Dead Right.

• Author: Henderson, Rick

I HOPE DAVID FRUM'S SOCIAL NETWORK isn't linked exclusively with the conservative movement, because if it is, he's going to be a lonely guy. In Dead Right, a crisply written, incisively argued book, the Forbes legal writer, former Wall Street Journal editorialist, and native of Canada skewers American conservatism for straying from its anti-statist roots. Except for a few conceptual problems near the end, this book uses straight talk to tell conservatives why they've failed and how they might make themselves relevant again.

Americans have overwhelmingly rejected the New Deal liberalism that dominated the nation's politics from the 1930s through the 1970s. But, Frum says, conservatives haven't found a coherent agenda to replace statism.

In the '60s and '70s, Ronald Reagan became a conservative icon--and the movement's political star--precisely because he attacked federal programs with the ferocity of Barry Goldwater. Reagan's 1980 presidential victory gave the right, in Frum's view, a chance to engineer a political realignment. Conservative promises to defeat the communists abroad and slash the federal leviathan at home could have routed the bedraggled left.

Yet as the election drew near, says Frum, Reagan transmogrified himself into a sunny supply-sider, promising that the federal government could simultaneously cut tax rates, boost defense spending, maintain welfare payments, and balance the budget. Reagan had made promises that he couldn't keep without alienating a substantial portion of his base.

Frum asserts that conservatives read too much into Reagan's victory. The tax revolt that helped bring Reagan to power was not a call for limited government. After all, Joe and Jane Suburban are perfectly happy with the government subsidies they receive. "Governors and mayors," writes Frum, "face voters who profess to prefer budget cuts to tax increases. But those same voters continue to expect lavishly equipped suburban high schools, subsidized tuition at state colleges, toll-free highways, and environmental improvements at others' expense." Meanwhile, federal programs subsidize retirees, veterans, farmers, mortgage holders, and college students--in other words, most Americans.

The Reaganites faced a choice: Cut the size and scope of government and face unhappy voters accustomed to receiving subsidies, or change the subject. Frum convincingly argues that conservatives chose the latter. "Conservatives have lost their zeal for advocating minimal government," he writes, "not because they have decided big government is desirable, but because they have wearily concluded that trying to reduce it is hopeless, and that even the task of preventing its further growth will probably exceed their strength." Conservatives have become obsessed with short-term results--winning the next election--with the likely consequence, in Frum's view, that they will become peripheral political players.

As the right makes peace with statism, Frum says, the movement is becoming incapable of confronting the problems facing American society, from illegitimate births to raging government debt to the culture of victimhood. He blames the welfare state, in all its forms, for "function[ing] as a political safety belt, reducing the riskiness of all our lives." And reducing that risk undermines the bourgeois virtues that made America great. "The children of a self-made man are different from their...