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                                                                                ESSAY, Page 82

The Conservatives' Morning After


By Henry Grunwald


    Question for conservatives: Now what?

    The first order of business is to sort out just who or
what failed: George Bush or conservatism? Or which mixture of
the two? The Washington Post gave its answer when it reported
"the end of the age of heroic conservatism" and announced the
start of a new day.

    Advice to liberals: not so fast!

    Experience suggests a little caution in proclaiming new
days -- or mornings -- in America. The electorate turned
against Bush not so much because he was conservative but because
he was perceived as inept. Some abandoned him because they did
not see him as a good conservative. Bill Clinton, meanwhile,
offered a program that was at least half conservative. He
promised (threatened?) massive federal intervention and
spending, but also restructuring and limiting government,
curbing bureaucracy, reforming welfare, strengthening individual
responsibility. Many conservatives, this writer included, saw
a chance -- just a chance -- that Clinton might carry out
conservative policies that a re-elected Bush could not have.
That's known as the only-Nixon-could-go-to-China syndrome.

    The "conservative era" did not spring from Reaganite
nostalgia for a mythical American Eden, or from a crass
conspiracy of the greedy and heartless, but from international
phenomena: the welfare state had grown too gargantuan, too
ineffective and had to be cut back; it became clear that
economies cannot indefinitely redistribute more wealth than they
create. The emergence of the information society requires
initiative and self-reliance rather than the setting of
standardized tasks and centralized control. Moreover, the
dislocations, including structural unemployment, of the "second
industrial revolution" are not susceptible to the old
quasi-socialist cures.

    In this changed landscape, there is room for maneuver, but
its basic contours cannot be escaped.

    In the economic sphere, conservatives have every reason to
continue to be critical of Big Government, undue intrusions into
the market, protectionism, excessive regulation and apocalyptic
environmentalism. They should continue to stand against ever
expanding entitlements and the ideal of forced equality. But
conservatives must not merely oppose. In that spirit they
should also question some of their taboos (certain tax increases
and government initiatives cannot be damned under any and all
circumstances). As creative conservatives from Disraeli on
understood, conservatism is bound to fail if it is seen as a
prescription for doing nothing.

    It is admittedly very difficult to "do something" while
relying on the free market and trying to curb the statist
Leviathan. But that is the narrow bridge on which the
conservatives will have to fight. It is not a matter of being
"kinder and gentler" but smarter and more imaginative. At
present, the challenge is best met by Jack Kemp and Co., who are
developing new forms of interaction between the public and
private spheres, more individual autonomy without setting the
individual adrift. That is, of course, the "New Paradigm" (but
won't somebody please invent a less clunky label?).

    In foreign affairs, the traditional positions are
confused. Many liberals have suddenly turned hawkish, some, for
instance, almost pushing to bomb Serbia back into the Stone Age,
while many once hard-line conservatives now oppose intervention.
But the differences are not dramatic. With communism gone,
along with its domestic political fallout, there is an
opportunity for a new bipartisan foreign policy.

    Social issues may be the most troublesome for
conservatives.

    Despite some ugly, off-putting rhetoric at the Republican
Convention, "family values" are of real concern to most
Americans. They are bothered by a moral vacuum in society and
the disintegration of the family (although that is as much a
result of economic forces and the dizzying mobility of American
life as of moral decline). And they resent the process by which
the redress of every grievance and condition becomes a "right."
Moreover, conservatives should be able to question the radical
politization if not exaltation of homosexuality or to protest
the cost to society of maintaining growing numbers of
illegitimate babies without being demonized as Babbittical
bigots.

    But such matters should not be fought out in Pat
Buchanan's fire-and-brimstone "religious war." They should be
settled by the civilized exercise of majority rule. Better
still, whenever possible, they should be left to the free
give-and-take of persuasion and argument, for they are really
philosophical disagreements not easily settled by politics.
Liberals should resist the monstrous thought police of the
"politically correct"; mainstream conservatives should resist
Fundamentalist zealots who sometimes seem bent on turning
America into a theocracy, a modern version of Geneva under the
rule of provincial Calvins. Thus conservatives should rethink
their universal opposition to abortion. If the conservative
movement, or the Republican Party, is taken over by the
religious right, it will become indefinitely marginalized, which
is what nearly happened to the Democrats when they were taken
over by extreme liberals.

    The most important task for conservatives is to be a force
for American unity. They must offer alternatives to the new
tribal urges, the growing ethnic and racial separatist drives
under the slogan of multiculturalism, which liberals,
unfortunately, often encourage. If Clinton himself fights the
tendency and steals some of the conservatives' clothes, that
would be great for the country. If he fails, the conservatives
will have a stronger mission than ever.