David Brooks, the New York Times’ philosopher in residence, has stumbled onto the astonishing fact that present-day conservatives don’t actually want to conserve anything; rather, they are nihilists who just want to destroy. He is hardly the first person to think this: I saw it coming many years ago, as have a host of others.
But it wouldn’t be a Brooks piece without a thumping non sequitur as its thesis: conservatives became nihilists, he says, because liberals drove them to it. Liberal culture and its sanctimonious hectoring literally “smother” American society, triggering a result as inevitable as combining two reactive chemicals.
He bases this conclusion on a survey of university students in two universities. If most of us think back on our college years, wasn’t it almost expected that we should be disaffected with any authority whatever, something we grow out of once the necessity of making a living stares us in the face?
On this slender evidentiary basis, Brooks concludes that conservatives are victims who can’t get a word in edgewise in woke America. This ignores the ubiquity of Fox News (a correspondent once wrote to me about being subjected to Fox News playing in a doctor’s office, as if the patients weren’t sick enough already). If you still own a device called a radio, you will notice that every commercial news-talk station is conservative.
Beyond that, have you ever been to a gun show (even in ostensibly liberal Northern Virginia where I live, there is a huge one at Chantilly)? Did you ever attend a NASCAR race, a country music concert or a megachurch, visit Branson, Missouri, or, if you’re really in the mood for amusement, tour the creation museum in Petersburg, Kentucky? None of these are exactly bastions of wokism, and somehow thrive despite the repressive atmosphere that Brooks conjures.
His victim narrative also puts conservatives in a strange ideological position that is contrary to their alleged principles. In the 1960s, as crime rates rose and inner cities smoldered with discontent, some liberals hypothesized that bad social conditions led to crime: crudely put, the slum made the criminal. Conservatives, led by William F. Buckley, Jr., their patron saint, responded vehemently: “society” bore no responsibility, it was a matter of innate character. The criminal made the slum.
Brooks has inverted this formula. As a spokesman for the erstwhile Party of Personal Responsibility, he now asserts that conservatives are persecuted victims of society. Their nihilistic rampages can be excused as acting out against cultural repression, as if they were the protagonist in Richard Wright’s Native Son, whereby the black youth commits a murder that is preordained by his upbringing in a violently segregationist society.
This is a slightly more sophisticated variant of the old chestnut that whites, particularly white males, are the most discriminated against people on earth, a trope that has been relentlessly worked over since Archie Bunker satirized it 50 years ago.
Embedded in Brooks’s complaint that the supposedly dominant liberal culture won’t listen to conservative ideas is the fallacy that all ideas, opinions, and traditions deserve equal consideration. One hopes that the vast majority of people would instantly reject the notion that slavery, ritual human sacrifice, or cannibalism are an acceptable basis for social organization. They once were, but enlightened opinion banished them.
All the supposedly vibrant ideas of present-day conservatism always reduce to a handful of notions that the Republican Party has been pushing for decades. The vision that the state can make life better for its citizens, meaning healthier, more economically secure, better educated, and with better infrastructure, is something conservatives have fought tooth and nail against since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
What they want is a weakened state that will do nothing for the citizen; instead, they want a strong state only when it comes to punishment—hence the money they throw at militarizing law enforcement and constructing a society of incarceration. Take a good look at Washington, DC—it’s coming to a city near you.
Conservatives believe in human inequality, whether in the economic, social, or racial spheres. Depending on the circumstances, they go to some lengths to conceal this belief, but the major voices of post-World War II conservatism were quite open about it. Buckley said “Unless you have the freedom to be unequal, there is no such thing as freedom.” Except that when conservatives are in power, inequality will indeed increase, but there is no corresponding increase in freedom, as anyone paying attention during the last seven months will have noticed.
Why are the rest of us supposed to respectfully indulge people who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old? Should we invite young earth creationists to rewrite geology textbooks to demonstrate how tolerant we are of their opinions? Is there really a legitimate difference of opinion on whether anthropogenic climate change exists, suggesting that scientists all over the world got it wrong and right-wing ideologues got it right? Should we thoughtfully examine the evidence that Jewish space lasers caused wildfires in California or that the Covid-19 vaccine is actually an injectable microchip just to show what good sports we are?
Beyond that, Brooks’s contention that nihilism is somehow the antithesis of conservatism is shaky. Joseph de Maistre, identified by the great historian of philosophy, Sir Isaiah Berlin, as one of the founders of Western conservatism, practically wallowed in nihilism: “The whole earth,” he wrote, “continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.”
Western religion itself, which Brooks thinks we must return to for life to have meaning, has its nihilistic element. Apparently, almost four in ten American adults believe we live in “end times,” and the behavior of much of the religious right during the Covid pandemic was that of a death cult. R.R. Reno, the editor of the religious-right publication First Things, actually wrote a paean to accepting death from Covid rather than taking precautions against it.
David Brooks spent his entire adult life pretending that modern American conservatism was about Edmund Burke and James Madison rather than an embryonic extremist movement that only needed the right leader to become a full-blown fascist party. Having finally lurched onto the unavoidable truth, he now assumes a pained expression and searches for a scapegoat.
