Friday, November 09, 2012

Frum's solution

I wrote a post recently criticising the nearly defunct Newsweek magazine. If you thought I'd been too harsh look at the most recent cover of the magazine:

Newsweek GOP: You're old, You're white, You're history!
 
As you can see the top headline reads "GOP: You're old, You're white, You're history". (hat tip: Ideologee)

The magazine seems to expect that its readers are on board with the passing of white America, so that it can be talked about openly and breezily as an acceptable development in American society. The historic, founding people of the U.S. don't seem to count for much in the minds of Newsweek liberals.

The headline advertises a piece by David Frum which attempts to point a way forward for the Republicans. The article has some interesting observations such as this:
The central divide in American politics is the same as the divide in almost every advanced democracy on earth: between one party more committed to private enterprise and another party more supportive of the public sector. These parties may be called Conservative and Labour, Christian Democrat and Social Democrat, Gaullist and Socialist.

I've argued something similar: that both left and right share the same underlying liberal philosophy, but that the right prefers society to be regulated by the market, whereas the left wants society to be regulated by the neutral expertise of a state bureaucracy.

So what is Frum's solution for the Republicans? He's not exactly a straight talker. He speaks, for instance, of the need for the GOP to become "economically inclusive". Which is code for what? Reading between the lines, he seems to want the GOP to appeal more to those lower down the economic scale. But how? He doesn't spell it out.

He also wants the GOP to become "culturally modern". But again he doesn't spell out what this means in practice.

Finally there's a lot of rhetoric about being future oriented. There's no clear indication, though, of what that means apart from being committed to technology.

The impression you get is that Frum doesn't believe in much at all. His message seems to be that a successful political party will look at whatever is happening in society and embrace it as the future.

I don't think that's how the left works. The left has an agenda and then changes society in line with that agenda. In fact, the left has a concept of what is just and then leads a moral crusade to impose this concept of justice on society.

According to Frum, the right should not attempt to lead in this way, but should instead jump to the front of whatever cultural and social trends are happening in society - trends which the left will have initiated decades previously.

That is a deeply unappealing strategy if you oppose the larger liberal trends in society. But Frum has already explained that there's not much of an ideological difference between left and right anyway - his party just has more of an emphasis on the free market.

So perhaps Frum is relaxed with the left doing the "social work" of moving society along in a liberal direction, whilst the right just goes along with it whilst keeping sufficiently up to date to have a good chance of winning office.

18 comments:

  1. Of course his message is hitch to whatever wagon comes along, liberals can't STAND tradition and values, they believe in self-autonomy, and sense you can't determine the values you're born into then it shouldn't matter completely ignoring the child/parent bonds.

    Real conservatives understand the fundamental reasons for not supporting gay marriage, open immigration, and abortions. Right-liberals just think if they supported those "social" issues then they'll be elected, sadly they've been duped, they've been duped into believing that the goal for left-liberals is those things, when in fact the goal is to destroy the family bond devaluing life with abortion, flooding society with values opposite of the host country through immigration, and destroying the well known biological complement of men and women with gay marriage.

    Just look at ireland, they introduced a bill that will allow the state to take children and put them up for adoption without parental consent, youcan find more at lifesitenews, this is coincidently after they allow gay adoption.

    Liberals want a utopian state, the family unit is the only bond that has been preventing that, destroying the family unit/devaluing the family bond, is the real goal of liberals. Right-liberals just believe the lies lefties use like "civil right" and "it's a woman's body".

    It makes me sick

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  2. *shakes head*. You're white!!! What can you say to that?

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  3. "economically inclusive" = more wealth transferred to the rabble

    "culturally modern" = pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, pro-open borders

    In short, the GOP should become the "Democrat lite" party.

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  4. The trouble is that if the GOP simply moves to the Dem-Lite position a la Meghan McCain and Steve Schmidt type approach, it becomes even less competitive politically than it is now. The reason is that it's a falsehood that there is a significant groundswell of voters who are "economically conservative and socially liberal" -- that is, who want low taxes, low regulation, smaller state, and who want gay marriage, abortion, sex free for all and so on. In other words, libertarians. Sure, there are libertarians, but not very many of them. Take away the social conservative planks from the Repub platform and you throw away many, many more votes than you gain, because there just aren't that many socially liberal/economically conservative people out there. Most people are in line on one side or the other, and the issue is getting them out to vote and getting a significant percentage of the small number of people in the middle.

    People like Meghan McCain really want to be democrats in substance while being republicans in name -- but that's a recipe for worse electoral showings than we've seen.

    The liberal punditry is well aware of this, of course, and is using this to try to drive a permanent stake into the political party that hosts the conservative movement in the US by suggesting that this is what it does. They know this would not help the party politically and would like result in a big split between social and other conservatives -- which is exactly what they want.

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  5. Brendan: "The liberal punditry is well aware of this, of course, and is using this to try to drive a permanent stake into the political party that hosts the conservative movement in the US by suggesting that this is what it does."

    Truth. The liberal pundits are not to be trusted.

    Pundits tell the Republican party: 'The only way you can win is by importing more Democrat voters'

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  6. Jesse_7: "*shakes head*. You're white!!! What can you say to that?"

    You say "You're anti-White."

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  7. David Frum is a strongly identified Jew. Could you find a White gentile so indifferent to the vital cultural interests of traditionally White nations?

    Yes, many millions of them. In the just-concluded American election, 39% of Whites voted for the candidate who among many other things urged hispanics to "punish their enemies," with their enemies implicitly being White.

    He was free to make such brutal appeals to anti-White hostility because he believed, correctly, that he would not be abandoned by too many of his White supporters. They either approved of having an anti-White President, or they did not mind it too much, which means that in practice they are anti-White too.

    They want the same sorts of destructive policies as David Frum; they just want to be the dance partner that leads, not the one that follows.

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  8. Could you find a White gentile so indifferent to the vital cultural interests of traditionally White nations?


    Yes I meet them everyday a lot of them women.

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  9. The whites who voted for BHO are mostly single white feminists and SWPL power couples living in majority white liberal-leaning states. The high housing prices, expensive private schools and the high taxation keeps most minorities out. That and cold weather (most Blacks and Hispanics prefer warm weather). The only minorities SWPLs meet are the good ones and they extrapolate this tendency to all minorities, which is a blatant lie.

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  10. Elizabeth Smith: "The whites who voted for BHO are mostly single white feminists and SWPL power couples living in majority white liberal-leaning states. The high housing prices, expensive private schools and the high taxation keeps most minorities out."

    In other words, they've accepted a bargain: life-long comfort, in return for collective death in the long run.

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  11. George W. Bush will be remembered in the future as the man who destroyed America and accelerated its demise. Perhaps a sort of dark hero. A man who knew that America wasn't worth it anymore.

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  12. It is interesting to see that, in this alleged democracy, it is thought that older white people with traditional values deserve no representation in government. "No political party for you, you pasty-faced troglodytes! Just go and play golf until you die, and don't mind the spent condoms on the seventh green."

    One irony is that no one but old white people read Newsweek. It became a very strange magazine in the end, filled with hipster journalism and advertisements for geriatric medications.

    What we need is a break-away nationalist party made up of the disaffected right wing of the Republicans. We would be happy to cooperate with the Republicans when it was in our interest, but we would never again place ourselves under their leadership. We would also be happy to cooperate with the Democrats, because we would be interested in something other than low taxes. Swing voters always punch above their weight!

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  13. "The liberal punditry is well aware of this, of course, and is using this to try to drive a permanent stake into the political party that hosts the conservative movement in the US by suggesting that this is what it does. They know this would not help the party politically and would like result in a big split between social and other conservatives -- which is exactly what they want."

    Yes, good point. The Conservatives shouldn't be taking pointers from from a group that would like to help bring about their demise.

    The Conservative message of self-reliance, limited gov't., private sector solutions, etc... appeals to our better natures. Unfortunately, the appeal to our lesser natures appears to be stronger at this point. There needs to be an effort to regroup and better enunciate the meaning of being a Conservative with a clear plan for America that the average person can grasp. Some people will be lost but a lean, strong body will develop.

    "George W. Bush will be remembered in the future as the man who destroyed America and accelerated its demise."

    So which is it? Did he destroy it or accelerate its demise?

    No. Its you cynical Libertarians who stayed home and pouted because you didn't get the exact candidate you wanted and in some cases actually voted against your's and the country's best interests so that you could instead "enjoy the decline."

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  14. On the bottom of the Newsweek picture is the title "What the President owes women." That(owes) is a good snapshot of the leftist mind.

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  15. Just for ethnic head-counting:
    David Frum: Jewish
    Daniel Klaidman: Jewish
    Michael Tomasky: Jewish
    Michelle Goldberg: Jewish
    4/4 authors: Jewish, liberal, anti-White.
    Anyone see any errors there?
    I wish we had ethnic networking like that. It's a huge advantage.

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  16. The problem with a "culturally inclusive" (someone upthread already IDed what Frum means by this -- he has no conservative principles other than maybe adding a minor free-market flavoring to leftist proposals, and a "tough" national-security stance which ironically is a big reason people don't like the post-Bush GOP) Republican Party is that, regardless of what people's individual opinions on it are, they'll ALWAYS be outbid by the Left. Sure you may peel off some liberal voters, but the diehards will still find a way to paint the next GOP nominee as, in their mantra, racist sexist anti-gay, just that it's more "subtle" now. (You see this in the attempt to delegitimize any policy discussions in the Obama era, liberals constantly claim that conservatives are purely motivated by racial animus and just won't admit it.)

    the thing is, even with continuing Latino immigration, Romney still got almost 48% of the vote. He has a "base" both of regular support and from ex-Obama voters who don't like how his first four years have turned out. So what the next nominee needs to do is obviously not alienate any of that constituency, while simultaneously bringing back working-class (non)-voters who Obama convinced not to "identify" with Romney cuz he's Mr. Burns or w/e. if they think they can do this by talking about amnesty and saying they're totally cool with gay marriage they're morons

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  17. I should add to a point I made, Frum likes to talk about how "the social issues" (really just two issues) are a reason large swaths of young voters don't vote GOP, which is true, but he NEVER mentions the role Bush foreign policy played in destroying the GOP's electoral advantage on that issue since Reagan, because he supported it.

    not that I think someone is discredited for supporting it. just that, you think they would maybe do some reevaluating of their own considering how it turned out, rather than blaming the GOP's current situation on people they never agreed with anyway, and who are its core support

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  18. Romney lost, and Frum's solution is to have create more Romneyclones. Makes sense.

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