The uncanny and unsettling distance between what seems and what is pops up again in David Brooks’s latest column . These are my bolds below:
If you wanted to pick words to capture Patio Man’s political ideals, they would be responsibility, respectability and order. Patio Man moved to his home because he wanted an orderly place where he could raise his kids. His ideal neighborhood is Mayberry with BlackBerries.
He doesn’t expect much of government. He believes that he is responsible for his own economic destiny. But he does expect government to provide him with a background level of order.
In times of turmoil, he has gravitated toward the party that could restore his sense of order. In the 1970s, crime and social breakdown seemed like the biggest threats to order, and he gravitated to the G.O.P. In the late 1990s, Republican revolutionaries seemed to bring instability, and he softened on Clinton. Then terrorism threatened his equilibrium and he helped re-elect Bush. Then, post-Iraq and post-Katrina, administrative incompetence led him a bit the other way.
There are two things going on here. The first is a real breakdown of order — an actual economic collapse in the predictability and stability of everyday life. Panic! in the foreground. There’s a social cognate, here, which helps explain in part why small-c conservative, respectable suburban bourgeois types are becoming less socially conservative (as opposed to culturally conservative): mainstreaming deviance mutes turbulence. This isn’t a value-laden claim I’m making: if marginal behaviors that cause a lot of fuss are integrated into the regular framework of everyday life, the wrenching strangeness and threatening atmosphere of the ’60s, ’70s, and early ’80s can be pressed out of consciousness without much of a lingering suspicion that you’re in strategic denial about how wrong everything’s going just outside of view.
But that’s become increasingly hard to do in terms of economic and political, as opposed to social, security. Why? Too much is vague and ominous. Too much is glowering and looming. The background is shuddering. The possibility that trillions of ghostly liquid capital could disappear no matter what cannot be integrated comfortably into the sense field. The possibility that seven years terror-free at home could simply be a winning streak cannot be made a restful part of everyday life, which, for most Americans, is quite hectic enough as it is.
Aside from the tactile or visceral reaction to disorder in one’s pocketbook and one’s business, there’s a second-order discontent, a "sense of" disorder. As problems seem to get larger and more distant — yet also more unsolvable by plain persons and more able to strike without warning — solutions take on a helplessly therapeutic cast. Without enough information, power, or authority, the American citizen has to develop a convincing impression of where public opinion is drifting and follow it, pulled by whichever party or personal narratives push out of the fog most compellingly (if not always most clearly). It’s too bad, but it’s also true that, for many of us, the foreground order of everyday life is plenty secure on its own terms — but utterly dependent on the tenebrous background, about which we can only ever get a "sense."
No wonder ideology seems so important! It’s CliffNotes for dealing with the perennial reality of politics. But Brooks wants to point out that most of our suburban dispositional conservatives aren’t driven at all by ideology, and this seems right. It also suggests a reason why even crisp and compelling ideological arguments from the right might face a slightly higher hurdle this time around: the sense of disorder is soothed more by temperament and cadence than by data and comprehensiveness. Brooks, however, also wants to argue that these dispositionally conservative suburban Americans are deeply distrustful of distant experts. He seems to hint that if distant liberal experts decide to run amok over the next two years, they will be sharply rebuked for it by the electorate. This sounds correct, but part of the pathology of the "sense of" disorder is the helpless sense that we have no choice but to rely on the big brains and big hearts of distant experts with big power. I’d like to say I can see this going away sometime soon, but I don’t — unless citizens and leaders work together to eliminate the contributing causes to the instability of the background. Probably the biggest argument to be had over the short term — in both parties — is over whether this is possible, or whether we are stuck in a "new world" where panoptic omnicompetence is the price of doing business.
Still, the bottom line appears to be that political conservatives retain a great opportunity to retain their natural base of support among dispositional and cultural conservatives all across America. They have to regain a compelling reputation as restorers of real order and obliterators of that rotten sense of disorder. Not much of this, I think, actually will have to do with demonstrated results. People nowadays are a little too frazzled to wait for results. They want to look at a set of people and trust them on impact. They want that kind of faith to be operative again. All conservatives may need are the right players to pull from the right bench . . . .
