Few readers will be surprised that I found a lot to agree with David Brooks’ column today. I’m not so sure about the neocons being ga-ga over Lincoln and the founding (though maybe that’s fair to say about the Straussian soaked University of Chicago branch of neoconservatism Brooks hails from). Nor do I see in Sullivan a Burkean temperamental conservatism so much as a temperamental conservative who quotes Burke. And while I agree entirely with Brooks that what’s missing from conservatism these days is a greater healthy tension between big C conservative ideology and small c conservative instincts, I do think it’s worth mentioning that David played his own part in the slackening of that tension. The Weekly Standard, great magazine though it is, was not founded by Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, JPod and David Brooks as a bastion of Burkean restraint, but of big C conservative triumphalism. David’s support for national greatness was not Burkean in the slightest. Nor was the Standard’s defense of McCain in 2000 in terms of “creative destruction” a particular Burkean pose. I bring this up not so much to criticize Brooks whom I admire greatly, but to note that if Burke’s flag has been dropped, the fault lies not just in “the Republicans” but in all of us as well.