Against David Brooksism

“The only thing Brooks’s ‘true conservatism’ is ‘responsible’ for, however, is progressivism’s thoroughgoing dominance of our culture. For Brooks, a ‘responsible’ conservatism must concede the moral legitimacy of every progressive ‘advance.'”

In two recent essays for The Atlantic, establishment conservative David Brooks takes aim at the new right, the pro-Trump faction of conservatism threatening to take over the GOP. In the first, he describes his experience at the second National Conservatism conference, the gathering of new-right intellectuals this past November in Orlando, Florida (that I too attended). New righters, he correctly reports, share a vision of “a world in which the corporate elite, the media elite, the political elite, and the academic elite have all coagulated into one axis of evil, dominating every institution and controlling the channels of thought.” Brooks thinks this anxiety is entirely unjustified and that we are in for a “terrifying future” if it takes hold. What is scary to Brooks is the new right’s fear itself, for it leads it to treat the left as a hostile enemy, a stance Brooks deems irresponsible.

His second piece is a “reclamation project” for “true conservatism,” a Burkean “social vision…about soulcraft, about how we build institutions that produce good citizens—people who are moderate in their zeal, sympathetic to the marginalized, reliable in their diligence, and willing to sacrifice the private interest for public good.” The new right, he argues, is “the opposite” of true conservatism. “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.” He aims to banish the new right from respectable politics. He continues: “A lot of my [establishment republican] friends are trying to reclaim the GOP and make it a conservative party once again. I cheer them on. America needs two responsible parties.”

The only thing Brooks’s “true conservatism” is “responsible” for, however, is progressivism’s thoroughgoing dominance of our culture. For Brooks, a “responsible” conservatism must concede the moral legitimacy of every progressive “advance.” It must submit entirely to progressive ideology. Like David French before him, Brooks employs pleasant rhetoric for his establishment view and catastrophizing rhetoric for his new-right opponent, but once we peel away to the content, we find the same controlled opposition that makes Brooks, like French, a useful idiot for progressivism.