New paradigm or old paradox?

HISTORY, according to an old Austrian friend of mine who saw more than one New World Order come and go, is mainly a matter of people rediscovering the obvious by tripping over it. This is certainly true of the current conservative debate over the post-Reagan future. The five points of the "New Paradigm" defined by White House aide James Pinkerton [NR, Jan. 281 are a case in point. For those whose memories go back to the Nixon years and before, the points are as much a case of deja vu as a glimpse into the future, a reprise of some of the oldest-and worthiest-conservative and Republican principles: "market forces," "individual choice," "empowerment" (a trendy new word for more individual opportunities for self-betterment), "decentralization," and "what works" (statism has failed; conservatism works; ergo, it should be applied).

In short, there is nothing particularly new about the Pinkerton Paradigm. Most conservative and Republican politicians have espoused these points for the better part of this century, and their roots go back much further. Their application has been another matter, limited, as it has been, by political reality: a virtual Democratic monopoly on control of the Congress for most of the past sixty years. More recently, while the Republicans have won five out of six presidential elections since 1968, the Democrats have kept control of the House of Representatives 12 times in a row, the Senate nine out of 12 times.

The public's electoral ambivalence when it comes to choosing executives and legislators was explained, perhaps unwittingly, by Mr. Pinkerton when he wrote that the most important political lesson of our time is: "First, the American people do not like taxes. Second, they do want a kinder, gentler America."

This is tantamount to saying that Americans want to lose weight while pigging out on Hostess Twinkies. Achieving what the voters want when their desires are contradictory is always tricky work. A Hollywood screenwriter of the 1930s once defined a successful story line as one that was "new but familiar, controversial but inoffensive, salacious but moralistic, and simple-minded but highbrow." That is not a bad definition of Reaganism in its diluted, applied form from 1981 to 1989. It was a lot more amorphous than the textbook truisms it invoked, but about as sharply defined as the public was willing to accept.

More for Less

AS anything changed? Today's voters, if we are to take Mr. Pinkerton at his word (and I am inclined to do so), want an America that is stingy but generous, that is secure but reaps the benefits of risk taking, and that makes them feel both comfortable and virtuous on the cheap. In short, unless and until they face a forced choice, most Americans would like a government that gives them everything they want, for less than they are currently shelling out in taxes.

Up to a point, this is a tribute to the good sense of the public. Government is spendthrift. If our taxes are not overly high compared to those in most other industrial democracies, the fact remains that billions-perhaps as much as 25 per cent of tax revenues-are either wasted through inefficiency, or allotted to goals that are undesirable, unnecessary, or unattainable. Unfortunately, the strength of statism's appeal is greater in its parts than in its whole; the war for pork-barrel spending and the welfare state has been won in detail, vote by vote, year by year in the Congress, with little or no relation to the big budget picture laboriously compounded in the Oval Office and the OMB. Having served as an aide to George Bush's three Republican predecessors, I was a reluctant eyewitness to this phenomenon, unchanging regardless of the fluctuations in public support for Messrs. Nixon, Ford, and Reagan.

In the end, focused special interests almost always triumphed over unfocused public sentiment on the spending side, whether the special interest in question was the welfare lobby, the defense industry, environmentalists, or agribusiness. There was plenty of blame to go around, but the heart of the problem lay not in too many pragmatists on the White House staff, but in too few conservative votes in the Congress.

To the extent that this public ambivalence continues-and, human nature being human nature, no drastic change is likely any century soon-the future of American conservatism will rest not on the application of a new paradigm, but on the delicate manipulation of an ancient paradox: the duality of human nature.

Forcing the Choice

CONSERVATIVES must force the choice. Keeping down taxes, bolstering traditional values, and promoting economic growth is the one really tangible domestic agenda which, if reclaimed, can lock in the loyalties of a working majority of American voters. Maintaining the Republican position as the party of strength and patriotism (and the Democrats as the party of weakness and self-doubt) is the foreignpolicy corollary.

Meanwhile, on the fund-raising fringes of the Right, another old paradox has come into play; the cry of treason among the King's ministers at a time when the King is at the height of his popularity has once again gone up. In 1972, it took the form of the late John Ashbrook's futile candidacy for the Republican nomination. Far from strengthening the conservative hand, Ashbrook's pathetic showing in the New Hampshire primary (Nixon won by a landslide and liberal Republican Pete McCloskey, running as a dove on Vietnam, out-polled Ashbrook 2 to 1) actually weakened conservative influence in the White House. In 1980, Ronald Reagan faced a similar challenge from self-proclaimed leaders like Richard Viguerie, who first backed Phil Crane and then John Connally for the GOP nomination. Result: One Connally delegate and a Reagan landslide.

Mr. Pinkerton is correct when he says the conservative movement today is "close to becoming a majority coalition." But he is dead wrong when he characterizes that movement as "combining the power of family-oriented evangelicals and libertarian supplysiders." If that were all the "power" there was in American conservatism it would be a beast with a tail, a snout, and nothing in between. Witness the 1988 GOP primaries: the candidate of the evangelicals (Pat Robertson) and the candidate of the supply-siders (Jack Kemp) were overwhelmed by the legitimist candidate of the Reagan coalition (George Bush, in case you've forgotten).

Again, it comes back to an old paradox. Applied, as opposed to theoretical, conservatism is at least as instinctive as it is intellectual. When it triumphs it is a victory of the visceral over the vaporous, drawing on values and loyalties deeply imbedded in human nature and the American character-so deeply that they almost defy analysis.

The American Left has either rejected these values or fatally underestimated their potency. To the extent that its warped thinking earned the New Deal/Great Society Democratic Party the status of the "Party of Ideas," it sowed the seeds of its own ruin. To the extent that we have profited from this ruin in five of the last six presidential elections, the Republican Party (in tandem with the mainstream conservative movement) has done so as a party of innate values rather than abstract ideas. While each generation must apply them anew in a new context, these values are as old as the Republic, neatly encapsulated by John O'Sullivan as "limited government, prudent finance, an independent citizenry with a stake in the economy, a network of little platoons, the diffusion of God-fearing morality ... a post-industrial version of the American Republic of self-reliant agricultural small-holders envisioned by the Founding Fathers."

By levering the old political paradox, by forcing the choice away from what the public tells pollsters it would like to see (and what liberal demagogues will always promise) and toward what is affordable, attainable, and true to American values, conservatism can secure and expand its White House beachhead. But only if we avoid the fate of the American Left, rendered irrelevant and paralytic by its own paradigm.