One has to give the devil his due and columnist and TV commentator David Brooks is nothing if he is not open and direct about advancing his cause of “national greatness” neo-conservatism. From his lofty perch as the house “conservative” at The New York Times, he shoots straight—right at traditional, Ronald Reagan conservatism.

Back in the 1970s, when Reaganism became popular, top tax rates were in the 70s, growth was stagnant and inflation was high. Federal regulation stifled competition. Government welfare policies enabled a culture of dependency. Socialism was still a coherent creed, and many believed the capitalist world was headed toward a Swedish welfare model. In short, in the 1970s, normal, nonideological people were right to think that their future prospects might be dimmed by a stultifying state. People were right to believe that government was undermining personal responsibility. People were right to have what Tyler Cowen, in a brilliant essay in Cato Unbound, calls the “liberty vs. power” paradigm burned into their minds — the idea that big government means less personal liberty. But today, many of those old problems have receded or been addressed.

Reaganism is no longer relevant. Brooks specifically points to a new Pew poll touted by The Heritage Foundation that shows Americans still buy Reagan’s traditional conservative message that government does not work and even that its regulation does “more harm than good.” But Brooks emphasizes that the poll also shows that limited government is no longer a pressing problem since Americans now also paradoxically think government should be “more active in reducing segmentation and inequality.” That is, they really want more government. Indeed, the polls prove the liberal opposition is more popular than ever.

The Democrats have a 15 point advantage in voter identification. Voters prefer Democratic economic policies by 14 points, Democratic tax policies by 15 points, Democratic health care policies by 24 points and Democratic energy policies by 20 points. If this is a country that wants to return to Barry Goldwater, it is showing it by supporting the policies of Dick Durbin.

Brooks offers a “new paradigm” for (neo)conservatism. “It is oriented less to negative liberty (how can I get the government off my back?) and more toward positive liberty (can I choose how to lead my life?). Goldwater and Reagan were important leaders but they’re not models for the future,” he notes, concluding that positive liberty meets the needs of modern times. What he does not say--or perhaps even recognize--is that same positive/negative distinction is what his openly progressive sometimes debating “opponent” E. J. Dionne defines as the fundamental divide between progressivism and conservatism. Dionne’s influential book “They Only Look Dead” specifically traced the distinction to progressive founding fathers T.H. Green, Leonard Hobhouse and Herbert Croly. Of course, Dionne is correct, so much so that Bill Clinton claimed Dionne’s book was the genesis for his whole idea of a New Democrat revival.

So Brooks’ solution for what he considers the growing irrelevance of conservatism is for it to adopt the opposition’s philosophy. Only it is not so new, even for Brooks. Indeed, the distinction was the basis for his 1997 neoconservative manifesto with William Kristol. Nonetheless, Brooks raises a critical question regarding whether traditional conservatism is passé? The core of his more damning claim is that there are new national and world threats to which old time anti-centralism conservatism has no response.

Today the big threats to people’s future prospects come from complex, decentralized phenomena: Islamic extremism, failed states, global competition, global warming, nuclear proliferation, a skills-based economy, economic and social segmentation. Normal, nonideological people are less concerned about the threat to their freedom from an overweening state than from the threats posed by these amorphous yet pervasive phenomena. The “liberty vs. power” paradigm is less germane. It’s been replaced in the public consciousness with a “security leads to freedom” paradigm.

It is significant that Brooks identifies his solution with childhood fear. His “security leads to freedom” paradigm, he argues, “is a fundamental principle of child psychology” and chides traditional conservatives for their inability to adjust to the new “historical circumstances” and worldview so they can be relevant to popular fears and possibilities. But this insight about “normal, nonideological people” is hardly novel either. It is the old doctrine of Niccolo Machiavelli that people naturally turn from things they fear and towards things they want--and smart politicians manipulate them on both. Take Brooks’ “new” global warming threat. It appears so frightening and so far in the future--and perhaps not in the future at all—that it is the perfect “problem’ for progressive Machiavellian experts to “solve.” European progressive leaders voted overwhelmingly to enforce the Kyoto Treaty—but energy use and emissions keep going up and no one seems to care as long as the politicians keep soothing the fears.

The historical circumstance that should frighten progressives is that their positive welfare state—which is inherently centralized--cannot solve modern problems. It cannot manage Katrina, or prevent 9/11 or the Oklahoma City or Virginia Tech massacres, or run the war in Iraq, or veterans hospitals, or banks or securities firms or even how to handle its own staff firings. Does not this abject failure on critical issues suggest the “stultifying state” is still the major problem? To hide this inconvenient fact, smart Machiavellians present “amorphous” problems in their stead. Islamic extremism is a real problem but every expert knows Muslims have to solve it. The U.S. needs to protect itself as best it can in the meantime and be ready for quick military ins-and-outs when crises occur but the U.S. cannot solve it, as Middle East expert Daniel Pipes emphasizes, including in this issue.

Nuclear proliferation, global competition and social segmentation are equally unsolvable and deserve the same measured and realistic response, not hot rhetoric to soothe the children. As far as managing the economy, politics keeps getting in the way. The government just mandated ethanol in gasoline that not only has fouled every marine engine in sight, including my own, and upped costs for all Americans, it has more grievously increased fuel and food costs in the developing world, amplifying misery for the poor for everything from Mexican taco shortages to increased burdens reaching markets in rural Indonesia. But the real problem with these amorphous matters is that they take attention from real problems.

There is an impending aging and child-dearth crisis facing the west that is exacerbating an explosion in seniors’ entitlement costs that will bust future budgets and lead to bankruptcy and world economic chaos. The Trustees of Medicare and Social Security have just issued their annual report conclusively documenting the facts. Yet, good “child psychology” says to avoid the problem and politicians are doing so very successfully. Only art infringes on adult sensibilities, which Christopher Buckley has attempted in a novel that just might pierce the childish culture. His heroine Cassandra Devine is so obsessed with the coming entitlement bankruptcy that she builds a popular movement among the young to create incentives for seniors to commit suicide to cut costs. While his solution may be a bit extreme, the economic columnist Robert Samuelson is serious that a significant backlash from the next generation is inevitable if something is not done. The young simply will not accept taxes increased by up to 50 percent so they can live in stagflation while seniors play golf.

The aging/child-dearth/entitlements crisis has been my obsession from the first issue of ConservativeBattleline. I even used the term Cassandra Devine about myself in an even earlier Conservative Political Action Conference speech. Whatever, a crash is inevitable and so-called conservative Republicans have led the charge not for reforming entitlements—except for a short effort on Social Security--but for increasing them. The compassionate conservatism praised by Brooks led to a Medicare prescription drug bill that increased the unfunded liability for entitlements 150 percent higher than that of all of Social Security’s.

The Cassandras of the world need not despair, however. The Democrats may ride to the rescue. After all, early in his presidency, Bill Clinton went to Franklin Roosevelt’s ancestral home and pledged to take responsibility for solving the financial problems with his hero’s Social Security programs. Today, it is a Democrat Representative—Tennessee’s Jim Cooper—who is one of the very few of either party talking to adults:

Democrats have a rare opportunity to buck the bad habits of the incumbency party with our new majorities in Congress. If we choose to enact the stale economic platform of our predecessors, we do so at our own peril, and of our children’s. If on the other hand, we begin to speak honestly about the large problems facing the U.S. economy, perhaps votes will keep us around long enough to fix them.

Cooper specifically reveals what no politician will admit, that entitlement spending dominates the rest of the federal budget they pretend is the whole ballgame and that by the time the U.S. reaches the paper budget “surplus” in 2012 they brag so much about, Standard and Poor’s will reduce Treasury bonds from their AAA rating for the first time since the Depression and Stagflation. As the entitlements hit full swing in 2025, their rating will be at junk bond status. The next president, likely a Democrat, will find the staggering costs of spending and raising funds increasingly difficult to ignore. Hillary just might speak to Eleanor Roosevelt again and begin working to save her favorite progressive programs and avoid catastrophe.

Once entitlements have been tamed, Brooks’ neoconservative Republicans can come back into power and vote once again for more “positive” government to appease childish fears. They might be in for a surprise, however. To avoid provoking the anger of the young by imposing choking taxes, the Democrats may just have transferred most other domestic programs to the states and localities to free funds to help pay for the remaining entitlements--frustrating the neo-national greatness crowd but revitalizing federalism and thus reorienting the future right in the direction Ronald Reagan wanted.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.