Reads the Weekly Standard
Levinson, Mark
Last spring and summer, as Newt Gingrich and his followers gleefully set about dismantling what remained of the American welfare state, there were many stories in the press about the debut of...
...Shortly after he made that statement it was reported that the number of people without health insurance in the United States increased from thirty-seven to more than forty million people...
...There are attempts at controversy, such as the Standard's dispute with the Wall Street Journal over whether or not the Republicans should support a budget compromise, or Kristol's support of Colin Powell for president...
...I reject, wholeheartedly and with intense fervor, his effort to draw a moral line down through the heart of my country, placing those he deems civilized on one side, and leaving the barbaric to the other...
...Come to think of it, who appointed these guys leaders of the Republican revolution anyway...
...It doesn't matter whether Loury and Krauthammer are correct...
...Yet the Standard would be different...
...Affirmative action is bad...
...Is it not a measure of the quality of American civilization that so many of our "brothers and sisters," of all colors, live amidst squalor, in hopelessness and despair...
...As a consequence, our socialeconomic problems will grow deeper, and sooner or later, people will demand that something be done...
...The study indicated that the bill—which Clinton was on the record as supporting—would push an additional 1.2 million children into poverty...
...All you have to do is work hard and pull yourself up by your bootstraps...
...A typical issue consists of articles that could be characterized as the best of the American Spectator, the worst of the New Republic, too specific for Commentary, too short for the Public Interest...
...One could find this in the New York Times...
...Stupidity," Milan Kundera wrote, "is not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas...
...Charles Krauthammer's critique of Newt Gingrich's book To Renew America is the only piece that asks the question: what is conservatism...
...The Standard would be a real conservative magazine...
...D' Souza has not one useful word to say about how this problem will be remedied beyond urging blacks in the middle class to get busy raising the "civilizational standards" of their brethren...
...q 104 • DISSENT...
...The New Yorker remarked that in the conservative movement Kristol occupies "the sort of ideological primacy that Mikhail (the Grey Cardinal) Suslov occupied under Leonid Brezhnev...
...Almost every piece could have appeared in the National Review...
...The only other piece that takes a critical view of currently fashionable conservative beliefs was Glenn Loury's dissection of Dinesh D'Souza's End of Racism...
...Conservatives are in power and, as a consequence, they don't have to think very hard...
...That figure, coming after immense pressure on the White House from liberals to oppose Republican welfare reform, prompted Clinton to backtrack...
...That was done by 102 • DISSENT Magazines their parents...
...Its editors are not thinking seriously about the problems confronting our society...
...For those who attempt to keep informed, it was hard to get excited...
...The startup costs alone are enormous...
...They chose the New Republic as a model because of its reputation for being unpredictable, interesting, readable...
...Among his many insights, he is perhaps best known for pointing out that "there is no health care crisis in the United States...
...and "Bill Clinton's Pathetic Lies...
...As someone who has spent a decade calling for moral leadership within the black community, I find it now an even more important task to urge that responsible moral leadership come forth in the "conservative community...
...Conservatism WINTER • 1996 • 103 Magazines cannot be revolutionary in anything but the more limited "negative" sense of radically stripping away the encumbrances of the welfare state...
...Tax cuts are good...
...The conservative program, or some version of it, will be enacted...
...There is the Wall Street Journal, the American Spectator, National Review, the Public Interest, Commentary, the National Interest, Policy Review, the City Journal and, as often as not, the New Republic...
...And weekly updates on developments in Washington: In the late afternoon of November 8, Bill Clinton met with advisers in the Oval Office to discuss an analysis of the Senate's welfare legislation by the Office of Management and Budget...
...There are a few exceptions...
...In the pages of the Standard you can see conservatism suffering the kind of mental laziness that characterized liberalism several decades ago...
...Whatever the public thinks of Congress, conservatism is ascendant...
...The Weekly Standard is edited by William Kristol, reputed to be among the Republican party's keenest strategists...
...The New Republic, despite its conservative turn, was not "of" the conservative movement...
...Week after week the Standard fills its pages with conventional conservative wisdom...
...It has no reason for being...
...Many conservatives, it seems, were disturbed by reports that the New Republic was the magazine most widely read in the Reagan White House (liberals felt the same discomfort...
...Launching a magazine is difficult...
...In Newt Gingrich's America, however, the sun shines on things right...
...But America is a free country...
...Conservative publications jam the newsstands...
...The Standard has a very brief shelf life— hardly anything that appeared in the first ten issues remains worth reading today...
...What new society this will yield, we do not know...
...Conservatives do not need a more "positive" vision other than the faith that, with these encumbrances removed, native American genius will flourish, and civil society, freed from the grip of the state, will renew itself...
...Conservatives believe such things unknowable...
...The president's reversal reflects the administration's deep division over welfare...
...That alone makes their articles stand out in the Standard...
...And that's the problem with the Weekly Standard...
...Most articles are drearily predictable, for example, "Three Cheers For the Tax Cut," "Bob Dole's Resilience," "Are the Democrats Going Nuts...
...They raise fundamental questions...
...One should read the Weekly Standard if only to understand the coming crisis of conservatism...
...Last spring and summer, as Newt Gingrich and his followers gleefully set about dismantling what remained of the American welfare state, there were many stories in the press about the debut of the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard...
...Block grants are good...
...An editorial in the first issue declared that the 1994 mid-term elections were the start of a lasting Republican realignment and that the Standard will "speak for, interpret and guide this realignment...
...The Standard will have little to say...
...As I write in late November the public disapproves of Congress by roughly those same numbers...
...There is strategic advice: The GOP's final remaining challenge this year will be producing the Medicare growth reductions [Never say cuts!—ML] necessary to achieve all the other policy goals embedded in its budget, while at the same time retaining a level of broad popular support that will allow conservatives to expand those achievements in the future...
...Nor do they attempt to question the underlying political assumptions of their inherited ideology...
...So despite the crowded field, William Kristol, ex-chief of staff to Dan Quayle, John Podhoretz, ex-Bush speech writer, and New Republic editor Fred Barnes decided to launch a new conservative magazine, which would be modeled, in part, on the New Republic...
...In his acceptance speech as Speaker, he proclaimed the goal of the conservative revolution of 1994 as not just political . . . but meta-political: the manufacture of a new society...
...no, it will have little new to say...
...Perhaps those guiding the Republican Congress have been giving faulty directions...
...The editorial went on to say that the public approved of the current Republican Congress 52-35 in the latest polls...
...Gingrich, he says, really is that oxymoron, the conservative revolutionary...
...Government is bad...
...According to press reports the three editors had a few discussions, approached media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and came away with his pledge to finance the Standard for at least three years, starting with an investment of several million dollars...
...That was September 18...
...But Americans have been known to change their minds...
...The editors of the Standard have not had to struggle to bring intellectual coherence to conservative ideology...
Vol. 43 • January 1996 • No. 1
