The Rise of the Right

...First he was sent to an orphanage...

...The result, in too many of our number, has been a lingering sense of persecution that is sometimes, but far from always, warranted...

...There he got the idea that would make him rich...

...It may be that in these disintegrating times satire is the only mode available to anti-liberals...

...That is not too surprising: He had been predicting it all along...

...In other words, he is a religious conservative...

...it has seasoned political managers ready to manage their campaigns...

...Rusher's personal political pilgrimage since the 1950s has had its eccentric moments--but also its intelligent hours...

...Among the former, one thinks of his flirtation with a third-party movement in 1976 and his somewhat bigamous posture toward Ronald Reagan's candidacy in 1979 and early 1980, when he nearly suffered the fate of Rumpelstiltskin (who, as readers of the Brothers Grimm will recall, was split asunder) in his efforts to keep one foot in the Reagan camp and the other in that of Representative Phil Crane, of whose embarrassing primary performance the less said the better...

...To say that he has mastered his subject and seen through the ephemeral to the significant is no small praise in a movement that, even now, at what may be the threshold of its triumph, is riven by so many cabals and so much frivolous squabbling...

...Conversely, I found some of the critics less competent and, for that matter, less loyal, than they gave themselves credit for...

...THE SPIRIT OF ENTERPRISE George Gilder/Simon and Schuster/S17.95 William McGurn When he published his best'selling Wealth and Poverty some four years ago, George Gilder thrust himself into the center of the heated debate over the worth of the American economic system...

...Then he was adopted by a New Jersey family...

...In other words, as the driving force of capitalism's vast productive engine Gilder has found a transcendent ideal...

...And the very catholicity of his conservative tastes--even his obvious relish for backstairs politics--makes him the ideal chronicler of what he accurately calls the Rise of the Right...

...With this book, he has moved from the textbook where businessmen William McGurn is editorial features editor o f the Wall Street Journal/Europe and European editor o f The American Spectator...

...Reagan's personal qualities as a candidate and elected leader, at least as much as his straight philosophical message (which he at times deliberately mutes or blurs), that has allowed him to lead a minority movement under the banner of a minority party to victory...

...As Mr...

...Charles's answer (but not the Gipper's) was that, if it was true it was because his words were his own but his actions were his ministers...

...Hence one of the biggest challenges facing thinking conservatives and Republicans in the next few years is finding an heir supple and inspiring enough to fill the old cowpoke's rather large boots once he departs...

...Reagan has voluntarily placed himself in the position of King Charles the Second, of whom the Earl of Rochester wrote the mock epitaph: Here lies our sovereign lord, the King, Whose word no man relies on...

...h o r t l y after President Reagan's election in 1980 1 decided the time was ripe for a narrative history of the conservative movement in the United States from its origins in the early 1950s down to the present," writes William A. Rusher in the introduction to his informative, highly readable, and largely candid The Rise of the Right...

...And Tyrrell, one has to admit, is easier than most to read between the lines of...

...What we are left with as conservatives--and Mr...

...As Mr...

...Armando Codina is typical_9 One of the 14,000 children evacuated from Cuba in Operation Pedro Pan, he arrived on America's shores with just two words of English: "hamburger" and "Coke...

...Here are his first lines, taken from the opening paragraph: The prevailing theory of capitalism suffers from one central and disabling flaw: a profound distrust and incomprehension of capitalists...

...For nearly two centuries capitalism's defenders continued in this line, relying on the traditional least-possible-evil approach in their arguments...

...With few exceptions, I found the technocrats much more loyal and con-" servative than their critics gave them credit for...

...Elsewhere he talks about "all those timeless arrangements, traditions, prejudices and nods to the supernatural that comfort ordinary men and women...

...The young Cuban was no simple nine-to-fiver...

...For, like Franklin Roosevelt before him, it has been Mr...

...In 1965, at age 17, Codina took a job as messenger boy at Jacksonville's American National Bank...

...These negatives are the unfortunate but probably inevitable side effects-there are useful ones as well--of a movement that spent so many years in the political wilderness...

...He writes frequently on politics, history, and the arts and is the author or co-author of five books including Winning the White House, which appeared in England this September...

...Or even the current argument over whether the Reagan tax cuts went far enough...

...Every day I was exposed to both the self-styled, complaining loyalists and the people they denounced as technocrats...

...Reagan embraced many profoundly ideological positions and brought rtiany ideologues into his administration...

...The doctor, who wasn't even sure what was owed him, referred Codina to his nurse...

...Fascinated by computers, he spent his nights and weekends trYing to come up with a software program that would computerize the teller accounting system...

...Nature endures...

...One sees the same thing Ln even the noblest of exile groups and underground movements, internal jealousies, factionalism, and conspiracies along with an obsession for ideological purity that sometimes pits reasonable men and women against each other over unreasonable trifles...

...The key, I would suggest, is for us to keep our shared sense of common direction without trying to force our comrades-in-arms to march in lockstep...

...Like Roosevelt before him, Mr...

...Gilder has taken it further...

...While trying to justify a loan for a distinguished local physician who was short of cash, Codina discovered that the doctor's financial records were a sea of complicated insurance, government,, and financial forms...

...Foundations for a more permanent structure have barely been begun...

...Rusher seems to strike the same note--is reasonable grounds for measured optimism...

...Almost alone he has insisted that a free-market economy, in addition to its aforementioned physical prowess, is what philosophers would call a "positive" good...

...it has ',public interest" lawyers testing its contentions in the courts...

...Heaven knows, American conservatives endured much of the suffering of a banished band of ~migr~s or a banned, clandestine movement during the decades when they were denied fair representation in the media, academia, and the corridors of power...

...He then set about to design 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984...

...In one sense, it just doesn't matter whether conservatism wins or loses some particular future election: The point is that conservatism is unmistakably on the playing field at last, as one of the two major contestants...

...But both men, at bottom, were brilliant politicians who, in drastically different times and circumstances, reached beyond the small number of radical purists who shaped many of their ideas but had never been able to win the support of anything close to a gbverning coalition based on popular elections...

...Subject at differing times and on different topics to at least three distinctive pulls (Republican party loyalties, intellectual conservatism in the Buckley mold, and the misnamed populism of the New Right), Mr...

...But, based on two and a half years spent as a senior aide to President Reagan, I am forced to conclude that most of it isn't...

...It worked, and by the time he moved to Miami two .years later, Codina had progressed far enough to become a loan officer at National Republic Bank...

...To the extent they have been, a large part of the praise is due to pioneer conservatives like Bill Rusher and Bill Buckley who encouraged so many younger writers and activists to take their fledgling steps in the movement, and to Ronald Reagan who made it possible for them to become active parts of America's first thoroughly right-of-center administration in the post-Depression era...

...Slowly, glacierlike, the nature of the debate has changed accordingly...

...It has numerous candidates for public office eager to expound its views...

...The best contemporary conservatives can do is imply what they stand for...

...Realizing that many of the 300,000 physicians across the country probably were faced with similar problems, Codina looked to his friend the computer for an answer...

...on the other, those who defended it only for its immense material benefits...

...Nature," he writes, "cannot be obliterated by rhetoric...

...It cannot even be obliterated by storm troopers and holocaust...

...League education, Republican ancestry, and long-time activism in the realms of conservative journalism and politics give him a unique if occasionally schizoid view of events...

...Intelligentia may have fallen into chaos, but ultimately it doesn't matter...

...Now, thanks to Bill Rusher, it has been addressed--and comprehensive is the word for this tightly constructed yet wide-reaching account of the emergence of American conservatism (to use a blanket term for what is, at best, a loose coalition) from the status of political pariah to the potentially dominant force in American politics...

...The emergence of the Right--to which Bill Rusher has made many a priceless c0ntribution--was a part, but only a part, of what brought us Ronald Reagan and a Republican Senate in 1980 and will, barring a disaster, return them this November...

...He is after all only a visitor there...

...are merely described and into the furnace where their spirit is forged...

...In the subsequent pages of this book the give and take of commercial life, hitherto deemed tawdry and mundane, is revealed in all its earthy splendor...

...and slowly but steadily young conservative journalists and academicians are entering and rising through those long-hostile ranks...

...Ask Katy-she'll know," he told Codina...

...Feminism, he claims, was touched with madness and therefore futile...

...Rusher graciously points out, "The intellectual history of the movement had been ably described by George H. Nash in his The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Basic Books, 1976...

...Since the latter are the people that Mr...

...One might call him the Yank at Oxford of the American Right...

...Above the intense bickering Gilder waved his hand and silenced the crowd with the baldness of his pronouncement: More than just efficient, America's system of free enterprise was, he said, good...

...Reagan himself appointed to help him run the country, one can only conclude that the gripers are wrong or that Mr...

...The father of capitalism himself, Adam Smith, hadn't ever gone so far, limiting his celebrated baker to at best an accidental virtue...

...But its political history, both as a separate matter and in its relation to the movement's intellectual development, had never been addressed comprehensively...

...Rusher concludes: _9 . . Reagan's victory [in 1980] can be said to mark the point at which the conservative movement achieved a political maturity equal to the intellectual maturity it already possessed...

...Rusher's Midwest origins, Ivy Aram Bakshian, Jr., currently a thriceweekly columnist for the Washington Times, has served as an aide to three Presidents, most recently as Director of Speechwriting for Ronald Reagan...

...He never said a foolish thing, Nor ever did a wise one...

...If ever an idea had a consequence, this was it...

...With its circular flows of purchasing power, its intricate interplays of goods and moneys, all modern economics, in fact, resembles a vast mathematical dram~i, on an elaborate stage of theory, without a protagonist to animate the play...

...Rusher's book--is warranted...

...Not all right-to-lifers are supply'-siders, not all libertarians are patriots or exponents of anything resembling Judeo-Christian ethical, not to mention moral, values, and not all Democratic politicians in the years ahead can be expected to dig their own graves...

...On the one side were arrayed those who reject capitalism in toto...

...it has formidable research institutions developing its analyses of every conceivable issue...

...But most of the time, on most of the issues, Bill Rusher has been on target, both ethically and pragmatically...

...it has columnists, radio and television commentators, and authors of all sorts, pleading its causes...

...But only so long as the disparate elements of the Ne~ Right, Neoconservatism, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 41 Traditional Conservatism, and millions of morally concerned, sensible, but largely nonideological citizens without strong loyalty to any political party can all be kept under the same tent--and even the strongest tent can be blown away in a storm...

...So some of the carping--and there isn't all that much in Mr...

...In the surge and pulse of America's present economic boom, only Gilder appears to have a handle on its underlying reasons...

...Perhaps this is why the final impression left by his writing is not one of bitterness or despair, but of amused detachment...

...All of them were part of a unique team that no one but Ronald Reagan could have pulled together and held together at this stage of American political development...

...Contemplating the generation of young conservatives that is coming along after my own, 1 am sometimes reminded of Ripley's dramatic formulation for the growth of the population of China: If the Chinese people were t o march, four abreast, past a given point, they would march on forever...

...It was the "good" that threw people...

...He was promoted to teller in 1967...

...Even as this review is written, there are nervous little political appointees (not to mention office seekers) who occupy or wish to occupy third and fourth echelon posts in the Reagan Administration and who blame every failure and frustration--every job or promotion denied--on allegedly "nonReaganite" technocrats...

...Who could imagine, for example, James Buckley's vigorous defense of the free market at a Mexico City Population Conference taking place before the publication of Wealth and Poverty...

...Today Gilder has followed up Wealth and Poverty with another groundbreaker, The Spirit o f Enterprise...