Leaving all that silliness aside, I didn’t find Brooks’s column compelling. He seemed to be conflating the case against statism with the case for extreme individualism. That some Goldwaterite conservatives have done the same thing from the opposite direction just means that Brooks shares more with them than he thinks. And I don’t think he is right about this, either:

The latest example of the mismatch between ideology and reality is the housing crisis. The party’s individualist model cannot explain the social contagion that caused hundreds of thousands of individuals to make bad decisions in the same direction at the same time. A Republican administration intervened gigantically in the market to handle the Bear Stearns, Freddie and Fannie debacles. But it has no conservative rationale to explain its action, no language about the importance of social equilibrium it might use to justify itself.

It is no great challenge to a free-market model to explain this “social contagion”–we have a lot of government distortions of price signals that would lead to just such mistakes: artificially low interest rates, the formerly implicit subsidies to the GSEs, etc. And maybe the failure of the administration to come up with a “conservative rationale” for its actions is a sign that it should have acted differently rather than rationalized differently.