David Brooks on the end of American Conservatism and his becoming a moderate Democrat

[andym]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/brooks-true-conservatism-dead-fox-news-voter-suppression/620853/
"WHAT HAPPENED TO AMERICAN CONSERVATISM?
The rich philosophical tradition I fell in love with has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression."
David Brooks
The Atlantic
--snip--
....
"What passes for “conservatism” now, however, is nearly the opposite of the Burkean conservatism I encountered then. Today, what passes for the worldview of “the right” is a set of resentful animosities, a partisan attachment to Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson, a sort of mental brutalism. The rich philosophical perspective that dazzled me then has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression.

I recently went back and reread the yellowing conservatism books that I have lugged around with me over the decades. I wondered whether I’d be embarrassed or ashamed of them, knowing what conservatism has devolved into. I have to tell you that I wasn’t embarrassed; I was enthralled all over again, and I came away thinking that conservatism is truer and more profound than ever—and that to be a conservative today, you have to oppose much of what the Republican Party has come to stand for....
--snip---

Trumpian Republicanism plunders, degrades, and erodes institutions for the sake of personal aggrandizement. The Trumpian cause is held together by hatred of the Other. Because Trumpians live in a state of perpetual war, they need to continually invent existential foes—critical race theory, nongendered bathrooms, out-of-control immigration. They need to treat half the country, metropolitan America, as a moral cancer, and view the cultural and demographic changes of the past 50 years as an alien invasion. Yet pluralism is one of America’s oldest traditions; to conserve America, you have to love pluralism. As long as the warrior ethos dominates the GOP, brutality will be admired over benevolence, propaganda over discourse, confrontation over conservatism, dehumanization over dignity. A movement that has more affection for Viktor Orbán’s Hungary than for New York’s Central Park is neither conservative nor American. This is barren ground for anyone trying to plant Burkean seedlings.

I’m content, as my hero Isaiah Berlin put it, 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. If its progressive wing sometimes seems to have learned nothing from the failures of government and to promote cultural stances that divide Americans, at least the party as a whole knows what year it is. In 1980, the core problem of the age was statism, in the form of communism abroad and sclerotic, dynamism-sapping bureaucracies at home. In 2021, the core threat is social decay. The danger we should be most concerned with lies in family and community breakdown, which leaves teenagers adrift and depressed, adults addicted and isolated. It lies in poisonous levels of social distrust, in deepening economic and persisting racial disparities that undermine the very goodness of America—in political tribalism that makes government impossible...."
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In a long essay, Brooks details his journey from socialism in his youth, to his adult self's love of Edmund Burke and American conservatism to his disgust with what conservatism has become in recent years. I found this a very interesting essay that explains the conservative intellectual mindset fairly clearly, while ignoring the deep contradictions that have always been part and parcel of the modern American conservative movement-- though Brooks does acknowledge the racism that even people like Bill Buckley fell prey to. What's most interesting is that he concludes that Burke himself was not anti-government and that "The central conservative truth is that culture matters most; the central liberal truth is that politics can change culture," and he believes that they should be combined.

Brooks realizes that it is the Democratic Party that still retains the sense of modern American democracy and sensibilities while the Republican Party has gone off the deep end toward Trumpian fascism.

[Paladin]

1. You're late, Brooks. Very, very late. (nt)

[Geechie]

6. Agreed. He helped make this mess. nt

[NewHendoLib]

10. This

[2naSalit]

13. He did too!

I saw him do it.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. Wow. David Brooks is now a moderate Democrat! I am amazed to read this.

I am also pleased. When a man of his intelligence and with his powers of observation comes to a place like this, it means he's been staying aware of political developments over time.

Most of us are too occupied with our own lives to see the way he's seen the events of the past decades.

Welcome to the Democratic Party, David Brooks!

[andym]

14. I was surprised as well by Brooks-- but as you state, he is quite intelligent

and at times is a keen observer of American politics.

Brooks clearly sees the forest for the trees here. He realizes, independent of policy, that now only the Democratic Party represents the values of mid-20th century American democracy, and carries the banner of American values of striving for freedom and equality for all. The Republican party is on the road to anti-democracy populism with an inability of its members to distinguish facts from opinions, and a strong predilection to be propagandized by the likes of Fox News. The Republican party has been thoroughly corrupted by the authoritarian Trump. Brooks clearly understands the danger of the devolution of the Republican party into what might become a neo-fascist organization.

[old as dirt]

3. The party of IA Gov Robert D Ray,

whose name was once synonymous with Iowa Republicanism, has become the party of Steve King.

[XanaDUer2]

4. He couldn't take it anymore nt

[EYESORE 9001]

5. Everyone has a limit to how long they can hold their nose

A shame it took him so long. Burke and Buckley never were admirable characters.

[Haggard Celine]

7. He's been flirting with the Democratic Party for a long while.

I would watch him on the PBS news hour when he would take his turn and then Mark Shields would give his opinion, and Brooks sounded more like Shields all the time, certainly more than he sounded like the GOP. Glad to see him leave that sewer once and for all. He was always better than that.

[regnaD kciN]

8. The Ever-Insufferable David Brooks gets it mostly right...

…but I found it amusing that his paean to “true conservatism” reminds me of nothing so much as those hardcore Marxists who claim that there’s never been a real communist state, merely corrupt versions that shouldn’t be used to judge the theory; true communism is always “just around the corner.” Similarly, Brooks’s musings seem to miss the possibility that a “humility about human nature” will, de facto, lead to the perpetuation of a stratified society of a small number of haves dominating the vast majority of have-nots, and that the idealization of the small community with the societal wisdom of its conventions and morals will invariably lead to racial and xenophobic conflicts whenever those communities can no longer remain isolated from each other. In other words, that conservatism leads in a straight line to the Enoch Powells and the Donald Trumps; that, far from being some dark aberration, they are conservatism’s logical outcome.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

11. Thank you.

I had such a hard time
Articulating what you just said.

This is why I reject all forms of conservatism
as well capitalism,that leads to ogliarchy when drawn to its conclusion too.

We need to do away with both someday or those terrible beliefs will be the cause to the end of humanity and the earth,Im not kidding.

[Paladin]

16. Well put.

Let's see if Brooks is still a "moderate Democrat," a year from now.

[Autumn]

9. The only difference now in the party he fell in love with is an attachment to Donald Trump,

a very sick attatchment. Otherwise they are the same. So...

[viva la]

12. I bet he decides his role is now to criticize everything Biden does

... accuse progressives of "creeping towards communism", and wonder aloud why the party of Franklin Roosevelt can't be more like the party of Ronald Reagan.

[hatrack]

15. As the Pequod sinks, Ahab announces new eco-tourism whale-watching company . . .

Remember those Imperial Japanese soldiers and marines holed up on remote Pacific islands for 10, 20, 30 years after the war ended? That's how late this is.

Maybe Brooks thought he was riding in a gilded coach with wheels greased by the weighty thoughts of Plato, Hegel and Burke. It was swapping the coach out for a coal-rolling F250 that bothered him, not the fact that both coach and truck alike traveled on a road paved with corpses, lies, greed and bullshit.

Also, I gave up many reverse dog years ago giving a shit what some guy who dumped his wife to marry his much younger research assistant (after fucking his research assistant while married) has to say about "decay" and "family" and "tradition" and "values".

[traitorsgalore]

17. What a vomitous load of lies

I'll quote this one as one of his many delusions listed "This is one of the core conservative principles: epistemological modesty, or humility in the face of what we don’t know about a complex world, and a conviction that social change should be steady but cautious and incremental."

[Joinfortmill]

18. Welcome. Hope there are many more to come.

[PlanetBev]

19. Never could stand that supercilious bastard

He’s been carrying the Repukes water for decades, and now he sees it? Go pound sand, asshat.