Right Cross

Rick Henderson from the October 1994 issue

Dead Right, by David Frum, New York: Basic Books, 256 pages, $25.00

I hope David Frum's social network isn't linked exclusively with the conservative movement, because if it is, he's going to be a lonely guy. In Dead Right, a crisply written, incisively argued book, the Forbes legal writer, former Wall Street Journal editorialist, and native of Canada skewers American conservatism for straying from its anti-statist roots. Except for a few conceptual problems near the end, this book uses straight talk to tell conservatives why they've failed and how they might make themselves relevant again.

Americans have overwhelmingly rejected the New Deal liberalism that dominated the nation's politics from the 1930s through the 1970s. But, Frum says, conservatives haven't found a coherent agenda to replace statism.

In the '60s and '70s, Ronald Reagan became a conservative icon--and the movement's political star--precisely because he attacked federal programs with the ferocity of Barry Goldwater. Reagan's 1980 presidential victory gave the right, in Frum's view, a chance to engineer a political realignment. Conservative promises to defeat the communists abroad and slash the federal leviathan at home could have routed the bedraggled left.

Yet as the election drew near, says Frum, Reagan transmogrified himself into a sunny supply-sider, promising that the federal government could simultaneously cut tax rates, boost defense spending, maintain welfare payments, and balance the budget. Reagan had made promises that he couldn't keep without alienating a substantial portion of his base.

Frum asserts that conservatives read too much into Reagan's victory. The tax revolt that helped bring Reagan to power was not a call for limited government. After all, Joe and Jane Suburban are perfectly happy with the government subsidies they receive. "Governors and mayors," writes Frum, "face voters who profess to prefer budget cuts to tax increases. But those same voters continue to expect lavishly equipped suburban high schools, subsidized tuition at state colleges, toll- free highways, and environmental improvements at others' expense." Meanwhile, federal programs subsidize retirees, veterans, farmers, mortgage holders, and college students--in other words, most Americans.

The Reaganites faced a choice: Cut the size and scope of government and face unhappy voters accustomed to receiving subsidies, or change the subject. Frum convincingly argues that conservatives chose the latter. "Conservatives have lost their zeal for advocating minimal government," he writes, "not because they have decided big government is desirable, but because they have wearily concluded that trying to reduce it is hopeless, and that even the task of preventing its further growth will probably exceed their strength." Conservatives have become obsessed with short-term results--winning the next election--with the likely consequence, in Frum's view, that they will become peripheral political players.

As the right makes peace with statism, Frum says, the movement is becoming incapable of confronting the problems facing American society, from illegitimate births to raging government debt to the culture of victimhood. He blames the welfare state, in all its forms, for "function[ing] as a political safety belt, reducing the riskiness of all our lives." And reducing that risk undermines the bourgeois virtues that made America great. "The children of a self-made man are different from their father," he writes, "more optimistic, often more generous, more sensitive, and more tolerant, but less careful, less provident, less hard-working, less self-controlled. In the same way, the citizens of a socially insured America will act and think differently from the citizens of self-reliant America."

Frum divides today's conservatives into three camps: optimists (headed by Jack Kemp), moralists (presided over by Bill Bennett), and nationalists (led by Pat Buchanan). "They differ about many things," says Frum, "but all agree that the time has come for conservatives to quit fretting about the power of the central government and to begin using it."

Of the three groups, Frum likes the optimists best. And why not? Who wouldn't be drawn, at least initially, to the sunny, dynamic message of the Kemp Republicans? Kemp "refused to mix his pro-growth capitalist cocktail with the faintest tincture of budget-cutting bitters," says Frum. "This was--it was said by conservatives and nonconservatives alike --conservatism with a human face."

Unfortunately, many of these cheery folks--notably Kemp and (until recently) House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich--profess that a growing economy would let conservatives reform the welfare state without cutting anybody's benefits. The optimists agree with Charles Murray that free housing, food, health care, and welfare's other enticements give unskilled young persons a huge incentive to go on the dole rather than accept low-paying jobs. But they don't take the next logical step and advocate Murray's suggestion to "end welfare as we know it" by ending welfare. Period.

Instead, the optimists want to reconfigure existing programs so that the incentives change. By embracing the "empowerment" agenda, the optimists don't want to eliminate transfer programs; they want to make welfare efficient and entrepreneurial. But the empowerment agenda, by itself, will always have trouble delivering meaningful results. As Frum notes, enterprise zones won't draw large infusions of capital as long as relatively crime-free, low-tax, deregulated suburbs exist nearby. Similarly, tenants may run public housing projects better than bureaucrats, but experiments with tenant management have resulted in paltry savings for taxpayers.

As "big government conservatives," optimists face opposition from limited- government advocates. So to win elections, optimists must reach out to moderates who believe it's mean to cut welfare. Kemp told Frum that, at the polls, budget- cutting "Scrooges" will always lose to the "Santa Clauses" of the left. "My view," Kemp said, "is that growth is the only political model that can compete with the Santa Claus of the Left." The pro-growth message may help candidates win elections near-term, but unless policy makers boldly cut programs, debt and overregulation will continue, and the problems of the underclass will remain intractable.

Moralists such as William Bennett, Irving Kristol, and education reformer Chester Finn also reject the Charles Murray solution to welfare dependency, but for different reasons. First, eliminating welfare "requires conservatives once again to embark on the hopeless struggle to get rid of a federal program (actually a slew of programs) that will be defended unto death by powerful constituencies [in Congress] and that influence noisy voices in the media," writes Frum. Not an easy way to win elections.

And, says Frum, the moralists believe Murray is too optimistic. Murray argues that removing subsidies for food, medical care, and housing when a woman bears a child out of wedlock would drastically reduce illegitimacy among the underclass. The moralists disagree. "Once welfare has brought a class of dependent mothers and violent sons into existence [the moralists argue], the abolition of welfare may well serve merely to push them deeper into violence and squalor."

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