Is 'Conservative Revolution' An Oxymoron?

...No ideational theory," Huntington explains, "can be used to defend established institutions satisfactorily, even when those institutions in general reflect the values of that ideology...

...As Daniel Patrick Moynihan has observed, we have so succeeded in "defining deviancy down" that what was once regarded as abnormal has by now been normalized, and what was once stigmatized as deviant is now tolerated and even sanctioned...

...This social pathology is most conspicuous, of course, in the underclass, but the rest of society is by no means immune to it...

...Nor is the impulse behind this conservative revolution an obsessive ideological attachment to the free market, as some have claimed...

...Surely conservatives are meant to conserve, not to revolt- to conserve by a series of prudent, gradual, incremental accommodations to reality, not by any radical, precipitous change...

...Dole commends himself to Harries not, as others would argue, because he is the best of an uninspired field of candidates, but rather because he is the only true conservative among them...

...A decade later no conservative could have written so sanguinely about the viability, let alone defensibility, of "established institutions...

...That is how conservatives have traditionally thought of themselves, and how some conservatives still do...

...Surely it is a contradiction in terms...

...Gertrude Himmelfarb is the author, most recently, of The De-Moralization of Society (Alfred A Knopf...

...Recently this view has been provocatively advanced in the London Spectator by Owen Harries, who takes it as a vindication of Bob Dole...

...Huntington disputes the ideological conception of conservatism, the idea that conservatism reflects a "political vision...

...It is ironic to find liberals mouthing the mantras of "community" and "civil society" while refusing to make those reforms (in welfare, most notably) that would restore a truly viable community and civil society...

...If this urbane and witty endorsement of Dole sounds equivocal, there is nothing equivocal in the implied criticism of Newt Gingrich and the other enthusiasts in the new Congress, nor in the distaste for the "Religious Right" and the "Movement Conservatives" who would carry the "conservative revolution" even further than Gingrich might like...

...This is the situation that faces conservatives today: an entrenched revolution that cannot be significantly affected by the small, incremental changes a conservative would prefer...

...More important, the failure to challenge the legitimacy of the revolution itself is, in effect, to legitimize it, to give the revolution the moral sanction that ensures its perpetuation...

...It is in such a situation that a conservative, a conservative by "disposition," may be tempted to give two cheers for a conservative revolution...

...What is a conservative to do-a conservative by "disposition"-confronted with a revolution so firmly established that it is now the status quo...

...The "Contract with America" is not the Ten Commandments...

...The black illegitimacy rate in 1965, presaging the breakdown of the black family, is very nearly the white illegitimacy rate in 1995...

...or a reform of welfare that will not eliminate public relief but transfer it to state governments...

...Radical change is all the more repugnant because it is in the service of an idea, an idea so compelling as to warrant so radical a change...

...Can this describe a proposed reform of Medicare that will not privatize health care but merely reduce the increase of government funding from 10 to 6 percent a year...

...He reasons that an ideology, he says, is called for only when radical change is desired, which is precisely what conservativism rejects, intent as it is upon essentially maintaining the existing order...

...And two, not one or none, because there comes, unhappily, a time when even a conservative has to be a revolutionist...

...Conservatives, unlike those properly called "reactionaries," are well aware of this...

...If these reforms deserve the label of revolution, it is because they do truly, significantly, change the direction of social policy...

...If they use the rhetoric of "revolution"-as in the "conservative revolution"-it is to highlight the gravity of the situation and the seriousness of their enterprise...

...By the same token, institutions that were born only yesterday, in the aftermath of the Great Society, are now regarded as so venerable as to defy retrenchment, let alone abolition...

...Where some conservatives complain of Dole's lack of principle and conviction, a cynicism and pragmatism that regards everything as negotiable (Harries cites Dole's willingness to "do" a Ronald Reagan if that is what people want), Harries finds in him an "irony" that is the mark of a true conservative...

...Oakeshott's in 1956...

...or a reform of taxation that will produce $11.2 trillion in seven years rather than the $11.4 trillion proposed by the Democrats...

...And it is precisely because conservatives ("cultural" or "social" conservatives, as they have been called) take these problems seriously that they seek to undo the policies that have helped undermine individual, familial, and communal responsibilities...

...Harries does not quote Oakeshott in this connection...

...By now, the nature of our institutions has been so radically altered that we find ourselves in a society few conservatives can tolerate, let alone "delight in...

...Two, not three, because a conservative is a reluctant revolutionist...

...But this social pathology is only a small part of the story...

...or a reform of education that will not abolish free public schools but provide vouchers to parents to be spent on schools of their choice...

...Nibbling away at the edges of this or that program, or cutting the budget of this or that agency, is little more than an invitation to restore that cut the following year and to devise yet another "initiative" to warrant the continuance of the agency...

...In this hothouse atmosphere, any program boasting even a five-year vintage is seen as an integral and inviolable part of our social system, a moral and legal "entitlement...

...But they hardly change it in conformance with some mythical agenda devised by the "dogmatic marketeers" conjured up by Ehrenhalt...

...That erosion, he tells us, can be corrected only by restoring "community" and "civil society...

...Thus, the proposal to reduce the budgets of the endowments for the arts and humanities, which have grown from less than $6 million a year each when they were founded in 1966 to $172 million each in 1995, is said to be tantamount to abolishing the arts and humanities themselves-arts and humanities which were, in fact, in a flourishing state before the creation of the endowments...

...This revolution may be quantifiably measured: In these three decades the illegitimacy rate has increased sixfold, crime fivefold, unmarried couples sevenfold, one-parent families threefold, families headed by a never-married mother twelvefold...

...And neoconservatives are even more acutely aware of it...

...By Gertrude Himmelfarb Budget reform, welfare reform, Medicare reform-this formidable combination of reforms has been proudly heralded by a new breed of conservatives as a "conservative revolution...

...Moreover, it is not in the name of an abstract idea or ideology, not out of regard for doctrinal purity or some notion of an ideal society, that conservatives launch their own revolution (or counter-revolution...

...And so with statistics of welfare dependency, illiteracy, drug addiction, and the other symptoms of an all too common "social pathology...

...Instead he cites a very thoughtful article by the American political scientist Samuel Huntington, "Conservatism as an Ideology," to the same effect...

...The revolution in social sensibility is no less dramatic...

...To undo a revolution, something like a counterrevolution is required...

...But this, of course, is precisely what conservatives had been saying long before liberals belatedly acknowledged these moral, social, and cultural problems (remember "the economy, stupid")- and long, long before liberals discovered the virtues of community and civil society...

...Yet an old-fashioned conservative may find that label disquieting...

...This too is anathema to the traditional conservative, who is as wary of ideas as of change...

...Huntington's essay was written in 1957...

...Revolutions, to be sure, are never completely undone, and counter-revolutions never completely restore the status quo ante...

...Ehrenhalt concludes by accusing conservatives of not appreciating the true nature of our problem: "the moral, social, and cultural erosion of the past quarter-century in American life...

...And it delights in the present not because the present corresponds to some idea or ideal that is esteemed, not even because it is better than what was or what may be, but simply because it is- because it is known and familiar, and therefore congenial to the conservative temperament...

...For the traditional conservative, all change corrupts and radical change corrupts absolutely...

...Market worship," "the unfettered free market," "the tyranny of the market," "an uncontrolled and amoral free market"-Ehrenhalt's repetition of these phrases gives a hyperbolic tone to his argument...

...The classical formulation of this view is by the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, whose memorable article, "On Being Conservative," defined conservatism as a matter of "disposition" rather than "doctrine"-a disposition that takes "delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be...

...It is a legislative program on the order of a party platform, containing specific, practical proposals for reform-proposals that can have large consequences in redefining and redirecting our social energies but that are by no means absolute or utopian...

...For these established institutions were decisively disestablished, first by the counterculture and then by the Great Society, both the products of the tumultuous- and revolutionary, a conservative might say-decade of the 1960s...

...Illegitimacy" itself has been officially rebaptized: It is now an "alternative mode of parenting" or "non-marital child-bearing," terminology that rhetorically legitimizes what was once illegitimate...

...This is the charge that has been brought against Margaret Thatcher in England and that was echoed here most recently by Alan Ehrenhalt in the New York Times...