Bill Kristol, David Frum, and the battle to reclaim conservatism

A dedicated reader thinks Bill Kristol wasn’t fired. Fair enough, perhaps not; Bill had only planned to be at the New York Times for a year, though as public editor Clark Hoyt noted when the Times brought him on, it was “a mutual tryout.” I’m not familiar with Bill’s thinking, but what I heard of the Times’ considerations sounded an awful lot like this George Packer post.

There are number of interesting postmortems on Kristol’s Times column, most simply hateful, some more sophisticated. Jacob Heilbrunn’s in particular is worth a look.

One thing I keep coming back to is something a liberal friend of mine points out: Kristol just lost a job in which he reached more readers in a week than he could in The Weekly Standard all year. That doesn’t bother me, so much as the fact that the Times will almost certainly hire another liberal in conservative clothing to fill the void. If only Bill Buckley were still alive and in health.

Whoever the new supposed conservative is — Ross Douthat, Andrew Sullivan and Megan McArdle have all been floated — it’s probably going to be another conservative acceptable to the New York liberal establishment, which means one who shares the boundlessly credulous credo that the government can accomplish anything, in spite of rather considerable evidence to the contrary. (See: your local DMV; the Iraq war; Hurricane Katrina; the routine loss of government laptops containing tens of millions of Social Security numbers; the inability of the finest police forces in the country to admit ticketholders to a presidential inauguration; the fact that you can’t get on the 4 train without being panhandled, etc.)

At the very least, conservatism implies a belief in limited government, and a skepticism about government’s ability to solve problems in a cost-effective and palatable fashion. Neoconservatism is the betrayal of conservatism from within, and lately the substitution of blind chauvinism and venality for principle. Look at the current debate over closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo, in which neoconservatives — having once again forgotten the first rule of holes — are arguing that the government should have the power to lock people up indefinitely without trial.

I don’t suppose it would help to point out that we have a constitutional system, and there are certain principles we uphold for our own sake, regardless of whether or not it wins us new friends. (You know, “habeas corpus” and all.) Or that the way a neoconservative thinks, why should the government draw the line at foreign combatants, their chauffeurs and whatnot? Who needs fair trials for muggers and murderers? They’re guilty, right? The cops caught them. Are we really going to risk allowing some of them to go free? Whose side are we on? Everybody knows the government never makes mistakes, and anything done in the interest of national security is legitimate.

It speaks well of the Times that they decided to part ways with all that. And if this is what David Frum rebelled at in leaving National Review, that speaks well of him and his intellectual integrity, too. It’s conservatives like Frum who keep hope alive of a Conservatism That Can Win Again.