New Right Now
Sounds Like Old Left

By PAUL A. GIGOT
99-02-19

As they get older, men can become wise and mellow. Or they can get cranky and despairing. The latter seems to be the tendency of too many of today's political conservatives.

Take Paul Weyrich, the prominent activist who in the wake of President Clinton's impeachment hung jury has decided that conservatives should secede from a corrupt America.

"I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values," he wrote in an open, overwrought letter to other conservatives this week. "We will be lucky if we escape with any remnants of the great Judeo-Christian civilization that we have known down through the ages."

That's what you call taking defeat hard. Those who know Mr. Weyrich understand that he will focus on the hole in any donut. But now he sees a hole and calls it an abyss.

More alarming, his post-impeachment, Decline-of-Rome pessimism is shared widely enough on the right (Robert Bork and Bill Bennett) that it could become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Especially since his advice is to drop out of politics altogether.

"Politics has failed" conservatives, Mr. Weyrich says, "because of the collapse of the culture." So his solution is to retreat in defeat--not like de Gaulle in London awaiting liberation, but to a private Idaho of permanent isolation.

It's a shame the old Paul Weyrich seems to have forgotten the progress made by conservatives over the past 30 years. The young Weyrich pushed the GOP to the right as a Senate aide in the 1970s. Later he institutionalized conservative reform through the Heritage and Free Congress Foundations. On today's culture, good and bad, there's no better monitor than Heritage's magazine, Policy Review.

Twenty years ago, when I graduated from college, the U.S. economy was a mess, with inflation roaring and a top tax rate of 70%. The Soviet Union was winning proxy wars in Central America, Africa and Asia. Crime, welfare and illegitimacy had begun their awful gallup. School choice was an idea confined to libertarian monographs.

The nation's progress--or, since conservatives hate that word, restoration--in all of these areas represents the triumph of conservative politics. It was achieved despite a hostile media and cultural elite.

These victories, indeed, go a long way to explaining why Mr. Clinton survived impeachment. With times as good as they are, America's risk-averse voters were reluctant to throw over the icon of their boom. They seem to regard Mr. Clinton the way someone described Queen Elizabeth I--a good king but a bad man.

Few polls even bothered to ask voters why they opposed removing Mr. Clinton. But the one I saw, in November by ABC, found that only 40% thought the offenses weren't serious enough to deserve impeachment. Some 43% said they thought impeachment would be too disruptive.

In a Washington Post focus group, three of 10 New Jersey voters said they didn't want to take their chances on a "scary" President Al Gore. This narrow definition of political self-interest may be regrettable, but it isn't irrational or morally corrupt.

The political blunders of Ken Starr and Newt Gingrich also made it easier to tune out the scandal as partisan warfare. Democrats came to believe they couldn't let Republicans oust the man who had rescued them from oblivion. Saving him became more important to Democrats than ousting him was to Republicans.

Voters weren't saying they share Mr. Clinton's morals. They were saying this president isn't much worse than most politicians, all of whom they mistrust. Throw in the public's ambivalence toward sexual harassment charges, and Mr. Clinton's survival seems preordained. The miracle is that he got himself impeached.

In any case, it's hard to see how blaming America first is going to improve things now. Wallowing in defeat will only make it easier for Mr. Clinton and his allies to rewrite the history of impeachment as total exoneration. People also don't usually heed leaders who are denouncing them for "barbarism."

Strangest of all is Mr. Weyrich's echo of the 1960s that conservatives should "tune out" and "drop out." This tendency always exists on the religious right, which cares more about salvation in the next world than in this one. They tuned out at least once earlier this century, after the Scopes trial.

But one reason for the cultural gains of the last 20 years is that religious conservatives re-emerged from their historic political isolation. Some were motivated by Roe v. Wade, others by Jimmy Carter's tax raid on private schools, still others by broader cultural rot.

To ask them to walk away now in disgust and despair is to repeat theerrors of the 1960s' left. Liberals then believed they could totally remake the world by the force of their moral arguments. And when they failed they denounced America as corrupt and unworthy of their patriotism. It's taken the left 30 years to recover.

Conservatives used to understand that all political change is slow, that in fact it ought to be slow, and that the task of political persuasion is never done. Russell Kirk, who forgot more about American culture than Mr. Weyrich remembers, liked to say that "There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes."

Conservatives can't save America by becoming anti-American.