The 1990s were pivotal and transformative for the American right. They were, at first, victims of their own success. Between twelve years of Reagan-Bush and the collapse of the Soviet Union, conservatives felt that their ideas had triumphed. All ideological competitors to Western liberal democracy – and its conservative interpretation at that – had been exhausted. Yet, all was not well. George H. W. Bush, never a true-blue conservative, governed as the last traditional Republican. Movement conservatives abandoned him for the fire-breathing Buchanan. Meanwhile, the liberal left adapted themselves to the new era. In the United States, the New Democrat Bill Clinton defeated the wounded Bush. In the UK, the New Labour Tony Blair ousted the post-Thatcher Conservatives.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, conservatives could wonder about a “world-wide conservative crack-up.” Conservatism dominated, but conservatives lost at the polls. Their ideas had triumphed “ending welfare as we know it”), but what ideas were there for the twenty-first century?
Into such uncertainty, men like Brooks – with National Greatness – and Kristol and Robert Kagan – with the Project for a New American Century – sought to raise the right’s sights. Without grandeur, without ambition, Brooks argued, citing Tocqueville, “Democracy has a tendency to slide into nihilistic mediocrity.” The nation whose people had paid any price, borne any burden risked becoming a republic of consumers, sated by cable and easy comforts.
“So America was to strive upward. But toward what? Toward more wealth? Greater scientific achievement? Bigger buildings? No, these were just steps along the way. America’s mission was to advance civilization itself.”
Brooks envisaged a manly American nationalism modeled on Theodore Roosevelt. TR believed in “believed in limited but energetic government, full-bore Americanism, active foreign policy, big national projects (such as the Panama Canal and the national parks), and efforts to smash cozy arrangements (like the trusts) that retarded dynamic meritocracy.” Contractually obliged to punch left, Brooks partly blamed the Left. Once, liberals like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and JFK “possessed high aspirations and a spirit of historical purpose.”
“We choose to go to the moon… and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” Kennedy declared in 1962. This was a fighting liberalism, born of self-confidence. Brooks didn’t note that liberal self-confidence had been undercut by the recognition – rightly – of the failure of the American order to live up to its foundational promises. Instead, he blamed liberal intellectual addiction to irony, of contingency, and the perpetual search for American hypocrisy rather than transcendence.