This is David Brooks we're talking about, howling today that the Obama budget offers

evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor-- caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once.

Brooks is snorting the frequently foresightful Edmund Burke who summoned the greatest arguments against the French Revolution--though not so much the Burke who sympathized with the American revolutionaries and the Indian victims of Empire. There was a lot to be said for the late 18th century, but even its smartest conservatives did not yet have an income tax they might have evaluated as a tradition worth conserving.

Obama's agenda, he thunders,

is unexceptional in its parts but...when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new.

What could it be? Force-draft enslavement of bankers? Chemists aux guillotines? Bill Ayers as Secretary of Defense? Or a possible $24 billion tax bill over 9 years for venture-capital and hedge-fund firms?

Brooks hears the tumbrils squeaking down Wall Street:

The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment. Yet the Obama budget is predicated on a class divide....Those of us in the moderate tradition -- the Hamiltonian tradition that believes in limited but energetic government -- thus find ourselves facing a void. We moderates are going to have to assert ourselves. We're going to have to take a centrist tendency that has been politically feckless and intellectually vapid and turn it into an influential force....The first task will be to block the excesses of unchecked liberalism....[M]oderates will have to sketch out an alternative vision. This is a vision of a nation in which we're all in it together -- in which burdens are shared broadly, rather than simply inflicted upon a small minority.

The "intellectually vapid" tendency that needs to be spiffed up now--what took it so long?--must be different from the one that he commended Team Bush for in his first NYT column, Nov. 9, 2003, when Bush pulled out the stops on Iraq war spending, thus "taking on the antiwar Democrats, but also the so far silent but oh-so-sullen fiscal conservatives in his own party." Those "oh-so-sullen" fiscal conservatives were grumpy about...deficits. They didn't get with the new big-government program! Oh, but those were Republican deficits predicated on the meritorious crusade against evildoers everywhere. Like those of his prince, Ronald Reagan, who with David Stockman's help preceded Bush trying to shovel a squawling government baby into Grover Norquist's famous bathtub.

Soon enough, Brooks was back hazing some conservatives for having "to betray some of the principles that first animated them. This week we saw dozens of conservatives, who once believed in limited government, vote for a new spending program that will cost over $2 trillion over the next 20 years." He singled out, along with federal education spending, up by 65 percent, "unemployment benefit payments...up by 85 percent." Imagine! Give these welfare qs....guys unemployment benefit payments and the next thing you know, they shuffling their cups at your gates demanding your bonuses.

Might the new, improved, intellectually robust, vigorously pragmatic regulatory wing of the federal government learn from the lemming deregulation that (thankfully! fruitfully! prosperously!) held forth from Reagan onward, according to Brooks' quivering column of May 4, 2004 ("Right Face, March!") which congratulated John Kerry's campaign for turning its

policy shop...over to the Rubinites -- the superintelligent Clinton administration alumni who, if they were a little more demonstrative, would gather at mass rallies waving Robert Rubin's little blue books of fiscal rectitude and chanting the inspiring slogans that spread frenzy in the bond markets: ''Cut the Deficits! Lower Rates! Cut the Deficits! Lower Rates!''

Loved that "frenzy in the bond markets," didn't you? That was good frenzy, not bad frenzy. But were they Robert Rubin's little blue books or Phil Gramm's?

Later in that campaign, on Aug. 29, Brooks committed more than 7,000 words to the Times Magazine on a familiar theme: "How to Reinvent the GOP." Claiming a Hamilton-Whig strong-government legacy, he "glimpsed" a new-issue Republican Party in the making, to "redesign the welfare state so that individuals have control over their own benefits packages." He raised his machete against--what else?--entitlements. He loved the "ownership society." (I wonder how his 201K is doing.) He thundered against the petty man's substitute for serious budget-cutting, earmarks. He hailed the "strong-government tradition." He wanted "the progressive conservative governing philosophy." This was a man who loved ideas less than bumper-stickers calling for ideas.

And by the way, when Brooks was calling for "some future president...to go through the budget and rake out the tens of billions of dollars of corporate subsidies," he added this (the italics are too good to resist):

They can be reduced only all at once, in a great sweep that overwhelms the parochial lobbying campaigns that groups will mount on behalf of each one. They can be reduced only as part of a larger tax-reform effort that will simplify the code, flatten rates and clean out the morass of credits, deductions, phaseouts, differential taxation arrangements, double-taxation provisions, alternative-minimum-tax fiascoes and growth-inhibiting distortions.

David Brooks likes "clean sweeps" when they're "block[ing] the excesses of unchecked liberalism." He doesn't like them when buccaneer capitalism rides out over the precipice and looks down, in which case he discovers moderation. He's a conservative's idea of a moderate--a garden variety, clueless one, moved by the minority status of billionaires.

Bring back Bill Kristol. At least he didn't pretend to be interested in ideas.