David Brooks is missing something important

Via Memeorandum, NYT columnist David Brooks:

It was interesting to watch the Republican Party lose touch with America. You had a party led by conservative Southerners who neither understood nor sympathized with moderates or representatives from swing districts.

They brought in pollsters to their party conferences to persuade their members that the country was fervently behind them. They were supported by their interest groups and cheered on by their activists and the partisan press.

I’ll assume he’s purposely juxtaposing the motives of “their activists” and “the partisan press” here. Surely, he doesn’t believe both groups were cheering for the same reasons.

Anyway, this is the important line:

They spent federal money in an effort to buy support but ended up disgusting the country instead.

On to the Democrats:

It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America. That’s because the plotline is exactly the same. The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates. They have their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon, their own plans to lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes.

…We’re only in the early stages of the liberal suicide march, but there already have been three phases. First, there was the stimulus package. You would have thought that a stimulus package would be designed to fight unemployment and stimulate the economy during a recession. But Congressional Democrats used it as a pretext to pay for $787 billion worth of pet programs with borrowed money. Only 11 percent of the money will be spent by the end of the fiscal year — a triumph of ideology over pragmatism.

…Finally, there is health care. Every cliché Ann Coulter throws at the Democrats is gloriously fulfilled by the Democratic health care bills.

Do you see the difference? Maybe Republicans were arrogant, insular, and blind to reality, but their final mistake was in trying to spend themselves into the majority.

In other words, they moved radically away from conservative ideology.

Democrats, on the other hand, are falling because they’re sticking like Superglue to their ideology.

That’s different, but Brooks doesn’t notice.

He concludes:

And so here we are again. Every new majority overinterprets its mandate. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again.

By his description, Republicans didn’t “overinterpret” their “mandate.” The Democrats might be doing so, but if anything, Republicans ignored theirs.

More:

• Matthew Yglesias still doesn’t understand trend lines.

• William Jacobson urges Brooks to stay off the phone.

• Melissa Clouthier has forgotten the difference between First-term Bush and Second-term Bush.

• Ann Althouse agrees with me: the most important thing is that we are amused.