Culture Equals Politics

...It cost them the engagement of their intellectuals and polemicists...

...Republican politicos have traveled a different road...

...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...

...Do you root for Robert Novak or Eleanor Clift...

...Intellectuals emphasize character-building institutions- parents, churches, friendship societies (and their descendants), and popular culture...

...There were once ferocious arguments about who was greater, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky Partisans in both camps could barely be civil to each other...

...Remember, it was not inevitable that budget balancing would emerge as the dominant issue for the new Republican Congress...

...They are for all virtues in general and none in particular...

...Like it or not, politics is the realm where national disagreements are hashed out...

...Watts talking about enterprise zones, but rarely a James Q. Wilson...

...True, Newt Gingrich talked about orphanages, beginning an important discussion about protecting children from the welfare culture...

...Ahopeful sign is an outstanding book due out in February from the American Enterprise Institute Press called To Empower People, edited by Michael Novak...

...It must be achieved through the cooperative efforts of individual citizens...

...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...

...Far from fighting the last war, conservative intellectuals might fairly be accused of fighting the next before this one is over...

...David Blankenhorn promotes fatherhood...

...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...

...culture and civil society are key...

...It's no wonder that conservative activists and intellectuals have no enthusiasm for the presidential field...

...so do talk radio, Ross Perot, and the prestige press...

...The people like it...

...the candidates are not pushing their hot buttons...

...The problem, as we now know, is that the government didn't become more like the charities, the charities became more like the government...

...Many of them are openly uncomfortable with all the big talk about values...

...But when actual policies are under scrutiny, then the debate is less banal...

...Culture Equals Politics Why Conservative Intellectuals and Politicians Need Each Other By David Brooks 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...

...Policies and politicians give off cultural emanations that change the way people see the nation...

...There was a heated dispute over whether the budgeteers should rely on Congressional Budget Office projections or Office of Management and Budget projections, though both sets of figures rely on extremely rough guesses about the growth of the economy...

...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...

...Their centerpiece reform involves Medicare...

...In a typical exchange, President Clinton declared, "I am acting to protect the values that bind us together...

...It cannot be pieced together through government programs, or stimulated into existence by more tax cuts...

...President Clinton proposed a plan that would have seniors paying $82.80...

...Phil Gramm declined to campaign for president on moral issues, declaring that he was running for president, not preacher...

...Dan Coats, Republicans on Capitol Hill have barely touched the social and cultural issues that are of primary interest to Republican voters and intellectuals...

...Himmelfarb's essays on the lessons of 19th-century moral revivals are widely quoted...

...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...

...While conservative intellectuals talk of character and virtue, Republican politicians have focused on appropriations, CBO projections, and the perils of federal deficits...

...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...

...Different policy options suggest real choices between different value systems (between, say, the the value-neutral Great Society welfare system and a value-laden Robert Woodson-like network of private charities...

...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...

...Instead, they trimmed here and there...

...It cost them moral fervor...

...Robert Woodson promotes successful charitable groups...

...Eberly rejects those liberals and conservatives who "talk in cold, rational terms about the programs of government or market systems...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Still, the strategy came at a cost for Republicans...

...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...

...The debate is still open among the contributors to this volume...

...Contemporary art is nearly irrelevant to national debate...

...Somewhere deep down beneath these debates there was an argument about how much would have to be cut from government spending...

...Berger and Neuhaus anticipated the current thinking about civil society, and in the process coined the phrase "mediating structures...

...The intellectuals have argued very persuasively that behavior and character are the key to solving social problems, but so far they haven't translated many of their Big Ideas on character into Big Policies...

...Occasionally you still hear a Republican congressman like James Talent or J.C...

...These days, the controversies that dominate the national conversation and shape the culture emanate from politics...

...Republican presidential candidates are almost as fiscally focused...

...The polarized situation of the 1990s is embodied in the phrase "politically correct...

...And it's no wonder that Republican nerves on Capitol Hill are so jittery...

...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...

...During the Bush years, for example, enterprise zones were a hot topic...

...The good society cannot be doled out like just another entitlement," he writes...

...If you care about civil society, you go after the forces corroding it...

...But the way people think, the whole frame of debate, shifts a little, and the effects are real...

...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...

...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...

...In this eye-glazing effort, it was President Clinton who ended up talking incessantly about values, and the Republicans who ended up talking arithmetic...

...The Heritage Foundation's Policy Review has reinvented itself as a magazine devoted to the study of civil society...

...These ideas left the feminists and other leftists an open field when they used politics to influence culture...

...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...

...The CBO numbers would demand larger cuts than the OMB numbers...

...But once the legislative clock started ticking, the Republican revolution settled on pretty traditional concerns-regulatory reform, tort reform, and, above all, budget balancing...

...Michael Joyce and the Bradley Foundation have created a network of civil society groups...

...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...

...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...

...We now define the zeitgeist by political events...

...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 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...

...Policies reify airy-fairy debates about values...

...House Budget chairman John Kasich held a news conference and retorted, "The president has no plan to balance the budget...

...Who's right...

...But with a few exceptions, such as Sen...

...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...

...Many conservative thinkers have simply given up on policy and politics...

...The greatest share of the blame rests on the politicians, whose decision to avoid the character issue represents a major failure of imagination...

...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...

...The levers of the tax code, voucher plans, and various incentive schemes could do that-if only Congress would pass a bill...

...The first year of the Republican revolution was dominated by haggling over appropriations...

...All those people were buying Bennett's Book of Virtues for a reason...

...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...

...Francis Fukuyama writes a book on how trust holds communities together...

...But it is where the money is...

...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...

...This was the argument for Colin Powell-he would be such an example of good character that his programmatic failings would be tolerable...

...Indeed, they insisted ad nauseam that they weren't really cutting but merely reducing the rate of increase...

...This book shows us the way to argue about cultural decline: centering the argument around policy, not preachment...

...But the problem with the notion that we should now go off and fight for culture is that there's no there there...

...The 1980s became the "Reagan eighties," with all the attendant cultural associations...

...But it is a concrete debate about concrete policy options...

...This is where the conservative action is in the mid-1990s...

...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...

...That's a difference of four dollars and eighty cents-hardly a battle of principle...

...At the heart of the book is a series of very practical essays on how to promote civil society through government...

...That's exactly the task left undone when intellectuals go off and debate culture while politicians don the green eyeshade...

...Stuart Butler, Douglas Besharov, Marvin Olasky, Novak, and others tackle the thorny question of how government 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 reality is that the distinction between culture and politics is a slippery one...

...What we have here is an amazing disjunction between the concerns of conservative activists and the interests of Republican politicians...

...Think back on the major issues of the past year...

...It is hard to get excited by a banner that reads "Reduce the Rate of Increase...

...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...

...Crime was by far the most frequently named issue, followed by health care, drugs, the economy, employment, and programs for the poor...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Medicare doesn't tear at the fabric of the nation...

...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...

...It doesn't crowd out civil society the way other social programs do...

...And only intellectuals can set the terms and outline the boundaries within which that battle can be fought...

...GOP politicians have shown themselves addicted to the Limited Politics that seemed to have been killed off by the Reagan Revolution...

...These days, you shift the culture by shifting politics...

...The conservative support groups in the public arena are not fully engaged in Republican political battles...

...And if you care about the deficit foremost, you go after the biggest programs first...

...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...

...The one exception is school choice, which so far lacks a political strategy for enactment...

...Fifty-five percent said social issues, 19 percent said economic issues, and 3 percent said foreign policy issues...

...The Republican budget myopia led to a series of strange debates in which arbitrary numbers masqueraded as the moral high ground...

...The challenge is to use government to influence culture...

...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...

...Republicans proposed a system that would have seniors paying $87.60 a month in premiums by the year 2002...

...Liberals thought they were doing that in the Great Society days when the government contracted out social work to private charities...

...These cultural fields have become professional fiefdoms removed from the main arguments about America's future...

...Republicans insisted that the budget be balanced in seven years instead of eight, or nine, or ten...

...People no longer have great public controversies about modern novels...

...When conservatives were out of power on Capitol Hill, they had more faith in the uses of legislation...

...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...

...A Washington 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...

...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...

...If society is to recover, the 21st century will have to recover a vision of man bearing inherent moral value and moral agency...

...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...

...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...

...When government sends cultural signals, the effects cannot be measured by social scientists...

...The assumption was that the problem of the underclass could be addressed by increasing economic opportunity...

...And why did the Republicans make Medicare the centerpiece of their budget...

...And of course it is not just a debate for conservatives...