Moderation for moderation’s sake

If Brooks’ house was on fire, he would urge the firefighters to take an incrementalist approach and try to reduce the flames slowly rather than t taking the radical approach of dousing them with water.

Modern conservatives claim to be followers of Burke but they are actually disciples of de Maistre.

I think that it’s an enormous mistake to take Brooks at face value. He’s an operative with an assigned task, which is to soften up the rightmost sector of the Democratic prosperous, educated, sophisticated middle class. Life the Republicans working with Jews and blacks he doesn’t have to change many minds to be a success. If he can wedge away 1% or 2% of the Democratic moderates, he’s done his job.

He answers both to the Republicans and to the Times, and he can play them off against one another. He has to keep his Republican cred, but the Republican pros know his game and will be easy on him. He has to keep his sanity cred and a bit of “moderation cred, but the Times can’t fire him because he’s a Republican plant / commissar / zampolit. He shows a little independence to maintain his cover, but at all key moments he does his job.

Yes, I think that this is actually true. The Times has been pressured into hiring “conservatives”, and conservativism is part of Brooks’ job description. he can’t change much, and the Times can’t fire him.

One thing that particularly got up my craw: “U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment.” Oh really? The Great Railroad Strike of 1872, Homestead, Haymarket, the Pullman Strike, the Harlan County Wars, Ludlow, Coxey’s Army, 1919, the entire 1930s, etc. etc.

Hell, America’s political system in the 20th century was riven by class resentment, and arguably remains riven to this day.

Why is Brooks considered an intellectual, again? He doesn’t know anything!

I think this must be the Douthat post you were looking for:

With this mind, I think there’s something to be said for simply conceding that support for segregation – as deep-rooted and “conservative” an institution as has ever existed in America, in a sense – simply was the conservative position in the 1950s, and that the liberals were right that the injustice of the practice required a deeply un-conservative response, as they have been right (and will be right again) on other points as well.

Riffle, “If Brooks’ house was on fire, he would urge the firefighters to take an incrementalist approach and try to reduce the flames slowly rather than t taking the radical approach of dousing them with water.”

I don’t think you understand Burkean arguments very well. Dousing flames with water is an established method of putting them out and has been for at least as long as civilization has used fire. Putting out fire with water is about as an extreme case of something that would be ok under the argument as I can think of.

Henry: “In short, Burkean conservatism, unless it is tempered with an implicit liberalism (as Burke’s own conservatism arguably was, at least in part) amounts to a defence of the status quo, even when that status quo is itself the product of direct political manipulations. It doesn’t (and shouldn’t be thought to) provide a case against ambitious political measures (which fall short of major experiments in social engineering) without further – and quite specific – arguments as to why these measures are problematic. And Brooks doesn’t provide these arguments, or anything like them.”

Well yes. Revolutionary concepts untempered by conservative instincts tend toward disaster. Conservative instincts untempered by liberal sensibilities tend toward calcification. Probably the most useful poltical voice has a good political sensibility which is the opposite of whatever trend is going on at the time. When liberal tinkering is ascendant you should be listening to conservative critiques. When conservative calcification is entrenched you should be listening to liberal ideas for change.

But the idea that Burkean conservatism is merely status quo with no good argument is misunderstanding the whole thing. First the caution to revolutionaries is “if you can’t explain to me why this fence was here, you can’t just take it down”. The idea being that societies evolve in fitness, and your lack of understanding about why they evolved in a certain way isn’t enough to radically tear it down. You should be able to experiment around the edges (if we shorten the fence is there a problem? if we put a gate in does it cause problems that overwhelm the good we get from the gate?). But if you want to just tear it down you better be able to demonstrate excellent understanding of why it was there in the first place. (Of course most revolutionaries paper over this step anyway by claiming everything they want to change was designed to oppress their favored class with no other useful function but misuse of theory doesn’t have to discredit the theory).

And I’m pretty sure that Burkean framework works pretty well to integrate into specific criticism. Take Friedman’s argument against radically progressive taxation programs, and for his ideal tax structure (and I paraphrase from memory).

Burkean insights: successful economies seem to have voting populations that seem connected to the costs and benefits either by having a tightly knit community with similar values (Nordic countries) or by keeping the tax structures relatively flat such that you avoid a situation where a majority can vote up its own benefits without feeling a large part of the cost. Successful economies also seem to take care of their poorest members without taxing them. So in arguing against a large disparity in taxation rate, he is using Burkean insights with a specific argument about why very progressive tax rates are bad (they divorce the cost/benefit analysis that is necessary for good governance by radically divorcing the benificiaries from the people paying). In arguing for his ideal taxation system (again from memory) he is offering experimental tweaks–exclude the poorest from taxation entirely (already done), transition them toward the basic tax rate smoothly to avoid disincentives (fairly minor tweak with clearly understood ramifications), tax everyone else in a fairly narrow band I believe he suggested that the top tax rate should be no more than around 10 points higher than the basic rate and raise the rate smoothly (avoiding the cost/benefit divorce and avoiding tweaking disincentives at step-points). This proposal isn’t really that far from what we have now, and would be an acceptably Burkean evolution rather than a revolution throwing away whatever benefits there are in what we currently have.

As far as I can tell, that is how a good Burkean criticism works. Which isn’t to say the argument WINS every time. Just that it seems to me that it is very well worth considering and not at all the same as a blind defense of the status quo.

Let’s keep Burke and Brooks separate. I’m not too crazy about Burke, but he deserves serious attention. Brooks is a hack.

A lot of radical experiments are status quo by now. Few conservatives are Burkean about attacking Social Security, or Keynesianism, or century-old progressive regulations, or the National Parks and the Smithsonian — etc. They’re all still radical experiments to conservatives.

“Moderation for moderation’s sake” is a defensible position. Go slow, doubt oneself, look for the wisdom of what already exists, etc. This is honorable conservatism, Burke’s and Coleridge’s. But as we all know, it has nothing to do with the Republican Party since Reagan, whose apologists are engaged purely and simply in the defense of privilege and the rationalization of plunder.

The bastards have been waging class war since they put down Shay’s Rebellion. Neither Buckley nor Brooks nor (I fear) Douthat ever did or ever will acknowledge this.

Well, put. I found the column bizarre. I don’t know what “social engineering” he is talking about. It is not like the budget embeds a radical healthcare proposal in it, and from what we know of Obama, he has no plans for a radical healthcare proposal.

The class warfare stuff was nonsensical. The idea that the wealthiest 5% will pay a greater share under Obama, in later years, than they did under Bush does not constitute class warfare.

I was trying to get you to acknowledge that Republicanism since Reagan has been a determined, even fanatical, effort to dismantle the New Deal. “Tinkering” hardly describes it. They were trying, in the immortal words of that great (and far more influential than Burke these last twenty years) conservative Grover Norquist, “to shrink government until it can be drowned in a bathtub.”

I couldn’t remember whether you’d ever repudiated this radically debased ideology with the contempt it deserves, so I wanted to offer you the opportunity.

I don’t see the dramatic expansion. Reaganism, Gingrichism, and Bushism are all of a piece, all one project. But I don’t mean to fence with you; I just wanted to press home the point that the last several decades of Republican rule have been radically destructive and that very extensive social repair is necessary and justified.

Adam Kotsko #9 –
Yah, and there’s an element of sadism in it, bondage fetish. Where the game is that the dominant player has some kind of moral imperative for what’s base gratification of perverse desire and power exchange.
Brooks speaks for the creators of mass impulse, manipulators of mass ideas about the world. There’s sickness there, wound, perverse catharsis.
Part of the game is that stance of near-innocent reaction, decisive, impelled by an active conscience, but it’s a reaction to an artificial circumstance the reacting agency has created .
It’s taboo to acknowledge how thoroughly the mass opinion Brooks responds to is controlled. Because then the game won’t work.

Burkean conservatism, unless it is tempered with an implicit liberalism (as Burke’s own conservatism arguably was, at least in part) amounts to a defence of the status quo, even when that status quo is itself the product of direct political manipulations

This reminds me of Sciascia’s critique of the Italian Communist Party’s high-minded approach to the Christian Democrats; he essentially argued that they projected their own Right-Hegelian vision of the Italian Constitution onto the party they saw as its contemporary guardians, heedless of the fact that that party saw itself (and was seen by its voters) as a machine for monopolising and distributing the spoils of power. Their Right-Hegelianism was all too genuine; I’m not sure Brooks’s is.

Yes, I agree that Democratic urban, racial, and law enforcement policies in the 60s and 70s were seriously flawed, and that critics like Moynihan, Glazer, Bell, and even Kristol made valid criticisms of them. (The best criticisms, in my view, came from liberals who stayed liberals, like Jim Sleeper.) But I emphatically don’t agree with the notion that Reaganism was an attempt to correct liberals’ mistakes rather than abandon their goals. Mid- and late-20th century conservatives never accepted the New Deal. They always wanted to roll it back — not incrementally and partially but rapidly and completely. They were radicals, and their successors in the Bush administration were ultra-radicals.

“But I emphatically don’t agree with the notion that Reaganism was an attempt to correct liberals’ mistakes rather than abandon their goals. Mid- and late-20th century conservatives never accepted the New Deal. They always wanted to roll it back—not incrementally and partially but rapidly and completely.”

That is your interpretation. I would suggest that you paint with much too broad a brush if you think that most mid and late century conservatives are/were like that, and that is doubly true for Reagan. Like most human institutional reactions, there was an overreaction that you can see culminating in Bush II, but that isn’t proof that the initial reaction was wrong any more than the horrific Democratic HUD policies proved that the New Deal was wrong.

you paint with much too broad a brush if you think that most mid and late century conservatives are/were like that

My condolences, Sebastian. You conservatives have been the victims of a gigantic terminological hijacking, just as we socialists have. “Socialism” means radical democracy, and the misappropriation of the word by Lenin and his successors to describe their party dictatorship was egregious. Of course, you conservatives, whether from ignorance or malice, were only to happy to cooperate with Communists in obscuring the original meaning of socialism. Republicans since (and definitely including) Reagan have misappropriated the once-honorable term “conservatism” to describe their version of rank plutocracy. You had better hope that others are more scrupulous about acknowledging the distinction between conservativism and Reagan/Gingrich/Bush -ism than you and your cohort were about acknowledging the difference between socialism and Lenin/Stalin/Mao -ism.

The way US conservatives — I mean political conservatives, not apolitical people, or even liberals and progressives, who would like their grandchildren to admire Fielding, Matisse, and Wesley, and to “respect” women by considering them best when refined and retiring — use Burke is strange. They don’t stop with the idea that social changes are good only when they arise organically out of the society itself. They go on to abhor the French Revolution, regarding which even the most reactionary Frenchmen have given up.

Some of them (I don’t mean Brooks, because I think he is confused) appear to understand this, but none of them will say it.

That in itself is particularly annoying because liberals have been so willing to appreciate what is good in conservative thought. (For example, I thought Oakeshott was a liberal on account of Rorty’s praise for him.) It is as if they know they are using liberals to do their thinking for them.

Ummm, OK. I mean if you can’t even tell the difference between Reagan and Gingrich, you don’t have much room to lecture.

This is exactly as silly and unresponsive as it would be to suggest that I had accused conservatives of seeing no difference between Lenin and Stalin. Perhaps, in order to avoid shallow and unthinking retorts like this, we should agree not to answer each other’s comments for an hour or so after reading them.

That said, I am open to the possibility that there could again be a liberal branch of Republicanism (“liberal” in the American sense, of course), as may have been true in the 1950s and early 1960s. But I don’t think it’s going to happen. Pretending neoconservatives are liberals won’t make it happen.

“I’ve never heard anybody “go back and forth” between political and nonpolitical uses of “liberal” and “conservative.” When I read, “there is a conservative and a liberal temperament,” I interpret this as meaning, “there is one temperament to which the Republican Party appeals and another temperament to which the Democratic Party appeals.””

And that would be an enormous misunderstanding of my comments. You’re doing worse than going back and forth between the definitions, you’re asserting that they are identical. It would be like saying that I ‘love’ my husband exactly like I ‘love’ a book. Not everything is political. In theory it could be true that conservatives (temperament) are conservatives (political). Someone at least thought it was a good concept from a propaganda point of view at some point. But in the US, if you are thinking conservatives (temperament)=Republicans you either aren’t understanding what I’m saying at all, or completely denying its validity in a weird passive-aggressive way.

Brooks is the Grima Wormtongue of the republican party. His job is to council democrats to embrace weakness in the name of “realism”, to surrender and despair.

And that was the case for my entire family

I guess I just don’t see that as a ‘big problem for conservatives’ in any strong sense. There are things that happen in life where certain temperaments are more suited to respond. There are times (I believe most because I’m temperamentally conservative) where slow organic change is wisest. There are emergencies where you have to act more quickly. That is a challenge, as we hate to operate out of our comfortable temperament, but that is how life works.

Take more personal area–human relationships. People with conservative temperaments want to slowly plod through working on them (good) but will often get stuck in ones that are never going to be fixed (bad). So when they are in abusive relationships they are at a disadvantage compared to those with more liberal temperaments because they are less likely to leave. (Maybe. It could also be that if the shift from non-abusive to abusive is very quick, it will be so jarring to the conservative temperament as to cause retreat).

A person with a liberal temperament may not be so open to the small changes in relationships, they want things fixed now. For actually bad relationships, this can be good. It will help them leave. For basically good relationships with some problems it might be bad, because it will encourage them to hop from one imperfect person to the next, never satisfied because the changes toward better don’t come fast enough.

Each temperament is suited better for different situations. And a really healthy human being (which I certainly won’t claim to be) learns to adopt a little from outside his own temperament when his temperament isn’t well suited to the situation at hand.

So yes, liberal (oriented toward sweeping changes) ideas might make more sense now.

But you should look at the value of organic change too. Who would have thought that even revolutionary change in the US could lead to a black president 30 years after Reagan? Yet in fact it was incrementalist change that got us there.

Yet in fact it was incrementalist change that got us there.

… All I can say is, I do not think you are correct at all. Unless you would also call Hoover-to-Roosevelt “incrementalist change” rather than a strong response to rather suddenly overwhelming stimuli.

Brooks is a “moderate” compared with shrieking demagogues like Limbaugh, but that doesn’t put him anywhere near the centre. It’s been said enough times that Brooks wasn’t all that concerned by Bush’s radicalism, and he wasn’t, and one suspects that if Obama set out plans to scrap Social Security and straight out replace it with ISAs or the like tomorrow, Brooks would find a way to praise him.

Furthermore, suppose Brooks’s goal were to push the libertarians out of the Republican Party, and make that party simultaneously more ideological and more socially conservative. He would be doing exactly what he is doing now. He would be drawing in the ideologically inclined among centrists, those attracted to the promulgation of socially conservative “values” such as are said to mitigate the effects of the market society. He would be attempting to marginalize the secular populist wing of the party. As for whether this really is his goal, I’m not yet convinced he’s that . . . um, Trotskyite.