What drove Frum away?

An article in the Times today observes that the National Review's reputation as a cerebral, civilized journal has been thrown into question recently, "thanks to the coarsening effect of the Internet on political discourse."

Reading the piece, you might be forgiven for thinking the main problem was that Kathleen Parker, an NR columnist, got some over-the-top nasty letters when she criticized Sarah Palin. (One suggested, infamously, that Parker should have been aborted by her mother.) However, as Rich Lowry, the magazine's editor, responds, you can hardly blame a magazine for its readers' emails. And David Frum and Christopher Buckley, who recently quit the magazine, are too polite to point fingers in public, so the reader is left somewhat confused.

I can think of at least three reasons why conservatives who want to be seen as open to rethinking their movement's role in American life and thought might want to take a few steps away from the magazine right now-- or at least its online arm.

1.) During the recent presidential campaign, NR contributor Mark Steyn argued that conservatives with doubts about Sarah Palin (like Frum, David Brooks, Charles Fried, and Christopher Buckley) were opportunistic snobs angling for dinner-party invitations.

2.) A National Review Online contributor named Andy McCarthy beat the drum for the … fringe argument that the ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama's book "Dreams of My Father."

3.) Blogger and columnist Jonah Goldberg made a mint on a book comparing modern liberals to fascists. When large crowds showed up to hear Barack Obama speak, he would note, on the National Review's Web site, the uncanny parallels with 1930s Germany.

It wasn't the "coarsening effect of the Internet," or the intemperate emails to Kathleen Parker, in short, that made the National Review an uncomfortable place for some right-leaning thinkers this year.