Social-agenda headaches.

ATTORNEY GENERAL Ed Meese is taking the social issues--abortion, crime, busing, quotas--off the back burner and, in so doing, turning up the heat in Ronald Reagan's political kitchen. Meese's Supreme Court challenge will be the long-postponed catalytic confrontation within the GOP, between those who want the conservative social agenda to be the centerpiece of future Republican outreach, and those who don't even want it on the table.

The GOP dilemma is this: Southern and Midwestern evangelicals and urban ethnics (many Catholics) have been quitting the Democrats and joining the GOP, largely becuase of the Republicans' conservative social agenda. Without social issues, the GOP today commands about 40 per cent of the electorate; with social issues, it has a majority. Numbers aren't the whole story. "The New Right and the Christian Right are the voters who get most turned on," notes one conservative political analyst. "Their power as campaigners far exceeds their numbers."

The other horn of the dilemma is this: Reagan's 1984 victory also owed a lot to his overwhelming young-voter appeal. But on many social issues--including abortion--young voters (especially the Republicans) are more libertatian than conservative. These voters are "pro-choice on everything," notes John Buckley, press secretary to presidential aspirant Congressman Jack Kemp.

"This demographic bulge is where the battle for the majority party is going to be fought," Buckley has observed, referring to the 94 million Americans between 18 and 39 (who outnumber the seventy million over 39). Republicans can attract them, he says, by playing down the social issues and playing up the economic and defense issues. Libertarianism is especially popular among tomorrow's managerial elite, typically a Republican stratum. One Harvard Business School professor, D. Quinn Mills, estimates that 60 per cent of young executives see themselves as libertarians, 35 per cent as conservatives.

Tactically speaking, how has Ronald Reagan hitherto handled this dilemma? Candidate Reagan ran on the Republican right-to-life platform. President Reagan authored a journal article (later published as a book), "Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation," on the sickeining scales of mass abortion in the United States. That's how Reagan treated social issues at the level of talk. Action was a different story; namely, precious little. In fact abortion typifies the President's all-talk, little-action approach to social issues.

Or so it seemed until Attorney General Ed Meese weighed in. In mid-July the Justice Department filed a brief in a case before the Supreme Court, one that challenges Roe v. Wade, the Court's decision that legalized abortion. True, the judicial impact of this may be minimal. Twice in the 1984-1985 term the Court reaffirmed the 1973 decision. But right-to-life activists welcome the Meese move anyway, hoping that the case will raise the public's consciousness. "FDR's solicitor general regularly filed briefs with the Court, when it was clear that the Justices would decide the other way," said one conservative legal scholar. "By holding up his flag in any weather, FDR led the march into liberalism, where we were beached for more than thirty years." Also, the Court habitually delays rulings on controversial cases until the end of its term. By May or June of 1986 the court may be repopulated--and the right one-vote shift is all the right-to-lifers need.

The immediate impact of the case, howerver, will be neither juridical nor pedagogical, but political: How will Reagan, and other Republicans, maneuver so as not to be impaled on either horn of the GOP dilemma?" "Social issues are not losers," argues one Hill Reaganite, siding with the pro-social-issues conservatives. "Yuppies wont' have anywhere else to go. The Democrats' tax-tax, spend-spend just won't be tolerated. Besides that, if the GOP come out on the social issies, it gains inner-city Catholics and Southerners." Reagan will support Meese, this Reaganite says: "He needs to give the evangelicals something--maybe not everything--but certainly abortion and probably school prayer."

LIBERTARIANS in the GOP disgrace. "On Meese's abortion brief, Reagon will say that it's wonderful, and the meese is doing just what Reagan wants him to," asserts Doug Bandow, a libertarian aide to former White House domestic counselor Martin Anderson. "But Reagan won't campaign for these issues, and neither will George Bush." Like Reagan, Bush will give the agenda a lot of lip-service because he needs to pick up New Right support that Kemp is seeking and largely has. For his part, Kemp is now covering his flank by signing on with a group of congressmen and senators who, like Meese, filed against Roe v. Wade, a brief that no one will ever see but one that can be produced if the conservative going gets rough.

The Justice Department isn't saying precisely what other social issues it will be taking up. "We don't want to tip our hand," notes one Reaganite at Justice. "The death penalty, forfeiture of assets for dope dealers, racial quotas in hiring, busing, maybe pornography, are next," predicts one conservative law activist. On most of these items, the libertarians and conservatives aren't at such loggerheads. All the more reason why, on the matter of abortion, Reagan should stick with Meese are re-Reaganize. The de-Reaganization of Ronald Reagan has proceeded too far already.