David Frum and Michael Anton are unalike in most ways. The former is a Canadian-born journalist, a current staff writer at the Atlantic, and a leading Donald Trump critic; the latter holds positions with the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College (my alma mater) and is a leading Donald Trump defender. Both, however, worked in the George W. Bush White House. And both, following their time there, employed for domestic political ends, in essays that have become famous, the rhetoric that spawned from the War on Terror.
In the latest issue of National Review, I look back at Frum’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives” (written in 2003 for this magazine) and Anton’s “The Flight 93 Election” (written in 2016 for the Claremont Review of Books under Anton’s then-pseudonym “Publius Decius Mus”). The former challenged the conservatism of Iraq War opponents; the latter challenged the conservatism of those who were unwilling to “storm the cockpit” (as the passengers of Flight 93 did) by voting for Trump in 2016.
Both made some good points. Frum was right to detect in some of his targets’ non–Iraq War views a certain disdain for America, which could curdle into racial animus. Anton was right to fault the decadence of Beltway conservatism (“Conservatism, Inc.”) and to loathe the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency. But their blatant abuse of martial rhetoric for domestic political ends led them astray. Frum unjustifiably attacked longtime conservative journalist Robert Novak and associated his own brand of conservatism with Iraq War advocacy, which helped discredit it (Frum has since drifted away from the right) and empower his enemies when the war went south. And Anton descended into generalization and apocalypticism in service of his case. Today, each remains, in a sense, stuck with his argument. Frum recently attempted to defend his Iraq War advocacy and to conceive of Ukraine’s struggle as a way to rehabilitate his worldview, while Anton has continued to defend Donald Trump without admitting that Trump has become an obstacle to the conservative goals that Trump’s administration, at its best, was able to pursue.
That both men saw fit to appropriate martial imagery for their distinct purposes bespeaks, in my view, conservatism’s fundamental aimlessness today — one that has yet to be worked out. Instead, conservatives seek meaning in ephemeral causes and figures. There has to be a better way. You can read the whole thing here.