The blindness of David Brooks

I usually enjoy David Brooks' remarks in the New York Times and on NewsHour, because he shows how conservatism can be at least somewhat sane. Comparing him to any other conservative commentator in the news in print or on television really shows you how ridiculous the party's public intellectuals have become.
This is because Brooks' conservatism is mostly grounded economically: social issues for him as well as the role of the government tend to be inflected through a relationship of governance to the requirements of a free market. In a column a few weeks ago, Brooks tried--unsuccessfully I think but better than any of the other conservative commentators out there now--to ground this view in the writings of Burke. But his view of things tends more to hearken back to a fiscal conservatism of the mid-twentieth century and tie in well now with many of the economic conservatives like Fukuyama and those in the law and economics crowd.
It is here, though, that Brooks becomes blind. Because he consistently is a conservative outlining critiques of values-based conservatism, he cannot successfully engage with questions of value except through economics or the role of the government engaging in economic issues. But what happens with this is not an inability to talk about questions of values, but rather a filtering of questions of values through economics so that they seem to fizzle away and not really be issues at all. This is what he does today in his column on Reagan's 1980 campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered sixteen years prior. Reagan got up and spoke of how he favored "states' rights"--insensitive to how that might sound to a group of people who used the issue of states' rights to oppose, sometimes through acts of murder, the federal attempt to bring civil rights to every state and especially those in the South.
Brooks says, after recounting the facts--which really did need to be done and he should be praised for it:

You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase “states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.
Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators ranging from Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the Reagan administration and is the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” to Kevin Drum, who writes for Washington Monthly, have concluded.
But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.

It is true that the "agitprop version" of the event overlooks the complexity of what happened (which Brooks does recount with fidelity in the case of Bartlett and drum--though, notice he does not speak of his colleague Paul Krugman's column a few weeks ago that makes the much larger claim that conservatism is based upon racism in the South, and is particularly faithful to the complexity of what happened in Philadelphia), but Reagan isn't being slandered as Brooks says because this "complexity," according to him, takes the following form:

He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”
The use of the phrase “states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.
Reagan flew to New York and delivered his address to the Urban League, in which he unveiled an urban agenda, including enterprise zones and an increase in the minimum wage. He was received warmly, but not effusively. Much of the commentary that week was about whether Reagan’s outreach to black voters would work.

That is, Reagan is being slandered according to Brooks because this event is set in a larger context that tries to economically help out African Americans by "increasing the minimum wage" and diverting more funds to schooling. Prior to this quote, Brooks also sets up the economic ways Reagan was trying to court voters.
I'm not saying that Brooks said that the economic program Reagan was outlining is really what he thinks contributes to the "misunderstanding" of Reagan here. I'm saying that throughout the article, the economic pops up as the tantilizing evidence to the contrary that Reagan wasn't a racist. Brooks underlying emphasis upon this is how he really persuades us that the situation was more complex, not by just recounting the events.
Look at how dismissively Brooks utters "Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair." What's more important to him by far is that Reagan "spoke mostly about inflation and the economy." The intention to help these people out is really there, its in the numbers, despite an insensitiveness that borders on racism. The question of values end up getting addressed in the long run by Reagan's fiscal conservatism: it would have been great if he would have encouraged brotherly love, but really he was encouraging it all along if we look at the complexity the right way--that is, economically. Questions of values really just reduce to this.
This is dangerous and what makes Brooks perhaps even more blind than the other conservative hacks out there. By not interrogating values as values and dissolving them into questions of economic policy, which is valueless, or at least safer, less heated, more rational, Books is able to get Reagan off from being a racist. The real question is what he never addresses: was this a racist act? In fact, this question should have been asked precisely because of the context of events. For Brooks, however, the context, because it is "complex" (read: economic), this question never needs to be pursued.