CNN’s Fareed Zakaria invited David Brooks to explain contemporary conservatism in the era of President Donald Trump, describing the left-wing columnist for The New York Times as a “conservative intellectual.”
The debate between “big government versus small government,” said Brooks, is passé; being supplanted by a new debate: opposition versus support for globalization.
Brooks neglected to define globalization or articulate its primary effects on its detractors and/or supporters. Zakaria similarly neglected to offer any analysis of contemporary globalization.
Neither Brooks nor Zakaria spoke of cultural change wrought by the era of mass migration to America and the broader West; no commentary was offered on the natures of new cohorts of foreigners and their compatibility with the American ethos. Also ignored were contemporary policies and informal attitudes toward cultural integration of foreigners, and how they have changed over decades.
No examination was offered by either Brooks or Zakaria of contemporary conservatism’s resistance toward expanding state controls over human behavior in both the social and economic spheres. No words were spoken on the values of freedom of speech and expression; property rights; a civil society independent of government controls; growing cultural apprehension under “political correctness”; left-wing corruption of academia, the news media, and entertainment; or other conservative concerns.
Referencing the thesis of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Brooks framed political paradigms as intermittently experiencing major shifts over time:
“You get a paradigm, you get a way of looking at the world. Reaganism, that was a paradigm. It works for a little while and then slowly it detached from reality, and it’s hollow but nobody knows it. Somebody comes along, punctures it, and it collapses. And that’s what Trump did to Reaganism.”
Neither Brooks nor Zakaria acknowledged an essentialist view of the human condition or of human nature, or of ideological predicates related to perceptions of the human condition or human nature. Zakaria accepted Brooks’ reframing of Kuhn’s historical analysis of scientific paradigm shifts as applicable to politics.
Brooks linked economic dynamism to the status quo of mass migration, suggesting the two were somehow interconnected:
“I would like an Alexander Hamilton [style of conservatism] — open trade, a lot of immigration, a lot of economic dynamism. … The Steve Bannons of the world, that’s where a lot of the people are. They’re older, they’re economically disadvantaged, and they want a national conservatism that will protect them.”
Americans who support Trump do so on superficial and racial grounds, said Brooks, dismissing the political acumen of Republican voters:
“A lot of suburban women in Missouri looked around and said, “Sarah Palin, she’s kinda like me.” And whether Sarah Palin believed in high tax rates or low tax rates, or health insurance markets or some other health care policy, that’s not what they were thinking about. They were thinking about, “Who’s like me?” And for a lot of people in the Republican Party, which is older, whiter, and less educated at the core, Trump was like them.”
Zakaria presents himself as a politically objective and non-partisan news media figure. CNN similarly presents itself as a politically objective and non-partisan news media outlet, branding itself as “The Most Trusted Name In News.”
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