A LAND WITHOUT CONSERVATIVES

And I discovered that as annoying as some right-wingers can be, life without them is infinitely worse.

I was in Australia to take part in something called the Adelaide Festival of Ideas. As I am sure you are aware, South Australia is known as “The Festival State” (it says so on the license plates), so when they have a conference to talk about things, it can’t just be a panel discussion, it has to be a festival. With cash infusions from the government and Nokia, the Finnish cell phone people, the organizers invited some of the keenest intellects from around the globe to take part in this carnival of the mind, and the ones who were willing to spend 50 hours on an airplane so they could give a speech and sit on some panels were assembled at various venues in Adelaide over an extended weekend earlier this month. I felt compelled to accept the invitation because who can resist the opportunity to share a podium with two or three dozen feminist-lesbian-Aborigine novelists? Even for someone who spends much of his life being the token conservative at pseudo-intellectual gatherings, this would be a challenge of Himalayan proportions.

As it transpired, no Aborigine lesbian novelists ended up attending — there were no non-white people of any sort on the podium or in the audiences — but there were enough post-colonial feminist theorists, Marxist economists and Trotskyite agitators, and cyber-punk revolutionaries to keep things interesting.

The event was remarkably well attended. Audiences ranged from several hundred to a few thousand. Adelaidians seem to hunger for panel discussions (and they even had to pay for the ones at the opera house in the evening). The organizers didn’t advertise any topic for my solo presentation. So the locals were presented with a speaker they had never heard of who was going to talk on a subject they had no clue about, and still enough people showed up to fill a small auditorium. I felt like talking about my digestive system for an hour just to teach them to be more discerning.

But the more amazing feature of the event was how left-wing it was. There must be conservatives or moderates in Australia, but they are apparently so cut off from intellectual life they don’t bother to come out to an event like this. In session after session, the questions from the audience were unrelentingly pinko: When would the CIA stop disrupting workers’ movements around the globe? Isn’t it awful the way trans-national corporations have conspired to keep the truth from the world’s oppressed workers? Even after a sober, scientific panel discussion on cloning, the questions were straight out of the Spartacist Youth League songbook: Would the military-industrial complex create mindless worker clones and soldier clones in order to displace members of the working class? Then there were two questions based on the Gaia theory: A young woman and then an older man pointed out that we are threatening the Earth Mother with our overpopulation. Wasn’t modern medicine a mistake?

You almost never get questions like this at American events. Even on university campuses, you might get one or two questions this left-wing, but there is usually a ripple of nervousness through the audience. Apparently the intellectual circles of Australia are several notches to the left of those here. Most panelists were simpatico, though more sophisticated. One speaker used a panel discussion on the media to launch an impassioned plea for what amounted to the 1970s Swedish welfare state. The two stars of the event were Hanan Ashrawi, the Christian Palestinian woman who is a favorite of Mideast journalists, and a woman named Beatrix Campbell, a British feminist who explicitly defended the Loony Left and Red Ken Livingstone, the London leader who was its symbol.

I sat in the audience during Campbell’s talk and was surrounded by middle-aged women, several of whom were yipping their approval at every sentence. She would talk about the patriarchy — even ironically — and they would yip. She would lambaste Tony Blair for deviationism, and they would yip. She attacked a former socialist who had revised his views on the welfare state and they yipped along with that. Then she asked if anybody in her audience had heard of the man she was attacking — Norman Dennis — and none had.

The striking thing was not merely that the event was further left than comparable ones in America. It was the particular brand of leftism on offer. It was leftism circa 1980. Whether the subject was macroeconomics, poverty, racial matters, or relations between the sexes, I kept hearing phrases and attitudes that I hadn’t heard for two decades. Cast your mind back to the No Nukes concerts that Jackson Browne used to headline, or to the anti-Thatcher howls of outrage that emanated from London literary circles around 1981. Recall the European peace protests before the deployment of the Pershing missiles in 1982. This was the flavor. Whatever the subject under discussion, I kept having the urge to stand up and be obnoxious, “Yes, we used to have these debates, and in a few years this is how your argument is going to turn out.”

It’s a reminder of how dramatically the debate in the United States has shifted over the past 20 years. Our feminists are second or third-generation feminists. Our left-wing economists are people like Robert Reich and Robert Kuttner, who don’t see the world in classic class-war terms. Our liberal political consultants are people like Stanley Greenberg, who have left behind earlier radicalism of the sort that still prevailed in Adelaide.

Why should there be such a large gap between the American debate and the Australian debate? This is supposed to be the information age, when ideas and concepts flow instantly through cyberspace. Don’t all those Cisco commercials keep reminding us that we are all one planet united by the Internet. Don’t Nicholas Negroponte and all those cybertheorists tell us that Distance is Dead? When I returned, I mentioned this phenomenon to a friend who has migrated to Washington from another country. His response was simple: “That’s what it means to be a superpower.” The future happens here first.

Americans used to defer to German philosophy or French novels or Scandinavian films, supposing that the big ideas would originate in Europe and then come here. But who feels that way today? On the contrary — just to stick with the grubby world of politics — now it is American political consultants who are hired around the world to package messages and campaigns. It’s American public policy and management thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama, Sam Huntington, Peter Drucker, Michael Novak, Michael Porter, and Jeffrey Sachs, who seem to have a much greater influence abroad than any foreign thinkers have on America. Through much of the 20th century, when the expanding welfare state seemed like the wave of the future, most of the cutting-edge reforms happened in Europe first. Even in the 1970s, it really did seem that the social democratic model being pioneered in places like Scandinavia was the wave of the future. But Sweden doesn’t seem like the future now. Instead, the avant-garde of political innovation is welfare state reform, privatization, and devolution. The cutting edge is probably to be found in reforms like charter schools, faith-based charities, and tax code simplification or in the minds of Third Way triangulators like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

History really did pivot with the stagflation of the 1970s and the subsequent elections of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. What seemed inevitable before then (Sweden) seemed obsolete afterwards. Moreover, secularism, which was on the march before the 1980s, no longer seems so militant. Faith-based public policy thinking is again on offense. The Reaganites and Thatcherites are not triumphant, but they have shifted the direction of debate, and destabilized the old arguments. And America, which has always been more free market and more religious, is now the nation with the head start.

The writers and politicians who seem up to date have absorbed the reality of the 1980s pivot. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair have tried to adapt their parties to the new direction. They are not dirigistes or secularists the way their predecessors were.

But most of the speakers at the Adelaide festival seem to be still fighting the elections of 1979 and 1980 — and on the losing side. Perhaps the reason they have not absorbed the lessons of that revolution is that they never had any conservatives around to grapple with. They never had to confront conservative ideas face to face.

These people come from countries where there might be a few small conservative or free market think tanks, and maybe even a conservative magazine and a few brave columnists. But while center-right candidates may win elections, the conservative presence in the intellectual world is so small it can easily be scorned or ignored. The panelists there knew a bit about conservative ideas, but they know conservatism as some abstract menace that afflicts people elsewhere, like smallpox. An education professor named Mary Kalantzis attacked the “virulent nationalism” of American conservatives. That’s just a cliche, which doesn’t even come close to being an accurate description of the American right. The feminist Beatrix Campbell referred to the Institute for Economic Affairs, a London think tank, as “made,” hardly a sign that she has actually listened to them. Then she attacked conservatives for having a dark view of human nature. For example, she said, Francis Fukuyama has written a book called The Great Disruption arguing that men have a genetic disposition to oppress and brutalize each other. That’s the exact opposite of what Fukuyama argues in the book. His point is that people have a predisposition to socialize and cooperate. These are the sorts of gross distortions you can only get away with if you are used to traveling in circles in which nobody knows any better.

At my various panels, well-meaning moderators kept introducing me in unintentionally patronizing tones. I was “a conservative who actually has a sense of humor,” one said. “He’s conservative, but I find I like him,” another beamed. Nobody who actually knows any conservatives would ever talk this way.

American commentators, even on the left, don’t talk that way (except maybe on some university campuses). American commentators not only know a bit more about conservatives ideas, but they also know some actual conservatives. They’ve discovered that intelligent and good-hearted people hold conservative ideas. That’s bound to have an effect on how they regard the body of thought. They’ve even absorbed a few conservative notions. A country that embraces an article called “Dan Quayle Was Right” is not closed-minded.

And for this we have at least two sets of people to thank. First, we need to thank the people who wrote the 501(c)(3) section of the tax code. Because donations to advocacy groups are deductible, conservatives were able to break the intellectual stranglehold of the academics. They were able to found think tanks and foundations that championed conservative ideas. (The importance of this reform is not to be underestimated. If I were made emperor of the world, the first change I would make would be to force all nations to make donations to non-profits tax deductible).

And second, we have Paul Weyrich to thank. He and his fellow pioneers built the institutions that thrust conservatives and conservative ideas into the American consciousness. If not for folks like them, our national debate would be like Australia’s. World history really would be different. For all the occasional inanity of American public debate, it is cutting edge. The future may be ugly, but it’s happening here.

David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.