David Brooks odd column yesterday reveals how conservative thinking has shifted on "brown-skinned" people. Recall that Brooks applauds Wolfowitz for suggesting that people in the Middle East want to be free. Brooks echoes statements of George W. Bush:
Some of the debate really center around the fact that people don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing and free. I strongly disagree with that. I reject that, because I believe that freedom is the deepest need of every human soul, and, if given a chance, the Iraqi people will be not only self-governing, but a stable and free society.
(George Bush, Aug. 14, 2004 press conference)
But, as I suggested yesterday, "brown-skinned" people's desire for freedom has been evident at least since Mahatma Gandhi marched to the shore of Gujarat and picked up a handful of salt.
But for Brooks and Bush, pre-2004, that was just the talk of leftist loonies (like Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King, Jr.), not American patriots. Isolated in their information cocoons, Brooks and Bush didn't hear it. So that thought comes to them today like a revelation.