… The most surprising critic of this approach, however, was the former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. “It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster,” he lamented at his site FrumForum. “Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But: (1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November — by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs. (2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.”
In this pessimism, Frum was part of a sizeable minority of conservatives. But in the rest of the column, he crossed a Rubicon of sorts. “At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration,” Frum explains. “No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo — just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.”
The result of this blind ambition?
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or — more exactly — with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother? I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters — but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead …
So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.… As for the response from conservatives, well, let’s let Frum’s wife, the writer Danielle Crittenden, give us a window into their lives (via Huffington Post):
For days I’ve been sitting here in the bunker beside him (and our three dogs), watching the whizzbangs land all around. What is distressing is not the predictable hate mail he has been receiving — and thanks to the internet, he’s been receiving it in hundredfold; we’ve both seen that before. What is distressing (to me, anyway) are the dishonest slurs on his character and integrity by people who know him, and in some cases have known him for many years — truly ugly suggestions that David is motivated by cynicism or sycophancy, or both …
We have both been part of the conservative movement for, as mentioned, the better part of half of our lives. And I can categorically state I’ve never seen such a hostile environment towards free thought and debate — once the hallmarks of Reaganism, the politics with which we grew up — prevail in our movement as it does today. The thuggish demagoguery of the Limbaughs and Becks is a trait we once derided in the old socialist Left. Well boys, take a look in the mirror. It is us now.Frum’s own update was rather more terse: “I have been a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute since 2003. At lunch today, AEI President Arthur Brooks and I came to a termination of that relationship.”
Politico’s Mike Allen was able to get Frum’s fuller account:
David Frum told us last night that he believes his axing from his $100,000-a-year “resident scholar” gig at the conservative American Enterprise Institute was related to DONOR PRESSURE following his viral blog post arguing Republicans had suffered a devastating, generational “Waterloo” in their loss to President Obama on health reform. “There’s a lot about the story I don’t really understand,” Frum said from his iPhone. “But the core of the story is the kind of economic pressure that intellectual conservatives are under. AEI represents the best of the conservative world. [AEI President] Arthur Brooks is a brilliant man, and his books are fantastic. But the elite isn’t leading anymore. It’s trapped. Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained. I think Arthur took no pleasure in this. I think he was embarrassed. I think he would have avoided it if he possibly could, but he couldn’t.“The idea that AEI donors sit down to talk with AEI’s president about who should and shouldn’t be on the staff, or what the staff should write, is fantasy,” insists Charles Murray, a scholar at the institution, writing at the Corner. “David has never seen the slightest sign of anything like that at AEI. He can’t have. He made it up. AEI has a culture, the scholars are fiercely proud of that culture, and at its heart is total intellectual freedom. As for the reality of that intellectual freedom, I think it’s fair to say I know what I’m talking about. I’ve pushed it to the limit.”Others, however, feel that Frum’s comments have the ring of truth to them. “I was fired by a right wing think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush’s policies, especially his support for Medicare Part D,” writes the former Reagan White House adviser Bruce Bartlett, at Capital Gains and Games. “In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC. Now the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the American Enterprise Institute … Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI ’scholars’ on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.”
Bartlett thinks this story is much bigger than the careers of two Republican free-thinkers:
I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn’t already.
Sadly, there is no place for David and me to go. The donor community is only interested in financing organizations that parrot the party line, such as the one recently established by McCain economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin … this is a black day for what passes for a conservative movement, scholarship, and the once-respected AEI.If Bartlett is right, it gives a whole new meaning to Frum’s admonition that “a win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.”
Watching the David Frum saga unfold, culminating with his being fired from the American Enterprise Institute yesterday and essentially purged from the respectable conservative movement, I’m reminded more and more of my old boss, Charlie Peters. Charlie founded The Washington Monthly magazine in 1969, and undertook to reorient a liberal movement that he felt had become hopelessly lost and inward looking. Charlie believed in a liberal vision for society–just not the means by which the Democrats of the 1970s and ’80s were pursuing it. His philosophy became known as neoliberalism. It’s a measure of how out of step Democrats at the time were with popular sentiment that a 1976 Washington Monthly cover story titled "Criminals Belong in Jail" was controversial.
The conservative reaction to Frum’s suggestion that health-care reform is a Republican Waterloo feels uncannily similar. Will David Frum become the conservative Charlie Peters? He certainly shares many of the same attributes–he’s an unfailingly interesting thinker and writer, he’s intellectually honest so far as I can tell, and he’s obviously not afraid to criticize his own side or confront its shortcomings. Frum is practically alone among conservatives in recognizing the importance of growing income inequality and social mobility in American society and wanting to do something about it. He’s also like Charlie in seeming as though he’s going to stick with his beliefs, no matter how unpopular. He’s no gadfly.
Over time, Charlie built a movement. He helped steer the Democratic Party in a better direction. Today his acolytes are everywhere–especially at The Atlantic, where they include James Bennet, James Fallows, Michael Kinsley, and, um, me. Frum, too, runs a publication, FrumForum.com, with a lot of young writers. Someday, Republicans will right the ship, come up with compelling new ideas for the country, and return to power. It isn’t going very far out on a limb to expect that Frum will have a lot to do with that. But that day seems a lot further off even than it did last week.
So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished.
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