Excuse me, but what didn't David Brooks see coming?

Hard pass on this long plea for empathy from a horrified old-school conservative.

I read almost all of “I Should Have Seen This Coming,” the much-buzzed-about David Brooks essay in The Atlantic. It seems to be a long plea for empathy from a horrified old-school conservative lost in Trumpian hell. I’m easy to empathize with almost anyone — a real softy — but I take a hard pass here.

What exactly did Brooks miss during the last 45 years?

Nostalgia for Ronald Reagan is understandable, given what’s become of the Republican Party in Trump time. But, having spent more years as a reporter and columnist than Brooks did — and focused on the local, not the lofty — I can safely say: There should be nothing surprising about the present American tragedy, given the history since Reagan’s election in 1980.

In that time, I have professionally watched the American spectacle and failed to understand why anyone with hopes for cultural or economic progress wanted to be aligned with the conservatism personified by the Republican Party. And that goes for both strains of conservatism that Brooks describes in The Atlantic — the intellectual one that championed “ideas” and the nasty one that just wanted to “shock the left.” One wanted the status quo, the other wanted to go backwards. (I leave out libertarianism, an ideology distinct from the strains of conservatism Brooks describes.)

Why would Brooks or anyone presumably interested in progress — the advancement of the quality of life at home and abroad — be associated with a conservative movement that saw as its first mission the unraveling of the New Deal?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a president confined to a wheelchair due to polio, defined a conservative as “a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned how to walk forward.”

FDR came from privilege, went to Groton, then Harvard and Columbia. A Democrat, he believed in public service and government for the greater good. He pulled the country out of the Great Depression and led the nation through World War II. He was a heroic figure of the 20th Century.

John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson embraced Roosevelt idealism and carried it into the 1960s, giving the country the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society. But Johnson, being from Texas, understood the consequences. As he signed the Civil Rights Act into law, he remarked, “We’ve lost the south for a generation.”

While 27 Republican senators voted for the Civil Rights Act, conservatives of both parties took counter measures, and soon liberal or moderate Republicans (fiscally conservative, socially enlightened) started to disappear from the political map.

In 1968, Republican Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy set out to exploit the Democratic Party’s association with civil rights and appeal to racism in the states of the Confederacy. As a candidate in 1968, Nixon sabotaged the Johnson administration’s efforts to end the Vietnam War so that his promises of “peace with honor” would elevate him to the presidency. It worked, but more than 21,000 Americans died after Nixon’s inauguration.

David Brooks, who was born in 1961, says he joined the conservative movement in 1980, the year of Reagan’s sound defeat of Jimmy Carter. Brooks saw the anti-communist Reagan as a champion of freedom at home and abroad, and that’s the Gipper’s legacy; he deserves that much.

But Reagan also gave us the welfare queen anecdote, suggesting that the government's social safety net was infested with fraud. He championed trickle-down tax cutting. He opposed the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday before reluctantly signing it into law. Reagan was horribly slow to recognize the AIDS epidemic and his administration adopted a harsh approach to disability benefits.

Reagan described government as an ominous threat to citizens. “The most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,'” Reagan said as he assumed command of a federal workforce he promised to shrink. And though he failed to do that — both the size of government and the federal deficit grew during his two terms — his Republican Party pushed deregulation of business and lower taxes for the wealthy; it suggested that government (other than the Pentagon) could not be trusted, and that unfettered capitalism would make more Americans more prosperous.

How’s that worked out?

The last 45 years have been marked by concentrated wealth and, until recently, stagnant wage growth. The rich got a lot richer while good-paying, middle-class-establishing jobs disappeared. Republicans consistently opposed raising the federal minimum wage. They forced Bill Clinton, a Democrat, to the political center to enact welfare reforms but still complain about the expansion of the federal food stamp program.

Republicans fought long and hard to keep the Affordable Care Act from becoming law. They then tried repeatedly to repeal it. Republican governors and legislators in 10 states continue to refuse to accept the ACA’s Medicaid expansion for uninsured, low-income citizens. If not for Democrats, some 40 million Americans would not have had health insurance over the last decade.

None of that should be news to David Brooks. What about conservative opposition to taxing the obnoxiously rich to pay for a strong social safety net did he miss?

What about strident Republican opposition to gun control, as the number of mass shootings piled up? Did Brooks notice that?

Brooks says Democrats have been elitists, talking down to ordinary Americans, lecturing them to the point of resentment or some such nonsense. That claim ignores the way the media ecosystem has changed.

Did Brooks ever tune into Rush Limbaugh on radio or Laura Ingraham on FOX? Limbaugh was on the air, mocking progressives and progressivism for more than 30 years; FOX News launched in 1996, back in the Newt Gingrich era, when nasty became de rigueur. Gingrich inspired a whole generation of cheap shot artists to run for office. Whatever collegiality existed in Congress started to disappear during that time — Bill Clinton gave the right plenty of fodder — and the vulgarity of Trump flows from the Gingrich sewer.

Not even a Republican president, George W. Bush, could get the Republicans in Congress to straighten out the nation’s immigration system, so it remains, 20 years later, something for Trump to exploit.

Bush got tax breaks for the wealthy, and so did Trump in his first term. Republicans want to do it again this year, and I note that they no longer bother preaching the myth that reducing taxes creates jobs. (Far more jobs — millions upon millions more — have been created under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents.)

No Republican in either the House or Senate voted for Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

No Republican in either the House or Senate voted for the American Rescue Plan, Biden’s first big initiative to further help Americans emerge from the pandemic. (The nation’s unemployment rate has been below 5% and around 4% since September of Biden’s first year in office.)

Like a lot of Americans, I don’t understand what 77 million of our fellow citizens found appealing about the ignoramus Trump, a felon and pathological liar.

But they voted for him again, and here we are.

David Brooks did not support Trump, but he seems surprised that the second coming of the Liar-in-Chief is so bad.

Give me a break.

Conservative, moderate or liberal, what did any of us expect, with the worst president in history elected to a second term, with compliant Republican majorities in the House and Senate, a Trumpified Supreme Court and a plutocracy serving as court to a corrupt presidency?

But all the horrors unfolding are the fruits of a poisonous tree, and that poison got into the roots a long time ago and its color was red.