Sandbagging Burke

David Brooks writes today about "The Republican Collapse," saying that the GOP is in free fall because it drifted too far from Burkean conservatism -- that is, became too enamored of big ideas, and forgot to leaven its dreaming with temperamental conservatism.:

The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan.

And this, says Brooks, is what Republican leaders have forgotten. Iraq is the lead example, he says. Or consider the failed attempt to expand individual choice in health care, and so forth -- that was un-Burkean because the traditional conservative

does not see a nation composed of individuals who should be given maximum liberty to make choices. Instead, the individual is a part of a social organism and thrives only within the attachments to family, community and nation that precede choice.

And so forth. It's an elegant little theory, but I'm not sure it's true, or rather, to what extent it's true (because it does contain at least some truth). Is the failure of these initiatives really to be chalked up to the fear of the American people of choice? To be precise, did people really fear that the choice would weaken their attachments to their little platoons, or was it more simply that life is complicated enough, and the liberty gained under these schemes seemed risky, and not worth the hassle?

I also am skeptical of this passage:

Over the past decade, religious conservatives within the G.O.P. have argued that social policies should be guided by the eternal truths of natural law and that questions about stem cell research and euthanasia should reflect the immutable sacredness of human life.

But temperamental conservatives are suspicious of the idea of settling issues on the basis of abstract truth. These kinds of conservatives hold that moral laws emerge through deliberation and practice and that if legislation is going to be passed that slows medical progress, it shouldn’t be on the basis of abstract theological orthodoxy.

Now wait. It seems to me that the truly Burkean response to stem-cell research, for example, is to practice the politics of moral prudence, and to honor what society until five minutes ago considered sacred. It is most un-Burkean to decide that we can reverse longstanding moral tradition just because we either can do it technologically, or simply want to do it. Brooks is probably right that social conservatives alienated non-ideological conservatives by standing on principle in these matters, but to say that the social cons were un-Burkean in so doing strikes me as stealing a base.

Anyway, I'm sure Larison will have all this and far more about what's wrong with the Brooks piece explained by sunrise. Talk amongst yourselves. I'm hitting the road in a few minutes, headed to San Antonio to harangue the Republicans for Environmental Protection at their national convention. I smell mole' enchiladas in my near future...