American Experiment (397 page)

Behind the complaints lay the fear that perhaps the liberal complacency was justified, perhaps liberalism did command a central fortress from which it could not be dislodged, perhaps the liberal establishment was as truly established as any state or church of old. That establishment, charged the conservative author M. Stanton Evans, “is in control. It is guiding the lives and destinies of the American people. It wields enormous, immeasurable power” by controlling popular opinion. Most mortifying of all to literate conservatives, liberals of various stripes wrote the books about conservatism that won the most respectability. Cornell political scientist Clinton Rossiter, taking a “hard look” at American conservatism, taxed it with being impotent in the realm of ideas. Harvard scholar Louis Hartz appeared to reduce conservatism to Whiggery and reaction. Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter pictured the radical right as rootless, dispossessed, paranoid, and not really conservative. Unkindest cut of all, a former editor of conservative journals, Alan Crawford, published in 1980 an exposé of the New Right as a movement, in the words of Peter Viereck, of a “lawless, rabble-rousing populism of the revolutionary Right,” that threatened the authentic conservative heritage of Edmund Burke and John Adams. But now, in the same year that Crawford published his book, the ecstatic crowd was celebrating its presidential victory, and some of the celebrants were the very “extremists” that liberals and moderate conservatives had attacked.

There would be many explanations of the rise of the conservative movement from the political slough of the Goldwater and Nixon years to its triumph in the 1980s: the exhaustion of liberal ideas, energy, and agenda; the reaction to the leftist “excesses” of the 1960s; the failures of Democratic Administrations; the revived cold war in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and turmoil in southern Africa and Central America. But the main reason for that rise was rather remarkable in an age when change was so often attributed to the uncontrollable collision of events or the blind turnings of history. The conservative triumph stemmed to a marked degree from a considered and collective effort of rightists of various schools to build their intellectual case and to use invigorated and broadened conservative ideas as vehicles to political power. They would build not the mythical “city upon a hill” but a formidable citadel of ideas as a foundation of the conservative effort. This strategy was based on the idea that powerful ideas themselves were the most steady and dependable
propellants of political action.
“Ideas Are Weapons,”
said the liberal Max Lerner.
“Ideas Have Consequences,”
wrote the conservative Richard Weaver.

But ideas as weapons must be armed and armored. Unless conservatives realized “that massive public education must precede any hope of a Presidential victory,” wrote Buckley, “they will never have a President they can call their own.” Journals were established or refurbished: the
National Review, The Public Interest, Commentary,
to join the long-established
Wall Street Journal
and
Reader’s Digest
as purveyors of right-wing views. Think tanks were founded for incubating ideas, and foundations for incubating think tanks. Serious journals like
The Public Interest
were all the more influential for being moderate in tone and scholarly in format, with tables, charts, and footnotes. These publications drew from a remarkable array of old and new conservatives: Hayek, Friedman, L. Brent Bozell, Ralph de Toledano, George F. Gilder, James J. Kilpatrick, Clarence Manion, Frank S. Meyer, Max Rafferty, Phyllis Schlafly, William E. Simon, and others less famous but influential in diverse ways.

The avalanche of books and articles tumbling out of conservative foundations, research institutions, publishing houses, and corporate public information offices attested to the intellectual breadth of conservatism; it also dramatized its divisions. The more conservatism prospered as a creed and cause, the more the various right-wing factions advanced their competing doctrines. Their schools of thought had not changed much during the postwar years. Traditionalist conservatives, still proudly resonating to the writings of the Burkeans, preached the virtues of order, reverence, stability, moderation, gradual change, to be achieved through a harmonious balancing of the demands of hierarchy, community, privilege, and noblesse oblige. Libertarian conservatives demanded optimal individual freedom of choice in cultural, sexual, and social matters, protected especially against governmental intrusion. Free-market conservatives called for an open, competitive economy, which to them meant reductions in government, in regulation, in union power, and a drastic cutback on the environmental, affirmative-action, and other controls loaded on private enterprise from the FDR through the Carter years.

Populist conservatives, in rising numbers especially in southern and western “Sunbelt” regions, echoed the demands of the free-marketers but focused their attacks especially on the “new elites,” nonelected and self-promoted—network news producers, liberal journalists, radical professors, federal bureaucrats, education administrators, left-wing writers, literary critics, and others of related breeds entrenched especially in northeastern and West Coast cities. The evangelical and fundamentalist right, embracing such groupings as the Moral Majority and Christian
Voices, overlapped the libertarians in its view of freedom and individualism as pro-market and anti-government. But the central commitment of the “new Christian right” was to family, religion, community, and old-fashioned morality, and its chief targets were moral relativism, sexual permissiveness, abortion, ERA, prohibitions on school prayer, the secular curriculum in public schools. The capacity of the Christian right to build networks, operate through local congregations, and mobilize its strength in the Republican party had been a decisive element in Reagan’s 1980 victory.

These conservative groupings intertwined, overlapped, and conflicted. They formed an unstable equilibrium, much like right-wing parliamentary coalitions. Liberationists wanted free-marketers to oppose government interference in private life as vehemently as intrusion into free enterprise; populists found some of the eastern sophisticates tending toward an elitist “conservative chic”; traditionalists deplored some of the destabilizing, disruptive tendencies implied in the other conservative philosophies. Nevertheless, conservatism as a whole displayed considerable coherence. Despite much writing about “new” conservatives and “neoconservatism,” the doctrinal branches of the right remained much the same over these decades. Indeed, the general terms—liberal and conservative, the right and the left—came into wider use and clearer usage during this period than in the New Deal era. When reporters referred to a “conservative” senator or “House liberals” the general public understood what they meant.

Still, the traditional differences among the doctrinal conservative groups persisted, and the left, accustomed to ferocious battles among its own warring factions, wondered whether the conservative movement could enjoy unity during its prosperity. For a time at least, the conservatives put up a relatively solid front. Journals such as Buckley’s
National Review
and Irving Kristol’s
The Public Interest
showed an ecumenical flair for bringing under their tents a wide variety of right-wing ideas. In particular, Buckley, who had been the scourge of liberal academics with his biting wit and carefully planned polemics, established intellectual and personal links with virtually every brand of conservative thinker; Buckley once boasted that he had had only a single resignation from the
National Review,
that of Max Eastman—and, considering the erratic career and mercurial iconoclasm of this former Marxist turned
Reader’s Digest
feature writer, Buckley could readily be forgiven that exception.

A key force for conservative unity was Ronald Reagan, who emphasized the common beliefs on the right; and in any event he was not one for fine theory spinning or jesuitical hairsplitting. He displayed a winning ability to talk order and stability to the traditionalists, individual liberty to the
libertarians, anti-regulation to the free-marketers, and anti-elitism to the populists. In unifying the disparate strands of conservatism, Sidney Blumenthal concluded, Reaganism “animated the intellectuals’ theories with a resonant symbolism—images of idyllic small-town life, enterprising entrepreneurs whose success derived from moral character, and failure induced only by federal bureaucrats.” The candidate also benefited from his skill in using anecdotage, reminiscence, misreminiscence, and jokes to glide over burdensome or hostile facts.

The most powerful source of conservative unity, however, was anti-communism. With their hostility to unregulated enterprise, to rugged individualism, to the FBI and other watchdogs against the “red network” in Washington, the communists were the perfect unifiers. Above all, anticommunism was a stimulus and attraction to the countless former communists who had deserted the “naked god” and flocked to the journals and think tanks of the right. That anticommunism would remain an enduring and dependable basis of unity appeared rather questionable, since it might depend more on communist developments abroad than on the efforts of conservative thinkers and politicians at home.

Liberals were in no mood to celebrate as they came to the end of their worst decade, the 1970s. During the final forlorn weeks of the Carter Administration, as they watched conservatives move into the new presidency, into a newly Republican Senate, and into the cultural and economic decision-making centers of Washington, liberals could reflect once again that nothing fails like success. Looking back over the liberal and Democratic dominance of the past five decades, they asked what had gone wrong—what had really gone wrong? The record seemed so positive. Three Republican Presidents had left virtually intact the New Deal and the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society, almost none of their major laws repealed or key programs canceled. Who could deny that poverty had been reduced, the elderly and the young protected, the farmer subsidized, civil rights broadened, educational opportunity vastly expanded, environmental problems confronted, with considerable prosperity for all but the very poor and without confiscatory taxation or runaway federal deficits?

Three decades earlier Lionel Trilling had written that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in the United States, adding that “it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Now, at the start of the 1980s, everything seemed turned upside down. By the hundreds
conservatives were pouring out of right-wing journals and research institutions, out of universities and corporations—liberals had not realized how large the army of the right had become. And how youthful they seemed, how self-confident, how brash, as they prepared to transform the nation. Some liberal memories reached back to the New Deal and the Kennedy years, when young people, equally brash and confident, had taken over State and Treasury, Interior and Justice, and the other federal strong points.

Already the left was challenging itself, on the eve of the touted “Reagan Revolution,” to come up with fresh ideas, new proposals. But liberals were still mesmerized by their decades of success and power. Of course, they granted, there had been egregious failures, shortcomings, inadequacies, sheer blunders, follies, and idiocies. But these had been the exceptions, departures from the norm, not failings inherent in liberal programs. Obviously liberals should govern better, innovate more carefully, administer more efficiently. But cancel or drastically alter the great liberal program of the past fifty years? Never!

The deeper problem was not simply that liberals were wed to the programs they had put through—it was that they were still living off the intellectual capital of the first fifty years of the century. That capital had been ample enough in the 1950s, and even still in the early 1970s, to influence the thinking of Republican Administrations, putting Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and their men on the defensive even while they presided over the White House. Now everything was different. The triumphant Reaganites evinced not the slightest interest in their ideas, except as artifacts to be swept away in the conservative revolution. Liberal thinkers, out of power or access to power, out of sight as their speaking invitations dwindled, would have plenty of leisure for rethinking liberalism.

How well would they use this time? Not to arrive at some “consensus”; it was already apparent at the start of the eighties that liberalism would remain divided within itself and from the much smaller authentic American left, itself far more fractured. There was much talk of neoliberalism, the New Left, postliberalism, and so on, but once again the prefixes did not help analysis. The divisions among liberals remained much the same, only enhanced: New Deal or New Frontier “welfare” liberals who stuck with their ideas and programs and wanted only to improve, extend, and perhaps enlarge them; other liberals who, impressed or depressed by the conservative resurgence, proposed to preserve the essence of the Great Society and its predecessors but in a modified, more “fiscally responsible” form, even if this meant more federal taxation attuned to lower spending; still others who turned toward what Robert B. Reich later would call a “New Public Philosophy,” which faced up to emerging industrial and technological
problems and opportunities, especially on a global level, without forsaking fundamental liberal values. ‘;

Fundamental values? These were precisely what liberals were more and more abandoning, according to activists further to the left. Especially one value—equality. Liberals in general, it was charged, had so fully joined the broad American consensus behind individual rights, civil liberty, individualism, individuality, that the great competing and balancing claims of equality—at least of equality of opportunity—were being ignored. Even committed egalitarians had to grant that inequality had been far more deeply rooted than they had perceived and that the road to social justice was strewn with bogs and pitfalls. As he neared seventy, Kenneth Clark, the longtime student and preacher of racial integration and equality, confessed that he had “seriously underestimated the depth and complexity of Northern racism.” Clark conceded that some major federal welfare programs might have worsened the lot of blacks by encouraging a trend toward one-parent families and helping maintain the “pathology” of ghetto life.