The establishment vs. the people.

LET'S; BE HONEST. There are conservatives who regard Richard Viguerie much as Churchill regarded Charles de Gaulle during World War II ("The heaviest cross I have to bear is the Croix de Lorraine"). For them, his new book will do but little to make him seem a more winning or reliable comrade-in-arms. This observations is not offered gratuitously, for the importance of Mr. Viguerie's book--which is subtitled "Is a New Populist Revolt on the Way?"--probably lies more in its potentially disjunctive effect on the conservative coalition than in any damage it may cause to its ostensible target, the liberal "establishment."

As though to confirm this hunch, a few months back there appeared in these pages an exchange between Joseph F. Johnston Jr. and Mr. Viguerie regarding the current "flirtation" of some conservatives with the rhetoric and, to some extent, the substance of populism. Mr. Johnston believes populism is a tar baby that conservatives cannot become entangled with and emerge unscathed. He argues that populism has a concrete historical meaning, which embraces egalitarianism, ant-capitalism, economic regulation, cheap money, and political expediency, seasoned with racism, anti-Semitism, and know-nothingism.

Mr. Viguerie is less fastidious about new wine and old bottles. As the concerns of the people change, he says in effect, populism changes correspondingly. Thus, modern populists are "anti-racist, compassionate, anti-Communist, future-oriented, and grounded in traditional values. . . . They promote economic growth and a return of power from the Federal Government to the states and localities and to the individual." Besides, he adds, the nineteenth-century populists weren't as bad as they've been made out; above all else, they--like their modern descendants-- had faith that the people "are smart enough to manage their own affairs," in contrast to those "elitists" who fear and distrust the people.

To be sure, there is much in Mr. Viguerie's book that every conservative will agree with. His bill of particulars against modern liberalism--growth-stunting taxes, inflation, the welfare system, moral relativism, irresolution in the face of Communist aggression-- will make every red-blooded conservative run to fetch his musket down from the wall. Nor will Mr. Viguerie gey any argument here on many of his sensible prescriptions for curing our ills.

Why, th, is the book so off-putting? To begin with, there's the populist rhetoric that gave Joseph Johnston indigestion. What a garage sale of shopworn usage Mr. Viguerie lays out: establishment, elitism, Big Government, Big Banks, Big Media (in Mr. Johnston's perfect words, "For Viguerie, everything big is also bad, except for big cliches"), country-club Republicans, the little guy, the working man, make America great again. Sinister trope abounds: the Ivy League, the Council on Foreign Relations, Chase Manhattan. And then there are the catchy locutions, like "the elite establishment is messing up our lives."

Of course, the problem is deeper than just unimaginative speech, for with the New Right, no less than the New Left, simplistic language betrays (at best) a lack of analytic exertion. Mr. Viguerie seems to be uninterested in, if not innocent of, ideas. His opinions --of which, as an energetic man, he has many--are essentially reflexive, as bereft of ratiocination as the editorial cartoons that make up one of the book's chapters or the dust-jacket-style blurbs that fill another. That many of his observations are pithy and true only partially mollifies those for whom conservatism is a construct of noble ideas and sentiments artfully crafted by expansive minds. The populists seem to be devoid of political culture, in the sense of an awareness of conservatism's intellectual heritage. For them, such luminaries as Russell Kirk or James Burnham might never have written-- not to mention Burke, Publius, and the others.

These differences in style and culture, as strongly as conservatives feel about them, probably could be overlooked if they were all that set the populists apart. But less forgivably--indeed, unforgivably--the populists turn mush of conservative orthodoxy on its head. The hierarchical ordering of society has never alarmed conservatives; quite the contrary, provided there are not unfair barriers to entry into the higher strata. By the same token, the "people" are not regarded as the repository of any special wisdom or virtue, certainly not in the sentimental, Rousseauvian sense suggested by demagogues of both the Right and the Left.

Conservatives know that social and political elites (a word they manage to pronounce without sneer) are inevitable and serve a positive good when functioning consistently with democratic principles. They check popular enthusiasms and the tyranny of the majority, against which there are no inherent safeguards in the populists' leveling credo. No more does populism offer a coherent criticism of such responses to the vox populi as pork-barrel politics, welfarism, or the more execrable products of popular culture.

Such things seem beyond the ken of the populists. It seems unlikely, therefore, that conservatives and populists can ever be more than allies of convenience. Mr. Viguerie seems to have reached the same conclusion, as evidenced by his prediction that the populists soon will be driven by Republican faint-heartedness to form a new party. If it comes to that, may the two groups, sharing as they do a common foe, separate like Abraham and Lot, without rancor.