It is difficult for me to see AEI or the Manhattan Institute as antagonists of a traditionalist project, as opposed to fora where people have different emphases and concerns, and I cannot see that a traditionalist should have qualms about being employed by either or reading their publications. The trouble I see with these loci is that they have been very unselective about who they hire at times, and this has diminished their seriousness as institutions. Journalists and journeyman writers should only be on the staff of these institutions if

A. They show up for work; and
B. Have a serious specialty in which they are self-taught by their reseach.

There are not many whom I think would qualify. Elizabeth McCaughey (whose writings are very much outside her academic training), Monica Crowley, or Maggie Gallagher would be appropriately employed at these places. David Frum would not.

Where does that leave us? As something of an incoherent coalition, one that does not actually coalesce around anything. IN this light, something like Blond’s Civic State assumes a greater importance.

There is another concern here to which you do not refer: who is currently engaged in ‘opening the conservative mind’, and at what cost do you co-operate with others? There are all sorts of individuals and institutions that dissent from the official idea, and there are some who pose at dissenting. The von Mises Institute is addled by a series of dubious enthusiasms: ‘Austrian’ economics, neo-confederate interpretations of the Civil War, conspirazoid thinking on contemporary history, &c.; the Reason Foundation and the Liberarian Party are most highly motivated by opposition to the drug laws, and addled by the idea that we should all behave as sexually liberated social monads; the Ayn Rand Institute is addled by their own highly eccentric moral theory; the Rockford Institute produces no working papers and husbands the work of no one capable of generating policy; the claque surrounding Patrick J. Buchanan have adopted support for the Democratic Party as their default position and are motivated by ephemeral questions on foreign policy almost to the exclusion of all other questions; Rod Dreher’s writing is ultimately about…Rod Dreher; the burden of much of David Frum’s recent advocacy is that the Republican Party should concede on matters about which David Frum cares nothing; and Conor Friedersdorf’s utterances are consumed with trivia and appear for all the world to be a succession of guises and poses. This crew ain’t going to ‘open the conservative mind’ for you.

Your point is loaded when you claim those who Porchers call “neocons” are conservatives. So what if Porchers like to attack certain strains which inhabit the conservative movement. There is uniformity among many of these, whatever one calls them.

The only thing I find disturbing is respectable and actual conservatives like Robert Nisbet would associate with the AEI.

AEI is a private organization and can choose with whom it does and does not want to associate. A voluntary association is a two way street. If AEI doesn’t want him around any more, what’s it to you?

Reading Mr. Bartlett’s post, its central argument is an unsubstantiated assertion that AEI muzzled its employees during the Obama’s run to shove the national health insurance camel’s shoulders through the tent flaps. Bartlett’s argument is shown to be so much nonsense by Conor Friedersdorf, who is certainly no fan of AEI.

I’m certain it won’t gain me points among the Porchers, who seem very quick dismiss certain conservatives with the free and pejorative use of “neo-con,” but Jonah Goldberg was recently hired by AEI and he’s been writing quite regularly against the Obama push for national health care.

So again I ask, why disturbing?

In his oft criticized piece, I’m not convinced that he was wrong to advocate dumping the anti-war right rather than attempting to pacify them. The anti-war right was a tiny movement to begin the game. They weren’t on board with the libertarian project that was dominating the GOP and still does. The movement was quite old, still hadn’t moved on from the struggles of the Civil Rights era, and wasn’t regenerating itself with youth. The flagship periodical Chronicles has largely composed itself of variations of the lament that they’ve been left behind. Some have used the later unpopularity of the Iraq War as a vindication from Frum’s critique, but even the paleos mostly recognize that this hasn’t been an ideological conversion but a technocratic one. This is confirmed by the eagerness of Americans to jump off the cliff once again in fighting Iran.

I am not sure why you want to injure AEI.

Two things are known publicly:

1. David Frum is a lapsed lawyer who has been employed as a journeyman writer for 20 years.

2. The formal name of the institute is the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

Dr. Brooks assumed office as the President of AEI less than a year ago and was presented with the following situation: his predecessor had granted a generous retainer to a newspaper columnist who gives no evidence of having made use of a piece of statistical software in his life. Do you think someone on the board might have asked, “what are we paying this man to do?”

As for Bruce Bartlett, he is an autodidact who had a patronage position in the Treasury Department 25 years ago. He was an atypical figure at the institute which employed him, whose fellows tend to have doctorates in economics and commonly have academic posts. His supervisor at the National Center for Policy Analysis complained that Mr. Bartlett had been given a dispensation from his routine work to produce a book which the supervisor later discovered was a polemical attack on a particular politician, not the stock in trade of the National Center for Policy Analysis.

Frum’s ousting from AEI is not disturbing. It’s typical. Yes, i wish politics (especially of the reasonable sort that is found here at FPR–not in the Rawlsian Political Liberalism sense excluding any and all “comprehensive doctrines”) followed more closely to argument that is sensible and worthy of following through to the end. Alas, this is not where we live nor have we ever been there and we’re not gonna get there.

Frum will find his spot. I suppose he will be the next David Brooks as the conservative liberals love to love. if Frum were in some backwater that no one gives two sh*ts about then I guess we should worry, but then we would have never heard about him. Who cares about Frum. he wrote a mildly interesting book on the 70s. So what? I could have written it in my sleep–minus the statistics which I can pull out of my a** like anyone else. It’s all stoopid.

A fuller story appears in the National Post: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2727727

Apparently, as Frum himself states: “They invited me to remain associated with AEI on a non-salaried basis.” He obviously, turned it down.

No such thing as “free” speech, you know.

But the readers are right; one shouldn’t read too much into these family quarrels, especially when quarreling with such a wayward son as Frum. Still, it’s interesting. Kinda. Sorta. Besides, after wasting his fortune in the fleshpots of Liberalism, he may return. It would serve AEI right if he did.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/03/26/what-david-frum-has-in-common-with-tiger-woods-and-why-it-matters/

From Charles Murray, referenced in the link:

“I do not have any certain information to convey about David’s departure, except what Arthur Brooks has already said publicly: David resigned. He could have stayed. But I will tell what is common knowledge around AEI: David got a handsome salary but, for the last few years, has been invisible as a member of the institute.”