TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121189/12118900.050

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.8 KB | 130 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 112

Being Right in a Post-Postwar World


By Richard Brookhiser


    A specter is haunting conservatives -- the specter of the
end of Communism. Our nightmare, our adversary, our dark
doppelganger for the past 40 years seems to be fading away. From
Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron
curtain is buckling. Will conservatism buckle with it?

    This is a small matter next to the chance for peace on
earth or a free Eurasia. But it's a matter of immediate
practical import. In the past decade the conservative movement
remade the face of American politics. Politics must change if
conservatives do. And how can conservatives avoid changing once
they don't have Karl Marx to kick around anymore?

    The question arises because, beneath the level of
day-to-day politicking, conservatives are a heterogeneous lot.
We conservatives mock liberals for playing coalition politics
with the federal treasury. But our own coalition, although we
don't glue it together with tax dollars, is as diverse as
theirs.

    The founders of the movement in the '50s and early '60s --
the people who wrote for National Review and nominated Barry
Goldwater -- included Southern Agrarians and free-marketeers,
isolationists and advocates of the rollback of Communism,
students of T.S. Eliot and fans of Joseph McCarthy. In the '70s
there was a mass immigration of mugged liberals -- the
neoconservatives. Communism acted on all these grouplets as a
powerful unifying force. Whether you wanted an American Century
or a minimal state, you could not be comfortable with Soviet
aggrandizement. Lenin was anathema whether your philosophical
polestar was Thomas Aquinas or Ayn Rand. Like an offensive guest
at a lousy party, Communism drew together a lot of people who
would otherwise have been standoffish.

    Foreign policy will be the most obvious point of
conservative contention in a post-Communist world. How long will
we be in favor of maintaining garrisons in West Germany, South
Korea and points between once the garrisons on the other side
become unthreatening? Irving Kristol and Tom Bethell have been
urging for years that the U.S. wind down NATO. The tradition of
American noninterventionism is a long one (we like pedigrees for
our prejudices). America should not "go abroad in search of
monsters to destroy," as John Quincy Adams put it. "She is the
well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the
champion and vindicator only of her own." At the same time, our
present forward position is the end product of an equally long
thrust of American expansion, which was propelled by the fact
that our stay-at-home sentiments were seldom consistent:
isolationist politicians, however much they disliked Europe,
typically favored brandishing big sticks in the Caribbean and
the Pacific. Look for an intramural fight over these questions
the next time our ally Israel finds itself embroiled in a
Middle Eastern war. It won't be pretty.

    Related to the issue of national strength is the issue of
international purpose. How active is our friendship for liberty
supposed to be? HUD Secretary Jack Kemp sometimes gives the
impression that if he were ever to become President, he would
show up with megaphone and pompons wherever in the world there
was a pro-democracy rally. Such enthusiasm strikes most
conservatives as suspicious -- liberal, even. If we expect the
world to mind its own business, we should mind ours.

    The most important foreign policy issue, after bringing the
boys home, will be keeping the Japanese out. Anxiety over
foreign imports has recently been a theme of Democrats like
Richard Gephardt. But before he came along, the same worries
were being expounded by John Connally. There is no such thing
as a presidential primary in South Carolina without a
protectionist pitch to the local textile industry. When the
Fourth Reich joins the Yellow Peril as an economic bogeyman,
squabbling on the right between free traders and protectionists
is bound to increase.

    The reef on which a breakup of the conservative coalition
is hourly expected is composed of social issues, particularly
that most inflamed social issue, abortion. How can libertarian
baby boomers raised on the Pill and Fundamentalists raised on
the Seventh Commandment stay under the same tent? Probably more
easily than anyone suspects. The fight for blanket antiabortion
legislation will be bruising, and many purely economic
conservatives will want no part of it. But the question of
Government funding of abortions unites laissez-faire and Old
Testament moralists alike. Many other social issues, such as
day care, lend themselves to similar cross-cultural
anti-Government alliances. Junk-bond dealers and snake handlers
agree in wanting Washington out of their lives. The Republican
Party, of course, may turn tail on some or all of the social
issues. But then, conservative diehards of every stripe have
always regarded the G.O.P. as a painful necessity rather than
an object of devotion.

    If the right stands together on social issues, it risks
falling together on the environment. Though conservatives and
conservation are linguistically related words, most of the
former have given the latter scant thought. For a brief moment
ten years ago, we geared up to argue that one of the reasons why
nuclear power is desirable is that it is safer and cleaner than
coal, gas and oil. We were right. But Three Mile Island made the
issue politically moot, and we've barely been heard from since.
We can save elephants more effectively than liberals can. We
also have to show that we can, for in an increasingly
Green-conscious world, if we don't go down to the seas again,
to the lonely sea and the sky, we may as well not go to the
polls.

    Mikhail Gorbachev may yet pull everybody back to square
one, by changing his mind or getting the sack. Even if he stays
on his present course, he will remain the ruler of a big country
with large arsenals. There is enough history ahead for all but
the most jaded. Once the malign magnetic field that held us with
such power breaks, however, conservatives will have to find new
ways to meet history. "Most of us," wrote political philosopher
Kenneth R. Minogue in 1963, "are, in some degree or other,
liberal. It is only the very cynical, the unassailably
religious, or the consistently nostalgic who have remained
unaffected." A lot fewer of us think of ourselves as liberal
since Minogue wrote those words. But the different impulses that
pushed us right -- the hard head, the stern faith, the backward
glance -- remain in play and remain different. Each must find
its own way through the sieve of events -- a conservative
sentiment, come to think of it.