Media's Model Conservative
by Joseph Morris
Issue 117 - October 9, 2008

The New York Times's idea of what a conservative columnist is is probably modeled on the work of Joseph Goebbels. The New York Times's idea of what a conservative columnist ought to be seems to be David Brooks.

A recent Brooks column demonstrates that he certainly does not embrace any contemporary definition of conservatism that conservatives would endorse, let alone the fusion of traditionalism and libertarianism upon which the success of the modern intellectual and political conservative movements has been based.

At the heart of the column is the renunciation, dressed up to look like an appeal to the empiricism of Adam Smith and the prudence of Edmund Burke, of a vision of "individualism" ascribed to Barry Goldwater. "Individualism" is condemned as being at variance with "reality".

Exhibit A in Brooks's case is the mortgage market meltdown. Brooks writes:

"The latest example of the mismatch between ideology and reality is the housing crisis. The [Republican] party’s individualist model cannot explain the social contagion that caused hundreds of thousands of individuals to make bad decisions in the same direction at the same time. A Republican administration intervened gigantically in the market to handle the Bear Stearns, Freddie and Fannie debacles. But it has no conservative rationale to explain its action, no language about the importance of social equilibrium it might use to justify itself."

Set aside Brooks's confusion -- shared, it seems, by all the editors at his newspaper -- between "conservative principles", on the one hand, and "the Republican Party", on the other. Note, as well, that Brooks does not offer his own explanation for "the social contagion that caused hundreds of thousands of individuals to make bad decisions in the same direction at the same time".

In fact, the conservative movement has a perfectly serviceable and empirically-provable explanation for such "social contagion". It is the same explanation for the market-skewing effects that state action ranging from tax policies to and Medicare rules has on human action ranging from capital formation to the costs of health care: Government compulsion. Bad laws compel law-abiding people to do inefficient, imprudent, unwise, and even bad things.

Dissing "individualism", I suspect, is part of a strategy on the part of leftist intellectuals to enervate conservatism by stripping it of its skepticism of big government. Note that Brooks does not denounce a Republican administration for its "gigantic" intervention in the marketplace; he denounces it for lacking a "conservative rationale" to justify what it has done.

If there is one thing, it seems, that Burke, Smith, Goldwater, Hayek, and Friedman -- and Brooks -- would agree upon is that there is no "conservative rationale" for big government. Of the six of them, only Brooks regrets it.

Joseph A. Morris is senior partner at Morris and DeLaRosa in Chicago and a member of the American Conservative Union Board of Directors.