David Frum's Comeback, Donald T. Critchlow's The Conservative Ascendancy, and Jacob Heilbrunn's They Knew They Were Right
Mattson, Kevin
COMEBACK: CONSERVATISM THAT CAN WIN AGAIN by David Frum Doubleday, 2008, 213 pp $24.95 THE CONSERVATIVE ASCENDANCY: How THE GOP RIGHT MADE POLITICAL HISTORY by Donald T Critchlow Harvard...
...After all, the reason Frum needs to claim he's on the side of "public service" and the "public good" is because so many conservatives and other citizens have concluded the opposite...
...Frum's optimism about the future of conservatism is unwittingly challenged in Donald Critchlow's The Conservative Ascendancy...
...Consider his take on tax policy: "To accelerate America's rate of growth, we should adopt as our Republican goals a capital gains tax rate of zero, an inheritance tax of zero, a dividend tax rate of zero, and a maximum corporate tax rate of zero...
...ANOTHER PART of the right's history serves us well in this context...
...Ohio was one of the states where Bush's vote increased the very least between 2000 and 2004...
...But then there's this admission, difficult for a conservative hoping that culture warriors will tone things down: "Pro-choice Americans outnumber pro-life Americans...
...making big, utopian promises about future wars and not preparing Americans for the realities of international engagement will lead to disillusionment...
...This is the most manifest form of a contemporary politics of irresponsibility...
...But pro-lifers care about abortion a lot more than pro-choicers do...
...DISSENT / Summer 2008 words "axis of evil"—Frum now shakes his head and performs intellectual acrobatics to explain why the last seven years of Bush's reign shouldn't confuse people about what conservatism really is...
...What makes conservatism so unpalatable today is its inability of its adherents to accept responsibility for the results of their own ideas and the consequences of their political theories...
...When you have to state something like that so explicitly, you've pretty much lost the battle...
...Second Best...
...It should start with attention to consequences, an idea indebted to the American pragmatic tradition...
...Contrary to Frum's wishes, the culture warriors are too important to go away anytime soon...
...Indeed, older neocons like Irving Kristol—despite his own Jewishness—went so far as to accept bizarre alliances with the "Christian right" in order to do so...
...Critchlow reminds readers of Reagan's attempt to depose Gerald Ford in 1976 and seize the candidacy from a sitting president perceived as too centrist and moderate...
...Critchlow sees direct continuity between the New Right and Bush...
...Since 1968, conservatives have blamed liberals for a failed track record—arguing, for example, that the Great Society didn't tackle the problem of poverty and sometimes exacerbated it...
...In the words of New Right leader Paul Weyrich, "We are radicals who want to change the existing power structure...
...Reagan's support from the New Right is important to keep in mind...
...He suggests that these make the neoconservative mind prophetic and absolutist in turn, rather than empirical or pragmatic...
...And who could deny the rise of some high-profile, pro-life Democrats...
...So we have the neoconservatives with their "what if" argument about Iraq or the conservatives who dissociate from—while simultaneously relying upon—the Christian right's activist base...
...He explains: "Obviously, this is not a populist tax agenda...
...Following Irving Kristol's bizarre statement that "there is no 'after the Cold War' for me," Heilbrunn shows how the neoconservative psyche held on to the permanent-war state of mind, even as there was clear evidence that the Soviet Union was undergoing a process of disintegration and liberalization...
...Frum would like Christian conservatives to go away but not bolt the party...
...at the top of society, among the best-educated Americans...
...Second Best...
...and a philosophy that degrades public service and government will result in lousy political leadership...
...We can make this programmatic list our beginning: Cutting the taxes of the wealthy will create deficits that are bad for everyone and will reduce our ability to use government to improve our lives collectively...
...Against Gerald Ford's moderation and his wife's cultural liberalism the New Right coalesced around a "groundswell of grassroots activism...
...Our conservative movement," he writes, "had begun as an intellectual movement...
...voting rating" from the ultraliberal Americans for Democratic Action, "the same as George McGovern's...
...I worked rural Ohio polling stations for the Kerry campaign in 2004, and I can tell you that over and over I heard voters explain they came out for two reasons only: To vote for Bush ("Boosh," in their words) and Issue One, the anti-gay marriage proposal...
...This included struggles against the ERA, bans on prayer in schools, purportedly obscene materials in textbooks, détente (seen as caving into Soviet communism), and abortion...
...This, too, should be added to the list: we don't have to settle for "Second Best...
...The claim that the same-sex-marriage issue tipped Ohio to Bush seems almost certainly wrong...
...Reagan invaded Grenada to show toughness...
...Heilbrunn points out a central conundrum in American politics and intellectual life: Just because an idea is stupid, just because it's been tested against reality and failed, just because it grows unpopular, doesn't mean it won't live on...
...Now there's a winning slogan for Republicans in 2008...
...This doesn't describe a party prone to rethinking or self-scrutiny...
...We need not examine anything as fancy as "unintended consequences" when we can simply analyze pretty easily foreseen consequences...
...As Republicans and conservatives, we should say: We will not accept defeat...
...On-theground activism helped Bush, of the sort that Frum seems leery of now...
...Once a speechwriter to Bush—he coined the famous 108...
...Or that big promises were made about this war, all now deflated...
...A statement like this makes it hard to imagine they'll be mollified by statistics about declining abortion rates among the wealthy...
...Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania as his vice-presidential running mate, a man who received an "89 percent...
...The conservative mind dreads having the historical tables turned on it...
...George W. Bush, whom Frum inexplicably compares to Bill Clinton, ranks as a "middle of the road" president, "far less radical than, say, Ronald Reagan...
...Heilbrunn even suggests that the failures in Iraq might pose as a conservative Vietnam...
...The politics of any future alternative to conservatism must embrace responsibility and realism...
...And although this is very much in the Republican tradition of screwing the poor, is it really a comeback idea...
...Goodbye to all that" now that conservatives flack for the president rather than reassess their own situation and come up with new ideas...
...The Bush coalition," he explains, "was in large part an alliance among white Christians, led by observant evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics...
...Frum's solution to the deficit is to tax consumption...
...Frum wants conservatives to do the impossible: "To vindicate our claim to be the party of the nation, we must make clear that we value public service as much as private wealth creation...
...That's not a bad list of talking points for November 2008...
...DISSENT / Summer 2008 • 111...
...KEVIN MATTSON is co-editor of Liberalism for a New Century (University of California Press, 2007) and author of Rebels All!: A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America (forthcoming...
...Critchlow tells a story of fierce determination, of infrastructure growing around that fierce determination, and of conservatives consistently engaging in a project of purifying the Republican Party and pushing it to the right...
...After telling about the John Birch Society (an organization that believed President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist stooge), the campaign that propelled Barry Goldwater to the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, and other tales of conDISSENT / Summer 2008 . 109 BOOKS servative activism, Critchlow turns to Ronald Reagan...
...Now with the track record of George W. Bush plain to see, conservative intellectuals fear liberals can return the favor...
...The arena for war changed from Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East, but what remained was the "insular nature" of the neoconservative mindset...
...Frum's intellectual acrobatics turn into contortions when it comes to Iraq...
...He's correct that the right has helped change broader cultural attitudes about abortion and marriage...
...Consider the saga of the neoconservatives who form the basis of Jacob Heilbrunn's recent book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons...
...It is the call to ignore the historical record, to wipe the slate clean, as if ignoring the past can be squared with the conservative project of appreciating tradition...
...It's also, he admits, "not an inexpensive agenda...
...As they watch the presidency of George W. Bush tank, they are singing like a chorus in a Greek tragedy: This is not our creation, this is a monster, a head cut off from the conservative body spinning out of control...
...He documents "national trends toward fewer abortions, less divorce, and less promiscuity...
...Neocons could not shed their rigid adherence to anticommunism...
...Among born-again and evangelical Christians, who made up 23 percent of the vote in 2004, 78 percent voted for Bush 1 10 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 and his support of the 'right-to-life' position and marriage for heterosexuals only...
...The neoconservatives have quite possibly not only destroyed conservatism as a political force for years to come but also created an Iraq syndrome that tarnishes the idea of intervention for several decades...
...After all, with the infrastructures they have in place, neoconservatives have a remarkable way of finding generational successors...
...Or with how troubling it would be to ask soldiers to risk their lives for "Second Best...
...Heilbrunn starts with two key features of the neoconservative world: its Jewishness and its fascination with Trotskyism...
...Paul...
...Neoconservatives have always occupied, in Heilbrunn's words, a "claustrophobic mental world...
...Liberals and Democrats keep rerunning Iraq through the Vietnam projector: Either it's a total success or else we have to cry uncle and withdraw...
...Here I can speak from experience, for Frum focuses on Ohio, the state where I live and that handed Bush a victory at the same time that it voted to ban gay marriage...
...This took the New Right wind out of Reagan's sails and promised him defeat...
...We start with a classic statement of declension...
...Where to begin with a statement like this...
...Ford's wife, Betty, was the first and last first lady who supported not only abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment but the legalization of marijuana...
...Its followers thought of themselves less as reformers than as revolutionaries...
...You can say that Bush barely increased his vote in Ohio from 2000 to 2004, but it's fatuous to say that the issue didn't matter in some voters' minds...
...But Bush took on Social BOOKS Security—something Reagan never would have thought of doing...
...The neocons turned their guns on Reagan this time, not the left...
...Comeback" is the contemporary conservative circumvention...
...FOLLOWING THIS, it's hard to take Frum seriously when he says that the anti-gaymarriage initiatives, especially in 2004, didn't help his cause...
...David Frum has joined this litany of dissatisfaction and dissociation...
...The only thing that slowed his momentum in 1976 was when he picked U.S...
...The struggle against the ERA especially united "evangelical Protestants" with "Roman Catholics" and "Mormons," and "taught conservatives that they could win when they mobilized around the right causes...
...We need a strategy of 'second best' for Iraq—a strategy that says that even if we cannot achieve everything we wanted in Iraq, we can achieve enough to enhance our security and advance the fight against terrorism...
...His thesis becomes especially fruitful as he documents the lesser-told story of how neocons drifted away from Ronald Reagan during his second term...
...COMEBACK: CONSERVATISM THAT CAN WIN AGAIN by David Frum Doubleday, 2008, 213 pp $24.95 THE CONSERVATIVE ASCENDANCY: How THE GOP RIGHT MADE POLITICAL HISTORY by Donald T Critchlow Harvard University Press, 2007, 359 pp $27.95 THEY KNEW THEY WERE RIGHT: THE RISE OF THE NEOCONS by Jacob Heilbrunn Doubleday, 2008, 320 pp $26 CONSERVATIVES ARE soul-searching...
...I can hear the chants emanating from the convention in St...
...Frum's rethinking of policy is no better than his historical assessments...
...they want Roe v. Wade to be overturned, not some cultural shifts in attitudes...
...BOOKS And yet: Heilbrunn warns his readers that just because ideas might crash and burn on the fields of war doesn't mean they'll go away...
...He places the onus on Democrats rather than his own side...
...Reagan has assumed mythic and heroic status, especially as conservatives look for a leader to counterpose to Bush...
...Then there are those culture wars...
...This isn't marginal to how they present or argue their beliefs...
...that we appreciate the duties of government fully as much as we defend the rights of the marketplace...
...His alternative...
...That Iraq didn't provide a threat to our national security before the war...
...Frum's act of reinvention and rethinking leads to some bizarre historical revisionism...
...The New Right pioneered direct-mail tactics to get its message out to comrades and raise money...
...he didn't go into one of the most unstable areas of the world and attempt to create a democracy out of a balkanized society held together through years of brutal dictatorship...
...believing political victory at whatever cost is the only thing that matters leads to bitterness and division...
...Thousands of campaign workers were sent to Catholic churches to win support for the president" in 2004, Critchlow documents...
...There is a "sense of embattlement and loneliness, of foes and enemies everywhere, that helps to account for the stridency and militancy of the neoconservatives...
...Meanwhile, younger neocons started their longish march to Iraq...
...We cherish our principles, but our first principle is the public good...
...We did not want a bloated budget, a deficit, a disastrous war, an imperial presidency, a crony style of governance...
Vol. 55 • July 2008 • No. 3
