Democrats: Keeping it RealityFrum's argument is noteworthy because he suggests that the Republican's need to re-orient themselves on the issue of income inequality: it's about inequality of opportunity, rather than inequality of wealth. The former plays into the G.O.P.'s wheelhouse - as long as everybody's doing better, who cares that some people are doing better than others? The latter, and where the Republicans get crossed up on the issue, suggests a desire to "pancake" wealth distribution. Savvily, Frum grasps that, from an electoral perspective, income inequality is a geographic issue: he wants to preserve the harmony in the exurbs. This allows him to skirt the idea that in order to reduce income inequality, you might have take positive steps to redistribute wealth through, say, the tax code, which has proven to be an effective tool in the past. His posited solutions are more targeted, and presumably somewhat more palatable to conservative opinion: target undocumented workers, who depress wages at the low end of the scale while providing a proportionate benefit for those at the top, and fix the heath care system, which Frum avers has devoured the sizable wage increases of the Clinton era.
In his piece Frum pays the most attention to the middle and upper-middle classes: the relatively well-educated denizens of suburban America who formed for decades the base of the Republican Party. He argues that as these people begin to feel the strains of income inequality - as their relative homogeneity is disturbed - they will, and have already begun to, vote Democratic in increasing numbers. Most compellingly, he argues that these people have begun to expect government to, well, work, and may be increasingly reluctant to hand the reins to politicians whose central thesis seems to be that government is destined to fail. This dovetails with a point that I have been making recently: that educated middle-class voters are increasingly voting Democratic because they view the Democrats as a pragmatic alternative to the strident ideology of the national G.O.P. It's not a novel argument to suggest that in pursuing a strategy of maximizing the social conservative vote at the expense of coalition-building, the Republicans have alienated a significant swath of voters whom do no share their constrictive values. Beyond this, though, I think that a growing portion of the electorate, in light of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and increasing evidence of climate change, wants leaders who view issues not through an exclusively ideological prism, but attempt to craft workable, realistic solutions that address the facts on the ground. To paraphrase an infamous Bush-era quote, they want politicians who live and work in our shared actual reality, not ideologues preoccupied with manufacturing their own counterfeit edition.
Thus I would suggest that the 2006 election, wherein Democrats did not seek to challenge the underlying values of voters - they ran a slate of conservative, pro-gun, anti-choice Democrats for seats in traditionally G.O.P. areas - was in large part a referendum on competence. Democrats won because they seemed to be in better touch with reality than the Administration or their Republican opponents. Likewise, I think Frum is arguing that for the G.O.P. to succeed, it must address itself to presenting serious solutions tailored to real problems, such as working to reduce the cost of health care instead of falling back on a doctrinal view of the tax cut as a panacea. While the implication of his argument - that the Republicans can furnish solutions to these problems comporting with their existing ideological outlook - is debatable, it is a superior alternative to what exists for conservatives in 2008: a choice between a Democratic party with a better grip on reality but a disagreeable ideological framework, or a Republican party with an inflexibly dogmatic viewpoint and a virtually nonexistent relationship with reality.
