On David Frum and Healthcare
My Friend David Frum and why he is worth 10 dozen Tunkus and why this post is not as off topic as it seems.
Last week Tunku with the unpronounceable last name, whose previous claim to fame was being the worst WSJ op-ed editor in living memory, decided to reveal to the world why David Frum disagreed with most conservatives (including Andy and me) on health care reform, arguing that Republicans should have compromised.
Did Tunku offer some devastating critique of David’s argument for compromise (which would not have been hard, I am sorry to say)? Nope. Not a bit.
His argument was that David is a suck-up, what Tunku calls “a ‘polite-company conservative’ (or PCC), much like David Brooks. . . . A PCC is a conservative who yearns for the goodwill of the liberal elite in the media and in the Beltway—who wishes, always, to have their ear, to be at their dinner parties, to be comforted by a sense that liberal interlocutors believe that they are not like other conservatives, with their intolerance and boorishness, their shrillness and their talk radio.”
This argument would be despicable except that it is so pathetic that despising it would take too much energy.
Judging motive is always a disaster. Even if one gets it right, the net effect is to allow one to dismiss the arguments of one’s opponent without engaging them. Judging motive shields the intellect from dissent. It makes people dumb.
When the critic gets the motive wrong, and obviously wrong, the whole thing just gets downright embarrassing. Despite Tunku’s “what I call a ‘polite-company conservative’” phrasing it’s not as if his charge was in any way original. We’ve heard the same argument for decades, applied not only to the two Davids, but to George Will, William Safire, even Bill Buckley (mentor to not only both Davids but me as well) or almost any conservative writer more influential, more famous, and more talented than the critics.
It sounds so plausible—unless you spend more than two seconds thinking about it. After two seconds you remember a few things. Like David Frum is roughly fifty years old, comfortably circumstanced, has a great career, is well-connected socially here and in Canada and DOES NOT EVER WANT TO BE INVITED TO ANOTHER COCKTAIL PARTY or at least not to one hosted by liberals showing off apostate conservatives.
Ditto David Brooks, George Will and the rest. They are famous and successful because they are enormously talented. They don’t suck up; they get sucked up to, an experience sadly denied to most of their critics.
(I would never speculate on Tunku’s motives of course. Be it noted, however, that with fewer than 200,000 Google cites (barely a ripple in Google terms), Tunku is a writer toiling in well-deserved obscurity, who seems never to have gotten as much attention before as he has from his piece on DF.)
Andy and I have known David Frum for almost 35 years (since Yale where we hung out with all the other elitist conservative conspirators who now run the world.) In all that time neither of us have ever seen any indication that David even a little bit craves the company or approval of liberals. Not to tell tales out of school, all the evidence in our extensive files suggests he doesn’t like them very much. In our experience his own dinner and cocktail parties are populated mostly by distinctly unfashionable but very bright people who don’t like liberals any more than David (or Danielle) do. (Or maybe we are just on their distinctly unfashionable but very bright list, which we could live with.)
David isn’t pretending to be anything, for anyone. He is today what he has been since he was seventeen: a gentle man of very conservative views, who is more inclined to seek agreement than argument. Unlike your humble authors he does not glory in conflict for its own sake. (This occasionally put us on different sides back at Skull and, oooops, I mean Yale. At least half the time, David was right.)
All the more honor then is due David for the times when he has not only gone to bloody battle but led the charge. Or are we confused? Was that Tunku what’s-his-name who stopped Harriet Miers cold when “real conservatives” like the leaders of the Federalist Society (also friends, also Yalies, also part of the conspiracy) were doing all they could to put a conservative hack on the Court.
Oh, and while we are at it, I have known Dave Brooks (and his astonishingly beautiful wife Jane) only a few years less than Andy and I have known David Frum. Guess what, he’s not sucking up or faking it either. When I met David B. he was a moderate liberal and a terrific writer who, partly under the influence of Bill Buckley, later became a moderate conservative and an even better writer. That’s what he is. Never pretended to be anything else. Do conservatives think the world would be a better place if there were no conservative writers the Times judged acceptable to its overwhelmingly liberal readers who otherwise might never hear a conservative voice?
By the way, for those of you who don’t get out much, liberals hate Dave Brooks, and the Times withstands a good deal of pressure from those people Dave is supposedly sucking up to, but who for some odd reason want him fired.
I worship the ground above which Sarah Palin ever so delicately hovers. (And don’t even get me started on the ankles) Both Davids loathe her. I love Ann Coulter. (Ditto the ankles) I am pretty sure Ann loathes both Davids, (though I don’t actually know that.) I consider Rush Limbaugh a serious public intellectual and overwhelmingly positive force (or at least that’s my impression from a decade ago when his show fit into my schedule.) David F. thinks he is a plague.
Ok, we disagree. But why does that disagreement need to be EXPLAINED?
RV
PS The reason this post is not as off topic as it appears is that the misjudgment of motive is central to the conventional but very confused narrative of what caused the banking crisis. See our piece “The Myth of Moral Hazard”, among others.
Tags: Andrew Redleaf, Richard Vigilante, Whitebox
