American Conservative Opinion Leaders

Mark J. Rozell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367153519
• eBook ISBN: 9780429718915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this book - one of the few academic works to scrutinise the major figures of American conservatism since the Reagan-Bush era began - the contributors identify and assess current trends in conservative political thought. Through their profiles of conservative opinion leaders, these scholars offer even-handed, critical examinations not only of the

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Introduction: Conservatism After Reagan

James F. Pontuso

As Ronald Reagan boarded the plane for his return to California on January 20, 1989, he left behind a triumphant political movement. Although some were pleased to see him depart, his conservative allies could take pride in the Reagan years. Under his presidency the nation had enjoyed a span of economic prosperity unprecedented in the post-World War II era. He had limited the expansion of the welfare state and reversed the trend toward a bigger and more intrusive national government. No new countries had fallen to Marxism-Leninism, and some had abandoned the doctrine altogether as Reagan had predicted they would in his 1981 speech before the British Parliament. Even the Soviet Union seemed to falter in its adherence to communism. During Reagan’s tenure, a new leadership emerged in the Soviet Union that was far more willing to compromise with the West. Not only did the Soviets agree to pull their medium-range nuclear weapons out of Europe; they pledged to withdraw from Afghanistan and Angola. From the perspective of many conservatives, Reagan’s military buildup and tough rhetoric had worked well. In order to keep up with American military spending, the Soviets were forced to choose a dynamic leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who could reform their badly functioning economy. But even Gorbachev’s charm could not transform the backwardness of the Soviet economic system without allowing greater political and social freedoms. Thus, a number of conservatives credited Reagan’s policies with having brought about Gorbachev’s reforms.

Reagan also had restored faith in the American system of government. His simple message proclaimed that the days of confusion, distrust and malaise were gone; “America was back.” People responded to Reagan, for even when he bumbled, he was too affable to dislike. Confidence in government grew steadily during the 1980s, despite the setback of the Iran-contra controversy. The public perceived that Reagan’s leadership produced successful government.

Whether or not Reagan’s good fortune was due to luck, as his critics charged, his personal and political achievements had an effect on the nation’s public agenda. For all his faults, some say because of them, Reagan led a reappraisal of America’s political principles. So complete was his political achievement that the Democratic candidate for president in 1988 was reluctant to call himself a liberal, the political philosophy that had dominated the United States for more than fifty years.

Yet not everything that occurred during the Reagan years pleased conservatives. What galled them most was that having gained the nation’s highest office, they were unable to fully carry through the social changes that had been so much a part of their credo. Although the Reagan Administration had some success in arresting the growth of the national government, there was no fundamental shift in public policy as occurred during the New Deal era. Legislation on the “moral issues,” such as school prayer and abortion, was quickly abandoned, the military buildup came to a halt, and, in spite of the spending cuts, most government programs were kept in place.

What dashed the high hopes for major change that conservatives experienced in the heady days of 1980? A number of explanations come to mind. First, it could be that conservatives, so long in the political wilderness of American politics, became accustomed to their role as critics. Indeed, it is possible that conservative criticisms of the failures of the welfare state and of the weaknesses of America’s military, rather than a positive vision of the future, were tactics designed to carry a conservative administration into office. Few people are likely to give up a tactic on which their past successes are based. And as it turned out, conservatives were better at criticizing than making the system work to their benefit.

Second, the much-heralded Republican realignment did not come about. Despite President Reagan’s personal popularity, his party was not able to translate his charisma into broad-scale support for Republican candidates and principles. Whether this was because political parties were so weak that they could no longer reflect shifts in public opinion, or because the public was unwilling to follow Reagan down the conservative path, is presently unclear. What is beyond debate is that after some initial successes, the President had to scratch, twist and compromise for every legislative victory he won. The Administration’s policy toward Nicaragua is a prime example. When the president, the cornerstone of whose foreign policy was to prevent the spread of Communist dictatorships, was unable to convince Congress to appropriate a paltry sum to aid opponents of a Communist dictatorship in this hemisphere, surely his clout with the legislative branch ought not to be overestimated.

Furthermore, for all his popularity, Reagan did not prove as effective as conservatives would have liked. Critics characterized him as an absentee president.¹ He delegated much of his authority to subordinates and almost never rebuked them. This made it nearly impossible to enforce discipline on the bureaucracy. Rather than through an orderly decisionmaking process, the Reagan Administration made policy through intense bureaucratic power struggles. The winner of that competition was not always the department with the best policy but the one with the most persistence and shrewdness in the ways of bureaucratic infighting. It was perhaps no surprise that the Administration was caught unaware of the arms-for-hostages scheme carried out in the National Security Council. Whether his inability to control the bureaucracy adequately stemmed from his leadership style—he was too nice a guy to fire anyone—or whether this inability was the result of his being too old to compel order within the executive branch made little difference to those who once expected Reagan to bring about a “revolution” in government.²

Nor did Reagan prove himself to be as conservative as many had initially hoped. After a halfhearted effort to put prayer back in public schools and to make abortion a matter of public rather than personal choice, he abandoned the field of “moral issues” to Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and such “New Right” leaders as the Evangelical ministers. For all the much-vaunted military buildup, Reagan was nearly as reluctant as President Jimmy Carter to exercise force as an instrument of foreign policy. Only once in eight years did he initiate a military strike against a terrorist state. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to reduce nuclear weapons in Europe showed that he was as willing to negotiate an arms deal with the Soviets as were his predecessors. And even with his success in cutting the rate of growth of the national government, he was not able to bring federal expenditures under control. Although criticisms of the President from the Right often were muted, Reagan’s actions did not go unnoticed in the conservative camp.³

Beyond the problems of leadership, there were other unsettling difficulties facing the political Right. Conservatives were badly divided among themselves, which made a political consensus extremely difficult. The conservative coalition includes free marketeers, who want government intruding less into our private lives, and those interested in “moral issues,” who would give the state more authority over our personal choices. There are fiscal conservatives, who favor a balanced budget, as opposed to supply-siders, who care less about spending than they do about stimulating the economy. There is, of course, the foreign policy debate. Is Soviet Russia the real threat to our security or is Marxism-Leninism? Those who see the Soviet Union as the challenge to American power call for tough, but not uncompromising measures to thwart Soviet power. Others see communism itself as an intractable ideological enemy of the West, one that must be fought and defeated wherever it exists if our way of life is to survive. Free-market conservatives, many of whom advocate trade with all nations, have been severely criticized by other conservatives who argue that open economic exchanges with the Soviet bloc undermine our national security.⁴ There are even some neoconservatives, such as former UN. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who are on the Right in foreign policy issues but who part company with the movement on domestic affairs.

Any coalition, especially a ruling one, has disparate elements within it. The New Deal coalition, which included African-Americans as well as those from the solid segregationist South, demonstrated that politics makes strange bedfellows. But unlike the New Deal alliance, which was held together primarily on the basis of the (monetary) interests that its constituent groups gained by their party affiliation, the contemporary conservative partnership is mainly ideological. The members of the New Deal coalition had a common stake in submerging their ideological differences in the hope of gaining material benefits; the conservative alliance has no such binding interest.

In Great Britain it was once said that conservatives made up “the stupid party,” for its members had held power so long that they thoughtlessly defended the status quo. In the United States this does not seem to be true. Conservatism was in such ill-repute for many years after the Great Depression that conservatives were forced to defend their views more vigorously than were liberals, who assumed that their ideas embodied the wave of the future. Conservatives became more original and innovative. Certainly they became more accustomed to the world of ideas, much as liberals (then called Progressives) had during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when their principles were not held in high esteem.

Of course, one of the signs of the strength and vibrancy of the conservative movement is its rich variety and diversity of members. Yet, this diversity can cause political difficulties. Because conservatives hold their political views primarily on the basis of their principles, when those ideals are in conflict, the coalition is bound to be torn by bitter internal struggles. These battles did not emerge throughout most of the 1980s because of the eclectic personality of Ronald Reagan, who, as is true of many popular leaders, seemed to be all things to all people.

It is therefore a propitious time to investigate conservative principles. What is happening to the conservative movement after Reagan? Who are its leaders? What ideas are guiding its choice of actions? Where are the conflicts and where are the agreements among conservatives?

Before any of these issues can be addressed it is important to have a working definition of “conservative.” Or, to put it as a Socratic question, what is conservatism? The answer to this question is not so simple as it may seem. For example, when Ronald Reagan came to power promising to cut the size of the government, decentralize administration, strengthen the free-market system, and limit the power of the bureaucracy, he was called a conservative. When Mikhail Gorbachev adopted many of the same policies, he was praised for his reforms and called a liberal.

One fairly common explanation of conservatism is that it wishes to support the status quo. All political action aims either at conservation— keeping things the way they are—or change—modifying them in hopes of making them better. But even here we cannot find a solid definition of conservatism. Reagan came to office as a visionary reformer. Far from wishing to conserve, he wanted to change the course of public policy. Moreover, free-market conservatives hardly consider stagnation a good thing. They favor innovation and change as a means of bringing about increased productivity. New technologies result in new ways of doing things, and this has the effect of making profound shifts in the structure of society and even can transform government.

The confusion over the meaning of conservatism is even more acute in the United States, where no conservative establishment has ever really held power. In fact, many Americans came to this country in order to escape the restrictive confines of conservative social structures.

In order to understand the older form of conservatism, we should turn to Europe prior to the Enlightenment. There, the governmental and religious authorities were not separated as they are today. The goal of the Church was to produce pious parishioners, and the aim of the state was to cultivate good citizens. The governmental, social and religious institutions used their united power and prestige to shape the character of individuals through the application of strict laws and codes of conduct to all aspects of human behavior. The government intruded into the everyday lives of people. Not only did it tell them what was lawful; it commanded the religion they should follow, the morals they should hold dear, the station in the social hierarchy they should keep, the professions they should pursue, and even the price they should charge for their goods (the fair-market price).

The Enlightenment was in many ways a reaction against the rigid framework of the “ancien regime.” The philosophers of the Enlightenment called for the liberation of the human species, which would be possible if what was said to be higher than human—hence beyond human control—was rejected in favor of what humans could sense— that is, the material world that could be brought under human command. To accomplish their goals, these philosophers realized that mankind had to be emancipated from the authority of the Church. During the centuries of Christian rule, religious leaders had done little to oppose superstition, prejudice and ignorance among the people. On the contrary, the priests retained their position by keeping the flock backward and innocent. In a deeper sense, the position of the clergy rested on a belief that existence was governed by the laws of God. For the religious person, human beings were only objects of His creation, and their duty was to accept life as it was given to them.

The Enlightenment philosophers rebelled against the supine acceptance of human destiny. They proposed that the wretched surroundings in which most people existed could be surmounted once the power of the clergy was broken and all people learned to think for themselves. Further, the belief that human beings should not question divine laws had to be destroyed. Rather than understanding themselves as part of nature, people would see themselves as its lord. In this way, the laws of nature could be studied and then used to satisfy people’s physical needs. The human race would be relieved of the constant struggle to provide for the necessities of life. Degradation, poverty and ignorance would be at an end.

The Enlightenment philosophers argued that intellectual pursuits had to be stripped of their normative content. In this view, science should show people how nature worked, not attempt to educate them as to the best use of this knowledge. The discoveries of science could be turned into technological inventions that, as Francis Bacon said, would relieve “man’s estate.” At the same time, a stable political foundation was to be constructed by turning people’s attention away from matters that were likely to make them combative, such as theological disputes, and toward those matters that would make them peaceful, for example, commerce. Dedication to religion and morality was to be replaced by a rational calculation of self-interest, and concern over spiritual matters was to be kept a strictly private matter. Thus, the Enlightenment was based on the principle of giving people what they wanted: peace and material comforts.

The Enlightenment’s principles found their political expression in the doctrine of Liberalism. The satisfaction of human desires could best be accomplished, according to Liberalism, if people were left alone to pursue their own interests in their own ways. All unnecessary hindrances to people’s ambitions were to be removed. The government’s major functions were to enforce contracts and to ensure that the contest for economic gain did not go so far as to upset the peace. The fundamental goal of such a state was to secure a realm of liberty, so that in their private lives people could live as they chose—hence, the name Liberalism.

The American Founders were devoted to the ideals of the Enlightenment. The Declaration of Independence was more than an instrument of separation from Great Britain; it was a symbol of the Enlightenment’s aspirations and a clarion call for the liberation of the human race from the restrictive convenants of the past. The framers of the Constitution hoped that the “new political science,” as Publius called it in The Federalist, would solve the problems of instability and turmoil that had haunted all free societies in the past. Making the Declaration a reality also meant allowing for something like a free economic system, one that left the individual unhampered to pursue his or her own interests and develop his or her own talents to the fullest.

From its very beginnings, then, the United States had a tradition of granting its citizens liberty. The tradition of America, therefore, has been Liberalism. Insofar as American conservatives pay allegiance to their political heritage, they are really liberals, as that term was originally understood.

The problem is that what it means to be a liberal has changed over time. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the greatest “liberal” of his day, would certainly be shocked at the agenda of contemporary liberals. Although he warned against the growth of government, fearing its tendency to degenerate into tyranny, today’s liberals seek a solution for many human problems by turning to the national government. At least in the economic arena, they are the ones who would have the government intrude on the liberty of the citizens.

Conservatism and the Difficulty of Defining the Common Good

All of this brings us to a consideration of the most difficult question facing conservatives: How do they define the common good? In an interesting article written prior to her conversion to the Republican Party, Jeane Kirkpatrick explained that the underlying flaw of the Republican Party, and by implication American conservatism, was that it had no notion of the common good.⁵ The principle most strongly endorsed by conservatives has been personal freedom. But personal freedom can be, and often is, used to satisfy the most selfish desires. Although the love of freedom may elicit self-sacrifice, there is no compelling reason people will use their freedom to promote the good of the whole. The political manifestation of the weakness of conservatism has been its in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Conservatism After Reagan
• PART ONE CONSERVATISM AND TRADITION
• PART TWO THE NEOCONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT
• PART THREE CAPITALISM AND ECONOMICS
• PART FOUR FOREIGN AFFAIRS
• PART FIVE CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION
• About the Contributors
• Index