David Frum explains:
From the time we launched the New Majority site, we have had to cope with a problem with our name. Simply put, there are a lot of “New Majorities” out there. There’s one down the road in Virginia, another at the New World Foundation, a conservative 501c4 here, a liberal one there. All this generated serious confusion, but the worst was with the best known New Majority of them all, TheNewMajority in California, because their mission and ours so closely overlapped. That overlap was leading to very unnecessary conflict with people who wanted many of the same reforms that we did.
The best solution seemed to be: a change of name. But to what?
We pondered a wide array of variations: Next Majority, New Politics, Republican Reform, Conservative Comeback. But they all suffered from one or both of two big problems. Either they could mean anything (”New Politics”) or they risked creating a false appearance of official sponsorship where none existed (”Republican Reform”).
We consulted at length with a brilliant friend of mine, one of the nation’s leading experts on branding. Her advice was direct and powerful: ”Nobody knows what the ‘next majority’ will look like. Maybe President Obama will be re-elected and your hopes of building a new modernized Republican majority will go unrealized for a long time to come.” In any event, she continued, whether Republicans return to majority or remain in minority status, the world of internet political commentary is a world built around individual personalities. Think DrudgeReport, HuffingtonPost, AndrewSullivan.com, Breitbart.TV. Her advice: Put my name on the thing.
I’ll confess that advice made me very uncomfortable. We’ve been grappling with the problem since the summer, and the main reason it has taken so long to achieve a resolution was my reluctance to go the obvious route.
My reluctance was based on two grounds.
1) NewMajority.com has been a collective undertaking and a work in progress. We are not here to substitute some new orthodoxy for the conservative orthodoxies of the past, but instead to develop creatively some positive and responsible new approaches. Any new title had to emphasize that this is an open-ended group project, not a one man band.
2) Conservatism’s sojourn in the wilderness is likely to be a long one, and the work of this site will probably have to continue past the point at which I am the right person to do it. The generation now in its 20s is the one that will lead the successful transformation of conservatism. Which means that the daily management of this site will need fairly soon to be handed off to new leadership with new names.
And yet it was also unanswerable that for the time being, at least, I’m the person with responsibility for this site and this project, and that it is shaped and defined for better or worse by my thoughts and my words.
The name we all eventually settled on, after a canvass of opinions, was FrumForum: Frum because that’s who the editor is, Forum because my job is as much or more to create a venue for the opinions of others as it is to express my own.
Starting today, we’ll operate the site both here at NewMajority.com and also at FrumForum.com. We’ll complete a full conversion to the FrumForum location over the next six months. I hope you’ll adjust your bookmarks – and any citations – accordingly.
I hope to see you return often to the renamed site!
Steven Menashi at The American Scene:
It sounds like an Orthodox Jewish bulletin board, but it’s actually David Frum’s rebranded blog. Too bad Frum Youth and Frum Teens are already taken; there’s nowhere for the next generation of “Frum conservatives” to go. But maybe giving up on New Majority means he’s not quite sure there will be a next generation.
E.D. Kain at The League:
I hate to say it, but I really don’t like the new name. Frum Forum? New Majority may not have been perfect, but I just don’t think Frum Forum really….works. I would have just opted for “David Frum’s New Majority” or “David Frum’s Comeback” or something like that – if the idea was to get the branding more Frum-centric.
Earlier today, NewsReal’s sparring partner David Frum announced he would change the name of his website from New Majority into Frum Forum. It was illustrative of the conservative intellectual’s major problem: the conservatism he advocates lacks both the confidence and principles an ideology requires to form a new majority.
[…]
But the problem with that was and is that Frum Conservatism doesn’t believe in itself. Its creator is convinced that conservatism can only be successful, if it compromises on its core beliefs. This idea, that uncompromising conservatism lacks the ability to appeal to a majority of the electorate, is related to Frum’s lack of confidence in his own ability to help shape a new majority. After all, if your ideology lacks confidence, so do you.
UPDATE: Razib Khan at Secular Right
Around The Sphere 