The crackup of the conservative monolith over the past two months is starting to resemble the snowballing collapse of the Communist order in Eastern Europe in late 1989.
The latest peon to throw off the yoke of the oppressor is David Brooks. His latest op-ed column in the NY Times, "From Freedom to Authority", purports to argue that GWB's travails stem from the difficulty of navigating a transition from no-government conservatism to the "strong-government conservatism" demanded in the wake of 9/11. But the column in fact gives up much more than that. It's a declaration of conservative surrender. Check this:
What people wanted post-9/11 was Giuliani-ism on a global scale -- someone who was assertive and decisive enough to assume authority and take situations that seemed ungovernable and make them governable.
Is "take situations that seemed ungovernable and make them governable" a euphemism for "govern"? What are we edging towards here? The answer reveals itself a few paragraphs later, in Brooks's analysis of the authors of the Iraq debacle:
They had too much faith in spontaneous social order, a libertarian myth from the 1980's that has been sadly refuted by events.
Whoa, nelly! That's a doozy there! What happened to "shock therapy"? What happened to rational choice theory? What happened to the relentless logic of the market, of the invisible hand? What happened to the evils of bureaucracy? Are we no longer aiming to drag our governments into bathtubs and kill them?
As John Kerry used to say (far too often): make no mistake. David Brooks is shucking off his Conservative Army uniform, throwing his M-16 into the woods, and fleeing. The battle has turned into a rout; Brooks has seen Lieutenant Fukuyama and Captain Bartlett cut and run, and he is hightailing it out before the NVA gets here. The wicked witch has melted, and the monkeys are waking up and claiming it was all just an evil spell. Spontaneous social order? Oh, we never believed in that! It was just the spell the Heritage people cast over us! You won't punish us, will you? Please?... Please?... I can still keep my op-ed column, right?...