A reader writes:
As a liberal, I hate to defend David Brooks, but you and Greenwald are piling on to him as if he’d never written another word before today’s column. Brooks isn’t advocating neoconservatism as Greenwald alleges, or big government liberalism as you’re alleging. If you’ve read him before – and I know you have – you know he sees himself as a Hamiltonian conservative who advocates opportunity as a social good. That is a value that if embraced could bring the Republican party back to relevance.
Personally, I hope the Democrats get there first. Opportunity is the flag in the middle of American politics; whoever grabs it wins.
I hope the Democrats get there first as well, because it is the authentically liberal vision: government taking care of its citizens, as parents take care of children. My vision is one where the government leaves its citizens alone as much as possible, and treats them as self-governing adults. I’m not a pure libertarian. If David were merely offering some minimal government help to increase people’s ability to enjoy freedom, I’d have no problem. I favor universal private health coverage; I favor strong public funding for secondary education. Like other conservatives, I believe in a strong small state – effective policing, strong defense, etc. But I don’t want government re-moralizing families, as David does, or legislating someone’s idea of virtue. I don’t want more and more entitlements. I don’t want a middle-class clamped to the teat of the redistributive machine. I don’t want a government marching around the world advancing freedom either; I prefer a government prudently attempting to prevent and deter threats to our freedom. I don’t support rendition, torture or the suspension of habeas corpus. I favor either prosecuting captured terror suspects through the regular legal system or treating them as prisoners of war. I want to see government spending on a whole range of areas slashed, not increased. I want Medicare and social security means-tested, and taxes flattened. I don’t want the federal government involved in local schools. I have never bought into "compassionate conservatism" which is now and always has been big government liberalism re-branded for evangelicals.
I guess I should address a semantic but perhaps salient point. I believe a strong, limited government is the necessary precursor for any freedom. Hobbes is an intellectual idol of mine. Order leads to freedom. But David’s formulation is importantly different. It is that security leads to freedom. That notion of security is for me dangerously open-ended. The point of freedom, to my mind, is to live in the constant presence of insecurity, indeed to embrace such insecurity. That to me is the essence of America: the nerve to live with insecurity. Life is insecure. The goal of America is for individuals to gain the self-knowledge and nerve to live with that insecurity. That can’t be given to anyone; it has to be earned by each of us, as best we can.
David wants government to soothe and remove such insecurity, to allay and calm it. He wants a mommy-state at home and a daddy-state abroad. I want to be left alone. I want to be treated as an adult. I want the state to do the minimum necessary and do that really, really well, which is, by the way, really, really hard. That’s the conservative understanding of freedom. David’s is essentially a liberal vision, dolled up with religion and patriotism. And it has wrought a terrible toll on both America and the coherence of the conservative movement.
The Dish 