David Brooks: Conservative Heretic

by Micah Tillman

Traditionalists and Reformers. To David Brooks you’re one or the other (if you’re a conservative). And he’s the other.

But in the process of making his argument, Brooks proves himself wrong.

What Brooks shows us is that there are two kinds of people who call themselves “conservatives”: Ideologists and Groupists.

And Brooks is the latter. Which means he’s no true conservative.

The conservative’s buzzterms are “individual liberty” and “personal responsibility.” To be conservative is to be a personalist and an individualist.

(This far conservatives are essentially libertarians.)

But Groupists like Brooks see conservatism as a group, not an ideology. It’s a collective, not a belief system. It consists of people, not propositions; it’s a crowd, not a claim.

The only way Brooks can consider it possible to “deviate toward the center” and still be a conservative is if “Conservatism” is a group name, not a worldview title.

It doesn’t matter if you change what you believe by becoming more progressive. It’s possible to be both a centrist and a conservative.

This is because Brooks believes being a conservative is an issue of group-membership. The question isn’t whether you hold certain beliefs, but whether you’re part of a certain club.

“Who will lead conservatives into power?” Answering that question gives Brooks his only basis for preferring one type of Conservatism to another.

What’s important is that you be in the alliance, and help it gain power. If you do that, you can believe what you want.

His argument for the “Reformers” (the Groupists) is that they will lead Conservatism to victory. His argument against the “Traditionalists” (the Ideologists) is that they lead conservatism to defeat.

Never once in his article does he make a case based on which sub-group of Conservatism is right about government, human nature, foreign policy, domestic issues, etc.. His only concern is who can win.

Brooks is concerned about the power, not the truth, of Conservatism, because Conservatism isn’t a belief system for him. It’s a group.

Thus, the main issue is whether the group survives and thrives (not whether what it believes is correct).

In this, Brooks shows himself to be confusing himself into Progressivism, and out of Conservatism.

First, his focus on Conservatism as a group is in conflict with conservative’s personalism and individualism.

A conservative — insofar as she does not move inconsistently beyond libertarianism — is concerned with persons, not groups. Such a conservative judges each person on the basis of who he is as an individual, not on the basis of whether he belongs to a (potentially) powerful group.

But in his article, Brooks judges people first as group members. And he judges them (positively or negatively) based not on their moral and intellectual virtues, but on their ability to bring power to their group.

Also, Brooks’s preference for framing things in pragmatic terms seems more akin to progressivism’s James and Dewey, than conservatism’s Jefferson and Burke.

I do not mean to simply criticize pragmatism in its Piercean, Jamesian, or Deweyan flavors, nor to claim that anything one can label “pragmatism” is pragmatism in those philosophical sense(s).

Nor do I mean to claim that pragmatists (in the philosophical sense[s]) need be progressives.

But Brooks’s pragmatism, combined with his Groupist approach to Conservatism, lead one to ask whether Brooks isn’t striking out boldly into conservative heresy.

It’s unclear to me, anyway, how . . .

1. seeing people in terms of groups,
2. preferring power to truth, and
3. believing in (the ideology of) pragmatism rather than the “Traditionalists’” ideology

But Brooks is unlikely to care whether anyone thinks he’s a heretic. Beliefs don’t seem to be important to him.

In a way, there’s something nice about that. Nobody likes a bunch of fighting about orthodoxy and heresy.

But there’s also something sad about it too.

Micah Tillman is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.