Conservatives are in quite a funk. It seems hardly a week goes by without my favorite conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, featuring a headline announcing some catastrophe. One cover story, “Chaos on Capitol Hill,” is followed shortly by “Total Chaos on Capitol Hill,” leading up to a full issue devoted to “Is There a Worldwide Conservative Crack-up?”
An international conservative conference held in Washington late last month featured not just the usual high-level debate that confirms conservatives as the party of ideas, but more gloom and doom than you’ll find in a global warming conclave. The first morning was devoted to: “Why Conservatism is Failing,” followed by “Diagnosis of Defeat.” My panel was entitled “Need Conservatism Crack Up?”–a peculiar mix of pessimism (a common conservative proclivity) and historical inevitability (a common Marxist one).
The answer, of course, is no. Conservatism is not failing. It is actually winning. Leave aside for a moment the epochal victory in the Cold War that has assured the worldwide ascendancy of democratic capitalism. Consider just the domestic scene in America this past year alone:
The 60-year-old entitlement to welfare has been abolished. The most populous state in the union has outlawed affirmative action. Perhaps most important, the courts have upheld this remarkable conservative counterrevolution: The 9th Circuit upheld Proposition 209–as will, undoubtedly, the Supreme Court. Moreover, the Supreme Court struck what is probably the most significant blow for judicial restraint this decade when it overturned, unanimously no less, lower courts’ attempts to legalize physician-assisted suicide.
So where is the failure? One reason why conservatives believe they are failing is that they see in Britain and France and the United States conservative governments being replaced by non-conservative ones.
But it is simple-minded in the extreme to measure the success of a movement by the fortunes of certain politicians, such as George Bush and Bob Dole and John Major. Loss of the executive branch does not mean failure. Indeed, in the United States major conservative victories have been won under a Democratic president–in fact, they could only have occurred under a Democratic president. Both free trade (North American Free Trade Agreement and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and welfare reform could probably only have been passed–relatively unsavaged by the Democratic opposition and its allies in the media–as the acts of a Democratic president.
The fact that both in Britain and in the United States the liberal party has shed its liberalism in order to win electoral office is a gain for conservatism. Clinton’s and Blair’s ideological plagiarism is not just the tribute political vice pays to virtue. It is an excellent way to consolidate conservative gains. It took a Clinton, for example, to make the balanced budget a bipartisan national issue. And it takes a Blair to legitimize for all the Thatcherite revolution.
So where is conservatism failing? There is frustration in the ranks that the first conservative Congress in 40 years failed between January 1995 and today to undo 60 years’ growth of the welfare state.
But there is a difference between frustration and failure. The expectations that were frustrated were wildly unrealistic to begin with. First, because conservatives did not control all branches of government. You do not, in the American system, run a revolution out of the House of Representatives.
Second, because the elite media were quite hostile both to the Republican Congress and to its agenda. The non-partisan Center for Media and Public Affairs found, for example, that TV coverage of the new GOP Congress in early 1995 was overwhelmingly negative: 68 percent negative evaluations versus 32 percent positive. (Dan Rather, on CBS, offered this typical description of the House GOP agenda: “to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor.”)
And third because the American people are simply not in a revolutionary mood. And why should they be? This is an era of profound political and social quietude. We’ve earned it. Sixty years of upheaval, of fighting mortal global enemies, is quite enough. Nonetheless, even in the midst of this quietude, we have just witnessed the end of the welfare entitlement and the beginning of the end of racial and ethnic preferences.
Yet many conservatives are crying in their soup, grandiosely lamenting their failure to dismantle the welfare state overnight.
To which I say, invoking my psychiatric credentials, lighten up. The diagnosis for the malaise that grips conservatism today is obvious: postpartum depression. We’ve had our splendid 9 pound, 6 ounce baby: an astonishing, world-historical victory over the Evil Empire and universal acceptance of the free-market system. And now that it is over, we cannot abide the letdown.
We are living in the safe, normal, humdrum, bourgeois, unheroic, undramatic, postwar world that Francis Fukuyama foresaw in his “The End of History and the Last Man.” And we’re asking: Is that all there is?
Cheer up, comrades. That’s what we fought for.