David Frum, the George W. Bush speechwriter turned fierce critic of the GOP, says he wants to save the conservative movement from itself.
“I still think of myself as a conservative,” Frum told The Daily Caller. “And I think a lot of what I’ve been pursuing for the past five years is a politics intended to advance some very traditional conservative goals.”
Once one of the GOP’s most prominent intellectuals, Frum’s relentless and very public attacks on the right in recent years have been greeted with much fanfare from his former enemies on the left. The masthead for his website, FrumForum, highlights the glowing assessments he has received from a number of prominent liberals like Salon editor Joan Walsh, and he recently published a piece in New York magazine blasting what he calls conservatism’s “alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.”
But Frum says he’s not interested in simply critiquing the right. He’s looking to change it and win converts to his way of thinking, while admitting his strategy for doing so may be flawed.
“It’s something I worry about a lot,” Frum told TheDC. “And I may not be very successful at this. You have this question of when is it good to challenge mistaken ideas, and when do you try to guide mistaken ideas into better channels. And I fully concede I may not be doing it right. And it may be that that is a job ultimately for somebody else.”
“But this is what I’ve also found: the conservative world in Washington has become very committed to a response to this economic crisis that is contractionary,” Frum said. He believes the conservative establishment is too committed to “tighter money, immediate reductions in spending on social programs” and lower taxes for higher income earners that he believes will damage attempts at economic recovery.
“They’re really not going to be talked out of that point of view,” he said, referring to powerful conservative activists in Washington. “But there are lots and lots of Republicans in the country that don’t share that point of view.”
Frum has said he will probably vote for former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman in the Republican primary, and says he would support former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney should he clinch the GOP nomination for president. If the nominee is anyone else, he wrote recently in the National Post, a newspaper in his native Canada, it “would gravely test my commitment to the political party I’ve supported since I entered the United States as a college student in the fall of 1978.”
While studying at Yale, Frum made a name for himself on the famously liberal campus as an outspoken, Reagan-supporting and fervently anti-communist conservative. He went to Harvard Law School only to find he was really interested in journalism, worked at Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, and published a book on the conservative movement, Dead Right, in 1994.
National Review founder William F. Buckley was so impressed with Dead Right that he called it “the most thrilling ideological experience in a generation.” His star on the rise, Frum joined the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in 1994. He accepted a speechwriting job at the White House shortly after the 2000 election, and was widely credited with coining the phrase “axis of evil” for Bush’s second State of the Union address. He left the administration shortly thereafter.
To some of his critics, the major irony of Frum’s current status as a pariah in conservative circles is his authorship of “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” a National Review cover story lambasting right-wing critics of the War on Terror. Along with a host of rather obscure anti-war libertarian journalists and activists, the article notably singled out conservative stalwarts Pat Buchanan and the late Robert Novak, for what Frum described as “terror denial” and “espousing defeatism.”
Frum told TheDC that since “Unpatriotic Conservatives” was published a number of those criticized in the piece have attempted to rebrand themselves as people who were simply critical of the Iraq invasion.
“There is an effort at rebranding by people who were making a much more radical point at the time,” he said. “There was a tendency in the conservative movement, then very small, now alas not so small, to have a radical rejection of their country as it is, and some of this now expresses itself in the Ron Paul movement and other places.”
“The piece didn’t call names,” he continued. “It quoted people, and I think even at this distance the quotes remain shocking. It’s one thing to say ‘I don’t think the Afghanistan invasion is a very good idea.’ It’s another thing to say ‘a patriot might be forgiven for hoping his country is defeated.’”
His argument, according to Frum, was not about whether the Iraq War was worth fighting, but whether America was worth defending. “Post-Iraq invasion, the people targeted in that article would have you believe that Iraq was their only complaint, and that’s simply not true,” he said.
Frum reiterated his regret, however, that Robert Novak was included in the piece, saying he was “not quite the same kettle of fish as the other characters included in there.”