David Brooks wrote today about race. He said that the 9.12 tea bagger protesters actually mingled with a group of African Americans who happened to be in the nation’s capitol celebrating their culture. For Brooks that anecdotal story of white folks and black folks hanging out is proof that race isn’t an issue.

“These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. They’d both been energized by eloquent speakers. Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them. It was just different groups of people milling about like at any park or sports arena.”

Wow, so you’re saying that black people can wax eloquent too, just like whites, even though blacks come from a polar opposite of whites in terms of politics and culture. Yeah there’s no way an African American could have to deal with anything remotely similar to whites – total opposites – like black and white.

But you see these people didn’t start beating each other, so to Brooks racism isn’t an issue any more around here.

“There are other, equally important strains in American history that are far more germane to the current conflicts.”

Yep, nothing to see here, no racists. Nope. None. Immigration!

The real problem is those damn militant progressives trying to drop the hammer on the working man like they always do.

“And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.”

Yeah those left-wing fascists are ruining this great nation. It’s not those right-wing-pro-business-overt-capitalists who’ve been running the country since at least the eighteenth century. It’s those damn liberals and their filthy welfare, and their all like totally militant about it too. First it’s Social Security, then it’s Civil Rights and Medicare and now they those militant fascists want to provide health care to everyone – even blacks.

“Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.”

Yeah Obama screwed up the economy back in 2007, became President in 2009, then maniacally instituted a federal takeover of all industry. Total commie bastard move.

“Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash, regardless of his skin color. And it was guaranteed that this backlash would be ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top — since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.”

See, it’s always been this way. Well, of course, most of the stuff blamed on Obama actually started during the eight years George W. Bush ran the nation and none of these particular “progressives” gave a crap, but hey it has nothing to do with skin color, it’s just that Obama really pisses off a lot of people for no apparent reason. It’s not that he’s black though, because the tea baggers would have been protesting Bush’s expansion of the federal government, rising health care costs and sinking wages, but there just needed to be some match to ignite the fire in their bellies. What’s different? Hmmmm

“What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.”

Wait, so the news media is populist and the tea baggers are progressive? I’m confused, I thought the news media were liberals and the tea baggers were conservatives, now they’re “militant progressives.”

“‘One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,’ the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. ‘The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.’”

I’m sorry but to refer to progressives as “elite” is too funny. Now sure there are progressives who are part of the elite, but real progressives and liberals are not part of the elite. Not if you define the elite as people who have all the real power in the nation, they certainly aren’t progressives. All throughout history the Establishment has violently crushed any and all leftist outbursts.

Now it’s true, as Brooks points out in his column, that during Andrew Jackson’s tenure as president, there was a strong push for more democratic control of government, but a) Jackson didn’t create that desire b) most people in the US couldn’t vote – so to overstate this fervor for democracy ignores the fact that blacks, Native Americans, women and anyone else that didn’t own land couldn’t vote.

But for Brooks these African Americans who mingled with these so-called progressives on 9.12 without murdering them is proof that race isn’t an issue. Nothing to see here.

“It’s not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old.”

I got your deep and old – right here.

Read Brooks’ column