Capitulation to Big Government and the Ivy Leaguers - David Brooks’ Historical Revisionism

Today's Whig Party Symbol

Weenie Brooks, is the NY Times and PBS idea of a conservative, who hates the vast "unwashed" constitutional conservatives of the Tea Party. He wants a big Rino and Lib Dem Government to protect him. He certainly doesn't want to get his hands dirty.

How wrong can someone be about history. The Whigs were a divided, barely and opposition party to the Democrats. Most tended to be abolitionists. That was how they eventually became the foundation of the Republican Party. But like one of the most famous Whigs, Henry Clay, Whigs were tough enough to fight duels, opposed the expansion of slavery while he owned slaves (freed them upon his death), but kept trying to compromise. All that did was simmer the pot of Civil War. m/r

David Brooks’ Historical Revisionism | FrontPage Magazine

By Paul Gottfried On February 7, 2014 

As an historian, I‘ve always been struck by how political journalists resort to an inappropriate use of history to sell their pet projects. Advocates of government expansion insist we need a “second New Deal,” as if we’ve wandered away from the much more ambitious planning practiced by Franklin Roosevelt. Actually our federal and state governments are much larger and more intrusive than they were in the 1930s, and the level of government control that our two national parties accept reflects increases in bureaucratic power since the 1960s. Most New Dealers, if they returned from the dead, would be surprised at how government intervention and social engineering, especially in the name of protecting an expanding list of minorities, have taken off.

The latest anachronism I’ve encountered by someone trying to sell government snake oil is the appeal by the New York Times-official conservative David Brooks to the “third ancient tradition” in American political history. In addition to the “liberal tradition that believes in using government to enhance equality” and the non-Brooks conservatives who “believe in limiting government to enhance freedom,” we can now celebrate the Whigs who worked at “enhancing opportunity and social mobility.” Represented by Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and (before he switched to the infant Republican Party) Abraham Lincoln, the Whigs got their start in the 1830s when they “fought the divisive populist Jacksonians” and “argued it is better to help people move between classes than to pit classes against each other.”

The Whigs, according to Brooks, were “interventionist in economics while they were traditionalist and family-oriented in their moral and social attitudes. They believed America should step boldly into the industrial age, even as they championed large infrastructure projects and significant public investments, even as they believed in sacred property rights.” In the name of the Whigs, who dissolved into the Republican Party in the mid-1850s, Brooks wishes to have government “expand early childhood education,” help get “young men wage subsidies so they are worth marrying,” and search for ways “to train or provide jobs for middle-aged, unemployed workers.” How about the government providing Plain Jane with a date in the name of Henry Clay or Daniel Webster?

I don’t know where to begin to correct this appeal to the supposed lessons of the past. The Whigs were certainly not less “divisive” than the Jacksonian Democrats.

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