David Brooks disappears the Republican Party

From Driftglass:

...In yet another lazy, error-riddled, paint-by-numbers column (when has Mr. Brooks written any other kind?) about the problems that are crippling our society, Mr. Brooks once again manages to make the entire Republican Party disappear.

So let's skip a stone across Mr. Brooks' shallow, brackish puddle of words to see what he'e really talking about...

Two Cheers for Liberalism! (Or Maybe One and a Half)

Free speech has to rest on a shared morality.

...I defend liberalism because I think...

There follows a Brooks-brand sweeping and false generalization.

I am a liberal in a classical Enlightenment sense...

Translation: I'm a Conservative who has supported depraved Republican policies my entire adult life but you are out of your damn mind if you think I'm going to even mention that Conservatism exists. Instead I'll adopt the wingnut Twitter troll's favorite protecting coloration, "classic Liberalism." Hell, I'll milk an entire column out of it!

Liberalism was based on the idea...

Yet another bullshit generalization.

Liberalism sometimes devolves into atomization, an alienated society of lonely buffered selves.

Have I mentioned that the first half of this column is nothing but a farrago of ludicrous and wrong categorical pronouncements?

Liberalism assumed that people are primarily...

No, we don't.

By itself, liberalism is so thin it can’t even defend itself.

I don't even know what that means.

Now strap in, because Mr. Brooks is about to make a head-snapping pivot from assembling a laundry of list of laughably simpleminded generalizations about "Liberalism"...to a disquisition on how much he hates laughably simpleminded generalizations.

One of the reasons that America is so angry right now is that there is so much dehumanization. Racism reduces a human being to a skin color. The first casualty in a culture, political or generational war is the willingness to see the full humanity of the other. In this moment, some people seem eager even to dehumanize themselves by reducing themselves to a simple label and making politics their one identity. “Speaking as a. …”

"America is so angry"? Which Americans, David? "Some people seem eager"? Which people, David?

If liberalism left little space for group identity...

It didn't.

You get all these absurd generalizations: White people believe this. Elites believe that.

If I start laughing now at David Brooks mounting his high horse and riding up the steep cliffs of High Dudgeon over other people's "absurd generalizations" I will never be able to stop.

But calm yourself, kiddo, because Mr. Brooks can save us all from the sucky, imaginary "Liberalism" which he just invented with a megadose of another "ism" that Mr. Brooks has glommed onto.

Personalism is the belief that ...

Personalism is about constructing systems...

Personalism judges each social arrangement by how well it...

800 words about what has brought American society to its knees and not a single mention of Republicans, Conservatives or the political history of the past 30 years.

If I were Newt Gingrich or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, I'd be pretty pissed that David Brooks just used his column in The New York Times to cancel my entire life's work.