Heirs of Joseph de Maistre

Mockery for Edmund Burke's support for Catholic emancipation, by James Gillray - Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

The historian Thomas Zimmer is doing some interesting (and scary!) analysis on his SubStack of what's been happening in the livelier precincts of the American right, at The Federalist and the Claremont Institute and the like, where they've decided to stop calling themselves "conservatives" because they're really revolutionaries, and they're ready to throw out the whole apparatus of representative government:

In a more recent piece entitled “Hard Truths and Radical Possibilities,” which came out in American Greatness in November, [Claremont thinker Glen] Ellmers reacted to the midterm results – by rejecting the legitimacy of elections altogether: “Elections – and therefore consent and popular sovereignty – are no longer meaningful.” Once again, his issue is not that the midterms were fraudulently stolen; it is actually much worse: “even if conducted legitimately, elections no longer reflect the will of the people.” There certainly isn’t much of a conserving spirit to be found here. Ellmers rails against the “woke oligarchy” which, based on a massive state bureaucracy that is entirely dominated by “the Left” and unresponsive to the will of the real people, has already completely destroyed the constitutional republic. There is, in this view, very little time to stand up to the “left-wing masters.”

That's a pretty weird turn. Elections are bad because they install a "woke oligarchy" in power. What kind of political process implements the "will of the people" instead? What is the will of "the" people as opposed to the will of most people?

To understand that, you should understand that most Americans aren't "authentic" Americans:

Goodbye Principled What?

Illustration by Alex Cai via Streak Club.

Say, what's in this barrel ("Goodbye Principled Conservatism" by Bret Stephens)? It appears to be full of fish!

How did the conservative movement reach this pass? Hemingway’s great line about how one goes bankrupt — “gradually, then suddenly” — seems apt. But the tipping point arrived on a precise date: July 20, 2015. That was the day Rush Limbaugh came to Trump’s political rescue after the developer nearly self-immolated with his remark that John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war, refusing early release at the price of gruesome torture, should not be considered a war hero.

I don't know, I'd go for 1957 myself:

In 1957, Buckley wrote National Review’s most infamous editorial, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer was crystal clear: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley cited unfounded statistics demonstrating the superiority of white over black, and concluded that, “it is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added definitively: “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”

Why don't conservatives care about manners any more?

Fighting Words

Rep. Preston Brooks, painted by Adam B. Walter (1820-1875), had the same look of self-righteous stupidity as Tucker Carlson, it's very remarkable. Via Wikipedia.

I wonder how your civility hounds feel when they see stuff like this, from Question Time in Westminster, when Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (MP for Hough) asks the prime minister about a 2018 Telegraph article in which Johnson, 1950s English TV comedian that he is at heart, complained about the existence of women in burkas on the grounds that it was "absolutely ridiculous that women should go around resembling letterboxes and bank robbers":

WATCH: Astonishing scenes as MPs applaud Labour MP @TanDhesi as he tears into PM, accusing Boris Johnson of “derogatory and racist” remarks about Muslim women, declaring “open season” on minorities pic.twitter.com/3VDoTiFWiK

— Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) September 4, 2019

I mean, it's clear these guys are not going out for a drink afterwards to plan the generous compromises in which everybody will get a bit of what they want in an atmosphere of mutual respect and affection. Does a David Brooks look at this room where Edmund Burke, the stern prophet of good manners and the aesthetics of the sublime, spent his career and wonder what happened to the Mother of Parliaments?

The Rest of the Moral Case

Loretta Young demonstrates how to be agreeable in Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928), via Fritzi.

"The rest of the moral case" against Trump, David Brooks was saying, "means hitting him from the right as well as the left."

We're good at calling Trump a racist and an immigrant hater, he's saying, but we ought to be accusing him of things conservatives don't like?

And then David Brooks would consider voting for us?

Stuck in the Muddle with You

Image via 2Cats&Chloe.

David Brooks ("What Moderates Believe") identifies the great questions:

Donald Trump is not the answer to this nation’s problems, so the great questions of the moment are: If not Trump, what? What does the reaction to Trump look like?

"If not Trump, what?" is a question that can be asked only by those who thought it was likely that Trump was the answer to this nation's problems and have since become uncertain about it. I think the great question is what the fuck was wrong with those people?

"What does the reaction to Trump look like?" Well, it looks like a red, red rose that's newly sprung in June. Or maybe it creeps in on little cat feet.

For some people, the warriors of the populist right must be replaced by warriors of the populist left. For these people, Trump has revealed an ugly authoritarian tendency in American society that has to be fought with relentless fervor and moral clarity.

Gods forbid we should have any moral clarity. That's just so obnoxious.

I don't know why recognizing the ugly authoritarianism Trump exemplifies (not "reveals", you should have known about it long before) entails demanding "warriors of the populist left". I'd think it would entail looking for less authoritarian ways of going on.

For others, it’s Trump’s warrior mentality itself that must be replaced. Warriors on one side inevitably call forth warriors on the other, and that just means more culture war, more barbarism, more dishonesty and more dysfunction. The people in this camp we will call moderates.

Ah, there we go. It's the good old there-are-two-kind-of-people template. There are two kinds of reactions to Trump: those who are bothered by the authoritarianism, who are bad, and those who are bothered by the "warrior mentality", who are Brooks.

Unlike us commoners, they have the good taste to be against culture war, barbarism, dishonesty, and dysfunction. The Brooks are very different from you and me, who would never make such classy objections.

So you know where he's going. Nothing can be changed anyway (if there are warriors on one side there are "inevitably" warriors on the other, and all the bad things that result from that—note by the way that that's the exact bothsiderism for which Trump was so roundly condemned last week). So we can adopt the let's-do-nothing modesty of Burkean conservatism, the smiling, humble, morally muddled authoritarianism aimed at preserving the authority of our traditional religious and class institutions, and call it "centrist".

It's "centrist" because Brooks just built a nice bothsides framework around it, but it's conservatism 101.

I'd like to think about whether there are any political means to the construction of a less authoritarian society, but it wouldn't involve cutting a large number of people out of the discourse because they choose sides and that makes them "immoderate", especially when the self-glorifying "moderates" are covertly choosing the soft-authoritarian side themselves, even as they claim they're not taking sides at all. We don't need to read any more of this. Check Driftglass by all means. And Drew's uncharacteristically brief preview from last week.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

A Sublime Thing, Like Space or Mathematics

From the Sublime to the Brooksiculous!

Richard Barthelmess contemplates whacking a policeman with a ukulele in D.W. Griffith's The Love Flower (1920). Via Fritzi.

David Brooks ("Big and Little Loves", May 31 2016) is interested in the concept of the sublime!

Ever since the days of ancient Greece, philosophers have distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime.

Sadly, no. According to my trusty Wikipedia, while an interest in the sublime goes back to classical antiquity, the dichotomy between beauty and sublimity as exclusive categories was invented in England, in the late 17th century, by John Dennis, who found himself, on a trip to Switzerland, struck by the contrast between his previous experience of the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason" on the one hand, and on the other the spectacle of the Alps "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair". And explicitly argued for the first time by Edmund Burke in his 1756 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

Brooks is working clearly on pure memories from something like 35 years ago, when he was first curating his self-image as the sort of interesting young man who has a favorite philosopher nobody else in the dorm has ever heard of, Burke, of course, and his lovely distinction between the dreadful revolutionary categorical continentals and the modest, conservative, whimsical, hobbity Englishmen of the 1790s. He wrestled, no doubt, through the first four or five pages of Burke's gnarly and unpleasant treatise on aesthetics—life was so hard in the days before Google!—for an only partly cribbed term paper, and what remains of it in his frazzled, weary brain has gotten divorced from Burke's name:

Don't stultify my fabric, bro!

Buster Keaton in Our Hospitality (1923).

1.

David Brooks on "The Age of Small Terror":

On New Year’s Eve some friends and family members had a drink at a bar in Tel Aviv. The next day a gunman shot up the place, killing two people and wounding at least five. When I heard about the shooting I was horrified, of course, but there was no special emotion caused by the proximity 16 hours before.

Friends and family members of whom? Where was there no special emotion? Whose proximity? He's not actually trying to hide the fact that he has friends and relatives in Tel Aviv, he's more trying to hide the fact that he exists at all, as a specific human being with a body and a family and particular emotions of his own. General David Brooks and his general emotions are focused on the big picture:

These days, we all live at risk of random terror, whether we are in Paris, San Bernardino, Boston or Fort Hood.

I.e., wherever there are Muslims, apparently, but I'll get back to that.

Real Leaders

Shorter David Brooks, "The Leadership Emotions", April 22 2014:

Barack lacks all conviction, while Joe Biden
Is full of passionate intensity.

O Captain! My Captain!.

We start off today complaining about how the politicals manage policy nowadays, something with which you and I might wish to concur with a hearty "Damn right, curse that Karl Rove!" or "Ol' Michael Deaver certainly has a lot to answer for!"

But it turns out that Brooks's problem isn't exactly that: it's more that dominance by the politicals has led to a presidency that's not amateurish enough:

The day Edmund Burke died

It's happened, folks. David Brooks has made it through.

Denial, 8/21/2012

The Hose, 7/9/2010

When you look at Mitt Romney through this prism, you see surprising passion. By picking Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has put Medicare at the center of the national debate. Possibly for the first time, he has done something politically perilous. He has made it clear that restructuring Medicare will be a high priority.

This is impressive. If you believe entitlement reform is essential for national solvency, then Romney-Ryan is the only train leaving the station.

[jump]

Brooks made a funny (addendum)

David Brooks. Image by Driftglass.

I knew it! Or, more accurately, I knew something; Brooks has not actually come out and endorsed Obama as the Burkean conservative in the race, but he has come approximately halfway:

But there is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions.

Not that that's exactly true: there was plenty of talk about family at the convention, for one thing. I'll never get over Rick Santorum riffing on his father's hard workingman's hands while his extreme makeup job made it look as if he himself was made of marzipan. And there was tons of church, as well, at least from Mr. and Mrs. Romney, and anecdotes of the churchy helping one another out.

What Brooks really objects to in these conservatives is on display in his opening paragraph:

America was built by materialistic and sometimes superficial strivers. It was built by pioneers who voluntarily subjected themselves to stone-age conditions on the frontier fired by dreams of riches. It was built by immigrants who crammed themselves into hellish tenements because they thought it would lead, for their children, to big houses, big cars and big lives.... Many Americans, and many foreign observers, are ambivalent about or offended by this driving material ambition. Read “The Great Gatsby.” Read D.H. Lawrence on Benjamin Franklin.

 Compare Burke, in his speech on Conciliation with America (1775), criticizing

vulgar and mechanical politicians... a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material; and who therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught,…ruling and master principles, which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth every thing, and all in all.... (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

It's that—of course Brooks has nothing against them, my no, salt of the earth, but—they're not very classy. Think a lot about money, less about the higher things such as the writings of Burke and Oakeshott. And apparently not joining things in the good old style; what we're looking at is a kind of right-wing Bowling Alone perspective.

The list of great communitarian conservatives of history goes like this: George Washington, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, and Condoleeza Rice. I'll just take a pause here, maybe for quite a long time.

Photo by Kilgub.

Brooks made a funny

...and a pretty good one, too, in some respects. It's a parody campaign biography of Willard Mitt Romney that takes everything we know about him and turns it into classic American silliness:

Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947, in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Virginia and several other swing states. He emerged, hair first, believing in America, and especially its national parks. He was given the name Mitt, after the Roman god of mutual funds, and launched into the world with the lofty expectation that he would someday become the Arrow shirt man.

The tone of the thing is meant to be affectionate fun-poking, I think--

Always respectful, Mitt and Ann decided to elope with their parents. They went on a trip to Israel, where they tried and failed to introduce the concept of reticence. 

 But it keeps sliding into a certain asperity:

Romney was a precocious and gifted child. He uttered his first words (“I like to fire people”) at age 14 months, made his first gaffe at 15 months and purchased his first nursery school at 24 months. The school, highly leveraged, went under, but Romney made 24 million Jujubes on the deal.

Thalia, Muse of Comedy and Idyllic Poetry, by Jean-Marc Nattier. From Wikipedia.

Brooks really has some comic talent, as you'll remember, maybe, from Bobos in Paradise. The famous 2001 Atlantic article, "One Country, Slightly Divisible",  in which he tried to illustrate our culture war by contrasting the lifestyles of blue Montgomery County, Maryland, and red Franklin County, Pennsylvania, where it turned out that he had made up all the examples of Franklin County lifestyle, was terrible journalism, but terrific shtik.

Indeed, it was famously through his humor that he got his first horse on the wingnut welfare carousel--a college parody of William F. Buckley, Jr., delighted the old man and earned Brooks an internship at the National Review.

So it's odd to see him here misjudging his tone, if I understand it correctly, seesawing between the tease and the out-and-out insult and back:

Some people say he retreated into himself during these years. He had a pet rock, which ran away from home because it was starved of affection. He bought a mood ring, but it remained permanently transparent.

Is it just the long disuse of those comedy muscles, since he became everybody's expert on political philosophy, that makes them hard for him to control? Or is it maybe that he's coming to realize that Edmund Burke would have voted for Obama (and not as the lesser of two evils, but enthusiastically)?

Burke really would, you know. Which doesn't mean I won't. Here's a little reading before the next class.

Edmund Burke. From Wikipedia.

A moment of Burkean minimalism and self-control

I have half a mind to congratulate myself—some friends say that's all the mind I have for any purpose whatever—on Monday's post where I called the Roberts ruling on the PPACA. But it will make me prouder if I handle this with Burkean minimalism and self-control, listening to what others have to say.

Here, incidentally, is some minimalist language from Edmund Burke, on the subject of the ex-Governor General of India, Warren Hastings, whose impeachment Burke was leading in the Commons: he

called Hastings the 'captain-general of iniquity'; who never dined without 'creating a famine'; his heart was 'gangrened to the core' and he resembled both a 'spider of Hell' and a 'ravenous vulture devouring the carcases of the dead'.

Shrill!

James Nixon (1741-1812), The trial of Warren Hastings. From 1st Art Gallery.

David Brooks:

Granted, he had to imagine a law slightly different than the one that was passed in order to get the result he wanted, but Roberts’s decision still represents a moment of Burkean minimalism and self-control.... [jump]