The American Spectator

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Sometimes his efforts bear fruit. On immigration, racial preferences, and same-sex marriage, Frum outlines useful ways for conservatives to navigate these culture war minefields, addressing the American majority's anxieties without pointless scapegoating or demagoguery. Frum advocates lowering the tax bills of a key Republican constituency -- families with children -- who decreasingly benefit from income tax rate reductions. He would index the child tax credit to inflation and expand it to benefit all working parents. Orthodox supply-siders are unlikely to be enthusiastic about this approach, correctly protesting that such policies won't do much to accelerate economic growth. But work isn't the only behavior conservatives would like to incentivize and growth isn't the only goal.

Then Frum starts reaching. Prison reform may be a good idea, but is it really an issue on which to build a new Republican majority? Frum asks, "Why shouldn't Republicans adopt the obesity issue as our own?" Maybe because doing so would encourage fat jokes about Dennis Hastert; maybe because it is hard to imagine what a conservative government could really do about the problem. 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?"

Frum seems to favor a conservatism that is more pragmatic and less ideological (except on foreign policy, where it should be less pragmatic and more ideological). He 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. For example, South Dakota did vote to repeal its strict antiabortion law, but by less than a 3-to-2 margin, not 8-to-1.

Reagan solved real problems using conservative principles. That means adapting to new problems, not new principles. Frum comes close when he points out the extent to which the government, rather than the market, distorts our health care system. Then he ends up suggesting that the government should force individuals to buy medical insurance. His green conservatism also starts out promisingly but falls short. Raising energy prices for ordinary people through carbon taxes to pay for investment tax cuts for the affluent -- no matter how defensible both policies are separately -- sounds like almost the opposite of a winning strategy.

In the end, the next generation's Milton Friedmans and Bill Buckleys can't be discovered in a day. The arguments and ideas Frum so convincingly encourages conservatives to develop can't be perfected in an election cycle. Frum once argued that "conservative intellectuals should be at work on something a little more ambitious than the Republican Party's next campaign manifesto." He was dead right the first time.

topics:
Taxes, Foreign Policy, Education, Health Care, John McCain, Social Security, Abortion, Environment, Law, Conservatism, Immigration, Energy, Medicare