TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/121189/12118900.050

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 7KB | 118 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.