Can Conservatives Govern?
FOR MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED YEARS, SINCE THE FOUNDING OF THE Republic, Americans have debated, often fiercely, the central question of American politics: How much government do we need? There has been no serious dispute, except from radical antifederalists in the beginning and radical libertarians in the modern era, that we require at least some government to ensure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“If men were angels,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “no government would be necessary.”1 But the founders recognized the darker side of human nature and attempted in the Constitution to forge a balance between liberty, for which they had fought a revolution, and order, which would protect the rights of all, not just the most powerful. They sought to create what had never before existed: a government, as Abraham Lincoln later phrased it, of the people, by the people, and for the people.
The essential problem confronting the founders, political scientist James Q. Wilson has written, was “how to devise a government strong enough to preserve order but not so strong that it would threaten liberty.”2 Their solution was a complex system of checks and balances among the three branches of the national government and between the national government and the states. The Constitution was a blueprint for a never-ending struggle among all these parties to determine the domestic and foreign policies of our government. But how do you prevent the concentration of power in the hands of any one “faction,” to use Madison’s term? The answer, for the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, lay in neither democracy nor aristocracy but a “federal republic.”
Accepting human nature as it was and not as they wished it to be, the founders decided to set ambition against ambition and interest against interest. In this protracted conflict, “the private interest of every individual,” Madison argued, “may be a sentinel over the public rights.”3 And with power divided between the states and the national government, “the different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.”4
It was not intended that the American government should be neat or efficient or predictable. It was intended that it should be a republic—in modern terms, a representative democracy—in which the government would be as good and fair and honest as the representatives chosen by the people could make it.
This was all uncharted territory. There were no historical precedents for a government that derived its powers from the consent of the governed. Even the founders, as Wilson points out, came away from the 1787 convention with conflicting views of what was meant by a federal republic.
Alexander Hamilton thought that the national government was “the superior and leading force in political affairs” and that its powers therefore should be broadly defined and liberally construed. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, felt that the central government, although undoubtedly important, was the product of an agreement among the states that, through the people, were “the ultimate sovereigns.”5
Madison was in the middle, supporting a strong national government at the 1787 convention (alarmed by the turmoil and uncertainty generated by the ineffective Articles of Confederation) but later becoming a champion of states’ rights. However, even when trying to win ratification of the Constitution, he wrote in Federalist No. 45: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”6
Was there a “true” conservative among the founders? Russell Kirk suggested that it was John Adams, who taught the value of “good and practical laws, transcending the passions of the hour,” and who kept the American government “one of laws, not of men.”7 No less important to Adams than the rule of law was the practice of virtue. Indeed, our second president wrote:
Public virtue is the only foundation of republics. There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honor, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty.8
But public virtue depends on private character. And for the best definition of American character, we must turn to the historic embodiment of America, George Washington. Throughout his public career, our pater patria maintained that the inalienable rights that Americans enjoyed required a commitment to moral duty and civic virtue.
Washington always sought, as political historian Matthew Spalding has written, to inculcate balance and moderation in the conduct of America’s domestic and international affairs. In his Farewell Address, Washington expressed the hope that his prudential advice would be remembered so as to “moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, [and] to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”9
Today, however, no matter what their differences at the time may have been, almost all of the founders would call themselves conservatives, not liberals. Some would be traditional conservatives, others libertarians; but none, not even Hamilton, would have endorsed Franklin Roosevelt’s call for a national government that intervened directly in the economy, created giant social welfare programs, and helped specific groups (like organized labor) to obtain greater economic and political power.
Limited government, individual responsibility, equal opportunity, a careful balance between liberty and law, a belief in God, a commitment to public virtue: these are the core beliefs, bounded by the Constitution, on which American conservatism rests and by which its leaders like Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich have strived to govern and politick. They did not always succeed, being human, but their failures were usually because they failed conservatism, not because conservatism failed them.
Can conservatives govern? Of course they can, as the solid accomplishments of the 80th Congress under Robert Taft, of the Reagan presidency, and of the 104th Congress under Newt Gingrich demonstrated. In 1946 and 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, cut government spending, reduced income taxes, and supported the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, building blocks of the bipartisan policy of containment. From 1981 through 1989, Ronald Reagan presided over the longest economic expansion in peacetime by defying Keynesian economics and cutting taxes and limiting the growth of government. In 1995 and 1996, Congress did away with New Deal-era farm subsidies, passed a presidential line-item veto, transformed federal welfare policy by giving states broad authority to run welfare programs, and ended, for the first time, a federal entitlement program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Sometimes, to be sure, conservatives have failed, as with the narrow defeat of the Bricker Amendment in the 1950s, the doubling of the national debt in the 1980s, and the failure to pass a balanced budget amendment in the 1990s, but they never gave up.
As the minority in Congress throughout most of the post-World War II period, conservatives usually played the role of the loyal opposition. They prevented repeal of section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act in the 1950s, warned that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would lead to affirmative action, blocked President Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan in the 1970s, and forced President Clinton in the 1990s to concede that the era of big government was over. But when they had the majority in the Senate, as during most of the 1980s, they helped President Reagan produce a remarkable record: historic tax reform, unprecedented economic growth, and a peaceful end to a cold war that had brought the world close to a hot war many times.
Along the way, congressional conservatives learned that sometimes the best way to govern is to govern as little as possible. After winning control of Congress in 1994, they adopted the first rule of Democrats who had retained power in Washington for forty years: “Get home early and often and never stop campaigning.” To some hard-core grassroots conservatives, columnist Donald Lambro wrote, “this strategy seems like a cynical abdication of principle and responsibility.”10
But for those who think (as the founders did) that the less Congress does the better and that building political power for a stronger offense in the near future against big government is shrewd tactics, the Gingrich-Lott strategy was sensible strategy. Of all people, conservatives should be willing to applaud, when appropriate, a passive rather than an activist congress.
Conservatives have also demonstrated impressively that they can govern at the state level. As Governor John Engler of Michigan has pointed out, Republican governors and legislatures have been balancing budgets, cutting taxes, and making government “more responsive to the people” for the last decade. That explains why more Americans are represented by Republican governors than ever before in America’s history: some 70 percent of the population.11
Governor John Rowland of Connecticut turned a $174 million deficit into a $74 million surplus in just one year. Governor John V. Voinovich of Ohio held state spending to its lowest rate of growth in four decades. Governor Arne Carlson of Minnesota erased a deficit of $1.8 billion, and Engler transformed a similar $1.8 billion deficit into a surplus of over $1 billion. And while they were holding down spending, they were also cutting taxes. Since 1991, Michigan has cut taxes more often than any other state—twenty-one times, a modern record. The average family of four, estimates Engler, “has been able to keep $2,000 more in their wallets every year.”12
Indeed, the Michigan governor argues convincingly that Clinton owes his 1996 reelection and his persistent high approval ratings to the prosperity generated by the conservative spending and tax policies of the nation’s Republican governors. They have also led the way in the area of welfare reform. No other GOP governor has received more attention, and justifiably, than Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and his “Work Not Welfare” program. The program requires welfare recipients to participate in job training to receive benefits. Since Wisconsin implemented the Thompson reforms in 1987, its welfare caseload has decreased by 49.2 percent. Michigan’s caseload has declined by 22 percent over the same period.13
The message that Engler, Thompson, and other conservative governors are sending to the federal government is pointed: “Free the states! Unshackle us from overweening federal control. Let us in the states govern as the U.S. Constitution meant us to govern.”14 It is a powerful message, backed by the unquestioned political success of its messengers, that Washington dares not ignore. And it provides an unequivocal answer of yes to the question: Can conservatives govern?
But modern liberals have shown that they cannot govern wisely, wed as they are to the socialist ideal. So convinced were they in the 1930s that government, and only government, could save the nation that they proposed a radical break with American tradition—nothing less than a new contract between the government and the governed. Their model was not the American Revolution, rational and grounded in the law, but the French Revolution, utopian and guided by the impulse of the moment. The New Deal, presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt explained in October 1932, was not a political slogan but “a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of Government.” Government, FDR declared, now “has a final responsibility for the well-being of its citizens.”15
With those fateful words, “a final responsibility,” and Roosevelt’s subsequent election, America began a fifty-year experiment in ever larger government and ever less individual responsibility that produced a swarm of executive agencies, a thicket of federal statutes and bureaucratic regulations, and a 90 percent solution to almost everything, from taxes to subsidies. The liberal experiment was not just any old failure—it was a multi-trillion-dollar failure. In the thirty years following the birth of the Great Society in 1965, the federal government spent $5.4 trillion trying to eliminate poverty in America.
“For $5.4 trillion,” Heritage analyst Robert Rector pointed out, “one could purchase every factory, all the manufacturing equipment, and every office building in the United States.” That is not all: “With the leftover funds, one could go on to purchase every airline, every railroad, every trucking firm, the entire commercial maritime fleet, every telephone, television, and radio company, every power company, every hotel, and every retail and wholesale store in the entire nation.”16 And all the while, low-income families disintegrated, illegitimacy soared, and crime in the inner city multiplied.
Given such a horrendous record, conservatism’s remedy was simple and obvious: Roll back the liberal welfare state. Conservative politicians preached unceasingly that government was not the solution but the problem. Libertarian thinkers argued that government had no business underwriting public housing, controlling social security, and running national parks. Popularizers asserted that Americans should stop propping up the “manifestly failed” public school system.17
But “life in this target-rich environment,” George Will wrote, turned out to be “too easy” for conservatives, who did not always consider the extended impact of their efforts.18 There were unintended consequences of conservatism’s antigovernment crusade. Some Americans began to believe that government was always the problem. Antipathy and then antagonism spread, affecting everything from voter turnout to respect for government as an institution. Conservatives were obliged to explain that they were for limiting, not eliminating, government.
Some Americans concluded that conservatives, in their rush to wipe out fifty years of welfarism, apparently did not care what happened to people who were dependent on welfare. One prominent conservative urged his colleagues to reassure the people that conservatives did not just know how to balance the budget or quote from the Federalist Papers but also cared deeply about the future of every American.19
Editor William Kristol of the Weekly Standard and his colleague David Brooks would ask a pertinent question: “How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?” Government does have its great and legitimate purposes, they argued, and we should be guided not just by anger but by “a love of country and informed patriotism.” They urged a revival of “national greatness” conservatism, modeled on the example of Theodore Roosevelt: a debatable choice because, as political historian Matthew Spalding has pointed out, TR’s New Nationalism called for “an activist state with strong regulatory powers,” a goal at cross purposes with modern conservatism. While conservatives might find Roosevelt’s “brand of vigorous leadership refreshing,” conceded Spalding, a better and more recent statesman to emulate was Ronald Reagan.20
Starting in 1989, traditional conservatives, libertarians, neoconservatives, and social conservatives began fussing and feuding like so many Hatfields and McCoys. They missed the soothing presence of Ronald Reagan and the unifying threat of communism. As soon as the Berlin Wall came down, conservatives immediately began building walls between one another. Just four years after Reagan’s departure, there was open talk of a “conservative crackup.” Editor-columnist R. Emmett Tyrrell wrote scathingly about organizations multiplying by the dozens to promote “The Supply Side! Our Judeo-Christian Heritage! The Black Tie Fund-Raising Banquet!”21
Often violent disagreements erupted between conservatives about trade, immigration, and the direction of U.S. foreign policy. One outspoken off-shoot was the paleoconservatives, who took particular delight in savaging neoconservatives. The paleoconservatives, who included political activist Llewelyn Rockwell of the Mises Institute and one-time National Review editor Joseph Sobran among their leadership, spawned the John Randolph Club and the America First Committee. They attempted to forge an alliance with paleolibertarians like Murray Rothbard, who had once argued that even a city’s traffic lights should be privately owned. Casting about for a political leader, Rothbard declared at a 1992 meeting of the John Randolph Club, “With Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy…. We shall repeal the twentieth century.”22
But with Buchanan’s failure to win even one Republican primary in 1992 or 1996 and Rothbard’s death in 1995, the paleoconservatives became no more than a small political offshoot. They were reduced to arguing, as historian Paul Gottfried did, that President Reagan “had handed over his administration to global Democrats and Eastern Republicans.”23 Most conservatives, and Americans, noting the sustained prosperity of the 1980s and the collapse of communism, would shake their heads in bewilderment at such rhetoric. Equally strained was the paleoconservative charge that a “neoconservative empire” controlled the conservative movement from New York to Washington and beyond.24 In truth, conservatism’s fundamental political problem, following the end of the cold war and the departure of President Reagan, was that no one was in charge of the movement.
Slowly conservatives began reconstructing what political strategist Ralph Reed called the three-legged coalition of “economic free-marketeers, antigovernment Perot supporters, and believers in conservative family values.”25 The last group turned out to be in many ways the most important. Despite the three straight presidential triumphs of 1980, 1984, and 1988, conservatives discovered yet again that man does not live by politics alone. They looked around and saw Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs in museums, heard Snoop Doggy Dogg’s pornographic lyrics on radio, noticed Calvin Klein’s sexually provocative ads in magazines, watched “Ellen” coming out on television, and found themselves agreeing with Robert Bork that “American popular culture is in a free fall, with the bottom not yet in sight.”26
Conservatives had been right about communism (it was evil) and the welfare state (it was a chimera), but they had neglected what T. S. Eliot had written to his friend Russell Kirk: “A decline in private morality is certain to be followed in the long run by a decline in public and political morality also.”27
In the wake of the 1964 Goldwater defeat, conservatives had resolved to concentrate most of their energy, attention, and money on national politics, reasoning that political success could be achieved by winning the presidency, the preeminent American political symbol. They did not have the resources to fight both a political and a cultural war, and they gambled that American culture would resist Sodom and Gomorrah successfully with the support of mediating institutions like the family, the church, and the community. Believing as the founders did in the fallen nature of man, they should have known better.
At the 1992 Republican National Convention, Pat Buchanan demanded that attention be paid to the degraded state of American culture. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” he thundered, “for the soul of America. It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself.”28 Buchanan was attacked in much of the mass media for fostering an atmosphere of “hate and fear” (a Newsweek headline), but conservatives agreed with him that while America had been winning the war against communism, it had been losing the war for American culture.29 A week later, Newsweek reported that its own national survey revealed that two-thirds of the population believed something was “morally wrong” with the country.30
The conservatives enthusiastically entered the lists of the cultural war. The Family Research Council (FRC), founded in 1981 by family advocate James Dobson, became an influential Washington presence in the early 1990s under the leadership of Gary Bauer. Bauer had learned the way Washington works as director of the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan. In 1991, he chaired the Citizens Committee to Confirm Clarence Thomas, which played a major role in preventing the black nominee for the Supreme Court from being “Borked” by liberals. The FRC (and its 200,000 members), explained Bauer, focuses on “the sanctity of human life, the quality of our schools, and the role of government and how it impacts families.”31
Another powerful voice of the profamily movement is James Dobson’s weekly radio program, Focus on the Family, heard by 3 to 5 million listeners in fifty-eight countries around the world. Although it concentrates on helping families with “practical solutions to everyday problems,” Focus on the Family has become more active politically out of necessity. “We could really be facing cultural meltdown,” says Dobson, “if we don’t change.”32
In 1994, therefore, when the 103rd Democratic Congress was considering a federal education bill containing a provision that would have invited government regulation of home schoolers (representing about 15 percent of Focus on the Family’s audience), Dobson warned his listeners. Within seventy-two hours, about 800,000 calls opposing the home-schooling provision were received by Congress. A week later, the House voted 421 to 1 to strip home schooling from the legislation.33
The largest women’s organization in America today is not the liberal National Organization for Women but the conservative Concerned Women for America, founded by Beverly LaHaye. With 600,000 members and an annual budget of $10 million, Concerned Women has materially affected public attitudes about pornography and partial-birth abortion. While conceding the proportions of the job ahead, LaHaye is optimistic and feels that American women “are coming over to our conception of feminism—an appreciation of marriage and families.”34
A major part of the work of the Media Research Center (MRC), headed by L. Brent Bozell III, is devoted to America’s culture war. Through publications like MediaWatch and TV, etc. and projects like the Parents Television Council, the center tracks the mass media’s treatment of social and cultural issues. In 1993, for example, MRC archives revealed that of eighteen thousand stories on the nightly news programs, only 212 (a little over 1 percent) dealt with religion. In the same year, there were 150 stories on violence in front of abortion clinics but only one unfavorable mention of the violent nature of abortion itself—in a story about Bosnia. With an annual budget of just under $5 million and more than 120,000 hours of programming in its video archive, MRC has become in barely a decade one of the most important media watchdogs in America. “We are not asking the media to be biased in conservatives’ favor,” explains Bozell, “but we do demand that they bring balance to political reporting and work to restore traditional values to Hollywood.”35
The MRC’s newest attempt to achieve that balance is the Conservative News Service, an on-line, full-time news operation intended to fill the vacuum left by the establishment media’s pursuit of the sensational at the expense of important stories. Launched in June 1998, CNS has an annual budget of about $1.8 million and aims to provide an Internet alternative to the Cable News Network.36
Profamily organizations create a climate in which politicians are willing to speak out. Vice President Dan Quayle, for example, roundly criticized the counterculture in a May 1992 speech, linking recent riots in Los Angeles to “the breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility and social order in too many areas of our society.” He singled out Murphy Brown, a character in a highly popular television situation comedy, for “mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘life style choice.’” At the time, liberals uniformly mocked Quayle’s critique of Murphy Brown, some seeing it as an attack on single mothers and working mothers, others calling it a “far-fetched attempt” to place blame for the ills of American society on Hollywood.37
But just a year later, the Atlantic Monthly, whose liberal credentials are impeccable, published a cover article entitled “Dan Quayle Was Right.” Sociologist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead discussed two social science findings that affirmed Quayle’s thesis: The dissolution of two-parent families was “harmful” to large numbers of children, and the increasing number of single-parent and stepparent families “dramatically” weakened and undermined society.38
Presidential hopeful Steve Forbes now spends as much time courting the Christian Coalition as he does the Cato Institute. And the Religious Right likes what it hears: The millionaire publisher was interrupted seven times by standing ovations at the Christian Coalition’s annual convention in September 1997. Forbes brought the delegates to their feet by calling for a flat tax, a ban on partial-birth abortions, resistance to assisted suicide, and no legalization of drugs. He ended by quoting President Calvin Coolidge on the importance of moral foundations to America:
We do not need more material development, we need more spiritual development.
We do not need more intellectual power, we need more moral power.
We do not need more knowledge, we need more character.
We do not need more government, we need more culture.
We do not need more law, we need more religion.
We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen.39
When describing his vision of a contract for 2000, Newt Gingrich invariably included three social goals: “a country which is virtually drug-free, where every child is learning at their best rate, and where practically all children are born into families that can nurture and raise them.” Gingrich was hopeful that he and other Republican leaders could persuade every GOP candidate in 2000, from the person running for the White House down to the courthouse, to sign a new contract that moves America toward “a faith-based, healthier, economically faster-growing, more decentralized, less-governmental society.”40
House majority leader Dick Armey has also seen the light. He urged House Republicans, in a January 1998 memorandum, to help America “recover [its] moral emphasis.” Often described as the apostle of the flat tax, Armey surprised many political observers by saying flatly: “I believe the issues of values and morality will be the dominant issues of 1998 and 2000.” The Republican leader pointed to a recent poll of the Republican National Committee in which 71 percent of the respondents said there was a “moral crisis” in America.41 What the former professor of economics did not reveal was that not long ago he had become a born-again Christian.
Armey suggested a six-point legislative agenda that included tax cuts to strengthen the family, expansion of charter schools, more effective drug rehabilitation, a ban on partial-birth abortion, and making an end of religious persecution “a high priority of our foreign policy.” Acknowledging that on many issues there was no place for a direct federal role, Armey nevertheless called for “[appropriate] legislation, good oversight, and proper use of our bully pulpit” to refocus public attention on the moral problems in America.42
Just as conservatives have always opposed centralized economic planning, so do they oppose centralized political planning. The conservative movement is and always has been a loosely bound movement made up of, in Morton Blackwell’s words, “activists, scholars, donors and organizational entrepreneurs held together by … shared philosophy, shared enemies, and shared experiences.”43 The often spirited debate about the future of conservatism between the different kinds of conservatives is a sign of the movement’s vitality. Debate and even disagreement can strengthen a movement as long as they are based on principle and not driven by a desire for political power. The political goal of conservatives is, as it always has been, the forging and maintaining of a winning national coalition broad-minded enough, as Phyllis Schlafly says, “to allow people to vote for our candidates for the reason of their choice.”44
Will conservatives succeed, or is the conservative revolution over? Where is conservatism headed: for the mountaintop or the ash heap?
Certain elements are necessary for any successful political movement. First, it must have a clearly defined, consistent philosophy. And it is a given that conservatives of all stripes honor the Constitution and its carefully established system of checks and balances. They agree that government should be limited, that individuals should be free, and that there can be no lasting liberty without virtue—public and private. Although there are differences between traditionalists and libertarians—for example, over how much to reduce the size of the federal government—there is no quarrel that it has become a Leviathan that must be significantly reduced. In this respect, congressional leaders Dennis Hastert and Trent Lott are in willing tandem with presidential hopefuls George W. Bush, Steve Forbes, and Lamar Alexander.
Second, a political movement must have a broad-based and broad-minded national constituency. Conservatives are independent, individualistic, a naturally contentious lot. They like to argue about ideas and institutions with their friends as well as their adversaries. They are uncomfortable with compromise and usually scorn accommodation. But they have come together and stayed together when the times demanded it and the right leadership encouraged it—like Robert Taft in the 1950s, Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.
The conservative movement includes, as activist Grover Norquist puts it, the “Leave Us Alone Coalition”: small businessmen harassed by multiplying government regulations and taxes; home owners threatened by rising property taxes; parents who oppose the distribution of condoms in their children’s schools; home schoolers who want to teach their children without government interference; gun owners who are angered by violations of their Second Amendment rights; evangelical Protestants, traditional Catholics, and Orthodox Jews who believe in the right to life; workers who are punished by affirmative action; young Americans who resent their earnings being siphoned off to bolster a tottering social security system; and veterans who love their country but wonder whether liberals do.45
Third, a movement must have a sound financial base. Thanks to technical proficiency and political success, the number of identifiable conservative donors has grown and grown and grown, from a few thousand in the 1950s to at least 5 million in the 1990s. The fiscal strength of conservative organizations, including the Heritage Foundation (annual budget of over $25 million), the Christian Coalition ($20 million), Concerned Women for America ($10 million), the Cato Institute ($10 million), and the Media Research Center (almost $5 million), is impressive. If you include frequent allies like the National Federation of Independent Business ($70 million), the National Rifle Association ($125 million), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($70 million), the conservative movement would be rated “triple A” by Moody’s.
Fourth, a political movement must be media savvy, knowing how to communicate effectively with the public through its own media as well as the mainstream media. Here there is a paradox: Conservatives have displayed distrust, anger, and contempt toward the mass media for decades. Yet the number one columnist in America (measured by the number of newspapers that carry his column) is conservative George Will, who appears in more than 500 daily papers and is also a prominent television commentator and best-selling author. The number two syndicated columnist is also a conservative: Cal Thomas, with 450 daily newspapers.
The number one radio talk show host is conservative Rush Limbaugh, heard by approximately 20 million Americans each week. Nearly tied with Limbaugh is Dr. Laura Schlessinger, whose advice on social and cultural problems is firmly right of center. Other conservatives in the top ten talk shows are G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, and Ollie North. The host of the longest-running public affairs program on PBS (almost a quarter of a century) is William F. Buckley, Jr. National Review (175,000) and the American Spectator (186,000) continue to vie for the largest circulation among journals of public opinion. The magazine with the largest circulation in the world (27 million) is Reader’s Digest. Weekly television talk shows like The McLaughlin Group, hosted by John McLaughlin, a former Washington editor of National Review, and The Capital Gang, created by political columnist Robert Novak, consistently receive high ratings and have no difficulty in obtaining Fortune 500 corporate sponsors.
Only on the evening television newscasts and nightly television magazine programs (60 Minutes, 20/20, Dateline) do liberals predominate, but their share of the viewing audience has dropped dramatically over the past thirty years—from close to 90 percent to barely 50 percent—because of competition from CNN, C-SPAN, local news programs, and other cable programs.
C-SPAN is a unique medium with a relatively small but highly sophisticated, activist audience. Under the scrupulously fair direction of founder Brian Lamb, C-SPAN helped Newt Gingrich and the Conservative Opportunity Society become nationally known and has given conservative groups and causes equal access, in contrast to mainstream television, still run by a liberal media elite.
Which brings us to the fifth and last element of a political movement: experienced, effective, principled leadership. For the first time in fifty years, there is no undisputed conservative leader—no Robert Taft, no Barry Goldwater, no Ronald Reagan—and no designated successor like George Bush or Bob Dole. For the new millennium, there will be a new generation of conservative leaders.
There are almost as many contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 as there are primaries, but they all have one thing in common (beside their desire to be president): they are conservative. Gone are the days when Bob Taft or Barry Goldwater was the only conservative candidate confronted by a phalanx of liberal competitors. The possibilities for 2000 include Governor George W. Bush of Texas, millionaire magazine publisher Steve Forbes, Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri, and possibly ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It is a sign of our media-dominated times that three contenders—Forbes, Patrick J. Buchanan, and Gary Bauer—have never been elected to any public office. But many conservatives argue that given the poor showing of the last two Republican nominees, both of them veteran officeholders, it is time for a citizen-politician.
Once one of these aspirants rises to the top, most of the frustration and uncertainty that characterize the conservative movement will fade away, as they did when Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan became the acknowledged leaders of American conservatives.
Conservatives in and out of Washington are generally optimistic about the future of the movement and the nation, qualified as always by an acceptance of man’s nonangelic side. They see conservatism as intellectually dominant, as well as politically dominant.46 They argue that conservative ideas have been proved correct by the failures of the welfare state in America and the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.47
It is hard not to be optimistic about America, argues television and film producer Neal B. Freeman, “when even a modestly equipped American seems to have a fifty-fifty shot to succeed wildly—and a thousand foreigners would pay handsomely to take his place, no questions asked.”48 One pessimist, at least in the near term, is national security expert Frank Gaffney, who laments the lack of a successor to Ronald Reagan who “exemplifies his personal courage and subscribes to his political vision.”49
Some conservatives even question whether a conservative movement exists. They argue that in the process of defeating communism, the Constitution was destroyed through the creation of a military-industrial complex and the whole character of the nation was changed. America, they say, is no longer a nation but a vast archipelago of disconnected human beings.50
But most conservatives are more sanguine, pointing to the success of conservative policies since 1981, the failure of liberal social programs, and the large conservative infrastructure that has been put in place since the late 1970s.51 In 1997 alone, as columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out, AFDC, a sixty-year-old welfare entitlement, was abolished; California outlawed affirmative action; and the Supreme Court unanimously overturned lower courts’ attempts to legalize physician-assisted suicide.52 Phyllis Schlafly, who supported Taft in 1952, Goldwater in 1964, and Reagan in 1976, who stopped the equal rights amendment when everyone said its ratification was inevitable, and under whose auspices the first profamily rally was held in April 1976, says simply, “The conservative movement is tremendous today!”53
Such optimism is based on the remarkable political triumphs of the 1980s and the 1990s and the bright constellation of philosophers, popularizers, and politicians who today lead the conservative movement. Conservatives have always known that in politics, there are no permanent victories and no permanent defeats, only permanent things like wisdom, courage, prudence, justice, and, overarching them all, liberty. Liberals used to say that conservatism was out of date, but that is like saying that the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, and the United States Constitution are out of date. It never made much sense, and in the wake of the defeat of communism and the continuing rollback of the welfare state, it now makes no sense at all. The conservative revolution is here to stay.