Red Bob: Dole as fellow traveler.

The trouble with Bob Dole is that he's too much of a Marxist. I don't mean that his heart bleeds for the condition of the toiling masses, whether foreign or domestic. It is doubtful he had heard of the toiling masses until Pat Buchanan had the bad form to mention them earlier this year. Nor do I mean that Dole wants to expropriate the expropriators. Just the opposite, he wants to help the rich get richer.

(Of course to camouflage his proposed windfall for the rich, he's had to sweeten the pot with an income-tax cut for average Americans. And to appease the family-values crowd, he's had to throw in a five-hundred-dollar-per-child tax credit. But the capitalists won't object to those sops as long as they themselves are taken care of royally.)

I certainly don't mean to say that Dole favors the dictatorship of the proletariat or the classless society. And despite endless GOP tall about "smaller government," he doesn't favor the withering away of the state either.

All the same, Dole (or whoever designs his campaign strategy) is a kind of Marxist since he accepts the fundamental axiom of Marxism, which is this The only factor that really counts in society is the economic factor. It is the system of wealth production that makes the word go round. All other factors - politics, religion, philosophy, law, science, scholarship, literature, art, education, entertainment, journalism, etc. - are secondary, if that. The economy is the cause, they the effects.

Consistent with his Marxist philosophy, Dole has reduced his essential campaign message to two economic proposals: tax cuts plus a balanced budget. The idea is that a combination of the two will prove a sovereign remedy for all that ails us. It is precisely the plat form Lenin would have run on had he been a Republican.

Are you worried about crime? Violence? Illegitimacy? Divorce? Poor schools? Abortion? Sexually transmitted diseases? Corrupt business practices? Rampant and ruthless greed? Or a hundred other moral and cultural ills? Well, worry no longer. Tax cuts plus a balanced budget will produce prosperity, and prosperity will make all these problems go away.

Oh, from time to time Dole mentions these things in passing. In late August, for instance, when drug use among the young happened to be front-page news for a few days, he promised a renewed war on drugs. But these are sidebar issues. His campaign has made it dear that the real issues are tax cuts and a balanced budget.

Ironically, in his acceptance speech at the GOP convention he criticized the unofficial Clinton slogan of four years ago, "It's the economy, stupid." Yet he's running on precisely the same slogan.

Most Dole critics have focused their, attention on the apparent contradiction between the two economic proposals. "How can we have a balanced budget," they ask, "if we also have a drastic tax cut?" But they have paid scant attention to the far more fundamental flaw in the Dole agenda, namely that the Marxist axiom is nonsensical. You can't solve a nation's problems by addressing its economic problems alone. For that matter, you can't even solve its economic problems by addressing economic problems alone.

Marxism was refuted in practice by the great Communist experiment of the twentieth century. But well before the event of 1917, it was refuted in theory by Max Weber, who argued that society cannot be explained in terms of the economic factor alone. Rather it is explainable in terms of a combination of economic and cultural factors - "culture" here being close to a synonym for "religion." Hence Weber's famous thesis, that the nineteenth-century industrial revolution was the offspring of the seventeenth-century Puritan mentality.

I have argued in the past that the public senses something has gone profoundly wrong with American culture in the last thirty years (see, "It's the Culture, Stupid!" Commonweal, September 23, 1994). Despite the fact that those who sense this most acutely - neoconservatives at the intellectual level, the Religious Right at the mass level - have become major players in the Republican party, the Dole campaign, with its "the economy is the only thing that counts" theme, has elected to sidestep this gigantic issue, or at least to downplay it.

In addition to their Wall Street Marxism, the Dole advisers don't want their man to address the cultural issue because they're afraid it will make the Republicans look "divisive", a synonym for "Buchananesque." God forbid that anyone should be divisive.

For a generation people with traditional religious beliefs and values, especially old-fashioned Protestants, have been treated with contempt by America's secularist and quasi-secularist elites. They have been the butts of endless jokes and sneers, they have been targets of moralistic indignation they have been stereotyped as stupid, bigoted, mean-spirited, and sexually repressed. Somehow this high-status contempt has never counted as divisive. Yet when the low-status objects of contempt fight back, this counts as divisive. Such is the alchemy of politics.

So does this mean that those who are unhappy with the moral tone of U.S. society will have no candidate to vote for? Not at all. They can vote for the incumbent president. Bill Clinton, whether he's a Weberian or because his pollsters run better focus groups, understands what Bob Dole and his neo-Marxist advisers don't seem to get, that the culture counts as well as the economy.

That's why Clinton has reinvented himself as a cultural conservative, a family-values candidate. He's the champion of teen curfews, school uniforms, decency on TV, getting tough on welfare recipients. He's the foe of tobacco, assault weapons, crime, and gay marriage.

Some will object, "Yes, but Clinton's not sincere, he's a mere opportunist. Look, for instance, at his veto of the partial-birth abortion bill. How can we trust the moral bona fides of someone who defends a procedure tantamount to infanticide?"

A point well taken. But it's a point that will make no difference if Bob Dole runs a neo-Marxist campaign, in the meantime leaving Clinton free to exploit the cultural issues.