Dead Right

...ernment is desirable, but because they have wearily concluded that trying to reduce it is hopeless...

...F rum divides post-Reagan conservatives into three subgroups: Jack Kemp's "optimists," Bill Bennett's "moralists," and Pat Buchanan's "nationalists," slackers all in the war against big government...

...What ails conservatism and the Republican Party is a spiritual emptiness that admits to no single, simple diagnosis...

...And so they have...

...The "dead end" of optimist ideology, Frum writes, is the public-school voucher movement, which will "inflict all the vices of the public sphere upon the private...

...Not even Reagan himself is spared...

...But for all of the time he has spent in American journalism, he remains a Canadian and perhaps does not quite understand this country and its politics as well as he thinks...

...It would take a lot more than an assault on deficit spending to cut through that malaise...

...Conservatives have lost their zeal for advocating minimal government not because they have decided that big govRobert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist, a television commentator, and editor of the Evans and Novak Political Report...

...The great majority of Republicans in Congress and the leading presidential contenders are so terrified by the ghost of the Houston convention that they hesitate to talk about values...

...Because of Finn's activist educational theories, Frum warns, "from the point of view of conservative ideology, we have arrived at a new destination, where the federal government is fully parens patriae, charged with responsibility for, among so many other things, the intellectual development of every resident...

...Today's GOP lawmakers pore over the federal budget with far greater attention than they bestow on Dr...

...He concludes that the overwhelming defeat of school choice by California's voters last year shows that "ordinary Americans seem to recognize this risk better than the conservative intellectual elite...

...You can feel conservative attention wandering away from overgovernment to the newer and zestier topics of race and sex...

...Even the doughty champion of paleoconservatism, Pat Buchanan, has fallen victim to the big-government malady, Frum insists...

...Which leads to his highly disputable premise: Radical criticism of the very idea that Washington should extract and redistribute one-quarter of the nation's wealth has simply petered out...

...Buchanan's policies on trade and immigration are seen as endorsing the views of columnist Sam Francis (described as "Buchanan's friend and idea-man") that DEAD RIGHT David Frum A New Republic Book–Basic Books / 230 pages / $23 reviewed by ROBERT D. NOVAK The American Spectator September 1994 67 conservatives should no longer "dwell on limiting the size of government but rather on the issue of who and what controls government...

...Frum is an adept writer and for the most part has not succumbed to the overheated anxiety over the nationalist right that marred his attack on Buchanan in The American Spectator (July 1991...

...It is odd to read his book at a time when anti-government conservatives are poised to make their most significant electoral gains since 1980...

...Instead of drafting campaign manifestos, conservative intellectuals "should be showing the public the necessary connection between the social pathologies it loathes and fears and the social programs it rather likes...

...Frum concludes with a rueful reworking of Nixon's remark on Keynes: We're all big-government conservatives now...

...That is, once the kinder, gentler operatives who ran the convention had purged it of anti-government rhetoric, the more incendiary speeches were divorced from any overarching policy or philosophy, and could be caricatured by opponents as a venting of hatred for its own sake...

...Frum blames him not only for not tackling big government but also for permitting the left to cement its foothold...

...but [conservatives'] fervor for eliminating the progressive income tax and the redistribution of wealth via Washington has cooled, when it has not disappeared altogether...

...But he also perceives an overriding failing that explains all else...

...Hence the triviality and faddishness of so much of conservative political and intellectual life since the mid-1980s...

...The single-parent family, tumbling educational standards, immigration, crime, ethnic balkanization—the conservative magazines and conservative conversation bubble with ferment over these...

...Bennett is berated for not dismantling the Department of Education when he was secretary and, implicitly, for hiring Chester Finn as an assistant secretary...

...The notorious 1992 Republican convention in Houston is a prime example, testifying "not to the ascendancy of the Right, but to the rebirth of moderate Republicanism...

...Having failed to tame the governmental behemoth during twelve years of Republican rule—and here Frum unfortunately has nothing to say about the treacherous politics of budget-cutting"the conservatives who had lived through that attack of faintheartedness shamefacedly felt that they had better hurry up and find something else to talk about...

...F rum's melancholy prescription for the right is a bit of an anti-climax: In order to revive itself, the conservative movement "just has to step backward from presidential and congressional politics...

...The problem with that something else, Frum argues, is that while social conservatism is potentially more popular than economic conservatism, it can degenerate into mere "posturing" once it is severed from a critique of big government...

...Bennett's index of cultural indicators...

...Today's Republican leaders—asprofessional politicians—can neither relate to the spiritual hunger of their fellow Americans nor understand how bitterly unhappy they are about the state of the nation and its government...

...In other words, forget about playing to popular tastes and sustain a few election defeats...

...see also my exchange with Frum in the August 1991 TAS...

...The author establishes this theme in his opening pages, and devotes much of the book to variations on it—faulting just about everyone in the Republican Party, with the notable exception of David Stockman, who has remained silent in the decade since he betrayed his president and his colleagues by calling their advocacy of big-government containment a sham...

...With the former issue essentially resolved, conservatives have tired of the latter...

...Ultimately, "if minimal government was off-limits—and it was—conservatives found that they did not have anything else of very much weight to say...

...Rather than liberate the innate virtues of the common man with libertarian public policy," Frum writes, "Bennett thinks that conservative politicians and any future conservative government must exhort them to improve their standard of conduct...

...More specifically, Frum relies on Buchanan's 1992 campaign in New Hampshire to describe him as "accepting a federal responsibility for promoting industry...

...While dismissing the hysteria over the "pseudo-menace of the religious right," Frum nonetheless asserts that the Christian activists who have joined Republican ranks aren't psychologically predisposed to taking on the welfare state: "Spend any time listening to the sermons of Pentecostals and Baptists, and it strikes you that they think of God very much in the same way that Great Society liberals thought of government: a distant benevolent agency that showers goodies upon all those who ask, without demanding anything very much in return...

...L ike just about everybody else who worries about the condition of conservatism and the Republican Party, Canadian journalist David Frum, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, has a gloomy diagnosis...

...Frum then indicts Bennett for "a predisposition to use state power" to achieve social goals...

...Frum sees Kemp's enterprise zones and tenant ownership of public housing as at best a truce with big government and at worst an aggrandizement of it—raising suspicions that it is not so much welfare as bureaucratic inefficiency that empowerment conservatives object to...

...Frum's indisputable contention is that the conservative movement of the past half century has been founded on "anti-Communism abroad and radical reduction in the size, cost and bossiness of the federal government...

...While Frumhits the target squarely in regard to Kemp's embrace of big government, the fact is that Kemp is isolated...

...The notion that conservatives and Republicans have chosen to fight about values as a way to avoid the more difficult task of cutting back government turns reality on its head...

...He observes the obvious symptoms: deep and rancorous division, absence of common purpose, and lack of leadership...