Modern Whiggery

David Brooks declares himself a Whig in his latest column, contrasting himself with both progressives -- even though the "Whig theory of history" is the epitome of progressive thought -- and libertarians. Unlike progressives, whose goal (Brooks claims) is equality, and libertarians, whose goal is freedom, the Whigs' ideal is social mobility. As Brooks defines it, "Whigs seek to use limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility" by investing in infrastructure, public education, "public-private investments" and "character-building programs." Make what you will of it, but he doesn't include protectionism among the Whig virtues. Historically, he traces American Whiggery back to Alexander Hamilton and sees its influence persisting at least as late as the early career of Theodore Roosevelt before it "disappeared from American life" until showing signs of fresh life in our time. Where did Whiggery go? It receded, we can infer, when the American left rejected entrepreneurial standards of living and the American right, freshly fearful of the state, preferred to have families and churches build character. Again, if you acknowledge protectionism as a hallmark of Whiggery, you could see the Trump movement as the real revival, but Brooks, a diehard NeverTrumper, prefers to look elsewhere for signs of life. He finds them in small towns visited by the author James Fellows where communities have come back from industrial decline through the leadership of "business leaders who were both entrepreneurial and civically minded." I suspect that Brooks finds President Trump and his kind insufficiently civic-minded to qualify as Whigs, but I also suspect that Brooks will find modern Whiggery a tougher sell on the left, where people are perhaps more likely to see "character building" and entrepreneurial values as contradictions in terms. Trumpism threatens to provoke a doubling-down, at least, on leftist rejection of whiggish premises, while Brooks doesn't indicate what a Whig-left dialogue would sound like, if he anticipates such dialogue at all. But unless his neo-Whigs reach out to the left in some way, their replacing the Trump movement is unlikely to resolve our political impasse. Maybe Brooks thinks the Whigs can take over without the left or its constituents, but Trump has already won without them, and look where we are.