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David Brooks ‘Terrified’ by NatCon; Most Conservatives Are Not
New York Times columnist David Brooks is terrified. This time, it’s not due to a shabby Bordeaux or a deli owner using “who” instead of “whom,” but from the National Conservatism Conference held in Orlando two weeks ago.
Called NatCon for short, the conference “brings together public figures, journalists, scholars, and students who understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing.” Speakers included Sens. Cruz, Hawley, and Rubio; radical bomb-throwers like Glenn Loury, Rich Lowry, and Batya Ungar-Sargon; and others committed to the cause, such as Peter Thiel, Christopher Rufo, and Rod Dreher.
I’m terrified just typing those names! (If I didn’t have my inhaler near, I couldn’t keep writing.) Anyway, when Brooks attended NatCon, he “had a sinking sensation” about the “apocalyptic,” “disconcerting,” “alarming” event and what it presaged for conservative youth. (You should have heard what he said about the Bordeaux.)
Brooks’s 3,000-word jeremiad includes plenty of quotes from the conference to justify his horror. Here’s a sampling:
“[The left-wing elite] is a totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims’ fathers, declare math to be white supremacist, finance ethnic cleansing in western China, and who partied, a mile high, on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express.” — Rachel Bovard
“Big Business is not our ally. They are eager culture warriors who use the language of wokeness to cover free-market capitalism.” — Sen. Marco Rubio
“Our Americanness is much more important than our Blackness. We must strive to transcend racial particularism and stress universality and commonality as Americans.” — Glenn Loury
Good thing I have a second inhaler handy.
Going through the ample quotes provided, I couldn’t find much I disagreed with, let alone was terrified by. Brooks spends a good 500 words mocking the hypocrisy of people like Sen. Cruz who attended elite universities yet have the audacity to critique their Ivy League tribe. This smacks of “class traitor” rhetoric, which is foolish on its face.
But his primary worry is that, after several decades in a defensive crouch, conservatives finally want to fight back in the culture war.
The first great project of the national conservatives is to man the barricades in the culture war. These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxism—how the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques. If I’d had to drink a shot every time some speaker cited Herbert Marcuse or Antonio Gramsci, I’d be dead of alcohol poisoning.
Conservatives have lately become expert culture warriors—the whole Tucker Carlson schtick. This schtick demands that you ignore the actual suffering of the world—the transgender kid alone in some suburban high school, the anxiety of a guy who can’t afford health care for his brother, the struggle of a Black man trying to be seen and recognized as a full human being. It’s a cynical game that treats all of life as a play for ratings, a battle for clicks, and this demands constant outrage, white-identity signaling, and the kind of absurd generalizations that Rachel Bovard used to get that room so excited.
Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.
Apparently, Brooks doesn’t think about the young girl raped by the “transgender kid” in some suburban high school, the anxiety of a guy fired from his job for not getting the second Pfizer shot, or the struggle of Glenn Loury trying to be seen and recognized as something more than a racial category. He’s quick to criticize the trickle of “apocalyptic” rhetoric in Orlando while ignoring the firehose flowing out of Manhattan.
Brooks seems to think conservatives are launching a culture war of their own rather than responding to one the Left began in the late 1960s. While we have made minor advances here and there (gun rights, school choice), you can’t compare American society in the ’80s to today and think we’ve won most cultural battles. It’s long past time for the right to engage in the culture war; the only thing that’s “terrifying” is pretending no war exists.
While Conservatism holds to unchanging ideals, its tactics constantly change. Calvin Coolidge was a great president, as was Ronald Reagan 50 years later. Both employed different tactics suited to their age. Fifty years after Reagan, I’m thankful young conservatives want to update their tactics for the current era.
Published in Politics
I would disagree. David French came off as a complete and utter dickwad. Or, I should say, came off as David French.
Great points and my response would’ve been similar. Brook’s critique strikes me as intellectually lazy and presumptive. I’ll simply deny that they are actual issues. If the transgender kid is suffering alone it is because less than a percent of people are trans not because anyone did anything to the kid. I’ve taught several theys and most just want to take classes and not make a big deal about it. They have stickers on their laptops and buttons on their backpacks but it isn’t an invitation to hug them or put them on the spot. No one would accept bullying the kid and very few people do. Who does that? No one claimed that was a conservative value. The idea that currently blacks aren’t treated like full human beings is silly. It all sounds dangerously close to projection to me.
I’m not sure I’d include healthcare policy in the culture war since that seems like an empirical debate, but it is lazy because every president wants to run on jobs and job growth– and that is how most Americans get healthcare. For the very poor we have mini-meds (a conservative idea that Obamacare was against) and for truly poor we have medicaid. Also wait: who is the guy buying healthcare for their brother? Who is doing that? Why didn’t Obamacare fix that?
This isn’t to deny there aren’t real policy issues with real differences, but from what I’ve read, the criticisms Brooks leveled have misfired.
Ah, a good Lileks fisking! What a great way to wake up!
Most fascinating to me is that the group of speakers at this event are not what you’d call “Trumpists.” Some of those listed were rather vocally critical of him. But I guess “Trumpist” is the label Brooks needs to scrawl on this box of demons he’s waving around to show his pals at The Altantic.
And you would base the fictionality or baselessness of these threats based on your extensive… hang on — how old are you?
No he wasn’t, but he was sometimes marketed as a conservative.
Back in Pre-Revolutionary France, I’m told, Marie Antoinette had a little farm on the grounds of her palace in which she pretended to be a shepherdess and played with little primped, perfumed lambs instead of nasty, dirty, smelly, actual sheep.
Today we have something similar: We have blow-dried midwits who like to pose as serious intellectuals and will then bring in someone from the list above to play the conservative part in their little pantomime roundtable TV shows. They look superficially like conservatives but don’t display any actual conservatism that might offend delicate lefty sensibilities.
I’m becoming a bigger fan of Glenn Loury.
People advancing new ideas rarely succeed at the outset. That doesn’t mean they won’t win in the end.
Bo Peep, is that you???
I have 0% understanding of what you are saying.
Never heard of NatCon, but this is hardly a bunch of radicals
After calling him
”David, you elderly queer”
Seemed likely to flow.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense for a group of people who call themselves queer to be upset by others calling them queer.
David Brooks isn’t gay.
And he’s not conservative, either.
She didn’t call him Conservative. She called him an elderly queer.
Doesn’t mean he’s not queer.
This entire comment is brilliant.
So what? And if you were really politically correct you’d pick up on the blatant ageism. Up your game you PC prude!
I know, my PC fail I guess. Actually you’d think that would be noticed by more of us. Are we self-hating old people?
Who the hell knows what “queer” means anymore? The term appears in nearly a dozen of the 72 varieties of gender.
Can we just be “human”?
I must be a self-loafing
agingold fart.He does appear to be human.
No, because the “man” part of “human” is degrading or dead-gendering or something.