Thursday, March 06, 2008

What's Wrong with the Frum Thesis ....

Owen Jones, a reader who served on the Reagan transition team, writes:

[P]olitics is about tactics and strategies that involve compromise. And I understand that. The Reagan people obviously believed that Reagan had to have a narrow focus to be successful politically. The desire was to focus on two things: restoring a credible military deterrent, and lowering tax rates. Any assault on the Federal bureaucracy would lead to a grinding counter-insurgency against Reagan and likely sabotage his efforts on those two key policy objectives.

While I can’t prove it, I believe that Margaret Thatcher got to him. Thatcher believed strongly that the unions were a better political target than the bureaucracy, and warned Reagan against trying to fight an entrenched, leftist bureaucracy. One of the complaints against Thatcher from her right, in fact, was her failure to even attempt to deal with the problem of the bureaucracy in Britain. Indeed, her assault on the unions was both successful and politically popular. Which may be why Reagan chose to act so decisively against the strike by the air traffic controllers early in his Presidency.

But these are all tactical decisions. They do not constitute a theory of anything. They take into account the political landscape and result in a cold-calculating judgment regarding what is possible, given the political forces arrayed against them. Not unlike Churchill’s war against the “soft underbelly of Europe.” In hindsight, the American planners were wrong and Churchill was right. A premature assault on France over the Channel in 1943 would likely have ended in a catastrophic defeat.

Fast forward to 1995 and the Gringrich budget battles with Clinton. There was a standoff, the GOP began flinching because Clinton was able to use a government shutdown as leverage, and the rest is history. The resulting theory by David Frum seems to be that the country has changed, people have changed, and our political ideas must therefore change. People want a large government to meet their needs, just one that is more competent and responsive.

But there is no analysis of the pragmatic issues regarding “flinching.” In a boxing match, the analysts look at the ability of the victor to get in his jab more successfully than his opponent, thereby wearing him down. The analysts don’t search for a “meta-theory” to explain the outcome. The sad fact remains that our leadership in the GOP is very good at flinching in the face of leftist jabs. They go something like this: Senator “A” is a bigot, and a meanspirited reactionary for opposing my bill. He wants to see seniors eating dog food and children dying of malnutrition, and ten million homeless people living under bridges.” Senator “A,” coming from a small town or suburbia, is used to working on political problems the same way the local Chamber of Commerce addresses them. They put all of their partisanship and personal religious beliefs aside, role up their sleeves, and work together to promote the economic expansion of their communities. Senator “A” has no experience whatsoever in dodging these kinds of extreme personal attacks, which are right out of V.I. Lennin’s playbook. So he flinches.

That’s a character weakness on the part of Senator “A.” We don’t need a new “meta-theory” about how Americans, including conservatives, now want the government to do more to help them, in order to explain a personal character weakness.

The only meta-theory we need is one to explain why we have so few men of character representing what is, unquestionably, the dominant political force among the American people: conservatism. Belief in a strong military, lower taxes, less government intervention in our lives, and a spirited counter-attack against the cultural despisers, the people who literally hate anything having to do with God, religion, traditional family values, and, yes, America. I wish we could find a candidate who was “authentic” enough to simply say to the American people, “I hate the government just as much as you do!” If a psycho like Ross Perot can get 19% of the vote based on that slogan, imagine what an articulate conservative with a "conscience" could get.

03/06 11:22 AM