The new malaise?

National Review, Oct 27, 1997 by Matthew Scully

You know it's time to call the troops together when conservatives start talking about "malaise." What's next for the Republican leadership -- killer rabbits?

At the International Conservative Congress here last month, one heard two explanations for this predicament. Look, the optimists argued, the Cold War is won, free markets have been vindicated, liberals have gained power but only by sounding like us. This is victory even if conservatives are not in office to savor it. When your "greatest problem is plagiarism from opponents," George Will remarked, you're doing okay; so "be of good cheer."

The other view recalls H. L. Mencken's definition of the pessimist as a man who, if he smells a rose, looks around for a coffin. But maybe the coffin is really there. The Left, observed NR editor John O'Sullivan, rules the White House, Britain, France, Canada, and Italy, with the Right clinging for dear life to Congress, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. "Why is conservatism failing in its primary political task of gaining and keeping power?"

There was a lot to be sorted out. In the week before the September 27 - 28 gathering, a few conservatives and libertarians -- James Glassman in the Washington Post, Virginia Postrel in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rush on the radio -- had faulted the NR-sponsored program for gloomy defeatism. And it's true that some of the more downcast prognoses could have been delivered with minor editing at NR's January 1993 conference right there at the Mayflower Hotel. The crisis then was a squandering of the Reagan legacy. Now it was a squandering of the Republican Congress. But in between there had been the Republican revolution, however brief its glory. Politics is what happens while you're planning something else. Who could say then -- who can say now -- what the next year might bring?

A happy thought, but not much of a strategy. And on hand were a pretty impressive array of speakers from across the map to caution against just such easy-going optimism. If not malaise, something equally worrisome seemed to be dragging down the movement. It was true, as American Spectator editor Bob Tyrrell pointed out, that the very presence of so many prominent conservatives -- from Will to Margaret Thatcher to William F. Buckley Jr. to Charles Krauthammer to Ralph Reed to Steve Forbes -- reflected strength. And, true, co-sponsoring the event were "four of the healthiest think tanks in the country": the American Enterprise Institute, the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover Institution. These are strengths, all right, but the strengths of opposition. Why were we attending soul-searching conferences while liberals confidently man the executive offices of the Western world?

Teeing up the debate was a Statement of Principles. "Conservatives," it said, "are not anti-government," but rather partisans of limited, decentralized government. This addressed the "national greatness" conservatism lately launched by Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who spoke at the opening session -- the Honorable Robert H. Bork presiding. A week earlier Kristol and David Brooks of the Standard had asked in the Wall Street Journal, "How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?" "Let the Left denigrate the U.S.," Kristol urged us. Government does have its great and legitimate purposes. We should be guided not just by anger, but by "a love of country and an informed patriotism."

There was a bit of stirring among his 450 listeners. Two years after President Clinton himself declared the era of big government over, why should we have to mind our words on the subject? And isn't it the Left that equates "the U.S." with "U.S. Government"? Government is great to the degree it draws on its source of greatness, the Constitution (and, as Harry Jaffa reminded us in a panel debate, the Declaration).

The greatness theme strikes one, however, as more a rhetorical lift than a political doctrine. Great government -- limited but clear federal authority, strong national defense, more power to the states, deregulation, reliance on markets, etc. -- bears a suspicious resemblance to good government. But maybe the program could use some spiffing up, and that seems to be the idea here: to give conservatism a starched shirt, shiny brass buttons, and Reaganesque handkerchief in the breast pocket. O'Sullivan remarked that it was "bad luck that the [Kristol - Brooks] article came out in the same week as the IRS hearings." More important than Greatness were the concrete policies offered under that banner, and here we had to avoid deluding ourselves with false confidence. "The sensible man," said O'Sullivan, "carries an umbrella when it looks like rain. He does not take one out in a heat wave, and he certainly does not leave his umbrella at home in a storm on the grounds that he is demonstrating his faith in the meteorological future."

The IRS hearings came up often during the conference. Clearly Republicans were on to something there. The question was whether they would run with it, as indeed with the other big themes around which a consensus seemed to be gathering: a defense of Western culture, national sovereignty, and, abroad, a unified democratic alliance led by America.