A social conservative credo - Thirtieth Anniversary Issue

Public Interest, Fall, 1995 by Charles Krauthammer

Establishment discourse has been forced to readmit moral categories into the debate about social decay and deviancy. The change is visible and rapid. One can almost chart it by comparing the reception accorded Dan Quayle's 1992 assault on Murphy Brown and that given Bob Dole's on Time Warner and Hollywood just three years later. Quayle was pummeled by establishment media. The response to Dole was: Why aren't the Democrats saying this too?

This represents a significant advance in two respects. First, it legitimizes the use of frankly moral language in public discourse. Second, it legitimizes the deployment of that language against the purveyors of culture and the holding of them to certain standards of decency.

This engagement in the cultural war is a necessary complement to the "structural" conservative attempts to rein in the welfare state. Reining in the state creates civil space open to new influences. But the cultural agenda - and particularly the attempt to force the mass media to clean up their act and alter their message - will crucially determine what gets to fill that space.

In the absence of religion

But even that will not be enough. Culture wars, however satisfying and necessary, are not sufficient. if there is to be a remoralization of society, it will have to occur at the level not just of supply but of demand. Getting the culture producers to limit the toxicity of their products will not be that difficult. Even without overt government censorship, political and popular pressure are quite capable of inducing the culture creators to self-censorship.

In a free-market society, however, such supply-side changes are not enough. The failure of the war on drugs should have taught us that. The producers of culture may accede temporarily to political demands for self-censorship out of fear or regard for public relations. But a more enduring change in the cultural market, as in any other, awaits a fundamental change in demand. The customer has to stop buying the stuff.

And where does that come from? We now leave the realm of governmental reform and media self-censorship and enter entirely new territory, religious territory. Irving Kristol has written about the current and coming religious revival as an echo of earlier Great Awakenings. There certainly is a religious revival under way, and it does establish a basis for a most fundamental reversal of social decay. But I have my doubts about the firmness and permanence of this fin de siecle awakening.

This is an age of advanced science and material abundance. Science and abundance offer invitations to skepticism and pleasure that are hard to refuse. It is difficult for me to believe that in such an era, a self-abnegating religious revival will prevail.

I hope I am wrong. If I am, the conservative revolution will unfold in and of itself, with near-Marxist historic inevitability. It is the task of the political strategist, however, to prepare for the possibility that the Great Awakening is not at hand. In which case the arrest of social decay, the revitalization of civil society, is a far more difficult and chancy proposition. It must then depend upon the more coercive and less reliable agency of politics - a politics crucially capable of articulating cultural with structural reform. Neither alone will suffice.