"The Republican Collapse"

My (Republican) friend Russ foisted another David Brooks column on me (excerpted below), but this one is considerably less offensive than Brooks' typical screed. If conservatism in America took the (ideal) form he describes, of course I would object to it a LOT less than I do the form of conservatism that we actually have (creedal, in his words). However, I must quibble with one of his early points - (since I'm a liberal) I believe that sometimes change can and should happen rapidly, like when this nation declared independence from the British or when Lincoln declared that slavery was over (or when apartheid was ended in South Africa). Of course those changes weren't orderly, but they were Right and Necessary.

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October 5, 2007
NY Times
The Republican Collapse
By DAVID BROOKS

Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.

When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders.

Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while the temperamental conservatism of Burke has been abandoned.

Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote “pleasing commencements” but “lamentable conclusions.”

The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan.