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David Brooks' Requiem for Conservatism's Most Recent Death


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Real Clear Politics

Peter Berkowitz

January 02, 2022

Bolstered by Barack Obama’s historic 2008 presidential run, leading pundits — George Packer in The New Yorker, E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, and Sam Tanenhaus in The New Republic — proclaimed the death of conservatism. Such announcements are back in fashion and no less suspect.

Then as now, the Republican Party, and America itself, faced grim times. After eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, the United States remained bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. An epic economic meltdown erased savings, wiped out jobs, and subverted confidence in the free market. Bush hatred tormented progressive minds. And the old Reagan synthesis — cut taxes, deregulate, respect the religious right’s concerns, and stand tall against the Soviet challenge — did not readily translate into policy prescriptions for the perturbations afflicting early 21st-century Americans.

(Snip)

Yes, Trump is vain and thin-skinned. Yet rather than adopt an authoritarian agenda, the 45th U.S. president cut taxes, curtailed regulations, restored the rule of law to America’s southern border, appointed judges committed to interpreting rather than rewriting the law, and gave states room to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yes, some thugs and kooks rallied around Trump. Meanwhile, other thugs and kooks gravitated to the Democratic Party. The swing voters who were decisive in Trump’s 2016 victory, moreover, supported him not out of “hatred of the Other” but in self-defense against the scorn that progressive elites directed at them, their communities, and their faith.

And yes, many conservatives feel embattled. But not, as Brooks ridiculously alleges, because “they need to continually invent existential foes — critical race theory, nongendered bathrooms, out-of-control immigration.” Conservatives and Trump voters feel embattled because, even as a New York Times columnist writing in The Atlantic dismisses their political concerns as a matter of benighted and feverish imaginations, they can see with their own eyes that schools indoctrinate students in critical race theory; that progressive elites make transgenderism a signature cause not to protect the basic rights of a tiny minority but as a lever to overturn traditional moral limits and teachings; and that since Joe Biden entered the White House, soaring numbers of migrants have illegally crossed the nation’s southern border.

Not the least reason to cultivate the conservative spirit is to counter the extraordinary excesses on the left to which progressives, in their recurring rush to bury conservatism, blind themselves and the nation.

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From The Comments

"I went to high school with David Brooke's at radnor in the middle of the Philadelphia main line. He was an avowed radical. Fbi visited him for having a subscription to Pravda as we all heard. He was a hard core liberal. Wicked smart and he got smashed...see youtube debate...by Milton Friedman a d then became a fiscal conservative. He stayed a very social liberal. He is a token. He lives the Manhatten lifestyle and lives for the next liberal guest list cocktail sessions. He is a fraud.

He has lost the guts to debate with those who found him entertaining in his worn army jacket and thick wavy hair quoting Marx in high school but saw in him a rather erudite child who wanted to be cool and who also knew that as a cloistered high school nobody he'd use his smarts to enter the world of the cool and do what it took to stay there...including being turned out by wealthy liberal pimps as their little orphan Annie conservative in suspenders and wing tips. He is liberal but of no value in so admitting so he pretends to be a conservative like a liberal court jester prancing about seeking the next example of a messiah based on the crease in their pants. So so so sad."

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