Ramesh, I’m with you. It seems to me Brooks is guilty of precisely what he complains about. He begins:
Near the start of his book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” Barry Goldwater wrote: “Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being.” The political implications of this are clear, Goldwater continued: “Conservatism’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?”
Goldwater’s vision was highly individualistic and celebrated a certain sort of person — the stout pioneer crossing the West, the risk-taking entrepreneur with a vision, the stalwart hero fighting the collectivist foe.
The problem is, this individualist description of human nature seems to be wrong. Over the past 30 years, there has been a tide of research in many fields, all underlining one old truth — that we are intensely social creatures, deeply interconnected with one another and the idea of the lone individual rationally and willfully steering his own life course is often an illusion.
And then towards the end:
The irony, of course, is that, in pre-Goldwater days, conservatives were incredibly sophisticated about the value of networks, institutions and invisible social bonds. You don’t have to go back to Edmund Burke and Adam Smith (though it helps) to find conservatives who understood that people are socially embedded creatures and that government has a role (though not a dominant one) in nurturing the institutions in which they are embedded.
That language of community, institutions and social fabric has been lost, and now we hear only distant echoes — when social conservatives talk about family bonds or when John McCain talks at a forum about national service.
Me: It’s David who’s setting up the false choice here, not conservatives. First, you don’t need to go back to pre-Goldwater conservatives, never mind Burke and Smith, to find people on the right talking about the importance of civil society and/or the federal government’s role in nurturing it. The conversation about civil society has been ongoing since at least the early 1990s. Second, George W. Bush’s faith-based stuff — as much as I disagree with it — is precisely the sort of thing Brooks is talking about. Indeed, if compassionate conservatism and No Child Left Behind weren’t examples (at least at the conceptual level) of the feds coming to the aid of local communities and the social fabric, I don’t know what would be. (There was also Poppa Bush’s thousand points of light stuff). Brooks dismisses McCain’s national service spiel as a mere “distant echo” of the “lost language of community, institutions and social fabric.” Well, McCain’s the GOP’s nominee for president, not some back-bencher.
More broadly though, I suspect David is trying to fit reality to his desire for a new politics and his work on his upcoming brain book. Goldwaterite conservatism, much like conventional libertarianism, is only a partial philosophy of life. It explains how man and society should relate to the state not necessarily to each other. I don’t know many sane, non-anarchist, libertarians who are truly contemptuous of civil society. David sets up the column as if conservatives are pure individualists because they are anti-statist. But anti-statism (specifically anti-statism at the federal level) is not the same thing as individualism. You can be a federalist, a communitarian, even a secessionist and be opposed to a greater role for the federal government without ever being an unalloyed individualist.