David Brooks: Hey, America, What If We Did 'Freaky Friday,' But For CONGRESS?

Another busy day at the Dumb Ideas Factory.

Poor awful David Brooks is thinkering again about all the division and partisanship in American life, and what could finally bring us together again into a functional happy American family, and it all distilled itself into a single tweet that just might be the most David Brooks idea that David Brooks has ever David Brooksed. Here's his tepid take for America a week before the midterms:

If everybody in red states voted for their Democratic candidates and everybody in a blue state voted for their Repu… https: //t.co/WcZ7ck6wD2

— David Brooks (@David Brooks) 1540919814.0 

Oh, David Brooks, what are we going to do with you? Besides point and laugh, of course.

Yes, yes, we get it, it's all about bipartisanship and walking a mile in the other party's shoes. If we were all represented in Congress by the minority party in our states, then we'd just HAVE to get along better, wouldn't we? And maybe Brooks was thinking along the lines of that scene in Gandhi where, during the riots over the partition of India and Pakistan, sage Ben Kingsley tells a Hindu man who murdered a Muslim child in revenge for Muslims killing his son,

I know a way out of Hell. Find a child, a child whose mother and father have been killed and raise him as your own.

Only be sure that he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one.

If we would all just take care of each other as if we were part of the same American family, what a beautiful world it would be. (Incidentally, any history fans know whether that touching moment in the movie is based on a real incident? A cursory search found bupkis.)

And of course this is merely a thought exercise for Brooks, because bipartisan fantasies (and a big dose of willful blindness ) are pretty much all he has left to him. Which is why we don't really need to quibble too much about trivia like the fact that California, with its weirdass top-two primary , has no Republican candidates for the US Senate. Presumably all the Dems in Cali would just write in the top Republican vote-getter from the primary. Or maybe the Nazi guy who flamed out, to make Opposites Day complete, and oh dear Crom why are we even thinking this much about it?

Then again, under Brooks's dream of Freaky Friday voting, a few actual white nationalists running as Republicans in overwhelmingly blue districts would make it to Congress, where surely they would learn to be nicer as they rubbed shoulders with all the newly elected Democrats from the Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Kansas delegations.

And just imagine what fun town halls in EVERY district would be. Might have the occasional violent contretemps between constituents and their non-representative representatives, but that's not entirely without precedent -- as historian Joanne Freeman discusses in  The Field of Blood,   Congress was once a pretty violent place, with regular fistfights, brawls, and the occasional knife or gun pulled on the floor. That was during the 30-year prelude to the Civil War, of course, so perhaps not thebest example.

And hey, since low-population red states have disproportionate power in the Senate (and the Electoral College), Brooks's little fantasy, if adhered to over time, would guarantee the Senate would eventually go Democratic -- but not this year, since in 2018 there are 23 Democratic seats up for election and only eight Republicans. On net, that would result in a filibuster-proof R majority for at least two years, which would surely encourage all the newly elected Republicans from blue states to act with comity on behalf of their constituents, huh?

Oh gosh. Yr Wonkette would like to apologize for having taken David Brooks seriously. It's a bad habit that too many editors and TV bookers have made, for entirely too long.

But hey, what if whatever the New York Times is paying David Brooks instead went to Wonkette? That's a Freaky Friday we could get behind.

[ David Goddamn Brooks on Twitter]

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