The new malaise?

You know it's time to call the troops together when conservatives start talking about "malaise." What's next for the Republican leadership -- killer rabbits?

At the International Conservative Congress here last month, one heard two explanations for this predicament. Look, the optimists argued, the Cold War is won, free markets have been vindicated, liberals have gained power but only by sounding like us. This is victory even if conservatives are not in office to savor it. When your "greatest problem is plagiarism from opponents," George Will remarked, you're doing okay; so "be of good cheer."

The other view recalls H. L. Mencken's definition of the pessimist as a man who, if he smells a rose, looks around for a coffin. But maybe the coffin is really there. The Left, observed NR editor John O'Sullivan, rules the White House, Britain, France, Canada, and Italy, with the Right clinging for dear life to Congress, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. "Why is conservatism failing in its primary political task of gaining and keeping power?"

There was a lot to be sorted out. In the week before the September 27 - 28 gathering, a few conservatives and libertarians -- James Glassman in the Washington Post, Virginia Postrel in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rush on the radio -- had faulted the NR-sponsored program for gloomy defeatism. And it's true that some of the more downcast prognoses could have been delivered with minor editing at NR's January 1993 conference right there at the Mayflower Hotel. The crisis then was a squandering of the Reagan legacy. Now it was a squandering of the Republican Congress. But in between there had been the Republican revolution, however brief its glory. Politics is what happens while you're planning something else. Who could say then -- who can say now -- what the next year might bring?

A happy thought, but not much of a strategy. And on hand were a pretty impressive array of speakers from across the map to caution against just such easy-going optimism. If not malaise, something equally worrisome seemed to be dragging down the movement. It was true, as American Spectator editor Bob Tyrrell pointed out, that the very presence of so many prominent conservatives -- from Will to Margaret Thatcher to William F. Buckley Jr. to Charles Krauthammer to Ralph Reed to Steve Forbes -- reflected strength. And, true, co-sponsoring the event were "four of the healthiest think tanks in the country": the American Enterprise Institute, the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover Institution. These are strengths, all right, but the strengths of opposition. Why were we attending soul-searching conferences while liberals confidently man the executive offices of the Western world?

Teeing up the debate was a Statement of Principles. "Conservatives," it said, "are not anti-government," but rather partisans of limited, decentralized government. This addressed the "national greatness" conservatism lately launched by Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who spoke at the opening session -- the Honorable Robert H. Bork presiding. A week earlier Kristol and David Brooks of the Standard had asked in the Wall Street Journal, "How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?" "Let the Left denigrate the U.S.," Kristol urged us. Government does have its great and legitimate purposes. We should be guided not just by anger, but by "a love of country and an informed patriotism."

There was a bit of stirring among his 450 listeners. Two years after President Clinton himself declared the era of big government over, why should we have to mind our words on the subject? And isn't it the Left that equates "the U.S." with "U.S. Government"? Government is great to the degree it draws on its source of greatness, the Constitution (and, as Harry Jaffa reminded us in a panel debate, the Declaration).

The greatness theme strikes one, however, as more a rhetorical lift than a political doctrine. Great government -- limited but clear federal authority, strong national defense, more power to the states, deregulation, reliance on markets, etc. -- bears a suspicious resemblance to good government. But maybe the program could use some spiffing up, and that seems to be the idea here: to give conservatism a starched shirt, shiny brass buttons, and Reaganesque handkerchief in the breast pocket. O'Sullivan remarked that it was "bad luck that the [Kristol - Brooks] article came out in the same week as the IRS hearings." More important than Greatness were the concrete policies offered under that banner, and here we had to avoid deluding ourselves with false confidence. "The sensible man," said O'Sullivan, "carries an umbrella when it looks like rain. He does not take one out in a heat wave, and he certainly does not leave his umbrella at home in a storm on the grounds that he is demonstrating his faith in the meteorological future."

The IRS hearings came up often during the conference. Clearly Republicans were on to something there. The question was whether they would run with it, as indeed with the other big themes around which a consensus seemed to be gathering: a defense of Western culture, national sovereignty, and, abroad, a unified democratic alliance led by America.

On the tax front, Forbes and his flat tax are going strong. It's a testament to the idea and to the man's perseverance that both survived the Dole - Alexander napalming in New Hampshire and are clearly going to shape the 2000 campaign, all the more strongly with Forbes's broader social themes today. But the best sign was the tax debate between House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Rep. Billy Tauzin.

Armey: "The current tax code is unbearable, insufferable, obnoxious, and will no longer be tolerated by the American people." Tauzin: "There is no more un-American institution in this country than the IRS. The income tax today is incompatible with freedom."

My kind of debate. Tauzin nearly rattled my flat-tax faith by noting that, under Armey's 17 per cent rate, you still have the IRS, whereas a national sales tax would take us back to the pre-Sixteenth Amendment system, with taxes collected at the purchase point. Armey counters that a sales tax turns every merchant into a federal tax agent; that sales taxes have a way of becoming invisible value-added taxes as in Europe; and that a repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment is problematic.

The Frick and Frack of tax reform are off this month on a national debate tour, Armey pledging to support Tauzin's plan should it prevail, and vice versa. (A scrap of news: Speaker Gingrich's press aide informs me that he recently devoured Armey's 1996 book The Flat Tax, sending back a zealously annotated copy, suggesting that Armey's plan might have the edge.) The aim is to pass a bill right around next November. "This President," says Armey, "if we get a new tax code on his desk, will look down at that bill, look at the polls, and say to himself, 'This is the stuff legacies are made of."'

All of the above abuse directed at the IRS proves, incidentally, that the "national greatness" and "anti-government" rhetoric can very easily be combined.

The Saturday panels and speeches were arranged so as to walk us through the philosophical valleys by morning, and espy the political summits just in time for dinner. O'Sullivan had sent us off with a warning that, having vanquished socialism, conservatives had now to contend with the new isms of cultural deconstruction. The Statement echoed this: "Conservatism is the politics of Western self-respect." This means standing against unchecked mass immigration, multiculturalism, bilingualism, diversity, and other euphemisms under which the Left seeks to divide, redistribute, and rule.

Gingrich stepped up with a ringing call to abolish affirmative action and bi-lingual education outright, probably his strongest words to date. Josef Joffe, columnist for both a major German daily and U.S. News & World Report, described the new "isms" as an attempt to create "a gender and racial spoils system" to be overseen by "the omnipotent state." The conservative message should be quite blunt, said Joffe: "E pluribus unum." (Or, as Al Gore has so beautifully put it: "Out of one, many.") But the multicultural man of the hour was Ward Connerly, leader of California's anti-quota initiative. And -- let's get this rolling now -- not a bad Senate prospect for next year's anti-Boxer Rebellion.

"A one-man march on Washington," as Will described him, Connerly in a Sunday speech reminded us that the diversity debate has to be framed in unflinching terms of "equality under law." Be optimistic, he said, but be willing to "suit up for this, and not be afraid to confront." Debating Connerly on Saturday, Glenn Loury of the Institute on Race and Social Division differed less on abolishing quotas than on the political difficulties.

There is no "ism" yet for the Left's immigration project (Goreism?) but this was the subject of an "Immigration: More or Less" debate between Ben Wattenberg (More) and Peter Brimelow (Less). It was Brimelow's Alien Nation, versus Wattenberg's First Universal Nation. By going to the flat-tax session, one missed that ongoing Texas death match. What's clear, however, is that the Clinton Immigration and Naturalization Service abuses and outbreaks of electoral fraud in California have borne out warnings that Brimelow has been making for years. Margaret Thatcher's words on "the threat to national identity" and "values and institutions that unite us" could have been spoken by Brimelow, Connerly, or Gingrich. Nor would Wattenberg have disagreed with her call to "recognize the priceless asset of a common language."

Guiding us in the loftier philosophical realms were, among others, Buckley, Jaffa, Michael Novak, Hilton Kramer, Irving Kristol, and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. Novak led us up into Eric Voegelin territory with a reminder that liberalism is at heart a cultural, not merely economic, theory. "It is a gnostic movement. It wants something infinite, it wants it now, and it will destroy anything in its way to attain that power" -- with marriage and family the eternal target. Buckley reflected on the illegitimacy rate as cultural signpost: "What can conservatives contribute to alleviating a problem that generated a 600 per cent higher incidence, among children raised by a single parent, of crime, poverty, illiteracy, and drug addiction?" Are we, in confronting moral questions, "suffering from a failure of nerve?"

Human Events editor Terry Jeffrey was eloquent in describing how, in 1988, he had learned of the nightmarish fetal-tissue experiments going on under federal auspices at a Palo Alto lab. He reported it, Reagan ended it, but it was resumed in 1989 and continues under a Clinton directive. As Whittaker Chambers had described his Communist faith "crumbling at the touch of a child" -- his own newborn -- a defense of the unborn was still, said Jeffrey, the key to the cultural debate. "The domestic Evil Empire reigns on."

I didn't hear much in the way of tactical advice. It is harder now, on the cultural questions, to counter the newly righteous liberalism of Blair and Clinton, perfectly capable of selling itself, when need be, in the language of Christian piety. The Statement was a good step, affirming that "we are united in seeking protection for the rights of every member of the human family -- including the unborn, the handicapped, and the frail elderly -- against practices and ideologies that regard only the strong and healthy as lives worth living," a formulation that reminded me less of any Republican leader than of Democrat Bob Casey of Pennsylvania. Reed seemed confident about the culture-of-life theme, contrasting the dejection inside the Beltway with the zeal of the grass roots. Krauthammer cited court rulings against assisted suicide as hopeful signs. But there was pessimism enough in the ranks, and it fell to NR's Kate O'Beirne to raise the depressing subject of the "social liberals/economic conservatives" who held the balance in Congress and, more than any internal rifts, had been brought the movement to grief.

On the other hand, a moral pessimist wandering the streets of Washington a week later would have risked being trampled by half a million or more Promise Keepers. It was striking to hear Lady Thatcher bring the point home with a call that raised the roof of the Mayflower: "We conservatives are not, most of us, saints: but even as sinners, above all perhaps as sinners, we have a duty to fight -- as wholeheartedly as our enemies promote -- the attack on the family that threatens the West to its foundations."

The Statement called for "protecting the integrity of the nation-state," and here, too, you saw the divide narrowing. Conservatives, it said, should guard against promiscuous multinationalism. "We envisage a world of free and independent democratic nations that respect differences in national interests, joined in amity by free trade and cooperative alliances." But peace is not a given, and the U.S. remains "the natural leader of the democratic world."

Visions of global government, Jeane Kirkpatrick reminded us, are invariably schemes for global redistribution. She agreed with Noel Malcolm of the London Spectator that national sovereignty will always be "the only reliable vehicle for democracy." The U.S. should steer clear of "pooled sovereignty" and the like -- "a statist project" and a threat to wealth and freedom alike.

Jeremy Rabkin of Cornell took the point a little further, cautioning that NAFTA and other trade pacts embraced by conservatives might well come back to haunt us, as the extranational panels they empowered become bolder. Australian businessman Ray Evans warned of supranational bodies moving in on the environmental front. Of urgent concern, he said, is the UN's December conference on global warming in Japan. Keep an eye out for the Kyoto Protocol, under which this assembly of globalist gasbags aims to regulate carbon emissions the world over.

On foreign policy, Krauthammer said it is a time for "keeping our powder dry," avoiding "grandiose internationalism" and "an ideological crusade against China." Sam Francis of Chronicles spoke for conservatives wary of doctrinaire free trade (while agreeing with the Statement's immigration plank), and warier still of a trade-driven policy toward China. Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Institute for Peace made his case for engagement in Bosnia, provided that U.S. aims are clear. Fareed Zakaria of Foreign Affairs replied that humanitarian motives there were all well and good, but engagement in any wider war would be an invitation to disaster.

What amazed was how all these themes converged in Lady Thatcher's address. No hidden hand here, either. Quite independently, conservatives from London to Munich to Melbourne to Los Angeles to Washington were gravitating toward a basic and unapologetic defense of the West -- morally, culturally, and literally. Steer clear, said Lady Thatcher, of "the banality of the global village" and of "bureaucratic internationalism." But NATO "must remain the basis for Western defense, and no rival institution" may be allowed to challenge it.

"National greatness" or no, when it was over few of us were left worrying over a lack of great objectives to be pursued -- or of winning issues. Anyone still unsure of this must have missed the "Defense of the West" panel featuring Sen. Jon Kyl. The likeliest threat to America, says Kyl, is from terrorists or rogue nations. An anti-missile system is so urgent that America needs first a sea-based system and then a space-based system of just the kind Reagan envisioned -- doable, says Kyl, at $17 billion and in 7 to 10 years. Today, America is living off the Reagan defense buildup. Against a direct attack or threat of attack, "we are nearly defenseless."

Not a bad cure for malaise.