THE RIGHT: IS THERE LIFE AFTER REAGAN?
Judis, John B.
the Right Is there life after Reagan? BY JOHN B. JUDIS Some conservatives believe that when Ronald Reagan leaves office in January 1989, he will take the conservative movement with him into...
...The political success of conservatism stems in part from an increasingly receptive populace...
...in 1988 and beyond, conservatives may not be able to find a candidate who can appear at once libertarian and traditionalist...
...As a result, Goldwater had no experienced conservatives to run his campaign...
...If a depression or major diplomatic or military setback occurred while the conservatives were in power, they could suffer a severe blow...
...In the words of Washington Post reporter Sidney Blumenthal, the Right has successfully created a "conservative counterestablishment...
...Reagan won a bigger landslide in 1984 than in 1980, and the popular voting margin between Democratic and Republican Congressional candidates narrowed...
...The two factions take dramatically different tacks...
...Reagan's opposition to affirmative action has cemented this tie...
...Most Americans are neither strictly conservative nor liberal, but from the Great Depression through the 1960s, they became increasingly supportive of welfare-state programs, even while continuing to adhere to a laissez-faire philosophy...
...Supplementing the think tanks and organizations are a host of conservative publications and universities...
...And such conservative Republicans as George Bush, Jack Kemp, and Robert Dole understand that the long-run prospects of the Republican Party depend on securing the votes of the "baby-boom generation"—Americans between the ages of thirty and forty-five who have tended to be conservative on fiscal issues but liberal on social issues and foreign policy...
...When Barry Goldwater unexpectedly won the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964, the conservative movement had a cause and a thousand activists—and that was about all...
...Richard Viguerie, who had to sell Conservative Digest, has begun to rebound and is again employing 200 at his Leesburg, Virginia, direct-mail headquarters...
...Some of the conservative organizations, such as AEI, NCPAC (the National Conservative Political Action Committee), and the Reverend Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority (now the Liberty Foundation), suffered financial reverses in 1985, but their troubles were the result of varying combinations of mismanagement and post-landslide overproduction...
...According to IEA director Leslie Len-kowsky, the Institute now funds thirty-four conservative newspapers, including the Harvard Salient and the Dartmouth Review...
...The coalition of social and economic conservatives—based on a blend of Wallace populism, economic libertarianism, and Cold War imperialism—has not shrunk but expanded...
...Reagan conservatism could be suffering a similar fate...
...If the Republican nominees attack Robertson, they risk alienating an important constituency...
...liberal infrastructure of the 1930s and 1940s was able to survive the Eisenhower 1950s...
...Heritage, begun in 1973 with a $250,000 grant from Joseph Coors, moved in 1983 from modest row houses to an $ 11 million edifice overlooking Capitol Hill...
...he also held in check the warring factions on the Right...
...With a staff of twenty, ALEC now boasts that 2,000 of the country's 7,500 state legislators belong to it...
...When Reagan came to power, conservatives could draw upon lobbies, think tanks, and political-action organizations that didn't exist or barely functioned in 1964...
...Conservatives have also been able to exploit a widespread perception that the country is going to the dogs, as traditional family morality declined, use of drugs skyrocketed, and America suffered repeated defeats abroad...
...And the Reagan Administration will have already attempted—to the limits of its mandate—the major legislative and diplomatic initiatives championed by conservatives over the last twenty years...
...But many Republican conservatives, particularly among the young, do not share the Religious Right's fundamentalist ethic...
...Similar challenges have been mounted in North Carolina, Tennessee, Arizona, and New Mexico...
...Out of this institutional framework has emerged the kind of self-perpetuating power base that helped sustain liberal Democrats over three decades...
...The Religious Right and New Right draw from previously apolitical Evangelicals and Wallace Democrats...
...In 1985, Cordia claimed to have placed about 250 conservatives in Administration jobs...
...they understand that the social populism of Pat Robertson and the New Right is likely to scare away baby-boom libertarians...
...Except for a burst of energy in the mid-1960s, New Deal liberalism had exhausted its popular thrust by the 1940s...
...BY JOHN B. JUDIS Some conservatives believe that when Ronald Reagan leaves office in January 1989, he will take the conservative movement with him into retirement...
...But traditional Republicans want above all to retain control of the White House and Senate...
...With the think tanks' help, the Reagan Administration has steadily replaced liberals with conservatives, moderates with reactionaries...
...In the Indiana and North Carolina Congressional primaries, two Fundamentalist candidates, backed by the Religious Right, upset conservative Republican candidates...
...The think tanks have prospered in the Reagan years...
...For decades, conservatives had feasted on the dreams of rolling back communism, dismantling the welfare state, and proscribing certain social behavior...
...In the 1970s, support for liberal programs began to falter...
...But the nature of this decline must be put in perspective...
...Not only are the corporate and financial elites siding with the Right, but white middle-income Americans, who make up the largest bloc of voters, are also finding the conservative cause attractive...
...if they don't, they risk losing an even more essential one...
...And when liberals began championing affirmative action and mandatory school busing, a mass constituency for Republican conservatives developed not only in the South, but in Northern cities as well...
...Conservative Republicans were able to hold together the Wallace Democrats and the baby-boomers in 1980 and 1984, thanks to both Ronald Reagan and his opponents...
...Voters who came of age in the 1970s and early 1980s appear particularly susceptible to Reagan conservatism...
...Within major universities, conservatives, with the help of the Washington-based Institute for Educational Affairs, have set up their own student newspapers as well as organizations...
...But it is too soon to bid adieu...
...Over the last two decades, however, conservatives have created a political and governing elite...
...After popular enthusiasm abated, New Deal liberalism was able to hang on for two decades—not only through the weakness of the opposition, but through the liberals' hold over the courts and the Federal bureaucracy and through the political and intellectual infrastructure they had built in Washington and New York...
...And Reagan's opponents, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, have been sufficiently weak and discredited to prevent an outbreak of Republican factionalism...
...AEI, Heritage, and Hoover are the best-known conservative institutions, but literally hundreds of others have sprung up over the last decade...
...Political consultants, policy experts, and social scientists were nowhere to be seen...
...Recessions alone, while causing some electoral setbacks, would not necessarily shake conservatism's hold, for conservatism has fed on a kind of selective prosperity—between regions, between cities and suburbs, and between blacks and whites...
...Bradford, professor of English at the University of Dallas and president of the Philadelphia Society, the principal organization of conservative intellectuals...
...Abortion and school prayer are their preeminent issues...
...It has taken on only two major challenges—generating a sustained high rate of economic growth and significantly strengthening the nation's defenses—and it has failed at both...
...The charismatic Reagan not only popularized conservative ideas...
...From 1980 to 1984, Democratic identification among white Southerners dropped from 54 to 46 per cent, while identification with Republicans increased from 32 to 39 per cent...
...The University of Massachusetts Republican Club claims 200 members...
...The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the Heritage Foundation have helped fill many of the Administration's mid-level positions and Federal judiciary vacancies...
...As historian George Nash wrote recently in the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, Ronald Reagan's political success "derives from his embodiment of all [the] impulses" that have characterized contemporary conservatism...
...To be sure, the conservative movement has not yet won the allegiance of a majority of Americans...
...this had fallen to 31 per cent by 1985...
...National Review has been a training ground for the President's and Vice President's speech-writing staffs...
...The infighting has already begun...
...Among new conservative publications are This World, The National Interest, and The Washington Times...
...IrL 1977, Antonio Scalia, Robert Bork, and Laurence Silberman were AEI fellows and part of a regular discussion group with Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, and current Budget Director James Miller...
...At the Harvard Republican Club, for instance, 67 per cent of the members oppose a constitutional ban on abortion...
...The greater threat to conservatism is factional divisions from within...
...By the early 1980s, its budget topped $10 million...
...The New Right, Old Right, and Religious Right have established their own organizations and lobbies—one for virtually every conservative cause ranging from the World Anti-Communist League to the Gun Owners of America...
...These sentiments are oddly reminiscent of the laments by liberals in the 1940s that the New Deal and liberalism had run aground...
...Many of these groups, like Lewis Lehrman's Citizens for America and the Young Conservative Alliance, have been born during the Reagan years...
...Before Reagan's term is over, he will have been able to fill about half of the country's 573 Federal district judgeships and 156 appeals court judgeships and perhaps as many as four of nine Supreme Court seats...
...All twelve Assistant Attorneys General and at least half of the 153 Justice Department officials Reagan has appointed have participated in the Federalist Society, which was founded in 1981...
...But in 1988 and successive elections, the Republicans may not be able to find a candidate who can appear at once a libertarian and a traditionalist, and the Democrats may pick a candidate who can appeal to the sensibilities of the baby-boomers...
...Others, like the sophisticated American Legislative Exchange Council, which assists conservatives in state legislative races, have seen their influence grow since 1980...
...Barring an economic or diplomatic disaster, the conservative movement will continue to play a leading role in American politics for the rest of the century...
...Conservatives have created a political infrastructure that will survive the twists and turns of electoral fortune, the way the John B. Judis, a senior editor of In These Times, is completing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr...
...Universities and university departments—the Claremont Colleges, the University of Dallas, the University of Chicago Law School and Economics Department, Hillsdale and Rockford Colleges—have become conservative preserves...
...The white middle class also moved right in reaction to the civil-rights movement...
...For the GOP," notes political observer Kevin Phillips, "fundamentalist Pat Robertson, flexing his political muscles, could turn out to be a white Republican version of Jesse Jackson, forcing the party and other Presidential candidates to make nationally impolitic commitments to a discontented but huge electorate hitherto taken for granted...
...This split creates a halo of status around the Republican Party...
...Court of Appeals and has now elevated Scalia to the Supreme Court...
...What's more, conservative ideology—opposition to "Big Government," Third World nationalism, and cosmopolitan morality—will continue to resonate among a potential majority of voters...
...Already, conservatives have blazed a trail from the think tanks to the bench...
...Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former White House Director of Communications David Gergen, and most recently World Bank President Barber Conable, was a shoestring operation in 1964...
...Nowhere is this more visible—and ominous—than in the Federal judiciary, which has been reshaped into an outpost of the conservative movement...
...The Reagan Administration was able to set the terms of national debate about social, economic, and foreign policy and even to do a good measure of what it promised in 1980, but it was not able to fulfill conservatives' deeper aspirations...
...But once in power, they've had to come to terms with such obduracies as the Constitution, Soviet military power, Americans' desire for peace, and popular unwillingness to forsake the New Deal...
...Reagan appointed Scalia, Bork, and Silberman to the U.S...
...From five years under Ronald Reagan, what we have learned is how little is accomplished by winning elections," says M.E...
...And their disenchantment with "Big Government" has remained as high as ever...
...And today's conservative students tend to be among the most intellectually gifted...
...Borrowing from the vocabulary of the sectarian Left, conservatives began developing "cadres"—committed ideologues capable of running campaigns and, once in office, running the country...
...But conservatives have a large base of financial and potential electoral support in the society—certainly sufficient to maintain a significant voice in American politics, if not win a majority of elections, in the 1980s and 1990s...
...Like New Deal liberalism, conservatism has constructed the institutional base to persevere even in the face of spiritual decline and diminished popular enthusiasm...
...The only conservative organizations were the Young Americans for Freedom and the disreputable John Birch Society...
...For the middle class, the reasons were more complex: The fear of depression disappeared, welfare became identified with the black underclass, and taxes began to increase...
...And had he won the election, he would not have been able to place his ideological kin in the major or second-level posts of his Administration...
...Among white Evangelical Christians, who are concentrated in the South, the trend has been even more pronounced...
...And in 1980, Reagan and the conservatives successfully tapped Americans' desire to restore what Reagan termed "America's place in the sun...
...They are not as worried about votes as about direct-mail and television contributions...
...Similar trends appear among white Southern voters...
...It buttresses a political division that consigns Northern inner cities and their residents to the Democratic Party and the white middle and upper classes to the Republicans...
...Human Events and National Review have circulations exceeding 100,000...
...In Oregon's Senate primary, fundamentalist minister Joe Lutz, armed with 5,000 church volunteers, received 43 per cent of the vote against the incumbent chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Robert Packwood, even though Packwood out-spent Lutz by almost fifty to one...
...And there may, indeed, be an important analogy to draw between conservatives today and the liberals of the late 1940s...
...Even with their base and their newly built establishment, the conservatives remain vulnerable...
...In 1952, 42 per cent of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine identified themselves with the Democrats...
...During the same period, Republican affiliation rose from 26 per cent to 37 per cent among members of this age group...
...After Reagan steps down, they probably will not be able to dominate American politics the way they have over the last decade...
...Short of war or depression, there will be a Right after Reagan...
...When I was an undergraduate student in the 1960s, the brightest students were on the Left," Barry Blue-stone, who teaches economics at Boston College, notes wistfully...
...Opposition to school integration and voting rights spurred Goldwater's surprisingly strong showing in the South...
...But while there are certain warning signals of a crash and of a new Central American "Vietnam," neither a depression nor an unsuccessful war appears imminent...
...In Massachusetts, Harvard, Tufts, and Boston College all have student conservative newspapers...
...Conservatives have produced a governing class of modern-day Mandarins to rule America for some time to come...
...By playing off these issues, Republicans began to attract Democrats who were drawn to George Wallace in the 1960s and 1970s...
...Next time they might not be so lucky...
...Conservatives have good reason to fear for their future...
...AEI, which contributed such luminaries as former U.N...
...The most important political idea of the mid-1980s is cultural conservatism," New Right leader Paul Weyrich recently declared...
...Heritage's staff of more than 100 publishes four or five new position papers each week, and its computerized personnel office, headed by Louis Cordia, former deputy director of the Environmental Protection Agency, funnels conservative professionals into government positions...
...The Mountain States Legal Foundation has contributed James Watt and Anne Gorsuch to the Reagan Administration...
...Leaders of the Religious Right and New Right do not appear to be as concerned about winning national elections as about securing and inspiring their flock...
...According to one survey, white Evangelicals voted Democratic by 56 to 44 per cent in 1976 and Republican by 81 to 19 per cent in 1984...
...Conservatives have produced a governing class of modern-day Mandarins capable of running a conservative Administration or of constituting a shadow government if the Democrats once again capture the White House...
...Business leaders, faced with stiff foreign competition and rising energy prices, sought to restore their profit margins by having Government reduce taxes and regulation...
...Most New Right conservatives have been deeply disappointed by the Reagan Administration, not because it has been too moderate, but because it has been both trivial and inept," writes William S. Lind in an essay published by Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Research and Education Fund...
...it took Republicans almost five decades to rebound from the Great Depression...
...During the Reagan-Mondale race, Kemp's press secretary, John Buckley, told me that the only time Mondale appeared to gain ground was when he ran ads linking Reagan with the Reverend Jerry Falwell...
...And this has created tremendous disillusionment and uncertainty in the ranks...
...Robertson's candidacy in 1988 could create among Republican nominees the same dilemma that the Reverend Jesse Jackson's candidacy created among Democrats in 1984...
...At Boston College, the conservative students have really done their homework...
...During the Reagan years, white middle-class Americans have not indicated a desire for a new "Great Society" or "New Deal...
Vol. 50 • October 1986 • No. 10
