Dead Right

A fortnight ago Josh Marshall recommended his ‘two best political books’: Michael Lind’s Up From Conservatism (1996) and David Frum’s Dead Right (1994). That David Frum? Off to library went I. (And checked out Lind, too. Pretty good.) I can see why Marshall finds Frum’s book … interesting. Its thesis is clearly stated in the final chapter’s final paragraph:

“Conservatives suffer a very different political problem from liberals these days. Avowed liberals have a difficult time winning power in this country; avowed conservatives do not. You no longer get far in public life by preaching that the poor are poor because someone else is not poor, or that criminals can be rehabilitated, or that American troops should get their orders from the United Nations. There’s no liberal Rush Limbaugh. But exercising power – that is a very different business. When conservatism’s glittering generalities, “you are overtaxed,” turn into legislative specifics, “you must pay more to send your kid to the state university,” we run into as much trouble in midsession as the liberals do at election time. Twelve years of twisting and struggling to escape this snare have just entangled us ever more deeply in it, until we have arrived at the unhappy destination this book describes. Is there a way out? Only one: conservative intellectuals should learn to care a little less about the electoral prospects of the Republican Party, indulge less in policy cleverness and ethnic demagoguery, and do what intellectuals of all descriptions are obliged to do: practice honesty, and pay the price.” (p. 205)

Frum’s conception of liberals as unhappy until there’s a paroled murderer and UN bluehelmet on every corner – is subject to doubt. But we pass over in silence; the man, to his credit, does not mince words about the faults of his party. Chapter 2 is about the hideousness of Houston, 1992 (the Rep Nat. Conv.): “Wall to Wall Ugly”. Chapter 3 is “The Failure of the Reagan Gambit”, i.e. how Reagan cut taxes but failed to trim the budget, thereby generating deficits that became the business of Democrats to fix. Chapter 4: supply-side economics is not credible. Chapter 5: Bill Bennett is not credible. Chapter 6: Pat Buchanan is the antipodes of credible. Chapter 7, “the Pseudo-Menace of the Religious Right”, is a thoroughly unconvincing apologia, yes. But Chapter 8, “1996” concludes bluntly, as per above.

I read the book with considerable care, not just for the history lesson – indeed I learned a thing or two - but because I was genuinely curious what Frum thinks conservatism looks like in all its glorious and unalloyed philosophical ideal purity, scoured clean and purified of blemishes, flaws, errors, compromises, distortions due to human weakness, money, K Street, the usual suspects. This question interests me, as per recent posts.

Also, many months back I went on a multi-post tear into the NRO. (Goldberg and the Derb, specifically.) What impressed me then was the lack of discernable political philosophy. To adapt the great conservative Carlyle: seldom have I seen someone execute such a shallow dive into such deep water and emerge so muddy. Day in, day out.

I won’t rehearse my gripes of last year. Go read if you care to. The posts hold up OK, which is more than I can say for most of my political posts from last year. My compass is evidently twitchy and unreliable. Wouldn’t advise anyone else to use it. But I do find the following piece of simple woodcraft has its rugged employments: figure out which side of the trees the NRO is growing on. Then head dead-straight in the opposite direction until you hit civilization. (There are honorable exceptions to this rule.)

As I was saying, I read Frum to find out whether he could refute my generally bad impression of the philosophical state of the National Review’s specific brand of conservatism. On the strength of Marshall’s recommendation, and Frum’s evident willingness to take his colleagues to task, I was prepared to be impressed by the rigorous and principled quality of the man’s views, even if I did not share them. At least I was prepared to give the man a fair shake. And I have been mightily disappointed. And this would be a good point to announce and clearly label for what it is the rather heavy-handed rhetorical device I intend to employ throughout the rest of this post. I am going to attribute rather outrageous views to Frum, not because I actually think he holds them but because I think he does NOT. These outrageous views are the views he WOULD hold if, perchance, he upheld and investigated only the most immediate ramifications of the bits and snippets of philosophy he espouses. My accusation, then, is this: the man thinks he has a conservative philosophy; it seems to me he does not.

And this post is too damn long, I’m warning you. Just started typing and didn’t stop. It’s probably pretty approximate at points. Which is bad. Oh, well. Here goes. Carpe diem and caveat emptor.

Let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start):

“Since it’s formation in the early 1950’s, the intellectual movement known as American conservatism has stood for two overarching principles: anticommunism abroad and radical reduction in the size, cost, and bossiness of the federal government at home. Anticommunism has lost most of its zest, for the time being anyway. The bossiness of government might have seemed to be an issue with staying power, but conservatives have tiered of it all that same. The country’s leading conservative politicians and intellectuals may attack this or that ridiculous feature of overweening government, they may propose this or that more or less libertatian alternative to President Clinton’s plan to reorganize the American medical system, [remember in the olden days – 1993 -when we all seemed foredoomed to have national health care?] but radical criticism of the very idea that Washington should extract and redistribute one-quarter of the nation’s wealth has simply petered out. The single-parent family; tumbling educational standards; immigration; crime; ethnic balkanization – the conservative magazines and conservative conversation bubble with ferment over these. About morality and nationality, conservatives have a lot to say. But their fervor for eliminating the progressive income tax and the redistribution of wealth via Washington has cooled, when it has not disappeared altogether.” (p. 1)

What is your impression at this point? I’m thinking: economic libertarianism. The man thinks the social and cultural issues are tasty, yes, but incidental. Appearances can be deceiving, however.

“The new topics could well enhance conservatism’s appeal. Social conservatism is potentially more popular than economic conservatism. But severed from economic conservatism, social conservatism too easily degenerates into mere posturing. The force driving the social trends that offend conservatives, from family breakup to unassimilated immigration, is the welfare function of modern government. Attempting to solve these social problems while government continues to exacerbate them is like coping with a sewer main explosition by bolting all the manhole covers to the pavement. Overweening government may not be the sole cause of America’s maladies. But without overweening government, none would rage as fiercely as it now does. The nearly 1$ trillion the federal government spends each year on social services and income maintenance – and the additional hundreds of billions spent by the states – is a colossal lure tempting citizens to reckless. Remove those alluring heaps of money, and the risks of personal misconduct would again deter almost everyone, as they did before 1933 and even 1965.”

It’s a bit – um, ripe - to analogize immigrants and single-parent families directly to sewage. Nevertheless, this can still be read as more or less pure economic libertarianism (with just a layer of slime on top.) What ‘offends’ conservatives about the welfare state is that it is economically inefficient: it destroys value by systematically encouraging masses of people to behave in reckless, value-destroying ways, which ultimately hurts those masses themselves. The cost of maintaining the safety net eventually frays even the satefy net, and then you’ve got nothing. Of course, this is putting the thesis rather crudely and ignoring numerous variants. But never mind that. It turns out economic inefficiency isn’t what ‘offends’ conservatives after all, at least not Frum.

“The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top. Social security, student loans, and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do not.”

The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will – a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’. Of course, crouching to protect themselves and their loved ones from the eternal lash of risk precisely won’t preserve these workers from risk. But the point isn’t to induce a society-wide conformist crouch by way of making the workers safe and happy. The point is to induce a society-wide conformist crouch. Period. A solid foundaton is hereby laid for a desirable social order.

Let’s call this position (what would be an evocative name?) ‘dark satanic millian liberalism’: the ethico-political theory that says laissez faire capitalism is good if and only if under capitalism the masses are forced to work in environments that break their will to want to ‘jump across the big top’, i.e. behave in a self-assertive, celebratorily individualist manner. Ergo, a dark satanic millian liberal will tend to oppose capitalism to the degree that, say, Virginia Postrel turns out to be right about capitalism ushering in a bright new age of individual liberty, in which people try new things for the sheer joy of realizing themselves, etc., etc.

Let’s be even more explicit about this. Postrel (for example) is like (say) J.S. Mill, insofar as she thinks freedom is good because it is required by, and conduces to, ‘pagan self-assertion’. I quote a passage from Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty”:

“What made the protection of individual liberty so sacred to Mill? In his famous essay he declares that, unless the individual is left to live as he wishes in ‘the part [of his conduct] which merely concerns himself,’ civilization cannot advance; the truth will not, for lack of a free market of ideas, come to light; there will be no scope for spontaneity, originality, genius, for mental energy, for moral courage. Society will be crushed by the weight of ‘collective mediocrity’. Whatever is rich and diversified will be crushed by the weight of custom, by men’s constant tendency to conformity, which breeds only ‘withered’ capacities, ‘pinched and hidebound’, ‘cramped and dwarfed’ human beings. ‘Pagan self-assertion’ is as worthy as ‘Christian self-denial’. ‘All errors which [a man] is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.”

Of course, many thinkers have argued that the kind of ‘negative liberty’ characteristic of the operations laissez faire capitalism precisely does not produce ‘pagan self-assertion’. To the contrary, it produces – if not mass misery – then at least withered, pinched, hidebound dwarf personalities. The thing to note about Frum’s position is that it is, as it were, a lower synthesis of the standard defenses and criticisms of capitalism. It assumes the worst-case scenario predications about capitalism's tendency to destroy individual spirit, and advocates capitalism on that basis. (As a great conservative once toasted: “Gentlemen! To Evil!”)

But isn’t this a horribly uncharitable reading I have just confabulated? Couldn’t Frum be saying, in the above passage, nothing more noxious than that the severe threat of punishment for risky behavior is just one cog of the mighty engine of economic efficiency – growth, wealth? He could be, but he isn’t. Here is the acid test: would he really be willing to go so far as to sacrifice economic prosperity expressly for the sake of breaking the spirit of ‘pagan self-assertion’ that causes one to wish ‘to leap across the big top’?

Why, yes – yes, he would. Because he believes 1) that big government devastates potential prosperity; and 2):

“For most conservatives [including, by implication, Frum], shrinking government has always been a political means rather than an end in itself. The end was the preservation of the American heritage, and beyond that, the heritage of the classical and Judeo-Christian (or Christian toute court) West. If that heritage could be preserved without fighting an ugly and probably doomed battle to shrink government, most conservatives would drop the size-of-government issue with hardly a pang.” (p. 13)

But is Frum really serious when he says this? And what exactly is he saying? Tolerating marginal economic inefficiency - if the voters bang on the ballot box, bawling for it – is not the same thing as advocating widespread economic misery (and the voters be damned). Surely Frum is at most guilty of insufficiently vigorous advocacy of prosperity. He can’t be expressly advocating the lack thereof. Oddly, there are various strong hints that he is. Example:

“Contemporary conservatives still value that old American character. William Bennett in his lectures reads admiringly from an account of the Donner party written by a survivor that tells the story in spare, stoic style. He puts the letter down and asks incredulously, “Where did those people go?” But if you believe that early Americans possessed a fortitude that present-day Americans lack, and if you think the loss is an important one, then you have to think hard about why that fortitude disappeared. Merely exhorting Americans to show more fortitude is going to have about as much effect on them as a lecture from the student council president on school spirit. Reorganizing the method by which they select and finance their schools won’t do it either, and neither will the line-item veto, or discharge petitions, or entrusting Congress with the power to deny individual NEA grants, or court decisions strinking down any and all acts of politically correct tyranny emanating from the offices of America’s deans of students – worthwhile though each and every one of those things may be. It is socials that form character, as another conservative hero, Alexis de Tocqueville, demonstrated, and if our characters are now less virtuous than formerly, we must identify in what way our social conditions have changed in order to understand why.

Of course there have been hundreds of such changes – never mind since the Donner party’s day, just since 1945 … But the expansion of government is the only one we can do anything about.

All of these changes have had the same effect: the emancipation of the individual appetite from restrictions imposed on it by limited resources, or religious dread, or community disapproval, or the risk of disease or personal catastophe.” (p. 202-3)

Words fail me; links not much better. The Donner party? Where did all these people go? Into each other, to a dismaying extent. A passage from one of those moving, stoical diary entries:

"...Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that [she] thought she would commence on Milt and eat him. I don't think she has done so yet, [but] it is distresing. The Donno[r]s told the California folks that they [would] commence to eat the dead people 4 days ago, if they did not succeed in finding their cattle then under ten or twelve feet of snow & did not know the spot or near it, I suppose they have [cannibalized] ...ere this time."

The stoical endurance of the Donner party in the face of almost unimaginable suffering is indeed moving. The perseverance of the survivors is a lasting testament to the endurance of the human spirit. (On the other hand, the deaths of all who stoically refused to cannibalize their fellows might be deemed an equal, perhaps a greater testament.) But it is by no means obvious – some further demonstration would seem in order – that lawmakers and formulators of public policy should therefore make concerted efforts to emulate the Donner’s dire circumstances. What will the bumper-stickers say? “It’s the economy, stupid! We need to bury it under ten to twelve feet of snow so that we will be forced to cannibalize the dead and generally be objects of moral edification to future generations.”

I think we are beginning to see why Frum feels that his philosophy may be a loser come election time. I think the Donner party – who, be it noted, set out seeking economic prosperity in the West, not snow and starvation – would not vote Republican on the strength of William Bennett’s comfortable edification at the spectacle of their abject misery. (“Let’s start with the fat one over there in the corner, playing the slots. We can eat off him for a week. See how he likes it.”)

To put what is surely rather an obvious point yet another way: if the Donner party is really what you want, the policy riddle (how to reproduce these conditions, since the Donner party was not political, per se?) already has an answer: Stalinism. The Gulag Archipelago opens with a morally edifying tale of misery and starvation, like so:

“In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which has actually a frozen stream – and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.”

As Solzhenitsyn observes, the publication of this tale was a bit of an official slip; for it opened a window on “the amazing country of Gulag”, inhabited by the freakish zek peoples.

“We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as those present at that event. We, too, were from that powerful tribe of zeks, unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.”

I think we can all agree that Solzhenitsyn’s book is among the most moving testament’s to the living human spirit ever committed to paper. I think we can all also agree that one shouldn’t inflict suffering in an attempt to replicate Solzhenitsyn. Why not is a nice question, but for the sake of abbreviating the present argument let’s just take as read: Stalinism bad. From this premise it follows that Frum’s (and Bennett’s) conservative point of view is somewhat confused; because their point of view implies that Stalinism will be good. It produced economic misery, yes; but by hypothesis we don’t care about economics; Stalinism produced a great deal of stoical, enduring good character in the form of resistance to itself. The goal of government, Frum says, is inculcating good character; and lectures won’t do it; you need to right social conditions. Ergo, the gulag is good public policy. And snow helps.

At this point let me step back and make quite clear: I don’t actually think Frum is a crypto-Stalinist, let alone a Stalinist. I don’t think he is actually advocating the intentional infliction of dire economic hardship and suffering – let alone cannibalism - on the American people for the sake of hardening them up, stiffening the national spine. I think if there were some Americans caught in the snowy mountains these days, he’d advocating sending in the helicopters and so forth – and he wouldn’t order them to stand off, just filming the poor schmucks eating each other for Frum’s subsequent viewing pleasure and moral edification.

Which is to say: Frum is not thinking about what he’s saying. Because what he is saying more or less instantaneously implies an indefinitely large cloud of things he really – really, really – doesn’t think.

We are at this point very near the heart of what Frum styles his ‘conservative philosophy’. But at the heart of it is a sort of proto-cognitive itch; a sensibility, or feeling, or subconscious reflex. Orwell talks about this in chapter 12 of The Road to Wigan Pier, incidentally: the naturalness of hostility to the softening that results from modern machine civilization. That’s the feeling, he explains. But, of course, next comes the thought.

“So long as the machine is there, one is under an obligation to use it. No one draws water from the well when he can turn on the tap … Deliberately to revert to primitive methods, to use archaic tools, to put silly difficulties in your own way, would be a piece of dilettantism, of pretty-pretty arty and craftiness. It would be like solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements. Revert to handwork in a machine age, and you are back in Ye Old Tea Shoppe or the Tudor villa with the sham beams tacked to the wall.”

That’s Frum in a nutshell. Had the feeling. Stalled out before he got the thought, right in front of ‘Ye Old Conferfative Philofophie & Non-Load-Bearing Architectonic Façade’. (Indeed, this seems to me an appropriate shingle to hang outside the offices of the National Review. And the next time someone over there has the temerity to quote Orwell piously. Take it down: whack!)

Exactly how is this Frum? You don’t drive west through the snowy mountains in covered wagons, gee-yawing a hundred head of cattle. You rent a U-Haul and follow the interstate highway system (thank you, federal government!) Likewise, the welfare state is a machine. It exists. If it were abolished, it would still exist in potentia. It can be built. A number of versions of it exist around the world today. There are reasons not to use a great many of these, since they have a demonstrated tendency to guzzle economic efficiency. And a number of them are just disagreeably interfering, perhaps. On the other hand, it seems that the majority of the voters prefer some sort of safety net to none. They don’t want to shoulder 10-12 feet of snow worth of risk themselves. And a machine exists to shoulder that risk. Are we going to use the machine or not? Damn straight we will! So the argument is reduced to: cost-benefit analysis, and weighing of diverse preferences and degrees of risk-aversion, so forth. There are a lot of technical questions and doubts, and serious arguments about people’s values to be had and hammered away at and ultimately voted up or down. Meanwhile Frum is clean out in the cold. He doesn’t disapprove of the welfare state on economic grounds, so he will not be a participant in these rational debates about costs and benefits. He wants to abolish the welfare state on pretty-pretty arty crafty aesthetic grounds. (Stretching a point, these might be moral grounds. But they are largely aesthetic, I think.)

Note how Frum’s pretty-pretty - “aren’t the hungry strugglers picturesque!” - perspective is indeed that of an aesthetically-minded spectator. And a very asymmetric perspective it is. Just as a movie-goer may enjoy watching all the grunts struggle heroically forward through the mud on the silver screen – while he himself sinks into a soft seat, 64 oz. Bladder-Buster Coke and popcorn ready to hand - Frum would never dream of employing public policy as a means to the good end of hardship for himself. But if it is good for the poor and middle-class to suffer and toil, surely it would do the well-to-do some good as well. We could stiffen upper-classes spines quick by raising the top tax bracket to, say, 95%, while firing all the cops, letting all the criminals out of jail, giving them guns, and busing them to the richest neighborhoods before letting them go. Not a good idea, obviously, but a lot of rich people would learn a lot of important, genuinely meaningful life lessons. And if you sold tickets (or gave them away, financing it all with tax dollars) some folks would be sure to find it aesthetically beguiling. But no. Not a good idea. A very bad idea. Brutality against kulaks and the well-to-do. Not good public policy, however character-building and highly rated as reality TV.

J.S. Mill saw Frum coming a century and a half away. In his essay, “Coleridge”, he writes:

“Take for instance the question how far mankind have gained by civilization. One observer is forcibly struck by the multiplication of physical comforts; the advancement and diffusion of knowledge; the decay of superstition; the facilities of mutual intercourse; the softening of manners; the decline of war and personal conflict; the progressive limitation of the tyranny of the strong over the weak; the great works accomplished throughout the globe by the co-operation of multitudes; and he becomes that very common character, the worshipper of ‘our enlightened age’. Another fixes his attention, not upon the value of these advantages, but upon the high price which is paid for them; the relaxation of individual energy and courage; the loss of proud and self-relying independence; the slavery of so large a portion of mankind to artificial wants; their effeminate shrinking form even the shadow of pain; the dull unexciting monotony of their lives, and the passionless insipidity, and absence of any marked individuality, in their characters; the contrast between the narrow mechanical understanding, produced by a life spent in executing by fixed rules a fixed task, and the varied powers of the man of the woods, whose subsistence and safety depend at each instant upon his capacity of extemporarily adapting means to ends … One would attends to these things, and to these exclusively, will be apt to infer that savage life is preferable to civilized; that the work of civilization should as far as possible be undone, and from the premises of Rousseau, he will not improbably be led to the practical conclusions of Rousseau’s disciple, Robespierre.”

The thing that is in fact keeping Frum from turning into the moral equivalent of Robespierre – IS THAT HE DOESN'T ACTUALLY MEAN IT. I doubt he actually approves of staging Donner parties.

What Frum has got, to repeat, is just a feeling that the kids these days are getting a bit soft. Everyone feels this way sometimes, of course – since it’s true. But some people have thoughts as well as feelings about this attendant effect of civilization. And so it turns out Lionel Trilling was maybe not such a poor prophet after all, when he wrote way back in 1953: “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition;” for the anti-liberals do not, by and large, “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Irritable mental gestures. Yep. Frum.

OK. Trilling too strong. I do concede there are serious conservative thinkers and intellectuals. I make a point of reading – and I quite enjoy reading - quite a number of quite conservative writers and thinkers, and I hope I am smart enough to learn from them when I should. But it is seriously easy to pretend you’ve got a conservative philosophy when really you’re armed with nothing but irritable gestures.

We all like watching movies about rugged tough guys (well, most of us: I do). But – write this on a 3 x 5 card and consult as necessary – it is absurd to advocate that the government intentionally impose hardship on the people, against their will, for the sake of toughening them up.

Now what would Frum say to all of this (after he calmed down and stopped just cursing my name)? It is important to pursue this question because – I have admitted this already – I have just spilled a lot of ink over what Frum implies but obviously doesn’t intend. So it sounds worse than it is: multiple adversions to Stalinism, so forth. To repeat: I am quite sure Frum is not a closet Stalinist. What is he?

Well, for starters he would strenuously object to the numerous hints dropped above that he advocates producing a broken-spirited society of cringing conformists. He would explain that he has an ideal not of child laborers toiling in dark, satanic mills. He has an ideal of rugged, self-reliant individualism which is, however, not exactly a ‘jump across the big top’ sort of individualism. (“I hate swingers!” said the man in the movie as he threw a lamp in the hot tub.) But, he would insist: that doesn’t make this ideal fawning lickspittlism and flinchophilia. (Monopoly Capitalist Boss twirling his handlebar moustaches and cracking the whip – Ha! Ha!) Frum would object that he talks about the Donner party not because he likes starvation and snow but because, as per the Mill passage, he likes crafty, stoically resourceful, lean and hardened woodsman-types.

It is perfectly fair to retort that the objection still stands: at best this is risably twee nonsense; faux-rusticated arty-woodcrafty tourist fantasy. At worst it is bonkers: blow up the cushy offices; blow up the factories. Drive the slackers and liberals back into the woods to eke out a living from roots and berries. That’s exceedingly asinine public policy, to put it mildly.

Nevertheless, there is something a bit more complicated at work. I’ve just been reading Empson’s fine and rather neglected literary critical masterpiece, .Some Versions of Pastoral. Fine book. The first chapter is “Proletarian Literature”. A relevant bit:

“As I write [1950], the government has just brought out a poster giving the numbers of men back at work, with a large photograph of a skilled worker using a chisel. He is a stringy but tough, vital but not over-strong, Cockney type, with a great deal of the genuine but odd refinement of the English lower middle class. This is very strong Tory propaganda: one feels it is fair to take him as a type of the English skilled worker, and it cuts out the communist feelings about the worker merely to look at him. To accept the picture is to feel that the skilled worker’s interests are bound up with his place in the class system and the success of British foreign policy in finding markets. There is an unfortunate lack of a word here. To call such a picture a ‘symbol’, like a sign in mathematics, is to ignore the sources of its power; to call it a ‘myth’ is to make an offensive suggestion that the author is superior to common feeling. I do not mean to say that such pictures are nonsense becaused they are myths; the facts of the life of a nation, for instance the way public opinion swings round, are very strange indeed, and probably a half-magical idea is the quickest way to the truth. People who consider that the Worker group of sentiments is misleading in contemporary politics tend to use the word ‘romantic’ as a missile; unless they merely mean ‘false’ this is quite off the point; what they ought to do is to produce a rival myth, like the poster. In calling it mythical I mean that complex feelings, involving all kinds of distant matters, are put into it as a symbol, with an implication ‘this is the right worker to select and keep in mind as the type,’ and that among them is an obscure magical feeling ‘while he is like this he is Natural and that will induce Nature to make us prosperous.’”

This strikes me as sharp cultural criticism; and I believe Empson hereby enables me to peg Frum’s (American) Toryism to the board. First, the stringy, hard-bitten-but-loyal-to-the-system ideal worker. None of those beefy, beaming, jut-jawed Soviet-style proles for us, thank you much.

Obviously our ideal worker may have trouble making his way today, armed only with chisel, but substitute some implement more suitable for the information age and you have Frum’s (and Bennett’s) ideal. When they say ‘Donner party’ they are thinking: hard-bitten and hard-nosed. Not starving, but made tough by a life lived right on the edge of failure. Inclined to stick it out in an unhappy marriage. Not a counter-culture type. Not asking anything from those above. Not having a lot of sympathy to spare for those beneath. Interests ultimately narrowly aligned with those of the upper-classes.

But that’s not the brilliant part. The brilliant part is Empson's correct perception (I think it is correct, anyway) 1) that lots of thoroughly disparate matters are hereby artfully collected and crammed into one simple image; 2) an illicit feeling is generated that economics is, magically, a function not so much of social or cultural arrangements as aesthetic ones. There is a potent aesthetic to Empson’s ideal worker, and Frum and Bennett are in the grips of an analogous aesthetic. And the feeling is: if only we achieve aesthetic satisfaction here, economics will take care of itself.

That this sort of flagrantly cargo-cultic turn of proto-thought is possible - just build him, and the economy will come – is very striking.

I think both these tendencies of thought strongly at work in Frum’s book. First, the compulsive bundling and cramming:

"Neoconservatives may roll their eyes at conservatives’ fondness for sweeping moral assertions. Conservative rhetoric can sound a little overbroad, if not positively bats, to nonconservative ears. Conservatives, however, see the things they dislike in the contemporary world – abortion, the slippage of educational standards, foreign policy weakness, federal aid to handicapped schoolchildren – as all connected, as expressions of a single creed, a creed of which liberalism is just one manifestation."

This passage cracked me up. (Belle was moved to inquire solicitiously: “Are you OK, honey?”) It is, of course, precisely because people know some conservatives see all these things as connected that some people think some conservatives are bats. (If it thinks like a moonbat, and it talks like a moonbat, and if it comes right out and says it’s a moonbat, it’s a moonbat.)

Seriously, here’s a cautionary lesson taught by the 1960’s (you’d think conservatives could learn such things): just because you feel that everything is, like, so connected in a mysterious way, doesn’t make it so. And for damn sure you don’t have the right to bother other people with constant reports of your weird but strong intuitions of, like, total interconnectedness.

It almost makes me feel sorry for neo-cons: trying to hold decent seminars on foreign-policy – US military posture in the Middle East, etc. ,etc.; always having to step on the conservative faithful to keep them from breaking in with ‘deeply-connected’ tirades against wheelchair-ramps in schools. Tinfoil hat stuff. Yeesh.

Far more interesting, actually, is the matter of feeling – not thinking, to be sure – that good social and cultural aesthetics will produce good economics. Just get the right sort of people – i.e. the people that appeal to conservative sensibilities – and somehow the economy will be fine. If you like it, call it natural. After all, if it wasn't natural, why would you like it? As Empson says: ‘while he is like this he is Natural and that will induce Nature to make us prosperous.’

Frum on economics is a very strange business. I quoted him already to the effect that conservatives would be happy to drop the demand for smaller government – i.e. the demand for an efficient economy – if they got what they wanted socially and culturally. One might simply be suspicious that he doesn’t mean it. Conservatives may say they would be willing to be taxed in a good cause. But that’s just a polite way of saying, ‘no, I like my money fine where it is.’ (Insert dsquared’s favorite quote here.) But I actually think the truth is more like: Frum has the strong feeling that if somehow his social and cultural demands were met, the economics would (magically) take care of itself. I think he envisions, as it were, the ideal lower-class/middle-class worker – sort of like the worker Empson sees on the poster, but suitably updated – and he thinks: no way that guy’s going to be poor. He’s one hard, conservative bastard (no offense intended.)

This sentiment or intuition or feeling (whatever you call it) produces a strangely hypertrophic concern with what seem (to me anyway) like rather ornamental details:

“If I am bearded, and I notice that my boss and the last four men in my section to win promotion are clean-shaven, I will find myself slowly nudged toward the barbershop. If the owner of the gas station across the road from mine smiles a lot, and I don’t, I will find myself forcing a cheerful manner myself, no matter how snarly I may inwardly feel. People who do not have to work for a living, however, can indulge themselves in a hundred little peculiarities of behavior – one reason that the English upper class is so famously odd. Millions of Americans now live as free from the pressure to conform as any English lord, thanks either to the direct receipt of welfare or to civil service employment where promotion is by seniority and firing is unheard of. The fact, as much as any fashion change, explains the sudden flaunting of ethnic difference in manner and dress that so distresses Patrick Buchanan in his native city. Relatively few vice presidents at Proctor & Gamble would dare wear a kente cloth or keffiyeh; nobody who intends to earn very much of a living in the polymer business can hope to get away with not learning English; but city hall employees and welfare mothers can do both.

So the cultural conservatives are simply deluding themselves when they hope for escape from the unpleasant task of resisting every enlargement of the ambit of government action and trying, when opportunity presents itself, to reduce that ambit.” (p. 196)

This is supposed to sound sober and sensible. If cultural conditions are functions of economics, you can’t change the culture without altering the economics. So conservatives must keep up the titanic, colossal, epic, probably cosmically doomed and tragic economic struggle to keep government small … so people will not dress funny or wear their hair in hairy ways? Sort of wimpy, as ragnaroks go. Notable disproportion here between means and the wished-for end. Even if you are the sort of person who feels deeply offended by funny, ethnic clothes (we're off the deep end) – even if you think it is anything like your business to dictate fashion sense to everyone around you (we're so off the deep end) – how could you possibly think it was so important as all that? And yet immediately we are off and running about after the bourgeois virtues, all dying out: thrift, diligence, prudence, sobriety, fidelity, and orderliness. I won’t bother to quote. Why can I not exhibit all these virtues beneath and/or behind a beard, kente cloth and/or keffiyeh? Frum seems to find it too obvious to bear arguing that the trick is impossible. (Yet he can’t actually think that.) Does Frum seriously believe there are no shrewd, sober businessmen in those parts of the world where businessmen wear beards and keffiyehs and kente cloths? (Obviously he doesn’t. That’s crazy.) So what does he think? I think he just has a powerful feeling that: things ought to be a certain way. And if they are that way, everything will be all right.

Bearded Guy: I like my beard.

Frum: You should shave it.

BG: Why?

Frum: Because it should have been the case that you were too afraid to grow it.

BG: But I wasn’t.

Frum: But you should have been.

BG: Why?

Frum: Because you are wrecking the culture.

BG: Why?

Frum: Because the culture will decay and then the economy will fall apart and we’ll all be poor.

BG: Because of my beard?

Frum: Just think about it. Our economy depends on a healthy culture.

BG: But you don’t even care about the economy. You said you don’t.

Frum: I wish you hadn’t mentioned that.

BG: But I did.

Frum: Look, if you shave the beard, everything will be … better.

BG: You’re a moonbat.

Frum: It’s all related to … foreign policy and wheelchair access in public school, in ways that … would take a long time to explain.

BG: Get away from me!

Frum: Look. Just shave your beard!

Seinfeld had his Soup Nazi. Frum is sort of a Suit Nazi. (OK, that’s too mean.) A kente cloth-free zone. An advocate of radical (what shall we call it?) sartorauthoritarianism. Society and culture conservatively dictate everyone’s dress code down to a whisker.

And why?

Because otherwise you wouldn’t be (wait for it) FREE!

Let’s step back and take in the big picture. Near as I can figure:

Frum cleaves to a radically elitist conception according to which, ideally, a narrowly-conceived set of social and cultural ideals are imposed on a potentially recalcitrant and resistant population. Why? Because he has the philosophical clarity of mind to see that the alternative is unthinkably terrible: a radically elitist conception according to which, ideally, a narrowly-conceived set of social and cultural ideals are imposed on a potentially recalcitrant and resistant population. Nothing that fits that description could possibly be good, obviously.

This passage that underscores the general economic situation, while moving us on to the point about freedom

“… It was awareness of the social consequences of social services, not mere Gradgrind-like zeal for economic efficiency, that initially convinced conservatives to resist the expansion of the welfare functions of government. From its beginning, the American convservative movement has devoted itself to one supreme mission: to warn the country that it had embarked on the wrong path.”

Frum (and other conservatives, according to Frum) are motivated primarily by Gradgrind-like zeal for efficient eradication of social and cultural individualism. (Thank goodness the man isn’t working for our economic benefit! Whew.)

Some hemming and hawing about whether the trouble started in the 14th Century or more recently. Bring, blang, bling. Whenever. The evil decision was made:

“It was a decision in favor of moral arrogance, in favor of the radical reconstruction of the world along lines suggested by whatever reformist or revolutionary ideology happened to hold power at the moment. Moral arrogance inspired the French and Russian revolutions. The same moral arrogance, conservatives believed, lay at the very core of post-New Deal liberalism and of everything else that conservatives thought themselves to be defying when, in William F. Buckley’s memorable metaphor, they took their stand athwart history to shout “Stop!”” (p. 3-4)

Luckily, we have conservatives holding the line against moral arrogance with their (Frum’s own words) “sweeping moral claims” and deep convictions about how everything is interrelated – kente cloths, handicapped access, not enough British history in school, foreign policy - and only they hold the secret key of knowledge. It’s. All. Connected. (You may not be able to see it. But that's just because you are benighted.)

“It is not new,” Whittaker Chambers observed of this creed in another seminal conservative book, Witness. “It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.””

Not conservatism – oh, no! liberalism! And what is it that makes liberals so authoritarian and arrogant? Well, Frum doesn’t quite out and say it, but it appears to have something to do with democracy and asking people what they want rather than deciding for them, forcing it down their throats (and making them like it):

“Viewers of the cable talk shows that proliferated in the 1980’s have seen this scene a hundred times: two pundits will be haranguing each other about some political point, and one will try to clinch his case by announcing triumphantly, “The American people don’t agree with you!” Strictly speaking, this shouldn’t be much of an argument – it begs the reply, “Well, then, the American people are wrong.” But it’s always felt to be deadly. In a democratic culture, feeling yourself at one with a crowd of people is a joy as intense as receiving the king’s soiled handkerchief was at Verseilles. Having tasted that joy in the early years of the Reagan presidency, conservatives have become addicted to it. Their message has adapted accordingly.

Conservatism has always been in danger of devolving from a philosophy of limited government to an ideology of middle-class self-interest.” (p. 8)

In short, conservatism, properly conceived, is not a philosophy whose practical implications are in the material interests of the middle-class. More of the same vein:

“What could be more tempting to a politician than to teach voters to blame taxes and regulations not on the requirements of the middle class but on the inordinate demands of the poor? What could be more reckless than to attack bloated education, highway, and farm budgets, which largely benefit the middle-class? Trouble is, the refusal to take that apparently reckless course dooms all other conservative hopes to futility. If you cannot say “no” to middle-class constituents, you cannot lighten the crushing load of government upon society. And it is that burden, in turn, that makes the social problems that conservatives fret about so intractable.” (p. 8)

Since things that are in the economic interest of the poor and middle-class can hardly constitute crushing economic burdens on them, I think it is fair to gloss ‘society’ in this context as follows: those earning more than $150,000 a year. A somewhat eccentric usage.

In short, Frum actually thinks that conservatism means forcing the poor and middle-class to sacrifice government programs whose existence is, or may be, in their economic interest. And why? Near as I can figure, for the sake of making over the poor and middle-class into more agreeable objects of aesthetic contemplation for (wealthy) conservatives, whose tastes run to: Donner party-like look-alike doughty leatherstocking hard-bitten frontier-type workers (respectful hats in hand.) And the word for this aesthetic transformation is: making people free. And somehow the economy is going to be OK.

Of course we could go around once again with Frum protesting that in fact these bloated government programs are not in the interests of the poor and middle-class because they are ultimately economically inefficient. The problem with this is that – even if it is true – it isn’t what Frum has been saying for 200 pages. I've got no problem with economic libertarianism. At any rate, I can reason with such folk. But Frum is a cultural and a social conservative. What's his philosophy? I’ve had enough of this. I’m stopping.

The funny thing about this book is: it isn’t nearly as bad I just made it sound. I don’t think Frum is obsessed with beards or anything, actually. He sometimes seems like a pretty sharp guy. The middle chapters – full of history and policy detail, so forth – are quite cogent. Just the main chapters have problems. Frum has written a book about the need for a reflective, conservative philosophy. And: that’s the one thing he hasn’t got. He just has no clue why he is a conservative, or why being one might be a good idea – or even what ‘conservatism’ ought to mean. Whenever he starts trying to talk about that stuff, his mind just goes blank and he fantasizes about shaving beards and the Donner party.

Those folks at the NRO are often weird.

Comments

[Jay C.]

To borrow a phrase from more journalistically-savvy bloggers, I think the "money graf" is here:

Frum cleaves to a radically elitist conception according to which, ideally, a narrowly-conceived set of social and cultural ideals are imposed on a potentially recalcitrant and resistant population. Why? Because he has the philosophical clarity of mind to see that the alternative is unthinkably terrible: a radically elitist conception according to which, ideally, a narrowly-conceived set of social and cultural ideals are imposed on a potentially recalcitrant and resistant population. Nothing that fits that description could possibly be good, obviously

This looks like it is the Great Modern American Conservative Creed in a nutshell: We Know What's Good for You - unlike those awful elitist liberals, who are under the foolish misapprehension that They Know What's Good for You, Unfortunately, as you have pointed out so plainly, What's Good for Us is most-often cast as a return to the supposed virtues of 18th or 19th-Century America. Whether or not this idealized Golden Age might or might not fit as a template for life in the 21st Century never seems to enter into the head of even intelligent conservatives like David Frum; still less the run-of-the-mill dolts occupying public offices across the land. Thanks also for the great quote from George Orwell: I was looking for some way to articulate that very point: I'm not at all disappointed that someone like Orwell had beaten me to it.

[Kent]

Thank you very, very much for this post. I laughed, several times. I didn't cry. But it did become a part of me. I will keep the ideas here in mind for a long time. Thank you.

I agree that this is a potential book, not just a blog. I hope you go for it.

[Lollius]

Viz. the conflict between cultural and economic conservatives, as well as splits w/in liberalism (I'll withold the author/source, lest the name derail consideration):

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash-payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasbile chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has subtituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto nonoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborours.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

"Creative destruction"? Or just destruction?

Another way to frame the question, then: at what point (moral &/or geographical) does one draw the line between "market values" and, simply, values? On what basis might one do so? Is it possible to do so without simply "spinning back the clock," with all that comes with it? Or without buying into some utopian, millenarian scheme or other?

[Russell Arben Fox]

Marx, of course. From "The Communist Manifesto." Excellent choice Lollius, though you might have also included the line: "All that is solid melts into air."

Regarding your question(s), I think it is important to emphasize the possibility of articulating sets of norms that are not, in fact, identitical to processes of commodification, and that doing so needn't simply be engaging in either nostalgia or utopianism. But admittedly it's difficult. A great part of the difficulty, I think, lies in thinking about (as was alluded to above) the proper "address," or "scale," of one's articulation. Modern life--capitalism, mobility, etc.--really has made some forms of shared normativity impossible. But that doesn't mean all such forms are impossible. I think one of the reasons that many people are suspicious of value-articulation on the civic level is because we have an all-or-nothing, everywhere-or-nowhere mentality; it's hard to work out arguments in such a (legal, political, and intellectual) environment that are truly pluralistic. There are broad ways of countering capitalism's destructive effects, and then there are local ways of doing so. The fact that, in any given situation, the former might seem overly nostalgic or dreamily futuristic doesn't mean that the latter necessarily are, however.

[Adam Stephanides]

I'm sorry, John, but this essay is off base. I disagree completely with the views Frum expresses in his book, but the way you present them distorts and misrepresents them. I don't insist upon being scrupulously fair to conservatives, when they so obviously refuse to extend the same courtesy to us; but Frum is not a candidate for anything, nor (I would guess) does his name mean anything to the average voter. Unfair attacks on him will provide no short-term political gain, while costing us long-term intellectual credibility.

To begin with your most inflammatory quotes: saying that present-day Americans don't exhibit the fortitude of the Donner Party doesn't logically require wanting more Donner Parties, any more than calling WWII veterans "the greatest generation" entails wishing for another world war. You know this, or should know this, very well. Anyway, it's Bennett, not Frum, who held up the Donner Party members as an exemplar. Frum is just quoting.

As for the paragraph about beards and keffiyehs which you have such sport with, it comes at the end of a passage six pages long in which Frum is arguing that none of the varieties of conservatives will be able to accomplish their goals without shrinking the federal government. Earlier in the passage he argued the point for Bennett's variety, and here he argues it for Buchanan's variety. And it's clear from the chapter on Buchanan, as well as elsewhere in this chapter, that Frum has no sympathy with Buchanan's conservatism (on p. 200, Frum talks about the "dangerous [potential] outcome" that someone like Buchanan might gain power). It's true that Frum in his own voice refers to "ethnic balkanization" as a bad thing (201). But, whether or not you agree with that, it's quite different, and much more defensible, than the insistence that everyone be clean-shaven which you (jestingly or not) attribute to him.

So what is it, precisely, that Frum wants? Granted, it's a non-trivial operation to dig this out of the book, partly because when Frum talks about what "conservatives" think, he often doesn't make it clear whether he's expressing his own views or just reporting something that some group of conservatives believes. But Frum does in fact say what he wants pretty clearly: the "bourgeois virtues" of "thrift, diligence, prudence, sobriety, fidelity, and orderliness" (196); a "self-reliant, competent, canny, and uncomplaining" character (202). This is a far cry, as you concede, from the cringing submissiveness you accuse him of wanting. Nor is it fairly characterized as "risably [sic] twee nonsense; faux-rusticated arty-woodcrafty tourist fantasy." It's not even an "aesthetic" preference, unless you're willing to say that believing that people should be generous, compassionate, tolerant and open-minded is also an aesthetic preference. It's true Frum doesn't provide philosophical justification for preferring the bourgeois virtues, but that's not the book's goal. It's not, contra Marshall, an exposition of conservative philosophy; nor is it an effort to win converts for it. It's written for people who are already conservatives, and whom he assumes already share his love of the bourgeois virtues. Nor, unless you're a libertarian, is it self-evidently absurd to say that the government should pursue policies which foster a particular sort of character.

Once the Donner Party red herring is removed, there's no evidence that Frum wants to impoverish the middle class. What he wants to restore is not poverty, but risk, as he repeatedly and explicitly states (not that it ever really went away, but that's another story). You do sort of admit this, only to go on to poke fun at him for supposedly believing that the character traits he advocates would automatically lead to economic prosperity. Well, it's possible he believes this, but as far as I know there's nothing in the book to indicate it. In fact, the book is not primarily concerned with economics at all, hard as this may be to believe. Frum is judging policies not on economic grounds, but on the basis of their consequences for Americans' characters. And while that may be a quixotic position for a would-be political thinker, it is not self-evidently ridiculous or contemptible.

Finally, what Jay C. called the "money graf" sounds good, but I don't know where you get the second sentence from. I found nothing whatever in the book to indicate that Frum opposes what he regards as "social breakdown" because it's "radically elitist" or imposed from above. On the contrary, his whole thesis depends upon the assumption that the behaviors he disapproves of are things that people will naturally indulge in if given the opportunity, and if shielded from their potential bad consequences.

I've gone to the effort of writing this out in part because I do have a bit of a soft spot for Frum, for getting off one of my favorite political lines: "if the voters reject ham and eggs, it is because they want double ham and double eggs" (175; he's referring to Republicans who wanted to nominate a supply-sider in 1996, but it applies equally well to many lefties). More seriously, I think it's bad for our side when we post something as full of holes as this, especially when it gets widely publicized, as it has. Most importantly, it's a big mistake to underestimate one's enemy. Demolishing a straw man may feel good, but it's poor practice for the real thing. In fact, it wouldn't be that hard to refute Frum's actual views, but John's article wastes that opportunity.

[jholbo]

Thanks for your comment, Adam. I'll have to think about whether you are, to some extent, correct in your criticism. (It was a late-nite screed I engaged in, with no intention of garnering such wide-spread interest. But that is no excuse, obviously, only an extenuating circumstance if it turns out I am, indeed, in the wrong.)

The point you make about taking a couple quotes out of context. Hmmmm. I actually puzzled over this one before using them and concluded that Frum really does stand by their content himself. He isn't, in any of the passages I quote, just narrating a view held by some other conservative - Bennett or Buchanan - from which he wishes to distance himself. True: he does want to distance himself from these folks. But: he also agrees with them about a lot of cultural points. More specifically, he critiques them not for their cultural goals but for trying to reach those goals by inadequate routes. He does at times critique their cultural ends as well. But the stuff I quote about beards and keffiyehs and so forth does not seem to be the stuff he disagrees with. I think it is Frum talking to us here. I admit that it's not 100% clear, but this is just part and parcel of my general critique. His own view is incoherent.

As to the Donner party example. It is reasonable to retort, on Frum's behalf: but this is at worst a somewhat silly slip. He didn't mean to actually advocate starvation in the snow. It's fair to make fun of him for making this slip, but it's not fair to pretend, with a straight face, that this is seriously his view. I do try to make clear that I know he isn't seriously in favor of enforced starvation. More than that - and here I may not be clear - the problem with the Donner party example is that it seems to lead on to some thought; it seems to do your thinking for you; this is Frum's feeling about it; it feels right to him; it feels like a wise example for him. it points in the right way; but it doesn't, in fact, point towards anything. It's a dead end. And so Frum feels like he's had a thought when he has only had a completely irrelevant feeling. An itch, a sudden eruption of aesthetic sensibility.

[baa]

For what little it's worth, I had the same reaction as Adam Stephanides. The philosophy of government Frum reaches for can be fairly described as "Aristotle meets bourgeois virtues." This doesn't strike me as obviously crazy, nor does it seem correct to characterize it as aesthetic preference.

Your essay was, however, very funny.

[jholbo]

This is an interesting line Adam and baa are pushing. I really want to find the time to respond fully, not because I am sure they are wrong but because they are obviously at least a little bit right. But no more than half, I think. The basic trouble is: if Frum were really advocating Aristotle meets bourgeois values - and there is textual evidence to support this, I freely admit - he would say a lot of things he doesn't say, and he wouldn't say a lot of things he does say. I think my view - which I do admit needs clarification and further butressing - is a better fit to the data set, although not a perfect one. I'll try to get a response up in a day or two. Thanks for the honest criticism, guys.

[Vicki]

Coming in late, after a pointer on a mailing list:

Another point is that the neocons aren't actually advocating decentralization in order to let each community find its own solutions, based on its specific resources, desires, and needs. They're advocating decentralization of resources, and simultaneously insisting on one-size-fits-all answers. They know about economies of scale, of course--they've looked at contemporary corporate capitalism--so the obvious answer is that they don't want efficient government. They don't want us to clean the streets as efficiently as possible, get good discounts on police uniforms, or save money on textbooks (for our imposed-from-above school curricula). They want us--the actual people who live in this actual society--to be weak, and to transfer as much money as possible to large corporations that aren't supposed to care about anything but money.

This may be a coherent philosophy, but I don't see what it has to do with either the Judeo-Christian tradition or human freedom. It is the Potemkin philosophy of the plutocrats.

[Russell Arben Fox]

I don't think this is right Vicki, or least not insofar as you choose to label what you call a "Potemkin philosophy of the plutocrats" as "neoconservative." To be sure, after nearly three full years of the Bush administration, figuring out who is a "neocon" and who isn't is harder than ever. Still, however you define your terms, it should be pretty clear that those who want to starve the government, make it inefficient and (perhaps not coincidentally) therefore a poor agent for social change and justice, aren't the people writing for neoconservative magazines like The Weekly Standard. You're talking about Grover Norquist-types. The "national greatness" neoconservatives--of which Frum may or may not be one; I have no idea--may be in practice hung up on the issue of actually paying for the powerful (imperial?) government they prefer, but in theory at least you can't say they don't acknowledge that the government needs to be efficient and capable. There's a reason why these folks like Alexander Hamilton, after all.

[Adam Stephanides]

When John posted his first response to my critique, I told him that I'd wait until I saw his more considered response before replying. But that more considered response doesn't seem to be coming, and there were a couple of points I wanted to make. So I hereby declare myself released from my vow.

"But the stuff I quote about beards and keffiyehs and so forth does not seem to be the stuff he disagrees with. I think it is Frum talking to us here. I admit that it's not 100% clear, but this is just part and parcel of my general critique. His own view is incoherent."

As regards keffiyehs, you may be correct. However, if does disapprove of keffiyeh-wearing, it's as a symptom of "ethnic balkanization" (201), not because he thinks that keffiyehs are incompatible with bourgeois values, as you implied. But as for beards--nuh-uh. To me at least, it's evident that the passage about beards you quote is simply an analogy, nothing more. (And as far as I know, there's nothing else in the book to suggest that Frum has an aversion to beards.) His next sentence is "If the owner of the gas station across the road from mine smiles a lot, and I don't, I will find myself forcing a cheerful manner myself, no matter how snarly I may inwardly feel." Presumably he isn't claiming that people should smile all the time whether they feel like it or not.

As I said in my original post, it is hard at times to distinguish Frum's own views from views he is just quoting. But as I also said, this is not because Frum's own view is incoherent (still less because he is making coded appeals to cannibals and beard-haters), but because the book is not a work of political philosophy. It's an argument about political strategy, directed at an audience of conservatives who are assumed to basically share the same views of what's wrong with American society (except for the Buchananites).

"As to the Donner party example. It is reasonable to retort, on Frum's behalf: but this is at worst a somewhat silly slip. He didn't mean to actually advocate starvation in the snow. It's fair to make fun of him for making this slip, but it's not fair to pretend, with a straight face, that this is seriously his view. I do try to make clear that I know he isn't seriously in favor of enforced starvation. More than that - and here I may not be clear - the problem with the Donner party example is that it seems to lead on to some thought; it seems to do your thinking for you; this is Frum's feeling about it; it feels right to him; it feels like a wise example for him. it points in the right way; but it doesn't, in fact, point towards anything. It's a dead end. And so Frum feels like he's had a thought when he has only had a completely irrelevant feeling. An itch, a sudden eruption of aesthetic sensibility."

I'm sorry, but I don't see anything, here or elsewhere in the book, to suggest that the Donner party has any more significance to Frum than as a quote to use as a springboard for his own argument: an aside, more or less. Just because Frum generally agrees with Bennett on social values (and the focus of his chapter on Bennett and other "moral conservatives" is not his agreement with them on values, but his disagreement with them on strategy), it doesn't follow that he agrees with everything he quotes from him. If anything, the Donner party are a problem for Frum's thesis, since the "lack of a net" didn't prevent them from trying to "jump across the big top." (For that matter, surely Bennett's point was not that starvation automatically breeds fortitude, but that the pre-existing fortitude of the members of the party evidenced itself in the way they reacted to extremity: hardly an absurd idea, or deserving of the ridicule you heap upon it, much as I enjoy seeing Bennett ridiculed.) Nor does it seem to me that Frum idealizes the nineteenth century. Insofar as his social ideal reflects any particular era, my impression is that it's the 1950s (minus Social Security, federally backed home mortgates, and the G.I. Bill, of course) more than anything else.

John's second post, addressed to me and baa, is too indefinite to comment upon, really. I was a bit peeved to see myself described as "pushing a line," particularly since I didn't say anything about Aristotle (mainly because I know very little about Aristotle's social and political thought, but based upon what little I do know, Frum doesn't seem that closely akin to him). As I said in my original post, I have no desire to defend Frum's social and political views, or even his quality as a thinker. He's wrong, but not ridiculous, or at least not ridiculous in the ways John claims he is. We liberals/lefties/anti-Bushies might as well hold on to our intellectual integrity, since it's about all we've got right now.

[jholbo]

I'm still working on Frum, part II. I drafted it, but it sort of sucked - just didn't say what it needed to say. And so I didn't post it. I don't really mean to retract much, ultimately, so I didn't feel too pressed to get it out. And all this lit crit I've been distracting myself with? Well, it's sort of related to my professional work, as Frum is not. That's my excuse, for what it's worth.

Two things: first, in direct response to Adam, I didn't mean to be slighting or critical with 'pushing a line'. I actually meant that as compliment: insisting on one's argumentative line, and not backing down (at a time when lots of people were patting my Frum post on the back and saying I was right.) Strength of your convictions. Good stuff. And worthy convictions. I do think that the line Adam and baa were taking is eminently respectable, even though I don't buy it ... just haven't finished explaining why yet. But I'll try to get it done soon. Adam's request for satisfaction is most reasonable. I have not been timely.

Second, I'll just make a quick little substantive point in response to Adam's comment, just in case the relevance of what I eventually say to what Adam says gets lost in the meantime. There is a misunderstanding. I hereby attempt to clear it up. Adam makes the point that the Donner party is nothing more than a springboard for Frum's argument. It starts him off on the direction he wants to go. My point is that I know it's supposed to be just a springboard, but it doesn't spring anywhere. (I know I've been unclear on this point. Last time I said something like: 'It does your thinking for you', which isn't quite it.) Why it doesn't spring anywhere is actually a very intricate and involved question. But here's a preview: the example springs you on to the thought that it ought to be the government's job to enforce hardships on the citizenry, even if the government could efficiently alleviate those hardships, and even if the citizens want it. This is quite absurd. Frum doesn't think this, exactly, so the Donner party springs him where he doesn't want to be.

It might be retorted that there are more reasonable thoughts in this springable neighborhood. To wit: it is nice for people to be tough, not fat-bellied (for what it is worth). And the government can encourage undue dependency, hence cost and inefficiency and many other evils, by trying to help people too much. The trouble is: although Frum does think this, he also needs more. He can't stop here. Because there are positions consistent with all this that Frum regards as utterly intolerable. The problem is that if he pushes further, to exclude the positions he loathes, he ends up where he really doesn't want to be. Just using the Donner party example - which might seem to suggest some sensible interpretations, masks the fact that Frum does not want those sensible interpretations. So the Donner party is telling because it amounts to a rhetorical avoidance of any genuine formulation of a conservative philosophy. And, yes, Frum does use the 'ph' word - he's got to put paid to it in some way. He doesn't.

Anyway, sort of a lot of ink spilled over this one no doubt badly and comically chosen example of Frum's.

More to follow - I promise. A day or two. I'll really do it this time.

[tristero]

I got halfway through and gave up. You were so bloody right and Frum was being so foolish there is no reason to continue.

But thanks. Very funny. Never in my wildest imaginations did I think Bill Bennett had advocated bringing back the Donner Party.

[kydd]

yeah I made it to about the Donner Party too ... I still think Rush is just an ignorant asshead. Its not an itellectual movement its a bunch of greedy bigoted assholes IMO

[perianwyr]

If everyone I ever fenced against just dropped their point and let me just walk up and hit them with a direct extension, I wouldn't be fencing.

[Benjamin Rosenbaum]

Actually, I am afraid I find this article rather specious.

You seem to willfully misread "let us make sure people are rewarded for their own efforts, and punished for their mistakes, for that will give them the incentives to grow to become responsible, capable, and adult" as "let us terrorize and impoverish people because it will make them subservient".

And everything after that misreading pretty much depends upon it.

I don't agree with Frum -- I like a nice big safety net, myself, and I'd like to see ours expanded a good bit.

But the opposite of "government-run social safety net" is not *necessarily* "abject misery and degradation". It might also be "prosperous, self-reliant populace".

Now, *I* believe misery would follow from the removal of the net. But *Frum* doesn't.

So it's an absurd misreading to suggest that he wants (or unthinkingly and accidentally implies that he wants) to promote poverty and thus subservience. What he wants to promote is responsibility. Not merely the Donner Party -- also the Gold Rush. But he wants prosperity to be the result of effort, and failure to have consequences. The idea is not that this will make people afraid to take risks. It is that it will educate them in which risks they should take. When they fail, it will require their families, neighbors, religions and associations to rescue them, which will strengthen these institutions (which Frum, I expect, believes have intrinsic advantages over the government as caretakers of the social web).

The result of this is not that people won't be risk-takers. It's that they will be *intelligent*, responsible, mature risk takers.

My politics are close to yours, and far from Frum's. But your exegesis of him is just plain silly.

It's a very easy out to say "what he seems to say is absurd; he must not really be thinking."

You might first try "what he seems to say is absurd; in all likelihood I have misunderstood him."

[Benjamin Rosenbaum]

Actually, I am afraid I find this article rather specious.

You seem to willfully misread "let us make sure people are rewarded for their own efforts, and punished for their mistakes, for that will give them the incentives to grow to become responsible, capable, and adult" as "let us terrorize and impoverish people because it will make them subservient".

And everything after that misreading pretty much depends upon it.

I don't agree with Frum -- I like a nice big safety net, myself, and I'd like to see ours expanded a good bit.

But the opposite of "government-run social safety net" is not *necessarily* "abject misery and degradation". It might also be "prosperous, self-reliant populace".

Now, *I* believe misery would follow from the removal of the net. But *Frum* doesn't.

So it's an absurd misreading to suggest that he wants (or unthinkingly and accidentally implies that he wants) to promote poverty and thus subservience. What he wants to promote is responsibility. Not merely the Donner Party -- also the Gold Rush. But he wants prosperity to be the result of effort, and failure to have consequences. The idea is not that this will make people afraid to take risks. It is that it will educate them in which risks they should take. When they fail, it will require their families, neighbors, religions and associations to rescue them, which will strengthen these institutions (which Frum, I expect, believes have intrinsic advantages over the government as caretakers of the social web).

The result of this is not that people won't be risk-takers. It's that they will be *intelligent*, responsible, mature risk takers.

My politics are close to yours, and far from Frum's. But your exegesis of him is just plain silly.

It's a very easy out to say "what he seems to say is absurd; he must not really be thinking."

You might first try "what he seems to say is absurd; in all likelihood I have misunderstood him."

[Benjamin Rosenbaum]

Oops -- sorry for posting twice!

[Benjamin Rosenbaum]

Oops -- sorry for posting twice!

[Hiram Hover]

On hardship and character--

Someone help me out here -- how is it that conservatives think both that:

1) hardship builds good character;

2) people get stuck in hardship because of ... bad character.

A truly vicious circle.

[rakehell]

Great essay. On a minor point, I find it amusing that "Frum" is so down on beards at a time when many men are growing them to avoid being tagged as gay in a culture that is in the full throes of a moral panic about homosexuality. I vaguely recall a pic of Frum--clean cut, bespectacled. I doubt he would meet with much approval in working-class culture where conformity to norms that have nothing to do with one's viability in the economy is considered more important.

[Brian]

Two years later (having been pointed here by Matt Yglesias), I have to add an anecdote.

I was just up in Alaska, where an old friend was getting married to exactly the rugged individualist woodsman of the Cons' wet dreams. J is a commerical fisherman in summer, bringing in halibut to Kachemak bay on the F/V Vigor. Winters, he lives alone, deep in the interior of AK, fur trapping. He's the man other macho Alaskans want to be. As somebody said to me: "He walks into the woods, and five months later he walks back out again."

And J is for damn sure a liberal.

He's a liberal because he remembers his shipwreck back in '96, when a Coast Guard helicopter went out in 90 knot winds (gusting higher), and yanked J and his shipmates off their liferaft. As he tells his libertarian friends, "All the taxes I'll ever pay in my life won't be enough to pay for that copter."

If J had died, of course, we wouldn't have his stoic account of the shipwreck on display at the local history museum. But it's not his business to be an object of aesthetic contemplation for anybody.

[jholbo]

Brian, thanks, that's a fantastically funny anecdote (in the context of the post. At the time I'm sure it was much more serious for those involved.)

[Virginia Postrel]

I actually say something stronger and less Frumian than "capitalism [will] usher in a bright new age of individual liberty, in which people try new things for the sheer joy of realizing themselves." I say that "play" is not merely an outcome but in fact a major source of economic progress within a market system. The argument is more fully developed in The Future and Its Enemies, but I gave a shorter version of it as a fairly polarizing AEI lecture in 1991, text here: http://www.dynamist.com/speaking/speeches/speeches-bradley.htm

And, by the way, could you get rid of the spam in your comments?

[jholbo]

Spam gone.

Point taken.