Googling, Oakeshott Brooks, " found these blog entries, in, "View from the Right: The passing scene and what's happening from the Traditionalist, Politically Incorrect Right." http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001974.html >...Beware of Brooks!
David Brooks wrote an op-ed speaking highly of our great soldiers in Iraq, and Lucianne.com posted it with the subtitle “the most important column you’ll read today,” and most of the folks at Lucianne.com are happy about it. VFR readers will be unsurprised to hear that I don’t buy it. Here is the comment I posted there:
Reply 79—Posted by: Larry, 12/2/2003 2:56:57 PM
A few posters here know what David Brooks is, i.e., a liberal calling himself a “conservative” in order to undermine conservatism. The people here who praise Brooks are suckers. Just last week he used his perch as the New York Times’ house “conservative” to advocate homosexual marriage—as a “conservative” idea, no less! But now, because he praises our soldiers in Iraq, conservatives rush to praise him. Thus he pulls you in to his game, giving you just enough bait (his support for the war), to make you overlook what a slime he is on other issues. I don’t think people should let him get away with that. Conservatives should stop acting like dogs eagerly wagging their tail at anyone who pets them. Conservatives should shun David Brooks.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001973.html >...The essence of neoconservatism
I have said all along that what defines neoconservatism is the belief that America is a universal idea, not a concrete entity. But the “proposition nation” idea is itself the expression of a more general characteristic of the neoconservatives’ mindset. The essence of the neoconservatives is that they are modern, rationalist liberals. I intend “rationalist” in the Michael Oakeshottian sense of people who grasp reality by means of simplified verbal formulae and think reality can be organized and re- organized on the basis of such formulae. Such rationalism is of course not the same as rationality, which means the attempt to understand and articulate truth in its fullness...
With such an earnest fellow as Brooks, I read that column as an fairly
explicit warning by a neo-con ally @ neo-con hubris. How else to read this
paragraph?
> ...We can't know how Oakeshott would have judged the decision to go to
> war in Iraq, but it is impossible not to see the warnings entailed in his
> writings. Be aware of what you do not know. Do not go charging off to
> remake a society when you don't understand its moral traditions, when you
> do not even understand yourself. Do not imagine that if you conquer a
> nation and impose something you call democracy that the results will be
> in any way predictable. Do not try to administer a country from behind a
> security bunker.