Why Don't Republicans Hate Disney's America?
Allen, Charlotte
Why Don't Republicans Hate Disney's America? On a whole range of issues, conservatives and liberals should be standing together BY CHARLOTTE ALLEN In late December, the Walt Disney Company...
...Conservatives should work to destroy agribusiness, which mistreats domestic animals, poisons the land with chemicals, gluts the markets with mediocre foodstuffs, and strangles small farms...
...their name—and also for a suspicion of government...
...If NAFTA takes away your job or your farm, that's the "creative destruction" that makes capitalism work over the long run...
...Most of today's conservatives ignore this counsel and instead promote an aggressively interventionist U.S...
...The view of today's conservatives: plow it under...
...Conservatives should favor legalizing drugs, or, at the very least, leaving their regulation up to local communities...
...Conservatives tend to be wary of environmentalism, and rightly so, for it often translates into snarls of federal regulation...
...That argument—an appeal to private compassion and to reciprocal loyalties between employer and employee rather than to written rules—would have made business interests (and most liberals) queasy, but it would have represented a genuinely conservative way to shore up families...
...Disney's America can and will be the first step in Virginia's renaissance," he told state legislators early this year...
...Small businesses...
...Giving peace a chance...
...Conservatives are supposed to stand for a love of tradition—hence Charlotte Allen is a contributing editor of City Journal, an urban affairs quarterly...
...The reason for the disjuncture between what conservatives call themselves and what they believe is that there is very little about American conservatism nowadays that would be recognizable as conservative anywhere else...
...Relationships with others are notably fragile...
...A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views," he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France...
...Protecting the environment, for example, ought to be a conservative cause...
...The right can't face the fact of environmental degradation and the enormous power of corporations...
...So, Burkeans of the world, unite...
...There's a certain Philistine streak among them," observes Philip Terzian, a conservative columnist for the Providence Journal...
...But far from needing the work, the Haymarket area is already prosperous on a modest scale, and metropolitan Washington in general has the nation's highest per-capita living standard...
...Deeply conservative strands also run through American society, from its rural and small-town communities to the family-centered immigrant cultures that fill its cities...
...Diversity and tolerance...
...we've progressed beyond them,'" recalls Gary Dorrien, author of The Neoconservative Mind...
...Yet The Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial writers have taken up the cause of Ewart Yearwood, the Swarthmore College student in trouble with school authorities for allegedly making a pest of himself around a female freshman...
...The Republican president and WASP aristocrat Theodore Roosevelt practically invented the word "conservation...
...The totalitarian "war on drugs" has done nothing to reduce their availability...
...So what's a real conservative to do...
...Without sacrificing their distaste for the Leviathan, conservatives can ally themselves with private-sector organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, the Nature Conservancy, and associations of local people who live off the land or water they are trying to preserve...
...And many paleos have their own imagined governmental and technological fixes for social problems: immigration curbs and population control, to name a few...
...Indeed, the former Reagan administration official and current Republican presidential hopeful William Bennett edited Washington's mind-your-own-business sentiments right out of the version of the Farewell Address he included in his Gibraltar-size tome The Book of Virtues...
...When Allen talks about Haymarket, though, he doesn't talk about anything resembling conserving...
...The movement to save the Chesapeake Bay is a perfect example...
...Family farms...
...Although they talk a great deal about personal responsibility and ethics, most of today's conservatives refuse to support the traditional social and economic arrangements—small towns, extended families, generational roots, secure livelihoods, and respect for the land—that create the stability in which a sense of duty to others thrives...
...Conservatives should take a second look at Lani Guinier, an innovative legal thinker who invoked a Southern agrarian, John C. Calhoun, to argue for assurance that racial minorities receive voting representation...
...The answer: align with or at least talk to liberals on issues that the left has adopted but that more properly belong to the right...
...Disney's America" is scheduled to occupy 3,000 acres of land and has a certain grotesque irony about it—not the least of which is the fact that the Washington area burgeons with landmarks of real American history, including the Civil War's Manassas battlefield a few miles away...
...Burke viewed people's obligations toward each other not in legalistic terms but in terms of "fealty"—mutual duties that bind people of every social class into "little platoons" of immediate and personal loyalties...
...Country squire George Washington, perhaps the most conservative of the Founding Fathers, cautioned the country in his Farewell Address to avoid entangling herself in foreign wars except in "extraordinary emergencies...
...Just for starters, don't let Wal Mart wreck your downtown...
...I've never heard anything so un-conservative in my life...
...Conservatives by all rights should be defenders of traditional communities, from black churches to urban ethnic enclaves...
...But you never heard any of the Republicans who opposed the federal leave law suggest that employers might have a moral if not a legal obligation to allow mothers to stay home with newborn or sick children without losing badly needed jobs...
...So far, that attention has not come from conservatives themselves...
...Let's bring back George Washington's foreign policy...
...The Wall Street Journal peevishly opposed those salutary clauses...
...No more subsidies for land-grant colleges, where our taxes pay for research for corporate farmers...
...For example, the Bush presidential campaign in 1992 made family values a rhetorical linchpin, but it was Bill Clinton who actually appeared to be doing something for parents and children when he pushed a federal family leave law through Congress soon after taking office last year...
...Good manners...
...Cultural diversity as properly understood (not as a cover for pseudo-Marxist Third Worldism) promotes the growth of autonomous communities with their own ways of life...
...But most conservatives nowadays call conservationists "tree hug-gers" and make fun of endangered species...
...The left—they're self-righteous and self-serving in their critique, but that doesn't mean they aren't right...
...Allen's rhetoric is typical of those whom we call "conservatives" in America these days, or at least of the conservatives who figure prominently in politics and the media...
...Figuring out a name for this new conservative movement will be difficult ("neoconservatism" has already been taken), but it deserves attention nonetheless...
...All that movement conservatives have to say to blue-collar blacks and ethnics is: Not to worry...
...He talks growth...
...Disney promises that the park's attractions will generate as many as 19,000 new jobs—of the low-paying, transient-attracting, tourist-service variety...
...For example, Edmund Burke, the benchmark philosopher of English-speaking conservatism, would have been horrified at the very idea of creative destruction...
...Here is a partial list of genuine conservative causes that movement conservatives ignore: >- The environment...
...goods are made to be used up and discarded...
...However, there is nothing "conservative" about polluting the air and water and destroying the habitats of animals and birds...
...Big spending, government entwinement in private enterprise, and the certain destruction of all that is left in Northern Virginia of a traditional, family-and-church-centered, rural way of life—sounds like political liberalism at its overbearing worst...
...However, Disney's America's biggest booster is no liberal but Virginia's new Republican governor, George Allen, who ran for office in 1993 on a conservative platform of old-fashioned morality and fiscal restraint...
...Conservatives ought to champion propriety and good manners...
...Just as there are "ne-oliberals" who find common ground with conservatives on such issues as crime and en-trepreneurship, there ought to be conservatives who take up causes we now associate strictly with liberals...
...Drug legalization has a respectable conservative provenance: The Austrian free market economist Ludwig von Mises was an early supporter...
...Clinton's 1993 tax law increased the burden for almost everyone, but it did cut small businesses' capital gains tax...
...national interest...
...The Cold War reconciled conservatives to big government via the defense buildup, and it also brought in waves of neoconservatives: welfare-state Democrats and even ex-Marxists disenchanted with the left's softness on Soviet totalitarianism...
...Worst of all, Disney, a multibillion dollar corporation that almost never fails to turn a profit, expects the commonwealth of Virginia (that is, its taxpayers) to underwrite part of the theme park's costs, shelling out $163.2 million to build roads, train employees, and even advertise the attraction...
...All this should change...
...Burke cherished individual liberty, but he saw it as the glorious end-product of a civilized society that could enforce its mores by long-held convention and custom rather than by coercion...
...Conservatives should oppose legalistic sexual harassment codes but encourage all extra-legal efforts to force people to behave like ladies and gentlemen...
...Among them: environmental protection, stopping the drug war, saving the family farm, and rooting out consumerism...
...The leftist critique of modernism is OK, even if you agree with none of the left's answers," says Chilton Williamson of Chronicles magazine, a pa-leoconservative monthly...
...Consumerism...
...Nor is conservation necessarily incompatible with hunting, fishing, farming, and economic prosperity...
...Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization," Lasch wrote in a 1990 afterword to his famous 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism...
...Stopping the drug war...
...He talks progress...
...reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images...
...The Bush presidential campaign in 1992 made family values a rhetorical linchpin, but it was Bill Clinton who actually appeared to be doing something for parents and children when he pushed a federal family leave law through Congress soon after taking office...
...foreign policy reminiscent of Wilsonian do-gooder Democratic internationalism...
...Conservatives should also line up with liberals to battle corporate America's outsized political clout and stranglehold on the regulatory agencies...
...Conservatives should generally let other people fight their own wars, intervening only when there is a direct threat to the U.S...
...Nonetheless, genuine conservatives ought to be willing to confront phony conservatism, if only to keep liberals from always seizing the high ground...
...But keep in mind that some of your fiercest enemies are likely to be other people who mistakenly call themselves conservatives...
...Instead, conservatives function as shills for big business and, as if America weren't already the most prosperous country on Earth, "growth"—a perpetual frenzy of economic development designed to make life ever more expensive and transform people into slaves of consumption...
...Thus, although conservatives fret about America's moral decline (which they blame on a leftish "adversary culture" of influential intellectuals), in order to find a serious moral critique of the state of current society you have to turn to a socialist such as the late Christopher Lasch...
...Pushed to the margin were the paleoconservatives—Southern agrarians and others...
...Thus, with American movement conservatism of every stripe in philosophical disarray, it is not surprising that genuine conservatives often find more to their liking in The Nation than in National Review...
...On a whole range of issues, conservatives and liberals should be standing together BY CHARLOTTE ALLEN In late December, the Walt Disney Company announced a plan to build an American history theme park in Haymarket, Virginia, a rural town of 500 just beyond the cordon of fake-farmhouse tract developments, glass-towered office parks, and shopping strips that make up the suburbs of Washington, D.C...
...Then conservatives wring their hands and castigate the "Hollywood elite" for turning young people into illiterate MTV-heads—as if everyone in Hollywood weren't working for the very capitalistic enterprises that conservatives otherwise commend...
...The law was arguably a mistake, and it certainly represented big government at its most heavyhanded (it overrode a plethora of state laws already requiring employers to grant unpaid leave for pregnancy and family illnesses...
...We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us," continued Lasch...
...But America also has the Republican Party, with its strong pro-business tilt that sometimes, but not always, coincides with real conservatism...
...I was at an American Enterprise Institute thing where someone said, 'Maybe we just don't need family farms anymore...
...And how about that incubator of hard work, thrift, and other Bennett-touted virtues—the family farm...
...Nonetheless, it is liberals who have appropriated both the word "communitarian" and the votes of working-class people who are deeply conservative on social issues but fret about their livelihoods...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 5
