Frum on the "Reagan Gambit"
[Angelo Matera  02/27 11:19 AM]

It’s interesting to read David Frum’s 1994 book, Dead Right, which was a (premature) obituary for the conservative revival of the 1980s, to see what’s changed and what hasn’t. It confirms that the Crunchy Cons critique is part of the ongoing Fusionist crack-up. Republicans keep finding new ways to forestall it (thanks to the clueless Democrats), but in the end you can’t reconcile the “pessimism” of traditional conservatism with the populist strategies necessary to win votes (and, I would argue, obtain funding from pro-free market business interests). Isn’t that what the 2004 Republican convention represented? Put the optimists on TV and keep the religious folks in the closet? The excerpt below is from the chapter entitled: “The Failure of the Reagan Gambit”.

“If there had been one thing that had distinguished the conservatism of the 1970s from earlier versions of the philosophy, it was a new faith in the goodness of ordinary people. Heavily influenced by the gloomier Roman Catholic theologians, the older generation of conservative thinkers questioned whether the ordinary man was quite all he was cracked up to be. The happy conservatism of the 1970s felt no such doubts. Were public morals and decency in decline? Don’t blame the people; blame the IRS. “A thousand people can grow up to produce opera, Broadway musicals or The Wizard of Oz.” [Jack Kemp]. This cheerful thought, as unconvincing as it would have seemed to the dominant conservative school of the 1950s and early 1960s, which stressed the need for the firm smack of authority, has an ideological pedigree of its own, traceable to a conservative theorist named Frank Meyer. Meyer argued that in a traditionalist society, libertarian means achieve conservative ends. Since the American people were God-fearing, patriotic, and morally responsible, if left alone they would form a society in which any conservative would be comfortable. It was government that was responsible for any antitraditional tendencies in American life. But over the 1980s, as every social indicator important to conservatives pointed further and further into the danger zone, an awful doubt began to spread among them: what if the American people were ceasing to be as God-fearing, patriotic, and morally responsible as they used to be? What if government were not the only—nor even the worst—subversive force?