Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Two Reviews

Many years ago, I read an interview with Debra Winger (in Esquire maybe?) that contained something like the following exchange:

Q: What do you think of the media you get?

A: Well, the media say I have a history of trouble with drugs and alcohol. And I do. They say I can be difficult to work with on set. And I can. They say I have had a lot of boyfriends. And I have! So really - I have no complaints.

I always try to keep Ms Winger's example in mind whenever I read about myself. One would prefer of course to read nothing but a steady flow of lovely compliments. Still, truth must be served.

In the past couple of days there have been two important and mostly negative reviews of Comeback, one in the American Spectator by James Antle and the other in National Review by Ramesh Ponnuru (not yet available online). They make broadly similar points, and so I'll take them both up together.

1) Both reviewers complain that even if my assessment of conservatism's problems is accurate, my solutions fall short.

Frum is unfailingly persuasive about the conservative ideas deficit but when he presents his own solutions this reviewer often wonders — if you'll pardon the Reagan-era expression — "Where's the beef?" (Antle)

Like the bits of advice dropped in a company suggestion box, some of Frum's recommendations are worthy. Others are too vague to be helpful. (Ponnuru.)

(2) Both reviewers complain that my solutions deviate from the pure spirit of conservatism.

... Frum leaves behind not only the conservative consensus of the day, as he intends, but conservative habits of mind. (Ponnuru)

Frum seems to favor a conservatism that is more pragmatic and less ideological (Antle)

(3) Both object that I slight the accomplishments and prospects of the prolife movement.

[Frum] asks pro-lifers to tone it down even though abortion is one of the few remaining issues where Republicans enjoy a net advantage and without showing much attention to the details. (Antle)

His advice to prolifers is unpersuasive (Ponnuru)

(4) Both reviewers conclude however with a mildly encouraging "E" for "Effort"

Our cupboard is nearly bare, and too few conservatives have noticed. David Frum can't restock it by himself. (Ponnuru)

The arguments and ideas Frum so convincingly encourages conservatives to develop can't be perfected in an election cycle. (Antle)

Some thoughts in reply:

(1) I have no doubt that many of my proposed solutions fall something short of completeness and perfection. In my defense, though, let me quote another old story, Pablo Picasso's reply to an art critic who told the Spaniard that he preferred the work of another Cubist, Georges Braque. Picasso: "Of course you do! I invent - Braque makes pretty."

Solving the problems outlined in Comeback will be the work of a generation. I have tried to contribute my mite, and I think readers of the reviewers above will be surprised at how much more detailed the solutions are than the reviewers indicate. I was concerned too to keep the book short and accessible. Still, I know better than anyone that difficutlies remain - and I will be the first to publicize and applaud any better answers that anyone else can devise.

But getting conservatives to see what the problems are - not in vague outline, but in specific detail - is the essential first step toward solving them. Shortly before Comeback was published, NR published an important cover story by Ramesh and Rich Lowry, echoing many of the themes that fill the book: the insufficiency of conservative ideology, America's trend away from conservative ideas, and so on. Yet that story, "The Coming Cataclysm," was itself a manifestation of the problem it sought to diagnose. Clear-eyed in its assessment of the bad polling data, it flinched from any recognition that we as conservatives have any rethinking to do of our own ideas.

The most plausible path toward a renewed center-right majority involves consolidating and deepening the trend of the decades before 2006: holding on to as much of the existing conservative coalition as possible while adding more downscale voters who lean right on social issues.

This is the Mitt Romney strategy in a nutshell, and it stumbles across three awkward facts: (a) downscale voters, being downscale, have a lot of pressing economic concerns to which traditional conservatism offers few answers in the context of the moment; (b) downscale voters are increasingly Hispanic in origin, who have repeatedly demonstrated their indifference to social appeals; and (c) torquing up social conservatism has serious political costs. (See below.)

Even with the terrifying data opened before them, even in full knowledge of the likely horrible consequences of a 1980-in-reverse in 2008, too many of our best and brightest conservatives can think of no better policy than that of the lost-and-bewildered English tourist: Keep repeating yourself, only louder and slower.

Maybe I should have spelled out even more emphatically than I thought I had one of the central messages, not only of Comeback, but also of my history of the 1970s, How We Got Here. We in 21st century America live in a new era of increasingly radical inequality.

This new inequality pervades all aspects of American life. Yet our conservatism remains a product of the mid-century era of narrow differences. It has not seriously begun to take note of the fact that the society for which it was created has already faded out of existence. The Reagan Democrats - remember them? They are gone: they are retired to Florida, where they depend on Social Security and Medicare. Their children have either migrated up to the fast-growing new mass upper class ... or failed to make it, and are now suffering economic pressures and stresses very different from those that preoccupied their parents.

I'll plead guilty to the likelihood that my attempt to offer new answers is flawed, if only my fellow conservatives will accept my invitation to follow my lead and start thinking of better ones. If Comeback does nothing more than that, it will have accomplished everything I hoped for it and more.

2) We all have our vices, and yes, I have always had a tendency toward deviationism. I see new things, and I think new thoughts. It's a bad habit I know, but my efforts to suppress it have been unavailing.

The specific instance of deviationism that most bothers Antle and Ponnuru is my suggestion that conservatives begin to develop a public response to the growth of obesity. I talk about the feds prodding local school districts to restore recess and phys ed to their previous importance; about efforts to get soda machines out of schools and to improve the nutrional qualifies of school meals; and to public awareness programs like those that promoted seatbelts and motorcycle helmets and warned against smoking and drunk driving.

How can I justify this mucking around in people's personal lives? My direct response is that the Centers for Disease Control estimates that one-tenth of national healthcare expenditures are spent to repair the health consequences of obesity. That's about $100 billion a year, not chump change.

But let me try a different angle. Suppose I said we have a huge problem with teen pregnancy. It causes poverty, increases the welfare bill, etc. If I urged a big federal abstinence-promotion program to deal with it, my conservative credentials would go unquestioned.

Yet obesity may well now be an even more dangerous problem than premature sexual expermentation. If conservatives are allowed to worry about the public health consequences of self-destructive sexual behavior, why not other forms of self-destructive behavior? (I have a personal suspicion, admittedly uncorroborated by any evidence I have yet seen, that obese girls are at higher risk for early sex. Sexuality offers ego reassurance.)

When I got involved in conservative politics in the late 1970s, conservative economists talked a lot about the importance of capital formation. It's increasingly true, however, that the most important form of capital is human capital. That's why education is such a vital public policy concern. Ditto immigration. Why not public health? We conservatives are not libertarians, we recognize that there are individual choices that affect the wealth and security of the nation as a whole. Why aren't we allowed to rethink which choices those might be, in the light of changing circumstances?

One of the major themes of Comeback is that conservatism is being damaged by two great internal sins: conformity and corruption. Surprisingly many of our conservative leaders have made the shift from movement work to full-time lobbying. It is disturbingly often true that we are urged to accept as a matter of core conservative principle something that the urger has been paid to urge. And the conformist tendencies of our movement make this false-flagging all the easier.

If we are to survive as a movement, we must think some new thoughts. New thoughts are often wrong of course. It may be, for example, that the costs of obesity have been exaggerated and that the difficulties of doing anything about it are simply overwhelming. If that's what the evidence shows, then I'll drop the whole concept. But we cannot allow ourselves to be scared away from creative thinking about new problems by ideological policemen, especially when so many of those policemen report to undisclosed employers with very particular economic interests.

3) I do appreciate what the prolife movement and social conservatives generally have contributed to conservatism. I myself have fought the same-sex marriage fight since the early 1990s. (See eg here.) But what has been true in the past will not necessarily be true in the future.

Ramesh has often and correctly argued that prolifers outnumber prochoicers among those voters who vote on the abortion issue.

The question I raise in Comeback is: Will this remain true if Roe v. Wade should be overturned? Remember, among the general public, prochoicers outnumber prolifers. Prochoice America does not vote on the abortion issue because it takes the availability of abortion for granted.

But if the GOP should win the next election - and should appoint one more conservative judge - then Roe v. Wade will suddenly totter. Power to regulate abortion will return to the states. Should that happen, the politics of the issue will change very abruptly and very radically.

Abortion will shift from a back of mind issue for prochoicers to a front of mind issue - and then it may matter very much indeed that prochoicers outnumber prolifers. I am sure that people in the prolife movement have given much thought to their what-happens-next strategy. Have Republicans in general? Till now, the GOP-prolife connection has been a great source of strength to conservatives, attracting new allies without much energizing potential opponents. Will that remain true after Roe? I don't think so. And Comeback tries to think through what Republicans might do next, how they might continue to support the prolife movement without provoking a conservative-crushing prochoice backlash. Liberals would have done well to engage in a little of this kind of forward-planning before 1973. Let's not repeat their mistake.

4) I am naturally very pleased that Ramesh and Antle agree at least that there is value in the project I've undertaken. I don't know however that we agree on what the project is. I'm less concerned to change conservatism's content than I am to change conservatism's method. What our party needs is not more "moderation." It is more empiricism.

My deepest concern in Comeback is less to advocate any particular policy change than to offer an example of how policy discussion should be done. And here, despite Ramesh's and Antle's commendations, it is not at all clear to me that the halls of government are lined with conservatives eager to improve upon my faltering first attempts. My sense rather is that the dead hand of conformism and ideological taboo rests more heavily upon our party and our movement today than at any time since I first became involved in politics.

I don't see much serious effort anywhere to improve upon the ideas offered in Comeback. As I talk to conservative radio shows and Republican audiences, indeed, I see tremendous resistance to any push for change. I don't group Ramesh and Antle among the resisters. Indeed both have written boldly about the need for change in general. It's change in particular that is always the problem.

01/16 07:18 PM