That Was David Frum’s Week That Was

Yesterday a week ago, on Sunday, March 21, the day Obama’s health-care bill passed the House of Representatives, David Frum posted on his website a long and elaborate blog in which he declared that conservatives and Republicans had suffered their Waterloo. It was the most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s, he wrote, and it was hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster for free-market economics and republican values. For this disaster, conservatives and Republicans had to take the blame because they had followed the most radical voices in their party. There should be no illusions – the health-care bill was here to stay. For this calamity, a possible victory in November was poor compensation.

On Thursday, in San Francisco, David Frum had lunch with Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, of which Frum was an employee at an annual salary of $100,000, with perks. He had great respect for Arthur Brooks. Brooks told him, very politely, that he could only stay with the Institute under certain conditions. David Frum could not accept them, so he resigned. As an explanation, Arthur Brooks told him that the donors to the Institute wanted to have a greater say in how their money was to be spent – clearly not on a man who had openly distanced himself from the radicals, the Tea Party wing of the party. (These are not David Frum’s words.)

On Friday, David Frum described on his blog his ideological journey since he became an intellectual player on the American political scene thirty years ago. This was a journey that had led him to being bashed up by Rush Limbaugh. (These are David Frum’s words.)

His reflections are of interest to those of us who remember his mother, Barbara Frum, with admiration and affection and who find it difficult to comprehend how her gifted son had become a prominent player in conservative American politics.

He arrived in the United States, he wrote, in the crisis years of the late 1970s when inflation was raging, economic growth had stalled, social order seemed to be breaking down, and the democratic West seemed to have lost its nerve and confidence in the struggle against its enemies.

Conservatives had answers to these problems: cut taxes, reduce government, repeal price controls, print less money, jail criminals, trust individuals, rebuild armed forces, strike back against terrorists and hostage-takers.

These ideas were tested, and they worked.

But then David Frum noticed something disturbing. While the congressional victory of 1994 had ceased to produce much in the way of important conservative legislation, it was producing a lot of wealth for individual conservatives. They were moving from the staff offices of Congress to lobbying firms and professional associations.

George Bush narrowly won the presidency in 2000. David Frum was recruited to join the administration as a speech-writer. His initial brief was domestic policy and economics, and it soon become impossible for him to avoid noticing that the administration’s economic policies were not working very well.

Even as it fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it dramatically increased domestic spending (including the first permanent new entitlement program since 1974, the hugely costly prescription drug benefit for senior citizens). Taxes were cut in 2001 and 2003. Big deficits ballooned and a great consumption boom exploded. The stock market and the housing market soared – but median wages stagnated.

Conservative economic policies, which had saved the United States and the other advanced democracies from stagnation in the 1980s, suddenly seemed bereft of answers for the economic challenges of the 21st century.

David Frum thought that too often Republicans were on the wrong side of history. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, they had been fighting to protect the common-sense instincts of ordinary people from elite interference. Now, in the Terri Schiavo euthanasia case, with stem cell research, on gay rights issues, it was the Republicans who were behind the times. To top it all, it was under a supposedly pro-market administration that the United States suffered the worst market failure of the post-war era. That should have sobered the Republicans. Instead, they rallied to Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber.

Disregarding evidence and expertise, he says, Republicans shrugged off warnings of environmental problems. Conservatives stopped taking governance seriously – and so Americans ceased to trust conservatives in government.

David Frum does not think he has changed his mind about fundamental principles. He still champions liberty and individuality, still advocates markets and entrepreneurship, still insists on free trade and open markets. His social preferences remain conservative, and he believes fervently in strong American international leadership.

But he believes that on environmental issues, they have to follow the evidence where it leads – and on social issues they have to take their society as it is. If the world changes, Americans have to change with it. The refusal of so many of his fellow conservatives in the United States to adapt their thinking to facts and realities does not demonstrate their adherence to principle. It demonstrates a frivolous indifference to the responsibilities of political leadership.

With horrible irony, he sees his fellow conservatives in the United States opting out of politics at exactly the moment when they are most needed. The Obama administration, he writes, was careening toward a more expensive and interventionist government, toward reckless spending and destructive taxation. This is where he came into politics 30 years ago, and he will stand again on the same side he stood then. But now as then, his side will only be successful to the extent it is knowledgeable, to the extent it is public-spirited, to the extent that it is based on evidence and research, to the extent that it advocates the greater good rather than the narrow interests and values of one class or one geographic section.

As to his conservative critics? On them, he thinks the most apt verdict was delivered by Niccolo Macchiavelli, 500 years ago: “This is the tragedy of man. Circumstances change, and he does not.”