Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition [New York, N.Y] 17 Nov 1994
On Wednesday, Nov. 9, the day after the election, the New York Times surveyed a team of experts to explain the Republican tide. These commentators included liberal historians David Halberstam, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Alan Brinkley; civil-rights leader Julian Bond; George McGovern; and a token Republican, Howard Baker. Now, it may be possible to draw up a list of people who would be likely to know less about the anti-government message that was delivered Nov. 8, but it would take a lot of effort.
One of the revelations of the past two weeks has been the incompetence on the part of so many liberals in understanding and describing the GOP takeover. Conservatives basically know about liberalism; anyone who goes to the movies, listens to popular music or reads the major newspapers finds himself traveling on liberal terrain. But many liberals, it transpires, have only the haziest phantasms about conservatism, having only read each other’s descriptions of it.
The New York Times Magazine (whose slogan is “What Sunday Was Created For”) recently did a story on evangelical Christians using a tone one might adopt in the contemplation of Martians. Mr. Halberstam wrote a massive book about the 1950s that placed no emphasis on two of the most influential events of the decade, the pioneering work of Milton Friedman, which contributed mightily to the ideas behind the revolutions in Eastern Europe, and William F. Buckley’s formation of National Review, which helped to form a conservative movement that led to the Reagan revolution and ultimately the Gingrichian ascent.
While liberals such as John Judis and E.J. Dionne have actually read the conservative sources, many other liberals, especially in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, have reacted to the election like gaping victims of a 1950s horror movie: They don’t know what this monster is; they don’t know where it came from, or how it got so powerful; they only wish it would go away.
All of this goes to show how distant the two political cultures have become. On the one side there is the Doonesbury cohort: the smart liberal Boomers who have had their lives traced by the lives of Garry Trudeau characters — Mark on public radio, Joanie the lawyer and Hill staffer, Rick the Washington reporter. On the other side are a quite different set of cultural references associated with former professors Gingrich, Armey and Gramm — Sunbelt suburbs, John Wayne movies, grace before dinner and high-tech entrepreneurs.
The 1990s culture war isn’t a conflict between country rubes and urban sophisticates. It is increasingly fought between elites, often with similar academic credentials but radically different world views. It’s no longer outsider conservative bomb-throwers railing against the East Coast establishment. The new paradigm is the assault on Robert Bork, with well-educated activists and journalists going up against well-educated theoreticians.
Last Tuesday’s election was not simply a political shake-up; it was another step in a long cultural revolution, the rise and maturity of what Sidney Blumenthal has called the Conservative Counterestablishment. We now have two rival establishments in this country.
The full story of this election starts in places such as a motel in Tennessee a quarter-century ago, where a law student, Fred Thompson, worked the night shift sitting at the front desk reading Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind.” Now Mr. Thompson has been elected to the Senate and many of the other people who also once sat alone reading Kirk or Hayek or Oakeshott or Burke join him in important positions. Many of them manage the institutions that conservatives have created over the past 25 years, and which have spread anti-statist thinking. As GOP chronicler John Podhoretz has pointed out, unlike the Reagan victories, this was a leaderless election sweep; it was anti-government ideas themselves that permeated into all those gubernatorial, congressional and state legislature campaigns.
This conservative establishment is of course radically different in shape, size and tone from the liberal one, but also from previous Republican leaderships. The Republicans who were formed before the Reagan administration practiced a limited form of politics. With their interest in getting policies right, the George Bushes and James Bakers were either satisfied with, or uninterested in, the cultural landscape.
The new generation of Republicans practice social politics. In his first postelection interviews, Mr. Gingrich spoke about the counterculture and the McGovernites. Mr. Gingrich set himself up for some snickering ripostes by bringing back McGovern — liberals have come a way since then and in fact liberalism is now too ethereal a thing to make an effective bogeyman. But in bringing up the 1960s, he was referring to the moment when liberals and conservatives first split into separate cultures.
Mr. Gingrich’s best moment came during the final weeks of the campaign when he stood against a withering assault by an entire world of people who declared the “Contract With America” a disastrous mistake. He insisted that no, it was actually a key to victory. That correct stand echoed another key moment, last year, when GOP strategist William Kristol stood against a similar public barrage and said that no, there is no health care crisis and the Republicans should oppose the Clinton plan, rather than merely compromise with it.
These brasher conservatives were displaying an intellectual self-confidence and Washington-savvy that has not always characterized Republican political players. Feeling beleaguered, many older conservatives ended up obsessing about and exaggerating the power of institutions that were unfriendly to them. That temper is obsolete.
The emergence of rival establishments means that the institutions of the old single establishment have lost importance. For example, the New York Times was once the paper of record, the voice of the governing New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans. But that group is gone, and there is no longer a role for a single paramount institution. The Times reasonably enough oriented itself toward the upper-middle-class core of Manhattan, the Upper West Side/Greenwich Village liberals. It is still one of the great papers of the world, but it is now one player among others. The more it serves its core audience in Manhattan, the less authority it will have over the rest of the nation.
Public debate between these two establishments is bound to be fierce over the next few years; the journalistic hit jobs are already getting nastier. We might be all better off to recall that establishments don’t triumph by building on the rubble of the old. They triumph by building new structures on greenfield sites and forcing everyone to move over to them.
Conservatives will have trouble acting like an establishment in part because so many conservatives love feeling persecuted and resentful, but also because conservatives are acutely aware of the dangers of establishmentarianism: insularity and snobbery.
But there’s no getting around it; if you want to run a country for a long period of time, you have to form an establishment. And establishments have one advantage: They are happier than renegade movements that feel history is going away from them. The best advice on how to win conservative allies still comes from a happy establishmentarian of the 19th century, Walter Bagehot. It is this:
“The essense of Toryism is enjoyment. Talk of the ways of spreading wholesome Conservatism through the country: give painful lectures, distribute weary tracts. . . but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concerned — try a little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is to enjoy the state of things. Over the `Cavalier’ mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the `regular thing,’ joy at an old feast.”
Let liberals wail and whine for the next decades; maybe it’s the conservatives’ turn to be happy warriors.