Ryan McMaken: 'David Brooks: The Conservative Future Is the Same as Its Past'

Source:Mises- editor Ryan McMaken.

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The first thing you’ll notice about this piece by David Brooks about the future of the Conservative movement is how boring it is. The second thing you’ll notice is that it is just re-hashing to same old story about the conservative movement. "Here are the new young guns of the movement!" At least this time the usual obligatory references to the latest batch of young neocons was preceded by a few lines about the conservatives at The American Conservative, who aren’t so bad.

But most of the article is just the usual list of younger neocons in the Romney mould who promise to never ever upset anyone’s apple cart, and ensure that the status quo endures forever and ever until the sun burns out. Ramesh Ponnoru? He wants "family-friendly tax credits." Yep, that’ll fix things. Tyler Cowen? He’s not even a conservative, but is definitely in favor of the status quo. One of the publications Brooks mentions is in favor of "a big agenda of institutional modernization" which of course means a mild tweaking of the status quo.

"Innovation." "Reducing inequality." "Burkeans." If you just arrived here out of a time warp from 1986, you’ll definitely find all this to be very cutting edge stuff. The Conservative movement is really barreling toward grappling with the tough realities of the coming bankruptcy and default.

Brooks of course, doesn’t mention Ron Paul even once, in spite of mentioning libertarians at least twice. And when he goes through what he thinks are the important issues of our day, he doesn’t mention the words "debt," "dollar," or "inflation" once.

Looking at Brooks and the New York Times columnists, I feel like I’m reading memos going back and forth between Louis XVI and his most sycophantic courtiers. "No need to bother about those middle classes and peasants out there. We’ve got the bright new thinkers here in Versailles. Everything will be fine!" 

You can read the rest of Ryan McMaken's piece at Lew Rockwell.