Never Right

Will Collier cautions that conservatives tempted to listen to David Frum should remember his history of making the same arguments – conservatism is doomed, we need to hand over more power from the grassroots to the elites, etc. – in the 1990s, including on the very eve of the great 1994 wave:

Most famously, his tome Dead Right proclaimed the intellectual and electoral barrenness of conservatism in general and the GOP in particular, and offered Frum’s own prescriptions for the renewals of both. The blurb on the original edition’s cover read, “The great conservative revival of the 1980’s is over. Government is bigger, taxes are higher, family values are weaker, and the Democrats are in power. What will the Right do next?”
Hilariously, Frum’s question was answered a scant two months after the August 1994 publication of Dead Right, when a back-bencher from Georgia led the GOP’s takeover of Congress with a majority that lasted for nearly a decade and a half. Along the way they stopped Bill Clinton’s wave of tax increases, killed socialized medicine, ended Welfare as a permanent dole, balanced the budget for a couple of years, and later cut taxes under an eight-year Republican administration. They also did plenty of other, less salubrious things, of course, but one can imagine how far Frum’s jaw must have dropped when his soothsayings of doom were proven wrong before Dead Right – well reviewed by no less than Frank Rich – had even been remaindered.

Read the whole thing.