[Dialogue] David Brooks critiques the GOP

[Jim Rippey]

A most interesting analysis.


Jim Rippey in Bellevue, NE


The Republican Collapse 


By DAVID BROOKS, NY Times Op-Ed Columnist, 10/5/07

 

Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not
an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a
suspicion of radical change.

When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market
conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious
conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order.
Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and
the founders. 

Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring
creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have
been magnified, while the temperamental conservatism of Burke has been
abandoned. 

Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of
democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is
suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform
anything will have, as Burke wrote "pleasing commencements" but "lamentable
conclusions." 

The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid
reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither
seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes
epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and
can know, what we can and cannot plan.

Over the past six years, the Bush administration has operated on the
assumption that if you change the political institutions in Iraq, the
society will follow. But the Burkean conservative believes that society is
an organism; that custom, tradition and habit are the prime movers of that
organism; and that successful government institutions grow gradually from
each nation's unique network of moral and social restraints.

Over the past few years, the vice president and the former attorney general
have sought to expand executive power as much as possible in the name of
protecting Americans from terror. But the temperamental conservative
believes that power must always be clothed in constitutionalism. The
dispositional conservative is often more interested in means than ends (the
reverse of President Bush) and asks how power is divided before asking for
what purpose it is used.

Over the past decade, religious conservatives within the G.O.P. have argued
that social policies should be guided by the eternal truths of natural law
and that questions about stem cell research and euthanasia should reflect
the immutable sacredness of human life.

But temperamental conservatives are suspicious of the idea of settling
issues on the basis of abstract truth. These kinds of conservatives hold
that moral laws emerge through deliberation and practice and that if
legislation is going to be passed that slows medical progress, it shouldn't
be on the basis of abstract theological orthodoxy. 

Over the past four decades, free market conservatives within the Republican
Party have put freedom at the center of their political philosophy. But the
dispositional conservative puts legitimate authority at the center. So while
recent conservative ideology sees government as a threat to freedom, the
temperamental conservative believes government is like fire - useful when
used legitimately, but dangerous when not.

Over the past few decades, the Republican Party has championed a series of
reforms designed to devolve power to the individual, through tax cuts,
private pensions and medical accounts. The temperamental conservative does
not see a nation composed of individuals who should be given maximum liberty
to make choices. Instead, the individual is a part of a social organism and
thrives only within the attachments to family, community and nation that
precede choice.

Therefore, the temperamental conservative values social cohesion alongside
individual freedom and worries that too much individualism, too much
segmentation, too much tension between races and groups will tear the
underlying unity on which all else depends. Without unity, the police are
regarded as alien powers, the country will fracture under the strain of war
and the economy will be undermined by lack of social trust. 

To put it bluntly, over the past several years, the G.O.P. has made
ideological choices that offend conservatism's Burkean roots. This may seem
like an airy-fairy thing that does nothing more than provoke a few
dissenting columns from William F. Buckley, George F. Will and Andrew
Sullivan. But suburban, Midwestern and many business voters are
dispositional conservatives more than creedal conservatives. They care about
order, prudence and balanced budgets more than transformational leadership
and perpetual tax cuts. It is among these groups that G.O.P. support is
collapsing. 

American conservatism will never be just dispositional conservatism. America
is a creedal nation. But American conservatism is only successful when it's
in tension - when the ambition of its creeds is retrained by the caution of
its Burkean roots. 

 

 

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