re: #197 Belafon

This is…interesting:

As Joseph Bottum wrote in “An Anxious Age,” mainline Protestants created a kind of unifying culture that bound people of different political views. You could be Catholic, Jewish, Muslim or atheist, but still you were influenced by certain mainline ideas — the Protestant work ethic, the WASP definition of a gentleman. Leaders from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama hewed to a similar mainline standard for what is decent in public life and what is beyond the pale.

It says something that seven months after his departure from the presidential stage, a codgy scold like Brooks has essentially assigned Obama to a place in the national pantheon. After years of his party’s birtherism and all-around hysterical Obama-is-a-Gay-Muslim-Brotherhood attacks, Brooks is starting to recognize the depths to which we have sunk since January (or November or June 2015).