Is There A WORLDWIDE CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP?

Conservatives worldwide are in a peculiar state. On the other hand, their ideas seem to be ascendant; on the other hand, the parties and politicians that represent them seem to be getting battered. Clinton, Blair, and Jospin are victorious, while politicians allied with what we think of as ” conservative” ideas about the free market, regulation, the size of government, and traditional morality are reeling from defeat after defeat. In the United States, the Republican Congress has lost its moorings in the wake of Bill Clinton’s reelection.

What’s going on? What does it mean? What happened to the confident conservatism of Thatcher, Reagan, and the 1994 Republican congressional victory?

Their responses appear below, in alphabetical order.
 
Michael Barone

This is not the first time that a movement’s candidates have been beaten while its ideas are ascendant. Forty years ago, in the 1950s, elections were won by Eisenhower, Churchill and Macmillan, Adenauer, the Liberal Democrats of Japan, de Gaulle. They slowed but did not stop the movement toward the welfare state that began in the 1940s; it gained speed again in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1950s, the advocates of the welfare state were frustrated, puzzled, and harshly critical of their own parties. But things were going their way. Taxes were inching up, welfare-state protections were marginally expanded, political energy on the right was spent not on delegitimizing the welfare state but on identifying with it.

So it is today, in reverse. Political forces and governmental mechanisms are now ratcheting the size of government down, not up; government agencies are being privatized and welfare programs withering away; even middle-class entitlements are under attack. Forty years ago politicians of the right proclaimed themselves liberals; now politicians of the left are eager to assure one and all of their conservatism. Since Margaret Thatcher’s victory in May 1979, with only a few exceptions, parties of the left have won elections only when they have moved convincingly to the right. If left parties have been winning more elections lately, it is only because politicians like Clinton, Tony Blair, and Italy’s former Communists have learned this lesson. Even those few who have won after campaigning as leftists, like Lionel Jospin in France, quickly move to the right after taking office.

They are responding to the very powerful forces that prevent governments from moving sharply to the left. One is the international marketplace. The flow of money and trade is freer even than in the halcyon years before 1914, and the country that devalues its currency or overpays its workers will be sharply punished. So will the politicians who allow these things to happen. Jospin will come to understand that, as Mitterrand came to understand it in 1983, as Blair and Italy’s Romano Prodi and Clinton understand it now.

In this international market economy, ordinary people are increasingly less inclined to seek Franklin Roosevelt’s security than to imitate Margaret Thatcher’s striving. Memories of the deprivations of the 1930s are dimming now to darkness, and people do not feel in need of protection from a sudden collapse of the economy. Instead the recalled bad times are the 1970s, when government was both bullying and feckless, obstructive and incompetent; when inflation and stagnation undermined the ordinary citizen’s lifelong project of accumulating wealth. Now people seek not entitlements and comfortable niches but a solid currency and the chance to work their way ahead. This is the second major force preventing a shift to the left.

The third is the de-sanctioning of pathological behaviors like crime and welfare dependency, which in the United States in the mid-1990s have been declining as sharply as they were increasing in the awful years from 1965 to 1975. The idea is dying that those who are disadvantaged should be excused for misbehaving; the idea is gaining strength that all should be judged by the same rigorous standards. This process is very far from being completed and could stand to go much farther. But it has gone some ways. If some damaging behaviors like divorce have not lost sanction, others like fatherless child-rearing have: Dan Quayle was right.

But he is no longer in public office. Conservatives are understandably irritated when parties of the left win elections. But democracy requires alternation in office, and it is corrosive for any party — British Tories, congressional Democrats — to be in office too long. Except in crisis, the important thing is which ideas, not which individuals, are in the saddle. And these days, most of those ideas are conservative.

Michael Barone is a senior staff editor at Reader’s Digest and co- author of The Almanac of American Politics 1998 (National Journal/Times Books).
 
Gary L. Bauer

Conservatives since Reagan and Thatcher have been struggling. In the last two U.S. elections, the Republican candidates for president have averaged less than 40 percent of the popular vote. Conservatives in Britain just experienced their worst drubbing in history.

What Reagan and Thatcher understood, and what too few leaders comprehend today, is that the conservative movement is no party wing. Thatcher was highly popular with working-class voters in Britain. She sided with the rank and file against many of their Marxist union leaders. Reagan, similarly, was not ashamed to court the “God and country” vote represented by everyone from evangelicals and Catholics to the American Legion.

To win, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair wrap their liberal policies in conservative rhetoric. Blair promised a “New Labour.” At last year’s National Education Summit, Republican governors spoke about training a more efficient work force to supply the needs of multinational corporations. Clinton spoke about moral values in education, the proper place of religious free expression in the schools, and the importance of school safety. Clinton’s liberal policies will not help in any of these areas. But his speech, not those of the Republicans, addressed the concerns of “soccer moms” and Little League dads. No wonder Americans consistently tell pollsters that Clinton ” cares about people like me.”

In 1992 and 1996, Republican campaigns confused the message on family tax relief, embraced realpolitik in foreign policy to the exclusion of historic American values, and avoided the social issues.

On taxes, Republicans failed to make the case boldly for lightening the burden on families. The moral case needs to be made why families are more to be trusted to spend their own resources than government bureaucrats are. When conservatives argue for pro-family tax relief, we are saying that “human capital” is a nation’s ultimate resource. Disparaging tax relief for families with children not only fails to move the agenda of smaller government and lower taxes generally, it serves to reinforce the liberal media stereotype of Republicans as “the party of the rich.”

The collapse of the Berlin Wall does not mean “the end of history.” We seek no new enemies. But we should recognize hostility when we see it. We do not support national defense in order to maintain jobs in California — as Bob Dole came close to saying — but to protect Americans at home and abroad. Evil exists. The Pan Am explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, drugs imported onto our streets, U.S. forces targeted in the Middle East or in the Straits of Formosa — all of these teach us that America cannot always avoid enemies.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil in the world is for good men to do nothing,” said Edmund Burke 200 years ago. In this age of the Internet and space travel, that wisdom is reinforced. Americans cannot hide from the world.

Margaret Thatcher was never as personally beloved as Ronald Reagan. Still, her “stern nurse” demeanor was politically attractive to voters in Britain because she spoke to the concerns of their hearts. When asked why it was worth fighting for the Falklands, a tough British sailor on his way to the war said simply: “It’s so we can walk about in the world with our heads held up.”

Ronald Reagan never abandoned the social issues. Even when he could not move Congress, he used the “bully pulpit” of the White House to move the hearts of the people. Leaving office, beloved by millions, he wistfully said he wished he had done more to stem the tide of abortion. He simply and eloquently upheld the right to life of the most vulnerable among us. He succeeded because he spoke common sense with uncommon conviction.

Today, it is especially important for conservatives to hold fast to “the permanent things.” With a growing economy, with the deficit clearly coming down, and with the country at peace, it is essential that conservatives speak to those issues that Americans tell us still trouble them. Something is terribly wrong when a young woman can go to the prom in New Jersey, give birth to her child in the girls’ room, stuff her baby’s body in the trash can, and return to the dance floor to request a favorite heavy-metal tune, “The Unforgiven.” This is not an isolated occurrence. George Will suggests she was taught that behavior by the Supreme Court’s extreme rulings on abortion. And a president who vetoes a bill to ban partial-birth abortions is sending a devastating signal about lives that are “unwanted.”

Conservatives here and abroad need to advance policies that make people proud again. We should stand unapologetically for the beliefs that move mothers and fathers. Human rights and national defense are legitimate objects of conservative politics. So are lower taxes and cultural renewal. People will care when they know their leaders care.

Gary L. Bauer is president of the Family Research Council.
 
Jeffrey Bell

I recently read a draft copy of Dinesh D’Souza’s new political biography of Ronald Reagan. I hope a lot of conservatives read this book when it comes out this fall, for a close review of Reagan’s career is particularly illuminating given the state of conservative politics today.

In every memorable decision he made in his presidency, Reagan invoked morality as his central impetus, even in situations that at first glance did not appear particularly moral in nature. His decision early in his presidency to fire striking air-traffic controllers, for example, has in retrospect been analyzed as a major turning point in the history of relations between management and labor, paving the way for a painful and historic corporate restructuring that wound up revitalizing American business. There is a lot of truth to this analysis. But at the time, Reagan said nothing about business, deregulation, or the proper balance between management and labor. He fired the controllers because he believed there is no right to strike against the public. Period. He gave a speech saying this, and the American public immediately and overwhelmingly agreed.

In 1986 at the Reykjavik summit, Reagan turned down Mikhail Gorbachev’s offer of a massive and asymmetrical Soviet reduction in strategic and intermediate nuclear weapons, contingent mainly on U.S. agreement to severely restrict research on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Secretary of State George Shultz and all of Reagan’s key advisers begged him to accept, asking him how it would look to the public when it was learned that a historic arms agreement had been sacrificed to an anti-missile program that was little more than an idea, not even out of the laboratory. Reagan’s answer was that it would be wrong for the government to deny the American people any hope of an attempt to defend themselves against nuclear attack.

Amid apocalyptic headlines and network reports of exactly the sort Shultz feared, Reagan returned home, went on television, and told the American people exactly what he had told Shultz: Much as he wanted the missile reductions, he could not bring himself to leave the American people unprotected. The American people agreed massively, and what seemed to be building into a crisis of Reagan’s presidency ended abruptly. Within a few months, Gorbachev was offering many of the same missile reductions without the SDI kicker, Reagan and Richard Perle’s “zero option” for Europe — contemptuously rejected by the Soviets a few years earlier — had been agreed to, and the Cold War was rapidly heading to its surprising end.

This is not the place to revisit all the old arguments about how much credit Reagan deserves for the good things that happened on his watch. We know Reagan’s many detractors will continue to make their ingenious arguments as to why exactly the same things would have happened under President Jimmy Carter or President Walter Mondale, only without those deficits. The interesting thing for this discussion is how intensely moral Reagan’s decision-making was, and how well this worked for him politically. The moral center of his politics is what removes him more completely from today’s conservative leaders than anything else about him.

In American politics, morality is not primarily about believing in God or having a restrained lifestyle, though these are viewed as goods by most voters. In American politics, morality tends to be bound up with the idea of human equality the core idea on which the country was founded. If it is not, moral politics becomes too didactic and is almost always unsuccessful.

It is often remarked that the United States is the only Western democracy that has a vibrant, massbased social-conservative movement. The obvious point is that it is also the only Western democracy that retains a lot of people who have high levels of religious involvement. In Western Europe, where people don’t go to church, conservative politics is mainly economic and occasionally ethnic and/or anti-immigrant. When irreligion and relativism spread more fully to the United States, we’re destined to become a larger Netherlands. End of story.

Or is it? Tocqueville wrote about the gap in religious practice between the United States and Europe in 1831. He suspected it had more to do with the workings of equality than with North America’s being a cultural backwater. Ronald Reagan is the politician of our era, as Lincoln was of his, who best understood the intimate connection between morality and equality in our politics. He wanted to export democracy and human rights; his Republican rivals preferred to focus on power politics. He advocated personal tax relief; his opponents preferred tax cuts for corporations and investors. He thought legalized abortion was a central issue and was unapologetic about wanting to end it; his Republican opponents, most of them pro-life, wanted it at the periphery of politics. They failed to understand that abortion will continue to be the bloody crossroads of American politics because it is not just about morality but about universal human equality.

Conservative political leaders will begin to get their act together when they understand that Reagan’s success was not about being a good speaker, but about the moral, egalitarian, thoroughly American content of what he said.

Jeffrey Bell is president of the Campaign for Working Families and author of Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Inequality (Regnery Gateway).
 
Walter Berns

Ask a conservative what he wants to conserve and he is likely to say ” freedom,” including the freedom to spend his own money; hence, his dislike of taxes. But ask the typical American (or British or French) voter the same question and the first thing that comes to his mind is “my benefits”: Social Security, unemployment compensation, food stamps, school lunches, government health insurance, care of the elderly, free (or in America, subsidized) higher education, and paid (and in France, lengthy) vacations. All these benefits are the gift of the liberal or socialist governments under which he has lived since the Depression of the 1930s and, particularly, since the end of World War II. Conservatives have little to offer the typical voter. Tax relief?. He thinks only the rich have capital gains, and his modest estate is not subject to a tax. Less regulation? He is comfortable with regulation. A stronger national defense? The Cold War is over. A smaller government? But, as he sees it, the government is not on his back.

As for freedom, whatever the case with the British and French, the American thinks he is freer than he has ever been, and he knows he has liberalism to thank for that. It was not conservatives who put the censors out of business, giving him the freedom to entertain himself as he sees fit (and assuring him that there is nothing shameful in whatever he sees fit); not conservatives who liberated women, from the kitchen and nursery to the work force, making them self-sufficient, able to take care of themselves, thereby allowing men both to have them — readily, thanks to the sexual revolution, another of liberalism’s benefactions — and leave them with a good conscience; not conservatives who promoted the idea of no-fault divorces; and, to sum it up, it was not conservatives who assaulted the culture and, in the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, succeeded in “defining deviancy down.” Not surprisingly, the nation that once mourned the deaths of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln now celebrates the lives of Madonna, Robert Mapplethorpe, and even Larry Flynt.

It is with something like this in mind that the editors speak of conservatism and “traditional morality.” I don’t doubt that conservatives are for it, but I wonder what they can do about it, or, more precisely, what they can do to strengthen it. If morality was a part of our tradition, as the term implies, so were the institutions that fostered and sustained it, by which I mean the family and the family’s ally, the censor. Can conservatives persuade women to leave the workplace and return to the kitchen and nursery, or, as one of our Founding Fathers put it, to the “domestic society” where manners are formed and morality taught, and where “the lovely and accomplished woman shines with superiour lustre”? Right now we’re having trouble keeping them out of the trenches.

By censorship, I don’t mean putting an “adults only” label on films, or a V- chip (combined with a rating system) in television sets. Such labels and ratings are merely statements intended by politicians to placate the ” concerned parents” among their constituents, and they serve, if they serve at all, only as buyers guides for the kids (and dirty old men). I mean censorship of the sort we used to have; for example, the Motion Picture Production Code, which, when enforced (and enforced it was until not so many years ago), favored films upholding “the sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home” and prevented the distribution of films showing violence, nudity, and “casual or promiscuous sex.” But liberals have succeeded in making the word censorship, in any of its forms, the one dirty word in the American lexicon, with the result that even Bill Bennett and Bob Dole feel obliged to reassure the public that they are opposed to it. And who can blame them?

Yet, the same public buys millions of copies of Bennett’s Book of Virtues, which suggests an awareness that our culture is awry, and that something ought to be done about it. And something — not much, but something — is being done about it. Congressional Republicans managed to pass the Defense of Marriage Act (and shamed the president into signing it), and, a couple of months ago, Louisiana, hoping to cut back on the number of divorces, passed a law allowing a couple (and only a male and female couple) the option of entering into a “covenant marriage,” defined as a lifelong relationship, not readily terminated.

The law may or may not do any good, but at least this can be said in its favor: The New York Times denounced it as stupid.

Walter Berns is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
 
Malcolm Bradbury

May 1 is a date British Conservatives will not forget. Their defeat was substantial, overwhelming, a decisive turn in politics. The damage to the historical credibility of the Major administration is now being done. It’s being typed as corrupt, sleazy, bankrupt of ideas. In truth, as governments go, it wasn’t a bad one. Inflation and taxes were held low, unemployment was falling fast. Few governments have so generously left the economy in such fine shape to successors. Much of the assault on “gray” John Major and his ministers was manufactured, not least by a hostile, competitive press colluding with leaks from a well-run Labour-party media machine.

But the 1997 election was probably lost back in 1992. Then John Major won a fourth Conservative term against the odds, his own party’s expectations, and the hopes of assorted opinion-makers, intellectuals, and power-brokers who had already made their plans for the New Labour Nineties. It was lost again when an unacknowledged and ill-managed recession wiped out many of the ’80s gains, and Britain incompetently withdrew from the European system of fixed exchange rates, discrediting Tory economic policies; lost yet again when internal division over Europe left the party fighting not Labour but itself.

For the moment, the Conservative party in Britain is dead in the water, and the appointment of untried William Hague as its new leader is not reassuring. New Labour is still enjoying a happy honeymoon. But if the Conservatives are wounded, conservatism is far from dead. Blair has inherited the rewards and many of the ideas of Thatcherite policies. He knows his key electoral support lies in the center ground. Paradoxically, his greatest danger lies in his large majority. It can only embolden those on the Labour left, who read the situation as a mandate for more radical policies.

There’s no doubt that — with New Labour in Britain, Jospin’s victory in France, growing problems for Kohl in Germany — a new mood is sweeping Europe. It’s marked by strong millennial feelings, characteristic of the ending of centuries. The great transformations of the 1980s — the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Marxism, the rise of the globalized, omnipotent free market — are already historicized. The ’80s statues have mostly fallen off the pedestals: Mitterrand, Reagan, and Thatcher are ghosts from the past; only a wounded Kohl remains. The 20th century — a century of European horrors — is fading too, and an agenda for the 21st century is already taking shape. In Britain, new young voters lived all their lives with Tory administrations. Though not instinctively left-wing, they’re deeply shaped by the trendy agendas of the past two decades: post-colonialism, multiculturalism, feminism, gay issues, green politics, New Age sensibilities, designer consumerism, streetwise cynicism about crime, sex, drugs, Web-site values.

Tony Blair’s decision to support a millennium grand projet, a great exhibition at Greenwich in 2000, declares his bid to make New Labour look like the party of the new age. No previous Labour government has stayed in office for two terms. Yet Conservatives will probably have to reconcile themselves to this — unless, under Hague, they can renew their long-term vision, overcome internal squabbling, restructure party organization, and above all appeal to a new voting generation. The Conservative base now is largely among the aging. They’ve lost virtually all the intellectual support that, in the ’80s, made Thatcher’s policies feel like a real historical revolution.

Previous Labour governments have collapsed through ideological division, bad economic management, above all indebtedness to radical interest groups demanding financial rewards or aggressive government intervention. Blair knows these dangers, but his lobbies are already demanding their share. Bans on smoking, laws against fox hunting, threats of high taxation on automobile owners, ministerial criticism of the “fat cat” company directors, “windfall taxes” — all have an anti-libertarian spirit, the smell of class envy and the interventionist nanny state about them.

The British are quiet anarchists — unlike the French, who are noisy ones. But they dearly love their liberties; the rise of state power is a serious concern on which Conservatives should capitalize. So is the break-up of the United Kingdom — the move toward devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales. A new government can create new political hopes; it can also open up dangerous national schisms. Only when Conservatives have a radical mess to transform, the ideas and policies to transform it, and an identification with real anxieties of people in a time of profound social and domestic change will they recapture their place in politics — and history.

Malcolm Bradbury, the English novelist and scholar, last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about Hong Kong.
 
David Brock

The Republican Congress lost its moorings not after President Clinton won reelection in 1996, but on taking power in 1994. Ideologues generally don’t have sound strategic judgment, as Hillary Clinton proved with her health-care initiative, and as Newt Gingrich proved with the 1995 government shutdown fiasco. Winning one election is not a license to launch a holy war. The Clinton administration learned that Americans don’t like extremists of any stripe only after a crushing defeat in 1994. The question now is whether the Republican leadership can also learn before the Titanic sinks.

Conservative Republicans believed their own rhetoric and post-1994 press notices about a wholesale shift in the mood of the electorate, a mistake nicely illustrated in the editors’ question. To continue to believe that ” conservative ideas seem to be ascendant” in the face of contrary evidence is to invite ruin. The country is ideologically schizophrenic. People favor cutting government spending and curbing regulation, but they don’t want to sacrifice education, the environment, or health insurance for poor kids. The task for conservatives is to convince the public that they have the right answers to these social problems. School vouchers vs. government-run schools should be a winner. But in the face of a hostile press, conservatives have never been adept at laying the groundwork for change. The singular achievement of the 104th Congress, the overhaul of welfare, came more than a decade after Charles Murray published Losing Ground.

The Republican victory was as much a vote against game-playing in Washington by the arrogant Democratic congressional party as it was about ideology. When the Republicans came in, they became part of that corrupt establishment. John Kasich’s attack on corporate welfare died on the vine. The present tax bill pays off the religious Right (the child tax credit) and major Republican donors like Archer Daniels Midland (the ethanol subsidy). GOP freshmen were pressured by the leadership to drop their support of a ban on soft money. And conservatives abandoned anti-government principles to support the V-chip and Internet censorship. All of this, of course, was foreshadowed within weeks of Gingrich’s taking office in his cynical and opportunistic book deal.

But the blame can’t all be laid at Gingrich’s door. In acquiescing to the nomination of Bob Dole, GOP leaders squandered another opportunity. The critical moment came when Paul Weyrich, Gary Bauer, Grover Norquist, and others called a press conference to block Colin Powell, who has more moderate views on abortion and affirmative action, from entering the Republican primaries. I don’t know if this preemptive strike influenced Powell’s decision, or if I could have supported Powell had he run, but I do know that these self-appointed “conservative leaders” do not speak for me or millions of other conservatives.

The challenge is even deeper than assembling a majority and finding someone to lead it. Conservatism, as it is currently constituted and represented by conservative elites, is failing because in some respects it is wrong. Gingrich’s stumbling has allowed the mask to slip. The emerging anti- immigrant consensus, pushed by Pat Buchanan and National Review, is one troubling development. Another is the waging of an ugly culture war by any and all means. Robert Bork, in his recent book Slouching Towards Gomorrah, proposed a constitutional amendment to allow Congress to overrule judicial opinions with which it disagrees, a radical and dangerous view.

If I were a Republican strategist, here’s what I’d advise: Side with real people and real families against the vested interests in both parties. Concentrate on issues where you already have a majority, like abolishing the IRS. Exploit the divisions between young and old by leading on Medicare and Social Security reform. “Conservation” should be a conservative issue. Stop turning over political and policy differences to prosecutors and drop the personal attacks. Was mine the only heart that sank when George Bush ascended the platform at the 1996 Republican convention and trashed the personal character of the first lady? Partisan railing against the volunteer summit and President Clinton’s national dialogue on race is bad politics. Find a way to favor both while advancing the conservative case. Don’t write off the black vote anymore.

Look ahead, not back. The core principles of Reagan and Thatcher are alive and well, but politics is changing in a fundamental way, both here and abroad. The terms “liberal” and “conservative” don’t even mean much anymore except inside the Beltway, in places like WEEKLY STANDARD symposia. Take a cue from Reagan, who once presciently observed that “there is no left or right, only an up or down.” The coming fault lines are something like change/status quo; consensus/partisanship; and tolerance/intolerance. If conservatives can advance their ideas of freedom, liberty, and responsibility within these lines, they might start winning, and they might also deserve to.

David Brock is an investigative writer for the American Spectator and the author of The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (Free Press).
 
Eliot A. Cohen

There are ample explanations for the apparent feebleness of conservative parties and politicians: the flabbiness bred of a decade or more of spectacular success, the adroitness of their opponents (a talented if shallow group), and sheer bad luck. The absence of foreign policy crises also helps explain the conservative retreat from power: Who would have voted for Bill Clinton if they thought he might have to lead the United States to war? Thus, like most major events, the conservative setbacks of the 1990s are overdetermined. About some of the causes — the skill of telegenic trimmers on the other side, for example — conservatives can do little. But in other cases there are some lessons they might learn.

The truth is that most people seem to prefer conservative policies while disliking conservatives, who manage to seem doctrinaire and curiously anti- patriotic in their domestic policies. Take as an example the usual conservative position on the environment. While most Americans think it absurd to let the fate of the snail darter determine the fate of farmers dependent on large irrigation projects, most Americans also like an unpolluted environment and take pride in our national parks — both tributes to activist government. Fairly or not, conservatives have been pegged as the people who will oppose almost any environmental measure and would, if they could, privatize the national parks, all in the name of free enterprise. Which conservatives, without prompting, will admit that government regulation has had a wholesome effect on the air we breathe and the water we drink, or celebrate the national parks as one of the glories of the United States?

The environmental issue illuminates a central problem of conservative statesmanship: its mindless opposition to the state. For too long conservatives have viewed government as either enemy or excrescence, excluding only the military from a general opposition to all its works. Yet most Americans appreciate the work of, and should take pride in the work of, the Public Health Service, the Library of Congress, and the Geological Survey, to take only a few examples. Conservatives declaim against liberal history textbooks, but how many are willing to spend adequate sums of money to acquire, protect, and maintain Civil War battlefields?

It is politically implausible to run for office on a platform of contempt for all officeholders. Far worse, however, are the moral consequences that flow from such a contradiction — a stunting and demeaning of the very notion of public service. Having taught a younger generation that government is everywhere and always to be mistrusted, why should conservatives find it surprising that men and women of character and ambition would rather devote their energies to some other activity? The Founders did not envision or desire a feeble government, and they did not shrink from endorsing its essential functions. While knowing the limits of what government can do, they paid due honor to its legitimate activities. The anti-government temper of modern conservatives subverts their own objectives and often expresses itself in a meanspirited way. The indifference, and in some cases malicious pleasure, shown by some conservatives at the shutdown of the federal government — an event that brought real hardship to clerks and secretaries living from paycheck to paycheck — raised questions, quite properly, about the fitness of such people to rule.

The libertarian streak in contemporary conservatism is one of the most corrosive imaginable, and in its spread lies one of the root causes of conservative ill fortune. It is often expressed as a celebration of greed first and foremost, and of moral license secondarily. To an astonishing degree, conservatives have put forward economic activity as the most noble of human activities, neglecting some of the destructive (possibly unavoidable) side effects of unbridled capitalism and turning acquisitiveness into a core human virtue. The uneasy coexistence of moral and economic conservatives will have to get uneasier yet before this problem is resolved.

None of this is to say that conservatives need to steal a page from liberalism if they are to regain their position. Rather, they might do well to reflect on their non-libertarian traditions (think of Teddy Roosevelt, for example) and to search for ways that couple their generally prudent opposition to unnecessary regulation of private activity with a regard for what government can and should do well, and an appreciation for those values that transcend making money. Until they do this, they cannot expect, and will not deserve, the successes they crave.

Eliot A. Cohen is professor and director of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
 
Noemie Emergy

Political people divide by ideas, which are always important. They are also divided by style, which is sometimes more pertinent, as it decides who and what gets to govern, and whose ideas are passed into law. In the style divide, one side belongs to Reagan and FDR, who understood how to govern, by attracting new people. The other belongs to the jihad style of the Goldwater and McGovern conventions, which tends to drive people away. The second group thinks it lives in a theocracy, where the main idea is to bear witness, no matter how many people are stunned by your theories. The first knows it lives in a democracy, where power derives from the will of the people, and that, without this behind it, no party holds power for long.

The Goldwater and McGovern campaigns were the parties stripped down to their cores, and proudly so, with no interest in others. What Roosevelt and Reagan knew is that governing depends on integrating one’s core within a larger majority structure, where it influences but does not manage the whole. In 1972, the Democrats turned into Goldwater liberals and lost the presidency for an extended period. Sometimes the Republicans have returned the favor, becoming McGovern conservatives, putting their power in doubt. Both parties are now all core and no coalition, unable to affix the broad middle for more than a moment, and then in response to the other’s excesses. The party that figures out how on its terms to appeal to the middle will control politics for the next generation. But to do this, it will have to change its ways.

Goldwaters and McGoverns accentuate differences, excluding those who differ on discrete points of policy. Reagans and Roosevelts know it is less important to exclude those who differ than to subsume them in transcendent, overarching common interests. From them consservatives should learn to frame their issues in terms of large and sweeping moral goals. They should take the lead in moving the country to a transand post-racial future, now that liberals have formally endorsed the ideas of identity, grievance, and victimhood that have made the West Bank, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland such wonderful places to live. Conservatives should back the kinds of affirmative action that guarantee access, not outcomes, and that reward personal merit and enterprise. They should urge that the country drop all racial classifications from the national Census, as a sign that the country relates to itss people as citizens, not interchangeable members of blocs. They should make their party a home, not just for the 12 percent who want a legal ban on all forms of abortion, but for the 70-plus percent who favor restraints and restrictions, who are disturbed by the move to a throw-away culture and the conflation of life with a “choice.” Most of the people described as “pro- choice” stop short at the first trimester, and many want restrictions even within it. They should be welcomed as allies, not decried and denounced.

In the flush of victory after the 1994 triumph, many movement conservatives called it the flowering of the Goldwater movement, imperiled in 1995 by Powellmania, which they saw as the ultimate menace. Powell, they said, was a Democrat, and should have remained so; and they invited him out of their party. In this, they got everything wrong. The Goldwater crusade was a cult movement, and would have remained so. It took Ronald Reagan, a Roosevelt backer, to make it a part of a national party by raiding the FDR base.

What made the difference? The likes of Powell did. The movement people were always there, in 1964, as in 1980. It was when an immigrant’s son, raised in the Bronx by parents who worshiped the Roosevelts, was lured over the line by an inclusionist leader, that a governing conservative majority was born. McGovern and Goldwater lost voters and shed large chunks of their parties. Reagan and Roosevelt, among the most ideologically defined of American presidents, were still inclusionist, and won power by winning non-dogmatic voters and raiding the enemy’s base. Conservatism became the governing movement when the Powells and the Reagan Democrats crossed over. If and when they cross back again, the movement will die. It will live on as a cult, as it did after the 1964 wipeout. It will hold meetings, emote, and make many statements. But the power will have passed to other men.

There is a nationwide base for a center-right movement, led by a corps of reform-minded governors, who reform schools and welfare, privatize, and cut taxes, while taming the gender gap, and winning 20-40 percent of the blacks. The key words are “center-right” and “reform.” Governments in this country are center-right, or left-center. A right-right, or left-left, coalition is a contradiction in terms. Reagan and Roosevelt knew this. They preferred, in the end, power to purity, knowing that if you ask for 70 percent instead of 100 percent, you may get 60 percent, whereas purists get nothing. Which will conservatives opt for? Reagan and Roosevelt, for all their convictions, wanted big parties and got them, and sequential landslides. McGovern and Goldwater wanted pure parties. They got them. They then had them all to themselves.

Noamie Emergy is a writer living i Fairfax, Virginia
 
Francis Fukuyama

While I largely agree with the symnposium’s opening premise that we live in an age when conservative ideas have become dominant, I don’t think it necessarily follows that conservative parties should everywhere be in power. Politics is, after all, the contestation over power, and if a big idea has been broadly accepted, then the contestation will be over smaller ideas or over personalities. Politics in the Byzantine Empire was organized around racing teams in the Hippodrome.

Many people have argued that parties of the left are in power because they have stolen the ideas of the right and repackaged them more effectively. This is true in the United States and Britain but less so in France, and it will probably not be true in Germany should Kohl be unseated in the upcoming election, so we need to be careful about overgeneralizing.

Tony Blair has been much more consistent (and impressive) as a repackager of conservative ideas than Clinton. He engaged in a tough behind-the-scenes struggle with old Labour and came out victorious. His early agenda — making the Bank of England independent, while lowering corporate tax rates — is much more consistently “Thatcherite” than were Clinton’s early initiatives. Blair has openly defended the core of the Thatcher revolution (releasing the economy and political system from the stranglehold imposed by the trade unions), while bowing only stylistically toward a Clintonite agenda (improving educational standards, cracking down on tobacco companies, etc.).

Clinton, on the other hand, had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards the center early on with a lot of Republican help — primarily through their beating back of his early initiatives on gays in the military, the 1993 stimulus package, and healthcare reform, and by the Republican victory in the 1994 mid-term election. In a broader way, conservatives (if we include in this category people like Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and a host of free- market economists) prepared the ground for Clinton’s current success by handing him an economy that was in extraordinarily good shape. Clinton has been brilliant, however, in taking what was given to him and running with it, particularly after November 1994.

The situation in France is rather different, because the French have never gone through a Thatcherite revolution. A significant group of French conservatives remain Gaullists who are wedded to a large state and have never heard of the University of Chicago’s economics department. Those conservatives who have are technocrats who, in contrast to Reagan and Thatcher, have been quite unsuccessful in articulating their point of view. Indeed, it is striking how the French have remained oblivious to the larger intellectual currents swirling around them, much more so than people in any number of less developed countries — from Mexico and Argentina to Russia. The French still believe in the possibility of politics — i.e., that sovereign publics can vote for leaders who want to reorder social and political priorities regardless of what global bond markets say. In today’s terms this doesn’t result in socialism, but in pathetic caricatures of socialist ideas like dealing with a high chronic rate of unemployment through cutting the work week and retirement age while maintaining benefit levels. France today has a youth unemployment rate of close to 30 percent, and given the way its political system works (a hyper-presidential pressure-cooker with few release valves), it is very possible that France may be on the verge of some kind of social explosion.

Germany is again different, because it at least has a class of conservative politicians and corporate managers who understand the deep problems of the contemporary German welfare state and realize that something must be done to get it under control. They face a Social Democratic party that has not yet been Blair-ized, but has been handicapped over the past two decades by weak and uncharismatic leaders. This situation will not last forever, and Germany is likely to move toward a more traditional social-democratic left that will delay the onset of needed reforms.

The parties of the left in Britain and America have been helped greatly by the fact that the charismatic conservatives who led their respective revolutions were replaced by extraordinarily routine ones who seemed to believe they inherited a right to rule. This process of gradual degeneration is probably inevitable and is one of the reasons we have two-party government.

Much as the editors of THE WEEKLY STANDARD may want to bemoan the political fortunes of conservatives around the world, America and much of the rest of the world are in pretty good shape at the moment. We all know about the U.S. economy, and global economic growth has been running at around 4 percent for much of this decade. We have not seen comparable levels of political stability in the international system in some time. Sit back and enjoy it, while it lasts.

Francis Fukuyama is Hirst professor of public policy at George Mason University and director of its International Transactions program.
 
David Gelernter

“He was used to being hit, but not that hard. That London should come out for the eleventh was more than anybody had the right to ask, but he did. Fifty-one seconds after it opened, Patterson, with a flurry of blows, drove him across the ring towards the side where I sat. The last punch sent London staggering back toward me . . .” This is A. J. Liebling describing, blow-by- blow, how Newt Gingrich (“London”) got clobbered by the New York Times (aka “Floyd Patterson”). Gingrich has been dazed and loopy since early ’96; the conservative majority in Congress is reeling. We know the reason (or one of the big reasons), but tend to forget or discount it because it is so depressing. If a conservative journalist publishes a book that is attacked and lied about in the mainstream press, he is shaken; Gingrich has woken up to vicious reviews every day of his whole career as a national figure. Of course he has friends, but the cultural Establishment doesn’t merely oppose prominent and powerful conservatives, it hates them: the Times and Post, which pass the word to the TV networks, which inspire the local press and TV, and on to the entertainment industry and beyond. Gingrich’s friends are okay as far as they go, but they don’t run ABC or any remotely comparable institution.

Why are Gingrich and his conservative majority reeling? Because of the first law of post-Vietnam American politics, “conservatives in power always retreat.” They are laid low by Hatred-induced Ideological Unraveling, a disease whose pathetic, punch-drunk endpoint is the state referred to by the press as “newfound receptiveness to compromise.” Gingrich during 1995 and Reagan during his first term were important exceptions, but the principle transcends them and transcends politics.

HIIU is an insidious disease that defies logic. Power and success ought to inoculate a person, but they don’t. Philip Roth investigates the phenomenon in a 1983 novel (The Anatomy Lesson) about his alter-ego, who is a famous big shot at the top of his field — and is so devastated by bad reviews that he wants to quit writing and become a doctor. Safety and comfort don’t inoculate you either. Daphne Merkin includes in her new book a peculiar, affecting essay called “Dreaming of Hitler.” As a teenaged Jew she found herself meeting Hitler repeatedly in her dreams, arguing him gently out of Jew-hatred. Hitler and the New York Times are in every sense incomparable; the point is that, however you batten down your mind, hatred gets in through the cracks. The girl was safe, the Speaker one of the world’s most powerful men. But they each dreamt of not being hated.

Do character and courage inoculate you? Top military leaders are selected for character and courage, but in the aftermath of Tailhook they allowed careers to be wrecked, and training to be reorganized around ideas that any 10-year-old could tell you are wacky and dangerous. (Women trainees can’t be relied on to throw hand grenades far enough to avoid getting blown up. Contemplated solution: lighter, less-powerful hand grenades. Today’s Army — Beating the Enemy is Job No. 2.) These generals and admirals make Gingrich look steadfast, but I don’t believe they are unprincipled; I do believe that the Establishment’s full-throttle hatred feels like jet engine exhaust when you face into it. The leaders of the Citadel and VMI are mostly former military men themselves. The federal government and courts ordered these two schools that revere tradition to eradicate one of their core traditions, which seems like a deliberate humiliation, and in a sense was intended to be. You’d have thought that, wherever it stood on admitting women, the leadership would have refused on principle. You can picture the two schools forswearing all federal funds and appealing to the public to make up the difference until today’s craziness subsides. Such an appeal would not have been prudent, but no military school ever had Prudence! emblazoned on its crest. HIIU, however, hits hard and is devastating.

Haven’t politicians always suffered the relentless hatred of political opponents? Certainly, but prestigious institutions at the top of the culture hierarchy have never been so powerful, unanimous, smug, and scarce. Gingrich failed the conservative intelligentsia but we failed him first, conservatives like me who have no stomach for any such contentious, exhausting prospect as remaking the cultural mainstream. There are some head-on conservatives, and it’s no accident that David Horowitz (with his Center for the Study of Popular Culture) is one of the most prominent. He’s a former leftist; he has Establishment-fighting genes. If he could distill that combativeness into a bottle, the whole conservative community could use a shot.

Contributing editor David Gelernter is THE WEEKLY STANDARDS art critic.
 
Stanley B. Greenberg

The conservative defeats in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Canada are only bewildering if you begin with the premise that conservative ideas are historically ascendant and a popular guide for modern societies facing new challenges. The premise seems reasonable enough given the triumphs of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the two great Englishspeaking democracies. That leaders of the center-left parties — like Clinton in the United States, Blair in Britain, Chrdtien in Canada, Kok in the Netherlands, and Hawke and Keating in Australia — have been caught stealing conservative rhetoric and policies only buttresses conservatives’ confidence in their own ascendancy.

Little wonder then that conservatives have concentrated on tactical explanations for their recent defeats, lamenting the conservative failure to communicate effectively, the flawed conservative communicators, the ” dysfunctional relationship” between the conservative movement and “its elected leaders” (Adam Meyerson, Policy Review), and the Left’s willingness to choose “the most adept, cunning, and unscrupulous candidates” who resort to a “new unpredictability, opportunism, [and] fuzziness” (David Frum, THE WEEKLY STANDARD). In the U.S., all tactical roads lead to the fateful decision to close the federal government — the ultimate tactical disaster that drove ordinary citizens away from the conservatives.

These tactical explanations must be reassuring because they allow conservatives to both acknowledge defeat and sound seriously self-critical, even as they affirm their belief in conservatism’s popular hegemony. But finally, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has had the good sense to wonder out loud why the Left always seems so consistently sure-footed and the Right so clumsy.

Grover Norquist tells us in Policy Review, “From Ronald Reagan, conservatives have learned optimism and discovered they are on the winning side of history.” That is the core problem — the conservative misreading of Reaganism and Thatcherism. Reagan and Thatcher were certainly triumphant at a particular historical moment, but conservatives have concluded that this pair’s electoral victories were a triumph of a particular historical course. That conclusion leads to a misreading of both the past and the future.

The conservative victories of the 1980s were a product of the public’s disillusionment with the so-called working-class parties and the unreformed welfare state. The electorate was not particularly enthusiastic at first about either Reagan or Thatcher, but this was less about them and their ideas than about the dysfunctionality of the Left. The electorate voted for big changes: to bring the rising prices, interest rates, taxes, and spending under control; to relieve the tax burden on the average citizen; and to push specialinterest power to the wings (trade unions in Britain and cultural- liberal groups in the States) and put hard-working families on center stage.

In an important sense, Reaganism and Thatcherism forced the reform of the modern state and of the parties of the left. The successful center-left parties today take as axiomatic that spending cannot run out of control, that the middle-class tax burden must be lessened, and that their parties must be inclusive but also broadly representative of the interests and values of the mainstream electorate. Defeat at the hands of Reagan and Thatcher was traumatic, but the struggle also freed many center4eft parties to break with past practices and reconnect with their broad working- and middle-class base.

This period of upheaval, however, did not produce public enthusiasm for core conservative ideas such as supply-side economics, deregulation, marketization, business primacy, and indeed, even the idea of cutting major government spending programs. Conservatives pretended that this was not so, or simply elided their critique of social-democratic governance and their own ideas for governing. In the process, they turned a historic episode into history itself.

Conservatives have entered the post-Reagan/ Thatcher period confident that the public is predisposed to the core conservative principle, “You’re on your own,” as Frum articulates it. Accordingly, conservatives across the globe seem prepared to go to the electorate with school vouchers and school choice, capital-gains tax cuts, deregulation of business, privatization of state pensions, and medical savings accounts as alternatives to government- supported health-care programs.

The problem for conservatives is that the public is, at best, unenthusiastic about the specific policies and, at worst, profoundly hostile to the principle. For more and more people today, ours is a time of simultaneous squeeze on economic and family lives. More and more people believe they face a new and uncertain world fundamentally alone, and they are looking for social and governmental support — whether it is a loan for college or assured health care in retirement. The conservative principle, ” You’re on your own,” is little more than a slap in the face.

The conservatives lost on both sides of the Atlantic because voters rejected the idea of an ascendant conservative history. Voters have long acceded to the conservative critique of the earlier, unreformed social- democratic parties and state, but voters have explicitly turned away from conservative ideas as a basis for governance in the future. In nearly all these elections, voters called for a lessening of economic and social inequality, the protection of public spending levels, limits on deregulation, privatization, and marketization, and the defense of health care and retirement systems. In Britain, for example, nearly three-quarters of the new (presumably more conservative) Labour voters wanted wealth redistributed from the better off to the less-well off, taxes and spending for schools increased, and all further privatization brought to an end.

This is not a communication problem. This is not a problem of tactics. In this period of information technology and markets, ordinary citizens are looking for help to support their own best efforts, and they are entertaining the idea that sometimes we need to do things together, even as a nation. Conservatives are losing elections because they are losing a history they never owned.

Stanley B. Greenberg has served as pollster to Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, and Tony Blair. He is co-editor with Theda Skocpol of The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics (Yale University Press, forthcoming).
 
Yoram Hazony

The fate of conservatism in Israel is the reverse of that in the rest of the West: The newly elected prime minister, Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, is the closest Israel has ever had to ideologically conservative leadership; Netanyahu supports economic liberalization, lower taxes, peace through strength, a balance of powers between the branches of government, and greater Jewish traditionalism in the public schools.

Yet the ideas for which he stands as a leader are not in the least bit ” ascendant” in Israel; indeed, most of these principles enjoy majority support neither in Netanyahu’s own Likud party nor in the governing coalition — much less in the country as a whole. Netanyahu is not riding the crest of a surging conservative political movement such as the one that brought Reagan and Thatcher to power; he is, rather, fighting a one-man war against the entire system, while most of his own colleagues strain to keep up with what he is doing.

Why is Bibi waging his battle for a strong, free, and Jewish Israel virtually on his own? The answer lies in the fact that Israel was not founded by Englishmen, as America was; it was founded by Russians. And its entire political debate for 70 years has reflected the political disputes of the East: the socialist-flavored nationalism of David Ben-Gurion (“the Right”) as against the utopian socialism of A. D. Gordon (“the Left”). When the first non-Russian intellectuals arrived in Jewish Palestine in numbers in the 1930s, they were German-Jewish refugees from Hitler, whose ideological commitments, like those of German-Jewish refugees arriving in New York at the same time, were not to Jewish nationalism but rather to a kind of humanist- existentialist Novocain — “Give peace a chance, because love is all you need, ” or something like that. Injected into the body politic in Israel and America, these ideas immensely strengthened the Utopian Left in both countries, with very similar results: Within a generation, the Germans had helped foment the peace movement and the social revolutions of the 1960s, which in Israel meant the end of BenGurion and the rise of a utopian socialist oligarchy (when utopian socialism leaves the kibbutz and acquires a bureaucracy, it becomes “social democracy”), which controls virtually every cultural and intellectual institution in the Jewish state to this day.

But unlike in America, Israel’s Eastern origins meant that there were no conservatives who could regroup and fight back; the only serious conservative leader among the Zionists, Ze’ev Jabotinsky — a boy from Odessa who somehow managed to educate himself in Italy and von Mises’s Vienna, and who later became mentor to Benjamin Netanyahu’s father — had been exiled from Palestine by the British in 1930 for sedition because he had advocated a Jewish state; he died in the United States 10 years later. Israel never had William Buckley, Irving Kristol, or Leo Strauss; no one to translate Burke or Hayek into Hebrew; no Commentary, no University of Chicago, no Heritage Foundation; and therefore no Ronald Reagan. In Israel, the utopian revolutionaries of the 1960s won their war and just kept going. Except on the single foreign-policy issue of the disposition of the West Bank, Israel has had no major cultural or public-policy debate in 30 years. Judicial activism, the welfare state, moral relativism, the sexual revolution, the corruption of the arts and the decay of academia, the excommunication of religion and the delegitimization of the idea of the nation — in all these, Israel now looks like America or Britain would have looked if the conservative counterattack had never taken place.

This is not to say that Israel does not have parties and social groups that are fundamentally inclined towards conservative ideas without ever having heard them described as such. There are numerous factions representing traditional religion, the last vestiges of a “national camp,” and even a handful of libertarians. Moreover, there are large numbers — Sephardim, the religious, women, ethnic minorities — who have been permanently shut out of North Tel Aviv’s socialist oldboy network, whose perpetual hold on the means of production is ensured by government-backed cartels.

But fusing these shut-out groups into a movement strong and united enough to break Israel’s continual slide past the 1960s and towards disintegration will not be achieved solely through the election of a neocon prime minister. This was already demonstrated by Menachem Begin’s center-right coalition of 1977, whose effect on the country’s dominant ideas — as reflected in academia, the media, the educational system, the state’s policymaking bureaucracy, and the judiciary — was nil. All of these institutions are more radical today than they were when Begin took office, and the ideas emanating from them are parroted unhesitatingly by politicians of every conceivable stripe. For example, in recent outbursts (there has been no “debate,” as such) over the ultra-activism of Israel’s Supreme Court — which makes the Warren Court look like a bastion of scrupulous textual analysis-almost the entire Israeli center-Right has jumped to join the farthest Left in defending the prerogatives of the court to overturn the decisions of the executive as it sees fit.

“No man is strong or rich enough to move a people,” wrote Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Jewish nationalism. “Only an idea can do that.” And without a unifying conservative idea to move the nation to a new and healthier course, Israel’s character will continue to be shaped by the self- evident truths of Euro-socialism, moral relativism, and the political correctness of the “enlightened” minority. In its lack of a unifying counter4dea, Israeli conservatism does in fact resemble the conservative movements in the West, which triumphed (prematurely?) over the Soviet Union, only to find themselves splintered today into a multitude of cultural, educational, religious, economic, and nationalist elements, unable to remember what they ever had in common. Conservatives have forgotten what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher understood so well: that conservatism, in all its branches, derives from a single source — enlightened tradition — and that one cannot sit on the branch of market capitalism, or that of limited government, or that of religious morality, or that of education in the Jewish and Western classics, without relying on this mighty trunk and the roots that feed it; indeed, that one cannot sit on any of these branches without tacitly recognizing th