Conservatives Take on Obama

George Packer
The New Yorker

David Brooks is going to be one of the best critics the Obama Administration will have, because his reservations and attacks are based on a world view that’s not only viable and thoughtful but almost always proved right: the view that we human beings overrate our ability to solve problems through the application of reason. The return of liberals to power has driven Brooks back down to his philosophical roots in Burkean caution toward rapid change based on abstract principles (he had lost touch with this inner self during the early Bush years, especially around the invasion of Iraq). Today’s column is just one of many recent examples, prompted by the fact that the Obama White House is taking on massive challenges in the economy, housing, banking, health care, energy, and education—all at once. It is, Brooks writes, “the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes.” Obama should do what Bush never did and make sure he talks to a critic like Brooks at least once every few months.

In one sense, the Administration is bound to disappoint, and Brooks’s “epistemological skepticism” is bound to be vindicated. If the test for Obama is whether “highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change,” what are the chances that in a year or two Brooks will have to admit he was wrong? History never produces such clear outcomes. The results of government attempts to deal with huge systemic crises, like the ones we face today, are always dissatisfying, especially in the short-term, and leave most of the old problems unsolved. Brooks’s standard is so high that it sets liberalism up for certain failure.

Here’s the test Brooks should set: will Obama’s efforts lead to worse than the alternatives? Will they be worse than his predecessor’s? The conservative approach to economic and social policy, as refined to ideological purity under Bush, is to get government out of the way, trust free markets, and let chronic problems fester until they turn into disasters. The results are all around us (one example among hundreds: the failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate Wall Street). Brooks pits a rigid, abstraction-loving liberalism against a wise, experience-loving conservatism. But recent American history has shown the truth to be closer to the opposite. We are where we are because the ruling conservative ideology of the past few decades refused to face facts, like the effect of private insurance on health-care costs, or the effect of deregulation on investment banking. Facts drove the Republicans out of power. And judging from their response to Obama’s first month in office, facts are very hard things to face in politics.

(More here.)