Why David Brooks Is Wrong to Give Up on Today’s American Conservatism

I n a recent issue of The Atlantic, David Brooks laments the decline of the conservatism he fell in love with as a young man. He now identifies with the “moderate wing of the Democratic Party,” because moderate Democrats see that the “core threat” of our time is “social decay,” and that “we should be most concerned with family and community breakdown.”

Setting aside, for a moment, this unconvincing portrait of the Left, Brooks’s belief that family and community breakdown are the central problem of our age should give him — and others of his generation tempted to move left — strong reasons to stick with the Right. If he looked more closely, he might even see cause for hope in some of American conservatism’s recent evolutions.

As Brooks’s New York Times colleague Ross Douthat points out, many on the so-called new right are animated precisely by “the collapse of birthrates, the dissolution of institutional religion and the decline of bourgeois normalcy, manifest in the younger generation’s failure to mate, to marry, [and to] raise families.” They are reacting to “the costs of cultural libertarianism, the increase in unhappiness and the high rates of depression and addiction in a more individualistic society.” Why doesn’t Brooks see this trend and seek to encourage it?

Perhaps Brooks is attempting in his essay to make certain elements of conservative thought — epistemic humility, the political importance of cultivating the sentiments — appealing to the Left. If that is his intention, one can only hope he succeeds.

But perhaps Brooks’s “modern conservatism” naturally led him to drift leftward because it is simply modern. Modern thought, after all, needs the most help from the pre-modern past precisely on the questions of family and community that Brooks cares about, and Brooks here shows little interest in the pre-modern past.

In accounting for the origins of modern conservatism, Brooks dismisses pre-modernity with a bloody story about the religious wars of the 16th century. From the desire to avoid such miseries, he argues, the Enlightenment began. Of the Enlightenment’s two forms — an overconfident “French” version and a more moderate “Scottish or British” version — Brooks prefers the latter. But he presents everything “pre-Enlightenment” as so much tribalism and holy war.

The truth, though, is that the deepest thinkers of modern conservatism, such as Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, were not simply moderns. They did not just repeat Enlightenment tropes about the bad old days, as Brooks does. They knew that much of what conservatism seeks to conserve — and in particular family and community solidarity — is an inheritance from the world that preceded the Enlightenment.

Against the Enlightenment idea of a society built on a social contract of free individuals, Burke celebrated the intergenerational character of social order. Every generation receives a civilizational inheritance from the distant past; its first duty is to steward that inheritance for the generations of the future. Against the specter of democratic individualism, Tocqueville describes the family and religion as bequests we receive from the aristocratic past. Both ask themselves, and their readers: How might we preserve and transform these precious elements of our inheritance from the pre-Enlightenment age so as to keep them vibrant in a world shaped by the Enlightenment’s individualistic principles — principles intended to unleash the energies of creative destruction?

A simply modern conservatism — a conservatism without Burke’s and Tocqueville’s appreciation of the elements of social order that predate the Enlightenment — has no positive vision to serve as a counterweight to the momentum of liberal individualism. A simply modern conservatism can aspire to nothing more than forever begging a dominant Left to pursue its efforts to escape from the past a bit more slowly.

Many on the new right perceive something like this. They are searching for principles that would allow them to propose an alternative direction to their society, rather than simply urging it to go in its current direction at a diminished speed.

Some on the new right respond to the Left’s dominance in modern politics by making a case for Machiavellian bellicosity and cunning. The idea seems to be to teach the Right to overcome its second-fiddle status by learning to be ruthless with the Left. But Machiavelli counseled infanticide and perfected the art of the insidious blasphemy. He can hardly be a guide to those on the new right whose primary concern is the restoration of family, community, and religion in the face of unchecked individualism.

Other elements of the new Right are looking for inspiration in the pre-modern world. In a pre-modern thinker such as Thomas Aquinas, they can find arguments truly beyond the pale of modern individualism: arguments that the union of male and female, the education of the young, and the desire to live in community and know the truth about God are among the primary concerns of politics. Figuring out how to make such principles relevant to a society such as our own, in some measure founded on their rejection, is daunting.

Doing so will require a prudence deeper and more principled than Machiavelli’s — an Aristotelian prudence. Aristotelian prudence begins with attention to ends, and considers the political community in terms of its contribution to complete human flourishing — not just security, prosperity, or power. But it also knows that identifying those ends is just the start of its work, and so asks what is possible for the community in which one finds oneself. It issues in both a political speech tailored to its time and policy measures one’s community might plausibly adopt.

The modern conservatism of Burke and Tocqueville — both active statesmen — exemplifies this form of prudence. It seeks to understand what is best for human beings as familial, political, God-seeking animals. It then seeks to use that understanding to guide the community it actually inhabits toward its best possible form. While rejecting the Enlightenment’s rote denigration of the pre-modern, it seeks to intervene in the world shaped by the Enlightenment. It does not insist on a vision of political life so foreign to one’s country that it can only be destructive or irrelevant.

Such a conservatism is better positioned to respond to the social decay of our time because it isn’t attached to the individualistic principles that make the problem worse, and therefore isn’t doomed forever to be the junior partner of progressive liberalism. Rather than dismiss those groping in this direction as barbaric or fantastic, the older generation of conservatives should encourage them, join them, and help to moderate their ideas. The old and new Right together might then develop a conservatism that knows how to be prudent without conceding what matters most.

Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey teach political philosophy at Furman University, where they direct Furman’s Tocqueville Program. They are visiting scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and authors of Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton University Press, 2021).