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The first 570 word chatter is taken up with the paradigmatic figure of Howard Buffet, father of Warren Buffett. Reader proceed with caution when reading Buckley’s protege! A potted history of the Republican Party, with its focus on Howard Buffet, as the major actor, that is then displaced by Brook’s ‘History Made to Measure’ a creature of the opportunism. Enter ‘Historian/Apologist’ Matthew Continetti:

In his superb history of conservatism, “The Right,” Matthew Continetti describes dueling essays in 1989 between the conservative commentators Charles Krauthammer and Pat Buchanan that ran in the pages of The National Interest. Krauthammer argued that America should steer the world away from an unstable multipolar order and toward a more stable “unipolar world whose center is a confederated West.” Buchanan, one of the few remaining spokesmen for the older, isolationist G.O.P., titled his essay “America First — and Second and Third.”

At that time, the party embraced Krauthammer’s vision and rejected Buchanan’s. Within a decade Pat Buchanan had left the Republican Party, thoroughly marginalized. In 1999 the editors of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, where I worked, celebrated Buchanan’s departure from the party. In that same issue I wrote a humor piece trying to imagine the most hilariously unlikely version of the G.O.P. future. That piece was headlined “Donald Trump Inaugurated.”

Mr. Brooks then ventures in into the realm of Psychohistory, or its pastiche.

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It turns out that some political tendencies never really die; they just lie dormant for a few decades, waiting for the emotional mood to change. It’s conventional to say that Trump destroyed the postwar Republican establishment. That’s not quite right. The Tea Party’s extreme disgust with the course of American life was already flowing by 2009. The Pew Research Center detected a surge in American isolationism back in 2013. In 2004 only 8 percent of Republicans thought the United States’ power in world affairs was declining. By 2013, after Iraq and Afghanistan, 74 percent of Republicans thought American was in decline. By 2021, nearly a third of Republicans thought violence might be necessary to save America. …

Speaking of ‘some political tendencies never really die’ : the Reader needs to acquaint herself with Brooks’ celebration of War & Patriotism, of a particular kind:

The Collapse of the Dream Palaces

The Collapse of the Dream Palaces

April 28, 2003 4:00 am

More Psychohistory :

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People often say that history is a battle of ideas, but sometimes it is just a succession of moods. It was a culture of pessimism — Trump’s belief that we’re living in an era of “American carnage” — that restored the old G.O.P., not any set of arguments. America has a dazzling economy and dominant military strength. Military spending as a percentage of G.D.P. is dangerously close to its postwar low. But the Republicans apparently lack the self-confidence to believe they can improve the world, or the willpower to substantially try.

…

And this wan final paragraph, Howard Buffett makes his return!

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Some of my friends believe that after Trump the showman is off the stage, the future of the G.O.P. will be up for grabs. I disagree. Today’s Republicanism has deep roots in American history. I suspect the post-Trump Republicans will be just as inward-looking, but drab and defeatist, without the Trumpian razzle dazzle. Howard Buffett would feel at home.

Mr. Brooks is a New York Times Public Intellectual! The virtues of this form of life is a self-serving political/moral conformity, and a long career at The Paper of Record. The New York Times is the propaganda organ for The American National Security State!

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