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David Brooks Blames the Base

David Brooks’s latest column is the flipside to Sean Scallon’s recent article in TAC. Scallon points out that many of the voters who made up the Buchanan brigades in the 1990s have since been co-opted into the establishment Republican coalition. Brooks knows that his Weekly Standard friends need these populist right-wing voters in order to […]

David Brooks’s latest column is the flipside to Sean Scallon’s recent article in TAC. Scallon points out that many of the voters who made up the Buchanan brigades in the 1990s have since been co-opted into the establishment Republican coalition. Brooks knows that his Weekly Standard friends need these populist right-wing voters in order to win elections — but he rues their uncouth attitudes.

Poor David. But whom can be blame but himself? Despite his invocation of Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, Brooks is not a traditional conservative in their mold, as Robert Stacy McCain points out. Among other things, the traditionalism of Kirk and Weaver (and also Robert Nisbet) was generally anti-militarist. Yet militarism and its Philistine cousin, Christian Zionism, supply neoconservatives like Brooks the only rhetoric they have that resonates with right-wing voters. Brooks cannot appeal to the political Right on the basis of social issues like abortion, since he and his ilk generally are not socially conservative and, even when they are, they cannot compete against the paleoconservatives on this terrain. Similarly, Brooks is not enough of an economic conservative or populist to make a right-wing appeal in that field — as Brooks’s rhapsody for the Paulson plan demonstrated, he cannot connect with either the antigovernment Right or the populist Right, both of which opposed the bailout.

The only ground Brooks shares with right-leaning, “Jacksonian” voters is on foreign policy. But the “Wilsonian” Brooks is horrified by the way the Jacksonians behave once they’re riled up — once a war is on, all they think about at home and abroad is friends and enemies. That’s their attitude toward the class war, the culture war, and the War on Terror alike, all of which, for this demographic, tend to blur together. (Incidentally, it’s quite satisfying to watch the McCain campaign spin like a windmill as it tries to calm down angry right-wing crowds at the same time as it runs ads linking Obama to Bill Ayers, which of course reinforces the message that Obama is a terrorist-loving radical. You can’t reap the rewards of sowing fear, Senator McCain, unless you’re prepared to reap the whirlwind, too.)

The nasty formula the GOP used so effectively in 2002 and 2004 now produces negative returns. Brooks’s response to this is to blame the base. But what else can he expect from proud people who have been subjected to six years of neocon propaganda that has drilled into their heads the idea that they must vote Republican in order to win World War IV and put An End to Evil? If those are really the stakes, it must follow that being on the right side of the conflict at home is at least as important as being on the right side on the battlefield overseas.

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