Conservatives Stumble Into the Future
Judis, John B.
Some conservatives believe that when Ronald Reagan leaves office he will take the conservative movement with him into retirement. Kevin Phillips, author of PostConservative America, writes,...
...Texas, Iowa, Minnesota, and Michigan experienced the growing influence of Bible conservatives...
...its internal resources nor its ability to influence American politics...
...This kind of evangelical fervor isolated the right in the 1950s and early 1960s...
...In a National Review article, Reynolds contrasted the "constructive" contribution of supply-side economics in the United States and the United Kingdom with the "forces of darkness [that] have appeared to be gaining the upper hand in the United States, Germany, and Japan...
...it was an optimistic philosophy that stressed the power of Americans to remake their country and the world...
...If conservatives focus on cultural issues in 1988 and beyond, they may scare off Republicans and Independents without attracting many Democrats...
...By 1988, all the major GOP candidates tried to appeal to the conservative wing...
...The conservative influence over Republican politics was exercised through a network of national and state political action committees and lobbies that grew during the Reagan years...
...Lacking public and congressional support for the 334 • DISSENT Nicaraguan contras—in opinion polls, opposition to contra aid hovered between 60 and 70 percent—the administration attempted to accomplish covertly what it couldn't do openly by using the CIA and the National Security Council (NSC) secretly to sustain and direct the contras...
...In the early 1970s, he was a low-level staffer on the Republican National Committee while attending Georgetown Law School...
...But Americans continued to be anxious about their place in the world...
...By the time Gilder's book came out, Micron was reeling from Japanese competition...
...For sizable fees, the firm advised both international clients, like Jonas Savimbi's UNITA in Angola, and domestic political candidates...
...One of Gilder's model enterprises was Micron Technology of Boise, Idaho, a five-year old firm that had captured the U.S...
...It has virtually no impact on politics...
...Reagan will have appointed about half the country's 573 federal district judges and 156 appeals court judges and filled at least three of nine Supreme Court seats...
...But in 1964, a coalition of new conservatives from the South and the West and "Old Guard" midwestern Republicans won the nomination for Goldwater...
...American conservatism also incorporated and redefined the program of past movements...
...The birth of conservatism in the 1950s coincided with a burst of theoretical work, the founding of two important journals— Modern Age and National Review—and important books and articles by Russell Kirk, Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Robert Nisbet, Leo Strauss, and William F. Buckley, Jr...
...The administration turned to the traditional conservative program of cutting spending to reduce the deficit...
...Comparing abortion to slavery and the present era to that before the Civil War, Lehrman predicted that "national politics during the late 1980s and the 1990s will be dominated by the great constitutional, moral, and social issues of our time...
...AEI also endured financial losses, forcing the resignation of its president in 1986...
...After Goldwater, conservatives adopted a more pragmatic—even opportunistic —public stance...
...In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the behavior of the Soviet Union in Africa, Afghanistan, and Poland and bellicose statements by the Soviet military lent a certain credibility to the conservatives' militant anticommunism...
...In the wake of the 1988 election, conservatives will have to redefine their approach no matter who wins the presidency...
...Modern conservatism's historical trajectory has been similar to that of modern American liberalism...
...After Nixon's resignation, a group of activists who eventually came to be called the "New Right" made an explicit push for George Wallace's segregationist constituency and for small-town Protestants offended by the new sexual morality of the 1960s and 1970s...
...In 1988, Republican conservatism is very much like the Democratic liberalism of the late 1940s...
...In 1980, Reagan adopted a new approach to economics...
...After the economy began to recover, supplyside advocates claimed that the tax cuts had worked all along...
...At this post, he advanced the conservative agenda, superintending the administration's stand on abortion, AIDS, and welfare...
...These groups howled every time a conservative appeared to be threatened...
...With inflation under control as a result of the 1982-83 recession, popular distrust of government and government programs noticeably decreased...
...In his columns and public appearances, Lofton took upon himself the task of questioning the Christian credentials of other conservatives, including Buckley...
...We have no power," writes Paul Weyrich...
...Before the 1980 election, the religious right had been organized by the Reverend Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, by Ed McAteer's Religious Roundtable, and by conservative leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, the rapidly growing Assemblies of God churches, and other evangelical groups...
...The ultimate question for conservatism after Reagan is not whether it will muddle through, but whether it can enjoy the kind of revival that the liberalism of the 1940s enjoyed in the 1960s...
...When the administration and the Soviet Union began to edge toward a treaty on intermediate nuclear forces in Europe, National Review, usually one of the administration's most loyal supporters, termed the pact "nuclear suicide" even though it had endorsed the treaty's terms five years before when they had been proposed by the United States...
...In 1964, when Goldwater unexpectedly won the Republican presidential nomination, the conservative movement had a cause and about thirty thousand grass-roots activists, but few, if any, political consultants, policy experts, or political scientists...
...Laffer called for the Fed to "slow the growth" of the money supply, while Roberts called for the Fed to accelerate it...
...Roberts contended that it was the Federal Reserve's slowing of money supply...
...The path from think tanks to the bench was well worn...
...As the organizations that helped engineer the conservative victory in 1980 floundered or folded, new organizations came forward to take their place...
...market in 64K ram chips...
...They urged the administration, unwilling to reduce military spending or cut entitlement programs, to cut the deficit with increased taxes...
...at the Republican convention in Miami, Dolan predicted that Reagan would win the nomination and lead a Roosevelt-like political revolution in the country...
...Neither Bush nor Dole represented the return of the liberal Republicanism of the 1950s...
...Having power presupposes holding 'territory.' Nowhere in America today are conservative agendas moving through state legislatures...
...Indeed, one could note, for instance, the tenuousness or precariousness of Gorbachev's glasnost...
...Tax cuts and deregulation had fueled a speculative boom in stocks and real estate without stemming the erosion of the country's industrial base, evidenced by a rising trade deficit in manufactured goods...
...Many voters blamed the party in power, the Democrats...
...Those who have the least will gain the most...
...By the end of the Carter administration, two decades of civil rights struggle had also fragmented the Democratic coalition...
...In 1985, Bennett succeeded Terrell Bell as secretary of education...
...They were also able to establish a political infrastructure of lobbies and think tanks in Washington that would continue to defend liberal ideas even when liberals were not in office...
...For instance, in 1977, Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, both nominated by Reagan to the Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court, and Laurence Silberman, whom Reagan appointed to the Court of Appeals, were AEI fellows—members of a regular discussion group with Kirkpatrick, Kristol, and James Miller, who later became director of the Office of Management and Budget...
...But it is one thing to remark upon the difficulty of change and another to rule out its existence on a priori ideological grounds...
...When the administration in August 1987 tentatively backed a peace accord for Central America that would have ruled out contra funding, conservative activists and the Republican presidential candidates denounced it...
...His report on the family treated welfare as a form of self-inflicted injury...
...328 • DISSENT Another judge, Danny Boggs, a former Young Republican and a disciple of Milton Friedman, was recruited by the Heritage Foundation to help write its massive policy agenda for the incoming Reagan administration, Mandate for Change...
...By the end of Reagan's second term, there were signs that conservatives were losing their grip on the Republican party...
...If one looks at conservatism as a rising movement that formed in the mid-1950s, won the 1964 Republican nomination for Senator Barry Goldwater, and then the presidency for Reagan in 1980, its moment may have passed...
...The director finally quit, but the organization was wracked by the bitter fight...
...But in the 1970s, the public became increasingly willing to try conservative approaches, and conservative politicians became increasingly discriminating in the way they advanced their own program, emphasizing what was popular and understating what was unpopular...
...Writing in the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, Irving Kristol suggested that the Republican party, "when in office, always finds itself floundering in one squalid financial scandal after another—it does after all take money (as distinct from sex) seriously...
...Both movements endured cycles of success and failure, growth and stagnation, roughly at ten-year intervals...
...In 1980, the presidential field contained only two acknowledged conservatives, Reagan and Illinois Congressman Phil Crane...
...A future historian, writes Irving Kristol, could define the Reagan years "as the first critical stage in the evolution of a conservative majority in American politics...
...In the 1988 primaries, the Reverend Pat Robertson's campaign was based on appeals to evangelicals...
...Liberalism emerged in the 1930s during Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal...
...In 1986, the highly conservative Olin Foundation, which had given AEI $300,000 the year before, decided on political grounds to give it nothing...
...Other organizations have suffered from a combination of waning political demand for their services and internal corruption...
...Finally, both movements succeeded because their leading ideas reflected the imperatives of the nation...
...In 1964, Lyndon Johnson's successful campaign against Barry Goldwater was epitomized by a television ad featuring a little girl whose picture faded into an H-bomb mushroom cloud...
...Supply-side economics appeared to have squared the political circle...
...William Bennett, Reagan's secretary of education, is a case in point...
...Court of Appeals...
...Its effort to create a guerrilla army to fight the Sandinistas in Nicaragua aroused popular fears of a Central American Vietnam and led to a congressional cutoff of contra aid funds...
...In the 1986 Oregon Senate primary, fundamentalist minister Joe Lutz almost upset powerful incumbent Robert Packwood—in spite of being outspent fifty to one...
...The election of black mayors in major northern cities like Chicago and Philadelphia speeded the emigration of middle-class whites from the cities and toward the Republican party...
...In the 1978 and 1980 elections, these approaches brought new voters into the conservative camp and helped revive conservative fortunes...
...What was distinctive about these opinions was not their conclusion but their reasoning...
...When the administration gave half-hearted support to the Central American peace plan proposed by Nobel Prize winner Oscar Arias, president of Costa Rica, in 1987, conservatives circulated buttons: "Support the Contras, Impeach Reagan...
...But there was still considerable support for conservative economic approaches...
...George Bush, John Anderson, and Robert Dole positioned themselves in the Republican center, and former Democrat John Connally tried to carve out a niche of his own...
...At the same time, former leftists, who came to be called "neoconservatives," sought successfully to reconcile right-wing politicians to a minimal definition of the welfare state...
...Thus, the British in the 1920s restored the Gold Standard even though it undermined British industry and contributed to the outbreak of world depression...
...It shared the old right's fervent anticommunism, its hatred of the New Deal and the welfare state, its xenophobia, and its small-town morality...
...While one associate of the firm advised the presidential campaign of George Bush, another advised that of Jack Kemp...
...Remarking upon the support for Reagan among thirty- to forty-five-year-old union men, Greenberg wrote that "the depth of racial sentiment and regard for Reagan's leadership and strength" outweighed their opposition to a "whole range of specific Reagan programs...
...Foreign bankers and many economists blamed the deficit for high interest rates and for undermining confidence in the stock market...
...By the late 1940s, it was again on the defensive...
...But others believe that the Reagan years laid the foundation for a conservative America...
...But both men are Republicans first and conservatives second...
...Conservatives who opposed the Supreme Court's integration decisions and the civil rights acts—and now opposed affirmative action and busing—were able to draw upon the racial backlash that George Wallace had exploited in his 1964 and 1968 presidential campaigns...
...The most important political idea of the mid-Eighties is cultural conservatism," wrote Paul Weyrich in May 1986...
...In April 1987, editorial page editor William Cheshire and four other editorial page employees quit to protest the Church's interference in the paper's editorials...
...Rather than being isolated as a crank, Lofton was accorded respect and even deference by other conservatives...
...The Iran-contra scandal was more than the work of duplicitous individuals in the NSC...
...NCPAC, the National Political Action Committee, once the most feared New Right PAC, suffered a similar fate...
...They eschewed open opposition to Social Security and focused on issues like crime and welfare fraud, which were attracting new voters to conservative candidates...
...Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former White House Director of Communications David Gergen, and World Bank President Barber Conable, was a shoestring operation in 1964, when it served as Goldwater's tiny brain trust...
...And the administration was rife with scandal, the most notable being that of the former White House aide closest to the Reagans, Michael Deaver, who was indicted for illegally using his White House influence...
...As remedy, the supply-siders urged a return to the gold standard...
...The national groups most responsible for the conservative Senate victories in 1978 and 1980 either folded or lost most of their clout...
...Reprinted by permission of the publisher...
...But when Gorbachev assumed power in 1985, he reoriented Soviet policy toward economic and political reform at home and a kind of détente abroad...
...The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Hoover Institution, and the Heritage Foundation helped fill many of the administration's mid-level positions and federal judiciary vacancies...
...In undertaking an aggressive foreign policy, however, he found himself torn between conservative doctrine and the realities of both domestic politics and international power...
...According to a 1987 Washington Post/Associated Press poll, more Americans favored an increase rather than a decrease in food stamps and unemployment insurance...
...The Heritage Foundation held a symposium in its journal Policy Review urging the administration to move "behind containment...
...The racial backlash also inflamed antiwelfare sentiments...
...Its optimism is rooted entirely in the fantasy of a recovered past...
...The administration even repudiated in practice its own free trade stance by backing sanctions against Japanese firms accused of unfair trade practices...
...William Bennett, the former philosophy professor and liberal turned neoconservative bureaucrat, was one of the administration's more thoughtful officials, but as he became entangled in internal disputes and beholden to conservative pressure groups, his own views became increasingly compromised...
...Many of these groups, like Howard Phillips's Conservative Caucus and Helms's Congressional Club, dated from the late 1970s, but others, like Citizens for America, an ambitious grass-roots lobby headquartered in the Heritage Foundation, and the Young Conservative Alliance, which tried to rescue a Soviet defector on the Mississippi river, originated during the Reagan years...
...Thus, the influence of liberalism persisted during the Eisenhower years...
...to a far-ranging reduction of nuclear weapons at the Reykjavik negotiations in October 1986, conservatives became hopelessly divided...
...Conservative views of social policy also stiffened in the late 1980s...
...L the conservative movement's first decades, the dominant religious trend among conservatives was toward a kind of aesthetic English Catholicism, epitomized by Buckley and by Catholic convert Russell Kirk...
...In 1980, even as Reagan was exploiting a decade of popular resentments against the United States being pushed around in the world and carefully nurtured fears that the United States was militarily falling behind the Soviet Union, he had to calm the worry that he might plunge the country into war...
...In the movement's early years, conservative politicians had difficulty winning elections because they expressed views in an extreme manner—for instance, Goldwater's attacks against Social Security during his 1964 presidential campaign—or because the public still supported the programs conservatives opposed...
...It is indeed true that the cuts, combined with military spending, probably did stimulate the economy in 1983 and 1984—in time for Reagan's reelection campaign...
...Strength in the Party In the 1940s and 1950s, eastern bankers and corporate executives dominated Republican presidential politics, while the midwestern "Old Guard," anti–New Deal and isolationist, reigned supreme in Congress...
...According to another survey, 56 percent of white southern evangelicals voted Democratic in 1976 and 81 percent voted Republican in 1984...
...In Indiana in 1986, two religious right candidates won congressional primaries against party moderates...
...The National Review even advocated reducing the margin costs for stock purchases from 50 to 25 percent—a measure that seemed to invite further debt and speculation...
...340 • DISSENT...
...In 1984, Jesse Jackson's influence within the Democratic party scared many southern whites into voting for Reagan...
...Conservative Republicans will undoubtedly suffer from divisions in their ranks, but short of being identified with a losing war or economic depression, they may remain within striking distance of national and state majorities...
...Heritage's staff of more than a hundred published four or five position papers every week...
...In 1984, George Gilder, the author of Wealth and Poverty, published The Spirit of Enterprise, a paean to American entrepreneurialism and an attack against government intervention in the marketplace...
...The threat of feminism and the sexual revolution had to be sufficiently vivid to scare socially conservative Democrats into voting for Republicans, and the dissatisfaction with Democratic economic and foreign policy had to be sufficient not to frighten away cosmopolitan Republicans and baby-boom Independents...
...The racial antagonisms that underlay the Reagan landslide in 1980 have, if anything, been exacerbated...
...Bennett not only became one of the administration's principal spokesmen, but brought into the department many young conservatives, including Kristol's son William...
...In the early 1980s, Wanniski and George Gilder helped inspire the administration's support for supplyside economics, while Richard John Neuhaus and Allan Bloom provided a respectable gloss on the fundamentalist reaction against modernism and the sexual revolution...
...These losses resulted from the flagging enthusiasm of corporate America for the conservative cause and the growing disenchantment of wealthy conservatives with an organization that was trying to position itself closer to the political mainstream...
...Support for conservative foreign policy also diminished...
...But like the liberalism of the 1940s, American conservatism has expended neither This article is adapted from an essay entitled "Conservatism and the Price of Success," which will appear in The Reagan Legacy, edited by Sidney Blumenthal and Thomas B. Edsall (New York and Boston: Pantheon, 1988...
...And conservative opposition to "big government," Third World nationalism, and affirmative action for minorities will continue to resonate among a significant minority of voters...
...But by 1983, there was little more that it could cut without sparking a political revolt in Congress...
...Heritage, begun in 1973 with a $250,000 grant from right-wing brewer Joseph Coors, moved in 1983 from a set of modest row houses to an $11-million edifice overlooking Capitol Hill...
...In 1980, he was a lobbyist for Direct Marketing Associates...
...In 1986, for instance, Viguerie was sued by the National Tax Limitation Committee, which claimed that Viguerie was using its mailing list to collect money for "bogus entities...
...its replacement by a more political and ecumenical politics was key to the movement's success from 1966 through 1984...
...As pressure mounted for action, the administration found itself hedged in by the budget deficits it had created...
...Although conservative ideas dominated the race for the Republican presidential nomination, the two leading candidates, Vice President George Bush and Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole, displayed little loyalty to the conservative movement itself...
...In 1956, conservatives had denounced Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's attack against Stalin as a ruse...
...Lacking experienced officials, conservatives turned to the Old Guard for practical leadership in the Senate and on Republican SUMMER • 1988 • 329 national committees, but the Old Guard increasingly deferred to the conservatives ideologically, most obviously in the presidential primaries...
...Neoconservative intellectuals increasingly allowed political imperatives to dictate their own thinking on highly philosophical issues...
...Hundreds of young conservatives set up shop in Washington as political consultants, pollsters, and media specialists...
...Like the supply-side economists, the foreign policy conservatives betrayed a rigid dogmatism that brooked no contradiction...
...When Anthony Dolan, a Yale undergraduate SUMMER • 1988 327 and future Reagan speech writer, met William F. Buckley, Jr...
...In 1978, on Himmelfarb's recommendation, Bennett was appointed assistant director of the National Humanities Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina...
...The success of the right was evident in a political shift among white southern evangelicals...
...As political scientists Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril showed in their 1967 study, The Political Beliefs of Americans, Americans were resolutely "conservative" in overall ideology — "they continue to accept the traditional ideology which advocates the curbing of Governmental operations" — while increasingly liberal in judging the worth of programs "at the practical level of Governmental operations...
...AEI, Heritage, and Hoover are the best known conservative institutions, but dozens of others have sprung up over the last decade, from the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which contributed James Watt and Ann Gorsuch to the Interior Department, to the Federalist Society, which is incubating a generation of cadres for combat in the legal profession...
...Conservative organizations multiplied rapidly, but there were significant symptoms of decay and stagnation...
...Its computerized personnel office, headed by Louis Cordia, former deputy director of the Environmental Protection Agency, funneled conservative professionals into government jobs...
...Laffer argued that the Federal Reserve's "recent acceleration" of the money supply was the cause...
...The public tolerated the use of military force only when the action was quick and decisive, as during the administration's invasion of Grenada and the air strike against Libya...
...The result was a new conservative movement—one that had never existed before and bore only a distant resemblance to movements of the same name in Great Britain and Europe...
...The conservatism of the 1980s was, above all, based upon this appeal to imperial nostalgia...
...For the first time, the federal budget deficit rose above $100 billion...
...Both Reagan's economic policy and his foreign policy— dubbed by neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer the "Reagan Doctrine" —have exhausted their political usefulness...
...Reynolds's postcrash prescription for the American economy: more supply-side economics...
...In the late 1980s, the only conservative institution capable of playing the same role is the religious right, but it tends to divide, rather than unite, the movement...
...Although Reagan tried to deny that 332 • DISSENT Social Security would be affected, the damage was already done...
...Liberalism suffered decline from the late 1930s through World War II but revived and was redefined during the first Truman administration, when Americans for Democratic Action was formed...
...The trouble was that reducing the money supply through raising interest rates canceled out whatever stimulative effects the cut had on the economy...
...Over the last two decades, conservatives have developed lobbying groups, think tanks, and political action organizations...
...In June 1986, the Reverend Adrian Rogers, an ally of Robertson's, became president of the 14.5 million member Southern Baptist convention—part of the highly organized campaign to take over that religious denomination...
...Its older leadership is tired...
...As the travails of Viguerie and the New Right demonstrated, organizations based on economic commonality could endure where those based on ideological mailing lists fell apart...
...By 1983, it reached $200 billion...
...By 1982, the United States had plunged into the worst recession since the 1930s...
...In the Senate, the treaty's chief supporters were liberal Democrats rather than conservative Republicans...
...The blind commitment of the supply-siders to their doctrine became even more evident after the stock market crash...
...With the think tanks' help, the Reagan administration reshaped the federal judiciary into an outpost of conservatism that will survive immediate changes in government...
...Besides anticommunism, wrote Andrew Ferguson in the American Spectator, "there is little else in Unificationism that American conservatives would find compelling...
...To the conservatives' chagrin, the Republican party has not become a national majority party...
...According to a survey of Southern Baptist ministers, party identification went from 41 percent Democratic and 29 percent Republican in 1981 to 66 percent Republican and 26 percent Democratic by 1984...
...Podhoretz, for his part, compared Gorbachev to Hitler...
...For instance, the same poll found that 49 percent of Americans still believed that "federal government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and private business...
...The administration split internally between those favoring accommodation and those favoring a continuing push for military superiority through a "Star Wars" program...
...By 1968, the situation had not changed...
...Kristol argued that "the current teaching of evolution in our public schools does indeed have an ideological bias against religious belief—teaching as 'fact' what is only hypothesis...
...The conservative think tanks were crucial in extending the influence of such cadres...
...But Buckley, aware of the conservatives' lack of trained leaders, replied, "Where are the assistant professors...
...Beginning in the late 1960s with Irving Kristol's influential collection, On the Democratic Idea in America, conservatives had staked out a position in opposition to the cultural assumptions of the New Left and of modern feminism...
...But many conservatives advocated cutting taxes and reducing stock-market regulation to encourage stock investment and prevent a recession...
...Wanniski and the supply-siders argued that tax rates could be cut across the board without reducing revenues...
...But in the late 1980s, a highly anti-intellectual Pietist fervor swept conservatives...
...Even more important, Weyrich's and Lehrman's focus on cultural issues obscured the conservatives' lack of an actual political program to govern the country...
...New Right activist Paul Weyrich complains that "the 'Reagan Revolution' turned out to be not a revolution at all, but rather a temporary bloodless coup...
...In Gilder's case, theory had become dogma...
...In a 1987 study of American attitudes toward military spending, pollster Stanley Greenberg found, above all, "doubts that America was still 'number one' or that she was a 'first rate power.' " In his A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee describes a political peculiarity of declining empires that he calls the "idolization of institutions...
...Kemp advocated further reducing capital gains taxes...
...This religion is based on the belief that Sun Myung Moon is a son of God and therefore the Messiah...
...Once of a single mind, they now disagreed about why the crash had occurred and what to do about it...
...As the United States began to lose its preeminence, Americans turned to SUMMER • 1988 • 331 the economic policies of the 1920s and the foreign and military policies of the 1940s even though, it could be argued, these approaches accelerate American decline...
...Indeed, Democrats have not lost the House since 1952 and lost the Senate for only eight of these thirty-six years...
...The success of the new right in using abortion as a political issue has depended on unique circumstances...
...In the late 1960s and the 1970s, Kevin Phillips, Irving Kristol and his Public Interest, and Norman Podhoretz's Commentary were important in defining the conservative strategy...
...Not all conservative organizations fared well during the Reagan years...
...But this perspective may offer little relief to conservatives in the years ahead...
...It will not be easy...
...and when Kennedy took office in 1961, liberal policy makers were ready to step in and run the government...
...Reagan's top domestic adviser, Gary Bauer, argued that Georgia's laws making oral and anal sex a felony—even in private, between consenting adults—should be adopted by other states...
...It incorporated and modified the program of prior historical movements — populism, socialism, middle-class progressivism, corporate reform...
...Six years later, deep in debt, it moved its offices from the Washington, D.C., suburbs to Everett, WashSUMMER • 1988 • 335 ington, where it played a minor role in state politics and none at all at the national level...
...In 1980, the Life Action Political Action Committee (LAPAC) led the campaign against the twelve liberal Senators it labeled the "dirty dozen...
...Kevin Phillips, author of PostConservative America, writes, "The tides that began launching the conservative era twenty years ago are old and beginning to ebb...
...In Crisis Nonetheless In spite of their gains, however, conservatives found themselves at the end of Reagan's second term in the throes of a political identity crisis similar to that which afflicted them after major setbacks in 1964 and 1974...
...In a study prepared for the Michigan House Democratic Campaign Committee in 1985, Stanley Greenberg concluded that Democratic defectors shared "a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics...
...Viguerie was also embroiled in a number of bitter disputes with organizations that had used his services...
...The October 19, 1987 stock market crash exposed the superficiality of the Reagan recovery...
...What Next...
...The prevailing confusion was epitomized by a debate that appeared in the Wall Street Journal between two founders of supply-side economics — economic consultant Arthur LafSUMMER • 1988 • 333 fer, inventor of the Laffer curve, and Paul Craig Roberts, a former Treasury Department official...
...Conservative intellectuals found themselves equally unable to adapt their view of the world to the changes that Gorbachev was making in the Soviet Union...
...Columnist George Will wrote that "glasnost can never be more than a carefully controlled tactic to confuse the West and motivate the Soviet masses with a tantalizing mirage of freedom just over a forever receding horizon...
...In the 1980s the movement's view of cultural issues appears to have been intellectually corrupted rather than inspired by its association with the Reagan administration...
...But what worked in 1980 won't necessarily work in 1988 and 1990...
...In 1960, Richard Nixon had to demonstrate his loyalty to the party's eastern wing by pledging to back New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's platform planks...
...The next year, Dolan's chosen successor, Brent Bozell III and Bozell's top aide quit in a dispute with the organization's board of directors and set up a rival group...
...Aware that their movement lacked a coherent program, a number of conservatives urged a focus on cultural issues rather than on economics and foreign policy...
...In February 1985, it laid off 625 employees—half its total—and in June, it filed an antidumping suit with the government against Japanese companies...
...And both were more likely to seek policy guidance from Wall Street and corporate Republicans than from the policy experts of the Heritage Foundation...
...Both sides could be right...
...Conservatives have had only eight years in power, but they have gained experience in the SUMMER • 1988 • 339 federal bureaucracies and established a network of pressure groups, think tanks, and consultancies that will survive even if a Democrat replaces Reagan...
...Fueled by school busing and affirmative action hiring, opposition to racial integration had spread north...
...If it becomes a dominant strand in current conservatism, it may prevent it from adapting to the politics of the 1990s...
...Other economists and public officials debated the proposal, but in the hands of the supply-siders, it became a magic wand that could wave away all economic ills...
...Their version of the gold standard was not economics, but sorcery...
...336 • DISSENT A movement's health is reflected in its intellectual life...
...It drew an enthusiastic response from conservative activists, but the Ford campaign used it to scare voters into believing that vital government services, including Social Security, would be cut under Reagan...
...With the accession to power in 1985 of Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, popular support for a posture of unremitting hostility toward the Soviet Union also declined...
...Heritage then championed his ascent through the federal government, from White House assistant to deputy secretary of energy, and then to the Sixth Circuit U.S...
...its goal is a global theocratic dictatorship...
...At each stage in the movement's growth, new magazines and new thinkers came forth to help revitalize the movement...
...Solidifying the Majority In his path-breaking 1969 study, The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Phillips argued that the combined votes in 1968 of Richard Nixon and George Wallace represented a new Republican majority of economic conservatives, with northern ethnic and southern white voters united in resentment against civil rights, the welfare state, and liberal cultural assaults 330 • DISSENT upon flag and family...
...At the beginning of Reagan's second term, he did not advance a coherent conservative economic program...
...In 1984, it went deeply into debt as a result of a mailing on behalf of President Reagan...
...The signs were already visible in 1986 in several elections, where Republicans who ran on "cultural issues" generally fared poorly...
...He also met neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol and Kristol's wife, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb...
...Reaganomics became a dim memory...
...This infrastructure consists of institutions and trained individuals —what the conservatives, following the Leninist left, call "cadres...
...The religious right, in the meantime, was rocked by the sex and financial scandals of televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker, who were proteges of presidential candidate Pat Robertson...
...Administration attempts to "roll back" communism overseas also ran aground...
...But in its second term, the administration, faced with conflicting priorities and new challenges, fell apart completely...
...From 1932 through 1952, liberals were able to transform the judiciary and the major government institutions in their image...
...Both movements were able to sustain their influence even when they were out of power nationally...
...Dolan's homosexuality had also divided the libertarian NCPAC from the other parts of the virulently antigay New Right...
...The conservatives, in addition, continued to lack mass institutions comparable to the labor movement...
...As a result, a new generation of conservative leaders has emerged, capable of filling high posts in a future administration...
...Dole's roots were in the anti–New Deal "Old Guard" midwestern party, while Bush was a hybrid of austere Yankee Republicanism and Texas conservatism...
...Reagan's victory in 1980 seemed to confirm this theory...
...A group of YAF leaders charged that the YAF director was siphoning off the organization's money—more than $150,000 — for purely personal expenses...
...The supply-siders did not acknowledge that Reagan and Volcker followed their original policy recommendations exactly...
...By 1986, the strength of the religious right was apparent in state and local elections and in Republican right factional fights...
...In 1986, its founder and director, John "Terry" Dolan, died from AIDS...
...he lost New Hampshire...
...He joined the Reagan campaign in summer 1980 and after the election was hired in the Office of Policy Development, where he came to the attention of Attorney General Edwin Meese III...
...Its thwarting of arms control sparked a nuclear freeze movement...
...Goldwater had few conservatives experienced at practical politics to run his campaign...
...Continuing inflation and unemployment eroded popular support for government intervention in the economy and contributed to support for conservative attacks against government regulation, spending, and taxes...
...In 1982, Bauer moved to the Department of Education as an assistant secretary...
...its attempts to reduce Social Security spending had already contributed to Republican defeats in the 1982 election...
...They took the same attitude toward any changes in Soviet foreign policy or in the policy of countries that they believed to be Soviet satellites...
...With Reagan in office, conservatives have been able to get on-the-job training in running the country...
...In the late 1970s and during the Reagan years, conservatives were doing consciously what liberals did largely on an ad hoc spontaneous basis...
...Liberalism was also a far more varied and spontaneous movement than the conservatism of the 1980s was...
...NCPAC remains in Washington but no longer targets senators for defeat...
...In 1984, the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), the first major conservative youth organization, nearly ceased to exist...
...Reagan's economic policy, or Reaganomics, evolved out of the political failure of the old conservative economics...
...When Reagan assumed office, he made Wanniski's original program of tax cuts and reduced money-supply growth the centerpiece of his economic program...
...Once in office, Reagan pursued a mammoth military buildup...
...Reagan's nomination in 1980—along with conservative Al d'Amato's defeat of incumbent Jacob Javits in the New York Senate primary—signaled the final defeat of the liberal eastern establishment of John Hay Whitney, John Lindsay, and Nelson Rockefeller...
...In 1987, at Meese's urging, he returned to the White House to head the Office of Policy Development...
...Over Reagan's two terms, however, popular support for conservative approaches to the economy and foreign policy diminished...
...Now they interpreted Gorbachev's programs of glasnost and perestroika in the same light...
...Rather, the administration backed a tax-simplification measure originally devised by Democratic Senator Bill Bradley and Representative Richard Gephardt...
...The administration could not stop the Polish military, acting under pressure from the Soviet Union, from suppressing the Solidarity movement...
...By 1985, he had become Bennett's chief deputy...
...White political leaders like Chicago's Edward Vrdolyak and Philadelphia's Frank Rizzo defected to the GOP...
...According to a 1981 Washington Post/AP poll, 72 percent of Americans favored an increase in military spending...
...By the early 1980s, its budget was over $10 million...
...Reviewing Reagan's first term in Foreign Affairs, Norman Podhoretz, editor of the neoconservative Commentary magazine, accused the administration of practicing "rollover" rather than "rollback" with respect to the Soviet Union...
...According to the theory, worldwide inflation and unemployment could be attacked by a simultaneous program of regressive tax cuts and reduction in money-supply growth...
...In the Washington Times, Martin Sieff tried to demonstrate that glasnost was "being used to mask repressive measures aimed at disciplining the labor force and smothering human rights activists and those seeking religious freedom...
...Although their militant anticommunism appealed to both patriotism and fear of Soviet attack, it also raised unwelcome anxieties about United States entanglement in foreign wars, or even nuclear war...
...Perhaps most important of all the distinctions, liberalism had an underlying program of Keynesian intervention in the economy and free trade that for three decades satisfied Americans' desire for a rising standard of living...
...For instance, Charles Black, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone, who worked for the Reagan campaigns in 1980 and 1984, set up a consulting and lobbying firm...
...In the mid-1970s, Wall Street Journal editorialist Jude Wanniski, aided by Kristol and maverick economists Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell, promoted a new theory that appeared to resolve the contradiction between conservative doctrine and popular support...
...The New Right was virtually shut out of both campaigns...
...Gary Bauer, Reagan's domestic policy chief in his second term, enjoyed an even more meteoric rise...
...If Reaganomics had become a memory, the Reagan Doctrine increasingly became a reproach leveled by conservatives against the administration...
...It has lost its political majority...
...Lewis Lehrman, the millionaire founder of Citizens for America, expressed a similar view in a 1986 cover story for National Review...
...After Reagan appeared to commit the U.S...
...The three issues that triggered the development of a conservative movement in the 1950s and 1960s were opposition to federally imposed racial integration, opposition to the welfare state, and support for the "rollback" (not merely the "containment") of Soviet communism...
...Rushdooney's followers, the Reconstructionists, seek to recreate their image of a Biblical social order in which sodomy, incorrigibility, blasphemy, and breaking the Sabbath are capital crimes...
...Building Cadre The existence of an infrastructure is the key to conservatives' survival...
...Writing in Commentary, neoconservative Eugene Rostow declared that the Soviet Union's apparent arms control SUMMER • 1988 337 concessions were really intended to gain an "offensive first-strike capability...
...Moreover, the United States found itself suddenly outflanked in arms control negotiations...
...But the signs of intellectual stagnation and drift were clear as the movement's thinkers were increasingly unable to reformulate their ideas in the light of changed experience...
...That plan was traditional conservative economics...
...Then, in 1981, the neoconservatives waged a successful and acrimonious campaign to win Bennett's appointment as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...It remains to be seen whether the conservative program can achieve more than a selective and limited prosperity...
...Rather than revise their basic ideas, Kemp, Wanniski, Lehrman, and the Wall Street Journal editorialists insisted that the recession of the early 1980s would not have occurred if the administration had prevented Federal Reserve Chief Paul Volcker from braking the money supply...
...It remains a marginal local party in much of the South, despite the popularity of some conservative ideas...
...Had he miraculously won the presidency, he would not have been able to fill cabinet or major staff posts with conservatives...
...Prodded by Representative Jack Kemp, Reagan in 1980 made supply-side economics a central plank of his campaign...
...Neither its scandals nor those of conservatives could be explained simply by a natural interest in money...
...In 1978, he was an assistant to Boston University President John Silber and, under Silber's influence, was transformed from an antiwar liberal into a conservative Democrat...
...After the 1984 election, direct-mail specialist Richard Viguerie, who helped create a network of new-right lobbies and PACs in the late 1970s, laid off hundreds of employees and sold his magazine, Conservative Digest...
...Alan Reynolds, the chief economist for Jude Wanniski's consulting firm, Polyconomics, attributed the crash not to the artificial boom created by administration politics, but to the threat of a "return to heavy-handed and unpredictable government regulation...
...AEI, which contributed such luminaries as former U.N...
...The religious right built public support for conservative politics in the South as it tried to take over not only the Republican party but also church organizations...
...It is a deeply irrational faith but appeals to a public driven by social discontent and intoxicated by imperial nostalgia...
...Its arch proponent was Washington Times staff columnist John Lofton, a convert to a bizarre form of born-again Christianity devised by R. J. Rushdooney...
...These voters, Greenberg notes, will support conservative candidates regardless of whether they agree with them on specific economic proposals...
...When the director was murdered in 1979, Bennett replaced him...
...And traditional conservatives waged a bitter and often petty two-term battle with neoconservatives over appointments, a battle that by 1986 dominated the proceedings of the philosophically oriented Philadelphia Society...
...Reagan's 1966 California campaign— managed by Nelson Rockefeller's former campaign consultant, Stuart Spencer—was the paradigm...
...Some of them were highly problematic...
...When a nation begins to fall from the pinnacle of world power, its people seek to restore the conditions that had made possible its rise...
...In the 1976 New Hampshire Republican primary battle between Ronald Reagan and incumbent President Gerald Ford, Reagan was defeated largely because he introduced a vague and threatening plan for transferring $90 billion in federal programs to the states...
...Liberalism enabled America to escape the threat of recurring depression and to assume a role as the leader of Western capitalism...
...But the tax cuts also helped create record deficits and laid the groundwork for a series of tax increases (or "revenue enhancements," as Reagan's White House staff euphemistically labeled them) that eventually canceled out much of the original tax cut...
...The conservatives of the late 1980s, however, are weaker than liberals of the late 1940s in several respects...
...And he brought in as many young conservatives as he could...
...It revived in the late 1950s and enjoyed an Indian summer during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations...
...Instead, these scandals reflected a movement that had lost its idealistic purpose...
...Its immediate legislative agenda has been exhausted...
...it was also the outcome of the conservatives' attempt again to square their own political circle...
...For instance, the Washington Times became the main conservative newspaper in the country, with a daily circulation of 100,000, but the Times—and two other conservative publications, the magazine Insight and the journal World and I—were owned and controlled by a South Korean-based religious cult, the Unification Church...
...and it is losing influence in local and state elections in the Northeast...
...The cause for this identity crisis was partly the boom-bust cycle that affects all political movements...
...Without a program that would resolve the contradiction between their own foreign policy aims and public opinion, conservatives contented themselves with arousing their own faithful...
...Thus, it was possible to cut taxes—a long-held conservative goal—without violating conservative strictures against budget deficits and without requiring unpopular cuts in social spending...
...Indeed, Gilder's model of unfettered free enterprise was the very first U.S...
...In Washington, conservatism increasingly became a business rather than a cause...
...By the late 1970s, popular disquiet about America's place in the world had been fed by the defeat in Vietnam, the energy crisis, the growing trade imbalance with Japan and West Germany, and the perception, carefully nurtured by Cold War lobbies, of Soviet military superiority...
...Conservatism is a defensive philosophy that seeks to arrest America's decline in the world...
...One Reagan campaign commercial promised that "if we cut tax rates deeply and permanently, we'll be removing many of the barriers that hold everyone back...
...The only conservative organizations were the Young Americans for Freedom and the disreputable John Birch Society...
...by 1987, only 31 percent favored an increase...
...Even if many voters agreed that supply-side tax cuts and 10 percent real increases in the military budget served a useful purpose in 1981, few believed that by the end of Reagan's second term...
...chip manufacturer to ask for government protection against the Japanese...
...By shifting income distribution toward the upper end, the Reagan administration had also created a vested interest in retaining conservative approaches...
...Public opinion studies during Reagan's two terms revealed that the public feared the Soviet Union but was unwilling to commit tax dollars to foreign wars whose outcome was uncertain...
...The liberals could constitute themselves as the governing arm of the Democratic party and take advantage of its deep local roots...
...Alerted by opinion polls favoring certain kinds of government spending, the administration proposed a catastrophic health plan that closely resembled a plan introduced by the Carter administration...
...An initial foe of fundamentalist efforts to replace or supplement the theory of evolution with creationism, he defended their judgment— "the judgment of the community" —against "experts" in a 1986 speech...
...There was friction between the Old Guard Republicans and conservatives like Senator Jesse Helms, but the two groups worked together to pass most of Reagan's economic program...
...But the Reagan administration is easily the most corrupt administration since that of Warren G. Harding...
...Riding the wave, conservatives established a formidable political apparatus capable of winning elections and pressuring legislators throughout the country...
...But it repudiated the old right's anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism and substantially modified its isolationism...
...Lofton was an extreme case, but other prominent conservatives displayed variations on the same evangelical spirit in which one's religious—or political—beliefs accord a person membership in a godly elect...
...This will depend on the movement's ability, on the one hand, to avoid the shoals of the right-wing sectarianism and, on the other, to establish political power in the cities and the states...
...Having emerged in the mid-1950s with a politics of antistatism and militant anticommunism, conservatives were forced to redefine their program and strategy after Goldwater's defeat in November 1964 and after Nixon's resignation in August 1974...
...Popular attitudes reflected the persistence of isolationism rather than sympathy for the Sandinistas or dislike of the contras...
...The growth of the religious right reinforced conservative dominance in the Republican party...
...Some conservatives were almost as critical of the administration's foreign policy as liberals...
...And this accounts for the depth of its popular appeal...
...In an important respect, the basis for conservative support may have widened during the Reagan years...
...Since the mid-1950s, conservatives had faced similar difficulties reconciling their foreign policy convictions with popular attitudes...
...338 • DISSENT Equivocation was apparent also in Irving Kristol, who, in a New York Times op-ed column, advanced the novel thesis that fundamentalist opposition to the doctrine of evolution was the result of the "dogmatic crusade" against creationism by proponents of evolution...
Vol. 35 • July 1988 • No. 3
