Agenda for the nineties.

Agenda for The Nineties

WE ESCHEW the recital of our credenda. In our first issue (November 19, 1955), we thought of ourselves as your David with his slingshot, proclaiming that our role at NATIONAL REVIEW was to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop!" History has done that, ground to a stop. The Marxist dialectic is dead, and as the occasions warrant, we will recite again our creed. But today, we seek merely to enunciate an agenda for the Nineties. If we succeed in the next ten years, and American liberals adopt the position that it was inevitable that the goals here suggested should have been realized, even as they have spoken recently in accents suggesting that they have a proprietary hold on history, we will satisfy ourselves, as we do here, to say merely: We welcome the changes, and will not dwell on their etiology.

Nuclear Polycentrism 

POLITICAL developments in the final year of the last decade give grounds for profound satisfaction. Communism continues to be a threat but has ceased to be a creed. And since political cosmologies require faith in order to prosper, the menace of Communism diminishes, though it can hardly be said to have ended. Using less than 20 per cent of its inventory of nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union could tomorrow destroy the United States, never mind that you-should-have-seen what we did to the Soviet Union.

Direct threats to the United States during this decade are of several orders. The first and most obvious threat is that posed by the strategic nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union. An intermediate threat is posed by the capabilities of China, which were it to pursue aggressive preparations could, by mid decade, acquire a menacing nuclear capability. And then there is the threat, down the line, associated with the proliferation of intermediate and long-range missiel launchers that can transport nuclear explosives, as also chemical and biological weapons. We know that there are six nations today that have intermediate launch capability, so that, for instance, a missle fired from Iraq could reach Great Britain. There are two problems posed by these developments. The first is to deter proliferation. An unsmilingly direct move in that direction was made by Israel in 1981 when it bombed Iraqi plants plainly designed to create nuclear-explosive material. When the United States detected plans in Libya as plainly designed to produce posion gas, we took no military action, satisfying ourselves with putting pressure on Libya's suppliers, though the year before, we had declared ourselves plainspokenly on the threat to international law and order posed by Qaddafi, dotting our i's and crossing our t's with a military strike that, however, failed to destroy Qaddafi. The lesson: we need to be continuously alert to the problems posed by such weapons, and prepared and equipped to make surgical strikes as required.

We will need to guard against nth-power aggression in the event anti-proliferation fails. In the long run we are going to have to explore the possibilities of an anti-nuclear technology, which means that we need to take appropriate action in the short run: now. The quarrel over SDI got mixed up, during the 1980s, with strategic ideology. The accommodationists feared, above everything else, disequilibrium; and although they did not succeed in killing SDI, they enfeebled it to the point of delaying until at least the middle of the decade an accumulation of empirical knowledge on whether an anti-missile system would give us effective protection against vagrant missiles. Ideally, we envision a new, universal nuclear umbrella, an enterprise undertaken in partnership with Europe, an enterprise dramatically collusive with the Soviet Union (by whatever name that landmass then calls itself). In any event, the development of protective technology against what used to be called ABC (for "atomic, bacterioological, chemical") aggression is high on our agenda.

Freedom's Friend

DURING THE Seventies, in ambiguous language, we were coaxed back in the Wilsonian direction on America's responsibility for human rights throughout the world by President Carter, and subsequently, though less explicitly, by Presidents Reagan and Bush. During the Sixties, prompted by the tribulation of Vietnam, a significant group of influential Americans abandoned not only our national afflatus as the country whose manifest destiny was to bring democracy to every country in the world, but also any subjective pride in living in a better society than that of Ho Chi Minh, who was bound to win in part because his society was more just than our own, more enviable--who were we to suggest that our way of life was superior?

That self-hatred/self-doubt has substantially modified, though there is a hard academic undertow that continues to disparage America. When we supported democratic forces in the Philippines, effecting the replacement of Ferdinand Marcos, and, several years later, when by a show of military power we prolonged Mrs. Aquino's tenure as democratically elected president, we were not directly engaging in cold-war theater. It was different from our landing the Marines in the Dominican Republic in 1965. The justification given by President Johnson at the time was the same as that given by President Reagan twenty years later when he landed the Marines in Grenada: We would not tolerate another Soviet satellite in the hemisphere over which, as an imperial power, we have primary responsibility, however diplomatic it is to apper at international conferences wearing egalitarian dress. The national anxiety over Nicaragua is based on cold-war reasoning. I.e., we have seen in Nicaragua the attempted Sovietization of a small Central American country, an act of imperialism made possible by arms shipped from Cuba, which arms had been shipped there by the Soviet Union or one of its Eastern European satellites.

Now, if the chain, Moscow-Havana-Managua, is broken in the immediate future, we will adjust our foreign policy accordingly. It is at least predictable that neo-isolationist forces in the United States, mobilized into action by the globalist Communist threat, will now ask the question: Why--if Nicaragua is no longer a salient of an imperialist enemy--should we care if its people consent to be enslaved?

The question is one that invites both moral and strategic attention. Moral, in that we have it in our power to prevent such a country as Nicaragua from "enslaving itself" (nicely handled in Spanish usage, by the way, in which the reflexive mode is regularly used, for instance, to inform us that "the teacup broke itself," finessing the question whether it was clumsily pushed over the edge of the table, or whether it decided, entirely on its own, to commit suicide. Se perdio Nicaragua). Possessing that power, should we use it? One important element in the America tradition flows from John Quincy Adams's famous statement to the effect that the American people are friends of liberty everywhere, but custodians only of their own. Assuming that the historical coroner gives us, in the 1990s, an authoritative reading of the death of the Soviet imperialist threat, we will be left facing directly the Wilsonian question: What is the nature of our responsibilities for human freedom in the rest of the world? There are people in the United States, though they are not numerous or influential, who would go to the remotest beaches of the world to midwife democracy, most ardently to South Africa. American conservatives are likelier to take differentiated positions on the question. We should continue to distinguish between those nations that can be helped by the exercise of diplomatic muscle (for instance, the Philippines at the time of the Aquino-Marcos crisis), and those that can be helped only by the expenditure of blood-and-muscle. In general, there has been approval of our effort in Panama, though no very large lessons can be drawn from this venture inasmuch as we were clearly motivated by our dislike of one provocatively offensive and ugly dictator (there was no serious movement to replace Omar Torrijos ten years ago). And although we face a Latin American backlash reflecting traditional opposition to gringo intervention, we are probably vindicated in hemispheric sentiment by the rhapsodic gratitude of the Panamanian people, what one might call the "Grenada effect."

In dealing with other nations, we should temper our rhetoric and adjust our trade policies with some reference to the way in which the governors treat the governed. My own suggestion, published ten years ago in Foreign Affairs, is to detach official human-rights groups (the Third Committee members within the UNM the U.S. representative on the UN's Human Rights Commission, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights) from government, to which they would cease to have direct accountability, leaving it to them merely to report on the status of freedom in the nations of the world (much as is now done by Freedom House, Amnesty International, and others). In any event, we should be guided by realistic priorities. They are the the safety of our own nation is of paramount concern, and that the strategic relevance of other nations to that concern has to be the operative consideration. But our interest in human rights elsewhere in the world must be manifest and enthusiastic, leaving us the task of developing the appropriate vehicles for expressing our humane involvement in mankind.

A Modest Environmentalism 

ALTHOUGH IT is arresting to hear the professional futurist of The Economist exclaim that the problems of Great Britain have almost always turned out to be different from those forecast twenty years earlier, there are, visible, a number of staples. Although it is possible that if oil were to return to the thirty-dollars-plus level, accessible reserves of oil shale would double or even triple existing reserves, a nation as heavily dependent on energy as our own cannot safely count on such a development. We need to encourage a substitute for fossil fuel, not only because we are running out of oil, whatever the touted reserves of the Middle East, but because a wider use of coal as a substitute is offensive to ecology. The way forward would appear to be nuclear power. The most binding scientific superstition of the 1970s had to do with the ineluctable toxicity of nuclear power. The success of the anti-nuclear-power movement has been the most momentous Luddite extravagance of the century. We need to rub our scientists' noses in the consequences of prolonging our ostracism of nuclear power. To do this required not only the dissemination of knowledge, but cooperative legal actionsuch as would immunize nuclear-power producers against legal harassment by ideologues.

In this same connection, we will need to keep our eyes on the metaphysical--yes, metaphysical--implications of the environmental movement. It is essentially conservative to conserve, whether we speak of energy or timberland, elephants or bald eagles. But the conservationist movement, in the hands of some who appear to dominate it, sometimes sounds as though the creation of man was an act of aggression against the animal and mineral kingdoms. We know that the regulation of hunting and fishing and mining and timber-cutting is pruddent and in most cases necessary. But the creeping imperialism of environmentalism and its hardening axioms are moving us in the direction of a prohibition against everything from the wearing of fur coats to the use of the gas-powered automobile, a form of fanaticism that lies sathwart the natural relationships between man, animal, and nature. Against such reductionism conservatives need to contend, by proping up the natural order of priorities while of course remaining sensible to our obligation to preserve the vital organs of our planet.

Protectionist Heresy

THIS IS the primary international economic question. We must cherish the benefits to which we are entitled as a nation, which are the result of a free-market system, an abundance of resources, and a resident population for the most part animated by the work ethic. But it is vital not to identify these factors, which have led to our prosperity, with any Divine warrant granting the United States perpetual economic ascendancy. The most reliable means of measuring our economic slippage is by consulting the marketplace, whose rankings are impersonal. The temptation to tamper with the indices of the market should remain us of the necessity to resist such tampering. The temptation will increase, during the nineties, to "protect" native industry. To do this is wrong for three reasons. The first is that the cultural effects of protectionism tend to encourage such anomalies as we are familiar with in Japan, a rich nation with poor inhabitants: the perverse effect of protectionist policies. The second is that protectionism cannot, in the long run, work, given that any net economic satisfaction has to reflect the value of the dollar in competition with other currencies. To hide depreciated production behind the veil of tariffs is to subsidize the attrition of the dollar; the results of this are inevitably mischievous, and can be tragic. A third reason for opposing protectionism is moral: to mobilize against the economic ascendancy of poor nations by attempting to exclude their products from the home market is inhibiting not only to the United States consumer but also to prospective economic growth in lands inhabited by--fellow human beings. Tariffs are a form of economic warfare, and it is fortunate that the arguments against protectionism blend prudential and moral considerations.

Still Losing Ground

DURING THE Eighties it was established that the high hopes of the Sixties for developing policies that would do away with the American underclass have failed us. They have failed us for reasons most systematically (and eloquently) chronicled by Charles Murray, who goes so far as to speculate that the people we speak of would probably have been better off, using conventional criteria (education, health, obedience to the law, preservation of the family unit), if the government in Washington had taken no measures whatever to federalize welfare.

Whether that is so we can never know, but we do know that although there are many exceptions, an underclass is developing which appears to be more static than any other with which, in its lifetime, the United States has contended--with uniform success, excepting only the intransigent problem of the American Indian. In the South Bronx, 83 per cent of the babies born last year were born to unwed mothers in families for which the father takes no responsibility; and some of them lose their mothers weeks, days--even hours--after their birth, to be raised as orphans, if they are not adopted. The phenomenon has got to be viewed as the fruit of policies fueled by a combination of moral liberalism and state compassion.

It is a conservative challenge to faten concntratedly on the advent of what threatens to be a stationary underclass, and to take measures against the consolidation of that condition. Much that is of an experiemental nature needs to be done to encourage upward mobility, but already there are data that would appear to justify two approaches. One is a heavy reorientation of educational policy at the grade-school and high-school levels in the direction of choice. More and more, states are beginning to permit parents to send their children to public schools of their choice. But this is not accomplishing the needed reforms. The alternative of private schooling appears to be essential in order to test the final resources of our system. The "voucher" plan is widely deprecated, both by citizens of egalitarian conviction and by educators who, among other things, quite correctly see in the voucher system a challenge to their own security. The reform needs to be pressed doggedly, and this is especially difficult to accomplish in a society as impatient, as achievement-oriented as our own. We are a people who want to a see the recapture of Danang on Monday, the immobilization of the DMZ on Tuesday, and the surrender of North Vietnam on Wednesday. As the boat people. But to examine the fruits of alternative education requires several high-school generations. Here and there, on a very small scale, such comparisons have begun, or are being made. It is a duty to celebrate those successes and to widen the experience to include more members of a class that appears now to be tethered to the deteriorated condition of so many of today's public schools.

Whatever else is responsible for the breakup of the family, it is inescapably the case that the official prejudice against religion in education has played a large, perhaps even a decisive role. The Playboy Philosophy, explicitly regnant in the Sixties, may have appealed to the younger generation as the key to hedonism, but hedonism is not the key to happiness, and the wretchedness that blights so many families--white certainly, but predominantly black--has much to do with the nakedness of the public square, in which for generations there were men and women who spoke the language of duty and morality, of loyalty and obligation. And licentious engagements in hedonism are more readily outgrown in the more disciplined classes than in those less self-reliant.

The church/state clause in the First Amendment has effectively been transformed into an instrument of secularization. The time has come, for those who deplore present trends and wish to resist them, to invoke their knowledge of history sufficiently to proclaim the fanatical interpretations of the separation clause of the First Amendment are unrelated to protecting the public from the illusory threat of an established religion. And to go further, to note that the effect of the fanatical interpretation of the separation clause has been to insulate two generations of urban youth from exposure to an ethos whose advocates would have been celebrated as prophetic benefactors of the lower class, if only what they spoke hadn't already been spoken under the aegis of the Bible. Conservatives should be adamant about the need for the reappearance of Judaeo-Christianity in the public square.

The Quality of Life

A POLITICS related to the view of man as a transcendent creature cannot avoid addressing the fundamental questions of human life, which have to do, obviously, with the preservation of life during its normal span. The questions raised in hot dispute around the world focus on the beginning and on the end of life.

The question of abortion divides Americans, and the appropriate means of proceeding politically also divideds Americans. Among those who oppose abortion, for instance, there are the latitudinarians who believe that effective moral pressure can only be generated internally. At the other end, there are those who believe that the higher moral perception should be written into the law, even as there were those who believed 150 years ago that a flat-out prohibition against slavery was the only tolerable moral mandate. Abraham Lincoln, as we all know, was not among them., And in between are those who believe that existing political mechanisms need to feel pressure, of whatever kind, to move in the correct direction.

Disagreement as to means is not only tolerable but welcome, sharpening the argument as it does, and exploring, to good end, different epistemological techniques. But that there should be an end in common is plain, that end being to gain acceptance of the assertion that some time before the child is born, the child is, and that to close out his life is a morally aggressive act, inconsistent with the dignity of life which is the foundation of conservative politics.

The same consideration should guide us in respect of life at the other end of the compass. This problem is already acute and will grow more so, given the pace at which science succeeds in elongating the time between when man is, so to speak, ready to die, and the time when man will die. The great quarrel will deal with the responsibility of society when there is the clearly expressed will of someone who deems life on earth under his current condition worse than death. We are aware that self-inflicted euthanasia is becoming conventional in the Low Countries of Europe, and we are progressively made aware that medical journeymen often surreptitiously practice euthanasia on their own initiative. What we have not arrived at is an understanding suitable to conservatives who believe in the sacredness of life, but who believe also that there is a point where its prolongation becomes fetishistic, rather than humane. Lively arguments on where the line is, how it is to be drawn, and what are the reasonable presumptions in the absence of coherent instructions from the patient will take place. Conservatives must once again be willing to listen, and to accommodate themselves to reasonable moral compromises provided they are assured that the only agents whose voices will give guidance are those directly involved with the individual as an individual, rather than the individual as a state statistic.

Thinking about Drugs

THE RISING crime rate is substantially related to the consumption of drugs and the continuing prohibition against their sale and purchase. Conservatives do well to be skeptical of radical proposals (the most notable of them in this area: to legalize the sale of drugs). But they should be curious and open-minded as data accumulate, data skeptical about the prospects of our war on drugs, and inquisitive about how the situation would unfold in the event that our war against drugs (because it would still be that, a war against drug abuse) were to proceed under the aegis of legalization. Social hostility to the abuse of drugs (whether alcohol or cocaine) should continue, with the question left open whether more damage--or less--would be done under legalization. At the very least, conservatives should forthrightly reject the proposition that to favor legalization is the equivalent of favoring the use of drugs. It is, moreover, a duty of conservatives to give running attention to the loss of derivative liberties as a result of the general mayhem caused by traffic in illegal drugs, even as it was a duty, and still is, to acknowledge the implicit effects of racial discrimination on the liberty of people discriminated against. The question of how to deal with the drug problem should therefore be considered open, with data reviewed dispassionately.

Big Government

DURING THE coldest days of the cold war, conservatives were frequently taunted as closet statists, opportunizing on their hospitality to joint enterprise of the state and industry, now become a vassal to a military-industrial complex. The taunt was always empty, in that it was never a feature of the conservative faith that the military establishmentcould efficiently be conducted a private enterprise; and the size of the military was, and continues to be, a response to the perceived threat against the nation, rather than the expression of a gestating appetite for statist growth.

Still, we did get used to large federal numbers, and although Ronald Reagan's Presidency is justly celebrated for having reduced the rate at which federal growth increased, it did in fact continue to increase. Some of that increase was an aspect of federal "entitlements," written into the law by Democratic Congresses and irreversible under Democratic Congresses. Notwithstanding, it is a fair criticism that, with few exceptions, less attention was paid than should have been paid to the creeping acquiescence of conservative monitors to the continuing growth of the Federal Government. With this derivative indulgence came a corresponding evanescence of any recognition of, let alone loyalty to, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which are there as constitutional beacons warning against shoal waters in approaching omnipotent central government.

Few of the major political problems we face are unrelated to the size, unmanageability, and roguishness of statist policies. The federal deficit is entirely a product of state activity. The huge subventions we give out (to farmers, to carefree patrons of thrift and banking institutions, to American manufacturers) are deeds of the Federal Government. Child care is now on the starting line of federal offensives. The implicit rationale of state-to-state income transfers has got to be that the relatively affluent states (there are 17) should provide help to the less affluent states (there are 33). That idea is completely lost in a sky made black by crisscrossing dollars. The renewed presumption against centralized government, a presumption reiterated in the doctrine of subsidiarity, needs to be reinvigorated. Conservatives need to guard against the kind of anarchy that sometimes detaches conservative analysis from the real world, bringing on the ridicule fully earned by political solipsists. But if anyone is to warn against the presumptive absorption by the Federal Government of social and federated activity, who questions that this ought to be the responsibility of American conservatives?

Tempting Justice

AND WHO, if not the courts, is responsible for the disappearance of the great constitutional brakes explicit and implicit in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments? The analysis and demonstrations offered by Robert Bork in his book, The Tempting of America, are central to the understanding of a wayward judiciary, whose improvisations led Judge Bork to share the fate of the two discarded amendments. It is difficult to deny that the courts are looked upon, by ideologically ambitious legislators, academicians, and journalists, as the agents through which they can hope to advance their policies when it proves impossible democratically to do so by mobilizing an electoral majority. The division brought on by the nomination of Judge Bork, unlike the divisions brought on by the nominations of a half-dozen other judges rejected in recent memory, stays in the mind and will be the locus of constitutional discussion at least through the forthcoming decade, during which the question of original understanding and self-government must be faced on the only possible rational understanding, namely that in the absence of the former, we cannot have the latter. We are self-governed, or we are governed by the courts. A commitment to circumspect behavior by the courts does not, once mentions in passing, endorse a court system instructed only by legal realism, according to which the legislature can ordain the suicide of individual freedom, in contradiction of the implied covenant given us by the Declaration, and the Constitution.

An Overmighty Executive?

CHIEF EXECUTIVES have tended during the past generation to be Republican, and they have on many issues been at loggerheads with a Democratic Congress. The result has been that many conservatives have developed a dangerous attachment to executive supremacy. We need to remind ourselves of the hypotehtical possibility that there might some day be a military adventure which we do not endorse. In a federal republic, Congress is the likeliest repository of conservative affinity, the more so since the distribution of power is designed to work to the benefit of the democratic dissenter. The coexistence of erual senatorial rights for Rhode Island and California with the Supreme Court's doctrince of one man, one vote suggests the tesion at the constitutional level. The inertial domination of Congress by the Democratic Party has done much to confuse conservative thought, causing it to be spastically pro-executive, which is a misdirection of energy that should be going into electoral reform and a vigorous loyalty to sound congressional representation of conservative views and analyses.

Even as we need to tame the Court, we need to beware the inclination to side with the executive in matters of public dispute over policy. We all know that there is a tendency to be enthusiastic about the authority of the Supreme Court, or less than enthusiastic about that authority, depending on the direction in which the Supreme Court opines. Just as we need to guard against judicial usurpation, we need to guard against executive usurpation. A strong executive can be a necessary, galvanizing force in a pluralistic and cantankerously divided republic, and especially importnat in an age in which decisive military or paramilitary action can only issue from a Commander-in-Chief. But the executive's authority cannot be supreme, let alone unchallenged. Just as it happened during the Fifties that the Court became an instrument of leftist ideology, so it has happened that the executive, most notably under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, became an instrument of leftist ideology. Conservatives need to revisit such works as James Burnham's Congress and the american Tradition and to remind ourselves that Providential absenteeism might at some point in the future result in the election of a Democratic President who will enter office citing paeans by conservatives to executive supremacy.

Merely Academic

THE PLIGHT of so many of our colleges and universities reflects the nescience that grips the academic world. It is distressing to reflect that the near-universal rejection of Marxist structure and methods by Eastern European workers and intellectuals is not emulated by our faculties of social science. There is a near-paralysis of reason evident throughout the academic world. The proposition that a college matriculant should be referred to as a "freshperson" suggests the utter imbalance, sociological and aesthetic, of the sponsoring academic class. That a first-rank college should feel obliged to sponsor "Gay-Lesbian Awareness Days" suggests the kind of cultural diffidence that testifies not to tolerance, but to helplessness.

The movements that have closed in around comparable worth, affirmative action, and feminist demands testify not to the wholesome latitudinarianism of the open society, so much as they do to the refusal of society to make wholesome commitments: to natural distinctions and natural inclinations to meritocratic priorities. At the level of higher education, the critique needs urgently to be encouraged, to dissociate genuine tolerance from the kind of faddism that denotes intellectual emptiness and a surrender to ideological academic warlordism. In this struggle the role of the alumni is critical. They must be encouraged to take an intelligent interest in the policies of the colleges they support, infusing jolts of sanity and realism into campuses in which academic and even social mores appear to be uninformed by deliberate thought.

E Pluribus Unum 

CONSERVATIVES should explore with concern, all the more so as the threat to the national security reduces and with it the need for a military of two million young Americans, the dissipating bonds of social cohesion. It has been thirty years since Robert Nisbet posited the need of the quest for community. The factionalism of modern politics militates against the recognition of common interests. These interests conservatives need to investigate, in search of the attenuating ties that bind us together. Whether the time has come to revisit the idea of national service is a question that should be explored without the rancor associated with traditionalist opposition. That any such service, if adopted, should be voluntary, and substantially the creature of individual states, should be conservative stipulations. But the idea should be explored, in particular at a time when high and illegal immigration, and the factionalism elsewhere spoken of, encourage centrifugal forces in our culture. The republic we give our loyalty to, which many Americans have died defending, has to attract continuing affection and pride, and such affection and pride are nurtured by reciprocal service. The republic guarantees us our liberty, and we revivify the spirit that generates the desire for liberty. To do this it is required that the sense of community be stimulated. A comservative challenge is to seek out ways by which the beneficiaries of our patrimony acknowledge their debt to it and feel the need to requite that which we enjoy. As some would put it, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Neither is there such a thing as free liberty.