Open progressive conservative thread

Go read David Brooks’ cover story for the New York Times Magazine on the future of both conservatism and the Republican Party (not necessarily the same thing). Brooks opens with a point I’ve made in recent months:

There used to be a spirit of solidarity binding all the embattled members of the conservative movement. But with conservatism ascendant, that spirit has eroded. Should Bush lose, it will be like a pack of wolves that suddenly turns on itself. The civil war over the future of the party will be ruthless and bloody. The foreign-policy realists will battle the democracy-promoting Reaganites. The immigrant-bashing nativists will battle the free marketeers. The tax-cutting growth wing will battle the fiscally prudent deficit hawks. The social conservatives will war with the social moderates, the biotech skeptics with the biotech enthusiasts, the K Street corporatists with the tariff-loving populists, the civil libertarians with the security-minded Ashcroftians. In short, the Republican Party is unstable.

In sketching out the future governing philosophy of Republicans, however, Brooks offers some depressing words for libertarians:

If you want to put a death date on the tombstone of small-government Republicanism, it would be Nov. 14, 1995. That was the day the new G.O.P. majority shut down the government. Gingrich, Dick Armey and others came to power with a list of hundreds of government programs and agencies they wanted to eliminate, including the Departments of Commerce, Energy and Education. They led what Grover Norquist called the Leave Us Alone coalition, the alliance of all those different Americans who wanted government to get out of their lives. Gingrich vowed to show the world ”how to end programs, not just create them.” Republicans welcomed a showdown over the size of government because they were convinced that the public would be on their side. Faxes came over the machines vowing, ”No Compromise.” Senator Phil Gramm celebrated the shutdown. ”Have you really noticed a difference?” he reportedly asked. The public did notice, as it turned out, and they didn’t like it. Within a few years the Republicans were backtracking so furiously they were proposing to spend more money on the Department of Education than the Clinton administration thought to ask for.

Read the rest of the piece to see the positive vision of government that Brooks offers, in the tradition of Hamilton, Lincoln, and TR. The essay probably offers the most articulate framework for understanding Bush’s domestic policy agenda you’ll see in the mainstream media. Then come back and post what you think. [What do you think?–ed. I have a mixed reaction. The overarching philosophy of using government to expand individual choice is an undeniably appealing one. Policies like the earned income tax credit certainly fit into that category. However, I have caveats to Brooks’ “progressive conservatism.” While there’s much discussion of what a conservative government can do, there’s less about how it can do this. My inclination is to prefer that the government act more as paymaster than implementor, but I’m not sure Brooks would agree. The boundaries of the Brooksian state don’t seem all that constrained. At the end, he argues that a good progressive conservative government could cut useless measures like corporate subsidies, farm subsidies, and needless tariffs. However, it’s no coincidence that the intellectual godfather of modern-day protectionism is Alexander Hamilton. Finally, I just hate the phrase “progressive conservative.” I understand what Brooks is going for, but it sounds like “pragmatic idealism” or “collective indivudualism.”]