Iqra’i

I haven’t even ordered a copy of Grand New Party to read yet. (I know, I know, shame on me. It’s fourth in my mental queue of books to read on Minneapolis buses. The Bible is third, though, and if I bump it back any further it’ll break the hearts of those nice ladies who proselytized me in Brooklyn Center the other day.) So I’m assuming that the reason the second half of today’s David Brooks column hasn’t received the attention the first half has is that Brooks is just recapping Ross and Reihan’s points.

But Brooks can still turn a phrase inimitably, so I’d be surprised if this line weren’t entirely his own invention:

Self-conscious maternalists like Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins ensured that New Deal programs were biased in favor of traditional two-parent families.

I’m tickled pink by “self-conscious maternalists,” and not just because it’s an adorable phrase (which may or may not have been appropriated for the “Political Views” box in my Facebook profile). The point about being a “self-conscious” maternalist, rather than a “deliberate” maternalist, is that it distinguishes between advocating for the maintenance of convention and being conventional oneself. Eleanor Roosevelt herself was hardly a role model for the sort of “traditional” family she espoused — “well-behaved women rarely make history,” and all that. But she understood that she didn’t need to become what she sought to protect: tradition for her was policy, not performance. Certainly Eleanor wouldn’t have been able to make any respected claim to caring about families today, when the accumulation of “everyday person” (read: good old boy) cred is tracked as scrupulously as that of donor dollars, when candidates establish traditionalism by becoming avatars of it rather than imagining policies to protect it.

It’s not just the ideas of the young conservatives that are heterodox, but their personalities. The blogger vanguard isn’t afraid to be, well, vanguardy. (Caveat: my perception of Brooks’ Crew of Babycon Worthies may well be skewed by the charismatic pull of Reihan’s music videos and James’ sideburns.) If much of what the conservative movement inculcated in its acolytes was the ambivalence surrounding a “Beltway conservatism” that valorized local wisdoms, one of the best side effects of the new breed’s heterodox trajectories is that it’s allowed them to realize that the idea-pushers don’t have to be everything they propose. (If I weren’t a postmodernist, I’d be using the phrase “be themselves” right about now, but from where I stand it’s much more a question of which self they’re being: not a solely public one.)

This isn’t to say that I hope Grand New Party drums the performativity out of politics: that’s technocratic, heartless and insane. But the wonderful thing about performative politics is that it enables the politician to adopt different roles depending on the situation, while the obsession with performing traditional values led to immobility and finally caricature. A man who performs his own platform isn’t necessarily authentic or consistent so much as he is a slave to identity politics.