Let me try to defend Brooks a bit. I don’t think he would contend that the Republican party has tried with single-minded intensity to shrink the federal government. I take his point to be something more like the following: Republican politicians recognize in practice that the public has no great desire to shrink the federal government, much less slash it, and act accordingly. But the ambition to do so still lurks within the Republican heart and the party has no alternative theme, mission, or rhetoric that it both finds compelling and can practically pursue. Brooks’s column is an attempt to supply such an alternative in the form of civic order. This line of thinking, whether it is right or wrong, does not seem to me to be obviously absurd.