Shorter David Brooks: This Nation Needs the Alien and Sedition Acts

David Brooks longs for the Federalist Party and closes with the same kind of elitist fear of the people that helped doom that party after 1800:

The breakthrough, if there is one, will come from the least directly democratic parts of the government, from the Senate or some commission of Establishment bigwigs. It will be enacted when voters realize we need to build arrangements to protect ourselves from our own weaknesses. It will all depend on reviving the republican virtues upon which the country was founded. 

I mean, if the Washington elite were all that mattered, David Brooks would even more Very Serious than he already is!