David Brooks Explains Conservatism for You

(My Fleming Foundation article)

One of the things the Left likes to do is put up fake conservatives to tell real conservatives what to think and do. This also serves the purpose of telling the Left what supposedly really is going on among conservatives.

A problem with this today is there are so many conservative websites, podcasts and other outlets, it’s impossible to define “conservatism” even within the loose outlines established during the years Bill Buckley was running National Review, 1955 to the late 1990s. In those days there were a handful of magazines, and maybe a dozen newspaper columnists and TV commentators. Today there are thousands. Each of us picks his own sources from among many alternatives, including Fleming.Foundation.

Religion, always important to conservatives, also keeps changing, influencing conservatives in unpredictable and undefinable ways. So do foreign developments, such as the rise of Eric Zemmour in France. And the Left’s ever-increasing assaults on common sense and decency force reactions from conservatives of all types.

Which brings us to David Brooks’ anti-Trump diatribe in The Atlantic, “What Happened to American Conservatism?”          

Brooks started out a socialist, but in his 20s, which was during the 1980s, “I started reading any writer on conservatism whose book I could get my hands on—Willmoore Kendall, Peter Viereck, Shirley Robin Letwin.” He never mentions Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver and other more prominent conservative thinkers still read today. Brooks admires Burke, of whom Kirk was the preeminent modern apostle.

“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.”

Uh, what country is he living in? The backing link is not to another source, but to his own Nov. 18 column, “The Terrifying Future of the American Right: What I saw at the National Conservatism Conference.” Actually it was a group of rather tame center-right types.

Trump remains popular now for the same reason he became popular in 2015, when he announced his bid for the Oval Office: As a businessman and marketer, he has tuned in to the market, and sold to it. Americans wanted immigration reform, standing up to China, better trade deals, pro-life Supreme Court justices, ending foreign wars and lower taxes and regulations. Trump actually tried to achieve all that. And given the forces arrayed against him – especially the Russia Hoax now being revealed in its full mendacity by John Durham – it’s surprising how much he achieved.

As to Tucker Carlson, he’s popular because he exposes stories Brooks, his New York Times colleagues and other Regime Media toadies won’t: The Russia Hoax, the persecution of journalist Julian Assange, the idiotic antagonizing of Russia over Ukraine, the 2014 Victoria Nuland coup against Ukraine’s democratic government, etc.

“Mental brutalism”? How about trying to parse a Biden speech.

“Voter suppression”? He means asking people for IDs to vote, to make sure the system isn’t rigged. What a fool. The 2004 Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, called for mandating a photo ID to vote. Was Jimmy a crypto-fascist “authoritarian” trying to suppress the vote?

Currently, the unifying force for conservatives isn’t conservatism, but Biden and the other “woke” Democrats hammering the country into the ground with inflation, attacks on parental rights, heavy COVID mandates, increasing racial animosity, wild spending, higher taxes and general incompetence.

Some actual sense comes from Brooks’ Atlantic colleague Ron Brownstein. Writing in this case on CNN just after the Democrats lost the Virginia governorship, he warned, “But the depth of the hole Democrats face with working-class White voters was underscored by last week's election losses in Virginia, where exit polls showed Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin, a wealthy former private equity executive, winning about three-fourths of Whites without college degrees, and in New Jersey, where the longtime Democratic president of the state Senate was swept away in a heavily blue-collar district by a Republican truck driver who had never before sought office. 

“To many analysts, those outcomes underscore how many cultural barriers still limit Democrats among White blue-collar voters, even if they can deliver more kitchen-table assistance.”

He quotes Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist who recently published a study on attitudes among working-class White voters. Abramowitz said, “What they are voting on is that they are much more closely aligned with Republicans across a whole range of issues, that arrays from cultural issues that get a lot of play to racial issues, immigration.”

Some polls also show Hispanics and blacks are moving toward the GOP. Although one always must be careful until actual voting shows what the real patterns are.

Brooks should break out of his East Coast isolation and visit the rest of this great, broad, wacky country. Even out here in California we have a more realistic view. People are working and struggling. They’re trying to figure out whether they should leave because simple houses in Orange County now cost $1.1 million. Who wouldn’t prefer Trump or Carlson over loopy Gov. Gavin Newsom?

Writing articles that please leftist proclivities the Widow Jobs, who finances the Atlantic, isn’t journalism. It’s stenography.

John Seiler blogs at johnseiler.stubstack.com