American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  But ideas as weapons must be armed and armored. Unless conservatives realized “that massive public education must precede any hope of a Presidential victory,” wrote Buckley, “they will never have a President they can call their own.” Journals were established or refurbished: the National Review, The Public Interest, Commentary, to join the long-established Wall Street Journal and Reader’s Digest as purveyors of right-wing views. Think tanks were founded for incubating ideas, and foundations for incubating think tanks. Serious journals like The Public Interest were all the more influential for being moderate in tone and scholarly in format, with tables, charts, and footnotes. These publications drew from a remarkable array of old and new conservatives: Hayek, Friedman, L. Brent Bozell, Ralph de Toledano, George F. Gilder, James J. Kilpatrick, Clarence Manion, Frank S. Meyer, Max Rafferty, Phyllis Schlafly, William E. Simon, and others less famous but influential in diverse ways.

  The avalanche of books and articles tumbling out of conservative foundations, research institutions, publishing houses, and corporate public information offices attested to the intellectual breadth of conservatism; it also dramatized its divisions. The more conservatism prospered as a creed and cause, the more the various right-wing factions advanced their competing doctrines. Their schools of thought had not changed much during the postwar years. Traditionalist conservatives, still proudly resonating to the writings of the Burkeans, preached the virtues of order, reverence, stability, moderation, gradual change, to be achieved through a harmonious balancing of the demands of hierarchy, community, privilege, and noblesse oblige. Libertarian conservatives demanded optimal individual freedom of choice in cultural, sexual, and social matters, protected especially against governmental intrusion. Free-market conservatives called for an open, competitive economy, which to them meant reductions in government, in regulation, in union power, and a drastic cutback on the environmental, affirmative-action, and other controls loaded on private enterprise from the FDR through the Carter years.

  Populist conservatives, in rising numbers especially in southern and western “Sunbelt” regions, echoed the demands of the free-marketers but focused their attacks especially on the “new elites,” nonelected and self-promoted—network news producers, liberal journalists, radical professors, federal bureaucrats, education administrators, left-wing writers, literary critics, and others of related breeds entrenched especially in northeastern and West Coast cities. The evangelical and fundamentalist right, embracing such groupings as the Moral Majority and Christian Voices, overlapped the libertarians in its view of freedom and individualism as pro-market and anti-government. But the central commitment of the “new Christian right” was to family, religion, community, and old-fashioned morality, and its chief targets were moral relativism, sexual permissiveness, abortion, ERA, prohibitions on school prayer, the secular curriculum in public schools. The capacity of the Christian right to build networks, operate through local congregations, and mobilize its strength in the Republican party had been a decisive element in Reagan’s 1980 victory.

  These conservative groupings intertwined, overlapped, and conflicted. They formed an unstable equilibrium, much like right-wing parliamentary coalitions. Liberationists wanted free-marketers to oppose government interference in private life as vehemently as intrusion into free enterprise; populists found some of the eastern sophisticates tending toward an elitist “conservative chic”; traditionalists deplored some of the destabilizing, disruptive tendencies implied in the other conservative philosophies. Nevertheless, conservatism as a whole displayed considerable coherence. Despite much writing about “new” conservatives and “neoconservatism,” the doctrinal branches of the right remained much the same over these decades. Indeed, the general terms—liberal and conservative, the right and the left—came into wider use and clearer usage during this period than in the New Deal era. When reporters referred to a “conservative” senator or “House liberals” the general public understood what they meant.

  Still, the traditional differences among the doctrinal conservative groups persisted, and the left, accustomed to ferocious battles among its own warring factions, wondered whether the conservative movement could enjoy unity during its prosperity. For a time at least, the conservatives put up a relatively solid front. Journals such as Buckley’s National Review and Irving Kristol’s The Public Interest showed an ecumenical flair for bringing under their tents a wide variety of right-wing ideas. In particular, Buckley, who had been the scourge of liberal academics with his biting wit and carefully planned polemics, established intellectual and personal links with virtually every brand of conservative thinker; Buckley once boasted that he had had only a single resignation from the National Review, that of Max Eastman—and, considering the erratic career and mercurial iconoclasm of this former Marxist turned Reader’s Digest feature writer, Buckley could readily be forgiven that exception.

  A key force for conservative unity was Ronald Reagan, who emphasized the common beliefs on the right; and in any event he was not one for fine theory spinning or jesuitical hairsplitting. He displayed a winning ability to talk order and stability to the traditionalists, individual liberty to the libertarians, anti-regulation to the free-marketers, and anti-elitism to the populists. In unifying the disparate strands of conservatism, Sidney Blumenthal concluded, Reaganism “animated the intellectuals’ theories with a resonant symbolism—images of idyllic small-town life, enterprising entrepreneurs whose success derived from moral character, and failure induced only by federal bureaucrats.” The candidate also benefited from his skill in using anecdotage, reminiscence, misreminiscence, and jokes to glide over burdensome or hostile facts.

  The most powerful source of conservative unity, however, was anti-communism. With their hostility to unregulated enterprise, to rugged individualism, to the FBI and other watchdogs against the “red network” in Washington, the communists were the perfect unifiers. Above all, anticommunism was a stimulus and attraction to the countless former communists who had deserted the “naked god” and flocked to the journals and think tanks of the right. That anticommunism would remain an enduring and dependable basis of unity appeared rather questionable, since it might depend more on communist developments abroad than on the efforts of conservative thinkers and politicians at home.

  Liberals were in no mood to celebrate as they came to the end of their worst decade, the 1970s. During the final forlorn weeks of the Carter Administration, as they watched conservatives move into the new presidency, into a newly Republican Senate, and into the cultural and economic decision-making centers of Washington, liberals could reflect once again that nothing fails like success. Looking back over the liberal and Democratic dominance of the past five decades, they asked what had gone wrong—what had really gone wrong? The record seemed so positive. Three Republican Presidents had left virtually intact the New Deal and the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society, almost none of their major laws repealed or key programs canceled. Who could deny that poverty had been reduced, the elderly and the young protected, the farmer subsidized, civil rights broadened, educational opportunity vastly expanded, environmental problems confronted, with considerable prosperity for all but the very poor and without confiscatory taxation or runaway federal deficits?

  Three decades earlier Lionel Trilling had written that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in the United States, adding that “it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Now, at the start of the 1980s, everything seemed turned upside down. By the hundreds conservatives were pouring out of right-wing journals and research institutions, out of universities and corporations—liberals had not realized how large the army of the right had become. And how youthful they seemed, how self-confident, how brash, as they prepared to transform the nation. Some liberal memories reached back to the New Deal and the Kennedy years, when young people, equally brash and confident, had taken over Sta
te and Treasury, Interior and Justice, and the other federal strong points.

  Already the left was challenging itself, on the eve of the touted “Reagan Revolution,” to come up with fresh ideas, new proposals. But liberals were still mesmerized by their decades of success and power. Of course, they granted, there had been egregious failures, shortcomings, inadequacies, sheer blunders, follies, and idiocies. But these had been the exceptions, departures from the norm, not failings inherent in liberal programs. Obviously liberals should govern better, innovate more carefully, administer more efficiently. But cancel or drastically alter the great liberal program of the past fifty years? Never!

  The deeper problem was not simply that liberals were wed to the programs they had put through—it was that they were still living off the intellectual capital of the first fifty years of the century. That capital had been ample enough in the 1950s, and even still in the early 1970s, to influence the thinking of Republican Administrations, putting Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and their men on the defensive even while they presided over the White House. Now everything was different. The triumphant Reaganites evinced not the slightest interest in their ideas, except as artifacts to be swept away in the conservative revolution. Liberal thinkers, out of power or access to power, out of sight as their speaking invitations dwindled, would have plenty of leisure for rethinking liberalism.

  How well would they use this time? Not to arrive at some “consensus”; it was already apparent at the start of the eighties that liberalism would remain divided within itself and from the much smaller authentic American left, itself far more fractured. There was much talk of neoliberalism, the New Left, postliberalism, and so on, but once again the prefixes did not help analysis. The divisions among liberals remained much the same, only enhanced: New Deal or New Frontier “welfare” liberals who stuck with their ideas and programs and wanted only to improve, extend, and perhaps enlarge them; other liberals who, impressed or depressed by the conservative resurgence, proposed to preserve the essence of the Great Society and its predecessors but in a modified, more “fiscally responsible” form, even if this meant more federal taxation attuned to lower spending; still others who turned toward what Robert B. Reich later would call a “New Public Philosophy,” which faced up to emerging industrial and technological problems and opportunities, especially on a global level, without forsaking fundamental liberal values. ‘;

  Fundamental values? These were precisely what liberals were more and more abandoning, according to activists further to the left. Especially one value—equality. Liberals in general, it was charged, had so fully joined the broad American consensus behind individual rights, civil liberty, individualism, individuality, that the great competing and balancing claims of equality—at least of equality of opportunity—were being ignored. Even committed egalitarians had to grant that inequality had been far more deeply rooted than they had perceived and that the road to social justice was strewn with bogs and pitfalls. As he neared seventy, Kenneth Clark, the longtime student and preacher of racial integration and equality, confessed that he had “seriously underestimated the depth and complexity of Northern racism.” Clark conceded that some major federal welfare programs might have worsened the lot of blacks by encouraging a trend toward one-parent families and helping maintain the “pathology” of ghetto life.

  “But that’s not God-ordained,” Clark said. “I’m convinced that social engineering is no more difficult than space engineering. If a program to get us to the moon didn’t work, the engineers would try another program.” Why not with social engineering as well? He was bewildered, Clark said despondently, that so many liberals—old friends and students—had given up trying and had even deserted the liberal cause.

  To staunch socialists further left on the spectrum, liberal weakness was no surprise. Liberal failure of commitment was one reason they were socialists. On the eve of the Reagan presidency, however, few leftists were optimistic about the future of socialism. Its leaders still showed little interest in shaking off the failed intellectual and political habits of the past. The leadership had usually had a Marxist as well as a religious orientation—a source of disunity in itself. Historically, the larger the appeal of the socialist movement, the more variegated its membership had been—militant Wobblies from the old Industrial Workers of the World, prairie populists, Wisconsin progressives, Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers, western copper miners, urban intellectuals. The socialists of the 1980s could no longer claim leaders of the quality of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, who had managed to transcend major divisions.

  Politically socialism had long been notorious for its electoral purism and ideological sectarianism. Socialist leaders had stood aside from the New Deal, even though it brought “the greatest wave of social reform that this country had seen for many decades,” in Irving Howe’s view. A half century later many socialist leaders and intellectuals were still standing aside from even the most liberal of liberal initiatives and programs. Typically socialist and other left-wing movements were composed of hundreds, even thousands of local organizations focused on specific goals of their own as they responded to local needs and interests.

  When the defeat in 1980 set socialists, liberals, and Democratic party strategists to considering new possibilities of a Democratic, left-wing coalition, the most perplexing problem for socialists was still the old one— whether to vote for the lesser evil between the two major parties, and thus run the risk of throwing away their vote, or to seek to build a strong third party, and thus run the risk of doing the same thing.

  If a measure of rethinking about coalition strategies was taking place, the left was ignoring almost completely the question of governmental strategy when and if a liberal-labor-left party coalition took office. It had long been obvious that the fragmentation of power resulting from federalism and the checks and balances would gravely hobble a left-wing government. It was remarkable that in 1987, when politicians and professors devoted much attention to analyzing the Constitution during its bicentennial, liberal and left-wing thinkers gave so little attention to a constitutional system filled with veto traps and devices for delaying and devitalizing progressive measures and programs. How much could the left expect from a radical or socialist leadership in Washington, considering how Wilson with his Treaty of Versailles, Roosevelt in his second term, and Kennedy in his one and only term had been thwarted by political forces acting through the marvelous contrivances devised by the Framers and elaborated by their successors to balk comprehensive and forthright government action? At least, as the Reagan era dawned, leftist thinkers could settle back and plan to enjoy the spectacle of a conservative Administration being divided and frustrated by conservative constitutional arrangements largely of conservative origin.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Decline of Leadership

  FOR AMERICANS 1987 WAS to be a special year of remembrance and perhaps of renewal. In a winter of deep cold and heavy snows New Englanders commemorated the guerrilla struggles of the Shays rebels during the same kind of harsh weather two hundred years earlier. Late in May 1987 scholarly conferences in Philadelphia marked the bicentennial of the arrival of delegates to the Constitutional Convention and the leadership of James Madison and his fellow Virginians in offering a bold new plan for a stronger national government. In September, on the bicentenary anniversary of the convention’s close, Philadelphia burst into pomp and pageantry as hundreds of thousands celebrated with floats and balloons and fireworks.

  The festivities barely concealed an undercurrent of concern and disillusion. The bicentennial year began amid revelations of gross failures in the Reagan White House, of an Administration out of control as a few men conducted their own “rogue” foreign policy with the government of Iran and with the Contra opposition to Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. Reagan’s erratic leadership, both foreign and domestic, compared poorly with that of his fellow conservative Margaret Thatcher, who won her third general election, and that of the worldly Soviet party bo
ss, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had launched a bold effort to modernize the Soviet economy and democratize the political system.

  At home Congress and the President gave a classic demonstration of the workings of the checks and balances by failing to agree on or enforce measures sharply to reduce the annual deficit and eventually tackle a national debt nearing $3 trillion. The nation continued to struggle with economic ills whose solution appeared beyond human wit—regional decline, inner-city blight, lack of affordable housing, large sectors of entrenched poverty. Abroad Americans faced brutal competition from Japan and other exporting nations. The United States had now become a dependent nation. Financially, wrote Felix Rohatyn, “we are being colonized.”

  The floundering leadership of 1987 stood in stark contrast to the bold, purposeful work of the Framers of the Constitution two centuries earlier. Even those who wondered whether the Constitution was good for another two centuries—or even two decades—freely granted that the Founding Fathers had displayed a collective intellectual leadership without peer in the Western world. Above all they had displayed during their four months in Philadelphia the capacity to stand back from the existing national government—the Articles of Confederation—and summon the institutional imagination and political audacity to fashion a whole new structure of government. Two hundred years later proposals to make even small structural changes in the constitutional system evoked emotional opposition from some members of the public and the academy—and almost complete indifference from officeholders who were struggling unsuccessfully to make the present system work.