Whimper on the Right by Fareed Zakaria

June 5, 2000

BOOKS
Whimper on the Right
Those hard-to-please conservatives.
By Fareed Zakaria

The day after John McCain won the New Hampshire Republican primary, William Kristol, the publisher of The Weekly Standard, wrote an article in the Washington Post declaring, "The conservative movement . . . is finished." Actually, the conservative movement was in trouble before New Hampshire. The front-runner, George W. Bush, had entered the campaign as a "compassionate conservative," championing the cause of those "left behind" by the current economic boom. He had criticized conservatives for being too gloomy about America and had accused congressional Republicans of balancing the budget "on the backs of the poor." Both his record as the governor of Texas and his proposals to date are distinctly middle of the road. The Bush campaign was thrown off course because it had planned to run in precisely the political space that McCain eased into.

Kristol's Post article was meant to be an obituary for the Republican establishment. But many of its members, like Bush, seem to be thriving.Republican governors run thirty-one states (including seven of the largest), states that are home to seventy per cent of the nation's population. They have an average job-approval rating of better than sixty per cent. And Republican mayors run America's two largest cities. The crisis in the conservative movement lies not with its politicians but with its intellectuals. Based mostly in Washington, they have shaped conservatism's national image. For thirty years, they have argued strenuously for a society dominated by capitalism and bourgeois values. Now they have it-and find themselves out of place in this new world.

Modern conservatism was born of despair. In the aftermath of the Great Depression and the Second World War, government intervention in the economy and in society expanded enormously in the United States and Western Europe (not to mention the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe). The Third World embraced anti-capitalist and anti-Western policies with revolutionary fervor. By the fifties, the conflict with the Soviet Union was providing more grist for pessimism. In that decade, it is often forgotten, the Soviet Union's economy was growing faster than those of many Western countries, and it was launching satellites, building nuclear bombs, and gaining allies at an impressive pace. In 1955, when William F. Buckley, Jr., founded National Review and, with it, modern American conservatism, he opened with the now famous exhortation that his magazine "stands athwart history yelling 'Stop!' "

This, then, is conservatism's dilemma: what to do now that history is going its way? The Cold War is won, and America dominates the world. From Beijing to Buenos Aires, governments are privatizing state-owned companies and dismantling regulations. Proposals that once seemed utopian-school vouchers and privatized pensions, for instance-are being seriously debated in political campaigns. Few think tanks or politicians advocate ambitious new government programs, even in the face of vast surpluses. Government spending has actually declined as a percentage of the gross domestic product, for the first time in nearly twenty years. The two most successful left-of-center politicians in the world, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, routinely cite balancing the budget as their proudest accomplishment.

Yet, with so much to cheer about, conservatives still sound morose. For some, this is a matter of habit, but many believe that even though Communism is dead and statism is in retreat, the tide is against them in one important realm. "Having been spared the class revolution that Marx predicted, we have succumbed to the cultural revolution," Gertrude Himmelfarb writes in her most recent book, "One Nation: Two Cultures" (Knopf; $23). A distinguished historian, Himmelfarb has written important histories, biographies, and essays on nineteenth-century England. Lately, though, she has turned her gaze on contemporary America; her last four books have tackled postmodernism in the academy and the fallout from "the sixties."

The sixties hold a special place for neoconservatives. It was the decade that drove them to the right. Liberal intellectuals like Irving Kristol (Himmelfarb's husband) and Norman Podhoretz found themselves dismayed by the direction America was going in-proliferating social programs, everincreasing government spending, a weakening of resolve in the Cold War, and an assault on traditional institutions and values. The seventies continued the trend with defeat abroad and stagflation and social transformation at home. A generation later, defeat has given way to American hegemony, and stagflation to the new economy, but the social transformation has endured.

Himmelfarb presents a daunting set of facts: between 1960 and 1990, the illegitimacy rate increased sixfold, crime fivefold, unmarried couples with young children sevenfold, one-parent families threefold, families headed by a never married mother twelvefold. The statistics, she continues, "do not tell the whole story. The loss of parental authority, the lack of discipline in the schools (to say nothing of knifings and shootings), the escalating violence and vulgarity on TV, the ready accessibility of pornography and sexual perversions on the Internet, the obscenity and sadism of videos and rap music . . . these too are part of the social pathology of our time." (She was more blunt in an article in The Weekly Standard five years ago, writing, "By now, the nature of our institutions has been so radically altered that we find ourselves in a society few conservatives can tolerate, let alone 'delight in.' ")

Nevertheless, the cultural atmosphere is better today than it has been for decades, as Himmelfarb herself now and then acknowledges. Many of the worst trends she cites have slowed, or even reversed course; crime is down, and so are the rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births. Still, compared with forty years ago, things look bad. Himmelfarb places her only hope in what she sees as an ongoing religious revival that is spreading across America. We are one nation but two cultures, she writes, and she hopes that the culture of the Christian Coalition wins out over that of multiculturalism and gender studies.

But, like so much conservative rhetoric these days, Himmelfarb's book pays far too much attention to the increasingly irrelevant world of postmodern liberal-arts studies. Her America is Antioch College writ large. In fact, there is little support in mainstream society today for the kind of nihilism or social and moral experimentation that characterized the late sixties and seventies. There are no equivalents of Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Gore Vidal, or even George McGovern on the political spectrum today. In the recent primaries, every candidate for the Presidency, Democrat or Republican, spoke of little other than his fondness for the flag, the armed forces, family values, God, and the glories of capitalism. Both Presidential front-runners are born-again Christians. College students today aspire to work twelve-hour days at consulting firms or sixteen-hour days at dot-com startups. The icons of our time are Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

David Brooks describes this new world in his amusing book "Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There" (Simon & Schuster; $25). His new new class is a hybrid-he calls its members Bourgeois Bohemians (hence Bobos)-but it's clear which side dominates. Bohemianism, once a passionately serious and anti-capitalist attitude, lingers mostly as a matter of aesthetics: the love of Mexican tiles, Colombian throw rugs, and organic food. The defining feature of the bourgeoisie, materialism, has become the defining feature of our times. The sixties generation is now driven by work, money, and family-particularly children, who have an almost sacred status in today's society. Meanwhile, Brooks writes, "Bob Dylan and Crosby Stills and Nash now play concerts at private conferences hosted by Nomura Securities." The bohemians have become bankers; what greater victory can you ask for?

David Frum presents a nuanced picture of the results of the cultural revolution in "How We Got Here: The Seventies, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life-for Better or Worse" (Basic; $25). Frum points out that the seventies-when most of the shifts in mores actually took place-produced as many virtues as it did vices. The country became far more dynamic and competitive but less loyal and egalitarian (compare the Silicon Valley of the nineties with the Detroit of the sixties); more socially equal but less united and trusting (think of the sagging reputation of government and the explosion in litigation); more honest and authentic but less polite and considerate.

The truly exceptional decade in American history, Frum writes, isn't the sixties or the seventies but the fifties, a period of national unity forged by war, the battle against Communism, and tightly controlled immigration. Frum hopes that some of the lost virtue of those years can be restored, but he recognizes that nostalgia for the fifties is misplaced. He writes:

Most Americans today would accept the case for restoring a measure of civility, standards, and even morality to our sometimes violent, vulgar, and dumbed-down culture. But when conservatives couch that case in fiery terms of condemnation, suggesting that we live in the last days of the Roman Empire (or in even earlier times of decay, as implied in the title of Robert Bork's 1996 book, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah"), they come across simply as reactionaries-nostalgic for a world that cannot and should not be restored. Bob Dole, in a speech at the 1996 Republican Convention that was bizarrely at odds with his long record as a moderate-one that was written by the conservative novelist Mark Helprin-angrily declaimed, "To those who say. . . that America has not been better, I say you're wrong, and I know, because I was there. I have seen it. I remember." Really? Kansas in the nineteen-fifties? Where most women couldn't have careers, minorities were treated as second-class citizens, a few companies and labor unions dominated work, big government was thriving, and the food was lousy? I'll take Gomorrah, thank you.

Francis Fukuyama, in "The Great Disruption" (Free Press; $26), makes the broader structural argument that many of the changes of the sixties and seventies were really the consequences of deep-rooted economic and technological forces. As he sees it, the Western industrial world moved to an information-based economy, in which physical strength became less important, women entered the labor force, being creative became more important than following orders in work life, and birth control became cheap and accessible. The cultural transformation owed more to capitalism than to Allen Ginsberg. How else to explain, Fukuyama asks, the rise of social pathologies in Western countries like Norway, Spain, and New Zealand, which didn't go through a sixties revolution?

Brooks, Frum, and Fukuyama, all conservatives, have, without ever saying so, undermined the right's critique of America's cultural revolution. They show that the transformation of society has produced problems but also progress, and that the two are often linked. Women gained economic power, permanently changing their relationship with men. Communities withered as a dynamic economy spurred people to move often and work harder. Any sensible criticism of the excesses of the sixties and seventies must grapple with the accomplishments of those decades.

Conservatism struck a chord with many when it was "standing athwart history," battling Soviet Communism abroad and statism and cultural nihilism at home. But, having been shaped by these struggles, it is in danger of turning into an oppositional movement, pining for the thrill of the fight. For the last few years, conservative intellectuals have been in search of great causes. And when they could not find them they have infused mundane political battles with the atmosphere of a jihad.

Kristol's pulpit, The Weekly Standard, initially tried to turn the social agenda into a war, running dozens of incendiary articles on abortion, homosexuality, secular humanism, and pornography. In January of 1998, Kristol urged a frontal assault on Roe v. Wade, writing that without its overthrow "there will be no conservative future." The Standard, The American Spectator, and the Wall Street Journal all took up the case for impeaching Clinton with a fanaticism that had an air of desperation about it. Most recently, conservatives have gone into a frenzy over the case of Elian Gonzalez, writing passionate denunciations of Cuban Communism which read as if they had been written in 1965.

On foreign policy, The Standard has fanned the flames of anti-Chinese hysteria, almost hoping that China will obligingly turn into the next Soviet Empire. The Standard's view of the world reads like Robert Bork's view of America. It recently editorialized, "The present moment looks a lot like the late 1970s. Obviously there's no Soviet Union; but . . . our weakness is in certain ways as dangerous today as our weakness was in the late 1970s." Yes, aside from the fact that our mortal enemy is dead, no serious rivals are in sight, our military is larger than those of the next five great powers put together, and our economy the envy of the world-aside from that, it's Saigon in 1975.

None of these attempts to "remoralize" American domestic or foreign policy have worked. Indeed, the public sees through the hypocrisy of conservatives suddenly embracing extravagant independent-counsel investigations (which they have opposed for twenty years) or the rights of children to separate from their parents (which they denounced in the 1992 Republican platform). So Kristol, at least, has moved to another idea: "national greatness." He and his colleague David Brooks have argued for a conservatism that is respectful of the state. They make an intelligent case for a more positive view of government and for the revival of a kind of old-fashioned nationalism. For similar reasons, many neoconservatives have praised John McCain, who symbolizes American patriotism and speaks its language eloquently.

But it remains unclear what, precisely, "national-greatness conservatism" would do. (Most conservatives disagree with McCain's policies for reform.) Brooks has suggested that the government build more monuments like the Library of Congress, which symbolize "the greatness of the American experiment." Fine, but was America energized by the completion of the gargantuan Ronald Reagan Building, in Washington? Should we follow Francois Mitterrand's flights of fancy and build "great works" all over the capital? It's ironic that conservatives, in their search for meaning, now want to make America more like France.

The national-greatness conservatives' model for the future of the Republican Party is Theodore Roosevelt, who employed both energetic government and nationalist rhetoric. There's much to admire in Roosevelt, but in his era the Democratic Party was the party of small government, states' rights, and free trade; the Republicans were for federal intervention in the economy and high tariffs. Roosevelt spoke with complete credibility in advocating higher taxes, stronger government, and the regulation of business. Were Republicans to do so today, they would be reversing positions they've held for seventy-five years.

I was a fiery young conservative in college, in the early eighties, and I admit that there's much that I miss about those years. Politics and ideas held center stage. Those of us who were politically active felt that the debates of the moment-on the Sandinistas, welfare policy, missiles in Europe-had crucial consequences. We thought we were arguing about the direction of history. Much of that feeling was probably the usual undergraduate self-importance, but those were tense, exciting times. When Caspar Weinberger visited the campus, he had an audience of a thousand, while a hundred protesters shouted outside and, in the hall, a dozen hecklers chanted, "Deterrence is a lie!"

I recently asked the students who now invite speakers to my alma mater who their biggest draws were last semester. (In my day, they were Weinberger, McGovern, and Buckley.) The winners were Alan Dershowitz and Michael Bloomberg. We live in earnest, bourgeois times shaped not by political ideology but by the new economy. No pundit commands the attention of society the way Walter Lippmann did in 1960, or William Buckley did in 1980 (except maybe Abby Joseph Cohen, the soothsayer of the stock market). Intellectuals still hurl polemics at one another from their perches in think tanks, at magazines, and on op-ed pages. But mainstream culture isn't paying much attention.

Politicians who are comfortable in this new world flourish, most notably the Republican governors. They are pragmatic, reform-minded, good-government types. They've cut taxes for six years running-Michigan's John Engler has done it thirty-one times-but they also pride themselves on services. They are tough on crime and welfare, but accommodating on abortion and homosexuality. They are willing to reexamine parts of conservative orthodoxy, and to cast aside debris from another era, as George Pataki, of New York, did recently when he proposed tough gun-control laws. They compromise because they can make lasting progress only with bipartisan support. (Only half of the Republican governors have majorities in both their state houses.)

Conservative intellectuals have never liked such politicians, dismissing them as compromisers who don't have the courage to stand up to the media and to liberal elites. Before George W. Bush's poll numbers stunned everyone into silence last winter, most of the conservative writers and pundits I spoke with had utter contempt for him. He was soft, they said; he was his father's son; he was the wrong Bush brother (Jeb is more hard-line). Rudolph Giuliani, George Pataki, Richard Riordan, and Christine Todd Whitman are all subjected to the same acid test, and routinely fail.

Whoever wins the Presidency- Bush or Gore-will strike ideological purists as a sordid compromise. But he will probably govern the way people today want to be governed: from the center, incrementally, and through consensus. This, too, is a victory for conservatism, properly understood. As the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott has pointed out, conservatism is not an ideology that aims at constructing an ideal society. (What would an ideal conservative society be?) It is, instead, a temperament or a disposition, one that values stability and continuity and shuns revolutions and radical change. In his celebrated essay "On Being Conservative" Oakeshott writes that conservatism seeks to "use and enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is the present rather than what was or what may be. . . . To be conservative then is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." George W. Bush probably wouldn't put it in exactly those words, but he might well agree.