”I feel certain that Conservatism is through unless Conservatives can demonstrate and communicate the difference between being concerned with [the unemployed, the sick without medical care, human welfare, etc.] and believing that the federal government is the proper agent for their solution.”
No group of Americans has suffered more under Donald Trump than conservative pundits. George Will, Kathleen Parker, Bill Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, etc. have all faced an existential challenge to their relevance in our national discussion.
Some, like Rubin in particular, have placed ideology on the back burner and focused solely on Trump’s malfeasance, accepting that policy distinctions that used to be the basis for argument now mean little with an unhinged nihilist at the helm. Max Boot has gone a step further and actually re-examined previously held positions – climate change for example – in light of his disgust for fellow travelers he can no longer countenance.
George Will bashes Trump where he believes suitable, but also seems intent on cherry picking instances of liberal excess to strut his right wing bona fides. But within this clan of wanderers, nobody is more lost in the wilderness than David Brooks, a man now far afield from the safe and pristine niche of parlor chat conservatism he used to be able to dabble in, getting paid a fine wage and achieving multi media credence for doing so.
Trump has forced Brooks to confront choices he’d rather have his molars pulled than have to make. Discussing Trumpist nihilism simply does not allow for free range intellectuality, much to Brooks’ chagrin. For while Brooks had no problem taking Trump to task in favor of other Republicans during the primary season, once Trump became POTUS, an unmoored Brooks was forced to do something he disdains… take a stand. He doesn’t like binary choices with simple features that can’t be nuanced with a statistic or an author’s insight.
The news flash he has been very slow to understand is opposing this Presidency is simply the right thing to do, and saying loud and clear Trump sucks doesn’t mean you suddenly have abandoned Edmund Burke; but it does mean you accept what the ascension of Trump and government by Fox/AM fully signifies… “conservatives” now in power never did and surely are no longer interested in Goldwater’s challenge. The least among us never stood a chance as a priority within any dimension of this GOP universe, and now are simply disdained by the base as liberal enemies, even as a sizable chunk of Trump’s bloc endures the same scarcity as the group they villianize.
But Brooks seems slow on the uptake. Recently he’s bent on understanding how, with economic performance at all time highs, Americans are so dissatisfied and pessimistic with the current state of affairs. He’s mystified full employment and a Dow 25K isn’t sufficient to put most in their happy place. He bemoans a disconnect between what people are doing to put food on the table and how confident they are that their lives are going in the right direction and their futures are secure. A “spiritual crisis” exists, declares Brooks, and the blame is shared. Conservatives, liberals and progressives all got it wrong. Really?
The party in power of our country, which pundits like him sought and fully failed to influence, has the following list of priorities: Stem a flood of illegal immigration that isn’t happening; rebuild a military that has no need for repair; provide tax relief at full employment during a structural deficit crisis; resist a global scientific mandate to reduce carbon emissions responsible for disastrous climate change; refuse to accept reasonable gun restrictions in the face of one mass shooting after another; criminalize abortion; and finally, above all, stay politically viable even as you pander to a shrinking core of supporters bent on denying the sweep of demographic changes that will overwhelm them within the next couple of decades.
Faced with such a governing party, whose intellectual underpinnings are exactly the type of “conservatism” Goldwater presciently predicted would fail miserably, I suppose one could forgive Brooks his delusions, but that doesn’t make his panning for deeper reasons for our malaise any more relevant. Brooks is a salesman without clients. The world he presupposes doesn’t exist, and the people he seeks answers for aren’t interested in even posing the questions he wants to explore. The crisis he sees is the same most thoughtful Americans recognize… millions of our fellow citizens are addled by grievance and resentment, which views social, cultural, economic and technological progress as a diabolical scheme to usurp their position.
Somehow Brooks imagines tangents and trends and societal misfires that tweaks to the relationship between government and the governed can remedy if only we think about it enough. Sorry Dave, some things are just not that complicated. Snake oil and nihilism is what your people now prefer, and unless you have some Eddie Burke chapters that cover such a contingency, you may want to adapt your thinking. BC