David Brooks makes a very interesting distinction

Generally I find David Brooks to be a knee-jerk supporter of the idiocies of conservatism. This time, though, he makes some distinctions between conservative types that I find really interesting. He compares Burkean conservatism to that of American creedal conservatism, and frankly I find that it makes real sense. He starts off with a characterization of Burkean conservatism:

What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.

I myself will admit to a strong suspicion of radical social change. If you look at human decision-making as limited by the human limitations on dealing with information and described by Bounded Rationality you will be and should be suspicious of radical social changes which are all implemented at once. The success of the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution needs to be compared with the general failure of the French Revolution as evidence for why Burkean conservatism makes a lot of good sense. Social change may be necessary, but sudden and radical social social change usually leads to major social failures. Radical social changes need to be handled a small piece at a time, and always tentatively. Reality always trumps ideology when making changes, but does so in the long run and usually after a great deal of damage to people who are effected by the changes.

David continues:

When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders.

It is not clear to me what he means by the creed created by Neoconservatives, and he does not make it clear later. But he does make the distinction between Free market conservatives and Religious conservatives.

In general, what he calls a 'creed' is what I think I would call an ideology. By describing it as a 'creed' I think he is focusing on the religious source of the ideas. I prefer to look at it as an ideology or as a 'meme', a theoretical unit of cultural information. The conservative ideology is a meme, but perhaps more than just one meme, it is a set of memes that fit with each other.

David Brooks describes Burkean conservative philosophy as

The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan.

I find little to disagree with in this view. Brooks goes on to suggest

Over the past six years, the Bush administration has operated on the assumption that if you change the political institutions in Iraq, the society will follow. But the Burkean conservative believes that society is an organism; that custom, tradition and habit are the prime movers of that organism; and that successful government institutions grow gradually from each nation’s unique network of moral and social restraints.

Not only do I agree with the Brookes-described Burkean view, but it also explains the utter failure of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Jerry Bremer regime in Iraq.

But to continue from Brooks

Over the past few years, the vice president and the former attorney general have sought to expand executive power as much as possible in the name of protecting Americans from terror. But the temperamental conservative believes that power must always be clothed in constitutionalism. The dispositional conservative is often more interested in means than ends (the reverse of President Bush) and asks how power is divided before asking for what purpose it is used.

When someone is interested only in the outcome, the social processes that lead to the outcome considered 'wrong' is automatically wrong. Any outcome that is considered incorrect must result from an incorrect process. In conservative theory Natural Law is the source of social or political law, but it is in fact based on the opinion of any individual who objects to the way such social law results.

Over the past decade, religious conservatives within the G.O.P. have argued that social policies should be guided by the eternal truths of natural law and that questions about stem cell research and euthanasia should reflect the immutable sacredness of human life.

But temperamental conservatives are suspicious of the idea of settling issues on the basis of abstract truth. These kinds of conservatives hold that moral laws emerge through deliberation and practice and that if legislation is going to be passed that slows medical progress, it shouldn’t be on the basis of abstract theological orthodoxy.

Over the past four decades, free market conservatives within the Republican Party have put freedom at the center of their political philosophy. But the dispositional conservative puts legitimate authority at the center. So while recent conservative ideology sees government as a threat to freedom, the temperamental conservative believes government is like fire — useful when used legitimately, but dangerous when not.

David Brooks makes the point that

suburban, Midwestern and many business voters are dispositional (that is, Burkean) conservatives more than creedal conservatives. They care about order, prudence and balanced budgets more than transformational leadership and perpetual tax cuts. It is among these groups that G.O.P. support is collapsing.

This seems to me to be a long description of the ultimate split between the Free Market conservatives and the Social conservatives.

My question is how this applies to the Movement conservatives in general. Whatever the result, the conservative movement is currently facing a major internal split that is not a route to total political domination of America. The conservative philosophy has failed as a dominant philosophy for America. Instead the liberal philosophy as built into the U.S. Constitution has won.

I think that is what David Brooks is predicting.