David Brooks spent the weekend watching a Western movie marathon on AMC and found his theme for remaking the Republican Party: America is 1880′s Tombstone, Arizona, and the Republicans are Wyatt Earp, bringing “community and order” to the Wild West via a gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in, My Darling Clementine is the McGuffin that director David Brooks uses to build a myth for tomorrow’s Republican Party:

[T]he movie isn’t really about the gunfight and the lone bravery of a heroic man. It’s about how decent people build a town. Much of the movie is about how the townsfolk put up a church, hire a teacher, enjoy Shakespeare, get a surgeon and work to improve their manners.The movie, in other words, is really about religion, education, science, culture, etiquette and rule of law — the pillars of community.

Is Mr. Brooks posing as a film critic to tell us that torture, like a good gunfight, is necessary and good for building our sense of community? Never mind.

I don’t think Mr. Brooks appreciates the irony. His imagery is not new. Shrub liked his cowboy boots as much as Big Dick liked his shoot ‘em ups. It would do little to detoxify the Republican Party or improve its electoral prospects. But Brooks’ job is making myths, not parsing reality:

Republicans like the way Westerns seem to celebrate their core themes — freedom, individualism, opportunity and moral clarity.

Bobo chooses the Hollywood Western because it’s the classic empty vessel: it can be filled with whatever the viewer brings with her. (The sci-fi equivalent would be Invasion of the Body Snatchers: do the pods represent Communists or McCarthy’s witch hunters?)

Brooks helps his theme along by calling his Hollywood Westerns history and then chides Republicans for "mis-learning" it. They’ve focused so much on freedom and individualism that they are "no longer the party of community and order."

I think it is Mr. Brooks who has mislearned his history. Cheney, Rove and Gingrich Republicans have a striking sense of their own community. That’s why they lock the clubhouse door and the neighborhood gates at night and elevate as their de facto leader a racist, sexist radio shoutist who wants everyone not white, male and well-off to STFU or go home. Their sense of order is just as keen: Tasers, secret prisons, secret government, immunized and subsidized private corporations. Only private individuals are left to fend for themselves.

Bobo sprinkles his fantasies with accurate observations, a trademarked technique, which, like Rove before the Grand Jury, avoids disclosing his own part in selling and legitimizing the Republican behavior he criticizes:

[Republicans are] out of touch with the young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle class, who are interested in the environment and other common concerns.

The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.

This kinder, gentler Republicanism hearkens back to Bush the Elder at the expense (or the goal) of exorcising Bush the Younger. Actually, the Western myth-as-Republican history is cleaved from Ronald Reagan’s tombstone. (It’s had lots of chunks knocked off it recently, as the GOP ramps up its extremism while superficially trying to detoxify itself.)

Bobo’s metaphor uses two of the Hollywood Western’s iconic actors, John Wayne and Henry Fonda. It is accurate, but for unintended reasons. Brooks holds out John Wayne and his favorite director, John Ford, as templates for an American civic virtue that Bobo wants Republicans to “re-establish”. Glenn Greenwald ably deconstructed the Wayne myth in Great American Hypocrites. (Critically reviewed here and here.)

John Wayne, unlike his film peers Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, David Niven and Tyrone Power, actively avoided military service during World War Two. As a 6’4" former USC football player, he played military hero on celluloid. They pay was better, there was less competition for the babes and billboards, and he got to go home at night whenever he and Ford and Ward Bond ran out of booze.

Henry Fonda, the man and actor was of altogether different stuff, a reality Brooks inverts to make his point. The real Hank Fonda was a lifelong liberal from Nebraska. The acclaimed actor was two years older than Wayne and exempt from military service, but he enlisted in the Navy in 1942 and served three years as a seaman and an officer. He was awarded the Bronze Star and a presidential citation.

As an actor, he was more proud of his role as Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s, The Grapes of Wrath, and as Juror No. 8 in Twelve Angry Men, than he was of his interpretation of Wyatt Earp. (He was later blacklisted by Hollywood, despite his meritorious war record, and spent nearly eight years in the New York theater before returning to Hollywood to reprise in film his Tony Award winning performance as Mr. Roberts.)

Any of those films would be a more fitting templates for a post-Bush party of the Right or Left. But for Republicans, that would require abandoning the Bush years with a fervor that neither Bobo nor his party is ready for. Not with Rush at the helm. He wants only to teach; listening is for wussies.

As Brooks knows, or as John Wayne’s story in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would have told him,

"This is the West, sir," the reporter explains quietly. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Westerns are confections that mirror the times in which they were made, not those they depict. With few exceptions, Hollywood airbrushes out the grit, the loneliness, the sweat, the rawness, hunger and exhaustion, and the frequent failures.

Cowboys are Steve McQueen white (as half-Indian Nevada Smith) not black and Hispanic as at least a third of them were. The owners of the frontier town’s proverbial general store are recast as generic ethnic instead of being Jewish. And American Indians get better billing in science fiction stories (The X Files) than they do in Westerns. Apart from films like Legends of the Fall or Dances with Wolves, the genocide practiced against them is as absent as the buffalo. More typical was dispossession at the point of a gun, followed by relentless, broken promises by the Great White Father, a fate modern-day Iraqis met at the hands of a Republican administration.

So, too, on David Brooks’ Ponderosa, cattle barons are self-reliant, but their employees kowtow or face a whip, a bullet or a noose (Red River). A ranch hand, as possessed as Batman trailing the Joker, searches for a lost girl so long that he rescues a woman, then wants to kill her because she grew up and wed an Indian. He improbably changes his mind at the behest of his half-Indian cowboy Robin (The Searchers). And naval captains are simple men of great moral clarity (In Harm’s Way). They don’t sell American arms to Middle Eastern potentates for money to run illegal insurgent operations in Latin America. That’s the job of real Marine lieutenant colonels working for the Reagan White House (Ollie North).

David Brooks’ purpose is both to improve Republicans’ image by his descriptions of them and to sell the public on how Republicans intend to "re-establish" themselves as the "decontaminated" party of a "market-driven", "civic order".

His phrases are as full of emotion as they are dangerously empty of specifics. Like economics. For Brooks, the Ponderosa runs itself. Ben Cartwright didn’t steal it, win it in a game of cards or cobble it together by claiming all the water rights for miles around. Vanderbilt’s railroads didn’t receive free land from the Mississippi to the Pacific, and Hearst and Rockefeller’s silver mines, the stockyards of Chicago and the steel plants of Pittsburgh just happened and were a universal good for owner and worker alike. Not.

Implied in Bobo’s prescription of how to fix the Republican brand is that it is a Party built on "freedom and individualism". In fact, it’s built on enormous deficits, on lavish government subsidies, legal immunities and monopolies for favored corporations, and on lawless excess, secrecy, spying and torture.

One commentator summed up Glenn Greenwald’s critique of Republican myth-making and David Brooks’ neocons this way:

Conservatives complain about the nanny state, but when in power they don’t actually work towards a lean, sensible government that sticks to a few basic responsibilities; their actual dream, as evidenced in this quote, is the daddy state, where resources that were once used to help people (deserving or not) are now used to punish those that step out of line. The daddy state doesn’t tolerate excuses or bother thinking about root causes; it has no respect for privacy or sense of limited authority. Anything it does is automatically within its rights. And if the children complain, or don’t step into line, the daddy state simply tells them to cut it out, and then delivers spankings when, mysteriously, they don’t. It’s a disastrous, patronizing, and profoundly stupid way to look at the world.

None of that fits Mr. Brooks’ public vision of Republicans or how they might reinvent themselves into a party meaningful to Americans not in his or Rush Limbaugh’s tax bracket. So expect more myths from Bobo and his peers as they try to make pigs fly.