Prophets on the Right
GEWEN, BARRY
Writers & Writing PROPHETS ON THE RIGHT BY BARRY GEWEN Pity the poor Rightwinger. He had wandered in the wilderness since the Goldwater debacle of 1964, longer if he was old enough to support...
...The Old Right and the New Right are sniping at each other...
...Phillips discovers the beginnings of a profound political transformation in Adlai Stevenson's successes in chic New York neighborhoods during the elections of 1952 and 1956, while Eisenhower was scoring well in the city's lower-middle-class area...
...Repeatedly, his arguments are built around statements like "Historically, price revolutions have...
...Demographics now assure a long-term Sun Belt ascendancy...
...Polls in 1980 showed Sun Belt support for conservatism and Ronald Reagan strongly correlating with individual optimism, not least in matters of economic opportunity...
...The stream of economists fleeing the White House confirms that Reaganomics' marriage of monetarism and supply-side theory was less a fusion than a confusion...
...The name Charles Darwin is tactfully missing from the pages of Back to Basics, but in his section on religion Pines takes as an instance of "America's religious vitality" the fact that half of our citizens believe the human race started with Adam and Eve...
...All over the country, Pines declares, people are rising up against liberal misrule in the name of fundamental American values...
...Similar failings abound throughout the book, the products of a fundamentally flawed concept...
...If America has a tradition in economics, it is hardly laissez-faire...
...Phillips has a mind eager to schematize...
...Phillips is at his best scrutinizing political evolutions through election returns, and to my mind the showpieces of Post-Conservative America are the sections tracing the rise of Reagan and his prospective decline...
...Now that his pattern has failed to hold, he has searched out other equally mechanical designs...
...Surprisingly, Phillips does not think Reagan and the Republican Party will be able to take advantage of it...
...The large Hispanic and oriental populations, just beginning to feel their political oats, are not likely to respond to the Republican message...
...These results foreshadowed the shift of the Southern-based Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt into an organization of elite Eastern liberalism, at the same time that Republicanism was changing from the voice of the wealthy Wall Street Establishment into a coalition of Sun Belt conservatism and working-class populism...
...For so many decades an outsider, the Rightwinger looked forward to an extended era of dominance and counterrevolution...
...Our past is studded with public subsidies for internal improvements, with tariffs to protect our industries, with public education programs to strengthen the nation, with regulations to defend the weak from the strong...
...Both are by influential conservatives...
...This "back to basics" campaign is evident in such areas as economics, education, religion, criminal justice, and the family...
...His readers may not be persuaded to share his pessimism...
...As much as any section in the country, the Sun Belt is dependent upon the government for its prosperity...
...The country was going to hell in a handbasket while crooks and mediocrities repeatedly wrested the scepter away from him...
...In the past, he viewed American elections in terms of almost automatic 32-36 cycles...
...Probably he should come from the Midwest...
...The two groups are natural allies, both seeking to get back to basics????The first to classic laissez-faire capitalism, the second to old-fashioned morality...
...Tradition is their bridge...
...Visions of Weimar dance in his head...
...Whatever their rhetoric, businessmen seem to understand this...
...Back to Basics (Morrow, 348 pp., $ 13.50) by Burton Yale Pines, former Time editor, currently vice president of the Heritage Foundation, is a fervent celebration of the new conservatism...
...He had wandered in the wilderness since the Goldwater debacle of 1964, longer if he was old enough to support Robert Taft over Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican convention...
...Once this community of interest is awakened, Pines foreseesa "vigorous, resurgent Traditionalist Dynasty," a new era with Ronald Reagan the right man in the right place at the right time...
...It may be too early to write off the Reagan Presidency as a lost cause...
...Further, Phillips points out that the Right-wing populists are, by tradition, economic liberals, and during hard times may well revert to their old habits...
...Spontaneous and diversified, it links various grass-roots groups that have not yet fully recognized their common purpose, their shared perspective of "traditionalism," a description Pines prefers to "conservatism" or "New Right...
...He believes, however, that any mutual suspicions are due simply to a difference in style...
...Phillips reminds us that Reagan got his start in 1964 campaigning for Barry Goldwater, the first politician to embody the new Republicanism...
...True, we should learn from history, but not too much...
...And some neoconservatives seem to be wondering why they ever left their Democratic home...
...If Pines is the Right's Pollyanna, Phillips is unquestionably its Cassandra...
...In other words, Phillips' analysis would have Democrats looking long and hard at John Glenn...
...Two recent books examine the ingredients that went into producing the Reagan majority...
...Soon monumental tax and budget legislation was sweeping through Congress, signaling an irresistible movement in full stride...
...Pines complains about Lee Iacocca's "incessant whining" for federal aid to Chrysler...
...Assuming the worst does not come to pass, Democrats will probably get more out of Post-Conservative America than Republicans...
...What pines calls tradition, Kevin Phillips labels nostalgia, and what Pines sees as a source of strength, Phillips regards as a futile, almost pathological retreat from the present...
...In selecting a candidate for 1984, Phillips implies, the Democrats need a man who can retain his party's base in the Northeast while drawing in voters from the vulnerable Sun Belt...
...His reasons are many, and fascinating...
...usually generated radicalism, peasants' revolts, revolution and worse somewhere along the line...
...Pines is sensitive to the fact that the two main camps in the Reagan coalition, the economics-minded businessmen and the social-issue-oriented populists, are not entirely comfortable with each other, that Walter Wriston does not frequently sup with Jerry Falwell...
...Liberalism was exhausted and helpless...
...They do not turn their backs on a government that intervenes in the economy to provide them with tax expenditures, protection from imports, agricultural subsidies, or phony depreciation schedules...
...Despite the wreckage of 1982, apparently down at the Heritage Foundation they still believe that June is bustin' out all over...
...Perhaps they would explain to him that government intervention is as American as apple pie...
...The elderly, an extremely important Sun Belt constituency, worry about Social Security, particularly whenever the President suggests cutting benefits...
...He should talk to John Connally about oil drilling allowances or Jesse Helms about tobacco supports...
...Nor is the evergrowing pool of disaffected low-income voters...
...Power has not proved kind...
...Tradition, Pines' umbrella for the faltering Reagan coalition, is either too small to cover everyone he wishes to crowd underneath it or so full of holes as to offer little protection against the storm clouds now gathering on the Right...
...Let us save the better for last and begin with the spinach...
...Unlike the business community, they are true reactionaries, genuinely in revolt against the modern, and Pines applauds their work in education, religion and family matters...
...analogies come too easily to him...
...How odd all of this sounds at the present moment...
...It would be useful, too, if he had a military background and some identification with Sun Belt industries...
...Finally, in 1980 his long-delayed moment arrived when Ronald Reagan was not so much elected President as thrust into office by a nation angry and disgusted????carrying along, undreamable dream, a Republican Senate...
...Even Jefferson, a libertarian hero, used his position to make the Louisiana Purchase...
...Actually, the educational reforms he identifies as' 'back to basics,'' such as the return to stricter grading standards and competency testing for teachers, might be supported by liberals (although the dress codes that seem to attend these efforts would probably make many otherwise sympathetic people nervous...
...Northern wasp elitists find they have little in common with Southern George Wallace populists...
...Where one is well worth the attention of anyone interested in current political trends, the other is an instant artifact...
...it is surely not too soon to call it a shambles...
...Libertarians are not talking to members of the Moral Majority...
...There the similarity ends...
...Our heritage is one of strong Presidents pursuing activist policies: Washington, guided by the country's first central planner, Alexander Hamilton: Madison, Lincoln, Wilson, and the two Roosevelts...
...Only one year later, his noon has turned to night...
...From over here that bridge looks awfully rickety...
...Pines has a better case with the Moral Majority types...
...In Post-Conservative America: People, Politics, and Ideology in a Time of Crisis (Random House, 261 pp., $14.50) he examines the contradictions likely to break up the Reagan coalition and sets out his fears about the tumultuous times he sees in store for us...
...The question is just how far back Pines wishes to go, for an indiscriminate pursuit of tradition can lead directly to book censorship or, worse, creationism...
...The prescient author of The Emerging Republican Majority and the coiner of the phrases "Sun Belt" and "New Right," hehasa track record for spotting trends too good to be ignored...
...Nothing is working as expected, and as the failures mount the divisions that always lurked beneath the surface of the 1980 victory are bursting forth...
...Instead of a Democratic revival based on these elements, Phillips predicts the growth of additional parties, "de-alignment," Balkanization, and breakdown...
...Clouding optimism would increase demands for federal economic action...
...Anyone who can view this with equanimity cannot be serious about education...
Vol. 65 • September 1982 • No. 16
