Conservatism and Individualism

Joseph Loconte

In a recent New York Times column entitled “The Social Animal,” David Brooks took the Republican Party to task for touting policies that cater single-mindedly to individuals and their solitary choices. He cited the work of cognitive scientists, sociologists, and geneticists, whose research suggests the importance of social networks and institutions to human flourishing:

“What emerges is not a picture of self-creating individuals gloriously free from one another, but of autonomous creatures deeply interconnected with one another. Recent Republican Party doctrine has emphasized the power of the individual, but underestimates the importance of connections, relationships, institutions and social filaments that organize personal choices and make individuals what they are.”

Although Mr. Brooks declines to mention it, the idea that “decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context” is not exactly a news flash for people of faith. It is an insight reinforced across the pages of the Bible. Man is a social animal, believers would argue, because he is made in the image of a personal and relational God. Politically speaking, yes, the column is a warning shot for the Republican Party. The “leave me alone” coalition—including fiscal hawks and establishment Republicans—mostly ignores the social context of problems such as poverty, racism, and family breakdown. The rhetoric of the libertarian wing of the Party can sound as self indulgent and atomistic as any child of Woodstock.

Nevertheless, Mr. Brooks seems oblivious to the social—and moral—importance of policies that are central to the conservative approach to government. He derides, for, example, the Republican Party’s support for school vouchers to address the problems in public education. “Schools are bad,” he says. “Throw a voucher.”

The condescending tone is regrettable. Maybe the capacity for empathy diminishes as the chardonnay consumption increases amid New York’s media glitterati. It shouldn’t: There are millions of poor and middle-class families whose children are marooned in lousy public schools. They cannot afford to send their children to private schools or to live in leafy, upscale suburbs where a quality education is more easily accessible. Voucher programs offer these kids not only the chance to escape a failing school and attend an academically rigorous one. Because most private schools are linked to religious institutions, they are more inclined than public schools to bind children and their parents to a larger community of families who share their values. School vouchers make it more likely that more children will be grounded in a network of healthy social relationships—the very thing Mr. Brooks cares so much about.

Mr. Brooks complains that the Republican Party is “locked in the old framework” of individualist thinking. But he fails even to acknowledge the Bush Administration’s eight-year, multi-agency effort to enlist community and faith-based organizations to confront our social problems, from drug abuse to youth crime. “That language of community, institutions and social fabric has been lost” among Republicans, he says. Nonsense. The premise of this Republican initiative is that individuals need the help of caring communities—much more than they need the crude, bureaucratic, and sterilized “assistance” of the secular state. While most liberals and Democrats have sneered at the faith-based initiative, religious organizations have been helping tens of thousands of needy people in communities across the country. They accomplish this, in part, by connecting the poor and vulnerable to strong families, churches, charities, and neighborhood groups of all kinds.

None of this may amount to a sea change in the Republican Party. But it’s a good distance from the caricature offered by Mr. Brooks—and from the liberal alternatives that treat individuals not as “social animals,” but as pets in the government play pen.

Fodder, Public Square, Society, Joseph Loconte, Thu 18 Sep 2008