After laying out his simplistic center-right philosophy, David Brooks diagnoses why his form of moderation didn’t prevail in Washington:
…I confess that about 16 months ago I had some hope of a revival. The culture war, which had bitterly divided the country for decades, was winding down. The war war — the fight over Iraq and national security — was also waning.
The country had just elected a man who vowed to move past the old polarities, who valued discussion and who clearly had some sympathy with both the Burkean and Hamiltonian impulses. He staffed his administration with brilliant pragmatists whose views overlapped with mine, who differed only in that they have more faith in technocratic planning.
Yet things have not worked out for those of us in the broad middle. Politics is more polarized than ever. The two parties have drifted further to the extremes. The center is drained and depressed.
What happened?
History happened. The administration came into power at a time of economic crisis. This led it, in the first bloom of self-confidence, to attempt many big projects all at once. Each of these projects may have been defensible in isolation, but in combination they created the impression of a federal onslaught.
Notice the copout: “History happened.” How’s that for personal responsibility? No mention of the Republicans and their media hacks driving the narrative of a ‘federal onslaught.’
On one level I agree with Brooks.
During periods when the [size of] government war is at full swing, the libertarian/Goldwater-esque tendency in the Republican Party becomes dominant and all other tendencies become dormant. That has happened now.
I usually phrase this differently. I say that the Republicans are against all government spending that they don’t control (and from 1933-1995 they rarely had any control of federal spending), but they conveniently forget their small-government principles as soon as they gain control of the pursestrings. That, combined with their tax-cuts, led them to destroy the country’s finances under both Reagan and Bush the Younger. They’ll do it again if given the chance. In fact, there is zero chance that they won’t.
What Brooks fails to do is to assign any responsibility to the Republicans for the fundamentally dishonest nature of their political ideology. They aren’t really for small government. They’re for control. Their governing style is indistinguishable from plunder. And, if the country feels like there is some socialist onslaught at play currently, the responsibility for that lies at least as much with the whackjobs and cynical hacks that are spewing that nonsense all over the radio and teevee waves in this country as it does with anything the president and the Democrats are doing.
And in the areas where there really has been some massive increase in federal action (banking, finance, the auto industry), it was only to clean up after the latest predictable Republican-created disaster.
For centuries, farmers in the Sahel–a band of land that crosses Africa at the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert–used rotational tree farming to provide year-round harvests and a consistent source of food, fuel, and fertilizer. But severe droughts and rapid population growth in the 1970s and 80s significantly degraded the Sahel’s farmland, leading to the loss of many indigenous tree species and leaving the soil barren and eroded. With the loss of the trees went the knowledge, traditions, and practices that had kept the region fertile for hundreds of years.