I am breaking out the scary clown faces for this one. You made me do it, David Brooks
I usually avoid David Brooks, I really do. Sure, he said something stupid
last week, but he says something stupid every week, and this isn't a damn day care center. We can't be babysitting him all the time.
But then he comes out with crap like this, and what are we supposed to do? Let's start from the end:
It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.
See, Mr. Brooks, here's your problem. That
mental ingredients bit, the notion that some group of people you do or don't like lack the mental capacity for self-government, the deep sigh of the White Man's Burden written into yet another column in yet another long, depressing decade. Yeah, don't do that. That a conservative pundit would spend a column constructing a defense of military coup if it got rid of the right sort of person is not even worth bothering with: Yes, yes, we know, we weren't all born yesterday and the Our Bastard theory of American power has been the basis of many a "good" coup and "good" genocide and "good" devolution into military rule so long as the insert-resource-here keeps flowing or the insert-bad-group-here finds a troublesome opponent in the new bastard-based regime. There's not a coup anywhere in the world that doesn't get the same column—there's no doubt a template, somewhere, a Mad Libs version cut from an old Kissinger or Reagan speech with the names tweaked to fit the enemies of the moment.
Brooks' more specific premise I find it more difficult to argue with. Probably not for the reasons he would hope, though, as I'll explain below the fold.
Democracy, the argument goes, will eventually calm extremism. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood may come into office with radical beliefs, but then they have to fix potholes and worry about credit ratings and popular opinion. Governing will make them more moderate.
You've got us there. I remember when people were making the same arguments about the new breed of Republicans, too. Didn't happen. Turns out religious crackpots don't give a damn about potholes (we didn't fix them), credit ratings (ours got lowered, if you can believe it) and popular opinion (Congress now rates below most venereal diseases, in terms of popularity.) It
did turn out to be a stupid argument, and people who made it should be shunned as imbeciles.
Those who emphasize substance, on the other hand, argue that members of the Muslim Brotherhood are defined by certain beliefs. They reject pluralism, secular democracy and, to some degree, modernity.
Wait, is this whole thing going to be about the radical incompetence of
other people's religious fundamentalists? Stop it, you're going to kill me. Do you know what I would give for a
secular democracy? Forget modernity, I'd settle for "we finally agree to believe sh-t most educated people thought settled a hundred years ago." Instead we've got Supreme Court judges making special notes in their legal opinions stating that they do not necessarily agree with statements on textbook biology.
The important thing is to get people like that out of power, even if it takes a coup. The goal is to weaken political Islam, by nearly any means.
Ah, and when the devil turns 'round on you, Mr. Brooks, what will you do then? That's a rather bold and generic statement to make considering the recent historical record of that very sentiment biting us in the ass.
It has become clear—in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Gaza and elsewhere—that radical Islamists are incapable of running a modern government. Many have absolutist, apocalyptic mind-sets. They have a strange fascination with a culture of death.
For a minute there I thought you were talking about Texas, but then I remembered that our own absolutists and apocalypse-humpers wave a different book around. Still, it's been bully work on the incapable-of-running-a-modern-government part. Not North Carolina good, but pretty damn good.
As Adam Garfinkle, the editor of The American Interest, put it in an essay recently, for this sort of person “there is no need for causality, since that would imply a diminution of God’s power.” This sort of person “does not accept the existence of an objective fact separate from how he feels about it.”
All right, now I know you're just fucking with me.
[Islamists] lack the mental equipment to govern. Once in office, they are always going to centralize power and undermine the democracy that elevated them.
I'm going to put you in a room and read your own column to you over and over. And then I'll be charged with torture, and it'll be a fair cop.
Nathan Brown made that point about the Muslim Brotherhood recently in The New Republic: “The tight-knit organization built for resilience under authoritarianism made for an inward-looking, even paranoid movement when it tried to refashion itself as a governing party.”
What Morsi's supporters really needed to do to defuse this is to blame every fucking thing that happens on ACORN. It can be the same ACORN as ours, it doesn't effing matter. Also, your reading list sucks. Also, the government is hoarding bullets because of Agenda 21. It's going to put the cows in charge.
It’s no use lamenting Morsi’s bungling because incompetence is built into the intellectual DNA of radical Islam. We’ve seen that in Algeria, Iran, Palestine and Egypt: real-world, practical ineptitude that leads to the implosion of the governing apparatus.
And before long you're putting weight limits on all the bridges because nobody in government can agree to cut a check to make them
not fall into the river if certain trucks go over them, and because the governing apparatus is instead spending all its time discussing what the rights of the nation's women ought to be and if they've gotten a bit out of hand. Actual true story. Not kidding.
This week’s military coup may merely bring Egypt back to where it was: a bloated and dysfunctional superstate controlled by a self-serving military elite. But at least radical Islam, the main threat to global peace, has been partially discredited and removed from office.
Silly columnist. Radical fundamentalism can never be "discredited." If you try it and it fails and the government turns incompetent or the nation falls on its collective economic ass it only means you weren't radical and fundamentalist
enough; the preferred next course of action is usually for everyone involved to write a self-serving book, then get on with their lives.
In reality, the U.S. has no ability to influence political events in Egypt in any important way. The only real leverage point is at the level of ideas.
Which is good, because that's all we've got. And our main idea is that your country sucks because it's full of religious fundamentalists who lack the
mental ingredients necessary for governing yourself in a non-batshit-insane way. So we're going to write columns about that, and how we can still hope you get your act together and reject modernity-rejecting religious nutjobs. Good luck with that.
I think I am finally beginning to understand the problem with David Brooks. The problem with David Brooks is an astonishing lack of self-awareness. Take any event in the entire world or any snippet from any Real American fleshed out into an awkwardly phrased column idea, and David Brooks can without effort turn it into a few hundred words that mean almost nothing about the actual situation at hand. His own party could turn into nothing more than raving packs of woodland-roaming loons (more so, I mean) and he would still be absolutely oblivious to it and linking approvingly to their opinion columns. Any and all notions that David Brooks once put in an op-ed could turn into catastrophic, world-shaking failures when put into practice, and David Brooks would not so much as notice, or even remember. He's not mean. He's not dumb. But he prefers to play at the surface of a very shallow pool, so shallow that only the ripples and reflections of things are considered real, and whatever swims down below there is a topic for, well, for never. He's amiable enough, but downright stubborn in his enforced gullibility.
With that, I think we can go back to ignoring David Brooks for a while. He doesn't even get the gigantic asshole of the week award, either: that's got to go to the Wall Street Journal editorial team, which comes down firmly on the pro-genocidal monster side of things because that's just the way Wall Street rolls, baby:
Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.
Christ, people. When your openly preferred model of military coup is
Augusto Freaking Goddamn Pinochet—so long as he opens up the investment markets—you're really making a fine case for the people that want to just boil you all in oil and be done with it. Brooks may have a very fine point indeed: I wonder if the ruling class of certain countries even have the basic intellectual heft needed to support a democracy.