While we’re having fun rummaging through old Brooks columns, this one stands out for contradicting the last one pretty impressively.  Instead of being the cause of Republican collapse, all those “creedalcons,” as my Scene colleague Matt Feeney has dubbed them, were the lifeblood of the party–in 2005.  Remember the “clamoring of creeds” that were smothering the Burkeans?  Evidently, two years ago–before everything went truly, horribly wrong–all the clamoring, factionalism and ideology were good for the GOP:

Conservatives have not triumphed because they have built a disciplined and efficient message machine. Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly. As these factions have multiplied, more people have come to call themselves conservatives because they’ve found one faction to agree with.

There’s also this:

This feuding has meant that the meaning of conservatism is always shifting. Once, Republicans were isolationists. Now most Republicans, according to a New York Times poll, believe the U.S. should try to change dictatorships into democracies when it can. Meanwhile, 78 percent of Democrats believe the U.S. should not try to democratize authoritarian regimes.

Moreover, it’s not only feuding that has been the key to conservative success – it’s also what the feuding’s about. When modern conservatism became aware of itself, conservatives were so far out of power it wasn’t even worth thinking about policy prescriptions. They argued about the order of the universe, and how the social order should reflect the moral order. Different factions looked back to different philosophers – Burke, Aquinas, Hayek, Hamilton, Jefferson – to define what a just society should look like.

That first passage about interventionist foreign policy is notable, since it drives home that it wasn’t the ideologues pushing intervention alone who have brought the GOP to its current lowly state, but it was also a majority of Republicans themselves who bought into this nonsense.  Had there been more instinctive, temperamental Burkeans, it would not have been so easy to persuade so many Republicans that promoting democracy on the other side of the world was a realistic or desirable end.  The GOP has certainly driven away many temperamental conservatives, but what the last few years have shown us is that, depressingly, there weren’t that many Burkeans left to be driven away in the first place.  Even more depressingly, those poll results indicate that the opinions of most Republicans and Democrats on such issues can be moulded and transformed based on little more than the partisan affiliation of the administration carrying out the policy.  Ten years ago, I bet the results would have been almost exactly reversed when the other party was in the White House.

Respondents, including myself, have been so caught up in talking about Burke-this and ideology-that, that we have neglected to mention that the column doesn’t actually explain very well why the GOP’s support collapsed.  As it happens, the policies that have so disgusted people with the GOP have not been shared equally among the different “creeds” identified by Brooks.  There were scarcely any national policies enacted that might be traced back to the “free market” or “religious” conservatives.  NCLB, Medicare Part D and amnesty were all the fruit of “compassionate” conservatism, so called, and good old-fashioned attempted vote-buying with earmarks.  We know who was most responsible for Iraq, and it cannot be pinned on the libertarians and the “theocons,” though many of them went along with it.  It is the backlash against the costs of these policies, and, of course, the body blow to Mr. Bush’s administration that followed Katrina (whether or not pinning the blame on the administration for the whole thing is fair) and the debacle of Iraq, especially in 2006, that have put the GOP in its present condition.  

It wasn’t the tax cuts that alienated your average temperamental or “dispositional” conservative, but the egregious expansion of government and spending that contributed to building up massive amounts of debt and future liabilities.  Brooks neglected to note the role that Mr. Bush’s immigration follies had in alienating core conservatives.  Strong opposition to ESCR has certainly not been a great position electorally, but in general religious conservatives’ adamant defense of life is not losing the GOP that much and routinely brings in tens of millions of voters who might otherwise probably never want to be associated with the party.  No, it has been the combination of “compassion,” big government conservatism, Iraq and, of course, mega-incompetence that explain why the “dispositional” conservatives and others have abandoned the party.