Dead Right: The Fall of the Conservatism of Hope and the Rise of the Conservatism of Fear. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1994 by Christopher Buckley

In this, the 25th anniversary year of Apollo 11, it's worth recalling the famous quip of conservative trencherman M. Stanton Evans: "Any country that can put a man on the moon ought to be able to abolish the federal government."

Sigh. A dozen years after the moon landing, Ronald Reagan came to power, and conservatives had their big chance. But we blew it. That could have served as the subtitle to David Frum's excellent book, Dead Right, but the one he put on it will do: "The Fall of the Conservatism of Hope and the Rise of the Conservatism of Fear."

This is a brilliantly argued, wonderfully readable and into the bargain a rather witty book. And it is, by gum, an important book, a 205-page reality check on the future of Republican politics. Republicans, and the conservatives who court them, have been in denial ever since David Stockman started warning about the deficits. The result is an ideological Yugoslavia, with Pat Buchanan leading the Croats and Ollie North at the head of the Serbs. At the rate it's going, Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour ought to consider siting the '96 convention in Sarajevo.

How - oh, how? - did we get ourselves into this mess? Frum provides the answer on page 204, but since this isn't a John Grisham novel, I'm going to give away the ending. It won't ruin your enjoyment; Frum is so good he manages to make wonk reading exhilarating, almost page-turning. The answer is that "we [the conservatives] adapted to them [the American people]."

If this sounds appallingly elitist, let us now proceed backwards to page one to see how Frum arrived at his conclusion.

Reagan came into office promising, among other things, to balance the budget. And here we are with these deficits the size of the budgets of some countries. As then-Vice President Bush's speechwriter (1981 to 1983), I wrote a lot of gargle about how we could absorb these, uh, revenue shortfalls - or whatever camouflage grease I was applying to the d-word in those days - but my fingers always felt a little dirty after lifting off the typewriter. In private, I would go in search of conservative wise men and ask, in a hushed voice, Why are we doing this? Do not worry, I was told, by people whom I had heard extolling the virtues of government thrift for decades: The deficits aren't that bad, relative to GNP. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Back I went to the typewriter to inveigh against Walter Mondale, and yet I had that... un-fresh feeling. Something seemed to me to remain profoundly, tectonically wrong.

And something was wrong. "For a brief and wonderful moment," writes Frum, "supply-side economics held out the hope of limiting government in a way that offended nobody. Alas, that part of the supply-side vision was quickly falsified by events." Faced with these overwhelming, theory-refuting (or, pace Bush, voodoo-confirming) numbers, Reagan stared into the eyes of the beast and flinched. We would grow out of the deficits, he said in that way of his, if he addressed the d-thing at all, and then would motorcade off to give another speech about the magic of the marketplace, the Evil Empire, and those awful Colombian drug barons.

Well, the ineluctable truth of the matter is that Reagan failed to do the dirty, rotten, lousy work of conservatism. He failed to cut spending, failed to brake the growth of government, failed to tell the truth: We're spending too much on Social Security, Medicare, entitlements, UDAG, the whole schmear. Why didn't he? Maybe he was smarter than the conservatives who voted for him, at least in this sense: Maybe he understood that for all his rhetoric, Americans basically like big government, Social Security, Medicare, veterans' benefits, farm and mohair subsidies, all the oinky meat at the bottom of the barrel. But if that's so, was he lying to us about cutting spending and shrinking Uncle Sam?

Frum's book is an unsettling litany of promises broken and unkept. "Despite all the caterwauling about Reagan's supposedly savage budget cuts in 1981, not one major spending program was abolished during the Reagan presidency." He only did away with one spending program, CETA; and that was immediately replaced with the Jobs Training Partnership Act, sponsored by one Senator Dan Quayle (co-sponsored by Teddy Kennedy). Honestly, it's enough to make you weep.

It gets worse. Reagan's 1983 Social Security tax nullified the much ballyhooed 1981 Kemp-Roth Roth tax cut; indeed, families at the median income level actually had their taxes rise between 1981 and 1984.

Defenders of Reagan like to blame it all on Bush's politically disastrous) 1990 tax increase. But as Frum points out, more than half the (Kemp-Roth) tax cut was lost between 1985 and 1989. Moreover, "If it's not honest to blame the loss of the tax cut on George Bush, it's even worse to blame the chronic overspending that made the tax cut unsustainable on a profligate liberal Democratic Congress. Of course liberals and Democrats are profligate. That's why God makes conservatives and Republicans - to stop Democrats from spending the nation into bankruptcy. But, through the 1980s, the conservatives failed to do their job."