Making It All Right
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
Making It All Right The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power By Sidney Blumenthal Times Books. 369 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by David M....
...A large base was created within the GOP...
...This is hardly surprising, because Blumenthal has written extensively about the Reagan-Walter Mondale campaign...
...The big four included the AEI, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, and the Heritage Foundation...
...changed much of that image...
...His observations about the meaning, the popularity and the staying power of Reaganism are simply superb...
...Here is one example: "Reaganism...
...Gold-water's advisers included William Ba-roody of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), one of the nation's first conservative think tanks...
...Most significantly, it marked the rise of the counterestablishment, "an intellectual elite, motivated mainly by ideology, and attached to the foundations and journals" of conservative belief...
...The answer, says Blumenthal, is probably not...
...This was a period," Buckley has recalled, "in which it was supposed a conservative couldn't survive a confrontation with a liberal face-to-face...
...The great conservative politician of the era, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, had all the charisma of a lawn jockey...
...the future leader, Ronaid Reagan, was cast up...
...Unfortunately for them, their first candidate was, in Blumen-thal's words, "a gaffe machine running against peace and prosperity...
...To believers, the flaws are in the world, not in the doctrine...
...There are two meaty chapters on David Stockman and the budget, but they read like finished essays Blumenthal has simply wedged into his manuscript without adding the proper connectors...
...He had run as a Republican, yet the values he represented went far beyond his party...
...Thus, Reaganism can never reach a culmination...
...Furthermore, the next conservative leader is unlikely to have the skill—or the luck—of President Reagan...
...But Reagan was different...
...By the 1970s the counterestablishment was almost fully in place...
...They have never recovered from the trauma of the '60s, when the New Left tried to sweep them into the dustbin of history...
...The bulk of it, in fact, comes from the writings of Norman Podhoretz and a windy interview with Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams...
...His syndicated column inspired numerous fellow-believers, including Pat Buchanan and George F. Will...
...At the same time, the angry battles within the Democratic Party—between the Humphreyites and the McGovern-ites, the old minorities and the new minorities—had offended a number of intellectuals who, in Blumenthal's estimation, were looking to get even...
...At this point—the critical point— Blumenthal's book begins to break down...
...They saw themselves as outsiders—people who dealt in ideology, not partisan politics...
...In 1964, the conservatives produced a Presidential candidate of their own...
...The landslide of 1980 brought about a changing of elites...
...Emerging in the 1950s, he added glamour and respectability to a movement in desperate need of both...
...For the first time, the conservatives must cope with a conservative past that is not mythological...
...The book's most obvious strength is its treatment of Ronald Reagan, the weaver of national myths...
...Blumenthal does not like the neoconservatives...
...Until Reagan, the counterestablishment had been shut out of the Executive Branch...
...and the AEI survived and flourished...
...Principles like the free market, the fear of government and the importance of cultural elites were ridiculed as anachronistic...
...The evidence that Blumenthal presents, however, is not exactly compelling...
...Calling themselves neoconservatives, they claimed that their party had sold out to blacks, to feminists, to disarmament fanatics, and to ignorant young radicals...
...The counterestablishment was vital to Reagan because it offered him freedom as well as expertise...
...Their aim was to use the GOP without being coopted or contaminated by the party regulars...
...People on campuses raised their eyes with newfound respect...
...Reagan's dream of the past is beyond our reach...
...We get a lot of gossip about the Podhoretz clan, but we do not get much feeling for the relationship between the counterestablishment and the formulation of Reagan's foreign policy...
...many voters were introduced to conservatism...
...the Restoration can never take place...
...Ironically, he describes them in much the same way that the neoconservatives (then liberals) used to describe the followers of Senator Joe McCarthy: as "sufferers from multiple forms of alienation—personal, professional, and political...
...Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history, Rutgers...
...Irving Kristol, the movement's godfather, defined a neoconservative as "a liberal mugged by reality...
...Jimmy Carter had no use for conservative intellectuals, who held him in contempt...
...Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford were loyal Republicans, dependent upon patronage, insensitive to ideology...
...Baroody, in turn, recruited economist Milton Friedman, speechwriter Karl Hess and philosopher Harry Jaffa, who suggested the memorable line: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of j ustice is no virtue...
...He not onlytookadrubbing, he also reminded reporters of the eccentric world of the American Right...
...He believed in the free market myth and the demonic power of government...
...A few collisions had a tremendous effect...
...It "let Reagan be Reagan, giving him an ideological base within his Administration that permitted him to be relatively independent of the controversial sources of Republican power...
...But the political reality, according to Blumenthal, was that neoconservatives "were a faction without a home, and the counterestablishment was a home without enough people...
...Yet it's indestructible because the path to it is always open in our imaginations.'' Will the counterestablishment be able to survive the retirement of Ronald Reagan...
...As Blumenthal observes, "the Gold-water campaign was a conservative advance...
...must be able to infuse the ideology with a new set of images, vivid for another age...
...With Reagan in the White House, these conservative cadres were now able to put their theories into action...
...His new publication, the National Review, attracted many students to the conservative cause...
...According to Blumenthal, the '64 campaign was both a conservative debacle and a preview of victories to come...
...Neoconservatives thrive on disillusionment...
...Conservative icons such as Whittaker Chambers and Russell Kirk were portrayed as goofy or paranoid or simply out of touch...
...They captured the Republican nomination for Barry Goldwater without attempting to capture the party itself...
...The next leader," says Blumenthal...
...Even Ronald Reagan entered the fray with a televised speech ("A Time for Choosing") that ignited his own political career...
...This is an interesting portrait, and it may well be true...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy" Forty years ago, Sidney Blumenthal notes in this book, it was hard to take the American Conservative movement seriously...
...But there were dozens of smaller conservative operations "devoted to virtually every public policy area, from taxes to law, from foreign affairs to family affairs...
...They hold grudges against almost everybody...
...cannot be disproved by history or events...
...Reagan is a radical reactionary because his image of the past is so ahis-torical that to return there would indeed be a radical change...
...Backed by Sunbelt millionaires and the ubiquitous Olin Foundation, the conservative think tanks became a major force in American life...
...We get some interesting information about the number of journalists in the Heritage Foundation computer, but we do not learn where Heritage is exerting pressure, or which Heritage people are now in government, or what they are trying to do...
...He feared the Evil Empire and insisted upon arming America to the teeth...
...William F. Buckley Jr...
...It was a match...
...And his acerbic elegance on television helped to demolish the notion that conservatives were necessarily dull...
...Or were they...
...A movement based on ideology cannot resolve its differences in the manner of traditional Democrats and Republicans: It cannot appeal to party loyalty...
Vol. 69 • December 1986 • No. 18
