Who Failed Conservatism This Time?

Image via TheNewsBuzz.

Longer™ David Brooks ("Republican or Conservative, You Have to Choose"):

You see, a while back we were walking along the yellow brick road, and—no, wait, it was other people, George Will and Steve Schmidt, who said it is time to leave the Republican party now that it's rotten to the core, and Dr. William Kristol, who says it's not, which is a good sign it is, given his record as the only New York Times columnist in history so consistently wrong about everything that the paper had to let him go, and when you recognize that I've still got my job, you'll understand that's saying a lot. But while I've posed this interesting question of whether it's time to leave the Republican party yet, I think it will be much more valuable to discuss something else, namely, since everybody in this discussion is a conservative, what is a conservative? Or, putting it more precisely, how can I bend the discussion into a book promo for Roger Scruton?

You see, as Roger Scruton reminds us, conservatism was invented during the Enlightenment, when thinkers in England, France, and North America were thinking about eliminating the monarchy. Since society was created by a social contract, these Enlightenment thinkers reasoned, in which free individuals came together to negotiate a sociopolitical order, therefore they should build an order based on reason, and the consent of the governed. Conservatives said, "We agree with this general effort, but it is based on a misunderstanding of human nature." There are no literally free individuals who can come together to build an order, they explained, so you must have the order first, and the freedom can come afterwards.

A Tale of Two White Houses

George III, anonymous contemporary etching, British Museum, via StreetsOfSalem. 

Longer™ David Brooks ("The Decline of Anti-Trumpism"):

I'll just start off with some observations that may startle you if you haven't been spending time at Washington dinner parties, think-tank lecture-recitals, and early-morning Stairmaster gym sessions with a lot of Republicans in the course of the past year (as I implicitly have, though I'm not giving you any details):

David Brooks, Reluctantly

Unsigned print via The Oatmeal. 

David Brooks writes ("The Clash of Social Visions"):

A familiar number on the caller ID screen. I gave it three rings, enough to grab a shluk from the vodka bottle and stash it back in the desk drawer, then picked up. The voice was familiar too, male, patrician, a little weary. "Brooks?"

"Jesus."

"Not exactly."

"Listen, pal," I said. "I don't work for you any more. I'm a public intellectual. I serve a higher purpose now, I'm reweaving the fabric of our out-at-the-elbows society." It was true. Only the week before I'd lectured the nation about the dangers of excessive partisanship, and pointed out that sexual predation is caused by guys getting bored with the hookup culture, which they should not have joined in the first place, preferably by remaining forever 11 years old and remembering the lessons learned from reading Jane Austen, or at least watching the stuff on PBS. "The partisan's over."

"Heh."

Beat. Then he went on: "Listen, Brooks, it's not a lot we need, just a kind word on the tax bill."

Extremism in the defense of moderation is no...

...oxymoron,  I guess.

I just remembered Brooks wrote most of yesterday's column five years ago, during the Obama-Romney contest, down to the reference to the Romanian-named political scientist who is at the current forefront of Moderation Studies. It seemed funnier then, and I thought I'd rerun the parody I did, just for fun.

Dim sum from China Max, San Diego.

David Brooks writes (27 October 2012):

Ever since the debate season began, Mitt Romney has been running hard after those moderate voters, lining out a new area of agreement with Obama at every turn. Obama, in contrast, has been disagreeing with Romney—but I took a look at the interview he inadvertently gave the Des Moines Register, which I thought was supposed to be scandalous, and found to my amazement that for the white and elderly-trending population of the Quad Cities he was peddling a fairly moderate agenda for the second term there. Evidently he's trying to keep his moderation quiet on the coasts, where it might cost him votes. And I figured that meant I would be able to hack together a column explaining what moderates are with only two tabs open on the browser, so here goes.

In the first place, moderation is not attained by establishing two extreme points on an opinion scale and then situating yourself at the midpoint between them. Anybody who thinks that is a helpless fool who should probably be enjoined from using a fork, really, if only for their own protection.

Nor is moderation some kind of abstract philosophical position, such as a person might learn about from reading Aristotle and committing herself to an abstract ideal of not being excessive in either direction. Only an idiot would say that. To understand moderation, in fact, you have to read history, and understand that America is a nation of immigrants whose parents worked hard and played by the rules so their children could go to college and graduate into a decent job; and a reverence for this country and the Founders who planned it that way.

Flavors of Freedom

What David Brooks meant to say ("Republicans Can't Pass Bills"):

Freedom is like ice cream: it comes in many different flavors. For example, you can have freedom in the future or you can have it right now.

Freedom in the future is what philosophers whose names escape me refer to as "freedom as capacity". Thus you should encourage your friend to practice the piano hard, which will increase his piano-playing capacity. In the same way you should feed your kid nutritious meals, make her do her homework, and see that she plays sports and performs volunteer work, so that she will have the capacity of getting into the college she likes. 

I have no idea how philosophers refer to freedom in the present, so I'll call it "freedom as detachment", which sounds kind of Buddhist but is not. This is when you let people alone to do what they want, based on the belief that people are freer when they are unimpeded. It is defined as a kind of absence—the absence of obstacles, stumbling blocks, speed bumps, and things that get in the way.

Back in the day, when the Republican Party used to be interested in running the government, it embraced both flavors of freedom, but its congressional priorities were all about freedom of capacity. When you consider the party's major legislative accomplishments since 1988, you can see it working to provide people with more capacities.

Clannishing Act

Via Gifrific.

David Brooks writes ("The Politics of Clan: The Adventures of Jared Kushner"):

A familiar number on the caller ID screen. I gave it three rings, enough to grab a shluk from the vodka bottle and stash it back in the desk drawer, then picked up. The voice was familiar too, male, patrician, a little weary. "Brooks?"

"It's Memorial Day, for fuck's sake," I said. "Don't you have a parade to go to? I'm writing the column."

"David, David, you sound so hostile. You got something to write about? We could help you."

"I'm good," I said,

"Spiritual marriage? The need to remake the community on the model of Stuyvesant Town in 1965? Dump on Trump?"

"I'm out of the game," I said. "I'm not going to write any nice stuff on Trump. I'm married again, I don't want to be explaining a defense of pussy grabbing over the connubial dinner table. I did your George W. Bush for eight years, that was bad enough. At least he'd heard the rumor that compassion was supposed to be a good thing. Trump makes Bush look like Gandhi."

"We're not asking you to write nice things about Trump."

The four plus or minus two or three American narratives

Josh Kirby, Discworld.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks writes ("The Four American Narratives"):

In spite of our many differences and the sheer size of the country, Americans have always been connected by a vast network of narrativium fibers, a single unifying story, or as I have called it "The Unifying American Story", also known as Passover without Jews, in which we told each other that all of us had reenacted the Exodus, escaping out of the oppressions of one Pharoah or another and into the wilderness, except instead of going to a land of milk and honey and killing all its people we stayed in the wilderness and killed all the people there and wrested the milk and honey into it with imported cows and bees and African guest workers, thus creating the last best hope on earth, so that when people around the world, similarly oppressed, were tempted to despair, they could always tell themselves, "At least there's America." 

Not that everybody could be allowed to come here, but they could still be glad to know it existed. We were so unified that even when we had a Civil War we were all on the same side, though this was not obvious to everyone at the time.

That Boston Globe parody on Sunday presented as the front page of the paper commemorating Trump's first 100 days as president was a hoot, but there was one big thing missing: the Op-Ed page! I couldn't do any of their columnists, but I felt I had to try my hand. H/t Ted the Slacker, whose comment at Alicublog gave me the idea.

The Great Wall of Trumpa. Via NorthCrane.

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST

Mr. President, Talk Up This Wall

David Brooks April 11, 2017

The great American poet Robert Frost famously argued that something there is that doesn't love a wall, and this is unarguably true to some extent. There is also something that does love a wall. That something is President Trump and the many Americans who voted for him five months ago.

Back in last year's fraught election campaign, many skeptical observers right and left asked hard questions of candidate Donald Trump: Could he build a wall completely protecting the land border between the United States and Mexico from Texas to California? Could he get the Mexicans to pay for it? Would it successfully keep hordes of violent Mexican rapists and Syrian terrorists cunningly disguised as Mexican rapists out of our country? Did those hordes of Mexicans and/or Syrians even exist?

Welcome Crooks, Liars, and the people who love them! Thanks, Tengrain!

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Rodent Complex

David Brooks April 1, 2016

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Designer rodent ensemble, via Trendhunter.

The unmannerly, unkind and unnecessary tone of the Republican primary contest has brought a new and undesirable element into our politics. Sometimes you have to shake your head in dismay, disbelief and disapprobation.

I'm talking about the controversy roused by a statement from Ted Cruz, in response to allegations of sexual misconduct. "Let me be clear," the senator reportedly said, "Donald Trump may be a rat, but I have no desire to copulate with him."

GÖPperdämmerung*

*Sure, others may give you the same old pun, such as the genial Doctor Cleveland, but will they throw in the essential umlauts? WILL THEY BOGROLL, as Smut would say.

Betty Amann in Gustav Fröhlich's Asphalt (1929). Via Fritzi.

What David Brooks meant to say ("The Post-Trump Era", New York Times, March 25 2016):

This is a thrilling moment to be a conservative!

For an entire generation, the Republican party has vegetated, stuck with the sclerotic ideology of Reaganism, which used to be conservative back in the day but is now liberal. Reaganism was based on the idea that voodoo economics, by creating more wealth for the wealthy than the wealthy could comfortably accommodate, would force them to let some of it out, and the resulting trickle would turn into a mighty tide upon which the dinghies of the lowly would float as high as the yachts of the great, but that's not true any more, though of course it was in the 1980s.

What happened? How did Morning in America turn into the Twilight of the GOP? When did the Lifting of the Boats become the Disintegration of the Drydock? How did these fresh and cheery metaphors turn anxious and bitter?

It's Awash

Three kabuki actors, by Toyohara Kunichika, 1868, via Wikimedia Commons.

David Brooks writes ("The Shame Culture", New York Times, March 15 2016) [PARODY ALERT]:

In 1987, the University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, which argued that American campuses were awash—awash, I tell you—with moral relativism, or the decadent new idea that one should not judge lest one be judged, closing their minds, as his title suggested, to the rich traditions of intolerance and self-righteousness, and dogmatically insisting that everybody ought to be morally open-minded.

"If it feels good, do it," they proclaimed, unmooring people from their traditional ideas of right and wrong and thereby depriving them of those fascinatingly varied peaks and valleys of wickedness and virtue and making life flatter and emptier.

He was right, of course, but now he's wrong, because everything is totally different. Campuses today are still awash, but they're awash in judgmentalism.

Brooks of the Year in Review

David Brooks in 1776, via Publius Maximus.

Twice a week or so for I don't know how long, probably three or four years, practically every Tuesday and Friday, I turn to the Times opinion section (nowadays generally on my phone, first thing in the morning during funding credits on NPR) to see what crimes against journalism and the English language David Brooks has committed that morning, and try to figure out something to say about it, or through it, or under it, whether with a Shorter (often with a lot of commentary) or a fully realized essay, a parody, or even once in a while a for-reals poem, as happened last January, when I got the impression from a column that he'd been trying out an online dating service (OK Cupid), and having a fairly humiliating time of it, and found myself moved for a change by a genuine compassion, together with a couple of really terrific rhymes.

I don't do this for every Douthat column, or every dithyramb by Jonah Goldberg, or anybody else (to say nothing of torturing myself the way fellow Brooksologist Driftglass does watching the Sunday morning shows every week), just Brooks, and I'm not completely sure why. One thing is it's a kind of exercise, and I sit down to it the way a high-tone jazz pianist might start a practice day with a little Bach (one prelude and fugue from WTC) and a little riff...

Simplicity ain't what it used to be

Lillian Gish, I believe in D.W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm (1921).

David Brooks writes, "The Evolution of Simplicity", November 3 2015:

We are raised in this country to head for the all-you-can-eat buffet of experience, and load up our trays with everything that's on offer; as M. Scott Peck has put it, we are expected to "Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex."

On the other hand, there has always been a parallel urge to simplify everything and look for formulas and easy answers. Thus Benjamin Franklin famously wore a simple fur cap instead of a normal wig when he was the US ambassador to France, to show how simple and unaffected he was, so that French people would understand that Americans were more than just wealthy publishers, annoying moralists, and distinguished physicists; and Shakers argued that it is a gift to be simple and a gift to be free.

David Brooks: Trick or Treat!

Image via Stevenson Financial Marketing.

David Brooks writes, "The Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio Moment", October 30 2015:

Well, it has been a pretty long summer, hasn't it! And I'm just about ready to party. I'm going as Zombie Bill Safire, and I've even got a couple of kids to shlep around door-to-door for the tricks and treats, little Paul and little Marco, dressed as that fabulous WWE tag team The Wonks, and let me tell you these kids look great!

No, but seriously, folks, these boys are the freshest thing in town, and if you think I'm kidding take a look at young Paul assuming the gavel in the House of Representatives, youngest speaker since James G. Blaine (the continental liar from the state of Maine), who was only 39 on his ascent in 1869. As for Marco, I think it's wise to start predicting right now that he's getting the presidential nomination, because that's been my plan since, oh, last February, and it looks like it could be starting to happen, as voters begin to tire of looking in the windows on Madison and go home to Jersey to start thinking about what they're actually going to buy.

Because for one thing, voters don't need to have a very clear idea what their candidate's agenda is, but they have to think she might have an agenda of some kind, and celebrity candidates Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson do not project that deep and abiding seriousness the way, say, that guy who was president before Obama once did in the awed eyes of your humble correspondent.

The Gravity Deficit

Georges Méliès, La Voyage dans la Lune (1902). Image via wifflegifs.

David Brooks writes ("Enter the Age of the Outsiders", New York Times, October 19 2015):

As any fool knows, gravity plays a tremendously valuable role in our solar system in encouraging planets, comets, asteroids and so on to stay in their appointed paths. If the sun were to start slacking off on the gravity, other heavenly bodies might just take up eccentric orbits or wander off altogether, shirking their responsibilities and setting a terrible example for their own moons.

I mention this because it's such an original and compelling analogy for what's been happening in our own political and social systems lately, and a good way of walking back my unfortunate lapse last week where I lost my temper with the House Freedom Caucus and inadvertently suggested that both sides might not do it.

A sour, overgeneralized, and intellectually sloppy sense of alienation

Edwin Levick, immigrants on Atlantic liner ca. 1906, Library of Congress, via Smithsonian Institution.

David Brooks writes ("The American Idea and Today's G.O.P.", New York Times, September 25 2015):

One of the exceptional things about American exceptionalism is the exceptionalism of American conservatism. While conservatives in other countries are essentially reactionary, yearning for an idealized past, American conservatives are retroactionary, afflicted with a nostalgia for an endlessly receding future. This goes back to the very beginnings, when those who settled, founded, and built America, not necessarily in that order, understood that our country had no history, and that only by forging a path into the future would we be able to acquire some.

Thin, relativistic, and ephemeral

18-foot fork in the road by Ken Marshall, Pasadena, Los Angeles Times, November 2009. Photo by Wakitu via Flickr. 

David Brooks writes, "The Big Decisions", New York Times, August 25, 2015:

Suppose you had a chance to become a vampire. Or suppose you had a chance to run for Senate. But I repeat myself.

No, seriously, the vampire question is one of those whimsical little devices used by professional philosophers to get a fix on how we should live our lives. And let's say it isn't a standard-issue evil Dracula type of vampire, for the sake of argument, but a stylish and benign vampire, what the philosopher L.A. Paul referred to before an editor got hold of the draft as a "vegetarian vampire", who only drinks free-range, organic, humanely slaughtered animal blood, bear with me here, and it turns out lots of your friends and relatives have done it already and are really happy with their decision, which gives them immortality, immense power, heightened sensory experience, companionship, and meaning. But once you do it there's no going back. I added the companionship and meaning part myself.

The Structure of Platitude

Welcome MBRU readers!

"Gratitude is a sort of laughter of the heart."

—David Brooks

"Lolwut?"
—me

Mary Pickford and Howard Ralston in Paul Powell's Pollyanna (1920).

Brooks in briefs and undershirt, crawling along the baseboard in search of a powerpoint for his laptop.

Hotel rooms, amirite? Can't live in 'em, can't live outside of 'em. They'll give you an iron just in case the one-hour laundry service doesn't do a good enough job with your shirt, but you can't find a fvcking outlet to plug it into. Maybe I could work that up for a column.

Finds it, sighs, sets up the charger, looks out the window.

Still, I could be in that breakfast bar in Michigan fighting over the self-service waffle maker. At least there's room service here, even if the waiter's shirt is better pressed than mine. I should be more grateful.

Sits at the machine.

Some are born grateful, some achieve gratefulness, some have gratitude thrust upon them. Hm.

Carry On Continentals

David Brooks is off today, so we're kind of on our own.

The late Sid James as (I'm pretty sure) highwayman Dick Turpin in Carry on Dick (1974). Via My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning.

David Brooks writes ("The Declaration Dilemma", New-York Times, July 3 1776):

All eyes seem to be fixed on the so-called Continental Congress, which has been hunkered down in Philadelphia for a little over a year now, ever since last year's unfortunate disturbances in Massachusetts, where rebel rioters managed to force the royal peacekeeping troops to pull back to Boston from Lexington and Concord.

Yesterday the Congress voted to declare that all the crown colonies south of the Canadas are independent countries, so that they can start negotiating with the French for financial support. A committee chaired by Dr. Benjamin Franklin is said to be drafting a document explaining this weird theory, and it could be published as early as tomorrow.

Dukes of Moral Hazard

On a bright day you can hardly see those stars and bars on the roof, and it's always sunny in Hazzardelphia.  But why can't you call it, say, the General Beauregard?

David Brooks writes ("The Robert E. Lee Problem", June 26 2015):

The debate about what I'll call the Charleston Bible study shooting, because even at this date if you assume it has something to do with race that could only hurt people's feelings, and I have this reputation for courtesy I have to keep up, has oddly transformed itself into a debate about the former Confederate States of America and their battle flag, which is not a trivial matter, because a flag is made of woven material and racism is a part of what it is woven from, though whether weft or warp is beyond my expertise.