The new right and the new pluralism.

THE NEW RIGHT AND THE NEW PLURALISM

"TO THE RELIGIO-POLITICAL extremists who exerted unprecedented influence at the 1984 Republican convention, "traditional values' is a code word for restoring an idealized vision of a long-gone America before women's rights, before desegregation, before labor unions, and before the full acceptance of religious pluralism.' That, to Anthony T. Podesta, executive director of People for the American Way, is the New Right, the Religious Right, the enemy. Podesta is an activist and a partisan. But his view of the New Right, the socialconservative coalition, or whatever you choose to call it, may be the most common one outside the circle of the movement itself. The New Right's concern with the social issues has caused even some other conservatives to worry that New Rightists might really want what their worst enemies accuse them of wanting: to establish a social uniformity so strict that it would be, in American terms, revolutionary.

The New Right, on the other hand, tends to see itself as simply reacting against cultural aggression from liberals, including Mr. Podesta's boss, the influential television producer Norman Lear. The movement's opponents charge that it is a threat to pluralism. But New Right leaders argue that the pluralism the Lift has in mind excludes anyone who takes seriously religious belief or traditional moral norms. Even Mr. Podesta seems to acknowledge-- notice the word "restoring'--the possibility that the New Right is a defensive, not offensive, movement.

The argument is a crucial one. Were the New Right to be decisively convicted, in the public mind, of trying to impose by force of law its own moral and religious convictions on all Americans, it would be effectively excluded from American politics, becoming as illegitimate as "McCarthyism.' Its enemies know this and direct virtually all their energies into delegitimizing, as opposed to disputing, the New Right agenda. On the other hand, were the New Right to persuade Americans that "secular-humanist' critics of traditional norms have been using the power of government to impose an unwanted social revolution on the nation, it would gain a great political victory. The fight, to a great extent, is over who gets to represent pluralism.

IF THE TITLE "founder of the New Right' could go to any one person, it would probably be Paul Weyrich. In 1973 he helped start the Heritage Foundation. In 1974 he founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, now called Free Congress PAC, and a few years later he founded the Free Congress Foundation, an activist think-tank specializing in social issues. In 1979 a conversation Mr. Weyrich had with a relatively obscure Baptist preacher led to the founding of Moral Majority.

"The Religious Right,' says Mr. Weyrich, "is comprised largely of people who, for many, many decades, were very quiet politically.' For most of this century, he argues, the Democratic Party, in which most of these people were firmly lodged, was seen as the great protector of neighborhoods, families, and family values. "All of that began to change' in the Sixties, as the Democratic Party was taken over by activists who "were pro-abortion, were hostile to any sort of religious values, were sympathetic later on to homosexual affirmative action, were very radical individuals who praised radical lifestyles and debunked cultural conservatism.'

The attack on cultural conservatism was as broad in some ways as the culture itself, but for most people, Weyrich would argue, it was reified in several key events: the 1962 Supreme Court decision banning prayer in public schools; the rise of sex education in the late Sixties; the 1973 Supreme Court decision effectively legalizing abortion; the rise of "values clarification' curricula (a welter of programs that, rather than teaching values of any kind, taught students to "question their values,' the inherent goodness of moral confusion being taken for granted); curriculum battles on other subjects (ranging from arguments over evolution to arguments over teaching the basics); and finally, in 1978, an attack by the IRS on independent Christian schools. These things, says Mr. Weyrich, "caused these people to feel that they were under siege.'

Notice the centrality of education issues. Mr. Weyrich explains that there had been, among those who were to form the core of the New Right, a tacit premise that "even though we dissented from what seemed to be the main cultural thrust of the day, nevertheless we could have our little enclaves and exist privately.' But "if this premise were to be correct then, of course, one would have to be able to educate one's children as one saw fit.' Thus, at the beginning of the Seventies, after the initial outrages had been perpetrated, "Christian schools were opening at a rate of three a day. When Carter got into office and moved against the Christian schools through the IRS and through other policies, that was the straw that broke the camel's back.'

The IRS, under Carter, began labeling such schools as discriminatory-- without showing that any of them had ever turned down a minority applicant --and moved to take away their tax exemptions. The IRS action, which was eventually stopped by an avalanche of mail, was, says Mr. Weyrich, a "dangerous precedent, which these folks understood in Technicolor. It wasn't just a single move against a small institution; it was a broad-based fishing expendition, requiring these small institutions to spend megabucks to defend themselves.' But defend themselves they did: They formed organizations and activated formerly quiescent citizens; eventually Moral Majority and other such vehicles took shape. The IRS action brought about an historic rapprochement between apolitical Christians and movement conservatives. Says Mr. Weyrich: "It was a realization that what the conservatives had been saying about the powers of the government for many, many decades was in fact correct.'

It would seem that the only relevant question for determining whether a school discriminates on the basis of race should be: Has the school discriminated on the basis of race? Has it turned down obviously qualified minority applicants? No one has shown that any of these Christian schools have done so. Yet the charge that these schools ("segregation academies' to their critics) were conceived in bigotry is crucial to the opponents of the Religious Right. Tony Podesta argues that "a lot of the Christian-school movement in the country came from' fear of desegregation, "not from droves of secular humanists running into the small towns of Virginia.' He concedes that most of the Christian schools were not turning away black applicants even in 1978, but is confident that "the historical record of the motivation behind the foundation of those schools was that they were a reaction to Brown.'

Now, it is ordinarily no part of the Millsian, skeptical free-speech tradition dominant among American civil-libertarians to question the motives of dissidents. Government charges that dissenting groups are violating government policy in ways unrelated to their dissent (charges that can be used to excuse a government crackdown such as the 1978 IRS ruling) are normally viewed by civil-libertarians with great suspicion. But, for Mr. Podesta, in this one case it is the Christian schools that are the suspects.

ON THE BROADER question of the origins and goals of the movement, Mr. Podesta is similarly concerned with hidden motives. He sees Mr. Weyrich and his colleagues as having "stumbled onto the social issues as a political opportunity, which they have worked very successfully.' Thus, he believes, the Religious Right was born of a fusion between conservative operatives and intolerant strands in American society that had not been cultivated politically. "I don't think intolerance went underground from 1925 to 1978,' Mr. Podesta adds. It is the re-enfranchisement of intolerance that People For (as it calls itself) fears.

People For is not alone in its opposition to the New Right or its emphasis on the hidden motives of the social conservatives. In some states the American Civil Liberties Union--which also clearly views the New Right as the main enemy and, with People For, provides the main institutional opposition to it--has mounted a virtual campaign of persecution against fundamentalist schools because it is suspicious of the motives for which fundamentalists claim the sort of rights the ACLU usually defends. The Virginia ACLU even sought to keep Liberty Baptist University graduates from being certified to teach biology in public schools, on the grounds that their professors had a sworn religious belief in a six-day creation. Public schools in Virginia have an established curriculum that calls for teaching evolution in biology classes. The Virginia ACLU was asking the state to presume that Liberty Baptist graduates would violate state law and sneak creationism into their classes. It sought to punish fundamentalist students not for any actual wrongdoing but for what it merely suspected (students don't have to take the oath prescribed for Liberty Baptist professors) were their privately held religious beliefs. The state recently ruled in Liberty Baptist's favor.

The ACLU, as everyone in the ACLU is constantly repeating, is not a monolithic organization. Ira Glasser, the ACLU's executive director and a more moderate man than Mr. Podesta, saw some truth in the complaints of New Right activists. "There is in America,' he says, "a clash of basic values' brought about largely by the tremendous cultural power wielded by television and the public schools, which "have gradually replaced the nuclear family, the small town, and the church as the major socializing institutions for the young.'

Sounding a bit like Mr. Weyrich, he explains that it used to be possible "to live in this country in a fair degree of isolation. If you drove across this country in the mid-Fifties, you would have been enormously impressed with the sense of difference and regionalism, and the isolation of small towns.' Thus, outside the metropolises, "even if people resented what was going on nationally, even if they saw New York City and Boston as Sodom and Gomorrah, even if they complained about the drift of the dominant culture, they didn't feel that it affected their lives or interfered with their right to maintain their own values.'

Under this geographic pluralism, the whole question of what were genuine American values didn't really have to come up, Glasser explains. But in the early 1960s mass culture began "to cut across those insulating shields' and intrude on the system of family, town, and church. "A caricature of the dominant culture began to be beamed in by television and began, as [the social conservatives] saw it, to take over what they saw as their schools, so you got a much more standardized curriculum and much more standardized texts.'

MR. GLASSER argues that small-towners felt threatened by the unfamiliar: other races, different sexual mores, different sex roles. It is in the latter context that he sets traditionalist opposition to abortion, which he calls "the leading symbol of female emancipation.' It is not stretching the point too much to say that Mr. Glasser sees his opponents as big babies afraid of what they do not understand. "Their pluralism was based on their isolation. Growing up in the big city [as Mr. Glasser did], your pluralism is based on real pluralism. It's based on learning to get used to a lot of different things.'

The invasion of mass culture left social conservatives with two choices, he argues. One was "to do what the Amish in fact do, which is to withdraw from the dominant culture and erect all kinds of artificial shields, and assert the right, for example, to take their kid out of the public schools--a right that organizations like the ACLU have always supported.' But for mainstream traditionalists, "that was not practical, given their numbers, so what they did is, they said we're going back into the culture, we're going to take it over, we're not going to let it take us over.'

The traditionalists, Mr. Glasser argues, are reacting in a way that is "understandable' but "also dangerous,' because "an attempt to take control of those institutions threatens the basis of pluralism. . . . What you can't have, it seems to me, is legal and political institutions that compel or prohibit cultural styles.' More revealingly, he judges the goals of the social conservatives to be futile, and thus harmful even to themselves: "Since you're going to have to learn to tolerate differences, it is best that you children grow up with that, and that you strengthen them to deal with it.'

That made me wonder whether Mr. Glasser would say that the old-fashioned pluralism, based on the relative isolation of internally homogeneous communities, not only cannot be resurrected, but really shouldn't be. He replied that the "issue of should or shouldn't is almost a Talmudic question; it's beside the point.' But if pluralism is the goal, what we mean by pluralism is crucial. He argues, for instance, that the New Right blocks a pluralistic settlement of the social issues because it is not "a movement designed to maximize freedom' (which is precisely what some New Right leaders claim it is) but is devoted to a particular set of values. But a strong allegiance to normative values is only objectionable, in political terms, if one believes old-style pluralism is either bad, or hopelessly lost.

"Hopelessly lost' isn't credible. What, for instance, of education vouchers, the ultimate old-pluralist program, whereby the government would give parents vouchers redeemable at the public or private school of their choice? With vouchers, government could maintain its commitment to providing an education for all, while maximizing efficiency, parental choice, and pluralism. Lawrence Uzzell, formerly a senior official of the National Institute of Education and an education writer who has contributed to some New Right publications, views vouchers as perhaps the most important tool for maintaining pluralism in the face of modern developments that threaten it. He calls the present situation "the modern equivalent of the eighteenth-century struggle to disestablish state churches. It is interesting to note that in North America, most Catholics and evangelical Protestants were on the side of disestablishment then as well as now.'

Connaught Marshner, a top official of the Weyrich organization and the editor of the Family Protection Report, notes that vouchers are a typical New Right solution: "From the school-prayer amendment that would make voluntary prayer a local choice, to campaigns against compulsory sex education, to the fight against tax penalties on full-time homemakers or other subsidies for feminism, we usually work toward reducing the government's power to mold the culture. We believe the moral and religious instincts of most Americans are a better guide than the plans of bureaucrats and political activists to building a healthy society. Even on abortion, where we certainly do seek to limit personal choice, our position reflects what was a clear, popular consensus before the Supreme Court overturned at a stroke fifty state abortion statutes.'

SUPPORT FOR programs, such as vouchers, that seek to minimize government control over the culture would seem to be the acid test of support for genuine pluralism. Anthony Podesta absolutely opposes vouchers. He sees the voucher system leading to "cultural, religious, or ethnic ghettos, in which all our kinds will be going to school with kids of precisely the same background. I happen to think there is a value in this country of multiple faiths, multiple philosophies, races, [taking] people from all imaginable corners of the globe and of the mind and putting them all in the same place and letting them understand that there are differences within this country.' Give the fundamentalists an escape route and Mr. Podesta, sometime advocate of individual liberties, becomes a fierce collectivist, contemptuous of individual choice, because he "happens to think there is a value' in the way he would run the schools. How extraordinary: He prefers what he prefers. Uzzell comments: "If state education agencies, teachers' colleges, and the National Education Association were controlled as firmly by fundamentalist Christians as they now are by people indifferent or hostile to religion, liberals would fall in love with vouchers. It's like their change of mind on the "imperial Presidency': They generally work to expand the power of whatever institutions they happen to control and to weaken them after they lose control.'

For Mr. Podesta, it seems, the various faiths and philosophies in our culture are not objects of respect in their own right, but are rather the raw material for construction of a society whose only absolute is tolerance. So "pluralist' are we that we cannot allow traditional moral norms to be propounded to the next generation without a challenge--or, while we may allow them to be, we must keep it inconvenient. "Pluralism' becomes a duty rather than a right. Mr. Podesta verbally repudiates the logical conclusion of his reasoning by denying that he believes in "compulsory public education.' But the conclusion is clear enough: pluralism redefined as mandatory exposure to conflicting viewpoints.

"Back in the early Sixties,' Mr. Glasser says, he was "very enamored' of vouchers because they "did seem precisely the way out of a lot of dilemmas.' But today he opposes them. In addition to some practical economic reservations, he fears the "terrific parochialism that used to exist, even in a place like New York, because of the isolation of neighborhoods and because of the way cultures and institutions have of replicating themselves. That's the flip side of the whole business. Isolation does breed fear, it breeds prejudice, and it's a big problem.'

So does he too view pluralism as mandatory exposure to diverse viewpoints? Stipulating that he is always uncomfortable with the word "mandatory,' Mr. Glasser concedes "that's an argument that ought not to be dismissed.' Public education "acts as a counterweight to the ethnic and religious and racial isolation which is productive of conflict and fear and prejudice in society. The Amish model is not wonderful. It works only if it's infrequent and represents a small number of people. If it's a model and pattern for the whole society, it can't work. Even if vouchers worked the way proponents think they will work, there would be something lost. We have to live with a great many different people, like it or not.' For all Mr. Glasser's personal moderation, his position is not, in the end, much different from Mr. Podesta's.

THE TWO ARMIES in the field both think they are fighting a defensive action. Yet whenever I asked the opponents of the New Right precisely what they were afraid it would do, they came up short on specifics. I heard, instead, a subtle paternalism that regards moral conservatives as intellectual and social infants who have to be educated out of their backward ways --not, to be sure, by coercion, but by the gradual attribution of their refuges.

The constituents of the New Right "feel threatened,' say its opponents, in a back-handed acknowledgment of its defensive nature. But when it comes to that, do New Rightists feel as threatened by change and diversity as the ACLU and People for the American Way do by traditional values and religious faith? Of course, the crusaders against the New Right have nothing against religion and values, provided Jerry Falwell doesn't try to "impose his values on the rest of society.' But if Jerry Falwell said to them, "I have nothing against indifferentism and relativism, provided Norman Lear doesn't try to impose them on the rest of society,' would they be mollified? Do they cheer the Supreme Court's decisions on school prayer although or because the decisions imposed a single viewpoint about religion where a rich diversity had previously existed?

Ira Glasser's insights about changes in American society are partly right. It is now much harder for groups with incompatible values to ignore each other. Interestingly enough, his two cultural superpowers, television and education, and themselves changing rapidly. Cable television and the home-video explosion have significantly increased personal discretion. And the education-reform movement is slowly drawing more attention to the baneful results of centralization and is popularizing both parental choice--as in vouchers --and greater local control of public schools.

If these developments pan out--if people can increasingly find an alternative to the television networks, and can choose private schools or even public schools that reflect their values --we will have restored some of the authentic pluralism we lost during the past twenty years or so. Then people of differing values will be able to compete in the various culture-making arenas, and there will be no further need for either side to detect dark conspiracies in the other.

That won't be the end, of course, because it won't settle the question of whether the Religious Right or its opposition is correct; that is, whether revealed religion or secularism is a better foundation for personal and social life. Authentic pluralism--the sort that accepts the integrity of ethnic and religious groups not as a concession but as a right--is not a solution to this problem: It is a set of ground rules for future competition. In the meantime, though, we frequently see a different sort of pluralism being advocated as a thin cover for an anti-religious, anti-traditional agenda. The debate over which pluralism we want for America is not out in the open, and it should be. That's the American Way.