To be sure, Bill Clinton goaded the independent counsel into some of this detail by the hairsplitting of his legal defense. But not all of it. And to be sure, Bill Clinton, by his failure to settle, and then to apologize, and then to tell the truth, was responsible in the first place for the nine months of trauma. But again, not entirely. For Bill Clinton was responsible for none of the prurient, lip-pursing moralism of the report, nor for the subsequent, egregious outspilling of grand-jury testimony. Proof of perjury or obstruction of justice required none of this, as most Americans immediately understood. This moral obsessiveness was the creation of Kenneth Starr and something far larger than Kenneth Starr. It was the creation of a conservatism become puritanism, a conservatism that has long lost sight of the principles of privacy and restraint, modesty and constitutionalism, which used to be its hallmarks.
This scolding, moralizing conservatism is one with a lineage; it is the construction of a cadre of influential intellectuals who bear as much responsibility as anybody for the constitutional and cultural damage this moment may have already wrought. And they will bear an even greater responsibility if the ultimate victim of this spectacle is the reputation and future of conservatism itself.
The Lewinsky Kulturkampf, after all, did not come out of nowhere. Since the implosion of Reaganism during the administration of George H. W. Bush, and the evaporation of anticommunism with the collapse of the Soviet Union, American conservatism has been in a period of radical intellectual reconstruction. Much of this reconstruction has occurred in journals and magazines and seminars largely unnoticed by the general public, but quite openly and candidly discussed among the conservative intellectual elites. And the dominant ideas that have emerged in the last few years bear only the faintest resemblance to the major themes of the 1980s: economic freedom, smaller government, and personal choice. Although libertarians are certainly numbered among the intellectuals of the right of the late 1990s, they are clearly on the defensive. What is galvanizing the right-wing intelligentsia at century’s end is a different kind of conservatism altogether: much less liberal, far less economic, and only nominally skeptical of government power. It is inherently pessimistic—a return to older, conservative themes of cultural decline, moralism, and the need for greater social control. As much European as American in its forebears, this conservatism is not afraid of the state or its power to set a moral tone or coerce a moral order. A mix of big-government conservatism and old-fashioned puritanism, this new orthodoxy was waiting to explode on the political scene when Monica Lewinsky lighted the fuse.
You can see it in the current congressional races. The issues that are driving the Republican base this fall have little to do with economics or politics or national security. They are issues of morals: infidelity and honesty, abortion, family cohesion, and homosexual legitimacy. Much of this, as has been widely reported, is because of the evangelical Protestants who now make up the Republican activist base. Some of it is also because of Bill Clinton, who has done more to give credibility to the far right’s conviction about moral collapse than anyone. But this is only half the story. If the remoralization of conservative politics has been fueled by events and by Republican activists, it has also been diligently refueled by conservative thinkers. The new moralism has been enforced with a rigidity that puts old-style leftists to shame. It is an orthodoxy, to put it bluntly, of cultural and moral revolution: a wholesale assault on the beliefs and practices of an entire post-1960s settlement. And, if recent polls hold out, it could be on the verge of coming to power in November.
The centrality of this moralism to the Lewinsky saga was perhaps best put by David Frum, one of the brightest of the young conservative thinkers now writing. “What’s at stake in the Lewinsky scandal,” Frum wrote candidly in the February 16, 1998, issue of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, “is not the right to privacy, but the central dogma of the baby boomers: the belief that sex, so long as it’s consensual, ought never to be subject to moral scrutiny at all.”
It would be hard to put better what was so surprising, and so dismaying, about the Starr report and the Republican Congress’s subsequent behavior. The report was driven, as the Republican leadership seems to be, not merely to prove perjury but to expose immorality. In this universe, privacy is immaterial, hence the gratuitous release of private telephone conversations, private correspondence, and even details of the most private of human feelings. For these conservatives, there is only a right, as Starr revealingly wrote, to a “private family life.” A private, nonfamily life is fair game for prosecution and exposure.
No conservative thinker has done more to advance this new moralism than William Kristol, best known for his urbane appearances on This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts, and about as close as Washington has to a dean of intellectual conservatism. And no journal has done more to propagate, defend, and advance this version of conservatism than the magazine Kristol edits, The Weekly Standard, founded in 1995 by Rupert Murdoch. Most of this year, Kristol and The Standard have gleefully egged on Republicans in their moral crusade. As early as May—at a time when it seemed the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal might dissipate—Kristol urged Republican congressional candidates to forget other issues in the fall and campaign solely on the issue of the president’s morals. “If [Republicans] do that,” he argued, “they will win big in November. And their victory will be more than a rejection of Clinton. It will be a rejection of Clintonism—a rejection of defining the presidency, and our public morality, down.”
His magazine has been relentless in presenting the scandal as a moral crisis for the nation. Thanks to the president’s affair with Lewinsky, The Standard’s writers were finally able to see unreservedly in Clinton what they had desperately tried to see in him from the start, but which Clinton’s own conservatism had blurred: the apotheosis of the 1960s. The Clinton White House, in the liberated words of Peter Collier in The Standard, is “a place where denatured New Left politics meets denatured New Age therapeutics.” In February, The Standard put on its cover a cartoon of Clinton-as-satyr on the White House lawn grappling with a nude Paula Jones and a nude Monica Lewinsky, surrounded by other naked women in bushes and on a swing, with the one-word headline “Yow!” Almost one out of two subsequent covers in 1998 have focused on the Lewinsky affair. One of the few breaks from Lewinsky coverage was a September cover article on Clinton’s alleged genesis. “1968: A Revolting Generation Thirty Years On,” the headline blared. The connection with Clinton was not exactly underplayed.
But perhaps no edition of The Standard captured the current state of American conservatism better than the one that came out immediately after the Starr report was made public. Its cover portrayed Starr as Mark McGwire, with the headline: “Starr’s Home Run.” Inside, page after page of anti-Clinton coverage, anchored by an essay by Kristol advocating a full House vote for impeachment of the president within a month, was followed by a long, surreal article by a reporter attending a four-day World Pornography Conference. Six pages of explicit sex, interspersed with coy condescension, followed. (The cover teased with the headline: “Among the Pornographers.”) One of many graphic scenes in the article occurs in a ladies’ restroom: “Unprompted, [Dr. Susan Block] removes a rubber phallus from her purse and hikes up [her assistant] LaVonne’s dress, baring her derriere. Block paddles it and kisses it while LaVonne coos.” The article was so lurid that The Standard’s editors prefaced it with a note: “Because of the subject matter, some material in this article is sexually explicit and may offend some readers.” The weird porno-puritanism of the Starr report does not exist, it seems, in a vacuum. It comes out of a degenerated conservative political and literary culture.
The only issue to rival Lewinsky for prominence among conservative intellectuals in 1998 was homosexuality. But in some ways, this was only apposite. For the new conservatives, the counterattack on homosexual legitimacy is of a piece with the battle against presidential adultery. They see no distinction between an argument for same-sex
marriage, for example, and a presidential defense of adultery, because in their eyes, there is no context in which a homosexual relationship can be moral. Homosexuality, for the puritanical conservatives, is not a condition or even a way of life; it is a disease. And again, the intelligentsia led the way—with Kristol at the heart of it.
If most Americans were a little surprised by the religious right’s advertising campaign last July in defense of “curing” homosexuals, then they had not been following closely the drift on the intellectual right. As usual, Bill Kristol was at the heart of it. In June 1997, he gave the concluding address at a Washington conservative conference dedicated, as its brochure put it, to exposing homosexuality as “the disease that it is.” Kristol shared the podium with a variety of clergy members and therapists who advocated a spiritual and psychoanalytic “cure” for homosexuals. One speaker, a priest, described homosexuality as “a way of life that is marked by compulsion, loneliness, depression and disease,” comprising a “history-limiting horizon of a sterile worldview divorced from the promise and peril of successor generations.” Another speaker decried legal contraception and abortion as the “homosexualization of heterosexual sex,” and bemoaned that nonprocreative trends among white Europeans was leading to “race death.”
In the broad advertising campaign last summer, sponsored by groups allied with those who organized the D.C. conference, homosexuals were portrayed as sick and in need of therapy. The notion that homosexuality was involuntary was dismissed, with Starr-like certainty, as a violation of “the truth.” The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, said that homosexuals were guilty not of a public crime, but of a private “sin.” Again, The Standard had pioneered this politics, routinely decrying any public destigmatization of homosexuals, and calling, in one article in late 1996, for the “reaffirmation by states of a sodomy law” that would imprison gay men for private sex as a counterstrike against the threat of same-sex marriage.
The Weekly Standard’s obsession with the Lewinsky scandal and homosexuality may seem an odd conjunction of issues, but the joint crusades have uncanny echoes in the halls of Congress. So Representative Bob Barr was the pioneer of the Defense of Marriage Act, and the author of the first resolution to impeach the president. And Trent Lott, while leading the charge against the president’s immorality in recent weeks, also ensured that the nomination of James Hormel as US Ambassador to Luxembourg was held up purely because of Hormel’s homosexuality. And among the most aggressive supporters of impeachment—the House Judiciary Committee members Charles T. Canady and Bob Inglis, for example—have been the most virulently hostile to gay rights in the current Congress.
But there is one issue above all others at the center of this new conservatism. That issue is not adultery or even homosexuality, although both have come to play a significant part in it. It is abortion. Its importance to the new generation of conservative intellectuals is easily underestimated, and far too easily ascribed simply to the influence of religious activists. In fact, abortion is at the center of current Republican orthodoxy as much because of conservative intellectuals as evangelical activists. Since this may not be self-evident, I’ll let one of those intellectuals stress it himself. Here is a writer in The Standard, taking a rare break earlier this year from the Lewinsky obsession:
Republicans talk a lot about being a majority party, about becoming a governing party, about shaping a conservative future. Roe and abortion are the test. For if Republicans are incapable of grappling with this moral and political challenge; if they cannot earn a mandate to overturn Roe and move toward a postabortion America, then in truth, there will be no conservative future. Other issues are important, to be sure, and a governing party will have to show leadership on those issues as well. But Roe is central.…
Who wrote this paragraph? Pat Robertson? Patrick Buchanan? Randy Tate? The answer, again, is William Kristol. His seamless merging of the Lewinsky scandal with the right’s other social concerns is perhaps what makes him so integral to the new conservatism. Always, however, the key social issue is abortion. He put the argument most revealingly in the February 1997 issue of the neoconservative political monthly Commentary. “The truth is,” Kristol wrote, “that abortion is today the bloody crossroads of American politics. It is where judicial liberation (from the Constitution), sexual liberation (from traditional mores) and women’s liberation (from natural distinctions) come together. It is the focal point for liberalism’s simultaneous assault on self-government, morals and nature. So, challenging the judicially imposed regime of abortion-on-demand is key to a conservative reformation in politics, in morals, and in beliefs.”
The choice of words is revealing here. Not just politics, a realm conservatives were once comfortable restricting themselves to, but “morals” and “beliefs.” And not revolution or reform but “reformation.” Kristol’s conservatism is happy with the vocabulary of religious war. Earlier this year, Kristol argued that “abortion is likely to emerge as the central issue in the Presidential campaign of 2000.”
In the 1980s, the outlawing of abortion was framed in the somewhat liberal terms of saving human life and protecting human rights. And that is why a smattering of left-leaning intellectuals also signed on as antiabortion advocates. But in the 1990s, the conservative emphasis has changed. Now the banning of abortion is linked primarily to an attack on the Supreme Court’s judicial activism in other areas as well (prayer in schools, women’s equality, and gay rights foremost among them) and to the more general sexual liberty of the society as a whole. Abortion is central to a reassertion of what Kristol called “traditional mores” and of “natural distinctions” between the sexes. It is not unrelated to the Lewinsky obsession and the antigay crusade. In fact, it is the anchor of both.
Bizarrely enough, abortion has even come to play a role in the reformulation of Republican foreign policy. After all, the main obstacle to Republican financing of the United Nations has not been that body’s wasteful bureaucracy, or even the United Nations’ infringement of American sovereignty, but rather its support of birth-control initiatives in the developing world. And the critical issue that seems to have tilted the right toward rampant hostility to China has not so much been Beijing’s Communist regime or its militarism but Beijing’s specifically anti-Christian bent.
In a long article two years ago in Foreign Affairs that Kristol cowrote with another Standard regular, Robert Kagan, the connection between domestic puritanism and foreign-policy interventionism was made explicit: “The remoralization of America at home,” Kristol and Kagan wrote, “ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy.”
China has been the case study, becoming the overwhelming foreign-policy obsession of the fin-de-siècle right. Kristol and The Standard have long advocated a policy of containment and economic sanctions against China almost identical to the one fashioned for the Soviet Union for several decades. Kristol has also argued for a large increase in defense spending and a policy of international isolation of the Chinese. The posture against China is not related to Beijing’s puny military power as such, but to its moral indecency. Gone is the realism that was once the hallmark of conservative foreign policy.
Kristol’s “remoralization” model here might seem, on first glance, to be Ronald Reagan. But it is interesting to see the differences between the Reaganism of the 1980s and Kristolism of the late 1990s. The historical context is the most striking contrast. Reagan tackled a monolithic, militarized Soviet state with global ambitions, military occupation of half of Europe and Central Asia, and an arsenal immensely larger than China’s is today. Although Reagan didn’t hesitate to talk about Soviet communism in moral terms, he was also a foreign-policy realist who deftly changed tack when he saw that real change had occurred within the Soviet bloc. Reagan’s foreign-policy moralism was also, with regard to China, far less strident than with regard to the Soviet Union, precisely because Beijing had never entertained the global ambitions of Moscow, and also because he recognized the eco
nomic and social freedoms that were even then making China a vastly different country—and a far more complex diplomatic problem—than the Soviet Union.
In the same way, it’s worth remembering that Reagan’s domestic moralism was also of a very different variety from that of today’s conservatives. Rather than sternly criticizing liberal mores, Reagan tended to ignore them, preferring to praise conservative ones, finding in small human examples object lessons of traditional virtue. It was occasionally a goofy moralism, but also a sunny one. Rather than pinpoint moral demons, Reagan would point out moral heroes in the gallery of the Congress during his State of the Union addresses. Whereas conservatives in the 1990s obsessed about Clinton’s draft dodging, Reagan went to Normandy to eulogize a different kind of ethic. It is a telling contrast.
Reagan’s view of America was never bleak, and he was careful to stay away from the front lines of the cultural wars. Although he was nominally antiabortion, for example, he never attended an antiabortion rally. Moralism, for him, was always a vague but essentially positive construct. As he was a divorced man who rarely went to church, this was a fittingly modest—and conservative—approach to the world. And it was far more in touch with the center of American culture.
Kristol’s version of Reaganism, in other words, is an oddly displaced one. It transfers concepts—like containment—to a historical context in which they no longer make sense, and a sensibility—moralism—in a way that inverts its original spirit. Reagan’s heirs of the 1990s have turned the man into an ism, his sense of right into orthodoxy, his smile into a scowl.
And they have done so with a vehemence and activism that can only be called characterologically leftist. Of course, because so many of the neoconservatives once hailed from the left, this imprint is unsurprising. It manifests itself in the structures of old-left activity: the magazines and journals dedicated to the correct line; the messianic faith in the capacity of politics to transform the world; the infighting, and the incessant definition and redefinition of ideology. One of the best descriptions of this evolution actually occurred in The Standard, expressed by a conservative writer with a bent for subtlety, David Brooks. It is from an article on “Rich Republicans,” a group despised by the troops of the far right and treated with thinly veiled disdain by the magazine. But Brooks put his finger on a critical shift in conservatism in a rare moment of Standard self-awareness:
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