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David Brooks

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

I’ve recently been reading about Warren Buffett’s father, Howard Buffett, a four-term Republican congressman from Nebraska. He seems to have been a very good father, but his political worldview was predicated on a deep pessimism. He was so convinced that federal spending was ruining the country that he bought a farm so that his family could feed itself while everyone else starved. He predicted that all government bonds would soon be worthless and bought his daughters gold jewelry so that they would have something of value after the dollar became worthless.

His pessimism manifested itself politically in several ways. First, an intense distrust of elites and a penchant for conspiratorial thinking. He believed that Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall had secretly maneuvered the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor in order to drag the United States into war. Second, intense isolationism. A nation on the road to ruin could not afford to be active internationally. Third, political rigidity. He refused to compromise or negotiate with the Democrats, who he thought were destroying the country. He was more willing to lose in Congress in order to make a point than to cut a deal.

Buffett was not alone in thinking this way. The Republican Party in the 1920s, ’30s and early ’40s was steeped in pessimism, and that pessimism showed up as it often does: as nativism, isolationism and protectionism. In 1924, Republicans set strict immigration quotas with the Johnson-Reed Act. As World War II loomed, Senator Gerald Nye urged the passage of several neutrality acts to keep us from exporting arms to warring nations and opposed Lend-Lease to Britain. Senator Robert Taft supported the America First movement before the United States joined the war, and after the war he opposed the Marshall Plan, NATO, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was designed to lower trade barriers.

That version of the Republican Party ended in 1952, when Dwight........

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