Post-Conservative America/The New Right Papers

...others are simply ludicrous, such as his comparison between Europe's aristocratic, anti-Christian New Right and our own...

...Fred Siegel IN THE Devil's Dictionary Ambrose Bierce defined a prophet as someone who has mastered "the art and practice of selling [his] credibility for future delivery...

...Moreover if we look at the religious right, which would presumably be at the center of the emerging oxymoron, apple-pie authoritarianism, we see a movement which despite Phillips's wishes (wishes which are all too often partner to his interpretation) is waning and divided...

...Martin's Press, $12.95, 256 pp...

...THE NEW RIGHT PAPERS Edited by Robert W. Whittaker St...

...In 1972, the Republicans again failed to-make any gains...

...Dennis argued that only an evolving corporatism could save the nation from social and economic chaos...

...While the earlier book was dense and generally tightly argued, this new work is a loosely organized collection of snippets from his newsletter and previously published articles in which he moves through numerous topics at tabloid speed...

...The minor sections, which serve as a prelude, concern (a) why it was that the political realignment Phillips expected for 1976 never came to pass...

...He seems unaware that less than fifty years ago an earlier generation of American intellectuals was debating whether democracy could withstand the pressures of political centralization and economic hard times...

...b) why 1980 was not the realigning election Republicans and conservatives had hoped for...

...After dismissing Reagan, Phillips scans the conjuncture between the political and economic currents to argue that the demand for a populist restoration is clearing the way for a new plebisitary state which will retain the forms of democracy while concentrating power in an executive strongman...

...The parties were, he points out, products of an earlier industrial age and are increasingly ill-suited to a-post-industrial era...

...Phillips goes out of his way to mock the acumen of his former boss, asking whether anyone "who saw the massive electoral opportunity which lay ahead in '72 would have given Gordon Liddy a go-ahead on an inane political attempt at espionage...

...He doesn't specify whom he has in mind for such an exalted position, but it's clear it would have to be someone like Phillips's beau ideal, Big Jawn Connally, the man who would have been king...

...Analogies from ancient Rome, Cromwell's England, Weimar, and contemporary Europe cascade across the pages...

...But those who pick up Phillips's Post-Conservative America hoping for another thunderbolt like The Emerging Republican Majority are bound to be disappointed...

...Since then writing in his highly influential newsletter, the American Political Report, and in a second book, Mediae-racy, the man who coined the phrases "New Right" and "Sunbelt" has elaborated on his contention that American politics is moved by the conflict between mass and class, between populism and prescriptive elites...

...he first argues, for example, that Nixon's fall was like a regicide and then goes on to point to the regimes which followed regicides in England, France, Russia, Germany, and Spain: ergo we should expect strongman rule sometime soon...

...Unsatisfied with Phillips, I turned to a collection of papers by New Right spokesmen, The New Right Papers, to find evidence for the kind of middle-class radicalism that could produce authoritarianism, or even fascism...

...In what can be best described as a right-wing version of Beardianism, Phillips has insisted that an alliance between the growing political strength of the Sunbelt and the street-corner conservatives of the Northeast, was the basis for a coalition which would reshape American politics...

...Some like Weimar are hackneyed and inappropriate...

...The administration's free-market instincts make it deaf to the anti-free trade and anti-immigration sentiments growing among erstwhile blue-collar supporters...

...Phillips's frequent use of European analogies' is ironic considering that he made his reputation by emphasizing the peculiarly American character of the past decades' populist protests...

...only to conclude that "clearly...

...Rather than heralding a new age then, Reagan's administration, beset by the tensions between the heirs of Andrew Jackson and those of Andrew Mellon, is just an interregnum, a shakeout period before the creation of new and expec-tedly authoritarian institutions...

...and here Phillips is forced into the implausible proposition that despite Nixon's having run with barely a mention of the GOP, it was the Republican congressional candidates who bore the brunt of Watergate...

...It was in the thirties that Lawrence Dennis, a self-proclaimed advocate of an American fascism, argued that democracy and liberal capitalism were dead, the victims of economic concentration and international competition...

...Without that third-rate burglary, he argues, the Republicans would have swept the '74 congressional races and Nixon would have been succeeded by John Connally, who would have cemented the new majority...

...It's marred by a porous terminology, far-fetched analogies, and shoddy reasoning...

...When he tries to typify the Jewish move away from the Democrats by comparing the strong Reagan vote from the Orthodox remnant on New York's fabled lower east side with the large socialist vote there seventy years ago, he fails to note an almost complete turnover in population...

...Rather than being welcomed, the religious right-wingers are finding that Republican candidates even in the South are shying away from both the Moral Majority and the once dreaded MCPAC on the grounds that they frighten more voters than they attract...

...The small core of Revelation...

...But perhaps what is most peculiar in this treasure trove of oddities is that Phillips overlooks the American precedents which most directly bear on his argument...

...Dennis was wrong then and it's likely that Phillips is wrong now...

...Woven through the book are three minor themes and one central one...

...His answer to (a) is simple...

...Swept into office by popular hopes for a restoration of what Teddy White has called ' 'the old country," Reagan fat cats and free-market ideologues have created, says Phillips, a country-club administration that has failed to deliver on its promises...

...The publication of his The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969, which anticipated the basis for Nixon's 1972 sweep, put him in the unusual position of a political soothsayer whose predictions had largely come true...

...Unable to show how we are likely to move from our present situation into the semi-fascist future, Phillips is forced to rely on strained analogies to do the work of explanation...

...Kevin Phillips has been hailed as just such a prophet...

...Given Nixon's ineptness - he had the good fortune to run against a badly divided Democratic party both in '68 and '72 - is there any reason to assume that he would have been able to seize the political reins Phillips held out for him...

...At some points he creates a staircase of analogies...

...Like Phillips, the authors of the collection cite the growth of Klan strength and the ferocity of textbook fights in West Virginia and busing controversies on both coasts...

...In 1970, the Republicans, armed with high hopes and a seemingly sure fire law-and-order issue, gained all of two Senate seats while losing a dozen congressional races to a Democratic party still reeling from the Chicago riots...

...This gaffe, an odd one indeed for a New Yorker, is unfortunately typical for a book that has numerous paragraphs which begin with "little information is available...

...Nowhere is there any indication of a movement remotely comparable in strength to those of Coughlin or Long in the 1930s...

...Cuckolded by Watergate, Phillips is blind to the way in which it was only with the Carter fiasco at interestgroup liberalism that the country was willing to experiment with the kind of conservative administration he had been touting for more than a decade...

...There are at least three problems with this scenario, namely the outcomes of the '70 and '72 congressional elections and Nixon himself...

...The Moral Majority is no longer marching from victory to victory and the Christian right is riven by bitter feuds between Falwell and Robertson and Falwell and Jones...

...but found this book wanting as well...

...When he talks of "sociology by administrative fiat," he clearly means administration by sociological fiat...

...It's a good question...

...and, closely related, (c) why the Reagan administration has already, in his view, failed...

...In answer to (b), Phillips argues convincingly that by 1980 American political institutions had been so weakened by television and the dissolution of old loyalties that a stabilizing realignment of the parties was no longer possible...

...These provide the backdrop for what has garnered the most attention, his prediction that the failure of Reaganism will produce a shift further to the right, a shift toward what he calls "apple-pie authoritarianism,' ' rather than a swing back to the center...

...This, not to mention the general revulsion on the part of small businessmen against high interest rate policies, is all part of what he sees a growing pressure for more, not less, active government involvement in the economy...

...Reagan was elected, says Phillips, by trading on the nostalgic yearnings of the American people for a return to the halcyon days before the 1960s...

...But most damning of all is the behavior of Nixon himelf...

...but like Phillips their ear for bluster far exceeds their nose for evidence...

...If we accept Phillips's contention that there has been a serious breakdown of our public institutions over the past two decades, and if we agree that fundamental changes are needed for the economy, it is still difficult to see how Phillips expects us to get from our current situation to the authoritarian future he envisions...

...Connally's brand of assertive nationalism and strong government, for instance, was a notorious failure in 1980, something Phillips conspicuously fails to mention...

...He blames it all on Watergate...

...Granted there has been a rising tide of middle-class discontent, and granted a growing and potentially dangerous split between popular and elite opinion on numerous cultural and social issues, but Phillips nowhere adduces the growth of a social movement or movements capable of creating the kind o,f future he envisions...