On Tuesday, The New York Times’ David Brooks joined syndicated columnist George Will in calling for conservatives to avoid voting for the Republican Party. Will claimed that Republicans in Congress had abdicated their duty to check the executive branch, and Democrats would do a better job, ignoring that Democrats would be stymied by a Republican minority and that the Democratic agenda has swiveled to the radical Left. Brooks argues that conservatism is about protection of the order that pre-exists liberty, the maintenance of the “sacred space” necessary for liberty to thrive. He contrasts the Enlightenment mentality of reason and consent with the Burkeian notion that such concepts, unmoored from shared cultural history and institutions, runs amok. He’s not wrong about the value of order:
The practical upshot is that conservatives have always placed tremendous emphasis on the sacred space where individuals are formed. This space is populated by institutions like the family, religion, the local community, the local culture, the arts, the schools, literature and the manners that govern everyday life. … Over the centuries conservatives have resisted anything that threatened this sacred space.
So far, so good.
But then Brooks goes wrong: he argues that conservatives only value small government because they treasure this “sacred space,” not because they value individual liberty that can only be maintained thanks to the sacred space. His hard-line distinction between Enlightenment thinking about reason and liberty and Burkeian thinking about sacred spaces leads him astray:
Conservatives fought big government not because they hated the state, per se, but because they loved the sacred space. The last attempts to build a conservatism around the sacred space were George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” and, in Britain, David Cameron’s Big Society conservatism. They both fizzled because over the last 30 years the parties of the right drifted from conservatism. The Republican Party became the party of market fundamentalism. Market fundamentalism is an inhumane philosophy that makes economic growth society’s prime value and leaves people atomized and unattached. Republican voters eventually rejected market fundamentalism and went for the tribalism of Donald Trump because at least he gave them a sense of social belonging. At least he understood that there’s a social order under threat.
This is a dramatic misreading of the nature of American conservatism, which has always been bound up in classical liberalism. That’s why so many conservatives disliked W’s big government brand. Drawing a hard break between Locke and Burke is foolish and wrong-headed. The founders believed in the notion of individual liberty, but believed that individual liberty could only be maintained so long as virtue was inculcated and supported by thriving social institutions. Liberty and order were two sides of the same coin. Brooks separates the two, however, and suggests that free markets are inherently non-conservative, which is wrongheaded and foolish in the extreme.
As to the notion that Americans swung to Trump because Trump was a substitute for market fundamentalism, that’s untrue as well. Most conservatives voted for Trump because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. And while Brooks is correct that we’ve substituted tribal politics for social institutions, he’s wrong that such tribal politics are a direct response to a market breakdown rather than a direct response to the fraying of the social fabric itself. The rise of tribalism is far more connected to lack of church attendance than lower taxes.
Then Brooks jumps into his criticism of Trump. It turns out that Trump’s promises of a new social order are based on bad premises. And this means that the sacred order is most threatened by Trump:
In 2018, the primary threat to the sacred order is no longer the state. It is a radical individualism that leads to vicious tribalism. The threat comes from those two main currents of the national Republican Party. At his essence Trump is an assault on the sacred order that conservatives hold dear — the habits and institutions that cultivate sympathy, honesty, faithfulness and friendship.
This is an extreme statement indeed. Radical individualism is not the outgrowth of market fundamentalism, as Brooks calls it — we’re seeing the rise of radical individualism resulting in tribalism all across big government-friendly Europe. In fact, there’s a solid case to be made that the state stands behind that rise in radical individualism, supplanting the social order with the support of the government, killing social institutions in favor of governmental support.
But Brooks concludes, wrongheadedly:
Today you can be a conservative or a Republican, but you can’t be both. When I look at places that are successfully nurturing beautiful communities, which seem most “conservative” in the true sense, I find great pluralism. Burlington, Vt., is doing it, and so is Salt Lake City. I find beautiful communities in places that consider themselves deep blue and places that consider themselves deep red. The next conservatism will be built on the back of these real-life communities, and the way they nurture good citizens and healthy attachments. It will be based on new alliances, which have little to do with your father’s G.O.P.
It’s hilarious to see Brooks suggest that Burlington, VT and Salt Lake City represent “great pluralism”: Burlington has a total population of 42,000 people, with a median family income of $76,000 and an unemployment rate of 2.1%; 60% of Vermonters live in a married couple family. Salt Lake City is half Mormon; Utah has one of the highest marriage rates in the country, and one of the highest birth rates, and Salt Lake City has an unemployment rate of 3%. What do these places have in common? Residents generally uphold certain basic rules of social order (marriage, family, education, getting a job). Pitting the market against social order is a false construct, in other words. You can have social institutions without a free market, but you cannot truly have a free market without social institutions. Free markets don’t kill social institutions do. Lack of social connection does.
And the party that is interested in forcibly destroying social institutions is still the Democratic Party, which sees traditional social institutions as oppressive leftovers from a bigoted hierarchy. Trump may not be preserving social institutions — he may be tearing them apart. But to suggest that conservatives have any home other than the Republican Party in this political matrix isn’t just wrong, it’s stupid.