Annals Of Architecture & "Punditry" (For Lack Of A Better Word)

Bourgeois Yank David Brooks.

Ortho-Religioso Daniel Larison saves us typing, thinking, what not on Brooks & National Greatness.

On "N.G." from the world of 1998. (If this were audio, there'd be echo on "1998.") 12 yrs. ago. Before everything changed.

Washington is a strange town. Having but a single business to justify its existence, and there being far more warm bodies in town than are necessary to do that business, many a peculiar notion has been known to issue from its excess capacities. Perhaps that helps explain the recent call to “national greatness,” wherein a coterie of metropolitan intellectuals has sought to plan for the next triumphal, and definitely great, American century.

One can readily detect this particular form of exhaust inside the Beltway. In February a “national greatness” colloquium was held in Washington, well-attended by journalists, think-tankers, assorted middlemen, and others prepared only to identify themselves as “consultants.” This colloquium followed from the founding documents of the "movement,” last year’s essays by Bob Kagan and William Kristol in Foreign Affairs, and David Brooks in The Weekly Standard. The flame has shone too in the dispatches of the Project for the American Century, a William Kristol initiative ably managed by Gary Schmitt from behind the portals of the Standard’s offices on 15th Street.

I bow to no one in my respect for both patriots and patriotism, and I, too, want America to be great. But there are mature and there are wayward ways to go about such things. The heavy breathing associated with the national greatness project, I am afraid, is an example of the latter.

Still, it is hard to argue with one of the movement’s main propositions: that one cannot love one’s country and hate one’s government at the same time. Some conservatives have somehow moved away from their Burkean sensibilities toward those more befitting the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, and it is surely worthwhile to try to haul them back to their better senses.

It is also easy to sympathize with one of the movement’s underlying motives: to prevent internationalist-minded Republicans from becoming an endangered species in the great swirling intellectual vacuum of the post-Cold War world. Otherwise, the realms of foreign and national security policy would become playgrounds for fuzzy-minded liberals for whom the term geostrategy has about the same ring as phrenology or leeching.

Nor is the moral core of the movement frivolous. The national greatness project frames two very important questions: As the preponderant global power, what responsibilities does America have toward the rest of the world? How wisely to share the gift of democracy we bear?

We could start w/ Reagan's big head on Mt. Rushmore.

First, some quick background. In 1997 Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Bill Kristol and senior editor David Brooks — two men who make up roughly 50% of the entire national-greatness “movement” — wrote an interesting essay in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the Right has internalized too much of its libertarian, anti-government rhetoric. “Wishing to be left alone isn’t a governing doctrine,” they wrote. “And,” they continued, “an American political movement’s highest goal can’t be protecting citizens from their own government.” Hence, they wanted to inject conservatism with more patriotic language and fervor.

In 1997 they favored an activist government that couched time-honored conservative goals in Teddy Rooseveltian rhetoric, arguing that we should “[B]ust the great public trusts of our time — the education, health and Social Security monopolies,” which, as Foer points out, is precisely what libertarians and conservatives had been arguing for a few decades. Abroad, they favored a more assertive foreign policy infused with American values, also hardly a “new” idea in conservative circles.

Over time Brooks wrote some wonderfully elegant essays in favor of building more patriotic monuments and public architecture. He wrote fondly of the Republican party’s post-Civil War activism and he praised land-grant colleges and the Library of Congress with a passion rarely associated with land-grant colleges and the Library of Congress. David Brooks is one of my favorite writers in the world, but with his emphasis on the patriotic spectacle and the wonders of government activism, he sounded a bit too much like Charles de Gaulle for my taste.

One might not immediately suspect who typed the preceding three paragraphs. The intro surprisingly demonstrates some self-awareness on the typist's part, & gives him away:

My computer crashed when I was two-thirds through writing a brilliant and thoughtful essay on national-greatness conservatism. As it is now a little after one o’clock in the afternoon and I am very weary, I’ve decided it ain’t worth rewriting the damn thing. I bring this up because, well, lately you you guys have been complaining about my tardiness and the length of these columns. I write long when short on time.

Yes, he's been knowingly working that shtick since 2001. Minimum.