Frum’s moderate conservatism, or, where did all the serious people go?

The big quote of the day, so to speak, from none other than David Frum is:

It’s being quoted everywhere, as if it, by itself, means something—”Look! David Frum loves Paul Krugman!” or something. Actually, what leads to it is far more interesting (as is often the case):

When people tell me that I’ve changed my mind too much about too many things over the past four years, I can only point to the devastation wrought by this crisis and wonder: How closed must your thinking be if it isn’t affected by a disaster of such magnitude? And in fact, almost all of our thinking has been somehow affected: hence the drift of so many conservatives away from what used to be the mainstream market-oriented Washington Consensus toward Austrian economics and Ron Paul style hard-money libertarianism. The ground they and I used to occupy stands increasingly empty.

Once upon a time, the two sides of American politics basically agreed on economics. They took Keynes (“We’re all Keynsians now,” harped Nixon), added in some Friedman: agreeing that the free market was good, but sometimes the government was needed. Sure, there was disagreement, but it was more on what side (between the market and intervention) to err, not which was wholly 100% correct.

While no viable hard-left movement ever arose (OMG! Socialism!), since Reagan, the right side has gotten more and more radical. Remember, it was Republican George H.W. Bush who called Reagan’s then-radical economic policies “voodoo economics.” That was really the beginning of the end for the consensus. Since then, the left has moved into the center, and the right became, well, crazy.

No wonder Frum (and Sully) are sitting around wondering where everybody went, and find themselves accidentally surrounded by Democrats (Democrats, who would be more comfortable in a center-right party anywhere else in the world). And, no wonder Frum is finding he has more in common with “Little Professor” Krugman, the academic economist who’s also sitting around wondering where all the consensus economists went.

Related posts:

1. Why don’t poor people want to help poorer people?
2. More on that moderate health care bill
3. Hey, white people: Are you scared enough of black people?