As slender as a Stiletto, and as cutting, David Frum's "Dead Right" arrives at a moment when conservatives, flush with some summer successes resisting Clintonism and anticipating substantial gains in this autumn's elections, are feeling chipper. Frum's book, constantly scolding and sometimes scalding, should complicate their complacency. He says few conservatives are serious about combating the social ills they deplore.
And his book calls the bluff of the rest of the country, too. He argues that if people really yearn, as they say they do, for the orderliness and uprightness of the past, they must be prepared to live by the self-reliance, and with the insecurities, of the past. You say we can't turn back the clock? Frum says: We damn well better.
Frum, who has been an editorial page editor at The Wall Street Journal and the legal columnist at Forbes, says conservatives, their rhetoric notwithstanding, have lost their zeal for really minimal government. This loss is apparent in the absence of sustained criticism of the idea that Washington should exact and redistribute a quarter of the nation's wealth. In 1992 Policy Review, the journal of the conservative Heritage Foundation, asked 20 moderate-to-conservative senators from both parties how they would cut $25 billion from the budget. The most telling fact, says Frum, is not that only five responded or that only one had serious suggestions, but that a conservative organization thought cutting $25 billion -- less than 2 percent of the budget -- was an ambitious goal.
By the mid-1980s it was clear that taxes must rise, or government must be cut in ways offensive to middle-class constituencies -- cuts in education, public works, farm programs, Medicare, Social Security -- or the government must borrow on a scale never seen before in human history. Conservatives opted for the third path, that of least resistance. Then they began casting around for ways to change the sub-ject, away from their embarrassing coming-to-terms with big government. Conservative attention turned to "the culture" -- race, sex, illegitimacy, "values." But, says Frum, conservatives are overlooking the causal connection between the social trends that distress them -- from family disintegration to uncontrolled immigration -- and the welfare state.
Twenty years ago economist Sam Peltzman noted a "feedback effect" from enhanced auto safety. Drivers wearing safety belts suffered fewer injuries than drivers who did not, but inflicted more. The safer the drivers felt, the more recklessly they drove. The welfare state, Frum argues, radiates similar "feedback effects" subversive of sensible living. The federal government's $1 trillion a year spent on social services and income maintenance, and the hundreds of billions spent by states, constitutes "a colossal lure tempting citizens to reckless behavior."
Reduce those heaps of money, Frum says, and the restored risks of life would make people more circumspect, disciplined and self-controlled, as risks did before 1933 (the New Deal) and 1965 (the Great Society). Big government enables people to engage in self-destructive behavior without immediately suffering the consequences. "Social Security, student loans and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do now."
Conservatives who want to come to terms with the welfare state and concentrate on restoring "traditional values" -- thrift, diligence, prudence, sobriety, fidelity, deferral of gratifications -- are seeking to restore those values in a world in which government makes them decreasingly necessary. Until the 1930s America was rich in both opportunities and dangers. "If the old American culture and the old American character were rational responses to the riskiness of life, you cannot alleviate that riskiness and expect the old culture to persist." Take away welfare, confront a pregnant unwed 16-year-old with the terrible choices she faced in 1963. Isn't it probable, Frum argues, that there would be fewer pregnant unwed 16-year-olds? There would be fewer even if the culture were vulgar -- even if Madonna's songs were broadcast all day on all radio stations.
Or consider, Frum says, the debasement of universities, where gay studies, courses on the novels of Louis L'Amour and the frivolities of decon-struction proliferate. Professors teach what they do for the same reason Eastern European factories used to turn out pairs of shoes for two left feet: government subsidies protected them from consumer sovereignty. Now, suppose there were no student loans and little other government aid for higher education. Suppose that students, other than those on scholarships, paid the full cost of education, and that universities had no income other than tuition, alumni gifts, endowment income and government or corporate funds for specific research projects. Students paying serious money -- their own -- would demand serious courses, and faculty would start teaching them.
Conservatives rarely think such radical thoughts because they do not think they need to. In the late 1960s and the 1970s liberalism went mad, giving the country busing, racial quotas, double-digit inflation, "bracket creep" tax increases and an adversary stance toward traditional values. Conservatives mistook the nation's revulsion against liberalism for a conversion to conservatism. Frum believes the Reagan years reinforced the misunderstanding because Reagan's cheerful conservatism, which assumed that the moral condition of the country was hunky-dory, did not seriously challenge big government.
Frum argues that if federal spending had risen only at the inflation rate between 1979 and 1989, Reagan could have had his defense spending and his budget cuts -- and a budget surplus sufficient either to repeal the corporate income tax or to cut by one third everyone's Social Security taxes. This did not happen because of "the inability and unwillingness of the most conservative administration since Coolidge's to resist the rise of social welfare spending." Granted, Reagan reduced the ratio of federal spending to GDP, but did so mostly because GDP rose so rapidly between 1983 and 1989. When the economy's growth slowed and government spending did not, the ratio rose again.
Reagan did not abolish any major spending program, and the only program of any sort he abolished, a job training program, was promptly replaced by another with essentially the same mission. Having promised to abolish the Education Department, Reagan kept it and fed it. Its budget swelled from $14.7 billion in 1981 to $21.5 billion in 1989. In the booming 1980s tax revenues soared and spending did even more, and the fastest rising spending was for GOP constituencies -- pensioners, farmers, veterans.
Since reagan's departure, republicans, frum charges, have begun arguing that "the time has come for conservatives to quit fretting about the power of the central government and to begin using it" for moral improvement. But "nobody has any convincing idea of how a modern democratic government could possibly inculcate morality in its people. Virtually the only thing it can do is spend more or less." And more spending is, more often than not, morally debilitating. Consider, for example, Frum's jaundiced view of a Jack Kemp idea.
Frum says Kemp believes homeowners behave better than nonowners, so federal policy should subsidize the privatization of public housing. But Frum suggests that perhaps it has been good behavior that has historically caused homeowning, not the other way around. If there has been a correlation between homeownership and socially valuable behavior, perhaps the causation was this: good behavior was required by the hard exigencies of accumulating enough capital to make a down payment and regular monthly payments. No such causation kicks in when government virtually makes gifts of houses.
Frum reminds his readers that Goldwater, who thought that if we could just get government back on a short leash everything would be jim-dandy, and Reagan, he of the "morning in America" sunny disposition, both believed in minimal government because they believed in the moral and cultural health of American society. The argument becomes more problematic when moral and cultural anxieties permeate politics, as they do today. Frum believes that freedom, understood as the absence of government coercion and supervision, is good for the soul. But his argument runs smack into a perennial dilemma of democracy:
If people are healthy enough to regenerate their lost virtues, do those virtues really need regeneration? Suppose the people have been corrupted by the debilitating kindness of an omnipresent and omniprovident government. Can that government that has been ruinously responsive to public appetites for benefits and security be counted on to stop being injurious? All Frum is asking of government is that it take a Hippocratic oath -- first, do no harm. But modern government's raison d'etre is to be therapeutic and ameliorative, removing the roughness and risk from life. Can it consciously act so as to promote, or at least not diminish, sturdy habits and hardiness of character?
Frum believes conservatives have succumbed to the moral temptation of politics, the addictive joy of popularity, and have adjusted their message to suit their addiction. He wants them to pull up their socks, screw their courage to the sticking point and tell the public not what it wants to hear but what it needs to know. It needs to know that there is a "necessary connection between the social pathologies it loathes and fears and the social programs it still rather likes." He wants conservatives to insist that "the tough old American character they mourn was a rational response to the toughness of American life."
But Frum can not convincingly say there is a bright political future for a party promising a tougher American life. He says, "The welfare state is collapsing about our ears, bankrupting the Treasury and corrupting the character of the people. Republicans need to say something about this unhappy situation." He says "the Reagan interlude" lulled conservatives into thinking the people were with them even when real conservatism might cost them a valued government benefit. Now conservatives should know better and should "practice honesty and pay the price." But what if the price is an extended stay in the wilderness while others in power make matters worse?
Among the current crop of candidates for the leadership of conservatism and -- this is much the same thing -- for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, Frum has kind words only for Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. His conspicuous role in this summer's debates about health and crime legislation has coincided with the arrival of Frum's book. Frum, who is nothing if not fastidious in his political tastes, finds fault with Gramm's frequent accommodations to modern government, but says "no senator of comparable intellectual power has as strong a voting record for less government." When Gramm was a Democratic congressman he co-authored the Gramm-Latta legislation enacting Reagan's budget cuts. As a Republican senator in 1985 he co-authored the Gramm-Rudman Act that, Frum says admiringly, "bespoke a willingness to shut down the entire federal apparatus rather than let it grow beyond the public's willingness to pay for it in direct taxes." Frum is aware of Gramm's reputation as an angry man with a serrated edge, but he says, with Reagan in mind, that "conservatism has not been entirely well-served by geniality."
Yes, but you have to get elected to do good, and Mr. Geniality carried 93 states in two elections. This, recalls Frum approvingly, was Barry Goldwater's message: "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom." Yes, but this was Goldwater's harvest in 1964: six states.
Granted, Goldwater was running when confidence in government, fostered by World War II, was at a postwar high. And if skepticism about government is a rough measure of conservatism, the country is markedly more conservative today than it was 14 years ago when it elected Reagan. Are Republicans and enough others ready to try Frum's recipe for Goldwater redux? Perhaps the fate of Gramm's presidential candidacy will be a leading indicator. In any case, Frum's stiletto has cut to the quick of conservatives' and the nation's current discontents.