David Brooks is smart.  But not here. 

Be on notice, this is not a polished final product.  I am sharing my initial thoughts and reactions, unedited. Italicized and indented portions are from Brooks’ original article.

On the one side, there were the economic conservatives. These were people that anybody following contemporary Republican politics would be familiar with. They spent a lot of time worrying about the way government intrudes upon economic liberty. They upheld freedom as their highest political value. They admired risk-takers. They worried that excessive government would create a sclerotic nation with a dependent populace.

In this section, Brooks presents one faction in the party in one-side terms.  What he says is true, as is the (currently overwhelming) tendency to overlook that these risk takers depend on government support even as they rail against government.  This is not new.  Re-presenting private interests as if they were public interests is a common strategy.

But there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now. This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government.

In this section, Brooks presents the other faction in one-sided terms.  What he says is true enough, but this faction also succumbs to the blindness of nostalgia for a past that never existed.  Their preservationism is at least as much about preserving their privilege (and others subordination) as it is about the concepts Brooks uses here as if they were meant to mean family as everyone lives it, communities that include everyone, and a ‘harmonious ecosystem’ that is not premised on exclusion and hierarchy.

Because they were conservative, they tended to believe that power should be devolved down to the lower levels of this chain. They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, finish school and postpone childbearing until marriage.

In this section, Brooks overlooks that the order-fetish central to this strain of American political thought is more than willing, in fact often eager, to call for the heavy hand of the law to enforce its view on marriage or voting rights or property rights, etc.  It is just one-sided and intentionally misleading to frame this perspective as opposed to centralized authority.

The two conservative tendencies lived in tension. But together they embodied a truth that was put into words by the child psychologist John Bowlby, that life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.

In this section, Brooks recognizes only the tension between his two romanticized halves, and not the tensions within each half.  By doing this, ‘from a secure base’ appears to suggest that there is a desire to create a safety net, but that is no where to be found here.

The economic conservatives were in charge of the daring ventures that produced economic growth. The traditionalists were in charge of establishing the secure base — a society in which families are intact, self-discipline is the rule, children are secure and government provides a subtle hand.

In this section, Brooks is just bullshitting.  This section depends on the fantasy that the daring ventures took place in a never-never land outside of the societies we live in and that securing the base for all families demands, as history shows us, more than a subtle government hand, particularly when the preservationist forces opposing this are willing to fight a civil war or campaign against voting rights to prevent it.

Ronald Reagan embodied both sides of this fusion, and George W. Bush tried to recreate it with his compassionate conservatism. But that effort was doomed because in the ensuing years, conservatism changed.

No comment.  Too far from reality.

In the polarized political conflict with liberalism, shrinking government has become the organizing conservative principle. Economic conservatives have the money and the institutions. They have taken control. Traditional conservatism has gone into eclipse. These days, speakers at Republican gatherings almost always use the language of market conservatism — getting government off our backs, enhancing economic freedom. Even Mitt Romney, who subscribes to a faith that knows a lot about social capital, relies exclusively on the language of market conservatism.

In this section, Brooks overlooks that the tea party is best seen as the other half of the traditional wing that he left out…on steroids.  So, far from in eclipse.  And Brooks is slippery here by choosing to say the other wind ‘uses the language of’ since this allows him to be honest and mislead at the same time.  It is true that this wing uses that language, but it is not true that this wing behaves in ways that are consistent with their own talk…they are first in line in search of government preferment.

It’s not so much that today’s Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don’t even know it exists.  There are few people on the conservative side who’d be willing to raise taxes on the affluent to fund mobility programs for the working class. There are very few willing to use government to actively intervene in chaotic neighborhoods, even when 40 percent of American kids are born out of wedlock. There are very few Republicans who protest against a House Republican budget proposal that cuts domestic discretionary spending to absurdly low levels.

If the traditionalist wing as he describes it was really as he describes it, there would be republican voices against the Ryan budget.  But he has argued by fiat to preclude this.

The results have been unfortunate. Since they no longer speak in the language of social order, Republicans have very little to offer the less educated half of this country. Republicans have very little to say to Hispanic voters, who often come from cultures that place high value on communal solidarity.

In this section, Brooks finally comes clean in describing the traditionalist as focused on order (not only or even primarily decentralized power, as he states).

Republicans repeat formulas — government support equals dependency — that make sense according to free-market ideology, but oversimplify the real world. Republicans like Romney often rely on an economic language that seems corporate and alien to people who do not define themselves in economic terms. No wonder Romney has trouble relating.

Some people blame bad campaign managers for Romney’s underperforming campaign, but the problem is deeper. Conservatism has lost the balance between economic and traditional conservatism. The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens.

The problem is deeper.  He is on target in these last two paragraphs, but the former makes understanding this impossible.