The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today. To mark our 10th anniversary, we invited several of our valued contributors to reflect on the decade past and, at least indirectly, on the years ahead. More specifically, we asked them to address this question: "On what issue or issues (if any!) have you changed your mind in the last 10 years- and why?" Their responses follow.
I'VE CERTAINLY BEEN WRONG a lot over the past decade. For example, I wrote a book in 2000 called Bobos in Paradise in which I predicted that the highly educated upper middle class suburbanites in places like Palo Alto, California, and Westchester County, New York, would lead us into an age of Clintonian, Third Way politics, reconciling left and right.
Wrong.
Instead, there's been a radicalizing of this graduate-degreed class in the Howard Dean/MoveOn.org direction, pulling the Democratic party over to the left. These people really hate President Bush and the religious, corporate class (their natural rivals within the elite) he represents.
I also thought politics would no longer be driven by economic class differences. I thought values would matter most. After all, the big split between the parties, it seemed, was between those who went to church and those who didn't.
Wrong.
In 2004, the economic divide between the Republicans and Democrats was greater than in all the previous elections in my lifetime. The Republicans are becoming the party of those who have reason to be optimistic about the future--because they are married or because they live in growing parts of the country. The Democrats are becoming the party of people who have reason to be anxious about the future--because they are divorced or because they live in shrinking parts of the country. I suspect opportunity issues (wage stagnation, dropping social mobility, fights over trade and globalization) will play a bigger role in American politics over the next several years.
But errors are not as important as evolution. Over the past decades, conservative thinking has evolved and its center of gravity has shifted. From a movement that once emphasized economic freedom, it is now a movement emphasizing that economic freedoms must be embedded in a strong society. From a movement that once lauded individual choice, it is now a movement preoccupied with family stability, civil society, and national cohesion.
The best description of conservatism's evolution comes from David Willetts, the Tory MP. He tells the tale as a personal journey, but it really applies to Anglo-Saxon conservatism as a whole:
"You start by making your own way in the world and what appeals to you above all is the language of flexibility, mobility, opportunity. It is the economically liberal bit which brings many people to Conservatism . . . .
"Then you get more tolerant as you begin to realize people don't always behave as you expect. You recognize how wide is the range of human motivation and how much knowledge and wisdom is dispersed. You see the market as one way in which all this diversity can be respected. Perhaps you become more tolerant and open-minded. That's the social liberalism.
"Then you have children and you start thinking about the environment in which they will grow up. You worry about how to transmit your values to the next generation. It can feel as if you are fighting a battle against not so much the state as an incredibly crude commercial culture that tells them there is no more to life but consumption. You begin to discover that there are deep ties and obligations across the generations. You notice that your friends who understand this best and live up to it are the ones with the most fulfilled and satisfied lives. In fact they are much more satisfied than the people who are just following the thin freedoms of mobility and choice."
The obvious thing Willetts is saying is that the Burke and Oakeshott side of conservatism is just as important as the libertarian, free market side, if not more so. This thought has obviously occurred to a lot of people all at once. (Read Rick Santorum's book, which treats the family, not the individual, as the basic unit of society.)
But the underlying point is that conservative writers are now spending a lot more time trying to understand the substratum of human behavior. Rather than treating human beings as economic actors and lauding the entrepreneur as conservatism's paragon, they are discussing the values, assumptions, and mental landscapes that are passed down unconsciously from generation to generation. Why do some groups succeed and others fail? Why are some people raised in environments that transmit one set of values while others are raised in environments that transmit another set of values? This is what Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Samuel Huntington, and even Bernard Lewis, in their different ways, have been writing about.
Everybody knew the complicated and politically treacherous subject of inherited group traits was always down there. Now it is pretty much unavoidable.
David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.