David Frum's Rethinking

Here's an excerpt from David Frum's response to the New York Times piece yesterday on the decline of respect at the National Review:

I have been engaged in some intense rethinking of my own conservatism. My fundamental political principles remain the same as ever: free markets, American leadership in the world, and intense attachment to inherited moral and cultural traditions. Yet I cannot be blind to the evidence that we have seen free markets produce some damaging and dangerous results in recent years. Or that the foreign policy I supported has not yielded the success I would have wished to see. Or that traditions must evolve if they are to endure. There are new principes too that must be included in a majority conservatism: environmental protection as a core value and an unwavering insistence upon competence and integrity in government.

I appreciate this statement on America's "leadership in the world."

That commitment will be restrained, unfortunately, if American leadership is compromised on the altar of the left's ideological doctrine of environmental globalism.

This idea of a "commitment to moral and cultural traditions" is good, but how much must they "evolve" if they are to endure?

We're seeing enough evolution right now with the coming of Barack Obama, whose positions on the issues seem to be "evolving" in a way that's not so great for moral and cultural traditions.

Other than that, great.

Frum will be intitiating a group blog on conservative politics sometime around the time of the inauguration (we'll see how "conservative" that turns out, yo, Peggy Noonan!).