David Frum and the End of Conservatism

Is Conservatism, as a movement, over?

You might get that impression from reading David Frum in Cato Unbound, a website sponsored by the Cato Institute that describes itself as "a state-of-the-art virtual trading floor in the intellectual marketplace, specializing in the exchange of big ideas."

Okay, I never claimed that these guys weren't incredibly fucking pretentious.

But forget the pompous phraseology. What do they think is "the big idea" now?

According to Frum, the big idea might be that conservatism is a movement whose time is over.

I think it's possible that in retrospect we'll believe that the worst thing that could have happened to the conservative movement was the "election" of George W. Bush to the White House in 2000. They virtually anointed him as their nominee in 1999 because they thought he was their best shot at recapturing the White House after eight years of Clinton and Gore. They didn't look too closely once they decided he was the most electable Republican they could find.

They thought he was one of them. They thought he would implement their agenda. They thought government would shrink on his watch. They were wrong on all three counts.

Bush certainly fooled Frum, who wrote a fawning book about him whose intent was seemingly to carve Bush's face onto Mount Rushmore while he was still in office. Now, it seems, he feels somewhat differently about the man he served under and whose boots he once licked so assiduously.

"... George W. Bush," Frum writes, "swept to a crushing triumph by campaigning as a “compassionate conservative” opposed to budget-cutting and committed to maintaining Medicare and Medicaid in more or less their existing form. In September 1999, he condemned congressional Republican attempts to curb the Earned Income Tax Credit as “balancing their budget on the backs of the poor.” In the following general election, Bush committed himself to adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

At the time, these maneuvers looked to many Republicans like wise and necessary adjustments to political reality. And since Bush had also committed himself to broad tax cuts, free trade, and Social Security reform, many gambled that the his self-described “different kind” of conservatism would nonetheless balance out as a favorable sequel to Goldwater-Reagan-Gingrich limited government conservatism.

This assessment has obviously proven wrong."

But Frum towards the end of his article offers up an even more startling possibility:

"Sometimes intellectual movements are called to life to save their countries at a time of challenge—and then gradually fade away as their work is done, as the Whigs faded away in the 1850s or the Progressives after the First World War. It may be that the future of conservatism is to recognize that it belongs to the past."

Has the political pendulum started to swing away from the Republicans? And if so, what does this mean for the Democrats, who have been playing defense for so long that they might be hard-pressed to say exactly where they stand or what they stand for?

Will the pendulum swing to the hard left in the wake of the five-year fiasco (to date) that is the Bush Administration? If so, Democrats better start doing some serious thinking, because in January of 2007 they might have control of Congress without having a clue what to do with it.

And that would really suck.

Tom Moran