Trump on 60 Minutes

[Crossless2.0]

Examples?

They think David Brooke is a conservative.

I assume you mean David Brooks.

Well, I also think Brooks is a conservative (note the lower case 'c'). For that matter, so does Brooks. But he's old-school conservative from when there were actually thinkers who represented conservatism, rather than the witless goons who grabbed the megaphone 20+ years ago and have presumed to speak on its behalf since.

Brooks is cut from pretty much the same cloth as Buckley and Kristol (Irving, not Bill). He's obviously read -- and taken seriously -- Smith, Tocqueville, and The Federalist Papers. (I doubt that Hannity or Limbaugh have ever read anything more substantial than their press clippings or market share reports.) He is urbane and cosmopolitan without being a snob. I can't count the number of times I've read his column and found a steady concern for the very people the two parties left in the dust and who finally turned to Trump, of all people, as the guy who cared. Perhaps if the Democrats and the GOP had heeded Brooks all along, we wouldn't have been stuck with a President-elect Trump. 

Brooks is a conservative who has not drunk the Conservative (note the upper case 'c') Kool-Aid that government is nothing other than pernicious -- unless we're talking about feeding the military-industrial complex and the security state, which is a-OK with them and something they have in common with establishment Democrats. Like all true conservatives, he worries about the effect of big government on civil liberties. He demonstrates a healthy skepticism about government efficacy (especially at the Federal level) and favors free markets and entrepreneurship, but he is not mindlessly doctrinaire about it. Government does have a purpose greater than some minimalist libertarian role. He considers the state legislatures to be the proper democratic laboratories for progressive change, a view I am quite sympathetic with. Unfortunately, for all their lip service on that very point, most Conservatives seem to think of state and local government as the place to kill progressive experiments, and then they act outraged when people who are frustrated at the glacial pace of reform and social progress take to Congress and the courts to press their case.

If he is not conservative enough for your tastes, Chad, then tell me who is. Which contemporary pundit passes your litmus test, and on what do you base that conclusion?