Posted on 09/03/2010 6:34:18 AM PDT by EternalVigilance
David Frum’s blog post connects his dismissal from AEI with Brink Lindsey’s and Will Wilkinson’s departures from Cato. In the post, Frum makes some important and well-articulated points about the GOP’s lack of direction and what a Republican majority could yield:
We are likely soon to have a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, maybe the U.S. Senate too. And what will that majority do? The answer seems to be: They have not a clue. Unlike the Republican House and Senate majorities of 1994, unlike the Republican Senate majority of 1980, these new majorities will arrive with only slogans for a policy agenda. After staging a for-the-record vote against Obamacare, and after re-enacting the Bush tax cuts, it will be policy mission accomplished.
There’s little other policy inventory, because the think tanks have not done their proper work. Without a think tank agenda, the new majority will rapidly decline into a brokerage service for K Street.
After the GOP lost its majority in 2006, a leading think tanker said to me: “Somehow I always thought we’d get more done before we became completely corrupt.” How much will we get done next time given the poverty of our think tank work over the past half decade?
This is one of my concerns, and the GOP’s recent courting of Wall Street and hedge funds leaves me plenty worried.
But I must say, Frum’s concerns about purges are a bit rich. Frum writes:
But in the Lindsey-Wilkinson case, we confront the problem of the closing of the conservative mind in its purest form….
The waters are surging in the conservative world, and conservative institutions must either ride the wave or be swamped. But if wave-riding is all that these very expensive institutions are doing, who needs them?…
The right-of-center world is poorer for the dessication of the institutions that used to act as the right’s brains.
Perhaps Frum has learned a lesson in the past seven and a half years, when he was the one doing the dessicating; he was the one trying to spur the wave and tell everyone on the Right to get on board with the party line or be damned; he was the one who saw an open mind as a sign of treason.
David Frum was the one who wrote this about those conservatives who dared oppose the invasion of Iraq:
There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen.
They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.
War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.
I was one of those conservatives who supposedly turned my back my country by opposing a war based on bad intelligence and bad foreign policy. More to the point, my boss at the time, Bob Novak, was branded in Frum’s purge article as a “defeatist,” a “terror-denialist” (because he suggested al Qaeda was a greater threat to Americans than Hamas was), and “unpatriotic.”
Frum is very correct that the GOP and the conservative movement is in danger of taking control of the car with no idea how to steer. I just hope David Frum’s current worries about rigid dogma reflects a lesson learned rather than a rank lack of self-awareness.
They know how to steer alright and it will be 180 degrees from are current course.
I'm really tired of both sides wanting to do somthing. Just leave me alone!
Well, a couple of questions naturally arise from your comment. First, who is “they,” and second, will “they” just steer us towards a different set of hazards?
An understandable viewpoint.
I purge a David Frum every morning. Sometimes two.
For the record, I don’t think very highly of the judgment of either Carney or Frum, to put it mildly. I just think this article offers some amazing insight as to how clueless these Republican insiders really are. The admission that they have no real policy agenda or vision is very telling.
Hey Dave, let’s try gridlock for a while, see how that goes...
Would seem that articulating a solid plan would be giving the media a club to beat you over the head with during the campaign. Better to play close to the vest like Zero did and announce you plans after the election is over.
With a hostile media this is a good strategy.
Well Frum can kiss my ass after the way he and his ilk treated Palin in 2008. And National Review along with those other “brains of the right” can go wherever it is that Frum went unless and until they get over their weird love of the anti-conservative Mitt Romney.
The rantings of an out of touch RINO.
Wow. The whole house must stink.
Yep.
we want to undo!!!!
Troubling fact is the lack of leadership in the GOP...currently.
...And I should add, that the intelligentsia tried to force-feed Romney to us, we puked it back up, and we were left with Juan McCain.
so we need new intelligentsia anyway, so I really don’t give a crap if these institutions get with the new program or crumble into dust.
This is a hostile takeover.
David, to borrow a phrase from the poseur-in-chief, your vision of conservatism is what has led the GOP into the ditch. We don't need you to tell us how to drive out of it. Senator DeMint and Congressman Pence will be given the wheel and they know exactly what they're doing, thank you very much. Just run along and get out of the way. It's clear that it is going to be too wild of a ride for you and your wobbly co-horts who Iowahawk has described so well ....weekly confabulation of like-minded conservative thinkers at the old family Montauk estate. Dame Peggy Noonan was there as always, along with the vivacious Kathleen Parker and those two mighty Davids of conservative intellect, Frum and Brooks.
I am anxious to see what their agenda is. Sure, extend the tax cuts but unless they are going to get real on spending reductions across the board (the reality of fiscal conservatism.....) then they will waste the opportunity nd all will be lost.
I’m down with the others. Stopping the Obama agenda is plenty good enough for now, until real leadership shows up.
“Somehow I always thought we’d get more done before we became completely corrupt.” How much will we get done next time given the poverty of our think tank work over the past half decade?”
How much did the founders rely on think tanks for their vision of government?
If we do get true conservative majorities in both chambers just ending this reaching across the aisle bipartisan nonsense along with some serious rollbacks will be a huge victory.
It’s gonna take a while to undo the damage.
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