The first takes George Packer and The New Yorker to task for having tried to rehabilitate Brooks for polite society without truly assessing whether and how he has reckoned with his own past work.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/06/18/the_conservatives_conundrum_an/index.php

The second -- written, if I may say, so, with a more commendably controlled anger than the cocktail-hour post here above, assesses Brooks' incredibly irresponsible (and un-Burkean) account of the great mortgage meltdown of 2008. Here I expose Brooks' intellectual usury, an equivalent of predatory lending in the realm of ideas:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/07/22/intellectual_usury_feels_good/

And you'll certainly offend sanctimonious hypocrites on the religious right. But you probably won't offend conservative libertarians!

Then again, as TPM readers know, The New Yorker isn't always to my taste or standard, either:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/06/18/the_conservatives_conundrum_an/index.php

That -- and not the 1960s' "liberalism" of cultural liberals who are assailed by the right - is what has created such a violent, depraved public culture, bypassing citizens' brains and hearts in direct appeals to their lower viscera to enhance the "bottom line." Whatever you can convince people to buy, you're allowed to try. That's not leadership, it's demagoguery, both commercially and politically. That's what I mean by the "free-for-all" -- the sense that there are no rules or norms of justice and social solidarity.

You may well be right, oleeb, and I wrote this post and the World Affairs Journal essay that's linked to it on the assumption that, as I say in the latter, if Obama fails we will all find ourselves looking through the gaping holes in the neo-liberal conventional wisdom and hoping to find deeper currents or touchstones for a better politics. If we can't find them, we're done for, but I write to keep that part of the prospect open, not to throw in the towel, as others above have done.

"The stolid old conservatives you imagine, who actually aspire to some Old Republic ideal of 'ordered liberty', don't exist anymore outside a few faculty clubs, prep school common rooms and northeast salons and magazine offices."

I think that only some embittered exile from leafy campuses would argue that the World Affairs Journal I linked is fit only for "a few faculty clubs, prep school common rooms, and northeast salons and magazine offices."

Probably the best way to understand the essay is to read its paragraph on fragmentary historiography and "pearl divers." These have their time and place, no matter how many or few in the madding crowd have time for them. As I noted in a comment above, most of my TPM posts have been about things such as the corporate speech matter or Jimmy Carter's comments about the racism in the opposition to Obama. But every so often it helps to dive below the surface and ride some undercurrents, not just gesture at them from nowhere.

Here they are:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/07/watch_out_for_wednesdays_other_donnybrook/index.php
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/09/the_supreme_court_delivered_a_laugh_a_minute/)

But every so often we have to dive deeper -- not into psychoanalysis of the players but into paradigmatic divisions in the human heart, and into belief systems that are strong enough to cope with them. That's what I've tried to do, in American terms, in the essay I link in the post.

http://chronicle.com/article/Intellectual-Diversity/48799/

Conservatives' problem is that they can't reconcile their yearning for an ordered, almost sacred liberty with their obeisance to every whim and riptide of a corporate capitalism that would have horrified Adam Smith and that is disrupting an degrading the very virtues and communities they claim to cherish. But that is a good reason to read Adam Smith, John Gray, and other conservative thinkers who have been frank about this.

It's also a good reason to recognize that neo-liberals, who are far more numerous in the academy, have this same dilemma but like Tom "The World is Flat" Friedman, are less frank about its problems.

One simply has to distinguish between conservatives who are frank about it, and conservative-movement types who are not. Please read the Chronicle symposium, One purpose of this post was to alert you to it.

Claims posted above that "conservatives are more willing to accept existing doctrine" and that they don't become scholars because they're in it for the money could easily be lobbed against certain stars of the academic left, not to mention against more than a few "liberals" and neo-liberals. But a more substantial objection to these arguments would ask the commenters, or others who'll come in, to distinguish among different kinds of conservatives. My Chronicle contribution (which I hope readers will click on and read) challenges the inclusion of conservative "movement" and "market" operatives in teaching, not the inclusion of serious conservative scholars, who are often quite capable of bouncing their "doctrines" off against "liberal" ones, to the benefit of both.

Democracy is really very problematic, in ways this isn't the place to go int,but I agree with more than just Winston Churchill that there's no better alternative, and I certainly wouldn't be here writing this without something pretty much like it. Neither would Kristol and the other neo-cons have been here, but they abused the privilege, if I may use that word, by degrading the demos in order to lead it.