Before his recent high-profile split from the American Enterprise Institute, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum visited North Carolina. He discussed the future of conservatism while delivering the annual John W. Pope Lecture at N.C. State University. Frum also discussed conservatism with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: You focused on this issue of conservatism and where it’s headed, and said that while there may be some good news on the elections front, there is some not-so-good news on the future of the movement. Why is that true?
Frum: Well, let’s remember, the Democrats managed to score big gains in 1986 and still to lose the presidential election two years later. There’s a risk of not understanding why you won and making mistakes because you misunderstood. Republicans are going to do well in 2010 because the economy is so terrible, and voters will punish the incumbent party, as they should. The danger for Republicans is that we’re going to assume we have solved all of our big political problems, now we have a big mandate, and that a lot of the kind of radical tone that voters have heard from us over the summer when we were expressing our opposition to things Barack Obama would be doing, that is now going to feed into the early days of a presidential campaign, and that could be very destructive and alarming to people.
Kokai: One of the things we’ve heard quite a bit from conservatives within the Republican Party is that Republicans lost so badly in the most recent elections because they weren’t conservative enough. You actually addressed that head-on and said that’s not the way the way to look at it.
Frum: Look, if it were an electorate of one and I were the only voter, that would be true, but there are all these other people out there. And when people say this, I’m not even sure people believe it. It feels like an answer, but do you really think that the reason that a lot of people who had voted for Republicans in years up to 2006, switched in 2006 and voted for a bunch of liberal Democrats for Congress was because, you know, we want more conservatism? It’s natural to believe when you lose that if you’ve offered voters ham and eggs, they turned it down because they wanted double ham and double eggs. But voters are voting not for ideology; they’re voting for results.
The reason Republicans got in trouble in 2006 and 2008 was because living standards weren’t going up. After inflation, the typical worker is earning no more in 2007, actually a little less, than in 2000. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not going well. People felt the Republicans just didn’t know what they were doing, and Katrina was exhibit A. Those are the problems we need to fix. We need to have an answer to the question: how are we going to get wages rising again? How are we going to govern effectively? How are we going to win wars?
Kokai: You made a special point during your presentation to contrast basic principles, conservative principles, with the policies that have often gone along with those principles in years past, and admonished the audience not to conflate the two. Why is that important?
Frum: Principles are abstract. It’s hard to get your arms around them. Policies are concrete. So school choice is a policy; a tax cut is a policy. What has tended to happen in the conservative world is we’ve taken these policies and made them principles here. You’re not a good conservative unless you believe you should cut taxes all the time. But sometimes I think the principle is limited government and market competition. And sometimes the way you defend limited government is by making the tax issue quite secondary. It is going to be important after President Obama leaves office, whether that is sooner or later, it is going to be important to restrain the growth of government, but it’s also going to be important to pay for the government that he unfortunately has bought. A lot of that money is paid. It’s spent. The stimulus is spent — or will be spent by the time he leaves office. We have to pay for it.
Here’s the thing I worry about a lot: the taxes that are easiest to raise in Washington are the most destructive taxes. [It’s] very easy for people to raise the corporate income tax by taking away — slowing deduction schedules. It’s quite easy to raise the payroll tax. We’ve seen that happen a lot of the time. Actually, we’ve had two increases, and we’ll soon have a third in the income tax since 1990. Now if you’re a Republican, you say, “No, no, no, we’re not going to consider any alternative taxes. Just leave us out. If it’s a new tax, we’re not going to do it.” The system needs revenue to pay for money it’s already spent. You leave open the door for Democrats to say, “Well, let’s raise the taxes we want to raise.” From a conservative point of view, you’re better off, it seems to me, one of the things that’s going to be mission one in this era we’re going to be paying for government we’ve already bought is shifting from destructive taxes, like the corporate income tax and other taxes on work, saving, and investment, to consumption taxes. And that isn’t a tax cut, it’s a tax change, but that is going to be priority one.
Kokai: Some in our audience I know are going to hear what you have to say and say to themselves, “That sounds good, but if you open the door to new types of taxes, we’re just going to have the taxes we already have plus these new taxes.” How do you respond?
Frum: Look, if you make mistakes, you do a bad job, if you get outmaneuvered you get outmaneuvered. There are a lot of ways to do that. But let me point to some concrete examples where this has worked. British Columbia, which is the western-most province in Canada. They have a right-of-center party that just imposed a carbon tax, the first carbon tax in North America, and used that money, dollar for dollar, to pay for tax reductions, especially in the corporate income tax in the province. It made British Columbia a much more attractive place to do business. You can see the governments do that, that all the money from this carbon tax — which is really an energy tax — has flowed through to reduce other taxes. I think one of the ways you do this, I would think, is instead of reducing taxes you talk about eliminating categories of tax. I think that would be a good warning. If somebody were saying, “Why don’t we have some kind of new consumption tax and reduce the corporate income tax,” I’d be nervous about that.
But if they said, “Why don’t we have this new tax and eliminate the corporate income tax,” I think that would be a good deal because the difference between not having one and having one is very visible.
A deal I’d be interested in is if you could say, “Eliminate the corporate income tax, eliminate the capital gains tax,” and pay for that with a new kind of consumption tax. I think that would be an attractive alternative. And you could check it because people would know whether it was there or not.
Kokai: You’ve written a whole book on where Republicans and conservatives need to go next. It’s called Comeback. We don’t have time to get into all the details. But in the remaining moments we have, what’s job No. 1, or one or two items that conservatives and Republicans need to do moving forward?
Frum: I think job one is restoring the party’s reputation for competence. Historically, Americans, when you asked them, “Which party is better on health and education?” they said the Democrats. “Which party is better on honesty, integrity, and competence?” They say the Republicans. A lot of that is based on people’s experience with local government. They contrast the daily machine with how their local county works. We really lost that reputation in the Bush years, sometimes unfairly, but sometimes fairly. In the 2008 cycle, voters gave the Democrats the advantage on that complex of issues by a margin of 5-to-3. And we rebuild that record at the state level by showing good, effective governance. Mitch Daniels in Indiana, people like that, they really contribute to restoring that. People get very excited, people get very angry, and we have now this huge media complex on Fox and talk radio of people who make a living by being very flamboyant and saying some wild things. But that has a cost, and the cost is you look like less responsible people. You look like people, maybe you’re fun to listen to, but you’re not to be trusted. We need to be the party that America trusts again.