It was telling, I think, that David Frum changed the name of his compelling website (for which I’m duty-bound to say I’ve written) from New Majority to Frum Forum. The title swap wasn’t an indulgence of vanity so much as a sober assessment of reality: there will be no new conservative majority until conservatism rescues itself from so many cut-rate bargains with splenetic populism and cynical electoral strategies and refocuses its energies into formulating ideas that accord with a changing American society.

The heritage of Burke and Disraeli wants for resuscitation but resuscitation will have to wait until the Tea Party exhausts itself or a Congressman is knocked unconscious by a brick. Frum has been banging on about a conceptual and attitudinal rethink of the right for some time and his recent ouster from the American Enterprise Institute--for failing to hew to the party line on healthcare reform, or at least keep his mouth shut when deviating from it--can be seen as both inevitable and cataclysmic.

An intellectual gets sacked from a prominent think tank and the best he can typically expect by way of reaction is cocktail party palaver or the gossipy D.C. feuilleton. But Frum has not only positioned himself as the Cassandra of modern conservatism, he’s taken very public stances against exponents of the ‘movement’ he deems most hazardous to its health: namely Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. Even when pointing out where these figures fail as true disciples of the right, he has been accused of defying popular tastes. This is an odd offense for a conservative to commit, as celebrity--which even Palin and Limbaugh’s defenders admit is their greatest joint asset--is nothing if not a “liberal” cultural phenomenon attributed to Barack Obama’s election and global stature despite a very hollow record of accomplishment. Since when have gravitas and intellectual distinction trailed behind big box office in the corridors of the right?  Frum’s crime in the health care fiasco was that he was too able of a translator and archivist of conservative ideas, demonstrating how the roots of Obama’s policy were laid down at the Heritage Foundation twenty years ago in response to Hillary Clinton’s disastrous attempt to reform health care when her husband was in the White House.

It is never the sign of the vitality of any political movement to brand internal opposition as treachery or heresy. In embryo, all successful movements must account for a wide array of opinions and standpoints, the better to cultivate the good and discard the bad through debate. (This has even be done outside Ivy League universities.) Lest we forget, two common entry-ways to Buckley’s National Review were liberal Roman Catholicism and ex-Trotskyism. As long as you were interesting, it didn’t matter how you got there.

Nor does one have to be a Marxist to realize that all political tendencies come with harbingers of their future decline. The implosion of the anti-totalitarian left can be charted by a series of forerunner starbursts that appear more significant in retrospect: Michael Moore’s scuppering of Paul Berman’s critical investigation of the Sandinistas in the pages of Mother Jones in the mid-80’s; a concerted effort, a decade on, led by Noam Chomsky to not only paint the Nato assault against genocide in the Balkans as neoliberal imperialism but to deny that genocide ever took place; an opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq which allowed no room for shows of solidarity with the victims of Saddamism; the co-operation between various ‘socialist’ parties in Europe with jihadist front organizations. The culmination of these events is as dire as it once was inconceivable: to be a ‘progressive’ today means to be a student of Brent Scowcroft.

Fortunately, that’s begun to change now, too.  I don’t expect too many readers of The New Criterion to keep up with the regular output of Dissent magazine, but it has just unveiled a new group blog called “Arguing the World," corralled by my friend Alan Johnson, the former editor of Democratiya, an online literary journal that I also had the proud honor of contributing to in its short but influential run (it has since “merged” with Dissent).  In one of the blog’s maiden posts, Martin Bright sounds hopeful for a resurgence of the anti-totalitarian left as it used to be defined--at least in Britain--by the likes of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and the recently departed Michael Foot:

I have been musing for some time about the future of the intellectual left in Britain. Where will discussion of progressive anti-totalitarian politics find a home? This is a serious question in a country that remains smug about the strength of its left-wing institutions (the party of government, trade unions with considerable influence, a surprising array of think tanks), while failing to grapple with the pressing issues of the day, let alone the future.

The left position on the Islamic extreme right (a real political force in parts of Britain) is still dangerously confused, for example. But we have also failed to develop a strategy for moving beyond the particular version of third-way politics developed by New Labour. We remain trapped in the headlights of the forthcoming election and so any grander theory of progressive politics will have to wait. Do we believe that the recovery will come as a result of the emergency Keynesianism of Gordon Brown and his Chancellor Alistair Darling (who will emerge as the real hero of the crisis)? Or will there be a new compact with the market via micro-entrepreneurship to drive the economy? We have no idea. And how we will embed the strides made during the New Labour era in the areas of women, children, and gay rights and anti-racism? We just don’t know.

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