When everything new is old again.

AT THE second conference of Pat Buchanan's American Cause Foundation, Kevin Phillips--who, we were reminded, was once described by NATIONAL REVIEW as the inventor of "country-and-western Marxism"--outlined the shape of the 1996 election. There is every possibility of a serious third-party challenge going beyond even Ross Perot's success in 1992. The convulsive contempt for "the self-dealing of the political class" we saw then is getting deeper--Rush Limbaugh offering the best evidence of this. No Republican will win who does not share it. "Tinkering around the edges of reform," as another speaker put it, will not do this time, nor will bland platitudes about "change" and "gridlock." Perot himself, meanwhile, is in decline; what began as a movement is now an erratic series of jerks and twitches. A huge electoral bloc awaits an authentic, articulate conservative populist.

Whether Buchanan himself could pull this off is another--and very different--question. The four hundred or so folks who came to his conference--the second of these semi-annual affairs--are more inclined to think so than the rest of the world. But their man meets many of the criteria. Nobody could dismiss Buchanan as a tinkerer, a man afraid of radical measures. He is personally popular even among people who might have their doubts in a primary vote. Former RNC Chairman Rich Bond departed a year ago with grave warnings about the "dark forces" represented by Buchanan, but that speech, front-page material at the time, was the last recorded instance of anybody paying any attention to Rich Bond. Where is he now while Buchanan conducts interesting conferences attended by U.S. senators, hosts a national radio show and a TV program in its tenth year, turns out a column for three or four hundred papers, and at the time of writing has overtaken Ross Perot as the leader of the populist Right against NAFTA? And, last, he is no self-dealer. Establishment Republicans dread Buchanan, one suspects, less because of the principles he has than because he has principles.

The theme of the day was "The New Conservatism," which, declared Buchanan,

is not about any ideology or paradigm of empowerment--and... is not really new. It is about the old things, the permanent things--about a moral vision of man rooted in Judaeo-Christian revelation and two thousand years of Western history. It is about looking out for families, neighbors, communities, and country. It is about preserving and passing on to our children a wonderful way of life, a free and independent republic, a society that has been a shining city on a hill, set up for freedom-loving people everywhere to admire and emulate.

A man who does not fear talking about "the old things, the permanent things," or invoking the shining city on a hill is not to be lightly dismissed.

Such poetry apart, however, the themes of the New Conservatism conference were not very different from, say, an AEI public-policy week or a Heritage get-together: a free-market approach to welfare (Charles Sykes and Charles Murray); family values (Bay Buchanan and "Star" Parker, a former welfare mother and the charismatic founder of the L.A. Coalition on Urban Affairs); foreign policy (Arizona Senator John McCain); and so on.

There was one exception: a spirited debate on free trade versus economic nationalism in which both sides were anti-NAFTA--though for all the passion of the speakers, at no point in the conference did the mention of NAFTA stir the crowd. If Pat Buchanan is hoping to bring labor into a coalition via protectionism, he has a ways to go. The step from conservative populist to simple populist has still not been made. There's no such thing yet as a Buchanan Democrat. "Pat's people" are overwhelmingly conservative Republicans.

Credit must go to Senator Gramm for the best lead-off story of the conference. Debating his health-care plan recently with a liberal academic type, the senator said, "My plan is based on the assumption that a government bureaucracy is less qualified than I am to provide for my children's health, that you do not love my children as much as I do."

To which the affronted woman replied, "Yes I do!"

Gramm, after a pause: "What are their names?"

Gramm's larger point was that if Republicans join in the stampede for socialized medicine, as in the Chafee plan, all principles of limited government are as good as lost; as a practical matter, there can never be a turning back. "If we win in '96 we can go back and repeal those retroactive taxes--retroactively," but the machinery of a massive health-care bureaucracy would be there to stay.

Likewise, observed Sykes (author of The Hollow Men) and Murray (Losing Ground), the moment is ripe for a challenge to the welfare state. The state's failures have reached the crisis point. Murray offered this "apocalyptic" social vision: 44 per cent of white Americans below the poverty line are born outside of marriage; above the line, 6 per cent. What we are seeing is an ominous parallel to trends among black families foreseen years ago by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, likely to bring still worse devastation.

It is not just this or that bureaucratic excess that must go, then, but our whole system of compulsory compassion: "liberalism as self-therapy," as Mr. Sykes puts it, aimed less at any provable benefit than at "showing that we care." This sounds a bit ambitious until Sykes reminds us that in his home state of Wisconsin, the Democratic-controlled legislature has recently voted, in a series of bluffs called by Governor Tommy Thompson, to abolish welfare altogether by 1999. This, Sykes reports, has shifted the entire debate toward conservative ideas, which may now be advanced not as "flint-hearted" cutbacks but as radically practical alternatives to a bankrupt state system. Charles Murray takes the point further. In place of the welfare state we would see a dramatic revival of generosity among private institutions, especially churches.

All in all, we saw in the proposals advanced at this conference differences of degree in clarity or courage from what other Republicans are proposing, but not differences in kind.

True, someone looking to prove Buchanan's "divisiveness" could point to the occasional speaker who, like Paul Gottfried, would rise now and then to exhort us in our "irreconcilable" struggle, "paleoconservative" versus "neo," gallant purist against sniveling appeaser. "Internal strife ... is a fate without release"; "there can be no masking this agonized reality."

This struggle gets a bit confusing (Is Jack Kemp really in "95 per cent" agreement with liberals, as Professor Gottfried insists? Does anyone really care that "the Italian political theorist Germana Paraboschi" is alarmed by American neoconservatives? And wasn't Bill Kristol, whom Gottfried regards as a threat to the Republic, the main speaker at the last Buchanan conference, applauded by one and all?), but no matter. (Buchanan himself, happily, is not so quick to draw the sword, which indeed was why he invited Kemp--who couldn't make it--to this very conference.) Suffice it to say that a conservative who devotes a 17-page address to the infractions of fellow conservatives--relating, one gathers, more to grant wars and press coverage and social groupings than to any moral issues that would actually warrant such somber tones--may have lost perspective.

Very unwise, reflects Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon (who--this just in--is seriously contemplating a Senate run against Ted Kennedy). A case, we concur, of letting the imperfect be the enemy of the good. It's all very exhilarating to talk about irreconcilable rifts and fates without release and agonized realities. But if one really supposes there is no important difference between Kemp and Clinton, or Bennett and Clinton, or Gramm and Clinton, or even Bush and Clinton, then Fate and Clinton have a lot more to teach us about agonized realities.

What is clear, in any case, is that Buchanan has re-emerged as a formidable presence whom others must take seriously either as friend or rival.

Mr. Scully is NR's former literary editor and a former speechwriter for Vice President Quayle.