from a downscale place....

In order to make his Great Project make sense, David Brooks spends an enormous amount of time pretending that Rush Limbaugh and his hundreds of imitators have not been on the air, coast-to-coast for the last quarter of a century selling exactly this view of Murrica to the millions of imbeciles and bigots who are flocking to Trump's banner.

Fox News does not exist.

Neither does Regnery Press,
Town Hall,
The Weekly Standard (his former employer).
National Review.
The Wall Street Journal (another former employer).
The Washington (Moonie) Times (another former employer)
or the entire Conservative Christian movement.

In Mr. Brooks' history of these United States, Nixon's Southern Strategy never paved a big wide highway to Donald Trump, and Lee Atwater never painted big, white lines right down the middle of it.

Karl Rove never existed.

The Tea Party never happened.

And so forth.

Of course, if instead of constantly leaning on the cherry-picked work of others and delivering it ex cathedra from the safety of his Beltway Basilica atop Mount Acela, high above and far away the from the teeming masses --

As Nate Silver has demonstrated, Trump voters are not poor. Their median household income is...

As Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic has shown, Republicans tend to do well in industrial places...

Michael Lind of New America argues in an essay in Politico that Republicans are becoming...

-- Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times ever got off ass, went out into the real world and actually talked to some of those upscale men from downscale places he would get a fucking earful about all of the above and then some.

Which would drive an Ann Coulter-sized stake straight though the heart of Mr. Brooks' Great Project.

Which is why, unless someone drag him bodily down Mount Acela and forces him to listen to the hoi polloi, there is no way Mr. Brooks is ever going to risk soiling his expensive shoes and shattering his precious opinions in actual, face-to-face interactions with actual upscale men from those downscale places.

Crossposted from Driftglass