Between the Mass and the forum, I had lunch with David Frum. His mood was elegiac and chastened. He now realized that, in 2001, Bush had been right and he had been wrong at their first meeting: the Party did need to change, but not in the way Bush went on to change it. "It wasn't a successful Presidency, and that's a painful thing," Frum said. "And I was a very small, unimportant part of it, but I was a part of it, and that implies responsibility." Frum has made his peace with the fact that smaller government is no longer a basis for conservative dominance. The thesis of his new book, "Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again" (Doubleday), whose message Frum has been taking to Republican groups around the country, is that the Party has lost the middle class by ignoring its sense of economic insecurity and continuing to wage campaigns as if the year were 1980, or 1968.
"If Republican politicians quote Reagan, their political operatives study Nixon," Frum writes. "Republicans have been reprising Nixon's 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century. As the excesses of the 1960s have dwindled into history, however, the 1972 campaign has worked less and less well." He adds, "How many more elections can conservatives win by campaigning against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale? Voters want solutions to the problems of today." Polls reveal that Americans favor the Democratic side on nearly every domestic issue, from Social Security and health care to education and the environment. The all-purpose Republican solution of cutting taxes has run its course. Frum writes, "There are things only government can do, and if we conservatives wish to be entrusted with the management of government, we must prove that we care enough about government to manage it well."
This is a candid change of heart from a writer who, in "Dead Right," called Republican efforts to compete with Clinton's universal-health- coverage plan "cowardly." In the new book, Frum asks, "Who agreed that conservatives should defend the dysfunctional American health system from all criticism?" Well—he did! Frum now identifies health care as the chief anxiety of the middle class. But governing well, in conservative terms, doesn't mean spending more money. It means doing what neither Reagan nor Bush did: mastering details, knowing the options, using caution—that is, taking government seriously. The policy ideas in "Comeback" rely on the market more than on the state and are relatively small-bore, such as a government campaign to raise awareness about the dangers of obesity. As with most such books, the diagnosis is more convincing than the cure.
Frum believes that the Republicans need their own equivalent of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, to make it safe for Republican candidates to tell their interest groups, such as evangelical Christians, what they don't want to hear: that they need to mute their demands if the Party is to regain a majority. At lunch, he said, "The thing I worry about most is if the Republicans lose this election—and if you're a betting man you have to believe they will—there will be a fundamentalist reaction. Not religious—but the beaten party believes it just has to say it louder. Like the Democrats after 1968." He added, "A lot of the problems in the Republican Party will not be fixed."
I asked Frum if the movement still existed. "We'll have people formed by the conservative movement making decisions for the next thirty to forty years," he said. "But will they belong to a self-conscious and cohesive conservative movement? I don't think so. Because their movement did its work. The core task was to stop and reverse, to some degree, the drift of democratic countries after the Second World War toward social democracy. And that was done."
As we started to leave, Frum smiled. "One of Buckley's great gifts was the gift of timing," he said. "To be twenty-five at the beginning and eighty-two at the end! But I'm forty-seven at the end."
When I met David Brooks in Washington, he was even more scathing than Frum. Brooks had moved through every important conservative publication—National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard—"and now I feel estranged," he said. "I just don't feel it's exciting, I don't feel it's true, fundamentally true." In the eighties, when he was a young movement journalist, the attacks on regulation and the Soviet Union seemed "true." Now most conservatives seem incapable of even acknowledging the central issues of our moment: wage stagnation, inequality, health care, global warming. They are stuck in the past, in the dogma of limited government. Perhaps for that reason, Brooks left movement journalism and, in 2003, became a moderately conservative columnist for the Times. "American conservatives had one defeat, in 2006, but it wasn't a big one," he said. "The big defeat is probably coming, and then the thinking will happen. I have not yet seen the major think tanks reorient themselves, and I don't know if they can." He added, "You go to Capitol Hill—Republican senators know they're fucked. They have that sense. But they don't know what to do. There's a hunger for new policy ideas."
The Heritage Foundation Web site currently links to video presentations by Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, "challenging Americans to consider, What Would Reagan Do?" Brooks called the conservative think tanks "sclerotic," but much conservative journalism has become just as calcified and ingrown. Last year, writing in The New Republic, Sam Tanenhaus revealed a 1997 memo in which Buckley—who had originally hired Brooks at National Review on the strength of a brilliant undergraduate parody that he had written of Buckley—refused to anoint him as his heir because Brooks, a Jew, is not a "believing Christian." At Commentary, the neoconservative counterpart to National Review, the editorship was bequeathed by Norman Podhoretz, its longtime editor, to his son John, whose crude op-eds for the New York Post didn't measure up to Commentary's intellectual past. A conservative journalist familiar with both publications said that what mattered most at the Christian National Review was doctrinal purity, whereas at the Jewish Commentary it was blood relations: "It's a question of who can you trust, and it comes down to religious fundamentals."
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