Right thinking

David Frum has spoken for American conservatism for a generation – now he despairs of it

David Frum has been a major force in American conservatism for more than 20 years. He was a speechwriter in President George W. Bush’s first administration and is said to have coined the phrase ‘axis of evil’. In the last few years, however, he has fallen out with the leading conservative magazine, National Review, the leading conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, and the leading conservative TV network, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. He is an active political blogger at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, where he regularly deplores Republican intransigence and bloody-mindedness.

Rather than write a self-justifying memoir, the time-honoured response to a public parting of ways, Frum has just published Patriots, a comic novel about dysfunctional Washington. America’s political community is going to enjoy matching fictional names to real faces, and it’s not hard to imagine a movie version.