Thinkers of the Dark Ages

...The people occupying center stage in Gang of Five, who all came of age during the 1970s, are: Bill Kristol, an academic turned Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff turned pundit, perhaps best described as a fairly moderate conservative out of the New York Jewish intellectual tradition...

...In their view it represses individual liberty...

...Indeed, Easton's description of Norquist would require few changes to become the saga of a Leftist terrorist member of the Weather Underground from the torrid years of the late '60s...

...Nevertheless, the five are fascinating subjects...

...Traditionalists regard a civilized society as a conquest that cannot be taken for granted, and therefore respect institutions, including government, that contribute to its maintenance...

...David Mcintosh, a Yale- and University of Chicago-trained free-market policy wonk who went from a job fighting government regulation for Quayle to continuing the battle as a member of Congress from Indiana, where he is now running for governor...

...Reed has pretty consistently been a "pol" first and a Christian second...

...At one point, writing about the father of a conservative journalist who had attacked him, Norquist warned that "when our team holds the Cold War version of the Nuremberg trials, I will testify against [him] as a collaborator...

...A society of Norquists would quickly degenerate into a Hobbesian "war of all against all," where basic ethical values like respect for others would get torched...

...And Ralph Reed, one-time powerhouse of the Christian Coalition and currently a leading Republican political consultant...

...On a broader level, Gang of Five effectively illuminates the tensions in the conservative movement between traditionalists (represented most purely in the book by Kristol) and libertarians (represented in their quasi-academic form by Mcintosh and in their populist form by Norquist...

...Reed's column was stopped following an incident of plagiarism...

...The Little Giant," a reference to his height as well as to Lincoln opponent Stephen A. Douglas...

...At the University of Georgia, where he was a conservative activist and student newspaper columnist, he was nicknamed "tricky Ralph" because of flip-flops on issues like the legal drinking age and the suspicion that his guiding star was "winning at any cost...

...I suspect, though, that mine is a minority position among contemporary American liberals...

...there is no suggestion that we are being introduced to "five men who changed America," not to mention the world...

...Grover Norquist, a radical antigovernment libertarian and antitax activist...

...After college he spent time in Angola with (supposedly) anti-Communist guerrillas and, upon his return, frequently wore guerrilla fatigues to the office...

...Moreover, I agree with Kristol that one of government's most important roles is to promote a social climate that inhibits people from indulging in self ish or gross behavior to the detriment of anyone in particular or humanity as a whole...

...Although Easton's title—evoking China's Gang of Four and the ideological wars during the waning years of Maoism—is telling, her quintet is not really a "gang...

...Many of them seem drawn to elements of libertarian "leave me alone" rhetoric, and repelled by the very idea of a role for government in cultivating character among citizens...

...Its mere 440 pages of text—under 90 pages per gang member discussed—seem properly apportioned...

...He wanted to ensure that "nobody on our side gets seduced by the dark side into joining their team...

...Seven-hundred-page accounts of the lives of obscure literary and political figures are commonplace...

...This background sheds light on Reed's support for the moderate Bob Dole in the 1996 Presidential campaign, his subsequent switch from the Christian Coalition to political consulting, and his early pragmatic support for George W. Bush...

...The son of a businessman in a tony Boston suburb, and a graduate of Harvard, Norquist came to delight in life on the edge...

...At age 11, Reed was captivated by television coverage of the 1972 Republican Convention in his hometown of Miami...

...and in junior high he was a volunteer for a Congressional campaign...

...Nor is there any pretense that the work is a social-scientific study with a large random sample, but it is possible to perceive generalizations, something a single portrait would have made difficult...

...By contrast, Norquist and his fellow libertarians hate government...

...I felt somewhat spooked reading Easton's observation that "in restaurant meetings, [Norquist's] hands transmitted the electric charge when his body couldn't, as he moved salt shakers to and fro [and] picked up sugar packages to shake"—for I have the identical nervous habits...

...Means of Ascent, the second volume of Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson, covers only 1948 yet runs 522 pages...

...In some respects, the portrait of Ralph Reed is the most intriguing in the book...

...Gang of Five is not only a good read...

...If the subject is someone as exalted as a President, well over athousand pages is served up, or else a multivolume treatment...

...For me the choice was easy, because Grover Norquist strikes me as not simply a member of some putative "gang of five" but as a gangster, asocial and unsocialized...

...He also set up a training program for new members of Congress to compete with the bipartisan offerings at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government...

...in eighth grade he ran for class president using the slogan, "Vote for Ralph Reed...

...When young Right-wingers launched the Dark Ages Weekend in 1995 as an alternative to the Renaissance Weekend President Clinton was attending—with rules "encouraging the use of chlorofluorocarbon sprays" and of hard liquor, surely pour epater le bourgeois—Norquist bizarrely called this "extremely important as a revolutionary act...

...He penned a song for college Republicans to the tune of "America the Beautiful," featuring lines such as, "The state conceived in blood and hate remains our only foe," and "Victory is nigh...

...Even more refreshing is the author's eschewing the grandiloquent claims usually found in such books...

...There are eerie resemblances, too, between the most ideologically radical of the five—particularly Norquist— and far Left activists...

...If you want to come to Washington and join the establishment, take the plane to Harvard," Norquist advised...

...If you want to join the revolution, join us...

...Except for Mcintosh (whose conservative ideology wasn't cemented until he went to the University of Chicago Law School), the rest were active conservatives in college...

...Mcintosh and Kristol both worked for Quayle, but Mcintosh has few ties to the others...

...But you decide where you stand...

...According to Easton, a majority of his friends greeted even his "bom-again' experience, which occurred a few years after he graduated from college, as "another one of his scams...

...It adds the most to the general public view of the man who brought the Christian Coalition to national prominence, and helps us to better understand some of his activities both at the Coalition and since...

...Similarly, he initiated an effort to "smash" (his word) the National Governors Association because it provided a place for Republicans and Democrats to get together...

...Hence their slogan, "Leave Us Alone.' NONCONSERVATIVES might find it a revealing intellectual exercise to ask themselves whether their sympathies lie more with the traditionalists or the libertarians...

...For one thing, Easton's accounts of their childhoods, college years and later careers make clear to what extent political activists are political activists, regardless of where they may stand on the ideological spectrum...

...In this context, Nina J. Easton's collective biography of five late-baby boom conservatives is refreshingly modest...

...Interestingly, each of the five not only became involved in politics and public affairs at an early age but possessed a strong drive and much nervous energy...

...it is a discriminating mirror...

...Kristol is a personal friend of Reed's, but they haven't particularly been political allies...

...Bolick does not appear to be close to any of the others...

...Clint Bolick, who set up a public-interest law firm to battle racial quotas and government regulations he believes hold back, rather than advance, minority progress...

...Come meet thy fate, destroy the state...

...Easton cites an article by David Brooks in Kristol's Weekly Standard that extols a "limited but energetic government" and declares: "You can't lead a great nation if you don't have an affirmative view of the public realm...

...For another, we see how those at the extremes, whether Right or Left, share more in terms of personality and disposition than they would probably care to admit...

...Reviewed by Steven Kelman Professor of public management, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University Along with self-help and investment books, big biographies have become a staple of nonfiction bestseller lists...

...As for being driven, consider Norquist, who periodically collapses from exhaustion and needs to sleep for a dayand-a-half to recharge himself...

...Norquist and Kristol despise each other...

...Bolick, who is from a working-class family in New Jersey, established a Teenage Republican Club in high school and was a staple of his local newspaper's letters page, writing missives "in the adult-speak of an overly mature adolescent...