Pat Buchanan may have made more news, but it was William J. Bennett who uttered the most noteworthy sentence at the 1992 Republican convention: “Plato understood in the end there is only one political issue: how we raise our children.”
Bennett took that thought and went on to publish The Book of Virtues, which tapped a deep vein of public concern and became one of the decade’s bestsellers. Since the ’92 convention, and with a vengeance, public attention has focused on the issues Bennett was pinpointing: how to re-moralize society and how to build character in the young. Conservative writers, think tankers, theologians, activists, and foundation heads — from Gertrude Himmelfarb to Arianna Huffington, from the Christian Coalition to the Cato Institute — have focused their energy on issues of character, morality, and civil society.
Republican politicos have traveled a different road. While conservative intellectuals talk of character and virtue, Republican politicians have focused on appropriations, CBO projections, and the perils of federal deficits. Republican presidential candidates are almost as riscally focused. Phil Gramm declined to campaign for president on moral issues, declaring that he was running for president, not preacher. Bob Dole told the Meet the Press audience that the first thing he would do as president “is be consistent with the balanced budget approach in the seven years and send up a budget that would take us to a balanced budget by the year 2002.”
What we have here is an amazing disjunction between the concerns of conservat ive activists and the interests of Republican politicians. It’s no wonder that conservative activists and intellectuals have no enthusiasm for the presidentia l field; the candidates are not pushing their hot buttons. And it’s no wonder t hat Republi can nerves on Capitol Hill are so jittery. The conservative support groups in the public arena are not fully engaged in Republican political battles. Republicans had a tough time fighting the budget propaganda war because many of those thinkers and writers who normally define points of principle and rally moral fervor were instead sitting in seminars on the virtues of civil society.
Who’s right? The intellectuals can argue that they have correctly identified character as the issue that will dominate public discussion for years and that the politicians are fools for conducting themselves like accountants. The politicians can counter that government gets dangerous when it starts trying to engineer souls, and that the intellectuals are fools to conduct themselves like archbishops. The reality is that the distinction between culture and politics is a slippery one. These days, the controversies that dominate the national conversation and shape the culture emanate from politics. The challenge is to use government to influence culture. That’s exactly the task left undone when intellectuals go off and debate culture while politicians don the green eyeshade.
The greatest share of the blame rests on the politicians, whose decision to avoid the character issue represents a major failure of imagination. Remember, it was not inevitable that budget balancing would emerge as the dominant issue for the new Republican Congress. In his new book, Values Matter Most, Ben Wattenberg has amassed a mountain of data to show that American voters are motivated by things larger than deficits and interest rates. He cites, for example, a 1994 Harris poll showing that only 5 percent of Americans listed the deficit when asked to name the two most serious problems facing the country. Crime was by far the most frequently named issue, followed by health care, drugs, the economy, employment, and programs for the poor. A $ IWashington Post/ABC News poll in 1995 asked voters which set of issues was of greatest concern to them: social issues, economic issues, or foreign policy issues. Fifty-five percent said social issues, 19 percent said economic issues, and 3 percent said foreign policy issues.
In the definitive analysis of the Republican landslide, pollster Fred Steeper concluded that there are two types of conservative, the economic and the cultural, that “cultural conservatism is the newer of the two, and it is likely the reason for the historical result on November 8, 1994.” All those people were buying Bennett’s Book of Virtues for a reason.
But with a few exceptions, such as Sen. Dan Coats, Republicans on Capitol Hill have barely touched the social and cultural issues that are of primary interest to Republican voters and intellectuals. True, Newt Gingrich talked about orphanages, beginning an important discussion about protecting children from the welfare culture. But once the legislative clock started ticking, the Republican revolution settled on pretty traditional concerns — regulatory reform, tort reform, and, above all, budget balancing.
Think back on the major issues of the past year. The Republicans didn’t cut big agencies, which would have changed the way the government looks, thereby forcing the nation to confront fundamental issues about which government actions are extraneous. Instead, they trimmed here and there. Indeed, they insisted ad nauseam that they weren’t really cutting but merely reducing the rate of increase. Their centerpiece reform involves Medicare. Republicans proposed a system that would have seniors paying $ 87.60 a month in premiums by the year 2002. President Clinton proposed a plan that would have seniors paying $ 82.80. That’s a difference of four dollars and eighty cents — hardly a battle of principle.
And why did the Republicans make Medicare the centerpiece of their budget? Medicare doesn’t tear at the fabric of the nation. It doesn’t crowd out civil society the way other social programs do. But it is where the money is. And if you care about the deficit foremost, you go after the biggest programs first. If you care about civil society, you go after the forces corroding it.
The Republican budget myopia led to a series of strange debates in which arbi trary numbers masqueraded as the moral high ground. Republicans insisted that t he budget be balanced in seven years instead of eight, or nine, or ten. There w as a heated dispute over whether the budgereefs should rely on Congressional Bu dget Office projections or Office of Management and Budget proiections, though both sets of figures rely on extremely rough guesses about the growth of the ec onomy. In this eye-glazing effort, it was President Clinton who ended up talkin g incessantly about values, and the Republicans who ended up talking arithmetic . In a typical exchange, President Clinton declared, “I am acting to protect th e values that bind us together.” House Budget chairman John Kasich held a news conference and retorted, “Th e president has no plan to balance the budget.”
Somewhere deep down beneath these debates there was an argument about how much would have to be cut from government spending. The CBO numbers would demand larger cuts than the OMB numbers. But the Republicans weren’t making the case that the government should be cut — and cut for the benefit of civil society — even if the budget were in balance. The deficit dominated the agenda in part because some veteran Republicans like Bob Dole and the now- vanished Bob Packwood still seem to believe that government’s most fundamental duty is to balance its books. Many of them are openly uncomfortable with all the big talk about values. They found themselves in surprising agreement with the populist freshmen Republicans in the House, who saw the deficit as a symbol of Washington’s inability to impose discipline on itself. That in turn played into the belief of some House leaders that government won’t have the credibility to tackle values issues until it gets its deficit in order.
And over and above all that was a naked political calculus about what battles to fight and when to fight them: After all, cutting the deficit was an agenda item delightfully free of controversy. The people like it; so do talk radio, Ross Perot, and the prestige press. It was a natural impulse to take concern about the deficit, which has long been a preoccupation in the editorial pages of the Washington Post and New York Times and in similar quarters, and use it as justification for their efforts to shrink government. This, in turn, put the Democrats slightly on the defensive, because they had to insist they wanted budget balance even as they sought to protect their spending programs.
Still, the strategy came at a cost for Republicans. It cost them moral fervor. It cost them the engagement of their intellectuals and polemicists. The first year of the Republican revolution was dominated by haggling over appropriations. It is hard to get excited by a banner that reads “Reduce the Rate of Increase!”
GOP politicians have shown themselves addicted to the Limited Politics that seemed to have been killed off by the Reagan Revolution. According to the doctrine of Limited Politics, also known as “leave me alone” Republicanism, taxes and guns are manly and important issues, but culture is froth and morals are for religious fanatics. These ideas left the feminists and other leftists an open field when they used politics to influence culture. Whether Republicans take culture seriously even now is still an open question
But intellectuals also deserve a share of the blame for abandoning politicians at a critical time, when the ideas about how to restore a civil society need embodiment in specific proposals and policies the politicians can take to the floor of the House and Senate. After all, politicians are primarily in the business of turning ideas into legislation, and so far the intellectuals have provided little material for them to work with.
Consider the strangeness of the situation: Republicans have just assumed positions of power in government, and at this important moment conservative intellectuals conclude that the nation’s most serious problems are in fact beyond the reach of government. Conservative political action is now more possible than at any time this century, just at a time when conservative thinkers seem sure that politics really isn’t sufficient; culture and civil society are key. Far from fighting the last war, conservative intellectuals might fairly be accused of fighting the next before this one is over.
When conservatives were out of power on Capitol Hill, they had more faith in the uses of legislation. During the Bush years, for example, enterprise zones were a hot topic. The assumption was that the problem of the underclass could be addressed by increasing economic opportunity. The levers of the tax code, voucher plans, and various incentive schemes could do that — if only Congress would pass a bill.
Occasionally you still hear a Republican congressman like James Talent or J. C. Watts talking about enterprise zones, but rarely a James Q. Wilson. Intellectuals emphasize character-building institutions — parents, churches, friendship societies (and their descendants), and popular culture. The Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review has reinvented itself as a magazine devoted to the study of civil society. David BIankenhorn promotes fatherhood. Himmelfarb’s essays on the lessons of 19th-century moral revivals are widely quoted. Francis Fukuyama writes a book on how trust holds communities together. Robert Woodson promotes successful charitable groups. Michael Joyce and the Bradley Foundation have created a network of civil society groups. This is where the conservative action is in the mid-1990s.
The intellectuals have argued very persuasively that behavior and character a re the key to solving social problems, but so far they haven’t translated many of their Big Ideas on character into Big Policies. (The one exception is school choice, which so far lacks a political strategy for enactment.
Many conservative thinkers have simply given up on policy and politics. “To restore civil society, a return to an earlier way of thinking about social problems is needed,” writes Don Eberly, president of The Civil Society Project. “The 20th century has traded in moral man for economic and psychological man, subjecting him at every turn to either economic inducements or therapeutic treatments. If society is to recover, the 21st century will have to recover a vision of man bearing inherent moral value and moral agency.” Eberly rejects those liberals and conservatives who “talk in cold, rational terms about the programs of government or market systems.” He’s interested in the space that is neither government nor market — the space in which children are raised, in which couples marry, in which people worship and help each other, and he doesn’t hold out any hope that either statist or capitalist institutions can clean up that space. “The good society cannot be doled out like just another entitlement,” he writes. “It cannot be pieced together through government programs, or stimulated into existence by more tax cuts. It must be achieved through the cooperative efforts of individual citizens.”
The argument that social problems are beyond the realm of government has always been a strain in conservative thinking (see Robert Nisbet), but it is especially prominent now. Tom Bethell, for one, believes that with the political victory of conservatism at the polls, it may be time to start in on cultural matters — by which he means high culture, literature, the arts.
But the problem with the notion that we should now go off and fight for culture is that there’s no there there. People no longer have great public controversies about modern novels. Contemporary art is nearly irrelevant to national debate. These cultural fields have become professional fiefdoms removed from the main arguments about America’s future.
Like it or not, politics is the realm where national disagreements are hashed out. People have periodically tried to launch television talk shows about literary controversies, but they don’t work because few people currently define themselves by their literary views. There were once ferocious arguments about who was greater, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. Partisans in both camps could barely be civil to each other.
These days, politics is the one issue on which people in business, the arts, the academy, the sciences, and other walks of life all feel qualified to express a view.
Do you root for Robert Novak or Eleanor Clift? Tell me that and I can make some pretty good guesses about many aspects of your life — where you live, how you decorate your house, how you think about homosexuality. We now define the zeitgeist by political events. The 1980s became the “Reagan eighties,” with all the attendant cultural associations. The polarized situation of the 1990s is embodied in the phrase “politically correct.”
Thus, some intellectuals have abandoned politics just at the moment they are most needed, since the distinction between political and cultural activity is a false one. These days, you shift the culture by shifting politics. Policies and politicians give off cultural emanations that change the way people see the nation.
(This was the argument for Colin Powell — he would be such an example of good character that his programmatic failings would be tolerable.) When government sends cultural signals, the effects cannot be measured by social scientists. But the way people think, the whole frame of debate, shifts a little, and the effects are real.
But if there is to be a reunion between Republican politicians and conservative intellectuals, it will have to be initiated by visionary politicians who see politics in the widest terms: as a battle for the nature of the culture. And only intellectuals can set the terms and outline the boundaries within which that battle can be fought.
At hopeful sign is an outstanding book due out in ebruary from the American Enterprise Institute Press called To Empower People, edited by Michael Novak. It’s a lively look back at the famous essay of the same name published 20 years ago by Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus. Berger and Neuhaus anticipated the current thinking about civil society, and in the process coined the phrase “mediating structures.” At the heart of the book is a series of very practical essays on how to promote civil society through government.
Liberals thought they were doing that in the Great Society days when the gove rnment contracted out social work to private charities. The problem, as we now know, is that the government didn’t become more like the charities, the chariti es became more like the government. Stuart Butler, Douglas Besharov, Marvin Ola sky, Novak, and others tackle the thorny question of how governm ent can create, in Novak’s words, a “protective umbrella” so that charities are supported but left free to act according to their original mission.
The debate is still open among the contributors to this volume. And of course it is not just a debate for conservatives. But it is a concrete debate about concrete policy options. When politicians try to talk about morality head-on, or when they hold hearings on moral decline, they are usually so ham- handed and opportunistic they make your skin crawl. They are for all virtues in general and none in particular. But when actual policies are under scrutiny, then the debate is less banal. Different policy options suggest real choices between different value systems (between, say, the the value-neutral Great Society welfare system and a value4aden Robert Woodson4ike network of private charities).
Policies reify airy-fairy debates about values. This book shows us the way to argue about cultural decline:
centering the argument around policy, not preachment. That way, intellectuals have something real to restrain their flights of utopianism, and politicians have something broad to latch onto, so they don’t retreat into the budgetary pedantry so sadly distant from the real concerns of ordinary Americans.
By David Brooks
