Review: David Frum's Patriots

David Frum's new political satire, Patriots, is an entertaining and at times dispiriting read.  Taking a look at partisanship and ideology in the current millennium, Patriots draws from Frum's experiences in the Beltway.

Briefly, Patriots is set in an alternate Washington.  9/11 never happened, but the US has been involved in a decade-long military conflict in Mexico.  It is also suffering through a long-term depression/recession.  Rather than Republicans and Democrats, we have Constitutionalists and Nationalists, respectively.  A moderate Constitutionalist, General George Pulaski has recently beaten Nationalist President Monroe Williams, the nation's first African-American president.  Washington is divided, angry, and feverish with partisan intensity (sound familiar?).  Pulaski comes forward with a series of sweeping reforms to help tackle runaway deficit-spending and restore the economy.  However, he plans to do so by appealing to moderates and Nationalists, and he thus enrages the right wing of his own party.  Enter the protagonist, Walter Schotzke, the spoiled heir of a mustard fortune who is sent to work in the office of the last moderate Constitutionalist senator from New England.  Hijinks ensue.

A lot of public attention has focused on the "Where's Waldo" aspect of Patriots, as readers and critics attempt to connect certain aspects of Frum's fictional universe to our real one.  Does Fox News really run like Patriot News?  Wait---is that Rush Limbaugh?  No, Mark Levin?  I think I've seen that---yes, Grover Norquist! I'd like to leave that sight-seeing concern to the side for the moment.  As Patriots is in part meant to be a satire, I doubt its main task is to offer 100%-accurate portraits of Washingtonians.  (It perhaps ought to be said that some of the personality sketches are very harsh indeed.)

Instead, its purpose is to reveal by its comic distortions.  Frum might have some scores to settle in this book, but it seems to me that fundamentally Patriots is not a Washington revenge fantasy.  It instead casts light on some of the grimmest tendencies of contemporary American politics.  Patriots, however, is not a plea for "extremists" to reach across their rigid ideological lines and work together in a spirit of moderate compromise.  The kumbaya imperative is a standard trope in political novels, but Frum's point is more sophisticated that that.  The Washington of Patriots is peopled not by individuals of radically pure principle who never compromise their ideals.  Instead, it is filled with careerist operators who use the language of purist principle as a marketing tactic.  Much of the political intrigue of the book is in part motivated by the fact that one Constitutionalist activist does not get the job he was aiming for in the new Pulaski administration, which causes his ideological allies to rally together to break the new president.  Once this activist does receive his chosen job, however, the ideological dogs are called off.  Overnight, the organs of Constitutionalist thought, which had been attacking Pulaski as a matter of principle, suddenly switch to his defense.  Once Pulaski kisses the ring of the right interest-group power structure, all principled objections disappear.  The sincerity of an ideologue might be refreshing in the Washington of Patriots.

Walter Schotzke provides an apt narrator for this dysfunctional capital.  Cynical, soft, and inconstant, Walter comes to DC without any fixed political principles or commitment to Constitutionalist thought, so many of the mantras of the think tanks and political operatives he comes across seem bewilderingly foreign.  An official at a top right-wing think tank, for example, poses the following question to Walter: "And do you think that if your family were allowed to keep more of their own money, you might start new businesses and create new jobs?"  Unused to the movement line on "wealth creators," Walter thinks to himself that any extra money he got from a tax cut would not go to investing in a new business but instead to extending his foreign vacation.

Walter seems a sympathetic character, if not an entirely admirable one.  On the downside: he seems more interested in Xbox, fine wines, and self-indulgence than anything else, at least at the beginning of the novel.  On the upside: unlike much of the rest of the Washington elite, he is not self-righteous about his privilege and shows at least a trace of real concern about the economic pain inflicted upon average Americans by failed Washington policies.  Even as the country has grown poorer in Patriots, Washington has flourished (one of the more striking parallels with today).  And rather than focusing on helping the country or standing for high principles, many of Patriots's Washington insiders focus on beating their opponents of the moment and enriching themselves, all the while wrapping themselves in the language of absolute rectitude.  One of the more troubling moments in the novel occurs when an uber-lobbyist pats himself on the back for being a moral crusader by enriching himself through influence peddling even as he actively works to impoverish his fellow American citizens.

Without giving too much away, I'll note that Walter finds himself a bit by the end of Patriots and seems to have exchanged the wastrel life of a playboy for responsibility, duty, and some kind of civil engagement.  Though this is a personal victory for Walter, I can't help shaking the feeling that there's something more broadly depressing at the end of the novel.

By the end of Patriots, the United States of Frum's fictional universe seems to have settled for decline.  Years of a dysfunctional economy has not woken Washington up to reality but instead has solidified some of its worst tendencies.  A watered-down economic package is eventually passed, and it helps the economy recover---but never to full health.  As Walter notes, "Most folks would not see again the kind of prosperity they had enjoyed in years gone by."  Some individuals might be richer---spectacularly richer---but America as a whole is a poorer place.

In some respects, the ending of this novel reminded me of the ending of the individual seasons for the HBO series The Wire: each season ends showing the advancement (or decline) of various characters even as the dysfunctional drug culture of Baltimore goes on, unabated.  So it is with Patriots.  There are individual winners and losers in its Washington power games, but it is the culture of Washington that is the ultimate winner and, perhaps, the American public that is the ultimate loser.  Patriots shows a world where an elite has gained power through manipulating and exacerbating tendencies that make government impossible or at least unstable.

Perhaps that pessimism is misplaced; I hope it is.  Perhaps there's something utopian about that despair in the first place.  Washington, or any other nation's capital, has never been a font of total virtue and prudence.  Even the Founders eventually dissolved into petty sniping.  But I hope it is not too utopian to yearn for a politics slightly better than that of Patriots---a politics where careerist blinders do not override personal sympathy, where principle does not degenerate into propaganda, where personal ambition can be tempered at least a little bit by public virtue.

David Frum's Patriots is not a simple indictment of Republicans or the conservative "movement" or the Tea Party or any other faction of the moment; as Frum has said, he could just have easily written a book focusing on left-wing rather than right-wing politics.  It is a sketch of a political dynamic gone terribly, horribly wrong, of the threat posed by an elite unchecked by any sense of humility or public spiritedness, and of the risk that the great experiment of this American republic might trade the pursuit of happiness for the pursuit of political spoils.

I don't want to believe that Patriots's Washington is a perfect mirror image of our own; the lens of fiction has distorted the contours of reality.  I don't want to believe it's a prophecy, either.  But it does seem a warning.  It is perhaps a sign of the extent of our troubles when even seemingly absurd satire could be so easily confused with reality.

(Full disclosure: A contributor to the now-defunct FrumForum, I have worked with Frum before and maintain some level of personal association with him.)

Inequality: Cultural Controversies

Charles Murray's new book on American inequality, Coming Apart, seems to have some interesting points (I haven't read it yet), but it is also generating some controversy.

David Frum has written an exceedingly biting commentary on Murray, suggesting that Murray's work does not do enough to address the cause of growing inequality and the stagnation of the middle class.  He takes issue with the following passage from Murray:

In one respect, the labor market did indeed get worse for [working-class white] men: pay. Recall figure 2.1 at the beginning of the book, showing stagnant incomes for people below the 50th income percentile.** High-paying unionized jobs have become scarce and real wages for all kinds of blue-collar jobs have been stagnant or falling since the 1970s. But these trends don't explain why [working-class white] men in the 2000s worked fewer jobs, found it harder to get jobs than other Americans did, and more often dropped out of the labor market than they had in the 1960s. On the contrary: Insofar as men need to work to survive - an important proviso - falling hourly income does not discourage work.

Put yourself in the place of a [working-class white] man who is at the bottom of the labor market, qualified only for low-skill jobs. You may wish you could make as much as your grandfather made working on a General Motors assembly line in the 1970s. You may be depressed because you've been trying to find a job and failed. But if a job driving a delivery truck, or being a carpenter's helper, or working on a cleaning crew for an office building opens up, why would a bad labor market for blue-collar jobs keep you from taking it? As of 2009, a very bad year economically, the median hourly wage for drivers of delivery trucks was $13.84; for carpenter's helpers, $12.63; for building cleaners, $13.37. That means $505 to $554 for a forty-hour week, or $25,260 to $27,680 for a fifty-week year. Those are not great incomes, but they are enough to be able to live a decent existence - almost twice the poverty level even if you are married and your wife doesn't work. So why would you not work if a job opening landed in your lap? Why would you not work a full forty hours if the hours were available? Why not work more than forty hours?

Frum's response:

You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today's money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He's working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you'll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That's not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren't married, and you don't go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.

How you can tell a story about the moral decay of the working class with the "work" part left out is hard to fathom.

A lack of opportunity and the hope of real advancement will in turn lower the incentive to work and to strive.  Faith in advancement for a variety of sectors of the economy will reinforce popular support for the market economy.

Alec MacGillis offers some interesting points on the role deindustrialization has played in increasing inequality.

Accepting Reality

David Frum has an incisive (and controversial) essay up about his struggles with Tea Party-style Republican orthodoxies. There's much that's on target here, though some I disagree with. This paragraph has considerable merit:

Some call this the closing of the conservative mind. Alas, the conservative mind has proved itself only too open, these past years, to all manner of intellectual pollen. Call it instead the drying up of conservative creativity. It’s clearly true that the country faces daunting economic troubles. It’s also true that the wrong answers to those problems will push the United States toward a future of too much government, too many taxes, and too much regulation. It’s the job of conservatives in this crisis to show a better way. But it’s one thing to point out (accurately) that President Obama’s stimulus plan was mostly a compilation of antique Democratic wish lists, and quite another to argue that the correct response to the worst collapse since the thirties is to wait for the economy to get better on its own. It’s one thing to worry (wisely) about the long-term trend in government spending, and another to demand big, immediate cuts when 25 million are out of full-time work and the government can borrow for ten years at 2 percent. It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote. It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that ­middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.

Robert Stacy McCain thinks that some of the problems Republicans have run into have resulted from a conflation of Republican politics and conservative principles, so that many non-conservative Bush-era policies were identified with conservatism. I think one thing Frum is trying to get at is that many so-called "conservative" policies function in highly non-conservative ways.

I think there's a tension to this part of McCain's response, though:

Frum is a wonk very much concerned with the question of what legislative and policy initiatives can be feasibly enacted (and politically defended) by Republican elected officials. That’s a very different thing than declaring, broadly, what the ultimate objectives of the conservative movement should be.

For example, were it in my power to accomplish one thing in Washington, D.C., the federal Department of Education would be abolished and its employees summarily dismissed from public service. Except for funding necessary research and providing educational benefits for military veterans, we would get the federal government entirely out of the education business.

This is not how wonks talk or think, however, because nobody in Wonk World has that kind of profound loathing for federal bureaucracy. When you suggest a genuinely bold proposal like zeroing out the Department of Education, a Republican wonk immediately imagines the hue and outcry from the Democrats, the teachers unions, and the New York Times. They can’t imagine Republicans withstanding such angry criticism and, they’ll point out, Reagan never followed through on his promise to abolish the Department of Education.

But, OK, say you want to get rid of the Department of Education, and say you that desire doesn't change the fact that it very likely will not be abolished? If it is going to exist, how can you make it run in the most effective and conservative way possible? That's not an incidental question (nor do I mean to suggest that McCain thinks it is). And it is precisely that kind of question that Republicans and conservatives need to think the hardest about.

Turnaround Techniques

David Frum puts forward some ideas on how to turn around the employment picture:

1) Cheap money, a low dollar, and moderate inflation.

2) Tax relief aimed at stimulating private consumption, such as a big payroll tax holiday.

3) Income support for people in need.

4) Modest and temporary subsidies to state building projects.

5) An immigration moratorium.

6) Agreement now on a plan to balance federal budget to begin only after such time as unemployment declines below 8% or the 10-year US Treasury bond goes north of 5%.