I was infuriated reading David Brooks' column today in the NYT. According to Brooks', "life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base". Allow me to paraphrase: "You are infants, and we will make sure we keep you away from power so you don't get hurt."
Conservatives have been infantilizing for as long as power has existed. But Brooks is somehow more irritating and corrosive than even Burke. Burke was obviously a member of an upper class that was truly blind to the world. He grew up in privilege, and the lens through which he saw the world was abject fear of chaos and disorder. No society for more than 1,000 years had survived without a monarch or similar, so his support for aristocracy had the same legitimacy as support for Newtonian physics until Quantum physics came alone - rigid power structures around religion and class did seem to promise more stability than constant tribal and small-state warfare.
But Brooks, this is the 21st century. We have the French and American revolutions, the emergence of democratic Europe from Fascism, the Internet, and countless other examples that prove that while the rule of law is essential for the prosperity and happiness, rigid societal order is not. You know better, but you promote worse.
Before we knew that men and women could prosper in liberal democracy, Conservatism was a legitimate theory - neither proven nor disproven. At this point, its predictive ability as a model is false, and like any theory that fails to predict real-world behavior, it must be abandoned.
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