The recommendations of his new book Comeback were central to the advice former Bush speechwriter David Frum gave Conservatives on his visit to London this week - and rightly so. As well as being an excellent guide to American politics at the end of this decade, the book’s observations are wide-ranging enough that only the densest of British readers could fail to see the relevance to our own politics of many of the arguments made. (Indeed, Frum makes it easy even for them with regular references to British politics, with not only Thatcherism, Tony Blair and David Cameron featuring, but Alastair Campbell and the extremism of so many British Muslims.) Reading through the book with a review like this in mind, I quickly lost count of the number of striking, provocative and original points made, often as asides. Among them:
- Even with the rise of China over the next few decades, America’s share of global output is projected to be much the same as it was twenty years ago, or indeed a century ago. Much forward-looking editorialising in Europe implicitly describes a world in which China’s growth will parallel America’s relative decline, with Europe standing still. In fact it is Europe’s relative influence that looks sure to decline as China grows - with America standing still.
- One cannot realistically - as Western leaders such as Bush and Blair have tended to do – both define the war on terror as a struggle “as epochal as World War II or the Cold War” and say that the terrorists are a tiny, outlandish fringe group with almost no wider support among Muslims worldwide.
- There simply was never a moment right after 11 September 2001 when the whole world was pro-American. Even the famous Le Monde headline ‘We Are All Americans’ had in the text below: “[T]he reality is perhaps also that of an America whose own cynicism has caught up with [it]”.
- Nonetheless “[i]f American power is not seen to be constrained by American law, then non-Americans will yearn to see it constrained by some force outside the United States”.
- When it comes to healthcare, America’s famed ‘uninsured’ are often quite wealthy: a third live in households with annual incomes above $50,000 – one fifth in households making more than $75,000.
- Education has been one of voters’ top three issues ever since the mid-1980s because education really has come to matter far more. While in 1973 the average graduate earned twice as much as the average non-graduate, by 1990 it was three times as much.
- America’s inequality statistics are as much a reflection of how open are the country’s borders to the rest of the world as of the poverty of native-born Americans. Most naturalised immigrants are poor and uneducated, and most legal immigrants are their relatives.
- Democrats have been trusted more on the environment by voters for decades, but this appears to be in spite of the actual record. Republicans have been responsible for all the major federal legislation aimed at protecting the environment.
- Why are so many environmentalist activists so indulgent of absurd conspiracy theories about Big Oil and car manufacturers holding back cheaper alternative fuels? Frum argues that this is at least partly because voters are extremely sensitive to increased energy costs, an inevitable consequence of the zealots’ proposals. This sort of conspiracy-mongering is the only way they can deny any conflict.
No one could accuse Frum of self-deception about the uphill struggle the American right has ahead if it hopes to continue to dominate the policy-making agenda. Comeback is not an optimistic book. Its essential message is that Republicans must change dramatically if they are to overcome the unpopularity with which they currently struggle.
In the opening pages – the first chapter is entitled ‘George W Bush: What Went Wrong?’, the second ‘Why We’re Losing’ – Frum makes difficult but truthful concessions. Despite enviable economic growth from 2001 to 2006, median incomes for Americans remained static. Now three quarters of voters think the country is going in the wrong direction and lately “Large majorities of Americans preferred Democrats to Republicans on virtually every public policy issue”, even taxes. This should be a stern warning to those who cling hopefully to the occasionally-voiced belief in conservative op-ed columns that unpopular as the Republican President now is, the Democrat-controlled Congress has lower approval ratings (it always rates poorly, irrespective of party). Most notably, George W. Bush won the Republican nomination and then the Presidency in 2000 because he wasn’t a traditional Reagan style conservative. Although many of Newt Gingrich’s big ideas won the legislative battle in the 1990s, they lost politically. A Gingrich-style small government conservative would have gone into the election opposing massively expensive but massively popular proposals such as prescription drugs for the elderly – and lost. Bush went in with more centrist, less ideological policies and narrowly won.
Frum’s explanations for this apparent reversal are powerful and persuasive. What kinds of issues won Republicans elections in the past? The tax issue was certainly once a voter winner. But now “after almost three decades of tax-cutting, most Americans no longer pay very much income tax … By contrast, the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay well over one-third of all U.S. income taxes”. Tim Montgomerie and Daniel Finkelstein have already debated the relevance of this observation to Britain, and I believe Tim’s argument - that after a decade in which taxes have risen more than a hundred times for tragically and visibly little in return, the politics of tax cuts in Britain are simply not the same as in the US - is surely closer to the truth. For me, the biggest lesson of this analysis for Britain is that it suggests great political dangers in taking the poor out of the tax system, thereby denying them a personal stake in future tax cuts. Tax cuts targeted at low earners is an idea that has resurfaced on many conservative blogs recently, but it is one that if implemented would make all future tax cuts much more difficult.
Crime likewise used to be an issue which led voters to turn instinctively to Republicans – and it was a serious concern, with voters once describing it as the biggest issue facing the country, and with one American family in three falling victim to a serious crime in 1974 alone. Consequently, conservatives policies such as mass incarceration and zero tolerance were implemented and of course crime plunged throughout the 1990s and since. But now crime ranks ninth as a priority for voters - below the environment, below poverty, below energy prices. Frum even writes that tackling the issue of prison rape should now be a big priority for conservatives, so much has the threat of what those criminals do on the outside receded.
Again there appears to be simply no parallel with Britain today, this country’s politics on crime being closer to where America was in 1974. But the policy lessons of how America in the 1990s became a society where people have the luxury of worrying less about being the next Gary Newlove than about what happens to criminals in prison are obvious. Mass incarceration was a great conservative success, whereas – as Frum puts it simply - “The best scholarly verdict on a century of prison rehabilitation schemes is: ‘Nothing works.’”
More fundamentally, Frum asks if conservatives remain as in touch with the needs of modern America. He cites the Democrats’ Tip O’Neill, who complained that Americans who in his view owed so much to the New Deal were giving Ronald Reagan his majorities. (Private Eye once put this left-wing exasperation into a superb cartoon whose caption suggested Robin Hood was beginning to feel he’d given the poor too much - all the little huts in Sherwood Forest were now displaying ‘Vote Conservative’ posters.) Frum suggests that just as O’Neill failed to see how Americans’ needs had changed since the New Deal, Republicans are slow to recognise that the needs of Americans today are not the needs of Americans who first elected Reagan almost thirty years ago.
In 1964, when Reagan first spoke of America as a ‘shining city on a hill’, liberty seemed in short supply domestically and was threatened internationally by the Soviet bloc. His anti-state, libertarian rhetoric reflected a popular reaction against this. Now, these threats have receded and people worry most about disorder - illegal drugs, uncontrolled migration, income volatility – not threats to liberty. They want government to do certain things, such as prevent mass drowning in New Orleans. This is a very different political environment from one in which middle class voters could be most inspired by a libertarian message. In The Age of Abundance, the Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey acknowledges the trend towards greater liberty over the last few decades, and concludes that as society and policies move in a libertarian direction, so will voters. In Comeback, David Frum more plausibly suggests the exact opposite: a freer world actually appears to mean less interest in and market for libertarianism. But neither party has been quick to catch on to this trend. As Frum notes in three brilliant sentences: “Since the late 1970s, the typical middle-of-the-road, middle-class American voter has acquired two huge new worries: the frightening new volatility of the American economy and the disturbing new turbulence in the American family. Voters want answers to both. Instead, they hear Republicans denying that the first concern even exists, and Democrats attacking those anxious about the second as reactionaries and bigots.” As I have argued elsewhere, I believe the centre ground in both Britain and the United States is increasingly made up of this type of neglected voter – socially conservative but looking to government on issues like healthcare and social security.
Perhaps the most interesting parts of the book look at what Frum believes will come to define and distinguish conservatism in the future: being the party of the nation and of national sovereignty. Where modern liberalism so often means a belief that the nation state is a fading concept whose replacement is to be welcomed, with very rare exceptions conservatives instinctively support national sovereignty and see that in absence of any global electorate, international institutions will remain undemocratic, immune from public opinion. John O’Sullivan above all has written regularly on this issue for most of the last decade, and in Comeback Frum briefly appears to concede that this distinction between those who believe in the nation state and those who believe it is an outdated concept may come to be the most fundamental between left and right in years to come. He notes that while 95% of Republican voters say they support the use of force to destroy a terrorist training camp, a mere 57% of Democrats answer the same way, that liberal emphasis on the need for international authorisation for the use of force would ensure the only wars that can be fought are selfless humanitarian efforts rather than deployments for the national interest.
At Policy Exchange last week, I asked Frum about this section of his book, and he noted in his answer how much being seen as the post-patriotic candidate has been an Achilles’ heel of the Obama campaign, from the anti-American statements of the candidate’s wife to the absurd and anti-American statements of his preacher. Arguably, British Conservatives have less work to do on this issue than the usually pro-mass immigration, pro-EU leadership of the US Republican Party.
It is a strength of Comeback that one can accept its diagnosis of the American right’s difficulties, which I have now detailed at length, even if one is sceptical of the recommendations as to where to go from here. The recommendations are creative and coherent, but do not follow inescapably from the rest of the book.
The central domestic policy proposals are a high carbon tax whose economic damage would be offset by major supply-side tax cuts and whose regressive impact would be offset by much more generous child tax credits. In theory, the aggregate effect would be pro-growth and pro-family (Frum argues persuasively that fiscal incentives do indeed persuade people to have more children) without compromising government revenue. In practice, the American political system is such that any one of these proposals could easily meet with defeat or be compromised out of existence when put forward as legislation – yet with each one relying so much on the others, each part of the plan would surely have to emerge as law almost unscathed for Frum’s proposals to work. Britain’s parliamentary system may actually be better suited to such an all-encompassing policy agenda. But when faced with a Conservative Party (or any other party) promising a major new tax on travel alongside fiscal proposals in other areas that offset this cost, the electoral nightmare of the cynical floating voter believing that only the first part of these policies will ever actually happen is entirely predictable. It also seems too indulgent of environmentalist wishful thinking about their own agenda to believe that the economic havoc that could emerge from imposing punishing taxes on post-Victorian transport methods can be remedied by sufficiently substantial reductions in capital gains taxes.
On foreign policy, Frum mixes electoral realism – including a frank acknowledgment of democracy-promotion as dead last when voters were asked to rank fourteen priorities in foreign affairs – with an enduring commitment to much of the foreign policy agenda often crudely termed ‘neocon’. Surprisingly, given how much Frum’s thinking on domestic policy appears to have changed since he attacked Reagan from the right in ‘Dead Right’, he directs readers to his 2003 book ‘An End to Evil’ to see more of his views on American foreign policy, suggesting his thinking here has altered little in the last five years. This seems tactless from such a prominent foreign policy hawk. Keen tax cutters and social conservatives may be justified in feeling irritation at how much they are being asked in the book to sacrifice to electoral considerations if others are unwilling to do the same. On the other hand, there is persuasive evidence elsewhere that the enthusiasm of ‘An End to Evil’ has been tempered. Frum notes how important it is to get across that democracy-promotion is not a code word for war, and advocates talks with Iran, even diplomatic recognition of the Iranian regime – whatever it takes to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.
Like the observations described at the beginning of the review, other proposals deserve much consideration. Based on historic average rates of return, it would cost as little as $300 per person invested each year in a fund tracking the stock market average rather than the government’s own social security system to ensure every American could retire at 67 a millionaire. If the political mood is not right for persuading voters to transfer their existing claims on the state pension system to the stock market, then why not put in an extra $300 on top of that? Marriage likewise, can be a difficult or embarrassing issue for conservative politicians to tackle, opening them up to charges of hypocrisy if they have failings of their own. But there is simply no other way to address poverty and inequality than to stand up for marriage and “If only the morally perfect are allowed to defend the family, then the family will go undefended”. These are lessons whose importance is entirely undiminished when transferred across the Atlantic.
If Republicans suffer a painful defeat on a par with 2006 come this November, the party will be looking at books like Comeback for guidance as to how to pick up the pieces. If its central policy recommendations are unlikely to be the way the party makes its comeback, the first step has to be an accurate diagnosis of where its troubles lie. Comeback’s honest analysis of the GOP’s and the conservative movement’s difficulties ought to be central to this stage of the party’s considerations, and it is to be hoped that smart Republican operatives will already be studying it closely before November comes. But it shouldn’t only be read by them. Even as British Conservatives enter our twelfth year of opposition, it has plenty to teach us about how we can avoid going wrong, and how to get things right.
