December 8, 2021

Good afternoon. My colleague (and fellow newsletter writer) Abigail Weinberg wrote a piece today about an unsettling poll in Georgia that indicated that Donald Trump still has substantial power to dictate the outcome of a Republican primary. The poll demonstrated what a lot of us already know: The Republican Party is still fully in thrall to the whims of a narcissist with nothing but contempt for democratic principles.

I read Abigail's piece in tandem with a new David Brooks article, published in my alma mater the Atlantic today, that's been stirring up social media users. In the article, Brooks tries to come to terms with what he sees to be the devolution of American conservatism, arguing that a formerly rich intellectual tradition has departed from its roots in the high-minded ideals of Edmund Burke and turned into a "set of resentful animosities," centering voter suppression and Tucker Carlson's nightly hate-fests. (Last night's, incidentally, was a doozy, giving cover to Russia's potential aggression toward Ukraine by fear-mongering about Democratic border policy back home—scary stuff.)

The new Brooks piece comes on the heels of another article, also in the Atlantic, where Brooks encountered the fresh-faced young conservatives at the National Conservatism Conference and was horrified by the brutality of their rhetoric and explicit desire to wield the power of the state to impose conservative cultural values on the rest of the country.

I confess to some sympathy for Brooks here. He seems genuinely disturbed by the antics of modern GOP politicians and desperate to salvage what he sees to be the honorable intellectual tradition to which he used to belong. But his argument grows shaky when he attempts to draw a hard line between the Burkean conservatism he treasures and the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party. I'm not convinced that the brand of conservatism for which Brooks is nostalgic ever existed, anywhere, except in the minds of the Ivy League–educated writers manning the mastheads of conservative journals.

Brooks would like to cast the repressive and racist elements of conservatism (represented, in his argument, by British politician Enoch Powell) as a "shadow" haunting a more egalitarian intellectual tradition. But even midcentury conservatism's most genteel representatives indulged in acts of rhetorical brutality that rival the worst tactics of the Freedom Caucus. William F. Buckley, for example, one of Brooks's mentors, wrote grotesque jokes about gay Americans dying of AIDS, and penned a notorious editorial in the pages of the National Review arguing that white Southerners were entitled to dominate Black Americans because white Southerners were "for the time being...the advanced race." Even Brooks' beloved Edmund Burke wrote approvingly of the use of violence to crush revolutionary social movements.

The question, then, is whether race-baiting and political repression can ever be fully separated from the so-called community-oriented conservatism that Brooks pines for, or whether they are its beating heart. Personally, I think a quick look at today's GOP is more than enough to provide an answer.

Anyway, that's what I've been thinking about. Just a regular Wednesday in late 2021. How about you?

—Noah Y. Kim