Waterloo (blog post)

Some other critics called Frum's complaints about extremist rhetoric and efforts to enforce ideological orthodoxy among conservatives hypocritical in light of his own writings earlier in the decade, particularly a 2003 National Review cover story that attacked paleoconservatives, including many by name, as "unpatriotic" for, among other things, their refusal to support the Iraq War.

After winning control of the House that fall, and the Senate in 2014, Republicans passed bills repealing the ACA, which eventually became popularly known as Obamacare, many times, none of which ever had the votes to overcome a veto.

In 2017, after the election of Republican Donald Trump, the House passed the American Health Care Act, a bill intended to "repeal and replace" Obamacare, but the Senate never considered it.

Almost seven years after his original post, Frum wrote that even though it was "my suicide note in the organized conservative world"[2] he stood firm in his prediction, and urged Republicans to take a more cooperative role in health care reform.

While these initiatives had often failed because most Americans who did have such insurance were accustomed to receiving it through their employers,[3] the idea gained more traction with the public during the Great Depression, leading President Franklin D. Roosevelt to propose such a program as part of the New Deal.

[6] In 1961 Ronald Reagan, who was elected governor of California five years later, released a recording of a speech he gave against further government involvement in health care, in which he warned that Medicare would be followed by "other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day ... we will awake to find that we have socialism.

"Having given our pensioners their medical care in kind," he asked, "why not food baskets, why not public housing accommodations, why not vacation resorts, why not a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and beer for those who drink?

Republican presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford were opposed to all but the most modest expansions of existing programs, and Kennedy and his allies could not reach agreement with their successor, Democrat Jimmy Carter, later in the decade, on a plan even though he supported the idea in principle.

[8] Reagan defeated Carter in 1980; while he was not opposed in principle to universal coverage, he believed it should not be provided by national insurance, and Congress did not seriously consider any proposals for it under either his administration or that of his successor George H.W Bush.

Their arguments now included not just the cost of the program and the tax increases that might be necessary to fund it, or its impracticability, but a generally libertarian principle that the state should not be involved in providing citizens health care at all.

Leonard Peikoff, heir to the estate of influential novelist Ayn Rand, who had promoted a philosophy of maximum individualism through her work, reiterated her argument in a speech to opponents that those unable to afford their own healthcare costs could and should rely on charity or the free market rather than make any claim on the labor of health care professionals through the government.

"[11] The bill ultimately died without even a committee vote, and Republican opposition to it was cited as a key reason the party retook control of the House in 1994 for the first time in 40 years, as well as the Senate, having made those elections a "referendum on big government".

[12] Opposition to big government and increased entitlement spending on health care did not prevent Republicans from adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare under the administration of George W. Bush in 2003.

[1] After getting degrees from Yale and Harvard Law School, the Canadian-born Frum became part of the conservative movement in the mid-1980s, serving as editor of The Wall Street Journal's right-leaning editorial pages and later writing a column for Forbes.

Frum was not afraid to criticize other factions, as he did in his 1994 memoir Dead Right, where he suggested that the movement should pay less heed to social conservatives and strict supply-side economics advocates.

[17] Frum was particularly repulsed by paleoconservatism, in which he saw strong antisemitic elements, defeatism, and a willingness to abandon core tenets of conservatism such as governmental restraint in favor of nationalistic or racialistic agendas.

[18] After a stint as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration, he wrote another, broader critique of paleoconservatives in National Review, excoriating them for their eagerness to blame American Mideast policy for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and opposition to the Iraq War, as well as the faults he had previously identified.

Those voices were the conservative talk radio hosts and Fox News panelists who had gotten their listeners and viewers to so fervently oppose the ACA that Republicans in Congress who had wanted to work with Democrats and possibly prevent those provisions from becoming law, had, instead, been too afraid of their supporters' anger to even attempt to do so.

In their conversation, Frum had merely noted this, suggested that AEI was "punching below its weight" on the issue, and merely speculated that donor pressure might be leading its experts to remain silent in the debate.

Frum had been "invisible" at the think tank for the previous three years, making only three posts to the group blog during that time and not participating in any other activities to further AEI's mission of spreading conservative thought.

"[34] In a lengthy response to "Waterloo" in his blog on The Daily Beast, Tunku Varadarajan, another former Wall Street Journal editorial page editor, sounded many of the same themes as Frum's other conservative critics.

He agreed that the bill would probably never be repealed, but countered that the unyielding Republican opposition was vital to maintaining the party's core principles of minimal governmental involvement in the economy and low taxation, especially after the passage of the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Not only would that principled opposition yield future electoral success, Varadarajan noted, it had affected the course of the ACA's passage when Republican Scott Brown unexpectedly won the Massachusetts special election to replace Ted Kennedy after his death, costing Senate Democrats the 60th seat they needed for cloture votes to prevent filibusters and forcing an expedited vote to pass a version of the bill that some of the party's liberals were not completely satisfied with.

From their common experience of the Journal's editorial page, Frum continued, Varadarajan should also have been well aware of which direction the stronger economic and social pressures on aspiring conservative intellectuals came from.

In Frum's account of his meeting with Brooks, the timing of which did not seem to him to be coincidental, the AEI president had denied to him that his vocal dissent from the hardline conservative opposition to the ACA had any relation to his action and felt bad about having to make the decision.

"Does AEI seriously suggest that it fired the man who led the battle that made possible Samuel Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court because I didn't pick up my snail mail often enough?

While he has not written for, or appeared on, any conservative media outlet since then, he has continued to write political commentary, merging FrumForm into The Daily Beast in 2012,[40] and as a regular contributor to The Atlantic since 2014.

"[42] In late 2011, as the first primaries for the next year's presidential election were approaching, Frum revisited "Waterloo" in a long essay in New York elaborating on his criticisms of the direction the Republican Party had taken.

Even before "Waterloo", he recalled, his vocal criticism of Limbaugh had effectively blacklisted him from Fox, and his volunteer speechwriting for one of that year's Republican presidential candidates had been kept a closely guarded secret within the campaign.

"[2] Making universal coverage a reality, Frum wrote, would accomplish many things conservatives would be proud of—increasing entrepreneurship as people would be more likely to leave their jobs and start business without the fear of losing their health insurance, improving the life expectancies of the white working-class voters who increasingly made up the Republican base, and reducing employment discrimination against workers more likely to incur higher healthcare costs, such as women and the elderly.