driftglass On the Dead Center

driftglass skewers NY Times columnist David Brooks' claim that young people don't want the politics of polarization:

Again, Brooks attempts to tack around the dead elephant in his Party's phone booth, so let me clarify this once again: Bobo, you people bred and perfected polarization as a means to your political ends.

This condition was not created by accident.

This is the world you built.

The water you poisoned.

The air you polluted.

And you are still doing it.

One GOP cadre dumps mercury into the milk, and then on-cue another begins to cry about how the milk's all done gone mysteriously bad.

One GOP cohort laces the apples with razors, and another weeps 'cause somehow the apples make his mouth all owie.

One wing burns the rhetorical Reichstag down, and another walks the rubble wondering aloud how such a terrible thing could have happened.

You, Bobo, are the problem. You personally. You specifically. You individually are the problem.

You wanna help this country find its way? Quit. Quit tomorrow. It is far too late to pretend you didn't know where this was all going, or couldn't tell how it would all end, or that you were working silently for change from the inside, or whatever nonsense collaborators tell themselves that lets them sleep at night.

You are the disease vector, Mr. Brooks, so please quit waddling the Earth looking for more venues to pass along your sickness.

You are the spongy, pastel beard of the hard, crazy Right and if nothing else, the last two years have at last demonstrated a clear natural limit to that specific strain of mass-hysteria and self-delusion that infects your side.

Yes, 30% or so of the citizens of this country are a cultural dead-loss. A morally atrophied slumgullion of wasted carbon, bad ideas and straight-grain-stoopid that cannot be reasoned with and should never be indulged.

And they have been feeding off of that steady diet of psychotic rage that their religious, media and political leaders have pumped into our national groundwater. For every ache and pain in their pathetic lives they have been offered the same, simple sacrificial scapegoats over and over and over again:

Queers, Feminists, Activist Judges and Dirty Hippies.

But that 30% is unelectable without a thick undercoating of respectability and a heavy carapace of "Reasonableness" welded to their hides. Without some nice, clean, articulate barker to work the Midway and wheedle the Moderates into Jerry Falwell's political freak show.

Without a suit, a pair of glasses, soft hands, a moon face, a pink tie and some valuable real estate on the editorial page of the NYT they're just another mob of racists and Dominionists begging for tyranny and screaming for blood.

You should read the whole thing. And, once again, I wonder, why driftglass doesn't have a nationally syndicated column, and Brooks does.