David Brooks argues today that conservatism is out of balance. Once upon a time, he tells us, economic conservatives who favored small government coexisted with an equally influential set of Burkean traditionalists, who sought to "preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government."
There's a lot wrong with this thesis: as Ed Kilgore says, Brooks thinks Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush balanced the two tendencies, which may have been true as far as their rhetoric went, but wasn't exactly evident in their approaches to governance. Also, much social conservatism is of the punitive, scolding variety practiced by the religious right (which gets along quite nicely with economic conservatism even now, as Kilgore notes).
But, yes, there are some Burkean conservatives out there, at least among the pundits and thinkers. Brooks writes, regretfully:
The two conservative tendencies lived in tension. But together they embodied a truth that was put into words by the child psychologist John Bowlby, that life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.If there's doesn't seem to be much of this sort of conservatism these days, I'd say it's for a simple reason: the big-money bankrollers of conservatism don't really give a crap whether American society has a "secure base."
The economic conservatives were in charge of the daring ventures that produced economic growth. The traditionalists were in charge of establishing the secure base -- a society in which families are intact, self-discipline is the rule, children are secure and government provides a subtle hand.
... It's not so much that today's Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don't even know it exists.
I think rich right-wingers are like drug dealers or Al Qaeda -- drug dealers aren't upset if the neighborhoods from which they operate have high crime rates, and Al Qaeda has never minded operating from failed states like the Sudan. There's no civic or national pride involved -- in fact, these organizations prefer a cowed population that just lets them operate. That's how many of our plutocrats seem to feel right now about America.
I'm not sure the financiers of the right ever cared about strengthening American society. In the past, when a Jack Kemp would rise to prominence preaching economic opportunity for the downtrodden, or a George W. Bush was preaching "compassionate conservatism," it happened because the right and its financiers saw traditionalist conservatism as an effective smokescreen for their main agenda: lower taxes and less regulation. Traditionalism was also a useful cudgel the right could use to beat the allegedly hedonistic libertines of the Democratic Party.
But traditionalism isn't working very well as a cudgel these days (people in all parts of the country, and across nearly all of the political spectrum, have now decided they're cool with sex in a large percentage of its variations). Pure Fox-style rage seems to get out the right-wing vote more reliably than suggestions that traditional conservatism will make America a harmonious Norman Rockwell nation. (Real right-wingers these days don't want a harmonious nation -- they want to destroy their enemies.)
So now we're getting conservatism's true agenda in undiluted form. And patsies like David Brooks, who thought the right wanted a rising tide to lift all of America's boats, still don't realize they were played for chumps. The big-money types never cared about their agenda. The Burkeans were just being used.
