Right thinking

David Frum has spoken for American conservatism for a generation – now he despairs of it

David Frum has been a major force in American conservatism for more than 20 years. He was a speechwriter in President George W. Bush’s first administration and is said to have coined the phrase ‘axis of evil’. In the last few years, however, he has fallen out with the leading conservative magazine, National Review, the leading conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, and the leading conservative TV network, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. He is an active political blogger at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, where he regularly deplores Republican intransigence and bloody-mindedness.

Rather than write a self-justifying memoir, the time-honoured response to a public parting of ways, Frum has just published Patriots, a comic novel about dysfunctional Washington. America’s political community is going to enjoy matching fictional names to real faces, and it’s not hard to imagine a movie version. His message is that the conservative movement has betrayed its heritage, lost its intellectual energy, and bred a generation of obstructionists.

Frum (born 1960), the son of a well-known Canadian TV personality, Barbara Frum, was educated south of the border, at Yale University and then Harvard Law School. Working for the Wall Street Journal in the 1980s and 1990s, he gained a reputation for writing brilliant but sharply critical articles on other conservatives. This phase of his career culminated in the publication of Dead Right (1995), a panoramic account of conservative follies and mishaps since the Reagan years. The Republican party, he believed, had failed to live up to its promise of limited government, and was too deferential to its evangelical wing.

He patched things up with What’s Right (1997), outlining a policy for conservatives to regain the initiative.