The reform conservative tries to place blame for the right's woes on the Republican Party's Ron Paul wing. When were they in charge?

Since the launch of his eponymous Web site, David Frum has done interesting and important work advocating a reform conservatism that breaks with the epistemically closed, bombastic world of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. He wants to develop better answers to problems like climate change, the stagnation of middle class wages, and the ongoing economic crisis. Reihan Salam, Ross Douthat, Yuval Levin, and Ramesh Ponnuru are other prominent conservative writers who've taken up some of the same themes, each in their own way. Among this group, it is Frum who is most antagonistic to the libertarian impulse on the right, partly because he is a neoconservative.

That isn't, however, his only complaint. As Frum sees it, what plagues the Republican Party can be attributed to the excesses of its libertarian wing. The Tea Party's unwillingness to compromise, opposition to the bailouts, the debt ceiling fiasco -- those are among his specific complaints.

And his least favorite GOP candidate is Ron Paul. He has reacted with dismay to the right-leaning writers and intellectuals who've flirted with or endorsed Paul in this year's GOP primary. Here is his complaint:

Some see him as a corrective to militaristic nationalism. Or as a principled champion of limited government. Or as a leader who can curb the excessive influence of social conservatives. Those perceptions are not very realistic, but leave that pass for now. More to the point -- even if true, which they are not, these are not the correctives present-day Republicanism most needs.



The thing most wrong with present-day Republicanism is its passivity in the face of the economic crisis, its indifference to the economic troubles of the huge majority of the American population, and its blithe insistence that everything was fine for the typical American worker up until Inauguration Day 2009 or (at the outer bound of the thinkable) the financial crisis of the fall 2008. It is the lack of concern to the travails of middle-class America that "reform Republicans" should most centrally be concerned with. And no candidate in this race...has been more persistently, aggressively, and forcefully heedless of those travails than Ron Paul.



I am sympathetic to Frum's reform project and value his insights, but I find this critique totally unpersuasive. As Frum himself acknowledges, the Bush administration made a lot of mistakes. None of them were caused by an excess of libertarianism, and Paul was against most of them. There is also the fact that the figures Frum is constantly sparring with, like Limbaugh and Mark Levin; the media entity he most frequently critiques, Fox News; and the Washington, D.C., think tanks whose behavior he criticizes, AEI and the Heritage Foundation, are themselves all vocal and consistent opponents of Rep. Paul's aspirations. It cannot be that Paul and all of those others are the problem, and Paul is the one that doesn't fit.