New York Times columnists Bret Stephens and David Brooks teamed up this week to demonstrate how out-of-touch they are with the modern Republican Party and how little true insight they have to offer about today’s politics.
The
intro to their conversation reads, “For decades, conservative values have been central to Bret Stephens’s and David Brooks’s political beliefs, and the Republican Party was the vehicle to extend those beliefs into policy. But in recent years, both the party and a radicalized conservative movement have left them feeling alienated in various ways.”
It’s so tiresome listening to well-off, Upper East Side white guys who resent that ragamuffin Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz crashed their country club party. They didn’t even really crash the joint. They were always there, providing the votes that for decades empowered Republican politics, but now they’ve taken control. That’s what the Republican elite finds so objectionable.
Stephens and Brooks pretend otherwise, of course, and we are treated to this paltry bit of name-dropping.
David Brooks: My thinking about the G.O.P. goes back to a brunch I had with Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza in the ’80s that helps me see, in retrospect, that people in my circle were pro-conservative, while Ingraham and D’Souza and people in their circle were anti-left.
Imagine eating a meal with Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza and not only admitting to it years later but still maintaining your appetite.
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Brooks goes on about how the “good” conservatives wanted to “champion Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and a Reaganite foreign policy” but the “bad” ones (i.e. all of them) “wanted to rock the establishment.” This is both incredibly naive and ahistorical. The Reagan Revolution was a radical insurgent movement, fueled by people like Phyllis Schlafly, Jerry Falwell, and, yes, a young Ginni Thomas. It stoked cultural and racial resentment and was overtly anti-intellectual. Reagan himself was no mental giant.
Stephens joins in with his theory about how Republicans lost their way — back when Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was in junior high.
The mid-1990s was also the time that Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House and Fox News got started. Back then, those who were on the more intelligent end of the conservative spectrum thought a magazine such as The Weekly Standard, a channel such as Fox and a guy like Gingrich would be complementary: The Standard would provide innovative ideas for Republican leaders like Gingrich, and Fox would popularize those ideas for right-of-center voters.
Sweet Christ. This guy must have his own collection of Brooklyn Bridges. Conservatives had no “innovative” ideas in the mid-1990s aside from dismantling the New Deal and steadily rolling back any equal rights gains. Fox News didn’t “popularize” ideas. It was a state media propaganda outlet.
Nonetheless, Stephens is befuddled that his beloved conservative movement “embraced Donald Trump as a standard-bearer and role model.” You fundamentally can’t comprehend MAGA if you’re not willing to concede its almost eerie similarities with Reagan-era politics.
Brooks dismisses Trump, Pat Buchanan, and “anybody who ran CPAC” as “fringe and wackadoodle,” but Buchanan was a welcome speaker at the 1992 Republican National Convention. “Mainstream” Republicans
regularly appeared at CPAC. Hell, Ronald Reagan gave the inaugural keynote speech at CPAC in 1974.
Brooks does reveal that he voted for Barack Obama in 2008 — mostly because Sarah Palin terrified him. Good on David! Stephens voted for McCain, which is his business, but here’s how he defends his decision: “If I were basing my presidential votes on the vice-presidential candidate, I’d have thought twice about voting for [Joe] Biden.” C’mon, man, Biden is a no-brainer choice over Palin, whose actual brain is somewhere in a Wasilla, Alaska, lost and found box. [UPDATE: Folks have kindly pointed out that Stephens is most likely referring to 2020 when Kamala Harris was Biden’s running mate. This is an almost irrelevant dig at the current vice president, which doesn’t justify putting Palin anywhere near the Oval Office.]
These sad outcasts from modern conservatism discuss where to go next. This conversation obviously would’ve benefited from a woman present to laugh at them.
[Brooks:] Furthermore, I belong in the American tradition that begins with Alexander Hamilton, runs through the Whig Party and Lincoln, and then modernized with Theodore Roosevelt, parts of Reagan and McCain. I wasted years writing essays on how Republicans could maintain this tradition. The party went the other way. Now I think the Democrats are a better Hamiltonian home.
Bret: I’m part of the same conservative tradition, though maybe with a heavier dose of Milton Friedman.
What all this means, I think, is that Brooks and Stephens are now highfalutin’ Joe Manchin-style Democrats. Of course, while Brooks thinks the Republican Party’s ideal future is as a multiracial working-class coalition, Stephens just preaches the gospel of Paul Ryan conservatism. His preferred Republican Party thinks “there should be consequences, not excuses, for unlawful behavior, which means it looks askance at policies like bail reform …” However, the whole point of bail reform is that people are innocent until proven guilty. We don’t just lock up people until we get around to a trial (especially if they pose no immediate threat to the community).
What I learned from this “conversation” is that Bret Stephens is more insufferable than David Brooks, whom I’d consider letting inside my house.
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