Brooks says conservative movement in crisis

New York Times columnist David Brooks challenged American conservatives to reinvigorate their movement by recalling Alexander Hamilton's vision of upward social mobility during Thursday night's keynote address for the James Madison Institute's conference, titled "The Conservative Movement."

Brooks called Hamilton the original conservative, an individual who rose from a broken home and poverty to pen the Federalist Papers and engineer the United States' treasury system.

"Social mobility was at the heart of his philosophy. He tried to make a dynamic economy where young poor men could rise," Brooks said.

The Republican Party has lost touch with lower-middle class Americans, Brooks said. He asked what today's Republicans could offer a family earning $35,000, or aging industrial workers concerned about their future economic security in the face of globalization.

In his remarks, Brooks traced the history of a conservative movement that he said came to ascendancy in 1994 with Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" and has since stagnated, especially on domestic policy issues.

Noting President Bush's inability to pass social security reform with Republican control of both houses of Congress, Brooks argued that conservatives do not have a governing philosophy or a cohesive policy agenda.

"Conservatism is intellectually moribund," Brooks said. This is the result, according to Brooks, of too many years of success in implementing their values and law-and-order agenda.

"Crime is down, abortion is down, welfare has been reformed, high marginal tax rates were a great issue until they were lowered, and radical feminism used to be a great issue," Brooks said.

He blamed, in part, the Republican Party's policy of rigid party discipline for the dearth of new conservative ideas. Brooks suggested that, in the long term, this governing strategy tends to suppress creativity of thought.

"The supply-side movement couldn't take off today. Why? Because it was founded by a bunch of freelance writers who were wacky oddballs," Brooks said.

Also to blame, Brooks suggested, was the Bush administration's habit of producing rhetoric that is anti-academic and anti-elite media. He added that, in his opinion, the strength of the conservative movement used to be its engagement with the liberal arguments of intellectuals.

Making light of this phenomenon, Brooks said, "The nice thing about this administration is that I can write a scathing column about something they've done, and I know it won't hurt my chances getting an interview because I know they won't have read it."

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Despite characterizing the conservative movement as being in crisis, Brooks said there is good reason to be optimistic about its future.

"In [the 2008 presidential election], we will have new candidates with very few ties to the past, with new ideas," Brooks said.

He predicted that candidates in the Republican and Democratic Parties will try to reshape their party platforms and present new ideological visions.

Brooks suggested that conservatives should use the next presidential election to resurrect the visions of Hamilton, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, saying, "[conservative] governments have to convince people that government can help them."