(6:05 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

A Brief Word from One of the Smart Conservatives

David Brooks is supposed to be a smart conservative. The man publishes regularly in The Atlantic Monthly. He has a regular column in the New York Times. He's so smart that he's decided to address the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, reportedly one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. He wonders whether Oakeshott would have supported the Iraq War -- certainly something that everyone gives a crap about.

This is the best he can come up with:

I remind Oakeshott that he was ambivalent about the American Revolution, and dubious about a people who had made a sharp break with the past in the name of inalienable rights and other abstractions. But ours is the one revolution that worked, and it did precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn't pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.

Because of that legacy, we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn't even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq — thank goodness, too, because any "plan" hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality.

I love the patronizing scarequotes around "plan" -- "Oh, so you wanted us to have a 'plan,' huh? A 'plan'?" All of a sudden, the fact that our government doesn't know what the hell it's doing is some kind of virtue:

I tell Oakeshott that the Americans and Iraqis are now involved in an Oakeshottian enterprise. They are muddling through, devising shambolic, ad hoc solutions to fit the concrete realities, and that we'll learn through bumbling experience. In the building of free societies, every day feels like a mess, but every year is a step forward.

I don't understand how the editors at the Times can read this stuff without screaming. First of all, the administration constantly claims to have a plan, even if the plan changes all the time. When things weren't going well at the beginning of the war, Rumsfeld was sure to remind us that we should trust him, because he has a plan. Second, I don't know if he realizes this, but the American Revolution was the exact opposite of the war in Iraq. There was no viable resistance movement on the ground in Iraq that we could come in and "support," so we can't even claim the role that France played in our revolution. The colonies had a long political tradition and already had institutions in place that would help to ease the transition to the new form of government -- it was actually new, but at the same time, it didn't just pop out of thin air. "Rebuilding Iraq" is pure social engineering, and based on Brooks' presentation of Oakeshott, it is exactly the kind of thing that Oakeshott would loathe.

Still, we have to give him credit for presenting Oakeshott in a way that is presumably accurate -- that is, since his presentation completely undermined his own argument, we have to assume that Brooks had nothing to gain from his presentation and thus probably did not consciously falsify it. I suppose that I could go read Oakeshott himself, just to make sure, but honestly, who cares?

UPDATE: I got the cable modem working finally, without requiring a technician to come to my house. The guy who came originally told me that every cable in the house would work with the modem, which turns out to be false. I ran a cable from the former computer room into my bedroom and hooked the modem up to that, and I called the Comcast people to get them to tell me how to register the modem myself -- but I had no apparent connection to the Internet. I couldn't even ping the registration server. I was seriously perplexed. Then I realized the solution: I hadn't turned on the modem. I am now officially one of those people who had to call tech support so that the person could tell me to turn the thing on. Now all that remains for me to return to my normal Internet-centered life is to search on Google for how to get rid of the "Internet Explorer Provided by Comcast" thing.

MEANINGFUL UPDATE: This is a much better executed criticism of the Brooks article, which has come up for a beating by virtually every blogger I've clicked on today -- Matthew Ygelsias, CalPundit, Talking Points Memo, etc. Hopefully the Times will fire Brooks, then fire Friedman, too, for good measure, then fire Nicholas Kristoff for being a little bitch. Then they can replace them with Josh Marshall, Eric Alterman, and, oh, some smart conservative -- I assume there must be a couple of them still around. Maybe Pat Buchanan is the best they can do now.

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