Column | Naive Conservatives – NRC

Naivety is called a left -wing feature. The cliché image of the left versus right looks like this: while the left dreams of a world in which people are good and sweet and share everything, looks to the right how the world really is, sees people tend to the bad ones, and does not believe in the manufacturability of man or society.

A lot can be said about this simplification, but that’s not the point now. It is about the self -image of some right -wing, and in particular conservative, intellectuals: that they are prudent, sober people who do not make any illusions, and always opt for step -by -step change over crazy plans.

How shocking should it be for them that in America the conservative party now shows revolutionary behavior. Such as Justin Smith-Ruiu on his substitian platform The Hinternet In an essay wrote about the new American regime: « Antiwoke is not conservative – on the contrary, it wants to wipe out the whole human history. » Smith, a Canadian-American philosopher, regrets that ‘his kind of conservatism’, which revolves around a tendency to preserve and melancholy, seems to have disappeared. But because he only feels « about 49 percent conservative », it does not immediately become personal. Smith is an observer, not a main character.

That is different with David Brooks, a well-known and also Canadian-American writer and columnist. Brooks has been counting itself in the conservative movement since the 1980s and usually supported the Republican Party. Now he is double shocked: he has mistaken himself in the conservatives, and in his own judgment. ‘I Should Have Seen This Coming’ is called his latest article The Atlantic. He describes how shocked he is by Trump: « If there is an underlying philosophy that drives Trump, then it is this: morality is for losers. The strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they have to. » That is at odds with what conservatism, according to Brooks, is: a belief in gradual reform, norms and values ​​and the separation of powers.

It is naive to believe that the best ideas always win

A term came up with me while reading his piece: Wishful Thinking. You can believe that your definition of conservatism is the right one, but that does not mean that other, more authoritarian forms of conservatism do not exist. I found the passage in which Brooks described how he looked down in the 1980s on conservatives that did not meet his image of the conservative intellectual. While people like him Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers and Edmund Burke read, young reactionaries made the student magazine Dartmouth Review Violently down an anti-apartheid demonstration. Brooks and his sizes did not take this seriously. « I think this is largely because we looked down on the Dartmouth Review Mafia (…). Their intellectual standards were so clearly third-handed. »

It is reminiscent of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who in Yesterday’s world Describes how he initially underestimated the Nazis. “I have also had the leaf of the new National Socialist Movement in my hand, the Miesbacher Anzeiger. But Miesbach was only a small village and the pieces in the newspaper were very ordinary. Who worried about that? « 

You expect Introspection from Brooks on this point: Why did he think people with ‘thirds’ intellectual standards were not a threat? Did he sometimes think that the most noble ideas automatically win? How did he explain the triumph of National Socialism in the 1930s? Or did he believe that as humanity we have since achieved a higher level of civilization? But unfortunately, this introspection is not coming. Instead, a paragraph follows with the things that the left has done wrong.

Why am I going on for so long about an American conservative? Because someone like Brooks shows how naive it is to believe that the best ideas always win. In fact, it is naive to think that politically primary is all about ideas, and not about earthly things such as revenge or entertainment. Under Trump, the political domain has become an extension of our social media accounts, writes Justin Smith: Elon Musk has engaged « shit-posting adolescents » to turn the state into a tech platform. That those people probably didn’t read Edmund Burke does not mean that you don’t have to take them seriously. But David Brooks ignores that entire online arena. Instead, he travels through the country, where he sees « the forces of the recovery » flourish again in the « neighborhoods and communities. »

Perhaps Naivety is not related to political color, but with a lack of imagination. You must be able to imagine that people come to power with ideas that would make a big insufficient in an essay or debate competition. That is no problem for them, because in reality they do not participate in that competition. They determine their own rules.

Floor Rusman (f.rusman@nrc.nl) is editor of NRC

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