| He started out by listing five big problems that will force the federal government to "act in gigantic ways." He even mentioned some topics progressives focus on, like the erosion of the social contract in health care, education, financial market reform, and infrastructure reform. It was ridiculous that he didn't mention climate change, since that is the most important long-term issue facing the entire earth, and will require a complete restructuring of the economy-but hey, for a conservative, it seemed like a pretty honest and reasonable start to his column.
But then he got ridiculous. He informed readers that periods of governmental change have often been periods of conservative rule. His argument was completely ahistorical in two major ways:
The first and most important way was all the examples of progressive leaders he left out. The biggest and most important periods of major change in the last hundred years were in the 1960s (ending Jim Crow, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, women's rights, environmental legislation, etc.) and the New Deal era of the 1930s. Our government was not exactly led by conservatives in those eras.
He also left out the 1860s. On the one hand, I give Brooks credit for not trying to claim Lincoln as a conservative, as some conservatives have tried to do over the years (that argument was thoroughly destroyed by Garry Wills' brilliant book Lincoln at Gettysburg). The key thing to know about the huge changes the 1860s wrought-which included abolishing slavery, the Homestead Act, the Land Grant University System, the first progressive income tax, and the three most important and progressive amendments to the Constitution outside of the Bill of Rights-was that the people who drove the change throughout that decade were a group known as the Radical Republicans. As their name implies, they weren't exactly conservatives-in fact, they were the most radically progressive group of Congressional leaders in power at least until the New Deal.
So the stuff Brooks chose to leave out was, um, pretty big. I guess when you are trying to make an argument and most of the biggest examples don't fit, you just choose to leave huge chunks of history out of the story.
His argument's second rather huge failing is attempting to claim Teddy Roosevelt as a conservative. I'm not going to comment on Disraeli (his other example), because I'm no expert on British history. But having just finished writing a book that traced the policies and political arguments of progressives vs. conservatives in American history, I can tell you that the Teddy Roosevelt link to conservatism is absurd. Except for his imperial aggressiveness in foreign policy and his mixed feelings about labor unions, Roosevelt acted and spoke as a clear progressive in a progressive era. He led a crusade to break up the big corporate trusts; he established the modern National Park system; he imposed food safety regulations on the meat packers; he supported ending child labor; he was the only President between Lincoln and F.D.R to openly welcome a black man (Booker T. Washington) to the White House. Politically, he fought a running war against the conservative, pro-big business Congressional establishment in his own party, and was so horrified when his successor (Taft) sided with the conservative wing of the party, that he destroyed Taft's chances of re-election by running on a progressive third-party ticket.
So Brooks, you're blowing smoke. Times of big change require progressive politicians to pull it off. |
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