In "The Conservative Mind," David Brooks writes an astonishing retrospective:
Ronald Reagan embodied both sides of this fusion [of economic and traditional conservatism], and George W. Bush tried to recreate it with his compassionate conservatism. But that effort was doomed because in the ensuing years, conservatism changed.
Economic conservatives went into ascent, traditionalists into decline. That's Brooks' thesis, notwithstanding the raging popularity of, for one, social conservatism's Rick Santorum, whose party would now happily trade Mitt Romney--"Official Economic Conservative"--for him.
So there's that. But that's not what really astonishes. What does that trick is Brooks' assertion that "conservatism changed" post-Reagan; that pretty much all things conservative were humming along just fine when Brooks joined The Cause (at National Review) in 1984--only afterward came the ideological mudslide.
Indisputably, things got worse after Reagan. Supply-siding conservatives became ruthlessly anchored in their righteousness, as did the traditionalists (e.g. the Moral Majority). But to suggest that conservatism began its deterioration after Reagan is to ignore the entire, wretchedly conspicuous history of contemporary conservatism.
Loosely impelled in '64 by the Goldwater campaign and confederated by the 1970s and firmly entrenched by the Age of Reagan were the New Rightists--those social "traditionalists" who demagogically honed the political crafts of bigotry, buncombe artistry, misogyny, homophobia, Gantryism and obscurantism. Even Reagan had to work at tolerating them, and by '84 they were threatening to bolt.
Meanwhile, although certainly not the absolutist that today's economic conservatives are, President Reagan had entered office by championing the incoherence, contradictions, oversimplifications, anti-empiricism and ahistoricity of voodooing supply-side economics. In today's $16 trillion national debt and massive wealth inequality, we see the real-world results of theoretical economic conservatism.
Still, there's something else, there's something far more fundamental in how "conservatism changed," and it's something that Brooks barely references. He of course borrows his column's title from Russell Kirk's magisterially conceived and beautifully written The Conservative Mind (1953), in whose foreword to a revised edition Kirk is unmistakably alarmed:
[T]he conservative abhors all forms of ideology.... Such a priori designs for perfecting human nature and society are anathema to the conservative, who knows them for the tools and the weapons of coffeehouse fanatics.
Kirk wrote that in 1986, and he wrote it partly with a censorial eye toward those intensifying ideologues at National Review, which Brooks had joined two years earlier. It seems Brooks has been a frog in the heating pot ever since, and he's just now noticing that the water is boiling.
OK, I am expanding my walls of Troy metaphor to include Brooks as Paris standing atop the wall beside his father, King Priam, as played by Bill Buckley.
Seriously, even Brooks is confessing Reaganism is dead, even if he must mischaracterize Reaganism. But what the hell, this is common at funerals.
After reading Kirk's article, it is obvious that Obama killed Reaganism with ... conservatism ... and arithmetic.
Posted by: Robert Lipscomb | September 25, 2012 at 10:07 AM
I feel a certain sympathy for such as Brooks. There is ofttimes a vast difference between the things we believe and the things we say and in politics this is particularly true. Do I imagine that Brooks, for a microsecond, believes any of the bosh his party regularly peddles to the religious types that infest and support it? No way that is true. Yet, over the years, he has defended it and provided the intellectual analysis and support, tortured though it be, to excuse it. Fellow travelers they were and are and like many of the brains in the Republican party they assumed they would be deciding the destination. And here we are at boiling frog pond.
Posted by: Peter G | September 25, 2012 at 10:20 AM
What the bloody hell is "buncombe artistry"?
The only thing I can find is some vague references to a small technical college in NC, a down-at-the-heels town in nowhere IL and swordswallowing broken glass walkers.
Did you mis-spell bunco (a confidence game)?
Posted by: DerFarm | September 25, 2012 at 10:22 AM
@DerFarm: It is tied to bunk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Walker_(American_politician)
Posted by: Robert Lipscomb | September 25, 2012 at 10:28 AM
ummmmm...Ok. I gotta remember that one. Obscure references are a fun way to drive other commenters bugfuck.
That's a good one.
Posted by: DerFarm | September 25, 2012 at 11:00 AM
"Gantryism" is my favorite!
Posted by: Jim Milstein | September 25, 2012 at 11:33 AM
And, by the way, PM, thanks for nicely taking apart Brooks column.
Is Brooks more to be pitied than censured? No.
He knows better.
Posted by: Jim Milstein | September 25, 2012 at 11:36 AM
Q: Why doesn't Brooks just go the Full Frum?
A: He'd lose his spot as pet conservative at the Times.
Q: Why doesn't Sullivan have a spot at the Times?
A: He likes to say "fuck".
Posted by: Jim Milstein | September 25, 2012 at 11:39 AM
@DerFarm:
Here's another link, with what is perhaps the more common spelling, bunkum:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bunkum
And now, off to dip a toe in Booman's frog pond -- see you there!
Posted by: Janicket | September 25, 2012 at 01:24 PM