David Brooks has a very good column on that very important new magazine, National Affairs. And its significance is no wonder. National Affairs, the successor to a journal of extraordinary excellence, The Public Interest, is edited by a one of the most intelligent and wisest voices in the conservative world: The Corner’s very own Yuval Levin (full disclosure: Yuval is a colleague at the Ethics and Public Policy Center).
I have read most of the entire first issue of National Affairs, and it is as good as the early reviews say. I would one add one reference to an essay David did not mention in his column, but which I consider to be quite insightful: William Schambra’s “Obama and the Policy Approach.” Schambra carefully dissects President Obama’s style of governing, which he argues is grounded in Progressive politics, in a highly ambitious agenda that seeks to move a host of enormous initiatives all at once, and in an unreasonable amount of faith placed in social science. According to Schambra, Obama’s approach is a
deeply anti-political way of thinking, grounded in a gross exaggeration of the capacity of human knowledge and reason. American politics as we have known it appreciates the fact that fallible men and women cannot command the whole – and so must somehow manage the interactions and the tensions among parts. Social science – however sophisticated it might now be – has come nowhere near disproving that premise… We are not capable of weaving our society anew from fresh whole modern cloth – and so we should instead make the most of the great social garment we have inherited, in its rich if always unkempt splendor, mending what is torn and improving what we can. Our constitutional system is constructed on this understanding of the limits of reason and the goals of politics.
Schambra’s views, then, are deeply and obviously Burkean (Wilfred McClay’s essay, “What Do Experts Know?”, is an excellent companion piece to Schambra’s).
Do yourself a favor and get a copy of National Affairs, read it, and reflect on the vivifying essays in it.