But thinking of it that way just shows how hopelessly off-base Brooks's criticism is. Obama isn't working out the details of some grand vision; he is doing what Machiavelli called "temporizing with accidents." He has specifically referred to FDR's principle of experimentation: try it, see if it works, and if it doesn't work then try something else.
When Oakeshott criticized rationalism, he wasn't advocating irrationalism, but instead a kind of empiricism, what he called "feeling for the balance of the thing." His "rationalists" – he was primarily thinking of Fabian socialists – imagine that they know a method of analysis that allows them to design major social changes in detail and impose them without much reference to facts on the ground or the opinions of others. Their "rationalism" is in fact dogmatism. That's the hubris against which Oakeshott warns. Could anything possibly be further from the Obama approach?
Neocons are rationalists in politics. Libertarians and the anti-tax crowd are rationalists in politics. Radical social conservatives such as Sarah Palin and Pope Benedict are rationalists in politics. Drug warriors and "anti-prohibitionists" are rationalists in politics.
Rationalists in this sense are what I have elsewhere described as archetypal Jacobins. (See here and here.) They are true believers who have a mental template that defines how the world ought to be, and they are rigid in their insistence that the world conform to their ideal imagination of it. And if it does not conform as it is wont not to do, they are often undertake ruthless crusades to force it to conform. It's what Mao had in common with the Spanish Inquisition; it's what the historical Jacobins in late 18th Century France had in common with the witch-burning Puritans in late 17th Century New England. It's what the Leninists of the teens and twenties have in common with the Taliban.
It's not that such true believers simply have an opinion with which one can agree or disagree. They are not interested in discussion because they already know the truth, and for them it's only a question whether you will be converted to it or not. If not they will, at best, have nothing to do with you, at worst they will have you liquidated because you are either damned or anti-revolutionary depending on the particulars. Such true believers are burdened with a form of collective mental illness. They are dangerous, and they are to be zealously resisted, and they must be prevented from assuming positions of political power.
I'm not going to pile on regarding Jindal's odd response speech Tuesday night. While he exhibits many of the characteristics of the true believer, I don't think he is one. Neither is a guy like John McCain. But it doesn't matter who they are individually because their party's power base is dominated by true believers, so even if they are not, their future in the party depends on accommodating them, because they will not accommodate non-believers. True believers don't accommodate.
Before the election I was talking to a conservative I know, and I suggested that Obama was more of a pragmatist than he was an ideologue, and he couldn't see it. I think that because he looks at the world through such a rigid ideological lens himself, he assumes that everyone else does. I was first struck by this during the Clinton years. I was amazed at how conservatives thought of Clinton as some monster from the left. There is hardly any empirical evidence to support that, but the conservative political template demands that anybody who calls himself a Democrat is a leftist. We're seeing the same kind of thing laid on Obama in the last couple of weeks. Their perception has hardly anything to do with what is objectively true and almost everything to do with their a priori projections.
Now as with any worldview, the Conservatives worldview has a basis in reality. They are right to fear the State butting its nose where it doesn't belong. They are right in their concern that people should do for themselves, that they should be self-reliant, that local communities and voluntary associations like churches, Rotaries, and other local civic minded groups should assume as much responsibility as possible for the welfare of their local communities without reliance or interference from the state house or the White House. They're right to worry about citizens looking to Big Brother to take care of things rather than assuming top down social engineering policies, overweening police and surveillance powers, and state encroachment on privacy and other civil liberties.
But why would any conservative who wants to be consistent and principled about these concerns vote for Bush/Cheney? That's why it's hard to take them seriously because there is so much intellectual confusion and dishonesty on the part of Republicans and the so-called conservatives who rally to the Republican cause. Their ideas have little or nothing to do with the reality. That's why intellectually honest conservatives who supported Bush/Cheney regime in the beginning came to loathe everyting it came to stand for by the end.
Andrew Sullivan, John Cole, Andrew Bacevich, Daniel Larison, and Patrick Deneen are conservatives I read because they are not mindless supporters of the GOP. There are others at Culture 11, and I learn from Douthat, too. I don't agree with them on a host of issues, but are intellectually honest, and I learn from them. They are not true believers, and they understand that it's possible to be principled, and not a true beliver and that real conservatism is profoundly antipathetic to any kind of true believerism.
We're not living in an either/or world. It's possible to recognize that people have to be self-reliant and at the same time interdendent. It's possible to affirm that real life happens at the local level, but that in a complex global society we need large governmental agencies and organizations to solve large complex global issues that cannot be handled at the local level. Because we think in polar terms that either the Grover Norquist minimal government true believers must be right or the left wing socialist true believers must be right, we're blind to how subsidiarity provides a pragmantic framework that enables the integration of both sides of the polarity.
So for me our politics is skewed when the battle lines are defines as pitting conservatives vs. liberals. It's really about true believers vs. pragmatists. The pragmatists are not without principles, and they can disagree with one another about goals and tactics, but the only fruitful discussion possible is among those who embrace pluralism as the eschew the habits of mind of the true believer.
UPDATE: Mike Huckabee at CPAC:
“The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics may be dead,” said Huckabee, “but a Union of American Socialist Republics is being born.” Democrats, according to Huckabee, were packing 40 years of pet projects like “health care rationing” into spending bills. “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”
I realize that rhetoric gets somewhat overheated at events like this, but this kind of thing is simply whacko. Does Huckabee really believe it? I wanted to think of Huckabee as being better than the the crowd mentality that characterizes the true-believer right, but time and again, despite his charm and intelligence, he shows himself to be among these crazy true believers. He has lost whatever credibility I once afforded him.
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