CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE BEGINNING
OF IDEOLOGY
Long ago, the “end of ideology” seemed so obvious as to be a cliche. It was thought to be less an immediate condition of the postwar era than a reflection of the American character itself. Neither socialism nor continental conservatism had made successful transatlantic voyages. What was called “socialism,” even after the fall of the Communist Party USA, was mostly a memory of a distorted image of a foreign model. And what passed as conservatism was eccentric and irrational, and left no trace. Because America lacked a feudal background and a fixed class system, virtually all social scientists and historians agreed that an ideological politics here was, quite simply, impossible. The historian Daniel Boorstin celebrated this as “the genius of American politics.”1
But even those who offered penetrating insights into American exceptionalism were still bound by an intellectual Eurocentrism. They could not conceive of a native brand of ideological politics because they defined it exclusively in foreign terms. The historians of the “consensus” school were captives of the comparative mentality, unable to disenthrall themselves from Europe, which remained the final authority. They argued convincingly about the uniqueness of America, but then short-circuited their own notion. To them, an ideological politics, a politics motivated by a comprehensive system of beliefs, was unimaginable; a mythological politics, a politics advanced by turning those beliefs into a story beyond history, was considered even more ludicrous. Thus, because they did not fit the proper European slots, the conservative movement and the Reagan presidency could not be explained by the logic of the “consensus” school. “People who talk about an ‘end of ideology’ are never ready for the next war of ideology,” said Edwin Feulner, the Heritage Foundation president. If the “consensus” historians had been correct, there would have been no Counter-Establishment and Reagan would never have been president.
The new ideological politics constantly eludes those using traditional frames of analysis. Because it doesn’t appear in the guise of the old Eurostyle, it can be declared not to exist; or because it sometimes inhabits the shell of the traditional parties, it can be pronounced simply the latest mutation of partisan politics. Conservatives are equated with Republicans, and their rise is seen as a shift in the party system. Since some of Reagan’s political strategists are seeking what they call a “realignment,” an interpretation organized around the concept of conventional partisanship appears on the surface to make sense. Yet after two Reagan victories, most commentators continue to wonder when the predicted realignment will occur. The failure of events to cooperate with the abstract model highlights, more than anything else, the inadequacy of the model itself.
We are not in fact experiencing a realignment of the traditional party system or a realignment of the electorate or a realignment of beliefs. Although some voters have become more reliably Republican and others more reliably Democratic, more voters are more volatile than ever. In any case, the evaporation of party loyalties makes a realignment in the old sense a shallow idea, for the prevailing system is the permanent campaign system.
Despite the conservative dominance over the policy agenda, public opinion on many specific issues is liberal. Much of Reagan’s personal popularity as president can be attributed to his studied refusal to challenge these beliefs and enact an unpopular agenda. These factors—the public’s operational progressivism and the old party system’s decay—contradict the conventional notions of realignment. How then can the relative effectiveness of the Counter-Establishment be explained? Another conclusion must be advanced: We are experiencing a realignment of elites.
Throughout his presidency, Reagan has married the ideas of the Counter-Establishment to the techniques of the permanent campaign. Star Wars is a demonstration shot, its trajectory illuminating the workings of the actual political system. After the Counter-Establishment does the treatment of the idea, Reagan makes the public presentation on television. Then the “free media” campaign comes into play, with the network news shows broadcasting cartoon versions of the plan. Pow! Zap! We’re saved! See, the Star Wars weapons have knocked the Soviet missiles out of the sky. Then, there’s the paid media campaign, mounted by the right-wing High Frontier group. On the screen, in the fall of 1985, appeared a child’s drawing of a happy scene—Mommy, Daddy, child, and pet. A shield, in fact a line drawn by a crayon, arcs across the sky. Enemy missiles cannot penetrate. The sun smiles.
In the past, a policy became concrete only after it was enacted. But electronic fantasies like Star Wars have changed that. Now the simulation becomes a reality. We know Star Wars can work because we have seen it operational on television. In order not to build the unreal, the earthbound opponents of Star Wars must dismantle a real image already rooted in our minds. To vote against it is to vote against a defense we have seen working. We have bought the project mentally long before the bill comes due, just like supply-side economics. “The Force is with us,” said Reagan. All that’s required for these ideas to work is our faith in them. This is civics, Reagan-style. What do political parties have to do with it? The Force is something else.
The conservatives are replacing the old party politics with an ideological politics in which the ideas order up the images. In their view, a party is useful only when it serves the ends of ideology. The transformation of the Republican National Committee into a technocratic wonder, combining the functions of a financial clearinghouse and an advertising firm, serves their interest well. By rendering the RNC a robotic factory without a program, the manufacture of the policy agenda is left outside the party. It is an independent enterprise assumed by the Counter-Establishment. These two modes of politics don’t conflict, but mesh.
Reagan’s pitched battles with such party stalwarts as Gerald Ford and Walter Mondale were more than neat symmetry. These foils embodied the obsolescent party politics in a double sense; neither man was acculturated to the permanent campaign, and neither fully grasped the paramount role of ideas. Unlike most politicians without a traditional party to fall back on, Reagan was not an isolated individual who had to construct an organization around himself from scratch. He was always the favorite son of the conservative movement; his victory was the victory of an ideological elite.
The rise of an ideological politics does not mean that a majority of the voters agree with conservatism, or even that many express themselves in its special language. It does mean that an elite devoted to this brand of politics is flourishing. Its cadres hold some key positions of power under Reagan; they are planning for the long run after Reagan; and they are constantly creating well-funded organizations to wage the endless “war of ideas.” Conservatives are not dependent upon the strength of their reasoning alone to ensure future success; the Counter-Establishment is the institutional force that carries the logic. Polls of the general public intended to demonstrate agreement or disagreement with conservative positions don’t get at this central point. Only a thin slice of political life can ever be revealed by the statistical matrix of conventional social science. And the polls prove nothing about the nature of the Counter-Establishment.
Reagan’s triumph in 1984 was hailed by many commentators as the reemergence of the “emerging Republican majority.” They cited the sudden increase of self-identified Republicans as proof. Yet Reagan did not campaign as a Republican and forwarded no positive reason why anyone should become one. He identified himself most often as a “former Democrat.” If the word Republican has any meaning, it has not been provided by Reagan. This is hardly a mere semantic issue. The crucible of Reagan’s politics is not the party, but the conservative movement; and at the head of the movement is the Counter-Establishment. The use of ideology by an elite in an effort to shift policy is not a realignment of the party system. The movement is an extra-partisan force, and when the occasion demands, it is anti-partisan.
Grounded outside the Republican Party, the movement is posed against the GOP traditionalists whose bastion is the Senate caucus and whose leader is Robert Dole. These Republicans still frequently find a natural sympathy in all the old familiar places—the great law and accounting firms; the investment banking houses; the corner offices of corporate executives who still pride themselves on their “responsibility.” They may be an Establishment, but they are not what is commonly called liberal. They may even call themselves “conservative,” but they are not what the movement conservatives mean by it. If Republicanism is to become strong again, it will have to do so at the expense of the movement conservatives. Conversely, the continuing influence of the conservatives must mean the continuing demise of Republicanism, the ideological end of the historical party. To maintain their preeminence, the conservatives must attempt to render the Republican Party their shadow.
The conflict between the conservatives and the Republicans is not something that occurs at the unconscious level. Conservatives, at least, are acutely aware of what is happening. “Conservatism is emphatically not the old Republicanism,” explained Feulner. “It’s a case of trend lines. Conservatives are in an up trend. Republicans are in a down trend. There’s always going to be a rearguard action, but the Republicans are quietly becoming not the dominant element. There will be fewer of the old politicians and more and more of the people who have been through the new kinds of activities. Not only do you have conservative cadres coming into entry-level jobs, but once out of office they will serve as consultants. Come ten years from now, you’ll have them ready to go, two or three notches higher, even at the cabinet level. Our infrastructure was never built up in the Nixon administration. By and large Reagan relied on the Establishment to staff his administration. Our bright young people hadn’t had the on-the-job training to be really credible. Ten years from now it will be very different. Next time around, there might be fifty percent conservatives—an order of magnitude larger. You won’t be counting the Jim Watts one at a time.”
Conservatives invariably assert that their ideology is nothing less than the sum total of eternal American verities, the one true faith. But the movement whose origin can be traced to the 1940s is not the same thing as the party whose origin was in the 1850s. When the Counter-Establishment was in its infancy, the Remnant despairingly wailed its helplessness at an alien America. “Stop!” wrote young Buckley in the first issue of the National Review—the best short description of the conservative attitude of the time. Conservatism was not the vital center; it was the irrelevant fringe. “We’re riding the crest of a process that began when liberalism was in ascendance,” said Feulner. “All you have is the logic of your arguments. If you’re part of the Establishment everyone grants your premises.”
The first principle of conservative first principles is the primacy of its ideology. In the beginning, the movement had little else. But its ideas arrived from different angles, and when they intersected, what was produced wasn’t picture-perfect. The cultural conservative’s golden past was not the free-marketer’s mechanized economy, which was not the ex-Communist’s national security state, required to exorcise the nightmarish Communist-liberal Hades. Conservatives have splashed clashing colors on the political canvas at different moments to achieve different effects. But the limited elements of ideology they have worked with have led to some novel distortions. To the extent that conservatism is really not liberalism, it has drawn from sources outside the American political tradition. This has given conservatives a platform to stand on; but even after two Reagan landslides, their ideology has encapsulated them. Most important, it has prevented them from being able to claim the Republican heritage.
“You might be interested to know that the Scriptures are on our side on this,” said Reagan on February 4, 1985, arguing against cuts in the Pentagon budget. No previous president has ever presumed in a matter of appropriations to declare that God is on his side. Are Democrats all heathens? Is Congress godless? Just as religious references in feudal Europe signaled a political linkage of church and state, Reagan’s scriptural citation is a sign of his alliance with the fundamentalist right, a political force seeking the practical dissolution of church-state separation, the end of a fundamental American idea. How conservatives cope with this crisis they have built into their politics will reveal the degree to which they actually reject liberalism.
The evangelical right has its own peculiar version of shadow liberalism. The Liberal Establishment, they insist, has systematically and consciously made true religion illegal (i.e., the Supreme Court rulings on abortion and school prayer). In its place liberals have substituted a false religion, “secular humanism,” whose high priests are trained at the Columbia University Teachers College and whose temples are the public schools.2 To combat the Liberal Establishment, the fundamentalist right has constructed a counterculture of television networks and schools, think tanks and political action committees. Their theology does not turn on small ideas like tax simplification, but on big ideas like Armageddon. In conservative ideology, the evangelical right represents “traditional values.” But this fulfillment of the ideology is not all milk and honey. The conservative movement can be many movements because its cadres can shift the debate nimbly from issue to issue. The truly religious, however, have limited flexibility because their positions are absolute; their uncompromising theology threatens to restrict the movement’s expansion. Yet the movement’s failure to accommodate the fundamentalists’ unyielding demands may lead to a more intractable situation if the religious rightists decide to take independent action to keep the movement pure. A presidential candidacy from the fundamentalist wing, perhaps that of the Reverend Pat Robertson, the mellifluous television host and multimillionaire owner of the Christian Broadcasting Network, would be an attempt to capture the movement in the way that the movement has attempted to capture the Republican Party.
But if the movement and the fundamentalist right are indistinguishable, then Jews and Catholics almost certainly would refuse to be baptized in that church: so much for realignment. The early warning signs were already present in the overwhelming Jewish vote in 1984 against Reagan and the Catholic bishops’ statements on nuclear war and the economy.
The bishops’ letters were not aberrant heresies, but derived directly from the Pope’s own positions. On the eve of the release of the bishops’ economic message, a Counter-Establishment group of lay Catholics, mustered by William Simon and supply-side theologian Michael Novak, issued a counter-manifesto that praised individualism and the free market. The Counter-Establishment effort to displace the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church with the Protestant ethic cannot expect instant success. Those engaged in this project must have great faith that the Counter-Establishment will be around for a long time. In their attempt to transform Catholicism by the customary methods of the conservative movement, they have taken a schismatic leap far beyond shadow liberalism. Will the Counter-Establishment fund a counter-papacy in Orange County?
On point after point, the conservatives have already separated themselves from the secular Republican tradition. Their embrace of the “Christian nation” advocates is merely the gaudiest display of their unorthodox doctrine. The effort by Representative Newt Gingrich, a leader of the movement in the House, to recast the Grand Old Party as the Great Opportunity Party, is the sound of a chain saw severing the ties. Gingrich’s exercise is more than sloganeering. Words, after all, do have meaning. And the word most conspicuously dropped in his new formulation is old. The cavalier discarding of the Republican past shows what little consequence these conservatives attach to tradition.
To the movement’s theorists, the party is less than “grand.” “The parties have not declined enough in my opinion,” said Irving Kristol. “To the degree that there are strong party organizations, they tend to suppress ideas. Well, that hasn’t been true for the Democrats. It is true for the Republican Party. The majority of party leadership in Congress is controlled by the traditional Republican Party, who are linked very much to the CEOs, who believe in managing things.” Kristol, of course, is a neoconservative, and the neoconservatives are as anti-Republican now as they were in their incarnation as leftists; they are dedicated to dissolving traditional political bonds even as they exalt an abstract traditionalism. Although Kristol is instinctively sectarian, he also speaks for conservatives on the question of partisanship. “The conservatives and the neoconservatives have come together in the birth of a new ideology,” said Feulner. They do not view the GOP, like the traditionalists, as an institution encrusted with a glorious past whose preservation lends society ballast in turbulent seas. The conservatives are ideologues before they are partisans. And their ideology has led them to jettison most of the first principles of the historical Republican Party.
The conservative ascendancy within the GOP has been marked by a curious reversal of positions. On civil, equal, and states rights the conservatives have imported into the party notions that were held dear only by the kind of Democrats who have disappeared from the Democracy. Just a generation ago, the GOP was still a competitor for the black vote—in 1960, Richard Nixon won 32 percent. By 1964 the regular Republicans were still unassailable within the GOP congressional caucus, but the conservatives managed to capture the convention and nominate Barry Goldwater. The split was manifested over the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, which the congressional Republicans helped pass and the convention denounced. In 1984, Reagan became only the second Republican candidate for president, following Goldwater, to fail to make a direct appeal to black voters.
The conservative opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment is another dramatic repudiation of the traditional position. It was Republicans, after all, who were responsible for the passage of the women’s suffrage amendment. And it was Republicans who first supported an equal rights amendment. From 1944 until 1980, every Republican convention platform contained a statement in favor of equal rights for women. (The first Democratic convention to adopt an ERA plank was in 1972—an act that contributed to the outrage of organized labor, party bosses, and neoconservatives.) At the convention that nominated Reagan, the platform denounced the ERA as a transgression of traditional values. The derision of equal rights as a squalid idea fostered by special interests and motivated by envy is not, however, an attitude consistent with the Republican past.
Instead of upholding the banner of equal rights, the conservatives uphold that of states rights. The two positions are not disconnected, for when the 1980 convention took its stand against the ERA, it justified its break with history in the foreign tongue of states rights. The matter, read the platform, is “now in the hands of state legislatures.” States rights, banished at long last as divisive and discreditable from the Democracy, was picked up by the conservatives as a “bloody shirt,” a banner in the war against big government. It was a strange garment in which to dress the Republican Party. Yet Reagan presented it as a revival of original principles. In his first inaugural address, he declared that “the states created the federal government,” substituting Calhounism for Republicanism.
Perhaps the most radical conservative departure from the Republican legacy is the movement’s unremitting hostility toward the national government. Republicans might have sought to modify certain aspects of federal rule, but never attacked the idea of the government itself. The Republican Party as a governing party rested on the marriage of the national idea with the central government. Republicans were not ashamed of a federal giveaway program called the Homestead Act, or the government enterprise that made possible the transcontinental railroad, or an industrial policy of tariffs. They made the world work, and that’s why their politics worked. Even when they were conservative, they were conserving yesterday’s liberalism. They were a party of governing, the Democrats a party of protest.
Now, however, conservatives resist any responsibility for the federal government; they are most comfortable in the pose of outsiders. Even when in office, they continue to wage war against what they must manage. Conservatives placed in charge of official bureaucracies often act like soldiers in a free-fire zone; their efforts at reform take on the air of search-and-destroy missions. Their complaint against the size of government is surpassed by their complaint against its autonomy, which they view as a usurpation of the market. And since private gain must be public good, according to their doctrine, they must be serving the national interest.
Some conservatives make little distinction between the market and public service, and so they apply the rules of success to governing. Politics, to them, is often seen as just another market to exploit. Since they are already winners in business, the same precepts of positive thinking should apply to politics. Michael Deaver, who was the presidential aide closest to the Reagans, offers a particularly striking case. As the chief public relations choreographer in the White House, he dramatized the mythology of Reaganism in which the greatest evil is a big government dominated by “special interests.” Then Deaver left the White House and cashed in, becoming a lobbyist with extraordinary access—a “special interest” in his own right. When the Reaganites encounter problems, precisely because of their inappropriate behavior, they cast around for culprits. Accordingly, when a conservative such as Edwin Meese is caught taking large loans from people who have been given lucrative jobs, he feels no guilt. Instead, this sort of conservative feels bewildered and angry at his accusers. Once again the conservatives believe they are being unfairly set upon by the Liberal Establishment.
The insiders’ status holds both fascination and repulsion for the conservatives. This is one of the many arresting affinities between them and nineteenth-century Populism—a tradition conservatives aver they are emulating and Republicans have always opposed. According to both the conservatives and the Populists, we had a golden age, a lost Eden, a time that can be retrieved. When the power of an intrusive monopoly is defeated, those days can be restored. In this battle there are two sides. The forces of goodness reside in the countryside; the cities are cesspools of crime and corruption. The Populists equated the agrarian West with the values of democracy and posed them against the settled East. This sectional conflict was a shadow war between individuals and big institutions. We were two nations: “the people,” and the millionaires. In the conservative version, big business completely recedes from view and big government looms large. Their rhetoric, however, captures some of the earlier tone. “The people” are still fighting “the special interests.” Once again the frontier, the Sunbelt, is equated with liberty and serves as a geographical metaphor for the battle of individuals against organizations.
The chief organizing issue for the Populist was money; they argued that the gold standard, the “cross of gold,” could be lifted by the unlimited coinage of silver, which would redistribute opportunity. In the conservative account, the Laffer Curve’s tax cuts replace free silver as the economic medium of growth. Taxes have been seized from the producers and given to a parasitical monopoly. When taxes are cut, our worth will be determined by the fortune we find. Ironically, the supply-siders, who label themselves the “populists” in their war against the “elitist” demand-siders, call for a return to the gold standard. (The tag they pin on themselves doesn’t always apply: George Gilder, for example, argues against “elitists”; yet he pays tribute to the heroic robber barons in Wealth and Poverty.)
Like many of the ancient Populists, many conservatives reflexively see an unhappy series of events as some sort of conspiracy against them. “Indeed, what makes conspiracy theories so widely acceptable is that they usually contain a germ of truth,” wrote Richard Hofstadter. “But there is a great difference between locating conspiracy in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy.”3 The Populists of course faced formidable enemies. But some Populists were not content to deal only with their real enemies. They conjured up lurid conspiracies of goldbugs, English diplomats, and Jewish bankers; the octopus and the spider were favored images. For those conservatives who have inherited the belief that there must be some evil, centralized mechanism making the world work according to its selfish design, the enemy is always the scheming Liberal Establishment, its tentacles slithering around the hidden levers of influence—the Trilateral Commission and CBS, the Council on Foreign Relations and Planned Parenthood. This mode of thinking is sufficiently pervasive among conservatives that Reagan himself campaigned in 1980 against the spider’s web spun by the Trilateral Commission.
Reagan also cast himself as a “populist” in his second-term campaign on behalf of tax reform. He evoked a symbol he called “Washington,” which he insisted was “un-American.” It was time, he declared, for a “second American Revolution.” Yet this “populism” was hardly progressive, a point Reagan himself observed. At the start of his tax reform effort, in 1985, he denounced the tax system for being too “progressive.” His “populism” amounted to an attempt to rid the tax code of its older populist features.
Traditional Republicans, who compose their fair share of the groups excoriated by conservatives, do not think as populists. They believe in institutions, including big ones, which they often run. They have faith in established procedures, disdain plebiscites, and are suspicious of passionate social movements. They do not believe that the market can or should be populated only by Adam Smith’s pin factories. They see modern corporations as part of a world of large institutions protected by laws. In short, these Republicans are not populists.
Conservatives who claim the title to the Populist tradition pay an odd homage by using the Populist rhetoric against most of the original Populist goals. While the Populists wanted government to regulate the marketplace in the name of opportunity, the conservatives demand its exit. Conservative antielitism, moreover, is in the ultimate service of a political elite— the Counter-Establishment. If conservatism is Populism, then it is Populism turned on its head and rattled. One thing it is not is Republicanism.
The story of Republicanism in the contemporary age is a story of decline, hastened by the conservatives. During the Eisenhower years, a pudding without a theme was whipped up and packaged as “Modern Republicanism.” Nelson Rockefeller and his innumerable panels of brain-trusters served it deluxe. Although the principal ingredient in “Modern Republicanism” was air, it did contain a dollop of old-fashioned Progressive protein. Meanwhile, the Taftite Republicans lumbered to the elephants’ graveyard. The new guard of ideological conservatives, whose resources consisted of little more than the word, went virtually unmentioned. By the mid-1980s, however, the institutional force and momentum was on their side. “Modern Republicanism” was as much a relic as the Taftite orthodoxy. The sudden appearance of a messiah like Rockefeller or Willkie was as remote as the possibility that George Bush would criticize the conservatives. Even a political career like that of the twice-nominated Thomas Dewey, Taft’s nemesis, was now implausible. Only a few congressmen and outriders traveling under the banner of “Republican Mainstream” attempted to do combat with the movement. Although echoes of the traditional “Mainstream” could be heard in the Senate chamber, it was easily muffled at the 1984 convention.
The Great Opportunity Party is less a house divided against itself than a house that tilts. Conservatives will never be satisfied until they have thoroughly purged it of Republicans. The emblems of their intent were hardly hidden. Conservatives rejoiced when many Lincoln Republicans, led by John Anderson, left the party in 1980. And they celebrated when the New England Brahmins were waylaid. In 1984, Elliot Richardson, the former everything, lost a Republican primary for the U.S. Senate nomination against a former John Birch Society member rehabilitated as a mere conservative. The days of Henry Cabot Lodge were long gone. In New York, the Conservatives conducted a lengthy campaign against the heirs of Dewey. Inspired by William F. Buckley, Jr., they organized a Conservative Party in direct emulation of the Liberal Party—a striking case of literal shadow liberalism. In 1970 they elected one of their own to the Senate, James Buckley, Bill’s brother, by displacing the Republican. They demonized Nelson Rockefeller for decades, eventually succeeding in tarnishing him so that Gerald Ford would not run in 1976 with his own Vice President. In 1980 a conservative discovery named Alfonse D’Amato defeated incumbent Republican Senator Jacob Javits, a reprise of the 1970 experience. And two years later, drugstore mogul Lewis Lehrman, a major Counter-Establishment figure, captured the nomination for governor.
By the mid-1980s, Reagan’s economic policies, which undermined American exports, threatened ruin for yeoman Republicanism, embodied by the midwestern farmers, the base of the Senate leadership. When a relief bill was passed, Reagan vetoed it. Once again he demonstrated his stand against big government. In doing so, he shut off relief for the family farmers, the traditional economic individualists. Since the reality of a mixed economy could never be acknowledged and accepted in conservative ideology, the stark dogmas of “big government” and “individualism” must prevail. Thus government was passive and individualism suffered.
Reagan’s policies undermined more than the GOP’s classical farm base. His actions, which inflated the value of the dollar in international markets, also injured the traditional manufacturing upon which the Dewey-Rockefeller wing had rested. A sudden conversion of many Senate Republicans to protectionism resulted. Not even the unexpected fall in the price of oil in 1986, pulling down the dollar, halted the protectionist trend Reagan’s policies had set in motion.
Some conservatives privately and happily anticipated the loss of the Senate in 1986; they reasoned that the defeat of the regular Republicans might give them greater freedom at the convention. In New England and the mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states, the old Republican heartland, they were driving traditionalists out of office and, they hoped, out of the GOP. The conservative devotion to the party, of course, was contingent on their ideological control.
Conservatives had already shattered the hegemony of the Republican national elite. Perhaps its last hurrah was the Law of the Sea Treaty, negotiated in good faith by Elliot Richardson and dismissed out of hand by the Reagan administration. Whatever vacuum was created by the Republican demise was promptly filled by the onrushing Counter-Establishment. Though its cadres failed to gain control of all the offices they sought, their debates had become the debates of the executive branch. With their broad supremacy over the Republicans, the conservatives had accomplished at least a momentary realignment of elites.
The Democrats considered none of this in their agonized reconsiderations of what had gone wrong. They had a Ptolemaic view of the universe, in which everything revolved around them. The 1984 primaries, conducted without Republican counterparts, undoubtedly contributed to their narcissism. They accepted their recent setbacks as proof that they were lost in space; yet they had little sense of the next galaxy. During all the post-election self-recriminations, not a single Democratic leader attempted to explain who the conservatives were, how they worked, or what they had wrought. Many Democrats confused their confusion with a realignment of the electorate.
If those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, then most Democratic leaders are fated to travel in an unending circle. They attributed the 1984 defeat to their own failure to occupy the “center,” which they were convinced they had forfeited. Mondale, they believed, was among the chief culprits for this fatal drift. Yet throughout his campaign, Mondale had obsessively tried to station himself in the “center.” At the Democratic Convention, in his acceptance speech, he spelled out the character of his “centrism” in great detail, even giving it a name—the “New Realism.” “Look at our platform,” he said. “There are no defense cuts that weaken our security; no business taxes that weaken our economy; no laundry lists that raid our Treasury.” Having succinctly stated the dilemma, he then locked himself inside it:
I want to say something to those of you across the country who voted for Ronald Reagan. . . . I heard you. And our party heard you. After we lost, we didn’t tell the American people that they were wrong. Instead, we began asking you what our mistakes had been.
Thus Mondale acknowledged the circumstances that made his politics seemingly unworkable; he rejected his old views while still clinging fast to them. Here was a man practicing the eulogy for his own funeral, an oration delivered virtually word for word by many Democrats after his campaign expired.
As self-described “pragmatists,” they continued their quest for the “center,” just as Mondale had before his defeat. After two thrashings they regarded Reagan as a right-winger who, through occult powers, had spirited away this “center.” Could it be won back by an even more intense “pragmatism”?
In the conventional wisdom, pragmatism is the rightful opponent of ideology. To be pragmatic is to be moderate, realistic, and sensible. Moderation, of course, may refer to an implicit belief in due process and a measured approach to citizenship. But the “moderation” of the self-conscious “centrist” is less a matter of principle than of positioning asserted as principle.
According to common political usage, pragmatism has no philosophical content, except the absence of such content, which is why there is often a bias in its favor; it means tactical adjustment within the current arrangements. Pragmatism is the politics of status quo maintenance, and it is ultimately inflexible because it rules out challenge to established power. Its absolute relativism, moreover, renders it derivative. The pragmatist never initiates, but constantly seeks middle ground. He lives by the spirit of the yardstick, always calibrating some elusive center determined by the distance between others’ points. His program is a series of disconnected policies. The self-styled pragmatist rejects Mondale’s image yet embraces Mondale’s premise. Against that contradiction, the conservative defends his program as thoroughly consistent. But the ideologue’s advantage is less his program than his purpose. Proposals divorced from larger principles are mechanical and cold, and however smoothly diagrammed are politically lifeless. The pragmatic concern is not ends but means, which results in the substitution of technique for goals. This inner void of the centrists is a great incentive to the ideologues. And the centrists may even relish the stimulation of extremes because it is the context in which they can position themselves as moderate. Their stance, however, can be defined by the ideologues because their positioning is a product of outer-direction. Rather than offering general ideas, the pragmatists assume that isolated facts by themselves make a convincing case. They have no story to tell, except that their facts are not the story of nasty extremes. But power must seek purpose, or wither. The pragmatism of the centrists is a constant rationale, not a purpose itself; it is a true conservatism and a false pragmatism. It has little in common with the spirit of the philosophy that originated with Charles Peirce, or any philosophy.4
Most of the centrists ritually denounced the Mondale campaign and then typically recapitulated the fiscal gloom and intellectual exhaustion of the New Realism. The conditions that Reagan’s program had fostered were implicitly accepted as an impenetrable reality. To the extent that Democrats gave credence to the conservative dogma about the absolute evil of all deficits, they had to bear the burden of conservative social policy. But what about the special character of Reagan’s deficit? Extravagant military spending combined with a regressive tax cut created the debt. Real interest rates were kept at an unprecedented high level by the Fed, still enthralled by a banker’s version of monetarist theology. Consequently, payments for interest on the debt exceeded payments for social programs for the first time since the New Deal. The program as a whole operated as a huge mechanism of income distribution. Those who lost were average tax-payers; those who gained most were holders of bonds and Treasury notes. Demands from conservatives to cut the tax burden and social programs increased; the taxpayers, seeking immediate relief, were encouraged in their rage.
In 1985, the Counter-Establishment once again filled the intellectual vacuum. Martin Anderson, the Hoover Institution scholar who had been the White House domestic policy chief during the first term, contrived a balanced budget bill in which Congress gave up its constitutionally mandated authority in exchange for certain immutable budget targets. Anderson’s idea was introduced by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, a renegade Democrat turned conservative Republican who had been David Stockman’s spy within the House Democratic caucus. Most Senate Democrats voted for what became known as the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings balanced budget bill, though many of them privately believed it was crackpot economics. They subjected the future to the strictures of a Counter-Establishment nostrum while abdicating their own heritage. This was the practical meaning of their pragmatism.
The Democratic bankruptcy was only one of the factors making the conservatives appear larger than life. In fact they were in a fragile political situation—despite the ready access to large sums of cash and foundation grants, the disarray of the once omnipotent Liberal Establishment, and the weakening of the traditional Republicans.
By defining themselves as a movement rather than as a party, they established restrictions on membership: one must believe in order to belong. The movement depends on ideological loyalty above professionalism to bind people together. (Professionalism is often regarded as self-conscious liberalism. When journalists respond to conservative attacks on the press by citing their professionalism, the conservatives usually consider this a hypocritical admission of guilt.)
The reliance on ideology naturally limits the numbers of Counter-Establishment cadres. The Heritage Foundation’s Annual Guide to Public Policy Experts is a directory listing perhaps a majority of the players in the Counter-Establishment who are not in the administration. The 1985 edition contains slightly more than a thousand names, a substantial increase over the six hundred listed in the 1982 edition. The compactness of the Counter-Establishment engenders a sense of fraternity and morale that is infrequently found in the outside world. Its leaders treasure every one of its people, especially the younger cadres, because they understand that their institutions are still overshadowed. They are no longer a Remnant, but they still are a relatively small band.
Their principal asset is also their principal liability. The belief in ideology has enabled the Counter-Establishment to organize around a set of strong convictions. But because agreement on a fixed ideology animates conservatives, disagreement has enormous disruptive potential. Unlike the constituencies of the New Deal, bound together finally by a common material interest in the role of government, the conservative movement is finally held together by its ideology. But the movement does not escape the Social Darwinism it fosters. At every point of doctrine, there is a sect mobilized around its own internally consistent theoretical system, with the most potentially divisive grouping being the fundamentalist right.
The economic crisis of the early 1980s offered a glimmer of the factionalism that could be ignited within the Counter-Establishment by unanticipated events. Left to the movement’s devices, Reagan would have been subjected to endless humiliation at the hands of his ideologues. He was rescued only by a complex deus ex machina: the Republican Senate leadership, the House Democrats, and the Federal Reserve. Without Reagan’s talent for explaining the recovery as the logical outcome of faith in conservatism, the movement’s fierce factionalism would have lacked a larger rationale. What Reagan actually conserved as president was the conservative movement.
To maintain its momentum, the Counter-Establishment has a constant need to elaborate its ideology; only an incessant agitation keeps the wheels turning. But conservatives can never resolve their own differences by an appeal to party loyalty, which must be secondary. The Hobbesian permutation, where each faction wars against all, always remains a possibility. Reagan’s inevitable departure from the stage heightens this chance.
Reagan gave the conservatives legitimacy they had not previously possessed. His reign laid down respectable roots. But his presidency presented a circumstance conservatives had never faced. They had built up a movement and Counter-Establishment in the shadow of their image of the Liberal Establishment. Now conservatives stood in another shadow—Reagan’s.
The battle for the succession occurs under his gaze. As the candidates squabble, Reagan remains in the White House. His continuing presence on the scene may have the curious effect of preventing the emergence of another commanding figure. But without one, it may be difficult to sustain the influence the movement has accumulated under Reagan. The next leader, moreover, cannot exactly be Reagan. He must be able to infuse the ideology with a new set of images, vivid for another age. For the first time, the conservatives must cope with a conservative past that is not mythological.
Early on, Reagan defined the ambition of his presidency as nothing less than “starting the world over again,” a New Beginning that would bring the country back to the values of the Founding Fathers. These values endure beyond history and do not fluctuate; once we believe, what we build upon them cannot fluctuate either. In the political economy of conservatism, the different spheres—public and private, political and communal—attain harmonious balance. Once we achieve the equilibrium of a Newtonian universe, everything will run like clockwork according to the laws of a benign deity and classical economics. The political realignment and the prosperity that flow from such values must be permanent. Only a lapse of faith could lead to our fall from grace. But what became of Reagan’s goals in his own time? Is the legacy as clear-cut as the ideology?
Without the Counter-Establishment thinkers to supply Reagan with notions such as the supply side, his hardened mythology would have lacked the gloss of innovation. He was the interest on their intellectual capital. But without Reagan, conservatism would never have become a mass cultural experience; he gave life to abstractions. Reagan’s personality seemed to be the movement and his rhetoric the ideology. Conservatism is contained by his image, which will linger after he leaves.
When the image is focused, an ideological dilemma comes sharply into view. His speeches are laced with references to the puritan virtues of thrift and stoicism. Political self-government is an extension of our personal self-control; the economy is the addition of household economies. Reagan wants us to become a nation of self-made men, to strive and succeed like the self-made president. Our characters will then be measured by the market.
But a curious exchange happens in the ideological marketplace run by Reagan. The self-made man becomes the self-indulgent man; personality defined by appearances replaces character hewn by hard labor; and supply-side rhetoric serves as the boilerplate of the culture of consumption. Nowhere did Reagan make plainer his belief in the consumption ethic than in a speech at St. John’s University on March 29, 1985, one of those inimitable performances in which his stark language was so revelatory that few took it at face value. “Perhaps the biggest mistake mankind has made in this century is to think that the big answer is how difficult life is,” he said. Negative thinking has led us to the “big thing that will fill the void of the spiritual values . . . the State that’s their idea, the State with a capital S. ” (Who are they? He did not explain.) “Some have said that this is the thing from which all blessings come.” But it’s a false religion because “our salvation is in ourselves and what we do with our lives and the choices that we make. It is in the things that we choose to worship.” What “things” should we “worship”? Reagan was not vague. He told the students that after they graduate, instead of paying a lot of taxes, “a condition of something approaching servitude,” they could spend money on “a portable computer, say, or clothing or entertainment. . . .” This was “moral” and, incidentally, a good way of “creating jobs”—a simple demand-side solution. It doesn’t matter what “things” we “worship” so long as they can be charged.
One of the disposable commodities we can select in the sprawling mall Reagan describes is a political party. For the conservative activists, the movement, not the party, is the paramount investment good. The party is a fashion label, the wrapping; the contents of the package are designed by ideologues. For the ordinary citizen, whose rejection of the materialism of “the State” comes through the “moral” act of shopping, the party may be an object of self-expression. In the culture of consumption, a realignment may mean temporarily acquiring a party label along with the other “things” that define us; it requires no investment of ourselves.
Reagan’s uncanny ability to evoke both the puritan and the pleasure-seeker at the same time is a specialty item. His campaign handlers in 1984 understood that his support rested in great part on this double-edged appeal. But can the package be reproduced? Personality is essential; anyone who strains to fill the image will be disqualified because Reagan never strains. Most important, this is a crisis of ideology. In the absence of a figure who can reconcile opposing worldviews, what happens if the ideological fault lines start cracking open?
Throughout his presidency, Reagan established precedents inconsistent with his stated aims. In the conservative ideology, the market is the frontier, which we can reenter by removing the artificial barriers set in our path by “the State.” Yet Reagan increased the powers of “the State” within the economy. The market for military contractors, where profits are guaranteed, vastly expanded, engulfing key industries such as electronics. While raising the banner of free trade, the Reagan administration in its first term almost doubled the size of the protectionist sector.5 The supply-siders, for their part, had forecast that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” But inequality and poverty heightened; the greatest increase in the ranks of the poor was among the children. According to the new rules laid down by conservative policy, those living on salaries and wages received a shrinking share of national income. Those most rewarded were corporate raiders, merger titans, and speculators, who measured their success by paper profits, not by productive investments.
These conditions fostered a fragmentation of the business community. Industry by industry, the business chieftains desperately sought protection from foreign competition. Interest by interest, the corporate groups moved against Reagan’s general effort at tax reform. And the corporate managers, preyed upon by the speculators, wanted some new form of governmental regulation to protect them from the free market gone haywire. Thus the CEOs resisted the Social Darwinism they had helped unleash.
The apotheosis of the corporate culture in the Reagan years was the tenure of Donald Regan as White House chief of staff. The former chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch had been generous in his political donations before Reagan’s election, giving to Democrats and Republicans alike. He had even given money to Jimmy Carter. In his early days as Secretary of the Treasury, he was befuddled by the ideological debate. But he was a quick study and soon leveraged influence for his department by presenting himself as an ardent supply-sider. Meanwhile, the contentious supply-siders were quietly purged from Treasury. As chief of staff, he tried to run the White House like a corporation. Politics to him was just another kind of business. He exhibited no strong convictions. Nor did he have a record of long personal devotion to Reagan. In sum, he was a man without a firm attachment to party or person, a man without an idea. He embodied the corporate world’s continuing failure to aspire to a larger justification.
These quandaries, however, were ignored or dismissed by the conservative elite. They typically appeared to prefer self-congratulation to self-criticism. So the demand-side recovery was hailed as a supply-side triumph. With every policy defeat, they pointed to the Liberal Establishment as the nemesis. With every policy victory, the conservatives believed we were moving farther from the decadent settlement and closer to the frontier. The Restoration was still within reach.
Reagan’s clairvoyance permitted him to see what will happen when the Restoration arrives, when time stands still. “We see and hear again the echoes of our past,” he said in his second inaugural address. “So much endures and transcends time.” Once we enter this time zone, we live in “golden years.” But what is it that “transcends time”? It is a “dream”—a dream, he explained in his acceptance speech at the Dallas convention, “conceived by our Founding Fathers.” The political choice we faced in 1984 was between “the dream” and the liberal nightmare that is “ultimately totalitarianism.” Winning meant defeating the liberals forever. “If we do our job right,” said Reagan, “they won’t be able to do it again.” Thus the political realignment would be eternal. As he had reminded us before, there would be no more “politics as usual,” and prosperity would be “built to last.” Thus the recovery would be eternal.
But Reagan did not establish conservatism on a new set of principles that would fundamentally realign our thinking. He could not overcome his own liberal heritage by censuring the most important liberal principle of all—progress. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” he proclaimed at every campaign stop. This was the progressive interpretation of history as crooned by Al Jolson. And Reagan sang it whenever he also offered the timeless Restoration. In the greatest of vaudeville stunts, we might be agents of history and yet transcend time.
With his incessant glorification of Roosevelt, Reagan did not dispel the ethos behind the New Deal; instead, he attempted to inhabit it. The “former Democrat” had neither the inclination nor the confidence to overthrow his hero. His personal shadow liberalism, rendering him incapable of challenging FDR’s accomplishments, defined the limit of a conservative realignment in American philosophy. To truly transcend time, Reagan might have asserted a conservatism rooted in natural law and natural rights, an independent moral order without reference to the oscillations of history. The object in this system would be to align politics with fixed principles, drawn from a fixed human nature.6 While Reagan occasionally talked about “enduring” values, he preferred a “rendezvous with destiny” and a “springtime of hope.” Like the Progressives, he believed that history ebbed and flowed in tides of progress and reaction. There could be new beginnings. Like Jefferson, he accepted the main tendencies of our politics as the aristocratic and the democratic. And he attempted to fit conservatism to this pattern. Government was the monarchy, liberals the royalists, and conservatives the Sons of Liberty. Because he spoke for change, Reagan claimed the authority of history. But by placing conservatism on its merry-go-round, his timeless goals were now subject to its caprice.
The responsibility for sustaining the ideology fell to the Counter-Establishment. Once a motley collection of exiles, ex-Communists, and nostalgists, its organizations were now housed in spacious and elegantly appointed quarters, its journals well subsidized, its cadres’ views amplified to the highest reaches of power. But could the Counter-Establishment continue to play the dominant ideological role in politics after what Reagan had done to conservatism? He had created a past that presented problems unimagined by any conservative theorist. Moreover, he proclaimed that his achievement would be permanent. But could a doctrine that failed to account for the present master the future? Could a belief in the automatic operation of the market abolish the business cycle? How thin is this ice?
The Counter-Establishment had not redesigned the doctrines bequeathed it by the Remnant. Instead, its foundations poured increasing sums of money into the manufacture of policies of the moment, the kind of ephemeral intellectual gadgetry perfected by the old Democrats.
But if time does not stand still, can conservatism stand still? Can the Counter-Establishment live comfortably on its accumulated intellectual inheritance? Or can it reconcile a fixed ideology to Reagan’s changes? If conservatives cannot accommodate their theories to their own history, will they lose control over the past and thus the future? Or is the conservative ideology inextricably bound up with memories of the 1930s and 1940s, memories that must fade with the generation for whom they are most meaningful?
The test of the ideology’s strength will come after Reagan. Revised or not, will it prevent conservatism from fragmenting into a cacophony of sects in the absence of the maximum leader? Will strife in the ranks stimulate the production of ideas, or induce a paralysis? Will movement loyalty, substituting for party loyalty, serve as a basis for a coherent or an incoherent national politics? To what degree is conservative vigor a reflection of the liberals’ intellectual weakness? How much longer can that be relied upon? No matter what the results of these questions, the Counter-Establishment will continue to be buoyed by its financial backers. But can transfusions of corporate dollars provide ideological answers? Does money really talk? Does money think?
Reagan had not established a philosophical realignment, so the conservatives were condemned to history: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” But what if conservatism is not the spirit of reform, like the New Deal, fulfilling the progressive theory Reagan espoused? If American history does run in cycles, is conservatism the spirit of reaction in an age of “normalcy,” like the other ages of “normalcy” that passed before?
Will an unaltered conservative ideology be enough to protract endless “golden years?” Perhaps. But nothing would reconfirm the ideology for conservatives more convincingly than defeat. Then they would be swept back to their shadow liberalism. In their Counter-Establishment redoubt, they would return to the opposition, where they began, secure once again in the tenets of their faith. There they could contemplate the next cycle of history and await another chance for Restoration.