Joining the cultural war.

A hostile reporter could have had a fine time describing the first annual conference of Pat Buchanan's new foundation, The American Cause. There was an impressive array of speakers - Bill Kristol, poet Frederick Turner, our own Joe Sobran and Jeff Hart - but also, among the audience, the sort of political eccentrics who make for "they're-not-like-us" caricatures in the Washington Post Style section. Oldsters in odd suits bearing "Buchanan in '96" buttons. Young staffers who look as if they have just left Salt Lake City on their first mission abroad. A woman in satin gloves and a sun hat with crepe veil, recalling Barbara Stanwyck or Claire Trevor in a 1940s thriller. And at the reception, for entertainment, a burly old guy with shaved head banging out an incongruous assortment of contemporary tunes, prompting a friend to remark: "I didn't know John Demjanjuk played the piano."

In short, these were the kind of folks one heard laughed about in the Bush White House, "right-wing crazies" who brought "embarrassment" on the party; definitely not people like us. And the Bush people were right. The people at this conference were not like them. They're principled and articulate, and prefer winning elections to winning good ink in the Style section.

Winning elections means first and foremost - the theme of the conference - "Winning the Cultural War." "We look upon this gathering today," Buchanan declared, "as the Boston Tea Party of the cultural counter-revolution." As in the Cold War, "containment is not enough"; we have to take the offensive. "This conference is going to focus not only on what we are against, but what we are for."

"Tea Party" may be overstating it (didn't he use that line in New Hampshire?), but the sense of purpose was demonstrated in the presence of victors from the battlefront like Will Perkins, leader of Colorado's initiative against "gay rights." Here was a semiretired car dealer, Buchanan observed, with no civic involvement whatever outside the Colorado Springs Salvation Army until finally he'd been pushed far enough by the activists. He then started a group, Colorado for Family Values, that defied craven local politicians, the national media, and threats of boycotts by forcing a referendum and passing it 54 per cent to 46 per cent. The state Republican Party, meanwhile, would have nothing to do with the issue. Too divisive.

Or take the phenomenon of home schooling, represented at the conference by Mary Kay Clark. Concluding even twenty years ago that the public schools were "the training camp of the enemy of my values," Dr. Clark began teaching her own seven children at home. She now directs a national home-schooling association that claims 4,500 students, who score about 30 per cent higher than public-school students on SATs.

About this approach there was some dissent. It seems to imply a surrender of the public schools, reflecting the larger debate between conservatives who aim to "recapture the culture" and those resigned to finding little "pockets of virtue" within it. Must we in the end retreat to the catacombs, or will more people rise up like Mary Cummins, the grandmother who rid the New York City schools of Chancellor Joseph Fernandez, Heather's mommies, Daddy's disgusting roommate, and all the rest?

Mrs. Cummins took ill and couldn't make the conference, but her example suggests an oversight in Chronicles editor Tom Fleming's formulation that in the cultural war "it's New York, essentially, against Nebraska." By our own reasoning, liberalism ought to be least popular where it's most powerful, and the crisis points are not in Omaha but in Queens. Here after all, as Buchanan observed, was this obscure district school-board member who took on, and routed, "an education establishment before which even national politicians have trembled and groveled." If she can do that, just why can't the Republican Party?

Well, for much the same reason, as Frederick Turner suggested in a discussion of "Art and the Cultural War," that corporations subsidize art devoid of beauty and hostile to their own interests. Corporate types, like establishment Republicans, "are chronic appeasers who know they are viewed with contempt by the cultural elite." Those "terrifying post-modern blocks" one sees outside the typical corporate headquarters represent their attempt - a futile attempt - "to buy a little bit of good will."

Professor Paul Gottfried, a pockets-of-virtue man, offered the similarly depressing point that much of America itself has bought into cultural liberalism. What we have, he said, is "a situation in which people are losing their autonomy voluntarily." Americans "actually pay money to send their kids to Harvard," without apparently worrying about what kind of instruction they'll get from "the social parasites who make up America's professoriate." True enough, but as Jeff Hart observed, an awful lot of those kids - not most, but still an awful lot - end up rebelling against the fraudulent professoriate itself, which is why even Harvard has a highly successful conservative magazine. (Although, Hart reflected, "without tenure, I'd probably be a gardener or something.")

Still more hopeful was Bill Kristol, himself a son of Harvard and former chief of staff to Dan Quayle. Said Kristol, We have at least one cause for optimism: the recent Atlantic cover declaring "Dan Quayle Was Right." And then there is the sense, "as with the Soviets in the early Eighties, of a hollowness at the center." This is why with every challenge - a parents' revolt in Milwaukee or Queens, a spending bill voted down, a nominee rejected - liberalism loses "its sense of inevitability." "Who really believed Ronald Reagan when he said Communism was destined for the |ash heap of history'?"

A good point, only it's too bad no one from the Republican National Committee was in the room to hear it. You would think it might have showed a little good will to stretch a corner of the Big Tent over the people here. Representative John Doolittle of California - addressing with Joe Sobran the theme, "The Obligations of Statesmen Who Know Abortion Is Wrong" - wondered as much himself. Haley Barbour, successor as RNC chairman to the simpering Rich Bond, is about to spend a few million on a series of conferences to figure out what the party believes. Here was a perfect chance, for a ticket price of a hundred dollars, to start figuring.