David Brooks: "What happened to American conservatism?"

[pecksniff]

In Atlantic, Brooks recounts how he was converted from socialism to conservatism in his 20s.
There follows a discourse on the difference between the rationalist French Enlightenment and the empirical British Enlightenment, and the value and wisdom of tradition. He expresses bemusement at how conservatism could have produced the British statesman Enoch Powell and his infamous anti-immigrant "Rivers of Blood" speech:

I realized that every worldview has the vices of its virtues. Conservatives are supposed to be epistemologically modest—but in real life, this modesty can turn into a brutish anti-intellectualism, a contempt for learning and expertise. Conservatives are supposed to prize local community—but this orientation can turn into narrow parochialism, can produce xenophobic and racist animosity toward immigrants, a tribal hostility toward outsiders, and a paranoid response when confronted with even a hint of diversity and pluralism. Conservatives are supposed to cherish moral formation—but this emphasis can turn into a rigid and self-righteous moralism, a tendency to see all social change as evidence of moral decline and social menace. Finally, conservatives are supposed to revere the past—but this reverence for what was can turn into an abject deference to whoever holds power. When I looked at conservatives in continental Europe, I generally didn’t like what I saw. And when I looked at people like Powell, I was appalled.

Brooks then discusses the unique history and character of American conservatism (there is no "international conservatism," he points out, because each country has its own history). The American form, he says, provides better grounds for optimism. But then:

Donald trump is the near-opposite of the Burkean conservatism I’ve described here. How did a movement built on sympathy and wisdom lead to a man who possesses neither? How did a movement that put such importance on the moral formation of the individual end up elevating an unashamed moral degenerate? How did a movement built on an image of society as a complex organism give rise to the simplistic dichotomies of manipulative populism? How did a movement based on respect for the wisdom of the past end up with Trump’s authoritarian campaign boast “I alone can fix it,” perhaps the least conservative sentence it is possible to utter?

The reasons conservatism devolved into Trumpism are many. First, race. Conservatism makes sense only when it is trying to preserve social conditions that are basically healthy. America’s racial arrangements are fundamentally unjust. To be conservative on racial matters is a moral crime. American conservatives never wrapped their mind around this. My beloved mentor, William F. Buckley Jr., made an ass of himself in his 1965 Cambridge debate against James Baldwin. By the time I worked at National Review, 20 years later, explicit racism was not evident in the office, but racial issues were generally overlooked and the GOP’s flirtation with racist dog whistles was casually tolerated. When you ignore a cancer, it tends to metastasize.

Second, economics. Conservatism is essentially an explanation of how communities produce wisdom and virtue. During the late 20th century, both the left and the right valorized the liberated individual over the enmeshed community. On the right, that meant less Edmund Burke, more Milton Friedman. The right’s focus shifted from wisdom and ethics to self-interest and economic growth. As George F. Will noted in 1984, an imbalance emerged between the “political order’s meticulous concern for material well-being and its fastidious withdrawal from concern for the inner lives and moral character of citizens.” The purpose of the right became maximum individual freedom, and especially economic freedom, without much of a view of what that freedom was for, nor much concern for what held societies together.

American conservatism began with the capitalist part of Hamilton and the localist part of Jefferson and ended with Mitt Romney in 2012.
But perhaps the biggest reason for conservatism’s decay into Trumpism was spiritual. The British and American strains of conservatism were built on a foundation of national confidence. If Britain was a tiny island nation that once bestrode the world, “nothing in all history had ever succeeded like America, and every American knew it,” as the historian Henry Steele Commager put it in 1950. For centuries, American and British conservatives were grateful to have inherited such glorious legacies, knew that there were sacred things to be preserved in each national tradition, and understood that social change had to unfold within the existing guardrails of what already was.

By 2016, that confidence was in tatters. Communities were falling apart, families were breaking up, America was fragmenting. Whole regions had been left behind, and many elite institutions had shifted sharply left and driven conservatives from their ranks. Social media had instigated a brutal war of all against all, social trust was cratering, and the leadership class was growing more isolated, imperious, and condescending. “Morning in America” had given way to “American carnage” and a sense of perpetual threat.

I wish I could say that what Trump represents has nothing to do with conservatism, rightly understood. But as we saw with Enoch Powell, a pessimistic shadow conservatism has always lurked in the darkness, haunting the more optimistic, confident one. The message this shadow conservatism conveys is the one that Trump successfully embraced in 2016: Evil outsiders are coming to get us. But in at least one way, Trumpism is truly anti-conservative. Both Burkean conservatism and Lockean liberalism were trying to find ways to gentle the human condition, to help society settle differences without resort to authoritarianism and violence. Trumpism is pre-Enlightenment. Trumpian authoritarianism doesn’t renounce holy war; it embraces holy war, assumes it is permanent, in fact seeks to make it so. In the Trumpian world, disputes are settled by raw power and intimidation. The Trumpian epistemology is to be anti-epistemology, to call into question the whole idea of truth, to utter whatever lie will help you get attention and power. Trumpism looks at the tender sentiments of sympathy as weakness. Might makes right.

On the right, especially among the young, the populist and nationalist forces are rising. All of life is seen as an incessant class struggle between oligarchic elites and the common volk. History is a culture-war death match. Today’s mass-market, pre-Enlightenment authoritarianism is not grateful for the inherited order but sees menace pervading it: You’ve been cheated. The system is rigged against you. Good people are dupes. Conspiracists are trying to screw you. Expertise is bogus. Doom is just around the corner. I alone can save us.

He concludes in despair that the GOP will again embody Burkean conservatism any time soon, and says he will try instead "to plant myself instead on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party."

 

[Bud_Spencer]

Brooks voted for Obama. Twice.

 

[pecksniff]

Jeet Heer responds:

Most of Brooks’s essay is devoted to a selective and potted account of some of the great conservative thinkers who enthralled his young mind, teaching him the value of prudence and the organic evolution of society. His roll call of names includes Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. A few oddball intellectuals are thrown in: Willmoore Kendall, Peter Viereck, and James Q. Wilson, as well as Buckley himself.

This history is weirdly denuded of complexity and particularity: Hamilton and Jefferson were foes—and they surely influenced liberals as much as conservatives. Both were revolutionaries, as was Lincoln. Even Theodore Roosevelt was a reformer.

We get Burke the lofty exalter of “little platoons”—but not the Burke who, absurdly, enthused over Marie Antoinette and the age of chivalry, the Burke who derided the “swinish multitude,” or the Burke who urged a total war against France. Willmoore Kendall is just name-dropped, with no mention of his support for Joseph McCarthy, his advocacy of preemptive war against the Soviet Union, or his promotion of biological racism. James Q. Wilson’s thoughts on morality are quoted without reflection on his key role as a promoter of mass incarceration.

About conservatism and race, Brooks writes: “To be conservative on racial matters is a moral crime. American conservatives never wrapped their mind around this. My beloved mentor, William F. Buckley Jr., made an ass of himself in his 1965 Cambridge debate against James Baldwin. By the time I worked at National Review, 20 years later, explicit racism was not evident in the office, but racial issues were generally overlooked and the GOP’s flirtation with racist dog whistles was casually tolerated.”

This is a whitewash of a much nastier and more consequential history. The Buckley-Baldwin debate is the least of it. National Review celebrated Jim Crow in the United States and apartheid in South Africa and promoted the “Southern strategy,” which polarized American parties along racial lines and paved the way for Trump. When Brooks was an intern in 1985, National Review still employed senior editor Joseph Sobran, whose open anti-Semitism and racism were notorious. It took Buckley many years to reprimand Sobran, who was eventually fired only for criticizing his employer.

<snip>

The history of conservatism is much uglier than Brooks admits even now. Leaving the GOP isn’t enough. Before we hold a feast for this prodigal son, he has to honestly reckon with his life of cavorting with a debauched ideology.

 

[pecksniff]

Brooks voted for Obama. Twice.

So did a lot of Republicans.

 

[Bud_Spencer]

So did a lot of Republicans.

Entirely likely...but they aren't conservatives, and conservatives need not listen to a word they have to say on the subject.

 

[pecksniff]

Entirely likely...but they aren't conservatives, and conservatives need not listen to a word they have to say on the subject.

The Lincoln Project are much better conservatives than any Trumper.

 

[BabyBoomer50s]

Brooks voted for Obama. Twice.

It was the crease in Obama’s pant leg.

 

[Bud_Spencer]

The Lincoln Project are much better conservatives than any Trumper.

Sure they are, that's why - when they aren't molesting little boys - they are busily electing Democrats.

 

[pecksniff]

Sure they are, that's why - when they aren't molesting little boys - they are busily electing Democrats.

Where do little boys come into it?

 

[YDB95]

Keep in mind, there used to be a difference between "conservative" and "right-wing". The former has long since become a euphemism for the latter, but it sounds to me like Brooks saw himself as a conservative from back when it did NOT mean "right wing".

 

[pecksniff]

Keep in mind, there used to be a difference between "conservative" and "right-wing". The former has long since become a euphemism for the latter, but it sounds to me like Brooks saw himself as a conservative from back when it did NOT mean "right wing".

There are very important differences between what William Buckley stood for and what Trump stands for.

But somehow I don't expect any of this board's self-ID'd conservatives to discuss that, or even to think about it very much. Most of them are not even mentally capable of understanding what Brooks had to say in Atlantic, let alone Heer's reply in The Nation.

 

[BidudeinWi]

In Atlantic, Brooks recounts how he was converted from socialism to conservatism in his 20s.
There follows a discourse on the difference between the rationalist French Enlightenment and the empirical British Enlightenment, and the value and wisdom of tradition. He expresses bemusement at how conservatism could have produced the British statesman Enoch Powell and his infamous anti-immigrant "Rivers of Blood" speech:



Brooks then discusses the unique history and character of American conservatism (there is no "international conservatism," he points out, because each country has its own history). The American form, he says, provides better grounds for optimism. But then:



He concludes in despair that the GOP will again embody Burkean conservatism any time soon, and says he will try instead "to plant myself instead on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party."

Please! What happened to the Kennedy Democrats? AOC now the face of the Marxist left!

 

[Lazaran]

.
Church boy "Pudro" is obviosly projecting with his "molesting little boys" comment.

JFC

SAD!!!

 

[pecksniff]

.
Church boy "Pudro" is obviosly projecting with his "molesting little boys" comment.

JFC

SAD!!!

Is this a QAnon thing, perhaps?

 

[YDB95]

Please! What happened to the Kennedy Democrats? AOC now the face of the Marxist left!

That's what your ideological forebearers said about Kennedy when he was president.

 

[pecksniff]

That's what your ideological forebearers said about Kennedy when he was president.

Hell, they said it about Eisenhower. Not making this up.

 

[Earthlyone]

There was a time when both progressives and conservatives stayed within the boundaries of acceptability, even today, Berny Sanders and Ted Cruz are rational people, but BLM/ANTIFA and Que Anon are completely bat shit crazy in their own ways and shouldn't be listened to.

 

[ll74]

There was a time when both progressives and conservatives stayed within the boundaries of acceptability, even today, Berny Sanders and Ted Cruz are rational people, but BLM/ANTIFA and Que Anon are completely bat shit crazy in their own ways and shouldn't be listened to.

BLM and Antifa are two separate groups of people. There is an intersection, but their agendas are unique to each. The failure of the right to differentiate any subset of progressives is a symptom of ignorance and generalization.

 

[ishtat]

Brooks is a likeable man but I find his quasi intellectualism intensely irritating. His analysis of Enoch Powell is woefully simplistic and his failure to contrast Hamilton and Jefferson is absurd. The question which occurs to me is how would an undoubted conservative but great regulator and populist like Theodore Rooseveldt go today.

The last American conservative leader to my mind was Reagan, deeply flawed and frequently wrong. but undeniably a leader. American Conservatism at the moment lacks leadership either in policy or personality. Unfortunately their opponents are still squabbling about the issues of the 1960's. No wonder that voters right across the spectrum are sick of all of them.

 

[The_Trouvere]

In Atlantic, Brooks...expresses bemusement at how conservatism could have produced the British statesman Enoch Powell and his infamous anti-immigrant "Rivers of Blood" speech

Civilizations only thrive when they are dominated by one of the two civilized races. Diversity is not our strength. It is the underlying reason for the political polarization that has made it difficult for us to solve problems that would have been manageable before 1964, when the civil rights legislation was signed and the War on Poverty was declared.

In the United States crime, illegitimacy, and divorce only became problems after President Eisenhower left office. They became serious problems after the assassination of John Kennedy.

Donald Trump, who I voted against in 2016 and 2020 is not the cause of our polarization; he is the result.

When the United States responded successfully to the Great Depression and the Second World War, 90% of the U.S. population was white. Most blacks were subjected to second class citizenship.

Those who continue to blame black social pathology on white racism cannot explain why black social pathology got worse after 1963.

 

[bellisarius]

Ahhh, yes Brooks. The "token" conservative that the left keeps around like a pet and point's to as the 'real thing.'

 

[Champakian]

He thinks that MSNBC is a conservative outlet and
that FOX is hair-on-fire radical white supremacy on display,
filled with vacuous talking heads that would no sooner give him
the time of day than they would Rachael Maddow.
Bill Maher is more conservative than Brooks.

He's become their Maverick Hero, their John McCain, their Liz Cheney, their Mitt Romney...

Just another RINO who would sell conservatism out for a 45-minute interview by Rolling Stone.

 

[BeatMan]

American conservatism mainly benefit white Americans

 

[Champakian]

You might consider the conservative inclinations of a lot of minorities
who are religious, family oriented and fully engaged in business...

Check out Fox News and start counting all the black conservatives.

I think you're just repeating a bumper-sticker phrase that you want to be true,
or want to boldly wield as propaganda in the hope that repetition sinks in.

Or maybe you just crave the approval of the other racialists who think like you do.

 

[JohnnySavage]

Jesus... walls of text.

Having the ability to cut and paste from the google doesn't make one more intelligent.