The fight for the soul of conservatism

David Brooks, New York Times Op-Ed Columnist and moderate conservative, writes in his column today of the coming fight for the soul of conservatism. While he does an excellent job of elucidating the grounds for the coming fight and the history of the traditionalist/reformist split in the Republican Party, his conclusion of ultimate reformist dominance, reassuring though it may be, is fundamentally flawed. Though he is correct in pointing towards a traditionalist victory in the short term, he is so only accidentally in that he has stumbled upon the ephemera of a large point - that is that the traditional wing of the Republican Party will end up triumphant in both the short term and the long term because it is only the traditional wing that holds onto a coherent view of humanity and its government.
In so far as we are to take the examples Mr. Brooks offers for a moderate conservative position, problems like inequality and middle-class anxiety, he fails to see that seeing such social phenomenon as problems to be addressed by collective action is precisely the folly that conservatism exists to fight against. In so far as conservatism, especially the conservatism of the young movement conservatives, actually means something, it stand squarely as a rejection of the idea that the ills and anxieties of a juvenile populace can be exorcised by the Holy Water of government and an enthronement of individual rights and responsibilities in the face such problems. We stand, in short, with adulthood that will accept neither wails of victimization nor the comfortable buzz of a cocktail reception with its fetid insinuation that our collective sophistication will be the end of all our problems. 'Reformists' conservatives, in so far as they wish to hand to the federal government a greater scope for the micromanagement of our lives and property are not actually believing in anything essentially conservative - their reform is not essentially a reform at all. It is essential equivalent to modernizing an airplane by stripping it of its wings and engines and thus declaring it perfectly safe - perfectly safe to go no where.
This isn't to say that conservatism doesn't have its problems, and in singling out the pervasive anti-intellectualism endemic to much of our movement Mr. Brooks is quite right. But we should not allow the very fatuity we currently suffer from to be replaced by the greater follies Mr. Brooks seems to be arguing for. It would be far worse for us, and for our nation we purport to serve, if we replaced our sometimes habitual anti-intellectual impulse with the ersatz-intellectual sophistication that our moderates and their liberal friends would like to offer us.