In responding to David Brooks’ disappointingly shallow column in the New York Times, Yuval Levin gets it exactly right:

As I see it, the basic idea is to apply conservative principles and ingenuity to a broader range of problems than we have been used to thinking about—to think in concrete policy terms about the worries of American families, and offer concrete conservative proposals for reforming our governing institutions. These need to be extensions of conservative successes in the past, like tax and welfare reform: applications of our basic view of the world to the problems of the day. This kind of reformism is the conservative tradition, not a substitute for it.

This sits a lot better with your humble Blog Goliard than Brooks’ argument, which seem to be that conservative principles have somehow gone past their sell-by date, and need to be “modernized”…in the manner of (God help us) David Cameron.

I shall let Peter Hitchens describe what the Cameron ascendancy looked like:

The Tory Party had been put into receivership. Its supposed owners - those who voted for it and supported it - had lost control over it.

The ‘Centre-Left’ establishment, Britain’s permanent government of media types, politicised moneybags and their approved pundits, had taken over, and their task was to make it as unconservative as possible, as quickly as possible.

Cameron’s tenure as Tory leader should serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when you let PR people take the helm: you get the sort of “modernization” which asks, in response to any issue, not “what is the best solution?” but “what is the most modern thing to do?” It should go without saying that such clueless chasing after what is trendy and new is unseemly for conservatives…and would be even if we weren’t bad at it. (Which we are, in the manner of a superannuated youth minister making painful attempts to be “relevant” and connect with the youngsters.)

Along with the many reasons that “modernizing” and “moving with the times” is a bad idea generally, it is particularly unwise for the Right because, for a very long time in so very many areas, the movement of the times has been in a Leftward direction. To be on the Right is to—as as wise man once said—stand athwart history, yelling Stop. And that struggle takes place within as well as without the Republican Party—and within many other organizations that may prove amenable to conservatism, but are also forever susceptible to the working of O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”

I also pick up a whiff of backwards PR thinking in Brooks’ call to “appeal more to Hispanics, independents, and younger voters.” Maybe he simply means that we need to find new and better ways to communicate what we believe to these people, and that of course is fine and much needed. I fear, however, that he actually means we need to first try and figure out what these people believe (presuming, as liberals do, that all members of a group like “Hispanics” think alike), and then change our principles accordingly.

That does not comport well with your humble Blog Goliard’s understanding of what principles are, and are for.