Memo to anyone taking @nytdavidbrooks column on 7 tribes (sic!) yesterday seriously: Whenever Brooks cites a source that confirms the line he's been taking for a while, he bets you won't check that source. When you do, as yesterday, you'll find he misrepresents its contents. 1/2
2/ I hear some of @nytimes usual suspects have been talking that Brooks piece up as brilliant. Yesterday I pointed out how he conflated pride and shame, distorting the underlying source material. Here I'll just point out one key difference he fails to address....
3/ His both-sider argument requires conservatives and progressives to be similarly rigid. But the points of disagreement he cites vary in the degree to which they are subject to empirical test. That is: do conservatives or progressives more deeply believe things that aren't true?
4/ And the answer, not completely, but with a preponderance of the examples is that there is such a difference in the issues he cites. Conservatives believe stuff that's either BS--actually false--or not subject to empirical analysis more often than progressives....
5/ The report he depends on compares, for example, MSNBC and Fox. Just about every study that's been done of accuracy in broadcast media points out that Fox tells more lies than any other net', and their audience is thus the least well informed of cable-news viewers...
6/ More broadly, lots of political scientists and conscientious political reporters have noted the difference in the kind of behavior both parties in legislatures have adopted; the national GOP is not like the Dems along key axes...
7/ And, of course, @realDonaldTrump has been both unprecedented in the amount of falsehood he injects into political discourse, and the degree to which his party has reinforced this civic pollution. All of this is easy to check, and is, by now well established; it's reality...
8/ And, you would think, the difference between a habitually gaslighting side in political discourse and the other, flawed but "normal" American political party would be relevant to a discussion of flavors of belief, commitment to positions, flexibility or not in viewpoint etc...
9/ But because @nytdavidbrooks is not in fact a public intellectual, but is rather a hack partisan masquerading as an above-the-fray thinker calling balls and strikes (mixed metaphor alert), he doesn't just ignore inconvenient aspects of our current polity...
10/ he actively misleads (hence the pride v. shame bottom-dealing). Those who praise him, within or outside the @nytimes echo chamber, R either too lazy or incapable to see the falseness running thru his work, or are complicit in it. He is, after all, famously effective clickbait
