A few conservatives - such as David Frum - seem to be grasping the fact that time, society and the country are moving on and that the same message of religious extremism, anti-gay hate, promises of low taxes, and anti-abortion obsessions are no longer a viable message if the GOP ever seeks to regain majority status. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your prospective, the Rush Limbaughs of the GOP and similar Christo-fascists are not getting the message and are attacking those like Frum who realize that the GOP must change. Frum and others are not taking the attacks quietly and are speaking out about the current state of affairs and what is wrong with the party. Here are some highlights from Frum's latest response to his critics:*
These days, the question I hear most from political comrades is: “What the hell happened to you?” . . . . So if it’s not too personal, let me request a few minutes of your time to explain how I ended up being bashed by Rush Limbaugh on the airwaves — and taking a few shots of my own in the pages of Newsweek.
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I moved to Washington, D.C., in 1996. And there I began to notice something disturbing. While the congressional victory of 1994 had ceased to produce much in the way of important conservative legislation, it sure was producing a lot of wealth for individual conservatives. They were moving from the staff offices of Congress to lobbying firms and professional associations. Washington (to quote something I’d write later) began to feel like a giant Tupperware party, where people you had thought of as friends suddenly seemed always to be trying to sell you something. Acquaintances of mine began accepting all-expense-paid trips to the South Pacific from Jack Abramoff.
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Conservative economic policies, which had saved the United States and the other advanced democracies from stagnation in the 1980s, suddenly seemed bereft of answers for the economic challenges of the 21st century. This worried me. What worried me even more was how little it seemed to worry so many of my friends and colleagues from the conservative world and the Bush administration.
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So much of our energy was being absorbed instead by cultural battles left behind from the unfinished business of the 1960s and 1970s. Here, too often, we were on the wrong side of history: Back in the 1960s and 1970s, we’d been fighting to protect the common-sense instincts of ordinary people from elite interference. Now, in the Terri Schiavo euthanasia case, with stem cell research, on gay rights issues, it was we who had become the interfering elite, against a society that was reaching its own new equilibrium.
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Of course, that’s not how conservatives saw it. We saw a country divided in two, red states and blue, NASCAR vs. NPR, real America against the phonies in the cities. A movement that had begun as an intellectual one now scornfully pooh-poohed the need for people in government to know anything much at all. But expertise does matter, and the neglect of expertise leads to mismanagement and failure — as we saw in Iraq, in Katrina and in the disregard of warning signals from the financial market.
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Conservatives stopped taking governance seriously — and so Americans ceased to trust conservatives in government. . . . But on environmental issues, we have to follow the evidence where it leads — and on social issues we have to take our society as it is. If the world changes, we have to change with it. The refusal of so many of my fellow conservatives in the United States to adapt their thinking to facts and realities does not demonstrate their adherence to principle. It demonstrates a frivolous indifference to the responsibilities of political leadership.
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my side will only be successful to the extent it is knowledgeable, to the extent it is public-spirited, to the extent that it is based on evidence and research, to the extent that it advocates the greater good rather than the narrow interests and values of one class or one geographic section.
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Personally, I haope that the GOP continues to ignore those like Frum and continue its veering ever further to the far right with the Christianists until the Party becomes so discredited that its only recourse will be to jettison the Christianists and banish them to the political wilderness for a generation or more.
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