It used to be liberals who railed against the complacency of the American electorate, but now it’s conservatives who long to see a little more mass outrage. It used to be liberals who based their politics on abstract notions more than concrete realities, but now it’s conservatives who like to emphasize that ideas have consequences. It used to be liberal intellectuals who longed for the drama and turmoil that put them center stage, but now the habits of the New Class, both good and bad, have migrated rightward.
That is putting it mildly.
But if you want to go to the spiritual nerve center of the new conservatism, you have to dig deeper than the weekly journalism of The Standard, and examine the other major new conservative journal of the 1990s, First Things. Few people outside the conservative new class will have heard of the monthly, which is devoted to matters of politics, culture, and religion, and edited by a former left-wing activist turned Catholic neoconservative priest, Rev. Richard John Neuhaus. But like The Standard, it is very much of its time, and like The Standard, too, it is deeply influential. Its editorial board includes respected scholars of the communitarian right, like George Weigel, Mary Ann Glendon, and Michael Novak; the neoconservative doyenne, Midge Decter, is also on the board.
Reading through the pages of First Things, one begins to understand why conservatism as a political movement has become, in many ways, a somewhat strained version of a neoreligious revival. A key phalanx of its intellectual gurus has, in fact, abandoned the secular underpinnings of the American constitutional experiment as a whole. These writers have been dubbed “theo-conservatives,” because of their religious bent. And, indeed, the intellectual basis on which their politics is built is a radically theocratic reinterpretation of the Constitution itself.
“The great majority of those who signed the Declaration [of Independence],” Neuhaus wrote in the November 1997 edition of First Things, “and of those who wrote and ratified the Constitution thought themselves to be orthodox Christians, typically of Calvinist leanings. It never entered their heads that in supporting this new order they were signing on to a minimalist creed incompatible with their Christian profession.”
So the distinction between church and state, in Neuhaus’s mind, has been vastly overplayed. All that the Constitution instituted, he would argue, was that no single religious group would become the official religion of the government. The Constitution certainly did not imply that Christianity would be forbidden to dominate the public ethos and institutions of American government.
That same order should, according to Neuhaus, apply today. For the theo-conservatives, the secular neutrality of modern American law and government is, in fact, no neutrality at all, but the willful imposition by liberal elites of what Neuhaus has dubbed “secular monism.” Neuhaus has no compunction in arguing that government itself—and its constitutional instrument, the Supreme Court—should uphold as public policy and law the articles of faith of orthodox Christians. The current secular order, he maintains, amounts to “the exclusion of the deepest convictions of most Americans from our politics and law”—what Neuhaus calls “perverse pluralism.”
What of non-Christian minorities in this divinely sanctioned order? What of those who do not, for example, adhere to Kenneth Starr’s view of “private family life,” or who do not even adhere to Christianity? Neuhaus insists that he doesn’t want “a sacred public square, but a civil public square.” Nevertheless, his main guarantee that non-Christian minorities would not be excluded from power is that Christians themselves would be urged to exercise “renewed opposition to every form of invidious prejudice or discrimination.” The guarantee of minority freedom, in other words, would be majority benevolence. It is perhaps unsurprising that when Neuhaus gathered a group of public thinkers and ministers to endorse a statement reflecting this orthodoxy, in October 1997, there were no Jews among the signers.
It is also unsurprising that the object of this group of thinkers’ deepest animosity is the current Supreme Court, the critical enforcer of what the magazine has dubbed “thinly disguised totalitarianism.” The Court’s deference to cultural pluralism and its defense of individual conscience and a right to privacy against communal and religious authority is anathema to the theo-conservatives. But even the most dogged critics of the theo-conservatives failed to anticipate the lengths to which they would go in pressing their case. In what became an infamous ideological fracas two years ago, First Things actually argued for seditious activities on the part of conservative Christians “ranging from noncompliance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution” against what it called, with echoes of the New Left, the “morally illegitimate” American “regime.”
The critical backdrop to this, of course, is the intellectual right’s conception of the continued ascendancy of sixties liberalism. The pages of The Standard and First Things are crammed with horror at the decline of American politics and culture into nihilism, self-indulgence, and rampant liberal individualism. In this picture of moral chaos, there is little space for nuance. So Bill Clinton, arguably the most conservative Democratic president since Truman, becomes, for these conservatives, the apex of 1960s liberalism. The fact that he balanced the budget, signed welfare-reform legislation, has shredded many civil liberties in the war against terrorism, is in favor of the death penalty, and signed the Defense of Marriage Act is immaterial to his conservative enemies. For the model of cultural collapse to work, Clinton must represent its nadir.
In the same way, the decade of the 1990s, which has seen cultural and social conservatism spread throughout the middle classes, and Republican control of House and Senate, is, to these intellectuals, a decade of unabashed liberal hegemony. The country may seem quiescent, even conservative, but a radical liberal takeover is still in full swing. Here is the novelist Mark Helprin, former speech writer for Bob Dole and darling of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, on the necessity for full-scale cultural war at the end of the century. Writing in Commentary last winter, he called the Democrats “proponents of a revolution in American life in which the tough talk came in the 60’s and the sweet talk comes now.”
But though the left revolution may be swathed in positiveness and pleasantries, it is a revolution nonetheless. It is a revolution in which individual rights have become group rights, in which responsibility has become entitlement, marriage has become divorce, birth has become abortion, medicine has become euthanasia, homosexuality is a norm, murder is neither a surprise nor necessarily punishable, pornography is piped into almost every home, gambling is legal, drugs are rife, students think Alaska is an island south of Los Angeles, and mothers of small children are sent off to war with great fanfare and pride.
By any measure, this is an extraordinary outpouring of anxiety. It is also, in almost all of its particulars, false. To take a few examples: Helprin claims that murder is neither a surprise nor necessarily punishable at the end of the century. Yet in the 1990s murder rates have been dropping precipitously and the prison population and execution rate are at record highs. Helprin claims drugs are rife. Yet drug use is far below the levels of two decades ago. He says that responsibility has become entitlement. Yet a Democratic president recently ended the federal welfare entitlement and welfare rolls have been free-falling nationwide. He argues that marriage has become divorce. Yet again, divorce rates have been steadily dropping for a decade. He says that birth has become abortion. And yet abortion rates are now at their lowest since 1975. One begins to wonder what country Helprin is living in.
Indeed, it seems at times as if conservatives in the last few years have been unable to take yes for an answer. As the country becomes more conservative, the right sees liberalism everywhere. It is almost as if the habits of beleaguerment have completely blinded conservative intellectuals to their own success. They need the adrenaline rush of persecution and the thrill of ideological battle. So if the enemy doesn’t exist, they need to invent one, by concocting ever more fanciful conspiracies of the left, by fatally misreading the c
haracter and politics of Bill Clinton, by constructing a Manichaean cultural universe where good and bad are always inseparable from right and left and where politics is always a war and never a conversation. And so an era of peace and prosperity and conservative cultural values has been transformed in their eyes into a liberal hell. These conservatives have become like Japanese soldiers on a distant island who don’t realize the war is over. And even when they’re told, they disbelieve it, because they need the war, even if the war itself has no reality except in the prose of Mark Helprin.
If one man alone could personify this hysterical pessimism about America, it would have to be Robert Bork. There are perhaps few more tragic examples of the degeneration of conservatism into puritanism than this once-piercing intellectual. Not so long ago, Bork was a pillar of conservative intellectual rigor and elegance. To be sure, his constitutional views placed him well outside the mainstream of liberal legal discourse, but even his enemies credited him with philosophical consistency, a sometimes tart and witty pen, and a brilliant legal mind. He was famously subjected to one of the most scurrilous attempts to smear a Supreme Court nominee in recent history. (For the record, I supported Bork’s nomination and wrote one of the first articles attacking his opponents for extremism and inaccuracy.)
But even in the wake of that inevitably embittering experience, Bork kept his cool. His memoir-cum-essay after the event, The Tempting of America, was a restrained, sometimes-funny, always-compelling defense of extreme judicial passivity in constitutional law. In that book, he was firm even with the ideologues of his own side, warning conservatives not to respond to liberals in kind, nor to appoint an ideologically conservative judiciary, which would be just as activist as the alternative. “Conservatives,” he wrote, “who now, by and large, want neutral judges, may decide to join the game and seek activist judges with conservative views. Should that come to pass, those who have tempted the courts to political judging will have gained nothing for themselves but will have destroyed a great and essential institution.”
Not many people outside conservative activist circles seem to have read Bork’s latest book, published in 1996, but it became a New York Times best seller on the strength of its sales to conservative book clubs alone. It was called Slouching towards Gomorrah. In it, Bork describes contemporary America as a hellish “moral chaos,” “punctuated by spasms of violence and eroticism.” He predicts “the coming of a new Dark Ages.” Much of this, he argues, is the product of modern liberalism, which has destroyed constitutional democracy by fomenting radical individualism and egalitarianism. Far from being in a conservative era, today’s America, according to Bork, is dominated by the left, which has no viable opposition: “There is no group of comparable size and influence to balance the extremists of modern liberalism, no ‘right’ that has a similarly destructive program in mind.”
The only hope, Bork posits, is “the rise of an energetic, optimistic and politically sophisticated religious conservatism.” Thus the prophet of judicial restraint puts his weight behind the untrammeled religious right, just as surely as Kristol and Neuhaus.
The extremity of Bork’s oratory is matched only by the simplicity of his argument. He makes almost no distinctions between the Clintonian liberalism of the 1990s and the radicalism of the 1960s. It is, for Bork, all of a piece. A president whose economic policy is designed to please bond traders, who bombs Sudan and Afghanistan without warning, and who declares that the era of big government is over is simply a cover for liberal radicalism. And the agenda is terrifying: “Modern liberalism,” Bork avers, “the descendant and spiritual heir of the New Left, is what fascism looks like when it has captured significant institutions, most notably the universities, but has no possibility of becoming a mass movement or of gaining power over government or the broader society through force or the threat of force.” The Clintons, it seems, are Nazis manqués.
One pillar of Bork’s case is that liberalism cannot win democratically, so it uses the courts and the executive to flout the popular will. And yet, at the same time, the people, in Bork’s view, are depraved as well, spawning a popular culture that is in “a free fall, with the bottom not yet in sight.” Indeed, Bork’s book was an early indicator of a new theme among conservatives: not simply a hatred of liberal elites, but a contempt for the mass of Americans. Such disdain, of course, has come to a head during the Lewinsky affair. As public indifference to the scandal has continued, and as Clinton’s approval ratings have remained buoyant despite a pitiless series of embarrassments, the new conservatives have had little alternative but to blame Americans for their lack of judgment.
Hence the title of William Bennett’s latest book, The Death of Outrage. Hence the religious-right icon James Dobson’s recent statement of disappointment in the American people in a letter to his group, Focus on the Family. “What has alarmed me throughout this episode,” Dobson wrote, “has been the willingness of my fellow citizens to rationalize the President’s behavior even as they suspected, and later knew, he was lying. I am left to conclude that our greatest problem is not in the Oval Office. It is with the people of this land.”
Once upon a time, this kind of distaste for America was the preserve of liberals and leftists who made up what was called the Blame America First crowd. Today’s conservatives have added a new twist to this. They are in danger of becoming the Blame Americans First crowd. Bork is particularly caustic in this regard. Here is his assessment of popular culture at the end of the century: “What America increasingly produces and distributes is now propaganda for every perversion and obscenity imaginable. If many of us accept the assumptions on which that is based, and apparently many do, then we are well on our way to an obscene culture.”
The only possible hope in all this, according to Bork, is either a fundamentalist religious revival or a sobering great depression. (Bork seems to welcome both possibilities.) Or, if all else fails, a restitution of government censorship. In an interview last year with the magazine Christianity Today, Bork was refreshingly candid about this. He would gladly use government power to restrict the dissemination of objectionable speech and images. When asked by the magazine what an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer would say about this, Bork replied that the lawyer would say, “ ‘You are inhibiting my liberty and my right to express myself.’ And the answer to that is, Yes, that is precisely what we are after.”
Thus modern conservatism, which began as a movement of personal liberation from the state and intellectual skepticism in response to ideological certainty, has become its precise opposite. Convinced that society is in mortal moral and cultural peril, the most influential conservative intellectuals have made their peace with big government, censorship, and the presence of sectarian dogma in politics. The supremacy of this way of thinking among conservatives is perhaps best illustrated by David Frum, a young writer who has long supported a more economically based conservatism, one that would return the movement to its 1980s emphasis on tax cuts and smaller government. But his rationale for such a move in his recent book, Dead Right, is revealing. He wants to limit government not to expand personal freedom, but to so rob the middle class of financial security that they would have little choice but to return to the social mores of the 1950s. In order not to fall through the widening cracks of the vanishing welfare state, Americans would have no option, Frum argues, but to strengthen family ties, avoid divorce, and cling more carefully to children, spouses, and parents.
In other words, even those conservative thinkers who still argue for a low-tax, small-government philosophy have been unable to make headway with their peers without cloaking their case in the austerity of moral revival. The blithe optimism of Reagan, the joy that conservatives once took in the sheer unpredictability of a free people in a free society, has been replaced by a dark dread of how people could misuse such freedom, and the desperate need to coerce them back into line.
In the 1990s, as America has experienced a phenomenal burst of new wealth, as conservative values
have enjoyed a revival among the young, as divorce and abortion have dropped, as welfare has been transformed and fiscal prudence restored, intellectual conservatives have responded by launching a bitter crusade to save the country from hell. No wonder that during the Lewinsky matter Republicans consistently misread the public mood and the popular culture. No wonder they managed to let one of the most duplicitous presidents in history seem an object of unjust persecution. No wonder they have yet no clue how to engage or inspire the vibrant, new America that their predecessors did so much to bring about.
This is not to say, of course, that morality is not an important, or an importantly conservative, issue. Conservatives have always been concerned with morality—and rightly so. They have long understood that political order rests upon a vibrant civil society, and on the morality that such a society sustains. But conservatives have also always been aware of the dangers of excessively policing that morality, and of the evils that can occur when the morally certain gain power. Hence the apparent conservative paradox. Conservatives want morality, but they don’t want the big government that could effectively enforce it. For true conservatives, the evils of moral chaos are usually outweighed by the evils of a moralizing big brother.
And so conservatives have learned over the years to live with a little paradox. They have resisted the temptation either to become morally indifferent libertarians or to become morally repugnant ideologues. Although they have worried about moral and social trends, they have resisted easy pessimism and the jeremiad. And they have left the impositions of morals to the churches and preachers and mothers and fathers and teachers and friends of America to sort out. When it comes to preaching, true conservatives would much prefer to praise the examples of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa than to demonize the likes of Dennis Rodman or Marv Albert.
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