by MIKE LOFGREN
NY Times’ pet conservative offers a lengthy apologia for America — and gets pretty much everything wrong
America’s so-called sane conservatives have had a lot of explaining to do since 2016, and even more since January of this year. How do they dissociate themselves from Donald Trump and still justify their own continuing belief in a conservative ideological project that is supposed to be good for America, but in practice has brought chaos, misery and poisonous social strife?
It would be more straightforward and honest of these anti-Trump conservatives to admit that postwar conservatism in America was all a lie, that they were dupes and that they finally saw the light. Or they could claim they were seduced by its darker, authoritarian strains, its temptation to worship power, and now they have finally saved their souls by renouncing this ideological devil. That is the well-worn path of sinners come to confession, or, in secular terms, Whittaker Chambers renouncing his allegiance to Stalin.
Instead, they typically reposition themselves as the immovable axis of correct values, and denounce their former ideological fellow travelers as heretics who profaned true conservatism. As they so often claim, I didn’t leave the party, the party left me.
This form of rationalization and denial is embarrassingly evident in a recent apologia by David Brooks, the New York Times’ notion of an ideal conservative. Writing in The Atlantic, Brooks says that the conservatism he enthusiastically discovered in the early 1980s was a movement bursting with ideas. There was a minority within the movement, he admits, who were not real conservatives, but reactionaries. At the beginning, they were barely worthy of notice.
I won’t bore the reader by recapitulating the process of his shocked realization, 40 years too late, that the reactionary “fringe,” as Brooks calls it, was the true core of the party, the seed of a poisonous fruit that required decades to reach its putrid bloom. It’s said that every confession is a species of boasting, and Brooks’s mea culpa, that he “should have seen this coming,” is in that vein: He was just too good-hearted to think his fellow travelers in the conservative movement capable of such iniquity.
Of course, maintaining one’s innocence requires rearranging history. It was mainstream conservatives, not some fringe, who perpetrated the Iran-Contra affair, invaded Iraq under false pretenses, enthusiastically tortured prisoners in the quixotic war on terrorism, and recklessly cut taxes and deregulated markets to pave the way for the biggest global financial crash since the Great Depression. It was mainstream conservatives who voted unanimously against Barack Obama’s rather tepid Affordable Care Act, itself a rehash of a Heritage Foundation proposal from the 1990s.
It was mainstream conservatives, not some fringe, who perpetrated the Iran-Contra affair, invaded Iraq under false pretenses, tortured prisoners in the quixotic war on terrorism, and paved the way for the biggest global financial crash since the Great Depression.
Brooks’ labored apologia is a history — his history — of recent American conservatism, a Manichaean fable of civilized, conscientious conservatives full of marvelous ideas and déclassé, knuckle-dragging right-wingers. But beyond its heroes-and-villains simplicity, the piece reminds us of a characteristic habit of conservatives.
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