If you are worried that the Republican Party is taking a turn toward closed-mindedness, authoritarianism, and a cult of personality, then maybe you shouldn’t be reviving your Bush-era attempts to purge from conservatism all critics of the Iraq War.
Yet columnist David Frum is doing exactly that.
Frum, a venerable and in some ways conservative columnist, has had many apt criticisms of Trump-era conservatism. Yet on Thursday, he decided to trot out the single worst article he has ever written.
Twenty years ago, I wrote an article predicting the emergence of “unpatriotic conservatives.” The piece caused a ruckus at the time, but it’s been all too sadly proven prophetic. https://t.co/fMrVqa2GA5
— David Frum (@davidfrum) September 29, 2022
Frum’s supposedly prescient article was the 2003 National Review cover story published at the very start of the Iraq War, “Unpatriotic Conservatives: A War on America.”
Frum on Thursday described “Unpatriotic Conservatives” as “an article predicting the emergence of unpatriotic conservatives.”
It was nothing of the sort. There are no predictions about the future of conservatism in the article. The entire argument of Frum’s piece was this: Conservatives who oppose the Iraq War hate their country and want it to lose.
In an effort to recast this terrible article, Frum on Thursday claimed that “its core argument holds: those who yearn for a homogeneous, authoritarian, deferential society — of course they’re going to turn against the United States, flag pin or no.”
This isn’t in any style guide yet, but it should be: You don’t get to pose as opposing “homogeneous, authoritarian, deferential society” while enforcing homogeneity and deference in defense of a disastrous war.
Read the article. It’s not about “some” antiwar conservatives being bad. The thrust of the article is clearly to call every conservative opponent of the Iraq War “unpatriotic.”
“Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves ‘conservatives.’ These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large,” he wrote.
His conclusion accused antiwar conservatives of “hating their country” and then went on:
“War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.”
The clear and direct implication of this article is that opposing the war made you unpatriotic. Frum denies that today, but his article said what it said.
Frum’s claim that he only meant some conservatives would have a few drops of credibility if he named a single conservative who opposed his favored war of choice but still passed his patriotism test. But he doesn’t.
Who were the “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” Frum was attacking?
The first two he named were “Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak.”
Novak, a Korean War veteran, was my boss at the time. So, yes, I took this article very personally. I have tried to put it behind me, and I assumed Frum would have done the same, considering how destructive and wrong his argument has proven.
The Iraq War was a disastrous, nation-changing mistake. It cost thousands of American lives and helped create ISIS. The people of Iraq are just about the most miserable people in the world today. The war helped Democrats take over Congress and then the White House. The Iraq War, dissent from which was unpatriotic in Frum’s telling, was crucial in eroding public confidence in the establishment and, in that way, helped give us Donald Trump.
Frum may still believe the Iraq War was a good idea. But Frum wasn’t merely defending the war. He was trying to shape conservatism into a movement with no tolerance of dissent from the Republican president — which is not the sort of thing either of us, today, believes is good.
The specifics of Frum’s attacks on Novak show the thinness of his case.
Here was Frum’s first charge:
Read that again. Calling al Qaeda more dangerous than Hezbollah amounted to “terror denial.” Nobody has ever, in 20 years, made sense of that charge.
Here was Frum’s charge No. 2:
Considering that George W. Bush never caught Osama bin Laden in two terms and Barack Obama didn’t catch him until nearly 10 years after Novak’s column, that seems fairly prescient.
Charge No. 3 against Novak was the false claim that he “blam[ed] Israel for 9/11.” Frum’s evidence? Novak noted in his first post-9/11 column that “the hatred toward the United States today by the terrorists is an extension of [their] hatred of Israel.” This is evidently true, as bin Laden made clear in his “Letter to America,” in which the terrorist listed his casus belli, beginning with the charge that the United States and Israel jointly “attacked Palestine.”
The argumentation and evidence in the piece were shoddy throughout.
Frum was taking one side in the conservative debate over America’s post-Cold War role in the world and declaring it the unshakable foundation of conservatism. It was utterly shocking to him that anyone who questioned nation-building and preemptive war would call himself a conservative.
I join Frum in the worry that Trump has deformed conservatism in a lasting and damaging way. However, I think Frum’s Bush-era intolerant purge in defense of a disastrous war is not a model that conservatism should follow.
