A Conservative Condemns E. Coli Conservatism

David Frum is certainly a man who knows which way the wind is blowing. In 1994 he wrote Dead Right, an argument for purer anti-government conservatism and a criticism of the Reagan and Bush administrations which nicely played into the Republican Revolution of 94. In 2003 he published The Right Man, a laudatory account of Bush in the white house before and after 9-11 that rode a tide of pro-bush pro-war jingoism. In early 2004 he published, with Richard Perle, An End to Evil which stands as the most prominent summary of Bush-era neoconservative ideas.

Today, with Republicans in disarray and Democrats united and exuberant he's written a book called Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again.None of this is to say Frum is dishonest. As Keynes said “when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Frum clearly has a unusually strong focus on the fragility of the present state of the political world. As he says in the closing chapter:

“The fact of change is the great fact of human life. The necessity of adapting to change was the impulse that inspired me to begin this book. And the dangers that threaten any institution or party or political idea that fails to adapt—those were the nightmares that drove me to finish.”

So what does a thoughtful conservative think of the modern Republican party? Nothing good. In fact, it could be that the most persuasive and bitter critic of the modern Republican party is none other than the man who coined the phrase “axis of evil.” Don't get me wrong, he's no liberal, but he has come to believe his party is deeply misguided and that the basic Republican program of the past decade—cut taxes no matter what, hate on the gays, and continue an imperialistic policy in the middle east—is fundamentally flawed.

The first point Frum makes is that Republicans' obsession with Ronald Reagan is deeply embarrassing and destructive. Reagan governed in an era where crime was a top concern, run-away inflation was a recent memory, and welfare was, for better or worse, on the minds of many voters (Reagan helped put it there). None of those things are the case any more. Governing by parsing the utterances of a man who's been out of office for twenty years and essentially senile for most of them is deeply absurd. If this book has one message it's that.

Nor is this criticism merely empty words. It's pretty shocking to see a former Bush speechwriter argue that “while many of the courntry's most pressing domestic problems can be traced to government... few of them can be fixed by Reagan-style tax cutting and deregulation.” Try getting your average Republican to admit to that! And it's pretty amazing to hear a man who co-wrote a book described as “a kind of neocon orgy, a Bohemian Grove weekend for militaristic moralists, a chance to get naked and do tribal, Lord of the Flies dances -- 'Invade Iran! Kill Yasser! Drink Kim's blood!'” write that “to reconcile others to American power, that power must be seen to be somehow constrained.”

What's more Frum essentially accepts the basic critique of conservatism as a fundamentally incompetent ideology that has been advanced by, among others, OurFuture's own Rick Perlstein. He writes that “to vindicate our claim to be the party of the nation, we must make clear that we value public service as much as private wealth creation; that we appreciate the duties of government fully as much as we defend the rights of the marketplace.”

He also accepts that conservatives, for all their high minded talk about freedom and small government, have essentially won by exploiting the resentment of middle class white people against less well off groups who have the temerity to try and improve their lot in life. He writes that Democrats have been the party of “those who felt themselves in some way marginal to the American experience: slaveholders, indebted farmers, immigrants, intellectuals, catholics, Jews, blacks, feminists, gays—people who identify with the “pluribus” in the nation's motto” and that, as those groups have become more numerous, the fortunes of the Republican party have declined.

He writes that “Republicans have been reprising Nixon's 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of century,” but that it won't work any more. Fewer Americans get off on beating up on hippies these days and Republicans aren't doing as well as they used to. Frum asks “how many more elections can conservatives win by campaigning against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale?”

The BigCon section of this site has one big idea and it's that an ideology that rejects the role of government in society can't govern well. We've seen it in tainted meat and deadly spinach. We've seen it in lead-laced toys, unsafe bridges, and gaping sink holes. We've seen it in dissembling administration officials and absurd economics. David Frum has a good record of sensing the zeitgeist and the fact that he's sensed the same thing should be more evidence that not only are we right, but voters are starting to agree with us.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future