Back to our roots.

IN HIS manifesto "Conservatism for the People" [Sept. 3, 1990], Paul Weyrich challenges the political Right to reformulate its agenda--until now largely an agenda of dissent--as a governing philosophy, with a "populist" (i.e., majoritarian) appeal.

Weyrich lists several prescriptions for a new conservative agenda, dealing with such social problems as poverty, education, crime, and drugs. I found myself comfortable with most of the elements in Weyrich's proposal, but my optimism was shaken by one central inclusion and one pregnant omission. Together these undermine any majoritarian aspirations the agenda might have and, in my view, serve as an emblem of conservatism's current impasse--the reason that many who finally become disgusted with liberalism still find themselves unable to cross the political battle lines to embrace a creed which otherwise, in their hearts, they know is right. I am referring to Weyrich's inclusion of the "defense of the right to life" as a key element of his manifesto, and even more strikingly his omission of any mention of the subject of race.

Weyrich is himself aware of the obstacle that any agenda that includes "defense of the right to life" must pose to majoritarian political ambitions: "Our agenda must affirm the right to life. But we must understand that the vast majority of Americans are profoundly ambivalent on this issue." In fact, only 30 per cent are actually ambivalent. A critical minority--another 30 per cent--are more than "profoundly ambivalent"; they are as determinedly in favor of the right to abortion with no restrictions as the 30 per cent who are convinced that the right to life is absolute are against any form of abortion. As long as one remains on the terrain of these absolutes, the arithmetic adds up to an insuperable political barrier: 30 per cent ambivalent and 30 per cent in favor of unrestricted abortion make up a majority coalition that will defeat any political movement that mobilizes around the code words "right to life."

This points up a basic principle of majoritarian politics that is absent from Weyrich's discussion. A true philosphy of governance for Americans must recognize the irreducible pluralism of American society. This means, to begin with, that its political agenda must not be perceived as a threat to the existence of America's minority communities. Conceived as a battle over inalienable rights, the abortion issue poses such a threat. This means that barring a transformation of the American character itself, there is no way that a political movement with the "right to life" as a key-stone of its agenda can become a governing philosophy for Americans.

But conservatives are not alone in attempting to force their particular morality on a recalcitrant majority. Liberals were the first to back themselves into a political corner over abortion. By claiming abortion as a constitutional right and ramming their preference through the Supreme Court, liberals created the political divisiveness of the "abortion issue" and in so doing confined themselves to a minority base among the electorate. Unfortunately, conservatives lock-stepped along and thus squandered the opportunity that this liberal power grab presented. By meeting the radical demand for an abortion right with a counterdemand equally absolute, conservatives forfeited the natural majority that was already opposed to the liberals on the issue.

As an alternative, conservatives could have taken the approach outlined by Judge Bork (for which he was crucified by the liberal-left), that there is no basis in the Constitution for an abortion right and that the issue should be resolved through the legislative process. Once returned to the legislatures, the abortion question could be resolved by political compromise, reflecting the real divisions within America's plural communities.

Changin Places

UNTIL the Sixties, recognition of the pluralism of American society and commitment to the defense of threatened minorities was the primary strength of American liberalism. It is the subversion of this appeal in the last two decades by the radical agendas of "liberation," affirmative action, and other group-defined and government-enforced privileges--agendas that Balkanize America and threaten to turn its politics into a South African system of group entitlements--that has subverted liberal principles, and undermined the Democrats' majority coalition.

But not completely. Thus, the abortion issue was originally pressed by feminist ideologues under radical formulas like "reproductive rights," but the politicians of the pro-abortion movement shrewdly recognized that this would never command majority consent. Rhetorically, therefore, the pro-abortionists ran their campaign under the conservative banner of "choice" and "privacy," voicing the classic conservative concern of keeping government out of individuals' bedrooms and lives.

This liberal hypocrisy was indeed the homage that vice pays to virtue. But the radicals could never have stolen the conservative agenda in the first place if conservatives had not yielded it up.

There is no clearer example of the way in which the fundamentalist Right has detrimentally set the agenda of the conservative coalition than in its attitude toward homosexuality--a subject on which Weyrich is silent. Without exactly endorsing the proposition that AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality, conservative spokesmen often seem to acquiesce in the conclusion. The notorious reluctance of the Reagan Administration to confront the AIDS issue head on is surely attributable to this fundamentalist disposition. In point of fact, if the AIDS epidemic demonstrates anything, it confirms the view that homosexuality is itself not a choice (for how many would choose to joint a highrisk group where the risk is certain death?), but is a stroke of God or nature. This being the case, an appropriate conservative (or even religious) attitude toward homosexuality ought in the first instance to be one of tolerance and respect for difference.

Tolerance and respect for homosexuals does not mean endorsing the political agenda of the homosexual Left, however. This Left has laid siege to the very concept of the biological family, and hijacked America's public-health and health-care-delivery systems for its own political ends. If silence = death, as the homosexual radicals proclaim, promotion of promiscuity and the obstruction of proven public-health methods (testing, contact tracing, etc.) have been the most important factors ensuring the spread of the epidemic and therefore the needless deaths of tens thousands of homosexuals and others (particularly Hispanic and black IV drug abusers) who were unknowingly in its path. The absolutist Left is a threat to its own constituencies (no surprise here). It is on this pragmatic ground that conservatives should join the political battle. For homosexuals as an American minority: tolerance and respect. For gay "liberation" as a radical agenda: no quarter.

Missing the Point

BUT Weyrich's most striking and significant omission is his failure even to mention the central social issue in America's history: race. Weyrich's omission is doubly odd because the issue of race provides the key to the transformation of American liberalism since the 1960s. It has been observed that the battles of the Sixties were in fact a kind of second civil war. The Sixties were also, in a sense, the true end of the Civil War, its successful conclusion in a new social contract that repaired the faulty structure of the Founding, finally including black Americans (and by extension all minorities) in the constitutional covenant. It is this completed covenant on which a persuasive conservatism must be built.

And it is the rejection of this covenant by post-Sixties radicals that creates both the opportunity and the necessity for this conservative moment in America's political drama. For the radicals of the Sixties, the historic achievement of the civil-rights revolution was not an act of completion, but an occasion for a new offensive on the covenant itself--the "System" that radicals despised by nature. Thus in the wake of the historic achievement of equal opportunity for all Americans, a new agenda was advanced--black power, black liberation, affirmative action, racial entitlement.

When this radical agenda was sold to liberals, it changed the very nature of American liberalism, and not only in the area of civil rights. Charles Murray, in Losing Ground, identifies an epochal shift in the Sixties from efforts to achieve equal opportunity to demands for equal outcomes, from the concept of rights as limits to government to the agenda of entitlements as claims on government.

This radical agenda has subverted liberalism, leaving conservatives as the sole defenders of the liberal legacy. This is the real basis of the majoritarian opportunity. But to defend the liberal legacy, conservatives must defend it against the illiberal forces not only on the Left, but also on the Right. These forces, operating from the ground of a moral fundamentalism, share with left-wing radicals a coercive utopianism in the belief that America's civil society can be reconstructed according to virtuous ideas.

It has been said that with the collapse of Communism and the end of the cold war, the conservative coalition will lose its unity and disintegrate. Perhaps. But conservatives are united in an older battle than the one with the Marxist millenarians. The intellectual roots of modern conservatism reach back to Burke's quarrel with the French Revolution, which also marks the real birth of the modern Left. The animating spirit of conservatism lies in its opposition to the rationalist utopias of the radical Enlightenment--the totalitarian democracies of Rousseau and Marx. Its abiding purpose--and future opportunity--lies in its commitment to the classic liberalism that inspired America's own revolution: limited government, individual rights, democracy, property, and the protection of minorities against the tyranny of the majority.

David Horowitz is co-author with Peter Collier of Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties. This article is one in an occasional series on the future of American conservatism.