Here is D.C. McAllister writing at The Federalist:
David Brooks says it’s time to dispense with the individualism and adopt communitarianism. Balderdash.
The question many Republicans are asking these days is “What do we do about Donald Trump?” Every answer, no matter what position one takes, unleashes a flood of judgments, condemnations, warnings, threats, and predictions of apocalyptic doom.
“People will be judged by where they stood at this time,” David Brooks warns in The New York Times, sounding like an Old Testament prophet bellowing “Woe to you!” from the mountaintop. “Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after for the degradation of standards and the general election slaughter,” Brooks continued. “The better course for all of us — Republican, Democrat and independent — is to step back and take the long view, and to begin building for that.”
The “long view” Brooks suggests looks a lot like a roadmap written by the Democratic Party. Instead of returning to classical liberal principles of individual liberty and free markets and bolstering conservative values of family and faith, Brooks suggests we take a different turn, that the solution lies in discovering a new, more communitarian, feminized, and less competitive path for America because the old one has brought only pain and suffering—pain that has given rise to unconventional presidential candidates like Trump and Bernie Sanders.
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Big Government Destroys Genuine Community
We’re not in trouble because our traditional values and institutions have failed, as Brooks suggests. We’re suffering because they have been abandoned. The progressive movement and a secularized material culture has been working for decades to move individuals toward state dependence and away from traditional communities that play an integral role in developing healthy people—family, church, community schools, and even friendships.
The family unit has been under attack by the state and a morally bankrupt culture that seek to redefine the family, pit children against parents, subvert parental authority, and purposely excise biological fathers and mothers from a child’s life in the name of the “modern family.” Increasingly, children are being driven to become wards of the state, isolated from their organic communal connections and forced into a Borg-like community hive.
Read more: The Federalist
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