Frum hasn't ignored practical realities-- he's actually much more in tune with them than Jeffery Hart. Look at Hart on Roe vs. Wade. He believes against all the polling that a vast majority of the American electorate is against any and all limits upon abortion and that Roe vs. Wade, despite being a technical overreaches, was a pragmatically grounded decision-- that
..Combined with Casey, however, it did address the reality of the American social process.
His analysis is utterly fact free and his conclusion demonstrably wrong, as anyone who has followed the abortion through Free Republic knows(as demonstrated by O'Sullivan's dissecting of Hart below). In fact, limitations on abortion such as waiting periods and parental notification are broadly popular and other first world Western nations, which undrwent the same women's rights revolution as the United States, are in fact far more restrictive of it than America is.
Hart is a fine literary critic and intellectual historian of the idea the created Western civilization. However, as his historical reflection comes closer to the present day, his vision blurs significantly. Therefore, his take on the modern conservative movement should be highly suspect to any conservative paleo, neo or otherwise. For example, take his notion that William James is the paradigmatic philosopher of American conservatism, as he claimed in this article in the Wall Street Journal's American Conservatism series:
For the things of this world, the philosophy of William James, so distinctively American, might be the best guide, a philosophy always open to experience and judging by experience within given conditioner's experience pleasurable or, more often, painful, but utopia always a distant and destructive mirage.
Hart's belief that William James is the paradigmatic philosopher of American conservatism is so deeply mistaken as to be absurd. Not Utopian? James thought the Olympics could serve as a replacement for war as a means of setting differences. As a cosmopolitan pluralist who upheld the idea that truth is nothing more than what works for you, James was anything but conservative--- a fact noted by those who knew, in particular his brother Henry (who was deeply conservative).
http://www.opinionjournal.com/ac/
Read Frum's current criticsm of the Bush administration and even Mike Pence on immigration
http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2NmNDQ5NzVhMjUzNGU1NDllYWYxMzczM2I1N2JhNjk= . One may take issue with aspects of the "Unpatriotic" article, but Frum is far from an ideologue who takes a position on an issue without due study on it, as Hart is I'm sure Hart's history of National Review is well done in many ways. However, at heart Hart is just what he decries and worse-- in denying the natural law at its most basic level, he has become (assuming he was ever anything else) what Russell Kirk called a "chirping sectary". He is well studied in the history of Christianity and Greek philosophy, and recognizes their current importance, but has forgotten why they remain important--- that the recognition of a right to life is not drawn from the Jacobins (as Hart claims)but from the finest, most humane traditions that followed in the footsteps of Hippocrates and Christianity. It's no wonder that another chirping sectary, Andrew Sullivan, readily finds solace in Hart as a kindred spirit
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_12_25_dish_archive.html#113578707332376987
while John O'Sullivan, by virtually anyone's estimation a real conservative when compared to Andrew Sullivan, does not. O'Sullivan quickly demolishes Hart's shallow attack on the pro-life movement:
Jeff's description of the Right's attitude to Roe as "utopian" because it simply is not going to be repealed, for instance, seems to me questionable on two grounds. First, it is surely wrong to use "utopian" as a synonym for politically unrealistic or difficult. The point about utopia is that it doesn't work even when it works--utopias produce perverse results even when they are successfully imposed. Would overturning Roe produce more abortions? I don't think so. Second, opposing Roe might not succeed in the sense that it will be repealed entirely but it might well result in more restrictions being placed on the abortion right. Indeed, that seems to be happening, albeit with agonizing slowness. And if that trend continues, the actual number of abortions might not be very different than if Roe were repealed since, as others have noted, prohibiting something rarely eliminates it entirely... ...Whenever I read something along the lines of what Jeff Hart has just written about the pro-life cause, I find it helpful to recall the words of T.S. Eliot: "There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.
I agree with you that there are different sorts of "neo-conservatives". There are also different sorts of "paleo-conservatives". I would suggest that Hart is neither; removed from his academic specialty, in which he still does good work, he is not a conservative at all.
I recommended Hart's book to KC Burke, because he was interested in the history of the conservative movement, not because I agreed with Hart on abortion or William James or anything else. I don't agree with him about such things, but he was around in the 1950s and 1960s when the conservative movement was coming together, so his views on the history of conservatism may be of interest.
It was not my desire to present a "Hart Good, Frum Bad" contrast, and that should have been clear from a reading of my post. But I'm not so sure that Frum looks that good in comparison to Hart. Hart's tried to bridge conflicts on the right, at least until recently perhaps. Frum's made a career out of pouring gasoline on brush fires and making conflicts worse.
As a pundit Frum's had a lousy record. He's pretty much admitted that he was wrong immigration, wrong about compassionate conservatism, and wrong about some other important things. Apparently, he's also changed his mind on abortion. Of course, there's always a self-serving element to Frum's criticisms of bad policies that he once supported.
Whatever Jeffrey Hart was right or wrong about, he's at least had the courtesy to keep a relatively low profile. One moderately controversial WSJ article in forty years isn't much. "Chirping sectary" Frum just can't help making a spectacle of himself. Anybody can be wrong sometimes, but those who crave the limelight as much as Frum does inevitably get things wrong more than other people.