EPILOGUE:
AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN THE BUSH YEARS

Ronald Reagan emerged from eight years in the White House standing tall, his public image untarnished by a second term marked by crisis, corruption, and indirection. The fate of the conservatism that he had led to power was considerably more mixed. The most common assessment was that the Right was entrenched but exhausted . On the one hand, many of its achievements and assumptions had become part of the framework of American politics. Tax cuts and large budget deficits focused political debate squarely on reducing government spending and made a liberal domestic agenda difficult to contemplate let alone enact. The large military buildup in Reagan's first term greatly raised the baseline of the perennial debates about less or more military spending. Reagan's federal court appointments put a long-term conservative stamp on American jurisprudence, which was most palpably evident in the Supreme Court decisions in 1989 on affirmative action and abortion. Above all, conservative views on most issues had gained legitimacy and acceptability.

On the other hand, the forward momentum of conservatism was largely exhausted, and hence the prospects of the Right making further major gains seemed slight. The Reagan administration in its second term had not pursued, let alone enacted, much of the conservative agenda; the conservative movement was in disarray; and most important, the Reagan years ended with neither a solid Republican nor a conservative popular majority much closer than when they had begun.

Political scientist William Schneider nicely summed up the conventional wisdom about the Right: "The Republicans will learn that Reaganism is a spent political force. . . . The Democrats will learn that Reagan has established a new institutional order."^[1] Indeed, George Bush is the very embodiment of this situation: a Republican president lacking deep roots in the conservative movement and committed more to consolidating and modifying the Reagan legacy than to extending it. This assessment of the Right in the Bush years accurately captures the general outlines of the situation, but it misses important details. Not all parts of the political force of conservatism are equally spent, nor has conservatism created a wholly new institutional order. To get a clearer picture of the Right today, let us examine the current condition of the various elements of conservatism discussed in this book and of the ideological climate as a whole.

The New Right

The New Right entered the Reagan years optimistic, aggressive, and, in Richard Viguerie's phrase, "ready to lead." It left them, as one observer put it, in "dismay and disarray." This mood, which became more and more apparent from 1986 on, is reflected in the words of movement leaders themselves. "The conservative movement is directionless," Viguerie sadly concluded; Howard Phillips spoke of "a sense of futility among conservatives"; and R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., speculated about a "conservative crack-up." At public conferences and in private interviews in the late 1980s, conservative leaders seemed adrift and apprehensive about the future.^[2]

This situation reflected the fact that for the first time in twenty years conservatives faced the future without a leader. Ever since Ronald Reagan had won the California governorship in 1966, he had been the movement's undisputed standard-bearer, around whom conservatives could rally when they chose. With Reagan headed to political retirement, no one of similar stature stood ready to replace him. Conservatives failed to unite around a successor in the Republican primaries in 1988. Partly as a result, the Republican nomination (and ultimately the presidency) went to George Bush, whom neither political history nor political instincts marked as a pure-bred conservative. Conservatives thus faced the Bush years with considerable ambivalence, their emotions ranging from cautious optimism (at best) to bitter alienation.^[3]

Dismay among conservatives arose also from their collective sense that however they might assess the Reagan administration's actual achievements, it had bequeathed little momentum to the Right—little, that is, with which to energize conservative activists. Reagan's second term got under way with hardly any program or sense of direction. By 1987 it was mired in scandal and crisis with the Iran-Contra revelations, the continuing investigation of Attorney General Edwin Meese, and the spate of unflattering insider accounts of the Reagan White House. Its main achievement, an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union, contradicted every conservative impulse and hardly inspired the rank and file of the Right. For conservatives as well, the political news from 1986 on was mostly bad: the Republican loss of the Senate, the unsuccessful nomination of Robert Bork to the United States Supreme Court, and the indecisive support for the Nicaraguan Contras.

Loss of leadership and political momentum, however, were only part of the reason for conservative dismay. Important New Right organizations faced considerable financial problems in the late 1980s; though neither pervasive nor necessarily permanent, these problems still absorbed attention and slackened the energy of conservative leaders. The Richard A. Viguerie Company, once the Right's premier direct-mail fundraiser, hit the skids in 1985 for a variety of reasons: too much credit extended to conservative groups, Viguerie's expensive unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Virginia, competition from other direct mailers, and a bad business investment. Viguerie reestablished solvency, but only after cutting his staff, selling the journal Conservative Digest (the New Right's mouthpiece), and focusing on his business direct-mail clients. The Life Amendment Political Action Committee, once a major political force in the antiabortion movement, collapsed under the weight of debt after its unsuccessful effort to unseat Senator Bob Packwood in the Oregon Republican primary in 1986. The National Conservative Political Action Committee, the largest PAC in the early 1980s, saw its fundraising fall precipitously after 1985 and ended the Reagan years in debt and bitterly divided. And the venerable John Birch Society, as far as its extreme secrecy about finances allowed outsiders to estimate, also seemed to be in trouble.^[4]

The most important reason for the disarray of the New Right was that its basic political style no longer suited the political tasks it faced. Conservatives had long cultivated the stance of the outsider; as I ar-

gued in Chapter 3, their adeptness with antiestablishment rhetoric and their capacity to focus diffuse discontent on concrete political targets had often been a political asset. By the late 1980s, however, these assets had partly become liabilities. What was needed, Republican House Whip Newt Gingrich noted, was "a governing rather than an opposition conservatism."^[5] The traits that made for effective opposition did not necessarily lead to effective governing. The title of Richard Viguerie's 1980 prospectus, The New Right: We're Ready to Lead , rang ironically in the late 1980s. The New Right was not ready to lead; it never had been. It was ready, as always, to oppose.

Two examples of the New Right's inability to shed its outsider pose were especially striking. The first was the failure of conservatives to unite around the candidacy of Congressman Jack Kemp during the Republican primaries in 1988. For the New Right Kemp came closest to being a natural successor to Reagan; he had a long history in the conservative movement, the correct positions on all but a few issues, and potentially broad popular appeal. Conservatives had so cultivated the outsider style, with its resentment and bitterness, however, that they could not warm to a candidate who did not identify and attack a political enemy. As one observer put it, Kemp's message was too positive; he was not "a hater or polarizer." Or, in the words of conservative leader Richard Viguerie, "[Kemp] could not bring himself to be critical. And failing that his campaign had no chance. Jack never pushed the conservatives' buttons because he could not bring himself to attack."^[6]

The second example was the failure of the nomination of conservative Republican John Tower as secretary of defense in early 1989. Although the Senate vote rejecting Tower ultimately fell along party lines (Democrats against, Republicans for), the initial volley against Tower came from New Right activist Paul Weyrich, who surprised the Senate Armed Services Committee by making public the frequent private rumors that Tower was a drunk and a womanizer. Weyrich acted apparently out of deep conviction that political leaders should set moral examples, but that he could so readily translate personal belief into divisive public attack reflects, again, the outsider's mentality of the New Right.^[7]

In the Bush years, the New Right seems likely to remain an outsider. Its organizations and activists are unlikely to be central to any conservative advances, which must come through other channels. The New Right's day has passed.

The New Religious Right

The New Religious Right entered the Bush years as a still potent source of Republican votes, conservative activists, and institutional power. It remained, however, not a religious Right, or even a Christian Right, but an evangelical-fundamentalist Right. In the 1988 presidential election, white evangelicals and fundamentalists confirmed their Republican leanings by giving 81 percent of their votes to George Bush. They were thus one of the very few groups from whom Bush got a higher vote percentage than Reagan had in 1984. By 1988 too, the remaining pulses of conservative grass-roots activism were coming primarily from the New Religious Right. In states as diverse as Michigan and Arizona, determined evangelical activists gained control of local Republican party organizations. At the same time, the focal point of the antiabortion movement shifted from conventional political activity to Operation Rescue, an effort to block access to abortion clinics by using civil disobedience tactics. The national leader of Operation Rescue, Randall Terry, and the majority of participants are evangelicals. Thus the antiabortion movement, like the anti-ERA movement before it, has drawn progressively more on the efforts of evangelicals; important elements of the New Religious Right have come to see abortion as the central issue in their political agenda.^[8]

Another striking example of the staying power of the New Religious Right has been the fundamentalists' continued dominance over the Southern Baptist Convention. By 1989, fundamentalists had been in power long enough to control nearly every major seminary, publication, and agency. Moderate Baptists vigorously contested national elections and regained control of a number of state conventions, but they began to concede their defeat. In 1987 some moderate Baptists broke away to form the Southern Baptists Alliance; in 1988 moderate faculty members at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, faced with a board of trustees committed to hiring only theological conservatives for future posts, began planning to start another seminary.^[9]

The influence of the New Religious Right, however, remained limited in scope: the vision in the early 1980s of an ecumenical religious Right had not materialized as the decade ended. The failure of Pat Robertson's well-financed campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988 to gain more than scant support among nonevangelicals is certainly prime evidence of this limited appeal.^[10] That the

New Religious Right will expand its scope in the near future seems unlikely, because the major television preachers who provided visible leadership have been mired in financial trouble. As the audience for televangelism became saturated in the late 1980s and the number of religious programs increased, all the major television preachers saw their revenues fall dramatically, even before the Gospelgate scandals involving Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. Where once the ministries had expanded confidently, retrenchment became the order of the day. Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network laid off more than 10 percent of its staff, cut its budget by a similar amount, and abandoned a new nightly news show. After substantially cutting his staff and borrowing millions to maintain the academic accreditation of Liberty University, Jerry Falwell began a phased retreat from active politics, culminating in the disbanding of the Moral Majority in 1989. In the wake of the Gospelgate scandals, revenues fell faster and the popularity of television preachers declined markedly.^[11]

To be sure, in the long run some of the television ministries will retain the support of the faithful, reestablish solvency, and generally sort themselves out. In the short run, however, the major television preachers will be preoccupied more with getting their houses in order than with leading a political movement. This will not mean the death knell of the New Religious Right; the epitaphs by some observers are premature. It does mean, however, that opportunities for expansion are limited: the New Religious Right will remain a powerful force within distinct limits. The interesting questions are how long the leadership vacuum will continue and how much it will affect the vitality of the New Religious Right.

Corporate Conservatism

Corporate conservatism remained an important political force as the Reagan years ended, but its aggressiveness, partisanship, and in some ways unity waned. The economic issues of the late 1970s and early 1980s had unified big business, but those of Reagan's second term split it. Disagreements among corporations and industries about trade legislation, budget deficits, and tax reform hobbled the Business Roundtable, divided corporate lobbyists, and pitted policy planning groups against one another.^[12]

More important, in the electoral arena, where a high degree of

unity still prevailed in contributions to political candidates, big business no longer made a concerted effort to elect conservative Republican challengers to House and Senate seats. Between the early 1970s and 1980, as I discussed in Chapter 5, corporate political action committees (PACs) had moved strikingly from pragmatic support for entrenched incumbents of whatever party to an ideological strategy of electing conservative Republicans. After 1980, however, pragmatism reasserted itself, as corporate PACs gave progressively less money to challengers, conservatives, Republicans, and close races and instead aimed contributions at powerful incumbents of both parties. In 1980, Republican candidates challenging Democratic incumbents or seeking open seats received 29 percent of all corporate PAC money in House races and 58 percent in Senate races; by 1986 the percentages had fallen to 12 and 28 percent respectively. In 1980 in House and Senate races pitting Democratic incumbents against Republican challengers, the Democratic advantage in corporate PAC contributions was virtually nil; in 1986, Democrats in these races enjoyed an eight-to-one advantage. In 1980, too, House and Senate Republican candidates in close races experienced a last-minute surge of corporate money; in 1984, this did not happen.^[13]

Big business became more ideological and politically partisan in the late 1970s partly because this strategy appeared to have many benefits and few costs. For a short time, it appeared that Republicans and conservatives could indeed win both houses of Congress as well as the presidency. The deep recession of the early 1980s dimmed those hopes and halted the Republican drive to monopolize corporate PAC money. Democrats, moreover, began to fight more effectively for business money by emphasizing probusiness candidates and stressing the risks of aggressively supporting Republicans as long as Democrats controlled the House. Congressman Tony Coelho, while he chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, spear-headed this strategy. His often-quoted admonition to corporate PACs is worth quoting one more time: "You people are determined to get rid of the Democratic Party. The record shows it. I just want you to know we are going to be in the majority of the House for many, many years and I don't think it makes good business sense for you to try to destroy us."^[14]

In reverting to a pragmatic strategy, big business hardly became politically neutral. Corporate PAC contributions in the aggregate still

favored Republicans over Democrats. A greater percentage of the money contributed to Republican incumbents than to Democratic incumbents, moreover, went to candidates in close races. Above all, the shift in corporate contributions hardly benefited Democrats who challenged Republican incumbents or sought open seats. They received 4 percent of corporate PAC money in House races and 11 percent in Senate races in 1986. Big business was certainly not investing in a new generation of Democrats or liberals.^[15]

Just as important, even if corporate conservatism lost its cutting edge in the late 1980s, its most important product remained intact. The network of conservative policy-making and policy-discussion organizations underwritten by business money continued to provide a conduit for conservative ideas and personnel into government. The Heritage Foundation, which remained the vanguard of this network, greeted the incoming Bush administration with Mandate for Leadership III , a thick volume of policy recommendations, and 2,500 résumés of conservatives seeking political jobs (the single largest set received by the new president). The American Enterprise Institute, whose financial troubles in the mid-1980s had made it the weak link of the network, was back on its feet again as the 1980s ended. This "conservative counterestablishment" will give legitimacy, plausibility, and visibility to conservative policy alternatives and will sustain a cadre of conservative leaders, activists, and policymakers—the so-called "Third Generation" of conservatives—whatever the overall political climate.^[16]

The legacy of the corporate conservative activism of the late 1970s and early 1980s, in short, persists into the 1990s, though that activism itself has proven episodic. Big business remains a conservative force even if in a more sedate way.

The Republican Party

The Republican party left the Reagan years with the gains discussed in Chapter 6 largely intact but far short of the realignment that once seemed possible. The Democratic edge in party identification remained much smaller than before the 1980s; the Republican party held onto its reputation as the party of prosperity and hence continued to enjoy the benefit of the economic doubt; above all, the GOP

maintained its financial, organizational, and technological edge. To be sure, Democrats in the late 1980s cut into the Republican advantage in national party fundraising, stemming the flow of business money to their opponents; they made important gains in political technology. The Republicans, nonetheless, have continued to be the more effective national party in channeling resources and services to candidates and in coordinating the activities of sympathetic PACs and other interest-group representatives. Democratic gains in fundraising, especially from business PACs, have also had a considerable cost: they have made the party beholden to business interests, pulled it away from its natural constituencies, and blurred its distinct political identity.^[17]

Although Republican gains remained intact, realignment still eluded the GOP as the 1980s ended. The 1988 elections confirmed the mixed electoral success that has been the fate of Republicans since the late 1960s. On the one hand, Republicans won the presidency for the fifth time in the last six elections. George Bush received 54 percent of the popular vote and 426 of 538 electoral votes. His victory was all the more striking because 1988 was widely reputed to be a "Donkey's Year" and because Bush trailed so badly in midyear polls. Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis saw a seventeen-point lead in the polls in July collapse into an eight-point loss in November, a more striking reversal of fortunes than that suffered by Republican Thomas E. Dewey in the fabled 1948 election.

On the other hand, Bush's coattails proved to be as short as any winning presidential candidate's had ever been. Democrats gained five House seats, one Senate seat, and a governorship, while losing only a few dozen state legislature seats across the nation. On all levels, Republicans were worse off (or at most no better off) than after Reagan's initial victory. That 1980 win, which was supposed to be a harbinger of greater Republican gains, has instead turned out to be a last hurrah.^[18]

Republican success in winning over and holding new constituencies was also mixed. White southerners as well as white evangelicals again voted heavily Republican, and of all regions Bush did best in the South. Younger voters, however, though maintaining a relatively high level of Republican identification, did not vote disproportionately for Bush. In addition, traditional divisions along class and reli-

gious lines remained at least partly intact, with Democrats doing markedly better among the lower strata and among Catholics.^[19]

The Broader Ideological Climate

The implications of the 1988 elections for conservatism have been a matter of debate. On the one hand, one can easily minimize the ideological significance of Bush's victory. He was after all the candidate of an incumbent party during prosperity and peace, and so his victory seems no more than another example of economic voting, plebiscitary and retrospective. He bowed at least slightly in a liberal direction by promising to have the federal government do more on education and the environment. The preference of voters for Democrats in other offices, moreover, hardly suggested an electorate intent on sending a conservative message.^[20]

On the other hand, one can argue that the 1988 elections sent a clear conservative or at least antiliberal message. From this perspective, Bush overcame his early deficit in the polls primarily by effectively labeling Dukakis a liberal and attaching pejorative connotations to that label (unpatriotic, soft on crime). Democrats, in contrast, were successful in contests for lower offices, because such races are inherently less ideological and issue-oriented than the presidential race and hence allow candidates to stress personal image and constituent services and to use the powers of incumbency. Republicans, according to this argument, win elections that are ideological and issue oriented; Democrats win those that are not.

Both these analyses have an element of truth to them. The message of the 1988 elections and public opinion polls over the last few years is a mixed one. Conservatives have won an important battle, but they are losing the war. They have succeeded in turning liberal into a pejorative political label that is a liability for most of those on whom it is pinned. They have failed, however, to push public opinion on most issues to the right.

Bush's attempt to tar Dukakis as a liberal—a strategy developed by his campaign manager, conservative Lee Atwater—apparently bore fruit. As Dukakis collapsed in the polls from July to October, the percentage of Americans identifying him as a liberal increased: in May 1988, 27 percent identified Dukakis as a liberal and 17 percent judged his views too liberal. By October, 43 percent called him a liberal and

31 percent regarded his beliefs as too liberal. This shift was consistent with other survey results as well: in the late summer of 1988, only 13 percent of Americans said they wanted a liberal for president while 40 percent preferred a conservative and 41 percent a moderate. Twenty-nine percent said they would feel less favorable about a public figure described as a liberal (compared to 17 percent in 1985), while only 14 percent would disfavor a conservative. Although the percentage of Americans calling themselves conservatives did not increase during the Reagan years, more Americans consistently identified themselves as conservatives than as liberals. Conservatives, moreover, were more consistent in approving of conservative public figures than liberals were of their fellows.^[21]

Conservatives have thus won an important symbolic victory, but it has been a limited one. Liberal may be a less appealing label than conservative, in part because liberals have not consistently given it a positive meaning. When Dukakis did redefine liberalism as economic populism in the last weeks of the 1988 campaign, he revived his sagging fortunes and won handily among voters who made up their minds just before the election.^[22]

More important, ideological labels are not the only or even the primary basis upon which Americans organize their political decisions. For many Americans neither label carries much meaning. In practice, how Americans feel about both labels often bears little relation to how they think about specific issues. Indeed in most major policy areas, conservatives have failed to put their imprint on the broad contours of public thinking.^[23]

Conservatives have inveighed against the evil Soviet empire and have argued passionately that the United States is involved in an international struggle on which the very fate of humanity rests; yet although their anticommunist rhetoric has sometimes had great appeal, they have failed to get public support for more than the quickest and cheapest assertions of American power in the world. Americans may have applauded bombing Qaddafi or invading Grenada, but they balked at the broader contemporary version of a liberation strategy, the funding of anticommunist insurgents around the world. Despite all the conservatives' efforts to stimulate fear over an alleged Soviet beachhead on the mainland of the Western hemisphere, Americans remained resistant to the idea of aiding the Contras in Nicaragua. Despite the evil empire rhetoric, Americans and even

their erstwhile conservative president eagerly grasped at opportunities for peace and rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Indeed, the advance of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union and their equivalents elsewhere threatens to undermine the very logic of a hardline conservative position. As David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, commented in early 1989: "The glue that held together the movement was the need for a strong anticommunist foreign policy. If Gorbachev survives, reforms the Soviet Union and redirects Soviet foreign policy, that glue will be weakened."^[24]

Conservatives have also decried the decline of the traditional family and traditional moral values and the rise of a secular, hedonistic culture. They have called Americans back to a moral consensus about the good and true. Again, this rhetoric has had potent appeal, but it did not lead to public support for the conservative social agenda. Certainly, conservatives have emphasized the abortion issue more than any other, yet by 1989 nearly fifteen years of intense antiabortion activity had failed to budge public opinion more than a few percentage points. Americans seem not to want their morality legislated and seem to seek a more careful balance of personal freedom and social constraint than offered by the Right.^[25]

Most important, conservatives have presented an image of society in which government plays a minimal role in producing and distributing goods and services. They have pictured big government as the problem rather than the solution to America's various economic problems. Once again, the general image of less government has appeal, especially when the issue is taxes. Despite eight years of Ronald Reagan and conservative rhetoric, however, a substantial majority of Americans believe government has broad responsibilities for promoting specific areas of social well-being; they oppose cutbacks in government spending in most social welfare areas. In practice, as opposed to rhetoric, most Americans expect an activist government; even Republicans and conservatives have tried to adjust their policies accordingly.^[26]

Put simply, Americans are symbolically conservative but substantively liberal.^[27] Conservatives have won important symbolic battles but have failed to alter the practical political sentiments of Americans. Those who oppose conservatism—whether they call them-

selves liberals, progressives, populists, or something else—are often more in tune with these practical sentiments but have failed to articulate an effective political vision. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the various elements of conservatism as the 1990s begin, how this asymmetry plays out may well determine the future of American politics.