The Great Awokening: Can They Be Trusted?

  Update: Text a good deal more edited than it was when first posted.  

In the Forest of Illusion.

My tentative answer (and I very much look forward to reading this piece by @nytdavidbrooks):
1. Conservatism isn't what it once was.
2. Conservatism was never quite what we thought it was. https://t.co/gH6pQm8daS

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 8, 2021

Yes he does. Basically calls US conservatism a moral crime.

— Nathan Newman 🧭 (@nathansnewman) December 9, 2021

Newman, the sociologist and labor-left Substacker who's been influencing my own thinking an awful lot lately, posted a response to Brooks's big Atlantic article on his great awokening, or final departure from the conservative fold, around the same time I was writing my own. 

My post was mostly about Brooks's outline of the history of conservatism, in which Burkean "modesty" was invented decades before Burke was born, in reaction to the terrible religious wars in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, when they all decided to abjure fanaticism and have governments that did less, which would have come as a big surprise to intolerant Catholic Louis XIV and equally intolerant Protestants William and Mary, who all probably would have thought they were pretty conservative if anybody had been using the term at the time.

No True Religionist

 

Painted lacquer basket from an Eastern Han tomb of what was the Chinese Lelang Commandery in what is now North Korea (1st-2nd century B.C.E.), illustrating historical paragons of the virtue of filial piety. Via Wikipedia.

David F. Brooks is shocked-shocked to find that authoritarians have been using religion as a justification for their abusive ways, not only in places with actual dictators like Russia and China, but right here in the United States of America! Luckily, he quickly realizes that the ones in the US and Germany are basically faking it ("When Dictators Find God"):

Even wannabe authoritarians in America and Western Europe are getting in on the game. The international affairs scholar Tobias Cremer has shown that many of the so-called Christian nationalists who populate far-right movements on both sides of the Atlantic are actually not that religious.

They are motivated by nativist and anti-immigrant attitudes and then latch onto Christian symbols to separate “them” from “us.” In Germany, for example, the far-right group that aggressively plays up its Christian identity underperforms among voters who are actually religious.

I don't know how carefully Brooks read the linked thing, but it wasn't actually so much about the far right as the normal conservatives, the Christian Social Union (CSU) of Bavaria, which is partnered with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of the other 15 states, Chancellor Merkel's party, and which has been known for its  strict adhesion to Roman Catholic social policy (there aren't a lot of Protestants in Bavaria) since its founding in 1945. That's 73 years when the party's faithful Christianity was never questioned, up to the 2018 state legislative election when it found itself threatened by the neofascist Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD):

Scrutonizing America

Iconic representation of the trickle-down prose of Roger Scruton, via Luxury Fountains for Your Home.

Ten days ago David Brooks devoted one of his book-report segments to Roger Scruton, the somewhat important writer on aesthetics and damnfool English political writer, whose new book, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, is described by Joseph Hogan in The Nation as

less an intellectual history of conservatism than a brisk walking tour through its main hall. We hear from Aristotle, skip to Burke, Thomas Jefferson, and later get to T.S. Eliot, Buckley, Russell Kirk. These individual voices join in a chorus of custom-worship, of adoration for tradition and nonideological prudence. Jefferson is important to conservatives, we’re told, for his “insistence on continuity and custom as necessary conditions for successful constitution building.” Burke teaches us that “Real popular sovereignty…involves respect for what the people themselves respect—namely tradition, law and the narrative of legitimate order.” Throughout the book, Scruton makes little effort to clarify what these ideas have looked like—or, more importantly, could look like—in practice. One quickly realizes that the book introduces conservatism in the style of promotional material. In effect, Scruton has authored a 150-page pamphlet to be handed out to freshmen at Hillsdale College or at a Heritage Foundation conference table. 

Heh.

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.

Weekend long read: Party of Lincoln

Image via C.K. Coleman.

I've  been paying a ridiculous amount of attention lately to rightwing academic fraud Dinesh D'Souza and his new booklike object, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, an extended argument that the party of Nancy Pelosi, Tom Perez, and Keith Ellison is objectively pro-slavery, since it was founded 190 years ago by slaveholders, and therefore Nazi, because Hitler's Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei was directly inspired by those leftists John C. Calhoun, James Buchanan, Jefferson Davis, and the Ku Klux Klan and Senator Theodore Bilbo, and Al Smith and Franklin Delano Roosevelt too, who were all essentially the same person, as you can tell by the presence of the word "sozialistisch" in Hitler's party name. And the progressive birth control advocate Margaret Sanger is in there because tying the tubes of intellectually disabled women without asking them for permission, which she thought was a good idea, seems wrong to us, and gassing Jews seems wrong to most of us as well, so that proves gassing Jews is a progressive program*, though only in a Democratic, Woodrow Wilson sense of "progressive", not a Republican, Theodore Roosevelt** sense.

I know it's so stupid it's not worth thinking about in serious times like these, but the thing is D'Souza's thesis is a reductio of a kind of thinking that can be found all over the place, for example in a piece in yesterday's Washington Post by somebody who seems like the opposite of D'Souza in almost every respect, the calm and dignified, indisputably honorable and honest, eminently moderate, compromise-loving, Episcopal priest and former Republican Senator from Missouri John Danforth, an unwavering Trump opponent (in theory at least; I can't find him publicly mentioning Trump's name between December 2015, when he found Trump revolting, and now, when he still does), who writes:

The GOP rejects Scotsmen

Via TrulyFallacious.

Shorter David Brooks, "The G.O.P. Rejects Conservatism", New York Times, June 27 2017:

No true conservative would contemplate eliminating the Affordable Care Act without providing some alternative way of getting people health care, because many conservative intellectuals are now kind-hearted folk and believers in income redistribution, just not liberal income redistribution but a more modest and gentle type that doesn't actually redistribute the income, like allowing tax-free health savings accounts, surely people who can't afford decent health insurance would be able to put together a couple of hundred thousand for an emergency if they didn't have to pay all those bloody taxes amirite? And reducing regulations and using market incentives [ed.: Market incentives without regulations?]. Etc. Therefore, Republican Senators are no true conservatives but beastly individualists, as Prophet Tocqueville spake it in the ancient sacred book.

The No True Scotsman fallacy is when you make your point by quietly changing the definition of a primary term to exclude the case you don't like. "No true conservative would support a health plan condemning tens of millions to sickness and impoverishment, because that's what Yuval Levin and I decided the other day."

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again". Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing." The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion, but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says: "No true Scotsman would do such a thing." (Antony Flew, 1975, via Wikipedia)

"Conservative" is, in the perfectly adequate American Heritage definition,

disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.

It doesn't say anything about a tendency "to have accepted the fact that American society is coming apart and that measures need to be taken to assist the working class" or "a vision for how they want American society to be in the 21st century". These are neither conservative nor non-conservative (you could use them to call for a socialist revolution, if you wanted to do that in such a dreary tone), they are simply thoughts that make Brooks feel good about himself.

Trumpism with a Chaser

Douglas Fairbanks in The Black Pirate (1926), via Twisted Sifter.

Analogical David Brooks, "Trumpism at Its Best, Straight Up", March 3 2017:

Now that we've seen the authentic Trumpian ideological stance at his address to the joint session of Congress, in the form of a speech prepared for him by flunkeys which he read without his usual interpolations so that we're not distracted by evidence of what the man himself actually thinks, we can say with confidence that he is not an odd single-digit number. Because for centuries, the odd single-digit numbers have been a coalition of tendencies, 3, 5, 7, or 9, and Donald Trump is none of these. What do you mean I left something out?

Yes, it's part 7,142 of How We Know Donald Trump is No True Republican. Really:

Boot on Ground

Image by Creekside, vintage 2006.

Bloodshed enthusiast Max Boot, late of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, perhaps best remembered for his 2005 remarks about how the torture practiced in Abu Ghraib was really no different from what our soldiers experience in basic training (maybe that's why they call it Max Boot Camp), is out with yet another of those Where-Did-We-Go-Wrong pieces expressing his shock and horror at what's happened to the formerly Grand Old Party, "How the 'Stupid Party' Created Donald Trump", in today's Times, blaming it on the anti-intellectual posing of figures like Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Ronald Reagan, and, yes, William F. Buckley, Jr.:

William F. Buckley Jr. famously said, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” 

....In a way, the joke’s on the Republican Party: After decades of masquerading as the “stupid party,” that’s what it has become. But if an unapologetic ignoramus wins the presidency, the consequences will be no laughing matter.

BooMan responds by reminding us, correctly, as he himself along with many others (me too!) has been saying since September, that the Republicans deliberately created a Racist Party, and the Stupidity was simply an inevitable consequence of that:

It wasn’t dabbling in stupidity that weakened the party to the point that it could be stolen from conservatives. It was dabbling in racism that did that.

A political movement that relied on polarizing the nation by race in order to survive without compromising or evolving their ideology wound up getting a racially polarized nation and losing their party and their power.

So, now, conservatives are actually offended the racism goes too far and is sincere, and the pretense to stupidity has become the reality.

But I think there's a lot more to it than that, which emerges from Boot's nostalgic tour of the Republican intellectuals of the good old days: